Sherry Chandler

In Liverpool, England, theater director Robert sculptor Richard Wilson has created a new temporary public artwork called “Turning the Place Over.” On a building to be demolished, Wilson has caused an 8-meter section of exterior wall to rotate in and out of the façade. The geometry of the rotation is complex and therefore the video is the only way for the virtual traveler to know a little of the work.

Link from Donna Marder.

I’ve been intending to let you all know that my husband, the wood carver T R Williams, now has a portfolio listing on the Southern Artistry register.

Southern Artistry is “a multidisciplinary showcase of outstanding southern artists” from nine southeastern states.

I’m very proud of this achievement. Other Kentucky artists listed include Jonathan Greene, Gwen Heffner, Leatha Kendrick, Pale, Stout and Amber, Arturo Alonzo Sandoval, Rebekka Seigel, Joe Survant, and Jim Tomlinson. And these just among the ones whose work I know.

I’ve hesitated to mention this because T R’s portfolio is just sort of a placeholder at the moment. It needs some work. And also because, for some glitchy reason, he isn’t yet showing up in the search engine on the site.

But I really am very proud of him and so I’ve decided to go ahead and brag on him a little bit.

Possibly. But Harry Potter may be all they’re reading:

Of all the magical powers wielded by Harry Potter, perhaps none has cast a stronger spell than his supposed ability to transform the reading habits of young people. In what has become near mythology about the wildly popular series by J. K. Rowling, many parents, teachers, librarians and booksellers have credited it with inspiring a generation of kids to read for pleasure in a world dominated by instant messaging and music downloads.

And so it has, for many children. But in keeping with the intricately plotted novels themselves, the truth about Harry Potter and reading is not quite so straightforward a success story. Indeed, as the series draws to a much-lamented close, federal statistics show that the percentage of youngsters who read for fun continues to drop significantly as children get older, at almost exactly the same rate as before Harry Potter came along.

,,,some researchers and educators say that the series, in the end, has not permanently tempted children to put down their Game Boys and curl up with a book instead. Some kids have found themselves daunted by the growing size of the books (“Sorcerer’s Stone” was 309 pages; “Deathly Hallows,” will be 784)

The same thing happened to Stephen King when his books became tremendously popular. They got longer and longer and, to my taste, duller and duller. Of course, it’s possible that I just grew up.

I haven’t read the first page of a Harry Potter book, but Eyewear has read “a secret copy” of the new one:

It may be a fake. It is over 600 pages long, though - if the author isn’t J.K. Rowling, they’re a fanatic with too much spare time (perhaps incarcerated).

…

Rowling herself has said that “two characters” die in the book - and a billion trees will have been murdered to publish it. In the interests of a Potter-free footprint, don’t buy the book, borrow it from the library… or better still, make up your own story, and hum it to yourself quietly.

Let me offer a proposition about Homo sapiens. We are the only species on earth capable of an ethical awareness of other species and, thus, the only species capable of happily ignoring that awareness. So far, our economic interests have proved to be completely incompatible with all but a very few forms of life. It’s not that we believe that other species don’t matter. It’s that, historically speaking, it hasn’t been worth believing one way or another. I don’t suppose that most Americans would actively kill a whippoorwill if they had the chance. Yet in the past 40 years its number has dropped by 1.6 million.

In our everyday economic behavior, we seem determined to discover whether we can live alone on earth.

The writer is Verlyn Klinkenborg, Millions of Missing Birds, Vanishing in Plain Sight, in yesterday’s NYTimes. He is writing about the new Audubon Society report on the reduced bird population in our nation: northern bobwhite down by 25.5 million over 40 years ago (only 5.5 million left), field sparrow down 18 million to 5.8 million, the population of 20 species down by 68%.

