Sherry Chandler

I found this announcement at Eyewear:

Nthposition’s global headquarters is a minuscule eyrie in North London, and now that In The Criminal’s Cabinet has been in print for nearly three years, publisher and chief editor Val Stevenson is keen to get a few boxes of unsold copies out of her bedroom, though not nearly as keen as her long-suffering husband… If you would like one, please email Val.

Copies will be sent out on a ‘first come, first served’ basis, and when they are gone, ITCC will be officially out-of-print.

Copies will be a staggeringly reasonable £2.00 plus postage and packing (for airmail outside the UK) per copy

As a matter of full disclosure, I’m a contributor to In the Criminal’s Cabinet, and I must say that I’m impressed with myself to be included among so much lucid and edgy work by an international cast from the e-pages of nthposition.

I’ve been reading my way through the anthology again this summer, and I’m pleased with what I find. It’s a very attractively produced volume with 215 pages of poetry and fiction from Robert Allen to Harriet Zinnes. To quote the introduction by edtors Val Stevenson and Todd Swift:

Since 2002, London-based nthposition has featured several hundred poets, from almost every place where people write poetry in English, especially America, Australia, Canada, India, Ireland, New Zealand, the UK and South Africa. …we have tried to offer a full-spectrum report on the state of poetry of the start of the 21st century, to suggest the various ways — from linguistically innovative to mainstream — a poem can be imagined and created. Good poems occur at all points of the writing compass, from political to just plain weird.

Within these pages, you will find, quite simply, indelible poets and poems to reckon with — from India’s Ranjit Hoskote to Ireland’s Kevin Higgins; from Canada’s Stephanie Bolster to UK’s Jen Hadfield; from American’s Charles Bernstein to South Africa’s Isobel Dixon…

And this, of course, is just the poets, in whom I am most interested.

The prose, too, is all “tight, vivid.” Nine short pieces from the UK, America, Canada, Ireland, Bulgaria, and Japan. I took time to read it this summer, which I had not done before, and I was blown away by works like Kieran D”Angelo’s “The Internal Life of a Brick” and amused and touched by Kenneth J. Harvey’s “No Better a House.”

Invest a few dollars and get hours, years, of enjoyment in return.

Prosecution had sympathy but jury found against:

JT LeRoy, the authorial “other” whom the writer Laura Albert employed as her alter ego and self-protective proxy in the world, was found yesterday by a jury in Manhattan to be not just a fictional creation, but a fraud.

More on this ever-fascinating story here.

Meanwhile, I’ll opine that our country has turned sort of vampiric, feeding on other people’s pain, which is what sets us all up to be suckers for this kind of story. If I really wanted to strecth that analogy, I’d say it’s sort of our version of the Roman coliseum.

Tina Brown’s Couples

Why these couples? Why H. G. Wells and Rebecca West; Katherine Mansfield and John Middleton Murry; Countess Elizabeth Von Arnim and John Francis (Earl) Russell; Vanessa Bell and Clive Bell; Lady Ottoline Morrell and Philip Morrell; Radclyffe Hall and Lady Una Troubridge; Vera Brittain and George Gordon Catlin? All were literary or artistic figures, famous in their time (some still are in ours). All had the useful (to the rest of us) habit of writing everything down. They did their thinking aloud on paper — in urgent, dashed-off notes, carefully hoarded correspondence, diary entries, hand-delivered notes and unsent emotional manifestos. All of it was “eyes only,” so to speak, but time has declassified it. The result is YouTube in a time capsule.

Reading Judas:

Pagels and King do an excellent job explaining why, according to the author of this renegade gospel, mainstream Christianity has gotten it so wrong for so long. Along the way they introduce us to, among other things, a goddess named Barbelo (for some Gnostics, a divine mother figure who often symbolized heaven) and try to make sense of teachings that to most readers today will seem like nutty musings on numerology, cosmology, astrology and eschatology. On the perennial question of death and the afterlife, Pagels and King explain that whereas other early Christians affirmed the doctrine of bodily resurrection, the Christians to whom this gospel is addressed believed in the immortal spirit. Here the body is suspect. Jesus is not reborn in the flesh but simply appears. The eternal life he offers is lived in the spirit alone, and it is won more through Jesus’ teachings than through his sacrifice on the cross.

I read this book with a great deal of pleasure. It seemed to me that Pagels and King don’t make an argument one way or another; they just explain what the argument is. The reviewer sees it differently and has his reservations. Anyway I wouldn’t really recommend this book for beach reading.

Body of Work:

Poetry and death have been seen around town for quite some time. Among all the literary musings on death, the most affecting and surprising, it strikes me, are by the poet who daily confronts it. To the fine essays of the poet and undertaker Thomas Lynch must be added this gleaming, humane work by the poet Christine Montross, written during, and about, her first year of medical school. (She matriculated at Brown University when she was 28 and is now a resident in psychiatry there.)

…

Montross’s response is to break down in tears, and the oncologist quickly steps in front of her to take over the discussion. On the one hand, she realizes that it “should not be the responsibility of sick patients to bear the burden of unease.” As doctors in training, she writes, “we are reshaping the ways in which we react — in fact we are suppressing universal reactions of fear and grief and horror.” The danger is that one will go too far and suppress all emotion. “I do not wish,” Montross writes, “to hear ‘stroke’ and think of the distribution of vessels to the brain and the territories they serve instead of my grandmother’s now-curled left hand and stooped walk.”

And, last but not least, not from the NYTimes Book Page, Lance Mannion on poets and the truth:

I like the poem better when I think that it’s made up. When I suspect it’s the truth—Glück’s version of the truth—it feels like a lie.

