Sherry Chandler

In the Box

via Jeff Hess

Fractal

Mandelbox Zoom from hömpörgő on Vimeo.

You can actually see this better if you click through and watch it at Vimeo.

Via Donna Rhae Marder

Shirley Jackson has a birthday

Today is Shirley Jackson’s birthday and, thanks to Roger Ebert’s Twitter feed, I have a link where you can go and take a look at a facsimile of the New Yorker for June 26, 1948, where “The Lottery” made its first appearance.

There’s a Richard Wilbur poem, too, on page 28.

I’ve always thought The Haunting of Hill House one of the most effective thrillers ever written, and the 1963 movie version The Haunting is equally excellent.

Here’s the first paragraph:

No live organism can continue for long to exist sanely under conditions of absolute reality; even larks and katydids are supposed, by some to dream. Hill House, not sane, stood by itself against its hills, holding darkness within; it had stood so for eighty years and might stand for eighty more. Within, walls continued upright, bricks met neatly, floors were firm, and doors were sensibly shut; silence lay steadily against the wood and stone of Hill House, and whatever walked there, walked alone.

__________
If you have a taste for the macabre, by the way, you might like Dr. Omed’s The Daily Tombstone. Says he

I have an unholy interest in gravestones and grave markers, as well as other forms of remembrance of the dead, whether ornately carved stone or homemade roadside memorial. I’m rather fond of cemeteries, too. Burial grounds are generally quiet and uncrowded…by the living. Usually, you can cut the solitude with a knife, and I like my solitude. The dead don’t talk. Much

To ‘cast or not to ‘cast

At DMX Zone, Linda Goin asks the question, Why Use Audio in Your Blog?

In the context of her article, she makes these observations:

To hear a poet read his own words is like watching an artist explain all the elements and principles of design in a painting or illustration.

. . .

Unless poetry can be made accessible through sight and sound, poetry and the poet could easily slide into oblivion, marking modern and historic poets less accessible than fossils.

Linda highlights several blogs and web sites where poetry and audio are joyfully melded, and I might mention that she gives a very nice plug both to Sheri L. Wright’s radio broadcast From the Inkwell — I love this statement about Sheri:

Her blog doesn’t reflect her poetry as much as her trains of thought – and some of those trains are powerful, with locomotives that could push you back a few feet with the blow-back from their passing.

— and also specifically to my interview with Sheri, which is available in the archives. In that interview, I talk about my enthusiasm for poetry podcasts.

And, by the way, you can find some audio files of me reading poems linked from my poetry page. Here for example, and here, and here, and one of my favorites here. And leave us not forget my own reading at qarrtsiluni (see below).

Linda also provides several links to how-to files on creating podcasts, so I suggest you click on over and give her article a read.

You might also want to read Dave Bonta’s Literary podcasting made simple with WordPress.com

Dave is an editor at qarrtsiluni, an online magazine that publishes a podcast along with the text of the poems they feature. Lately, he’s been reading the print edition of their Economy issue, and he fell to contemplating the effect of hearing those poets read:

I continue to feel that the combination of text and audio players on the same virtual page is a wonderful thing, even if not every author is the best interpreter of her own work. . . .

I might not have remembered every nuance of every poem and story in the Economy issue, but to my surprise and amusement I did remember many of the poets’ voices, and heard them in my head as I read through the print edition. Of course, a Scottish accent is pretty memorable for a Yank like me, but I found I remembered the accents of many of the other poets too: Alex Cigale’s precise consonants, Tom Sheehan’s age-mellowed Boston accent, Eileen Tabios’ hilariously seductive reading of “Post-Coital,” Monica Raymond’s world-weary, vatic cadence in the closing piece, “Economies.”

I think the fact that I was still able to conjure these up a year later is a pretty strong testimony to the power of audio to focus attention. The [Christian Science] Monitor article mentions Socrates’ dismissal of written language in passing, as a way to call into question the seriousness of these new criticisms of electronic media, treating it as self-evident that Socrates was just a conservative old fart. But Socrates was right, as any number of studies of contemporary oral societies have shown: dependence on writing systems has harmed our memories and fundamentally altered our ability to listen and thereby internalize language. Heard speech is alive in a way that printed words are not, though our ability to record and now digitize it does alter its ephemerality, if not quite its relationship to time. The druids too opposed literacy, for much the same reason as Socrates, but they took a huge gamble in doing so and essentially lost: what we know of them today is largely what was written down by their enemies. And would anyone remember Socrates if not for Plato?