When I was a child, whippoorwills were so common around my Owen County home that they would sit on the doorstep at night and sing. My mother, who will be 90 on September 5, still lives there, but the whippoorwills are gone. I wrote a little poem about it several years ago. Not a brilliant poem, perhaps, but I think it says about everything I was going to say here:

You Can’t Go Home Again

The little house is still there
on the hill
but my cousin logged
the woods that ran
down to the creek
where I used to ramble
on my Tennessee Walker.
My mother has a neighbor now,
on the next hilltop.
A nice young man, she says.
He likes to party.
His bamboo torches light
the night, his pedal steel
has displaced
the whippoorwills that trilled
my raucous lullabies.
How my young sons cried
to hear them jarring in the yard,
my sons accustomed only
to the nighttime
hum of big rigs on the bypass.

— from Dance the Black-Eyed Girl (Finishing Line, 2003)

A day or two ago, Rosalie commented that we must learn to live differently on the earth. Whatever one may think of multinationals, Rosalie is right to say that we must change our ways. The Earth will survive and regenerate. She has done it before. But we’re the ones who will be gone, along with our brothers and sisters the birds and raccoons.

To let Klinkenborg finish the thought:

In our everyday economic behavior, we seem determined to discover whether we can live alone on earth. E.O. Wilson has argued eloquently and persuasively that we cannot, that who we are depends as much on the richness and diversity of the biological life around us as it does on any inherent quality in our genes. Environmentalists of every stripe argue that we must somehow begin to correlate our economic behavior — by which I mean every aspect of it: production, consumption, habitation — with the welfare of other species.

This is the premise of sustainability. But the very foundation of our economic interests is self-interest, and in the survival of other species we see way too little self to care.

The trouble with humans is that even the smallest changes in our behavior require an epiphany. And yet compared to the fixity of other species, the narrowness of their habitats, the strictness of their diets, the precision of the niches they occupy, we are flexibility itself.

We look around us, expecting the rest of the world’s occupants to adapt to the changes that we have caused, when, in fact, we have the right to expect adaptation only from ourselves.

Which was an expression I heard and may even have used as a child with no idea that it was a euphemism for a certain currently popular and sometimes “fleeting expletive.” It may be that the adults I learned it from didn’t know that either.

A panel of judges from the Second Circuit U.S. Court of Appeals has found against the Bush administration’s FCC on the matter of publishing broadcasters for these “fleeting expletives,” saying in essence that what’s okay for Dick Cheney on the floor of the Senate is okay for Bono at the Golden Globes.

It’s a good decision. I’m against censorship. But I was struck by this passage in this morning’s report in the NYTimes:

Beginning with the F.C.C.’s indecency finding in a case against NBC for a vulgarity uttered by the U2 singer Bono during the Golden Globes awards ceremony in 2003, President Bush’s Republican and Democratic appointees to the commission have imposed a tougher policy by punishing any station that broadcast a fleeting expletive. That includes vulgar language blurted out on live shows like the Golden Globes or scripted shows like “NYPD Blue,” which was cited in the case.

Reversing decades of a more lenient policy, the commission had found that the mere utterance of certain words implied that sexual or excretory acts were carried out and therefore violated the indecency rules.

“Sexual or excretory acts were carried out”??? So the problem isn’t that the terms are abusive or just low street talk unworthy of the high discourse of television but that they imply that somebody somewhere must have sat on a toilet and relieved themselves?? Or even some angus on the back forty? The problem isn’t that some of these expletives are sexist in their implied violence against women? It’s that they might be sexy?

Dear old Mrs. Grundy is alive and well. We’ll be putting cloths over our tables next, to cover up their “limbs.”

Anyway, the judges would have none of it:

But the judges said vulgar words are just as often used out of frustration or excitement, and not to convey any broader obscene meaning. “In recent times even the top leaders of our government have used variants of these expletives in a manner that no reasonable person would believe referenced sexual or excretory organs or activities.”

And this, which is more like it:

Although the judges struck down the policy on statutory grounds, they also said there were serious constitutional problems with the commission’s attempt to regulate the language of television shows.

“We are skeptical that the commission can provide a reasoned explanation for its ‘fleeting expletive’ regime that would pass constitutional muster,” said the panel in an opinion written by Judge Rosemary S. Pooler and joined by Judge Peter W. Hall. “We question whether the F.C.C.’s indecency test can survive First Amendment scrutiny.”

Anyway, I’m pretty sure that television can find ways to imply that sexual or excretory acts were carried out without resort to fleeting expletives. And it doesn’t take “vulgarities” to make a medium vulgar.

