Sherry Chandler

A song we all seem to be singing nowadays:

are having a resurgence at our house.

They went quiet for a while but then they came back.

Probably a different lot.

But three servants and a free-standing lab with a full-time lab assistant. And of course patronizing friends.

I really didn’t care much at all for Dark Victory, not even for Humphrey Bogart and his faked Irish accent. Sort of fun to see Ronald Reagan playing a drunken playboy, though it’s possible that being incoherently amiable wasn’t a big stretch for him.

I can see that this is a great performance by Bette Davis before she became “Bette Davis” but the plot is so ridiculous and the rest of the cast so lame that I don’t really care much. It’s the worst thing I’ve ever seen Humphrey Bogart do.

By the way, as a Kentuckian I feel compelled to set the record straight. I’ve seen reviews that say that Bogart is playing a “stable hand.” He is, in fact, the trainer for the heiress’s stable of steeplechasers. Not a lowly job, though it doesn’t exactly make him one of the gentry.

It takes a lot of nerve for George W. Bush to go to Beijing with Henry Kissinger and scold China about its human rights record. He coulda stood home. Little wonder China told him to mind his own business.*

But, on a more positive note, the story of our flag bearer Lopez Lomong is one that we should all celebrate, not just because our country played a very positive role in his life but for what he has managed to survive and accomplish. You can listen to his story on Morning Edition or read a fuller bio at his website.

Lopez speaks from experience about what it is like to be separated from home and family. At age 6, he was abducted from a Sudanese church by a militia faction that wanted to turn young boys into child soldiers. He eventually escaped the militia camp through a hole in a fence with three older boys who carried them on their backs as they walked for three days until they reached Kenya, where police arrested them and sent them to a refugee camp. He spent 10 years in the camp, living on one meal a day.

Those of you who have been reading me here for a while know that one of my great griefs is the use of children as warriors. So I urge you to take time to learn a bit more about Lomong and also to explore the Team Darfur website.

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*I’m agreed with Avedon on this one:

It’s not just about whether a bunch of Democrats will be cranky if the criminals don’t go to jail, it’s about throwing away what was probably the most vital resource our nation had for over 200 years - our position in the eyes of the world. Without the rule of law, the only thing we have is bombs.

You can sign Dennis Kucinich’s petition for impeachment here. Likewise, Wexler.

For some technical reason that I don’t understand, the embedded YouTube video that’s supposed to be above this text is not displaying for me. If it’s not displaying for you, you can watch it here.

It’s the 63rd anniversary of the day we dropped an atomic bomb on Hiroshima.

In Human Smoke, Nicholson Baker quotes Alfred Nobel in August 1892:

“Perhaps my factories will put an end to war even sooner than your congresses,” Alfred Nobel said. “On the day when two army corps may mutually annihilate each other in a second, probably all civilized nations will recoil with horror and disband their troops.”

Mutually assured destruction. That worked out well.

Morgan Chandler (left) with driver Billy Teegarden in 1973 at Northern Kentucky Speedway. Photo by Mike Roland.

This Saturday, at the Florence Speedway in Union, Kentucky, my brother Morgan Chandler will be officially inducted into the National Dirt Late Model Hall Of Fame. Here’s Bill Holder’s write-up from Stock Car Racing:

Morgan Chandler’s was a shining career that lasted through two decades (1965-1985) as a car owner and showed a total of 189 victories with an impressive collection of 20 talented drivers, half of them already in the Hall of Fame.

This was not a full-time deal for Chandler, though, as he also had a regular job.

“Didn’t get much sleep during many of those years, sometimes getting home in time to go to work,” he says.

It was a time, says Chandler, when the driver was a lot more important than the car, quite different from today.

“There is a lot more technology today, but there are still similarities,” he says. “Heck, I used to have the left-front tire up just like today.”

Chandler laughs when he recalls that he once built a 539-cubic-inch engine derived from a 427 truck engine. “It made about 750 hp, something that small block engines can make today,” he says.

Through most of his career, he converted street cars to build his racecars. His built his first car from the ground up in 1978.

Chandler says that he ran with NASCAR in 1968 at Clay City Speedway, Kentucky. It was a dirt track, of course, but he also competed on pavement, using his dirt cars rather than a purpose-built pavement car. “Won a big race on the paved Dayton (Ohio) Speedway,” he recalls.

His top driver was Floyd Gilbert, and they won 27 races in a row and 42 overall in 1972 and ‘73. And there was Ralph Latham, who was behind the wheel of a Chandler car for 25 wins in 1970.

More at Dirt Fans. A couple of his drivers talk about working with him, too: Billy Teegarden, Flyin’ Floyd Gilbert

There is also a nice write-up about Morgan in the local paper, but it doesn’t seem to be posted online yet. In the article, he says that the sport has been taken over by professionals now, that amateurs such as he could no longer compete.

Chandler’s 1973 Camaro, #28, in its party clothes at the 1973 Cavalcade of Customs.

From the NYTimes obit:

Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn, whose stubborn, lonely and combative literary struggles gained the force of prophecy as he revealed the heavy afflictions of Soviet Communism in some of the most powerful works of the 20th century, died late on Sunday at the age of 89 in Moscow.

His son Yermolai said the cause was a heart ailment.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn outlived by nearly 17 years the Soviet state and system he had battled through years of imprisonment, ostracism and exile.

