Sherry Chandler

I know a lot of you all reading here think I’m in the tank for Hillary Clinton, and it’s true that I prefer Hillary on the issues (Obama has apparently made it a policy not to have policies). But —

Oh just read Joan Walsh:

Throughout this long campaign the Clintons have been turned into a vile caricature: amoral, power-mad narcissists who are not beyond using racism and even worries about Obama’s safety to press their political cause. I’ve criticized both Clintons repeatedly in the pages of Salon for over 10 years, but it’s really time to say: Enough.

For several months I’ve found myself bothered by a double standard in both the behavior and the media coverage of the Obama campaign, as supposedly representing a new kind of clean, post-partisan politics, by contrast with the dirty old win-at-any-cost Clintons. Hardball Obama campaign tactics — David Axelrod partly blaming Clinton for Benazir Bhutto’s death; the intimidation of Clinton voters by a pro-Obama union in Nevada (to be fair, some Obama supporters claimed intimidation by Clinton forces, too); the campaign’s infamous South Carolina race memo (prepared before Bill Clinton made his dumb Jesse Jackson remark); the multiple “Harry and Louise” mailers distorting Clinton’s healthcare proposal; not to mention ties between Obama, Axelrod and the Exelon Corp., even as Obama is touting his lobbyist-free campaign. Nothing seems to stick to Obama; he’s Teflon.

This episode was worse than many but not entirely atypical: After his staff helped whip up a frenzy about Clinton’s remarks, Obama himself said he accepted Clinton’s statement that she had been misunderstood, and Axelrod tried to act gracious and insist that it’s time to move on. But the damage had been done. Obama has run a better campaign than Clinton, there’s no doubt about it, but he’s had a lot of help from a fawning media. (Here’s a great piece making a point I made months ago about how such coverage may ultimately hurt Obama.)*

*Hint: backlash.

And then read Redstar. I’m not sure that I agree with everything she says here, but I have come to respect her intellectual integrity and she makes me think we might all need to step back and take a deep breath (emphasis added):

Part of the reason for last night’s insomnia has been my growing frustration from the Clinton RFK remarks skirmish. It began in earnest when I read Kevin’s response at Slant Truth, in which he stated that regardless of her intent, it was his personal associations of the assassinations of black leaders that mattered to him. He added that he was further troubled by the racially segregated - and polarized - link networks he was seeing in response to her comments; i.e., whites were linking to other whites in support of their perspectives, and bloggers of color - including many African-Americans - were linking to one another in opinion solidarity. When I read this, I thought Duh! Obviously. Anyone following this election, especially since early ‘08, has seen this cultural fracturing around the blogosphere, as we all interpret the candidates’ actions, statements and alleged motivations and intent based on our personal and/or collective experiences and identities.

Then I read a compelling analysis from Latoya at Racialicious, which I found to be strongly undermined by her strident vocabulary that “hell no…there is no way Hillary was talking about herself when referencing the RFK campaign.” Latoya’s voice is one I really respect in the ’sphere, yet so is Pocochina’s, who just as convincingly argues that of course Clinton is thinking of herself in referencing RFK, because it’s a) a defining (generational) moment for her in her political development, b) she faces her own threats of assassination, and c) and this is my elaboration of Pocochina’s point - that she has arguably come to represent for millions of moderate- to low-income Americans (mostly white, but not exclusively) the underdog candidate fighting for them. Just because this vision of her is routinely derided in many pundit circles does not mean that it does not ring true for countless Clinton supporters (if those I read on-line are any indication).

So who’s right, here? Who’s interpretation is valid? Hopefully you realize these are trick questions - obviously all of them are, as they are grounded in experience, identity, and each blogger’s situated knowledge. …

I remember last fall at the Congressional Black Caucus Conference wearing a Clinton pin and an Obama button. I remember my cynical detachment about the two of them, centrists not remotely interested in challenging the status quo other than via their own historic candidacies and the legitimately new perspectives they would bring to the Oval Office: the first serious female contender with her gendered and generational whiteness, modern marriage and professional career working with women and children, and the first multi-racial, cosmopolitan, almost-not-a-Baby-Boomer, black-middle-class Presidential candidate. Yet, as the months have passed since Iowa, I’m getting more and more narrow-minded in my support of Clinton, mainly in response to her unparalleled opposition. My emotionalism is seriously challenging my more “rational” preferences for her policy positions, campaign platform and professional experience.

