Sherry Chandler

which you’ve already seen in the NYTimes:

Eating locally raised food is a growing trend. But who has time to get to the farmer’s market, let alone plant a garden?

That is where Trevor Paque comes in. For a fee, Mr. Paque, who lives in San Francisco, will build an organic garden in your backyard, weed it weekly and even harvest the bounty, gently placing a box of vegetables on the back porch when he leaves.

Call them the lazy locavores — city dwellers who insist on eating food grown close to home but have no inclination to get their hands dirty. Mr. Paque is typical of a new breed of business owner serving their needs.

Ah! the entrepreneurial spirit.

And then there are High Density Vertical Growth Systems, sort of like growing chickens in cages where they can’t stand up.

H/t Lambert and gizzardboy at Correntewire.

From yesterday’s New York Times:

BEREA, Ky. — Berea College, founded 150 years ago to educate freed slaves and “poor white mountaineers,” accepts only applicants from low-income families, and it charges no tuition.

“You can literally come to Berea with nothing but what you can carry, and graduate debt free,” said Joseph P. Bagnoli Jr., the associate provost for enrollment management. “We call it the best education money can’t buy.”

Actually, what buys that education is Berea’s $1.1 billion endowment, which puts the college among the nation’s wealthiest. But unlike most well-endowed colleges, Berea has no football team, coed dorms, hot tubs or climbing walls. Instead, it has a no-frills budget, with food from the college farm, handmade furniture from the college crafts workshops, and 10-hour-a-week campus jobs for every student.

Berea’s approach provides an unusual perspective on the growing debate over whether the wealthiest universities are doing enough for the public good to warrant their tax exemption, or simply hoarding money to serve an elite few. As many elite universities scramble to recruit more low-income students, Berea’s no-tuition model has attracted increasing attention.

The article, with its focus on higher education in general, does not mention that the town of Berea, perhaps because of the College, is a powerhouse of art and politics in the state. Home to many fine craft shops (production as well as retail), including but certainly not limited to the Kentucky Artisan Center and the Appalachian Fireside Gallery. The world-class artisans who live in Berea include my friend Gin Petty, Teresa Cole, and Warren May. Berea is also world headquarters of the Kentucky Guild of Artists and Craftsmen.

Some of the best writers in the state live in Berea, including Jim Tomlinson, Normandi Ellis, Steve Rhodes (who has a book coming out soon from Wind), and my old friend Margaret Ricketts.

The town is also home to political activists, such as Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, which works to stop mountaintop removal mining, and the Mountain Association for Economic Development.

From the New York Times:

When Kay Ryan was a student at the University of California, Los Angeles, the poetry club rejected her application; she was perhaps too much of a loner, she recalls. Now Ms. Ryan is being inducted into one of the most elite poetry clubs around. She is to be named the country’s poet laureate on Thursday.

Known for her sly, compact poems that revel in wordplay and internal rhymes, Ms. Ryan has won a carriage full of poetry prizes for her funny and philosophical work, including awards from the Guggenheim Foundation, the National Endowment for the Arts, and in 1994, the Ruth Lilly Poetry Prize, worth $100,000.

Still, she has remained something of an outsider.

“I so didn’t want to be a poet,” Ms. Ryan, 62, said in a phone interview from her home in Fairfax, Calif. “I came from sort of a self-contained people who didn’t believe in public exposure, and public investigation of the heart was rather repugnant to me.”

But in the end “I couldn’t resist,” she said. “It was in a strange way taking over my mind. My mind was on its own finding things and rhyming things. I was getting diseased.”

I hadn’t paid much attention to Kay Ryan’s poetry until I heard her read at West Chester last year. I found her reading style wonderfully wry and funny and her work just wonderful.

I also sat next to her at one of the readings at that conference but alas, none of her talent rubbed off though I rubbed shoulders. I could no more match Ryan’s minimalism than I could match Naomi Nye’s expansiveness. But I am very very glad both poets are in my world.

Here is Ryan’s page at Poets.org, where you can read some of her work if you don’t already know it. I see that they have “Home to Roost,” her famous 9/11 poem, except that it’s not, as David Orr points out in the current issue of Poetry:

The only problem, of course, is that “Home to Roost” was written prior to September 11 and has nothing whatsoever to do with the attack, its aftermath, or the now-famous invocation of this specific phrase by Jeremiah Wright. Ryan enjoys tweaking clichés, but when a particular cliché is thrown into political relief—as often happens—then her poem tends to follow. It’ll be another five years before she can call this one her own again, which probably annoys her endlessly.

