Sherry Chandler

A Cure for All Diseases by Reginald Hill

My review

rating: 4 of 5 stars

This semi-epistolary novel is a re-telling of Jane Austen’s unfinished novel, Sanditon, as a detective novel. As a gimmick, it’s pretty amusing, though I’d guess the number of people who have read Sanditon is small indeed.

Beyond that, the novel offers Hill’s usual cast of characters: Andy Dalziel, Peter Pascoe, Edgar Wield, and the nemesis Frannie Roote. They blend in well with the resort town characters “rescued” from Austen.

Hill is an intelligent writer who seems to be having fun with the English literary tradition in all his books.

It’s a good read. Maybe not the very best of the Dalziel/Pascoe novels.

View all my reviews.

Trying out this widget that lets me post my GoodReads reviews to my blog. I am not the real Hill fan on this blog and I leave it to, in fact invite, Poppysmatus to give us his take on the novel.

Meanwhile, here is also my GoodReads review of Claudia Emerson’s Late Wife:

Late Wife: Poems by Claudia Emerson

My review

rating: 3 of 5 stars

This is a clean even eloquent collection of poems that somehow didn’t move me as much as it ought to have. I am willing to admit the fault to be in myself. Sometimes wonderful books come to us at the wrong time.

The book has three sections: Divorce Epistles, Breaking Up the House, and Late Wife. The last section, mostly loosely rhymed sonnets, is haunted by the ghost of the lover’s late wife. This is the section that spoke most to me, though I read it in a noisey cafeteria.

For a long time there would be the small
resurfacing of things you had forgotten
to throw away, or ceased to see at all.
These returned her, not to you, but to me
the way I had seen a spider unknot itself…
– from “Corrective”

View all my reviews.

Too little, too late, on CNN Howard Kurtz examines the question with a panel of (gasp!) women journalists. He predicts a backlash. Ya think?:

Watch at YouTube

Link via Tennessee Guerilla Women.

I do not have cable tv, let alone HBO, so I did not watch Recount, but Jane Smiley did and she came to conclusion that Al Gore was right to concede because, in part, it allowed the Republicans to show themselves:

Winning to them trumped every other consideration. It is also evident that they learned from their “victory” in Florida that bullying was the way to go, and so they attempted to use the same strategy and tactics in Iraq. The last eight years show that ethics, law, and human decency meant nothing to these Republicans. And their current pleasure in the depiction of their own rottenness shows that they have learned nothing.

I would like to be a fly on the wall in the room where John McCain is watching Recount. In the course of the next few months, knowing that bullying, cheating, and subverting the election might or might not work, he will have to make a choice. He can run an honorable campaign and lose or a dishonorable campaign that shames him. Does he watch Recount and see Warren Christopher as a “wimp” and James Baker as “tough”? Or does he watch Recount and feel the humiliation that every Republican should feel? He is the carrier of the Bush poison now. The sooner he recognizes it, the better off the nation will be.

My thought? Maybe the Democrats should examine their own house.

Link courtesy of Avedon.

Aside: Kurtz can’t resist a bit of blame the victim in his Washington Post venue:

Somewhere in Hillary’s inevitability phase, the trailblazing nature of her effort got lost. She became the establishment candidate, the return-to-the-’90s candidate, and the wow factor–which has always surrounded Obama–simply faded.

Simply faded? How about was stomped on and crushed and still wouldn’t die? See Avedon below.

Update: Over at Suburban Guerilla, zuzu asks Obama supporters how they’re going to reach out to disgruntled Clinton supporters in the event that Obama is the nominee. Interesting lot of replies. Go read. (Short version: they got nothin’)

and less of “women will wake up to reality once Obama is the nominee,” a paraphrase of a comment I saw at TalkLeft and an attitude that has seemed endemic.

From Obama’s Memorial Day speech:

We’re going to have hundreds of thousands of new veterans coming in, many of them who suffer post-traumatic stress disorder. They are not being diagnosed quickly enough, they’re not getting the services that they need quickly enough.

And, sadly, the group of veterans that are probably being most neglected in this area are women veterans. We’ve got to do a better job of creating facilities…. specifically for women veterans.

And part of what we need is to recognize that oftentimes our women servicemembers are more prone to post-traumatic stress disorder partly because they — there’s a sad, but real, problem of sexual harassment and sexual abuse for women veterans, and that makes them much more prone, then, to have post-traumatic stress disorder.

Maybe a a bit patronizing. Obviously pandering, but I’m ready to be pandered to, big time.

He also made a quick promise to stop protests at military funerals, a thing that needs to be done.

Now how about some promises to protect Social Security and work hard for universal health care??

You can watch the speech at YouTube here.