Back in January 2006, when Frontline first showed David Sutherland’s documentary, Country Boys, Brooks Carver sent me an e-mail in which he said, in part,

if they run that coal train through there once more I’m going to throw my shoe at the screen

Turns out he wasn’t the only one who thought there was a little bit too much train.

Last night, just sort of browsing through the stacks of books we have lying around, I picked up a copy of Appalachian Heritage from Spring 2006 and found this statement in a review of Country Boys by Tim Skeen:

My father lived in Garrett [home town to one of the "country boys"] when he was a child. He thinks Sutherland’s film was, shall I politely say, not very complimentary to the town. “For one thing,” my father said, “there are only a couple of coal trains that pass through that town a day. [From Sutherland's film] you’d think the trains were going through there all the time.”

Country Boys has come back on my radar screen because The Oxford American Southern Movie Issue has picked it as one of Thirteen Essential Southern Documentaries, Part II. Reviewer Kevin Brockmeier says:

But as the film progresses and you become more and more immersed in the stories of the people involved, something happens and all the broken things begin to change. They seem to reflect the light rather than absorb it. It is as if they have been invested again with all the promise they must have displayed in their infancy. The feeling overtakes you that the world you’ve been gazing upon is slowly piecing itself back together. It doesn’t last, this feeling. It can’t. The difficulties of life keep rising up to reclaim the story. But by the end of the movie, the erosion you see in every frame means something different than it did at the beginning. Maybe the world is broken, you think, but it’s our world, it belongs to us, and we have to love it anyway.

Tim Skeen taught two of the principles — Cody Perkins and his girlfriend Jessica Riddle — at Prestonburg Community College. In the film, you see Cody and Jessica visit the college and look over the class catalogue. Skeen found them intelligent and savvy and he had a high opinion of Jessica’s writing talent. His review in Appalachian Heritage, entitlled “Stereotypical Images Prevail,” [link is to PDF document], is not so enthusiastic about the film:

For all of his considerable effort, Sutherland’s film says more about him than the people he filmed: that he’s grateful to be an outsider, dismayed by the abandoned cars, the monstrous, coal-laden trains, the roadside advertisements for Social Security disability lawyers and Jesus. I don’t blame him. It’s complicated, and he’s not alone…

…other than an Andy Hardy Hey, let’s put on a show! mentality, I’m not sure why he came to Appalachia. In a January 1, 2006 article about the film in The New York Times, Sutherland is quoted as saying, “Everyone wants things to be all black and white, but with me everything is nuance. This film has a lot of that: you get a take on something and it can be wrong.”

Skeen, whose collection of poetry Kentucky Swami won the John Ciardi Prize for Poetry, might be accused of reflecting the native’s resentment of outside meddlers, as illustrated brilliantly in Appalshop’s Stranger with a Camera. At the time he wrote the review, Skeen was living in California (a fact that has no relevence whatsoever).

In our household, the problems with the film go back to those trains. Sutherland may have thought they were atmosphere. We thought they were filler. The film seemed as long and slow and draggy as those coal trains and, while our hearts ached for the boys, we weren’t as moved by the visual atmospherics and nuance as we might have been. Maybe because that “broken” the landscape is the one we live in…

It is the 70th anniversary of the bombing of Guernica and Poppysmatus has drawn my attention to Joseph A. Palermo’s blog post at the Huffington Post:

In his latest book, A Power Governments Cannot Suppress, the historian Howard Zinn writes: “If we want to break the addiction [to war] we need to teach history, because when you look at the history of wars, you see how war corrupts everyone involved, how the so-called good side behaves like the bad side, and how this has been true from the Peloponnesian War all the way to our own time.” Few events illustrate Zinn’s point more graphically than the bombing of the small Basque town of Guernica during the Spanish Civil War, which took place 70 years ago today.

As Palermo’s post reminds us, when Colin Powell made his now infamous presentation to the United Nations, the one in which he showed the spurious evidence in favor of our invasion of Iraq, our government demanded that the U.N.’s reproduction of Picasso’s Guernica painting be draped.

