Sherry Chandler

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.

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*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?

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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.”

I do occasionally knit but I am a real amateur. But knitting seems to be on people’s minds today. Makes sense here — we awoke to the first real snow of the season.

Over at Pocahontas County Fare, Rebecca has information about Latvian Mittens, a knitting pattern book with “lots of real mittens knitted by real people to keep warm and to delight.” Sounds pretty good to me right now. (Or, if it’s more to your liking, Rebeccas has some tips on sewing lingerie.

On a side note, I made a bathing suit once long ago when I was young and still a bit curvy. The result looked good and fit well but I picked the wrong kind of fabric and it was a little embarassing when I got wet in it. I only wore it the once.)

Meanwhile, Donna Marder, who’s a dab hand at stitching herself, sends a link to Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting:

A provocative and timely exhibition of work by international artists using fiber in unexpected and unorthodox ways, Radical Lace & Subversive Knitting illuminates a field of creative practice that is fresh, surprising, and engaging. Featuring 27 artists from seven countries, this exhibition will exhibit work that ranges from Althea Merback’s microknit garments (1:144 scale) to large-scale, site-specific installations. Artists employ a variety of media, from traditional yarns and laces, to found objects and video, and explore contemporary currents in art practice of socially engaged, participatory work.

Althea Merback’s wire-knit silk gloves, as a contrast to Latvian mittens, are not bigger than a finger tip. They are on loan from the Kentucky Gateway Museum Center, right up the road here in Maysville.

The exhibit is up January to June at the Museum of Arts & Design in New York City.

Click through to see these impressive driftwood horses by British sculptor Heather Jansch at rense.com.

I found the link at Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Blogosphere where we are told that Heather got the idea of making horses of driftwood thus:

One day while I was out, my son couldn’t find any kindling wood to light the wood-burner and had chopped up a piece of ivy that had grown round a fencing stake. He’d left behind a short section that I immediately saw as a horse’s torso of the right size to fit straight into the coper wire piece I was working on. The next question was where could I find more or similar shapes, and the answer was of course driftwood.

The British, I suppose, are nearly as horse-obsessed as we Kentuckians. But a horse is an elegant beast and so are these sculptures elegant.

Governor Ernie Fletcher and the Kentucky Arts Council have announced the 2006 Governor’s Awards in the Arts.

I am pleased to see Morehead State University’s public radio station honored, and I’m pretty sure my friend Georgia Green Stamper will be pleased about the Russell Orchestra getting the Education Award. She lived in Russell for many years.

The awards will be presented at 10:00 a.m. on February 14 in the Capitol Rotunda.

A correspondent has sent a link to this Soviet bus stop photo series at Polar Inertia. The photographer is Christopher Herwig. The passage below is excerpted his statement:

For the most part Soviet architecture and design is remembered for its heavy block buildings and functionally Spartan designs. Its overpowering desire for conformity left little room for individual creative freedom. A notable exceptions to this is in the transportation sector. … While many of us are aware of the elaborate splendor of the Moscow underground, it is easy to overlook the phenomenon of the common roadside bus stop as an example of soviet art and design letting loose and becoming a little weird and crazy.

… much time, effort and imagination went into many roadside bus stops. The sky was the limit with different shapes and design– blocks, domes, columns, towers, A-frames and archways, even ones shaped like birds, yurts and hats. If the bus stop was less bold and daring with its architectural design then the creators would often attract attention with decorating the structure with murals or mosaics. The themes that these decorated bus stops took usually varied depending on the region, often reflecting the local culture, history, or industries.

Sadly, with the breakup of the Soviet Union many of the bus stops are quickly deteriorating from their original glory. That being said some local communities have recognized the local treasures as worthy of preserving and have maintained and repainted them. They will appear in the most unlikely places – sometimes in the middle of the desert, steppe or countryside, sometimes with no homes in sight. They will make you wonder why and they will make you smile. The following collection of images was taken during 2002 and 2006, starting with a cycling trip through the Baltic countries to St. Petersburg and followed by several road trips around Central Asia.

I like the one with the horse in it.

Who would not want this lovely cosahedron made of pecan pie (recipe on the Karo syrup bottle).

Full instructions here.

H/t to Donna.

The Sedlec Ossuary is a small Christian chapel decorated with human bones. It’s located in Sedlec, a suburb of the Czech town Kutna Hora.

In 1278, the Cistercian abbot of Sedlec made a pilgrimage to Palestine and brought back a bit of soil from Golgotha, a typical tourist impulse. By sprinkling this soil around, he transformed the local graveyard into a bit of the Holy Land and, coincidentally, into prime real estate for dying Europeans. During the 14th century especially, and the years of The Black Death, the terminally ill flocked to Sedlac for burial and brought their dead relations with them.

After a while, as often happens in old European cemeteries, it became necessary to dig up the old corpses to make room for the new. Thus the ossuary, built in about 1511.

But it was left to a 19th century woodcarver (ahem) named Frantisek Rindt to turn 40,000 sets of human bones into a macabre sort of architectural ornamentation. Decorating with bones does seem such a 19th century sort of thing.

A man named Frisco Ramirez has gifted us with a gallery of photographs of what I can only call bone bas-relief in this chapel. I am not going to reproduce one here because they are proprietary (and for sale) but I do recommend that you click through on the banner above and take a look. The image I’ve included here is from Wikipedia. Click the thumbnail to see it full sized.

It will cause you to contemplate your mortality here in the closing days of the year, now that we have reached “meteorological winter.”

Or perhaps odd ways to find immortality through art.

As usual, a hat tip to Donna Marder, my guide to art on the web.

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Ossuary, a short black & white film by the Czech animator Jan Svankmajer takes a tour of Sedlec, using the Jacques Prévert poem “How to Make the Likeness of a Bird” as soundtrack.

How to make the likeness of a bird…
how to make a likeness
First draw a cage
with an open door…

Gin Petty sends this notice from the Berea College Events page:

Black Diamonds

Date: 12/1/2006
Time: 7:30 PM - 9:30 PM
Location: Phelps Stokes Chapel

A new documentary about the devastating affects of mountaintop removal will be premiering at Berea College. A talk back session with the filmmakers will commence immediately following the film.

For more information, contact Chad Berry at (859) 985-3727.