Sherry Chandler

As New Orleans evacuates, on this holiday weekend almost exactly three years after Katrina, I think we should all have the city and its residents in our hearts.

As of 4 a.m., NOAA called Gustav ad Catetory Three hurricane, which is a downgrade. Here, via Tom Watson is a social network of interest on Ning, the Gustav Information Center.

And I think we should contemplate our failure to help the people of New Orleans then and since then. Let us hope that this storm is of lesser magnitude and that the Army Corps of Engineers is right in saying they’re prepared for it.

In 1650, Anne Bradstreet’s The Tenth Muse Lately Sprung up in America was published in London. If I remember correctly, it was the first book of poetry to come out of North America, certainly of that area which was to become the United States. And it was written by a woman! Bradstreet knew such a publication could be at the least a scandal. At worst, it could get her in real trouble. Anne lived in Puritan Massachusetts Bay, where women were expected to keep their decidedly secondary place. A decade earlier (1638), another Anne, Anne Hutchinson had been exiled from the colony for the heresy of daring to think for herself and teach religion. Penelope Scambly Schott has published an excellent biography in poetry of Anne Hutchinson, A Is for Anne: Mistress Hutchinson Disturbs the Commonwealth.

In an attempt to forestall a similar fate for herself, Bradstreet included this apparently fawning prologue. Irony and satire are not 20^th century inventions. The poem is a rhetorical masterpiece.

You’ll find a nice hypertext gloss here to help in understanding Bradstreet’s complex word play. Obnoxious, for example, has several meanings more than the one most of us are currently familiar with, though I like it here in the modern sense.

The Prologue

To sing of wars, of captains, and of kings,
Of cities founded, commonwealth begun,
For my mean pen are too superior things:
Or how they all, or each their dates have run
Let poets and historians set these forth,
My obscure lines shall not so dim their worth.

2
But when my wond’ring eyes and envious heart
Great Bartas sugared lines do but read o’er,
Fool I do grudge the Muses did not part
Twixt him and me that overfluent store;
A Bartas can do what a Bartas will
But simple I according to my skill.

3
From schoolboy’s tongue no rhetoric we expect,
Nor yet a sweet consort from broken strings,
Nor perfect beauty where’s a main defect;
My foolish, broken, blemished Muse so sings,
And this to mend, alas, no art is able,
“Cause nature made it so irreparable.

4
Nor can I, like that fluent sweet tongued Greek
Who lisped at first, in future times speak plain.
By art he gladly found what he did seek,
A full requital of his striving pain.
Art can do much, but this maxim’s most sure:
A weak or wounded brain admits no cure.

5
I am obnoxious to each carping tongue
Who says my hand a needle better fits,
A poet’s pen all scorn I should thus wrong,
For such despite they cast on female wits;
If what I do prove well, it won’t advance,
They’ll say it’s stol’n, or else it was by chance.

6
But sure the antique Greeks were far more mild
Else of our sex, why feigned they those nine
And poesy made Calliope’s own child;
So ‘mongst the rest they placed the arts divine;
But this weak knot they will full soon untie,
The Greeks did nought, but play the fools and lie.

7
Let Greeks be Greeks, and women what they are
Men have precedency and still excel,
It is but vain unjustly to wage war;
Men can do best, and women know it well.
Preeminence in all and each is yours;
Yet grant some small acknowledgement of ours.

8
And oh ye high flown quills that soar the skies,
And ever with your prey still catch your praise,
If e’er you deign these lowly lines your eyes,
Give thyme or parsley wreath, I ask no bays;
This mean and unrefined ore of mine
Will make your glist’ring gold but more to shine.

— Anne Bradstreet

I prefer Michael. In my view, he’s cuter. But then I’m decidely hetero. I would hazard to guess that he’s also funnier.

Sarah Palin embraces all the wrong issues.

Still there are ways and ways to oppose her, as Melissa McEwan points out in here Sarah Palin Sexism Watch #1

Well, that took—what?—an hour? Petulant just emailed me to say he heard someone on the Stephanie Miller Show calling Palin a “bimbo.” (Presumably because she’s a former beauty queen.) And I’m already reading indictments of “her” that include information like “her husband works for an oil company.”

…

For the record, there is plenty about which to criticize Palin that has absolutely fuck-all to do with her sex. She’s anti-choice, against marriage equality, pro-death penalty, pro-guns, and loves Big Business. (In other words, she’s a Republican.) There’s no goddamned reason to criticize her for anything but her policies.

And I’ll go ahead and put it right in the fucking inaugural post in this series: I will defend Sarah Palin against misogynist smears not because I like or support her, but because that’s how feminism works.

Time to see, I guess, whether all the attacks on Hillary were pure Clinton Derangement Syndrome or whether it was just plain old-fashioned sexism.

Oh, and to the list of Palin’s bad policy positions, she’s gung-ho for drilling in Alaska.

Oh, and, via Susie, she’s under investigation for an ethics violation.