…

What I think has been the real issue in this campaign - in the politics waged from both sides that have employed or capitalized on systemic sexism and racism - is that both campaign[s] have condescended to the other. …

All of this is getting to my long-drawn-out conclusion: that for most of us this primary has ceased to be about the two candidates, and all about ourselves - in all our complicated beauty. Which of our multiple identities is elevated consciously or otherwise in feeling drawn to the candidates, what our biases or privileges really are, what our core personal networks really look like, what we feel we’re owed by society personally or collectively, and what we’re projecting onto these two figureheads who are similar triangulating centrists - one with most of her dirty laundry exposed, and the other with his soon to come out to dry.

I feel like I’ve lost a lot of virtual allies in this primary (hopefully temporarily), but gained a plethora of new ones. At my old blog I wrote I how I tended to identify with middle- and moderate-income white ethnics and women and men of color I meet because our life experiences are often quite similar. Who I have met in numbers on-line via supporting Clinton are many new young outspoken working-class and middle-class Asian-American and white ethnic feminists. I have purged many middle-class and upper-middle-class mostly white male and female bloggers who I felt marginally about to begin with. Good riddance. They don’t speak for me. I’m not sure who does these days…

And from the Online Etymology Dictionary, tribe:

from O.Fr. tribu, from L. tribus “one of the three political/ethnic divisions of the original Roman state” (Tites, Ramnes, and Luceres, corresponding, perhaps, to the Latins, Sabines, and Etruscans), later, one of the 30 political divisions instituted by Servius Tullius (increased to 35 in 241 B.C.E.), perhaps from tri- “three” + *bhu-, root of the verb be.

We are dividing ever more strongly into our tribes in this country. It’s dangerous.

The summer 2008 edition of Rattle devotes a special 60-page full-color section to visual poetry. Ruth Bavetta has written to announce that her three pieces from her series “Readings” will be featured in this issue.

Ruth works in a medium called altered books. The piece above is one she let me feature here back in 2005. It was done by altering an old yoga book. Here’s a newer example. This work is not that which is featured in Rattle.

For more examples of the art of altered books, try this site. I’ve been visiting for years.

Well, I blew that. I wrote 38 consecutive 100 word posts and then I crashed. I plead illness. I was in a fog more than one way yesterday and Sunday, and last night’s troubled dream had hubby and me trapped in my parents’ house by some primitive manlike creatures with eviscerated bodies all around and no sign of my parents.

We really do need to impeach the Bushistas.

I’ll claim one of my two remaining lives and start over tomorrow. But first I have to restore my poor mangled poem. It is one of my favorite creations and I am chagrined that I mistreated it so. You can still read the full version where it was originally published, at the Other Voices International Project. While you’re over there, check them out. I was published in Volume 19. They’re up to volume 32 now with an international cast of poets writing in English from the big names to the small. Some I see that I recognize are Billy Collins, Ursula K. Le Guin, Dorianne Laux, but it’s among the names that I don’t recognize that I like to wander. Much treasure.

My poor poem in its intended state:

Behind the Blackberry Thicket

Crashing through, I find a grove,
sycamore, ash, a single maple.
The deer take refuge here unhampered
by the mass of blackberries
and goldenrod, monarchs and bees,
that excludes a thing my shape.

Between the trees
along the leaf-mold floor,
grapevines twine like Laocoön’s snakes,
binding all into slow silence.

Twenty years since the astonished dog
cornered a crawdad in what I’d thought
was just another hayfield,
this wet-weather streambed,
not a place to mow or plow.

Focused on the quick –
children, garden, livestock —
I did not see this wilderness of vines
and saplings transform itself into a woods.

What seems motionless is growth and what
seems still is motion. Even my house
moves westward half an inch a year.

From an interview in Rattle (winter 2007):

…you really have to stay in the chair a long time to get stories. Ray[mond Carver] taught me not to begin to correct or second guess things when writing prose, just keep your pen on the page and don’t lift it until you get the whole draft, even if that draft is awkward. You can interrupt yourself, and it’s very productive to interrupt yourself, when writing poetry, but to get a story you really have to just stay with it, bulldog it right down and get that ending to just come right in that session. …Because it’s going to be read in one sitting. …And that flow is very important, and his feeling was that when you came to the end of that story, there should be some kind of hum, some kind of luminous hum that the story leaves with the reader. And I think you can feel that in his stories, and in many good stories, that’s a part of it.