It’s good that Ryan has been named Poet Laureate because she is a fine and “accessible” poet, but also because she’s a woman. As Amy King points out here, Ryan will be only the 10th woman out of 45 poets to hold the office since 1937.

1945-1946 — Louise Bogan
1948-1949 — Leonie Adams
1949-1950 — Elizabeth Bishop
1971-1973 — Josephine Jacobsen
1981-1982 — Maxine Kumin
1985-1986 — Gwendolyn Brooks
1992-1993 — Mona Van Duyn
1993-1995 — Rita Dove
2003-2004 — Louise Glück
2008 — Kay Ryan

Here’s the best photo I’ve seen of Kay Ryan. I stole it from Poesy Galore:

When I was watchng Persepolis, I didn’t know whether I should be relieved that our country had not gone so far to the right or appalled that we had already given in so much to our own fundamentalists on women’s issues.

This news, from Suburban Guerrilla, is not reassuring:

WASHINGTON, DC – U.S. Senators Hillary Rodham Clinton (D-NY) and Patty Murray (D-WA) today called on the Secretary of Health and Human Services to stop misguided plans to put in place new obstacles for women accessing family planning services. This proposed rule change is a poorly-veiled attempt to roll-back women’s health care options before the current Administration leaves office.

…

One of the most troubling aspects of the proposed rules is the overly-broad definition of “abortion.” This definition would allow health-care corporations or individuals to classify many common forms of contraception – including the birth control pill, emergency contraception and IUDs – “abortions” and therefore to refuse to provide contraception to women who need it.

The question here is not just birth control but who has control of a woman’s body.

Your thinking here should be along the lines of “First they came for late-term abortions…” This sh1t has to stop.

Yesterday afternoon when I left the office, got into my car for the drive home, and turned the ignition key, all I got was a series of clicks. Rats! sez I and I gets out my handy-dandy cell phone and called Triple A.

Had to wait about 40 minutes, long enough to get hot under the collar in the July sun, for the nice young man to show up with his charger, But once he arrived, it took him about ten minutes to diagnose my problem and get me enough juice to start my engine, then I was on my way again.

My headlights were turned on, and though the car is supposed to and always has turned them off for me when I turn off the ignition, I suspect this time something didn’t quite work and the headlights drained my battery. My car is 11 years old. Soon it will hit puberty.

I wonder, though, don’t they have jumper cables for airplanes? According to The Daily Yonder:

Congressmen Ben Chandler (D-KY) and Norm Dicks (D-WA) were scheduled to tour the coalfields of Central Appalachia by air Saturday, to view the effects of mountain top removal coal mining. The two congressmen were to take a plane from outside Washington, D.C., to Hazard, Kentucky, where they would meet Saturday with local residents.

The trip never got in the air. Somebody left a switch on in the plane overnight, running down the aircraft’s battery. The plane wouldn’t crank up Saturday morning and Chandler and Dicks were left grounded in Washington.

Some at the rally were not surprised, and suspected that the federal Office of Surface Mining intentionally bolluxed the trip. Members of Kentuckians for the Commonwealth, who helped organize a rally in Hazard that was to meet Chandler and Dicks, felt the trip could have been sabotaged. KFTC has long battled the Office of Surface Mining, the federal agency that organized the trip for the two congressmen and is charged with regulating coal mining.

“They must think we’re stupid,” said John Roark, a resident of Vicco, Kentucky.

Chandler’s Legislative Director, Jim Creevy, said that Rep. Chandler pledged to reschedule the trip, but offered no date for when this would happen.

Is there only one airplane in Washington, D.C.? Only one battery? Don’t they have chargers? No AAA for Congressmen??

Or is this excuse as lame as it seems?

I tracked this from The Sideshow to Hecate to Dependable Renegade and on to the Telegraph:

The American leader, who has been condemned throughout his presidency for failing to tackle climate change, ended a private meeting with the words: “Goodbye from the world’s biggest polluter.”

He then punched the air while grinning widely, as the rest of those present including Gordon Brown and Nicolas Sarkozy looked on in shock.

Mr Bush, whose second and final term as President ends at the end of the year, then left the meeting at the Windsor Hotel in Hokkaido where the leaders of the world’s richest nations had been discussing new targets to cut carbon emissions.