Added: More on the sexism front.

Added August 31: I don’t always agree with Gail Collins but I think she has this one right:

However, I do feel kind of ticked off at the assumptions that the Republicans seem to be making about female voters. It’s a tad reminiscent of the Dan Quayle selection, when the first George Bush’s advisers decided they could close the gender gap with a cute running mate.

The idea that women are going to race off to vote for any candidate with the same internal plumbing is both offensive and historically wrong. When the sexes have parted company in modern elections, it’s generally been because women are more likely to be Democrats, and more concerned about protecting the social safety net. “The gender gap traditionally has been determined by party preference, not by the gender of the candidate,” said Ruth Mandel of the Eagleton Institute of Politics.

Over the last week, we have heard over and over and over that Tuesday was the anniversary of the day women got the right to vote. (They got it when a state representative in Tennessee, where the House was split on the ratification issue, changed his vote because his mother wrote him a letter telling him to shape up. That’s a story that I would love to get into, but, unfortunately, right now we have Sarah Palin to deal with.)

After that big moment of enfranchisement, women went through a long period in the desert where they had the vote but not much else. Then came the great revolutions of the 1970s, when all the assumptions about the natural divisions between the sexes were challenged. During that era, women could be excited and moved by symbolic candidacies that promised a better, more inclusive future, like Shirley Chisholm’s presidential race and Geraldine Ferraro’s presence on the Democratic national ticket.

This year, Hillary Clinton took things to a whole new level. She didn’t run for president as a symbol but as the best-prepared candidate in the Democratic pack. Whether you liked her or not, she convinced the nation that women could be qualified to both run the country and be commander in chief. That was an enormous breakthrough, and Palin’s nomination feels, in comparison, like a step back.

If she’s only on the ticket to try to get disaffected Clinton supporters to cross over, it’s a bad choice. Joe Biden may already be practicing his drop-dead line for the vice-presidential debate: “I know Hillary Clinton. Hillary Clinton is a friend of mine, and governor, you’re no Hillary Clinton.”

Oh my dears, I have been much distracted over the last week or two by a variety of projects that I hope will refill the old coffers, because, unlike George W. Bush, I can’t count on doing that by giving a few speeches.

(If anybody would like to pay me for giving a speech or even a poetry reading, I am available.)

And so I have been neglecting my blog and my blog community. I hope to be back in the full swing of things soon, if only to share a Tim Keith tale of my own. Meanwhile, rest assured, I continue to look out upon the world with eyes as skeptical as Bert’s.

At YouTube

I’m with the Trailer Park Troubadors, Skinny Women Ain’t Hip:

See also Matt Bors.

From Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke (Simon & Schuster, 2008):

Victor Klemperer [a retired teacher in Dresden] listened as a loudspeaker radiated Hitler’s speech [on September 19, 1939, after invading Poland]. “Some of it is rhetorically very effective,” he thought. But it pointed to a long war. At his library, all the English books were withdrawn.

Klemperer’s heart was bothering him. “one of two things will happen,” he predicted. “Either Hitler will conclude victorious peace in a week — then we shall perish. Or the war only really starts now and lasts for a long time — in that case we shall also perish.” [p. 145]

Victor Klemperer, who died in 1960, kept a diary, including his experience of the firebombing of Dresden. These reflections are from that diary. The entries for years 1933-1941 were translated into English by Martin Chalmers and published by Random House as I Will Bear Witness in 1998. (At least the version in the Univ Ky library is dated 1998. Seems late to me.)

I must take this book back to the library today. I only made it through the first 200 pages, not because the book is dull but because it deals with painful subjects. You might guess that a book subtitled “The End of Civilization” might not be light reading. (WWII introduced, among other horrible things, the bombing of cities—and Winston Churchill was not totally innocent in escalating that tactic—and the word civilization derives from the Latin word civis, a citizen, a member of the city.)

The format also slows me down. It is sort of like a 475-page PowerPoint presentation. No narrative frame, just entries such as I’ve copied here over the last several days. In some ways it’s like reading a collection of poems. After reading an entry like the one above, it’s impossible just to turn the page and read the next one. I have to sit and stare out the window at the birds in the pine and mourn a bit.

In some ways, I think Human Smoke provides a balance for the nationalistic hype of The Greatest Generation. I have not read Brokaw’s book nor do I plan to read it so I’m not comparing the two books. I’m talking about the hype, the hunger for war heroes. As Mannion implies, heroism is value neutral. Human beings can be heroic for all kinds of causes, some good, some very wrong-headed.

And now somebody else wants to read this book, so I can’t renew it. No other library in the area has a copy, only Lexington Public.

May be time to 16 bucks for the paperback.

Susan Faludi nails it in the NYTimes:

Today, the United States ranks 22nd among the 30 developed nations in its proportion of female federal lawmakers. The proportion of female state legislators has been stuck in the low 20 percent range for 15 years; women’s share of state elective executive offices has fallen consistently since 2000, and is now under 25 percent. The American political pipeline is 86 percent male.