Dave draws no conclusion here as to whether slow reading or micropoetry is the salvation of humankind. Like me, he samples all of it and finds different joys in the different media. One thing I really like about internet publishing, as I mentioned in my interview with Sheri Wright, the one that Linda Goin was kind enough to recommend, is its capacity to present a reading of the poetry with the text.

A couple of other places where poets are using audio in creative ways:

Mike Snider is podcasting poems from his book manuscript Other Voices. Mike works in form and you’ll find some rare ones in this collection, like the rubliw.

Brenda Clews is a Canadian poet and dancer who experiments with audio multitracking and video to produce some fascinating performance poetry.

Wedding poem

Well, by now, if you haven’t heard about Chelsea’s wedding poem, you probably llive on the Planet Xergon.

Some links:

Chelsea’s wedding poem was originally code for British spies

Breaking the Code: Chelsea Clinton’s Wedding Poem

What do I know? Who but a President’s daughter would lookk to a British spy for a wedding poem?

Thanks for the links to Kate Bernadette Benedict and Linda Goin.

The unholiness of holy war

I have been reading old New Yorkers again, as is my wont when my friend sends me a care package. This week, in addition to some fascinating archaeological study of the Donner party and some surprising revelations about the Little House books, I was absorbed by Jill Lepore’s Plymouth Rocked, an article that is basically a review of historical treatments of the Pilgrims.

Given my interest in the interaction between indigenous peoples and the European settlers of North America, it will come as little surprise that I was most interested in this article’s take on King Philip’s War, one of the bloodiest and least known of our American history. I deal a little bit with King Philip’s War and how it contributed to our national mythology and the literature of captivity myths in this post.

What interests me in Lepore’s article is the role King Philip’s War played in our sense of what you might call Manifest Destiny as holy war.

In proportion to population, King Philip’s War was one of the deadliest wars in American history. More than half of all English settlements in New England were either destroyed or abandoned. Hundreds of colonists were killed. Thousands of Indians died; those who survived, including Philip’s nine-year-old son, Massasoit’s grandson, were loaded on ships and sold into slavery. Because the conflict was, for both sides, a holy war, it was waged with staggering brutality. New England’s Indians fought to take their land back from the Christians, mocking their praying victims: “Where is Your O God?” One, having killed a colonist, stuffed a Bible into his victim’s gutted belly. Puritans interpreted such acts as a sign of God’s wrath, as punishment for their descent into sinfulness. Not only had they become, over the years, less pious than the first generation of settlers; they had also failed to convert the Indians to Christianity. The Boston minister Increase Mather asked, “Why should we suppose that God is not offended with us, when his displeasure is written, in such visible and bloody Characters?”

Reading those scarlet letters, Puritans concluded that God was commanding them to defeat their “heathen” enemies by any means necessary. For the English, all restraint in war, all notions of “just conduct,” applied only to secular warfare; in a holy war, anything goes. Ministers urged their congregations to “take, kill, burn, sink, destroy all sin and Corruption, &C which are professed enemies to Christ Jesus, and not to pity or spare any of them.” Such a policy, then as now, breeds nothing if not merciless retaliation. As a Boston merchant reported to London, the Indians, in town after town, tortured and mutilated their victims, “either cutting off the Head, ripping open the Belly, or skulping the Head of Skin and Hair, and hanging them up as Trophies; wearing Men’s Fingers as Bracelets about their Necks, and Stripes of their Skins which they dresse for Belts.”

After the blood bath was over, Lepore says the Pilgrim’s repented of their savagery.

I suppose in those days as in these, the brutal over-reaction was born out of terror.

But the lesson to be learned here is one we never ever seem to learn. Or one we have to learn over again with each generation.

Miss Emily Bronte has a birthday