The good news is this:

After years of withering in an unfriendly legislative committee, a bill that would stop coal mine operators from filling valleys and creek beds with toxic excess waste jolted to life Tuesday.

House budget committee chairman Harry Moberly, D-Richmond, inserted language from the so-called stream saver bill into a decoy measure that would have given tax breaks for camels and heard 90 minutes of testimony on the proposal from various proponents.

Believe it or not, there are a few camels in Kentucky and with the droughty summers we’ve been having they may become more popular.

Be that as it may, this “decoy measure” was necessary because Jim Gooch, the chair of the House Natural Resources and Environment Committee has refused to let HB 164 out of committee for three years. You remember Jim Gooch, the man who holds committee meetings on global warming and invites only the wing-nuttiest opponents, the man who wants political cartoonists declared lobbyists, the man who sells mining equipment to coal companies. No conflict of interest of course for such a man to be chair of the Natural Resources and Environment Committee.

Decimation of our mountains is bad enough, but as House testimony showed yesterday, the fallout of mountaintop removal mining effects water quality for a large part of the state:

Two university scientists testified in favor of the measure, saying the industry’s practice of pushing spoil and overburden over mountainsides and into the valleys below is harming water quality, increasing the potential for floods and destroying aquatic habitat.

“The increase in metal concentrations is particularly alarming because of their toxicity to humans and wildlife,” said Nathaniel Hitt, a research associate in the Department of Fisheries and Wildlife Sciences at Virginia Tech University.

As a result, many of the small streams that now flow into tributaries of the Kentucky River, which supplies water to 800,000 Kentuckians, are “as colorful as a fall Oak tree,” said Democrat Don Pasley of Winchester, the sponsor of HB 164.

“While questions about Central Kentucky’s water supply have divided us in recent years, we should at least be able to agree that it should be clean,” Pasley said.

This bill may come to a committee vote today (March 5). Kentuckians for the Commonwealth and the Central Kentucky Council for Peace & Justice are urging us all to call House Appropriations and Revenue Committee members before 1:30 today in support of this bill.

***
In other good news, Dennis Kucinich won his Ohio primary bid yesterday.

AND

BRATTLEBORO, Vt. (AP) — Voters in two southern Vermont towns passed articles Tuesday calling for the indictment of President Bush and Vice President Cheney for violating the Constitution.

More symbolic than substantive, the items sought to have police arrest Bush and Cheney if they ever visit Brattleboro or nearby Marlboro or to extradite them for prosecution elsewhere — if they’re not impeached first.

via

Blogalicious offers a handy-dandy list of print magazines that accept e-mail submissions.

As Diane points out, postage is going up, so these magazines are doing us a considerable courtesy.

Thanks, Diane.

Well, your Senate just made the Bush unitary presidency stronger by passing a FISA bill that gives the executive branch the right to decide who they should spy on, without judicial review, and gives the telecommunications industry retroactive immunity from legal action for giving up your information.

You might call your Congress person and suggest that s/he support the RESTORE act. Otherwise, unfettered spying for six years.

Meanwhile Antonin Scalia continues his charm offensive, saying torture is just all right with him and you can’t call it “cruel and unusual” unless it’s punishment for a crime. Waterboarding equals a smack in the face? Guess we have a hint how the Supremes might decide on the question of admitting evidence obtained by torture.

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, when everything is pink and rosey. Except in the coal-bearing Appalachians. Still time to consider joining the I Love Mountains Day Rally. Wendell Berry will be there. And it looks like the weather is gonna cooperate. Forecast calls for 45 and sunny.

Friday, February 15, is the postmark deadline for entries to The Heartland Review’s Joy Bale Boone poetry prize. Kathleen Driskell judges.

AND February 29^th, Leap Day, is deadline for the Green River Writers suite of contests. (Link is to PDF file.)