So it goes…

Read this whole post.

Don’t go to church on Sunday
Don’t get on my knees to pray
Don’t memorize the books of the Bible
I got my own special way
But I know Jesus loves me
Maybe just a little bit more

I fall on my knees every Sunday
At Zerelda Lee’s candy store

Well it’s got to be a chocolate Jesus
Make me feel good inside
Got to be a chocolate Jesus
Keep me satisfied…

— Tom Waits and Kathleen Brennan, from Mule Variations

In a recent post about yewberries, Geof Huth says:

Everything is poetry, everything is fruit, everything is poison.

For some reason, I was reminded of that statement when I read the Pocahantas County Fare post on knots, which in its turn links to this long Washington Post article on the same subject.

The Post article in its turn links to The Knotplot Site, where you can download a software package that will allow you to create graphic knots right on your own computer. Or, if you click to here, you can see Knot 2234 from The Ashley Book of Knots in 3-D image.

You will also find a PDF file there with instructions for crocheting a Lorenz attractor. The creator wanted to crochet something useful. But my life is chaotic enough. I think I’ll stick to afghans.

Rebecca is interested in knots, of course, because she knits. The image above is American needle lace, also a form of needlework knotting.

I know a square knot from a granny and can tie myself up in simple yogic knots. I knit a little, crochet more easily, and once upon a time I taught myself tatting from a book. I wanted to do it because I was given a handkerchief for which my great-aunt Ruth had tatted the lace border. “Tatting,” thought I, “I never heard of tatting. How exotic to learn it.” And so I set off in search of instruction.

Alas, it was not a success because, while I could teach myself the way to run the shuttle under and over to form the lace — it’s like making a buttonhole stitch around a thread — I could never figure out how to keep my thread from snarling up like a mistreated telephone cord.

Perhaps snarled thread is the “poison” of lacemaking.

My son, who loves all things Celtic, from Enya to Granuaille, loves Celtic knots.

And my husband, the wood carver, loves Welsh spoons.

Knots, of course, are associated with calligraphy and gnarled graphics were used to illuminate manuscripts such as the Book of Kells. Perhaps that’s why all this reminds me of words. Or specifically of words as Vispo. Take a look at Geof Huth’s the drunken E. Or f.r.o.g.p.o.n.d.

But I’ll tell you, this is a knotty business. No end to the associations of knots. My head is spinning through loops and braids and bends. I feel as drunk as an E. I think I’ll make this sentence the bitter end.

I got an e-mail yesterday under the signataure of Lori Meadows, Executive Director of the Kentucky Arts Council. She reports that she has been in Washington lobbying for “the President’s recommendation for a budget increase of $4 million for the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA).”

It amazes me that the current government has been, relatively speaking, generous to the arts when they are eager to slash all other government programs unrelated to the “war on terror.” And when conservatives have always tended to lump the NEA in with NPR as the evil-doing enemies in the culture wars.

Dana Goodyear, in The Moneyed Muse, puts forward one explanation:

Some of Gioia’s most visible initiatives at the N.E.A. have involved arranging for Shakespeare and opera to be performed on military bases; Operation Homecoming, which received funding from Boeing, established writers’ workshops for soldiers who have fought in Iraq and in Afghanistan. A recent article in Business Week cited the endowment’s “focus on programs with patriotic themes” as one reason that its budget has increased seven and a half per cent under Gioia….A forthcoming piece, by Steve Evans, in The Baffler, a leftist Chicago magazine, asserts, “Through men like Dana Gioia, John Barr, and Ted Kooser, Karl Rove’s battle-tested blend of unapologetic economic elitism and reactionary cultural populism is now being marketed in the far-off reaches of the poetry world.”

Goodyear is not a disinterested reporter, of course. And Ted Kooser, who has taken a lot of flak, is a good if perhaps not a ground-breaking poet. I sort of hate to see him condemned as a Rovian tool. (I noticed this week that one of Lexington’s free alternative newspapers, Nougat, picks up Kooser’s newspaper column. Guess that speaks volumes about the state of the counterculture in sleepy old Lexington.) Though Ron Silliman would no doubt put him firmly in the School of Quietude, he reaches many people in the circles I travel in, regional poets like himself. Like me. Asked to choose between Eastern elitism (Goodyear) and regionalism (Kooser), I shall bestride the fence the way the Colossus bestrode the harbor in Rhodes. (Notice how the one at right is modestly breech-clothed. I wonder whether Martin Heemskerck took government funding back in the 16th Century.)