Women’s real annual earnings have fallen for the last four years. Progress in narrowing the wage gap between men and women has slowed considerably since 1990, yet last year the Supreme Court established onerous restrictions on women’s ability to sue for pay discrimination. The salaries of women in managerial positions are on average lower today than in 1983.

Women’s numbers are stalled or falling in fields ranging from executive management to journalism, from computer science to the directing of major motion pictures. The 20 top occupations of women last year were the same as half a century ago: secretary, nurse, grade school teacher, sales clerk, maid, hairdresser, cook and so on. And just as Congress cut funds in 1929 for maternity education, it recently slashed child support enforcement by 20 percent, a decision expected to leave billions of dollars owed to mothers and their children uncollected.

Again, male politicians and pundits indulge in outbursts of “new masculinist” misogyny (witness Mrs. Clinton’s campaign coverage). Again, the news media showcase young women’s “feminist — new style” pseudo-liberation — the flapper is now a girl-gone-wild. Again, many daughters of a feminist generation seem pleased to proclaim themselves so “beyond gender” that they don’t need a female president.

And Garry Trudeau nails it at Gocomics.com

Today is, of course, the anniversary of the passage of the 19th amendment.
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Added: from Eric Boehlert:

What’s so startling in watching the coverage of the Clinton convention-speech story has been the complete ignorance displayed about how previous Democratic conventions have dealt with runners-up like Clinton. It’s either complete ignorance or the media’s strong desire to painstakingly avoid any historical context, which, in turn, allows the press to mislead news consumers into thinking Clinton’s appearance (as well as the gracious invitation extended by Obama) represents something unique and unusual. Something newsworthy.

Based on previous conventions, if a candidate had accumulated as many delegates and votes as Clinton did during the primaries and then did not have her name placed into nomination, that would represent a radical departure from the convention norm.

…

Even after all these months, I still don’t completely understand why Clinton’s essentially centrist campaign for the White House ginned up so much open contempt from the press corps, which has felt completely comfortable addressing her in an openly derogatory and condescending manner. The issue of her convention involvement simply allowed the press to whack her around like a piñata one more time, regardless of the facts.

Couldn’t be because she’s a woman?

If you read the whole thing, especially the last three bullet points, you might be led to believe that.

Perhaps because they are so unlovable.

From Nicholson Baker’s Human Smoke (Simon & Schuster, 2008) :

Christopher Isherwood wrote in his diary that it was one month since the war began. “One looks ahead to a war and imagines it as a single, final, absolute event,” he said. “It is nothing of the kind. War is a condition, like peace, with good days and bad days, moods of optimism and despair.”

Isherwood’s radio was always on; it was driving him crazy. He especially hated the European correspondents, broadcasting local color: “The Paris sky is blue. The leaves in the Bois are turning yellow. A lark is singing over Montmartre.” He said: “I feel about them the way some bums must feel about the Salvation Army worker who forces you to take hymns with your soup.”

Felicia Mitchell, nominated by the Dead Mule School of Southern Literature for inclusion in Sundress’s 2008 Best of the Net anthology, calls her online chapbook There Is No Map

Here is his Southern Legitimacy Statement:

Will it help if I say that I was so homesick for South Carolina two weeks ago that I got into Google Earth and called up a tiny corner of Williamsburg County, my mother’s birthplace, and then moved to the small town of Sumter, where I was born, to find the exact neighborhood where I once played with my brothers in the dirt with our coal bucket in the backyard? It’s possible that living where I have lived for twenty years, southern Appalachia, could make me a southerner, but that’s not the case. My roots are in South Carolina, and when spring comes I’m like a dog catching a scent in the air. I want to get in the car and drive down the mountain to the low country where I was born and bred, where generations of my family were born and bred. Two years ago I brought my mother, Mama, up near me to live, and you’d think that having her with her equally southern accent and charm ten miles down the road in a cozy nursing home that I visit almost too much would make me feel as if I’d brought the most important part of South Carolina, my father already buried down there, up to me. I’ll tell you the truth. When the two of us get together and sit on the porch (since I picked her nursing home because it has a porch and flowers she can tend and horses across the street that we can watch and all the loving care you’d get in a big extended family living in a big house the way her family did a few generations ago), it’s almost like being back on her porch. But it’s not quite the same.
Would I lose points if I said I qualify for Colonial Dames but am not at all likely ever to join? Having moved away from the South Carolina where my family had lived for generations without straying far, having married a man from New Jersey, having borne a son who doesn’t talk like he comes from South Carolina—these things should not be held against me.

I currently live in Meadowview, a rural town in Virginia near the border of Tennessee, and work in Emory, an even more rural town in the interior of Meadowview (Emory is a village within a town, a very small village within a very small town).

Her nominated poem is also called “There Is No Map.” You can read it here.

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There is the list of all six poets nominated by the Mule for The Best of the Net. Like Helen, I hope one of us makes the cut.