…from Avedon, who is neutral* and doesn’t usually say too much (emphasis mine):

Digby noted the other day: “I just heard Chris Cilizza suggest on MSNBC that this charge of sexism is impossible to quantify, but Obama is winning partially because he turned his historic candidacy into a movement, while Clinton failed to turn hers into one. That may be true. But I can’t see how she ever could have done it with coverage like this:” - such as the attack on her when she said at Wellesley, “In so many ways this all women’s college prepared me to compete in the all-boys club of presidential politics.” Of course, she was simply saying something good about what she learned at Wellesley, but the media excoriated her for “playing the victim”. The media worked very, very hard to make it impossible for Clinton to highlight the historic nature of her campaign. You’d have thought that after her win in New Hampshire, they’d at least allow a mention of the fact that it was completely unprecedented for a woman to have won a state primary, but no - it devolved into an entirely counterfactual exclamation of surprise that Hillary was not dead yet, and an “explanation” that all those Clinton voters were a bunch of racists who’d lied about how they were going to vote - although, in fact, they hadn’t lied at all, and she’d been leading in the polls all year.

Also, this:

I really look forward to the day when I don’t get up in the morning and find my formerly favorite blogs littered with so many stupid posts attempting to twist statements by Hillary Clinton into Proof of Evil. When the Republicans say stupid things about Obama, everyone is perfectly capable of seeing through it and tearing it apart - in fact, y’all do it so well that I have little to add. Why can’t we do that for Hillary? And why is it that when I try to do that, I get attacked as a “Hillary supporter”, even though I’ve made it clear that I can’t choose between her and Obama? What’s wrong with you people? Do the Republicans spend half their time trying to destroy the reputation of the Reagans, or Gingrich, or any of their standard-bearers? Do you think they would spend five seconds doing this kind of self-immolation? Pull yourselves together

_____________
*I believe Avedon is neutral but being neutral is all it takes in some quarters to be smeared as a rabid Clinton supporter. Because in some quarters, apparently, “Clinton supporter” is an accusation.

Photographs taken by my son in support of my tweet of yesterday, to wit:

Orchard grass shoulder high, heads purple with seed. Bluegrass to the waist, red clover to the knee. The sun is shining, time to make hay.

Update: A correspondent has written to ask if I worry about haymaking harming small critters like box turtles, birds, and rabbits. And the fact is that any kind of mowing is dangerous to small creatures. My husband said he scared up a big turkey just mowing the farm road the way you see here. I’ve mowed up rabbits nests and snakes cutting the grass in our side yard with a push mower.

I think, though, even more dangerous than the mowing is the destruction of habitat. The very thing that makes the Bluegrass Region so picturesque, the lovely clean fencerows (some maintained with herbicides), make the place less friendly to small creatures who need shelter to nest and feed. As these photos illustrate, our place is comfortably shabby and our wildlife seems to be abundant. I was even wrong about the meadowlarks. I’ve seen several this year. I just wasn’t in the right place.

Here’s a bonus picture. I put up a photo of this tree earlier when it was bare and the red-winged blackbird was perched high up in it.

Image from Wikimedia Commons

Released in 1949, Akira Kurosawa’s film Stray Dog revolves around two World War II veterans who are mirror images of one another. Both men had seen and done terrible things and, sort of like Viet Nam and Iraq War veterans in the U.S., both as veterans were spurned by their society for the terrible things they had seen and done in its service.

Discharged into a disordered world, each soldier has had his knapsack stolen. The crux of the story is how each man responds to this theft of all their worldly goods, this final betrayal by the society that sent them into futile and bloody war. Murakami (the incomparable Toshiro Mifune) joins the police and works to restore order. Yusa joins the underworld and becomes the stray dog of the title.

The two men are connected by Murakami’s Colt pistol. The pistol is lifted from Murakami’s pocket on a crowded bus. It becomes a commodity on Tokyo’s black market, where Yusa (Isao Kimura) leases it, giving his rice ration card for security, to pull an armed robbery to get money to court his girlfriend. That the black market leases guns instead of selling them indicates how scarce they were in post-war Japan and what a power symbol this small colt is.

Murakami, obsessed by guilt for releasing this instrument of violence upon his city, haunts the black market until he traces it to a girl who says she rented it to Yusi. Because he is a rookie, Murakami arrests the girl and, in doing so, not only misses the more important connection to her gang boss but also keeps Yusi from returning the pistol. And so the cycle of guilt and violence spirals until the film’s climax, the inevitable face off between the two men.

There is another mirrored pair in this story: the rookie cop Murakami and his older mentor Sato (the equally incomparable Takashi Shimura). This mirroring is of course youth, age, innocence, experience — though as a veteran, Muakami is hardly innocent — passion, and wisdom, but perhaps most obviously for this film, the pre-war and the post-war generations. Sato is from a time of high order and his view of criminality is much simpler than Murakami’s. For him, Yusa is not doppelganger but stray dog.

Some elements of this film serve almost as documentary for a generation of Americans who did not live through World War II and whose only knowledge of the U.S. occupation of Japan comes from our own propaganda. One is the 8-minute segment during which Murakami wanders through the Tokyo black markets trying to find a gun-seller. Eight minutes is forever in cinema time, and this sequence is shot in the real black market with a hidden camera by Inoshiro Honda, who will later do the Godzilla films. No dialogue, just mean streets.