And just to cheer you up further on a Monday, There was a Class War, The Rich Won It:

What happens if there’s a class war and only one side bothers to show up and fight it? That’s what happened over the last thirty years. There was a class war, and the rich won. Period. It’s over, they kicked our knees out from under us, put on their steel toed boots and spent the last thirty years telling us that they were going to trickle on us and we’re going to like it and beg for more.

Seems like hyperbole? It’s just the numbers. The top left shows the manufacturing wage earner’s hourly wages. Not “family income” which includes both of you going to work, but hourly wages. The only reason it’s goods producing is they go back longer, but other charts show the same pattern.

So, if you’re an ordinary slob, you haven’t had a raise in over 30 years. In fact, your real wage peaked over 30 years ago and it’s never recovered.

This would be ok if the US hadn’t been getting richer, getting more productive, ever since then, but I’m sure you won’t be surprised to hear that, well, actually, productivity and whatnot has kept going up. Yet somehow wages didn’t.

…

So they made themselves rich. They reduced taxation on themselves in a number of ways, they broke union power, they got rid of old New Deal laws that had stopped speculation from getting too bubblicious and they went on a bubble spree - shoving money into various different asset classes, driving them into the stratosphere, taking the profits and then letting the taxpayer eat the loss. They took as much public infrastructure private as they could and they did so for cents on the dollar. They imported manufactured goods from the east to keep goods inflation down and they exported jobs to low cost domiciles to keep wage push inflation down.

They also ran, in most periods, very tight dollar policies, so that there were fewer dollars around than the rest of the world needed. Needing dollars badly, people had to sell to the US cheap. And since everyone from outside the US wanted in on whatever the bubble of the day was, they kept giving the US real stuff (oil, goods) for pieces of paper. Those pieces of paper represented something real, at the end of the day: they represented the future. But the future always seems a long way off until suddenly it’s today.

It was a death bet. And back in the late 70’s and late 80’s it was a good bet. Heck, it was even a good bet for many over the last ten years. If you expect to be dead before the bill arrives, who cares how big the bill is? Tim Russert just won that bet. Reagan won that bet. Jesse Helms won that bet. It was a good bet for a lot of powerful men (and a few powerful women) in their late forties or older.

But some people lose death bets, and most people reading this today will lose this bet. You had your chance to die, now you’re going to get to live and pay. I suppose it’s better than the alternative, but I don’t imagine you’re going to enjoy it much.

All of which leads me back to Hecate’s question: Why? Why? Why Didn’t I Riot In The Streets In 2000? Why? Why didn’t anybody?

The latter also compliments of The Sideshow.

Bill Bishop has written a must-read article at The Daily Yonder concerning the Neshoba (Mississippi) Democrat and its work the murder of three civil rights workers in Philadelphia in 1964. The Democrat was recently awarded the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism at the University of Kentucky. Here is part of what Bishop has to say:

Jim Prince was a mid-20s reporter in Alabama in 1989 when he received his mailed edition of his hometown weekly newspaper, the Neshoba Democrat from Philadelphia, Mississippi. This edition was a special one. It contained a long interview with Dr. Carolyn Goodman, the mother of a young civil rights worker who was murdered in Philadelphia just a few months after Jim Prince was born in 1964.
The Democrat’s editor, Stanley Dearman, conducted the interview with Dr. Goodman at her apartment in New York city. Prince had heard about the murders of Andrew Goodman, James Chaney and Mickey Schwerner from his first memories — how the three had been pulled over by a local law enforcement officer in Philadelphia on June 21, 1964, tossed in the Neshoba County jail, released and never heard from again. He knew that the car the three young men were driving was found a few days later, abandoned and burned, and that in early August of that year the bodies of the three — two white and one black — were eventually dug out of a earthen dam. He knew that seven men were eventually convicted on federal conspiracy charges, but none had served more than six years in prison. And he knew that the state had never prosecuted a soul for the killings.

It was Dearman’s interview with Goodman, however, that “put a face on them for me,” Prince said of the three slain civil rights workers. “I wasn’t much older than Andy at the time I was reading the article. I was moved by the way his mother described him. He was athletic. He loved dramatic arts. He was a peaceful person who cared about people. That was a turning point for me, and I decided I had to be in Philadelphia for the (25th anniversary) memorial service.” Prince left his job at the daily paper in Alabama and came home to work that summer for the Democrat.