But I’ll have to admit that there is something a bit youth-brigadish about Poetry Out Loud, though I can’t really fault any program that pays children for interpreting poetry and brings money to school libraries. I’m not so sure about making it a competition, but that’s just my bleeding heart. Anyway, I’m probably projecting my own boredom at having to memorize a doggeral poem a week in the eighth grade —”‘Tis the schoolhouse that stands by the flag.”* I doubt that Mrs. Broadus thought I’d ever see anything negative in that statement.

Art in the service of patriotism is, of course, the aim of every authoritarian government, and artists who serve a cause are apt to be subsumed by that cause. I am reminded of this passage I read last night (sitting in Ruby Tuesdays, of all places) in Kenneth Rexroth’s American Poetry in the Twentieth Century:

We have now moved to a later literary generation, people born in the early years of the century who came to maturity in the troubled times after 1929. It was a lean season for American poetry. Hundreds of young intellectuals who started out as writers were consumed and cast aside by the Communist Party. Most of them became political activists and gave up writing. The strong-willed ones obeyed the Party Line and dutifully wrote Proletarian literature and Socialist Realism. The stultifying effects of bureaucratic control are more than conclusively shown by the fact that all this passionate activity and commitment produced, in poetry, almost nothing of enduring value.

So has Dana Gioia, and with him John Barr of the Poetry Foundation, pulled the teeth of American poetry? Did it have any teeth to be pulled? Can former Wall Street executives and ad men also be poets of worth? Can a poet in the employee of The New Yorker be a poet of worth?

More on that later.

Here are the ways Lori Meadows says that NEA money serves the arts in Kentucky:

Kentucky is the beneficiary of NEA funding in three ways. The first is through grants to the Kentucky Arts Council for operational and administrative support; funding earmarked for arts education, folk arts and underserved populations; and funding and technical assistance to participate in the national initiatives such as Poetry Out Loud, American Masterpieces and Challenge America. The Kentucky Arts Council ranks 14th out of 56 state and territorial arts agencies in the amount of funding received from the NEA according to the National Association of State Arts Agencies. The second benefit is in grants and awards made directly to Kentucky arts organizations and Kentucky artists. And the third benefit is through grants, programs and services available to Kentuckians through the Southern Arts Federation (also funded by the NEA).

Meadows also says we are a bit underserved (emphasis added):

I would like to encourage our Kentucky arts organizations and artists to take advantage of these direct grants and awards as well as the offerings of the Southern Arts Federation. The number of Kentucky organizations receiving funding is very low compared to other states and the data indicates that it is simply because applications are not being submitted to the NEA and the SAF.

Are Kentucky artists contrary? Well, yes, but probably not too contrary to take government money. I think artists are pretty pragmatic.

*I remember this snippet from childhood but have never been able to find the poem and I have no idea who may have written it. I don’t think I made it up because, for some reason, my thirteen-year-old self resented this one above all. And we had to copy the poems into a notebook and find a suitable illustration. Anybody out there ever heard of a poem like this?

Corollary: from the NYTimes this morning, Play about Iraq War Divides a Connecticut School:

But even as 15 student actors were polishing the script and perfecting their accents for a planned April performance, the school principal last week canceled the play, titled “Voices in Conflict,” citing questions of political balance and context.

…

In response to concerns that the script was too antiwar, Ms. Dickinson reworked it with the help of an English teacher. The revised version is more reflective and less angry, omitting graphic descriptions of killing, crude language and some things that reflect poorly on the Bush administration, like a comparison of how long it took various countries to get their troops bulletproof vests. A critical reference to Donald H. Rumsfeld, the former defense secretary, was cut, along with a line from Cpl. Sean Huze saying of soldiers: “Your purpose is to kill.”