Here is the opening paragraph of poet Ann Neelon’s editor’s introduction to the Winter 2008 issue of New Madrid — Mexico in the Heartland:

On August 12, 2007, Covarrubia Manuel Montes, 34, of Santiago Ixcuintla, Nayarit, Mexico, was killed on a tractor while working tobacco in Calloway County, Kentucky. Although I did not know him, I found myself saddened upon reading his obituary in The Murray Ledger and Times. I wondered if I had passed him in a straw hat in Wal-Mart on a Sunday afternoon and failed to say hello. His dead body struck me as the elephant in the room of the immigration debate. It made all the talk about getting tough on immigration into a moot point. Here was a human being who, on some level, had sacrificed himself for us. I remembered what the Nobel-Prize-winning Mexican writer Octavio Paz had said so famously in The Labyrinth of Solitude: “It seems to me that North Americans consider the world something that can be perfected, and that we consider it to be something that can be redeemed.”

As one who has worked those tobacco fields in hilly country, one who has known many fine men who have been lost on and under tractors, I feel a sense of kinship with Mr. Montes. Not so much that he has sacrificed himself for us as that he has suffered and died as one of us.

Mexico in the Heartland has a series of black and white photos of Mexican’s working in tobacco fields and in most instances, they look not much different from my grandparents, parents, aunts, uncles, brothers and sisters. The photos could fit right into James Baker Hall’s Tobacco Harvest.

Hall and Wendell Berry have sung the elegy. Mr. Montes is like a soldier who has died after the generals signed the treaty.

Danielle Nethery’s photograph of a Mexican farm worker from New Madrid, Winter 2008.

My family cutting tobacco in the early 1940s. Pictured are my maternal aunt, my mother, my sister, my maternal grandmother, my father standing, my paternal grandfather kneeling with my older brother, our neighbor, my paternal aunt on the horse, my maternal grandfather, my younger brother, and my paternal grandmother.

David Payne, “Writing on Writing,” in the March 2008 issue of The Oxford American, a column entitled “Carrying America’s Shadow:”

While it’s true that a half-century ago a galaxy of celebrated Southern writers—Capote, Welty, Faulkner, Williams, Harper Lee, and others—enjoyed cachet in the North; and though once a generation or so along comes a Gone With the Wind or a Cold Mountain, the fate of a writer like Lee Smith remains more typical. Author of the masterly Fair and Tender Ladies, Smith has a large, devoted audience in the Southeast, yet after a dozen novels, her reputation and readership continue to plummet north of Washington, D.C.

Smith’s latest book sets the pattern: Upon its publication in 2006, On Agate Hill, a novel situated in and around Hillsborough, North Carolina, shot to No. 1 on the Southern Independent Bookseller Alliance (SIBA) bestseller list and remained there for weeks. During that time, it never appeared on any of the seven other regional lists around the country. By contrast, Anna Quindlen’s concurrently published Rise and Shine, with a Bronx setting, appeared throughout its run in high positions on all eight lists, including SIBA. Both trajectories are typical for established writers from their respective regions: that is, Southern writers are “regional”; Norther writers are “national.” And what’s true of Smith and Quindlen today was also true of Faulkner and Hemingway in their primes.

Why?

Is human experience in the South a specialized and limited affair, relevant only to other Southerners, while life in the Bronx is “universal” and relevant to all, including Southerners? And, if not, what accounts for the confinement of Southern writers to the region?

There may be some conflict of interest in Mr. Payne’s picking Lee Smith as the exemplary novelist for his column. Smith’s husband, Hal Crowther, is also a contributing columnist to The Oxford American. However, I thoroughly agree that Smith is one of the best novelists writing in the United States today and if you haven’t read Fair and Tender Ladies then you’ve missed out.

It also may be true that Smith, along with Ron Rash (another neglected writer mentioned in this column), is operating under the double whammy of being not just Southern, but Southern Appalachian. We all know what exotic inbred creatures dwell in the southern mountains.

Possibly also, compared to a Southern novelist like Cormac McCarthy, Smith suffers from writing of women’s issues—the home and hearth. You’ll find no shoot-outs in Smith’s world.

Besides, as Payne points out, in order to achieve his popularity, McCarthy had to leave the South and begin writing Westerns. Maybe Texas is the one Southern state everybody in the country can identify with?

To return to the Southeast in The Road, McCarthy had to create an area so burnt-out as to make Sherman’s scorched-earth March to the Sea look like a weenie-roast.

Still, it’s an interesting question: why is the Bronx considered more normative for the United States than Hillsborough?

Finishing Line Press has announced their tenth annual New Women’s Voices chapbook competition. Deadline is February 15. Click here for guidelines.

The Heartland Review has announced its third annual short-short fiction contest. Deadline is January 1. Click here for guidelines.