…

Dearman bought the paper two years after the three civil rights workers were murdered. He brought to the paper a determined kind of journalism. For example, Dearman exposed a bootlegging ring that brought in booze from Missouri to the dry county and used the local grand jury and constabulary to drive out competitors.

From the time Dearman first came to Philadelphia, he was haunted by the killings of the three civil rights workers and by the failure of the state ever to bring the murderers to justice. Dearman also knew that the town had never come to terms with the murders, in part because the town had never been confronted with the young lives that ended on the back roads of Neshoba County.

Here is what Al Cross says of the award at The Rural Blog:

For its 40 years of community leadership, especially on civil rights and reconciliation, The Neshoba Democrat, a weekly newspaper in Philadelphia, Miss., is this year’s winner of the Tom and Pat Gish Award for courage, integrity and tenacity in rural journalism from the Institute for Rural Journalism and Community Issues.

The Institute established the award to honor the couple who have published The Mountain Eagle in Whitesburg, Ky., for more than 51 years. The Gishes were the first recipients of the award…

The centerpiece of the newspaper’s work in civil rights and community reconciliation was its effort to bring to justice all the killers of James Earl Chaney, Andrew Goodman and Michael Schwerner, civil-rights workers who were murdered in Neshoba County in July 1964. Though seven men allied with the Ku Klux Klan were convicted of federal conspiracy charges, none served more than six years, 11 others went free, and the case was never prosecuted by the State of Mississippi until Stanley Dearman, Jim Prince and others called and worked for action.

By the way, Bill Bishop will be at Joseph-Beth Booksellers here in Lexington tonight reading from his book The Big Sort.

From the NYTimes:

CAMPTON TOWNSHIP, Ill. — In an environmentally conscious tweak on the typical way of getting food to the table, growing numbers of people are skipping out on grocery stores and even farmers markets and instead going right to the source by buying shares of farms.

On one of the farms, here about 35 miles west of Chicago, Steve Trisko was weeding beets the other day and cutting back a shade tree so baby tomatoes could get sunlight. Mr. Trisko is a retired computer consultant who owns shares in the four-acre Erehwon Farm.

“We decided that it’s in our interest to have a small farm succeed, and have them be able to have a sustainable farm producing good food,” Mr. Trisko said.

Part of a loose but growing network mostly mobilized on the Internet, Erehwon is participating in what is known as community-supported agriculture. About 150 people have bought shares in Erehwon — in essence, hiring personal farmers and turning the old notion of sharecropping on its head.

The concept was imported from Europe and Asia in the 1980s as an alternative marketing and financing arrangement to help combat the often prohibitive costs of small-scale farming. But until recently, it was slow to take root. There were fewer than 100 such farms in the early 1990s, but in the last several years the numbers have grown to close to 1,500, according to academic experts who have followed the trend.

Or maybe there’s some hope after all, according to Paul Krugman:

But the vote was bigger than the theatrics. It was the first major health care victory that Democrats have won in a long time. And it was enormously encouraging for advocates of universal health care.

Ostensibly, Wednesday’s vote was about restoring cuts in Medicare payments to doctors. What it was really about, however, was the fight against creeping privatization. Democrats finally took a stand — and, thanks to Senator Kennedy, seem to have prevailed.

The story really begins in 2003, when the Bush administration rammed the Medicare Modernization Act through Congress, literally in the dead of night. That bill established large de facto subsidies for Medicare Advantage plans — plans in which Medicare funds are funneled through private insurance companies, rather than directly paying for care.

Since then, enrollment in these plans has been growing rapidly. This has had a destructive effect on Medicare’s finances: the fastest-growing type of Medicare Advantage plan, private fee-for-service, costs taxpayers 17 percent more per beneficiary than Medicare without the middleman. It also threatens to undermine Medicare’s universality, turning it into a system in which insurance companies cherry-pick healthier and more affluent older Americans, leaving the sicker and poorer behind.

…

In previous years, payments to doctors were maintained through bipartisan fudging: politicians from both parties got together to waive the rules. In effect, Congress kept Medicare functioning by expanding the federal budget deficit.

This year, the Democratic leadership decided, instead, to link the “doctor fix” to the fight against privatization and offered a bill that maintains doctors’ payments while reining in those expensive private fee-for-service plans.

…

Here’s how it will play out, if all goes well: early next year, President Obama will send his health care plan to Congress. The plan will face vociferous opposition from the insurance industry — but the Medicare vote suggests that this time, unlike in 1993, Democrats will hold together.