Mr. Solzhenitsyn had been an obscure, middle-aged, unpublished high school science teacher in a provincial Russian town when he burst onto the literary stage in 1962 with “A Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich.” The book, a mold-breaking novel about a prison camp inmate, was a sensation. Suddenly he was being compared to giants of Russian literature like Tolstoy, Dostoyevski and Chekhov.

Over the next five decades, Mr. Solzhenitsyn’s fame spread throughout the world as he drew upon his experiences of totalitarian duress to write evocative novels like “The First Circle” and “The Cancer Ward” and historical works like “The Gulag Archipelago.”

Sonnet CXLV.

THOSE lips that Love’s own hand did make
Breath’d forth the sound that said ‘I hate,’
To me that languish’d for her sake:
But when she saw my woeful state,
Straight in her heart did mercy come,
Chiding that tongue that ever sweet
Was us’d in giving gentle doom;
And taught it thus anew to greet;
‘I hate,’ she alter’d with an end,
That follow’d it as gentle day
Doth follow night, who like a fiend
From heaven to hell is flown away.
‘I hate’ from hate away she threw,
And sav’d my life, saying—‘Not you.’

— William Shakespeare, from W. J. Craig’s The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. London: Oxford University Press: 1914; Bartleby.com, 2000.

Paul Fussell opines that not even Shakespeare can make the bouncy four/four rhythm of iambic tetrameter work in a sonnet.

The poster at Shakespeare’s Sonnets has this to say about this particular number:

This is the only sonnet of the 154 which is not written in the usual iambic pentameter (verses of five feet consisting of a short followed by a long syllable) but of the more jerky iambic tetrameter, or octosyllabic verse, which is thought to be more appropriate for epigrammatic and comic verse. It is a sonnet that is not highly regarded, being thought of as rather trivial, and most commentators would prefer to discard it. It has been suggested** that it might be a piece of juvenilia, written in 1582, which Shakespeare subsequently adapted to fit in with the sonnets. This involves a pun on Anne Hathaway in line 13, and possibly another pun, (suggested by Booth) in line 14, ‘Anne saved my life’. (SB.p.501).

Tempting though these suggestions are, I think they are overcome by the supreme difficulty of imagining how Shakespeare could have familiarized himself at this early stage with the sonnet tradition and its language and ideas.

The poster also notes the way this poem echoes some themes (probably universal at the time) from Sir Philip Sidney’s Astrophel and Stella, a sonnet sequence written in hexameter or six beat rhymes. Fussell and others have argued that six beat lines don’t work in English either because they tend to divide into two three-beat lines. These are the theorists who argue that an iambic pentameter line is the perfect one for English poetry.

for those poets and writers among my readers.

Bernadette Mayers’s writing experiments and Charles Bernstein’s Experiments.

Both teach at UPenn.

I was pointed in the direction of these prompts by Catherine Daly on the Wom-Po listserve.

Here is a nice linky web page for Mayer and one for Bernstein.

Meanwhile Raqhun reminds me that it’s lammas, beginning to the harvest season and the beginning of the end of summer. I’m not sure that I am grateful for that reminder, but I love Raqhun’s tweets and we do have raccoons in common.

Oh, by the way, Exxon’s Second-Quarter Earnings Set a[nother] Record. But it would be punitive to ask them to pay for a twenty-year-old oil spill.

And Glenn Greenwald talks about anthrax:

The FBI’s lead suspect in the September, 2001 anthrax attacks — Bruce E. Ivins — died Tuesday night, apparently by suicide, just as the Justice Department was about to charge him with responsibility for the attacks. For the last 18 years, Ivins was a top anthrax researcher at the U.S. Government’s biological weapons research laboratories at Ft. Detrick, Maryland, where he was one of the most elite government anthrax scientists on the research team at the U.S. Army Medical Research Institute of Infectious Disease (USAMRIID).

The 2001 anthrax attacks remain one of the great mysteries of the post-9/11 era. After 9/11 itself, the anthrax attacks were probably the most consequential event of the Bush presidency. One could make a persuasive case that they were actually more consequential. The 9/11 attacks were obviously traumatic for the country, but in the absence of the anthrax attacks, 9/11 could easily have been perceived as a single, isolated event. It was really the anthrax letters — with the first one sent on September 18, just one week after 9/11 — that severely ratcheted up the fear levels and created the climate that would dominate in this country for the next several years after. It was anthrax — sent directly into the heart of the country’s elite political and media institutions, to then-Senate Majority Leader Tom Daschle (D-SD), Sen. Pat Leahy (D-Vt), NBC News anchor Tom Brokow, and other leading media outlets — that created the impression that social order itself was genuinely threatened by Islamic radicalism.

If the now-deceased Ivins really was the culprit behind the attacks, then that means that the anthrax came from a U.S. Government lab, sent by a top U.S. Army scientist at Ft. Detrick. Without resort to any speculation or inferences at all, it is hard to overstate the significance of that fact

What you ask is daruma-otoshi? Let Gizmodo explain:

Kajima’s floor-by-floor slow demolition is one of those rare things in life that leaves you truly speechless, mouth wide-open, and pinching yourself to be sure this is real while you mutter “what the frak.” After all, seeing the video of a 20-floor building submerging into the asphalt as if it was liquid is something that belongs to a sci-fi movie. The stunning process—called daruma-otoshi—is not only almost surrealistic but it helps to reduce the environmental impact.

Read the whole post to find out how this is done.

Courtesy of Donna Rhae Marder.