There are signs of occupation everywhere. The characters wear western dress. When Murakami identifies the woman who picked his pocket on the bus, his colleague is at first doubtful because this woman always wore a kimono and Murakami said she was wearing a dress. Women only seem to wear kimonos in their homes in this film. This same pickpocket, under questioning, also demands her civil rights, a concept introduced by occupation forces.

The dog shown panting in the opening sequences was also the subject of some controversy. Occupation censors accused Kurosawa of injecting the animal with rabies in order to get a realistic shot and Kurosawa had to go to great lengths to prove that they had simply exercised the dog to make it pant.

I do need to mention the heat, which serves as a major trope in this motion picture. The heat seves as a marker of Murakami’s descent into the underworld and moral relativism. He starts out a young turk, a hero in a shiney white suit and white shoes and ends up, after his battle with his shadow Yusa, wounded and slimed with swamp water. But everybody in this film gets grubbier and grubbier. Sato constantly uses a handkerchief to wipe grime from his brow and arms, Murakami’s white suit becomes sweated through. Showgirls collapse in a limp sweaty pile backstage. Hotel clerk and mobster alike live within the range of the old oscillating electric fans of the day.

In the end, Murakami confronts his shadow self and overcomes him but, as in all quest stories, not without suffering a wound both physical and psychic. The shadow he confronts is not just his own, but that of his society that will not or cannot assimilate and forgive its returned and defeated soldiers.

Tellingly, in the final scenes, a middle-class girl practicing Mozart on the piano overhears the shot that wounds Murakami. She comes to the window, looks out, yawns, and goes back to her piano.

Yusa, capture and handcuffed, wails and wails. It is an eery, epic mourning for all that has been lost.

Stray Dog is a long and visually complex black and white film. I haven’t begun to hit on all the elements of the plot here, let alone the camera work and the performances. An excellent ensemble cast, including the 29-year-old Mifune in pretty much his breakthrough performance. The next year, in 1950, Kurosawa would make Roshomon and stake off in a new direction.
Good review at Bright Lights Film Journal and Images

A Dead Boche

TO you who’d read my songs of War
And only hear of blood and fame,
I’ll say (you’ve heard it said before)
”War’s Hell!” and if you doubt the same,
Today I found in Mametz Wood
A certain cure for lust of blood:

Where, propped against a shattered trunk,
In a great mess of things unclean,
Sat a dead Boche; he scowled and stunk
With clothes and face a sodden green,
Big-bellied, spectacled, crop-haired,
Dribbling black blood from nose and beard.

— Robert Graves, from Fairies and Fusiliers (Knopf, 1918)

When I called my mother last night, she told me that the three little sisters had been to see her. These are her sisters children, her three nieces, all middle-aged women now with grown children of their own, but to my 90-year-old mother, they are still the little sisters.

The sisters had returned to the home town on this lovely May weekend to “visit the graves.” In the South, we call this spring memorial to the dead “Decoration Day,” and we use it to remember not just our war dead, but all of our dead kin. To be remembered is as near as we can get to immortality in this world.

For a description of how this holiday is observed, here is an excerpt of Georgia Green Stamper’s essay, “Decoration Day:”

There was a time, not so long ago, when Memorial Day was more than an excuse for a Bacchanal picnic marking the beginning of summer. Before the mall and its three-day sale, before everybody had a public or private swimming pool to open, before the holiday always fell on the last Monday of May — my family celebrated something we called Decoration Day.

This was an accurate description of the way my rural Kentucky family observed the May holiday because we did, indeed, decorate. Iris and peonies grew abundantly in our yard, and our ancestral clan was — or had been — large. We would rise early, my grandfather and I, to clip bushels of the dew-touched flowers, and before the day was over, we would complete our annual transformation of the New Columbus cemetery into a glorious garden such as Monet, himself, might have painted. In fact, had Monet been related to us, we would have decorated his final resting place too, because we didn’t want any of our dead kin to feel left out. Even now, I am compelled to place a plastic flower on the grave of every relative who ever sat around a Christmas table with us, and in more forgiving years, even on the graves of some who didn’t.

…

In my memory, these May Sundays were always perfect, warm, spring days; it never rained, the wind never blew, and we never got hungry or thirsty

…

Walking through the cemetery with Gran was both a history lesson for me, and a crash course in his philosophy of life. I knew from his stories who he respected, and why; those he disapproved of; and those he loved in spite of their shortcomings. He told me about old jokes and pranks played a half century earlier. He told me of parties and childhood crushes. He taught me the names of the old families, the pioneers. He taught me about a place, about a culture. He taught me who I was, and who he hoped I might become.

You can read this and many other essays in Georgia’s Book You Can Go Anywhere (Wind Publications, 2008).

The summer 2008 edition of Rattle devotes a special 60-page full-color section to visual poetry. Ruth Bavetta has written to announce that her three pieces from her series “Readings” will be featured in this issue.

Ruth works in a medium called altered books. The piece above is one she let me feature here back in 2005. It was done by altering an old yoga book. Here’s a newer example. This work is not that which is featured in Rattle.

For more examples of the art of altered books, try this site. I’ve been visiting for years.