Unless Democrats win even bigger than expected, however, they won’t have the 60 Senate votes needed to override a filibuster. What the Medicare fight shows is that the Democrats could nonetheless prevail by taking their case to the public, daring their opponents to stand in the way of health care security — so that in the end they get some Republicans to switch sides, and get the legislation through.

A lot can still go wrong with this vision. But the odds of achieving universal health care, soon, look a lot higher than they did just a couple of weeks ago.

Possum, who is stubborn (maybe because she only has about two brain cells) was sleeping in the corner of the cabinet top. This position is defensible, you see, from all the big males in the house, but we humans didn’t find it acceptable so we bribed her with a bed and now, for the moment, she sleeps on the dryer. Slight improvement but she doesn’t look any happier.

Another cat poem from Baudelaire:

Le Chat

I

Dans ma cervelle se promène,
Ainsi qu’en son appartement,
Un beau chat, fort, doux et charmant.
Quand il miaule, on l’entend à peine,

Tant son timbre est tendre et discret;
Mais que sa voix s’apaise ou gronde,
Elle est toujours riche et profonde.
C’est là son charme et son secret.

Cette voix, qui perle et qui filtre
Dans mon fonds le plus ténébreux,
Me remplit comme un vers nombreux
Et me réjouit comme un philtre.

Elle endort les plus cruels maux
Et contient toutes les extases;
Pour dire les plus longues phrases,
Elle n’a pas besoin de mots.

Non, il n’est pas d’archet qui morde
Sur mon coeur, parfait instrument,
Et fasse plus royalement
Chanter sa plus vibrante corde,

Que ta voix, chat mystérieux,
Chat séraphique, chat étrange,
En qui tout est, comme en un ange,
Aussi subtil qu’harmonieux!

II

De sa fourrure blonde et brune
Sort un parfum si doux, qu’un soir
J’en fus embaumé, pour l’avoir
Caressée une fois, rien qu’une.

C’est l’esprit familier du lieu;
Il juge, il préside, il inspire
Toutes choses dans son empire;
peut-être est-il fée, est-il dieu?

Quand mes yeux, vers ce chat que j’aime
Tirés comme par un aimant,
Se retournent docilement
Et que je regarde en moi-même,

Je vois avec étonnement
Le feu de ses prunelles pâles,
Clairs fanaux, vivantes opales
Qui me contemplent fixement.

— Charles Baudelaire

A translation:

The Cat

I

A fine strong gentle cat is prowling
As in his bedroom, in my brain;
So soft his voice, so smooth its strain,
That you can scarcely hear him miowling.

But should he venture to complain
Or scold, the voice is rich and deep:
And thus he manages to keep
The charm of his untroubled reign.

This voice, which seems to pearl and filter
Through my soul’s inmost shady nook,
Fills me with poems, like a book,
And fortifies me, like a philtre.

His voice can cure the direst pain
And it contains the rarest raptures.
The deepest meanings, which it captures,
It needs no language to explain.

There is no bow that can so sweep
That perfect instrument, my heart:
Or make more sumptuous music start
From its most vibrant cord and deep,

Than can the voice of this strange elf,
This cat, bewitching and seraphic,
Subtly harmonious in his traffic
With all things else, and with himself.

II

So sweet a perfume seems to swim
Out of his fur both brown and bright,
I nearly was embalmed one night
From (only once) caressing him.

Familiar Lar of where I stay,
He rules, presides, inspires and teaches
All things to which his empire reaches.
Perhaps he is a god, or fay.

When to a cherished cat my gaze
Is magnet-drawn and then returns
Back to itself, it there discerns,
With strange excitement and amaze,

Deep down in my own self, the rays
Of living opals, torch-like gleams
And pallid fire of eyes, it seems,
That fixedly return my gaze.

— translated by Roy Campbell in Flowers of Evil A Selection, ed Marthiel and Jackson Mathews (New Directions, 1955)

The Lar that Campbell refers to here is the singular of Lares, the domestic gods of the ancient Romans. There was a lar familiarie, which was the familiar of the house. Possum, lately, has been entirely too familiar with some places for my comfort. Peanut, on the other hand, has staked out the top of my desk and will not be moved. We tried a bed for him, thinking we could entice him away, but he sleeps beside it.

Hard to get much done around here.

For other translations, see Fleur du Mal