I think that Glück has a streak of perversity in her that allows her to “remember” the past in ways that appeal to her vanity. I think she is vain about being gloomy and withdrawn, vain about being a person who responds to affection and emotional claims upon her by going cold and turning mean.

I think she is nursing a grudge that has no cause but her own self-loathing.

I think she is a female, poetic Dr House.

You know why I think this?

Because I have read other poems by her in which she presents herself as just this kind of person.

I didn’t pick the most coherent part of the Mannion argument here. You can get that by reading his whole post, which is fun. But I like comparing Louise Glück to Gregory House, one of my favorite tv characters, and so I chose to put that part of the post here.

(One little side note: one reason why I think Hugh Laurie is so successful as House is that that whole House world is about as silly as Bertie Wooster’s.)

Update: Also not from the NYTimes Book Page but from Juan Cole’s Informed Comment:

Al-Hayat says that the Iraqi legislature issued a statement on the knighting by Queen Elizabeth II of author Salman Rushdie: “At a time when we call for a dialogue of religions and civilizations, and work to combat terrorism in all its forms and wherever it exists, we express our amazement and our regret that the Queen of England has honored a person who has insulted Islam and millions of its adherents.”

James Wood has a long review of The Road in The New Republic, now available at Powell’s. It’s a good read for itself, as I find most New Republic reviews are, but I bring it up here because Woods voices some of my own reservations about the novel:

There is no obligation for The Road to answer an unanswerable dilemma like theodicy. It is a novel, not a treatise. But the placement of what looks like a paragraph of religious consolation at the end of such a novel is striking, and it throws the novel off balance, precisely because theology has not seemed exactly central to the book’s inquiry. One has a persistent, uneasy sense that theodicy and the absent God have been merely exploited by the book, engaged with too lightly, without enough pressure of interrogation. When Ely says that “there is no God and we are his prophets,” the phrase seems a little trite in its neat paradox of negation.

In this respect, to compare McCarthy to Beckett, as some reviewers have done, is to flatter McCarthy. His reticence and his minimalism work superbly at evocation, but they exhaust themselves when philosophy presses down. The style that is so good at the glancing, the lyrical, the half-expressed struggles to deal adequately with the metaphysical questions that apocalypse raises.

What Wood expresses for me here is the feeling I had that all the religious symbolism was just there for window dressing, and what this boils down to is an adventure novel with some window dressing.

I get back to my question of the feminine. I suppose one could argue that when you’ve killed the earth, you’ve killed the feminine aspect of God. And perhaps the whole novel is about what happens when the Mother dies.

But if that is the case, the ending is even more contrived and jarring than I’d thought. To let the father die just before the son is delivered into what my son would call “a cozy apocalypse” and into the arms of a replacement mother, well, jeez, it’s sentimental. It glances away from the horror at the end.

I don’t have any experience reading McCarthy beyond The Road but there is nothing in it that leads me to disagree with Wood’s statement that he deals in “bloody battles between good and evil.”

All McCarthy’s remarkable effects notwithstanding, there remains the matter of his meaning. There is another vaudevillian strain in The Road, a troubling one, in the way the novelist manipulates his theological material. McCarthy’s work has always been interested in theodicy, and somewhat shallowly. Here the comparisons to Melville and Hardy are rather inexact. McCarthy likes to stage bloody fights between good and evil, and his commentary tends toward the easily fatalistic. There is nothing easy about the machinery of this book — the mise-en-scène, the often breathtaking writing, the terrifying concentration of the evocation — but there is something perhaps a little showy, a little glib, about the way that questions of belief are raised and dropped.

When your world view is Cartesian: good and evil, black and white (and the world of The Road seems more black than white with the only color that bright red can of Coca Cola they find), then there is no room for the nuance a mother would bring.

In the end, I come rather regretfully to the conclusion that The Road is a flashy piece, a virtuoso exercise. Very impressive but it teaches me nothing. To give Wood the last word:

The question of endings in an apocalypse must be philosophical as well as merely emotional, even in a novel.

I must start out by saying that I don’t like the title of Jane Gentry’s new collection, Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig (LSU Press, 2006). I am in the minority on this one if I can go by the reactions I’ve seen and heard myself. To me, though, it seems flip, derivative, and misleading as to the nature of the poetry inside. I wouldn’t buy a book with this title if it didn’t have Jane’s name on it. And that would be a mistake. These are exquisitely wrought poems.

Take, for example, “April in Your Garden,” which begins:

The day falls open out of the sky.
Even the cedar bent from the wet late snow
seems to rise up into it
like the richest voice in a chorus.

This is not a flippant voice. This is work of a quiet elegance that will knock your socks off.

I do understand why the poem “Portrait of the Artist as a White Pig” had to be the title poem. The scene it sets up is this: the speaker driving along Western Kentucky Parkway into the sunset on a November day and suddenly into the vision of a field of white pigs backlit by the sun, in light “bronze as a baby shoe”:

…white pigs,
a field full, eating, all snouts
to the ground…
That earth should take the form of this
strange beast, should eat itself and shift
into this shape! The bows of their backs
gold-leafed: snout and mouth to golden earth,
as hungry as one breath for the next.

This is the ars poetica, the central image of the collection, a transcendant vision based on a humble omnivorous (but highly intelligent) brute.

The free-verse lyrics of this collection range from Kentucky to New York and Paris (the one in France, though the one in Kentucky does get a mention in the poem “Taking the Train from Maysville to New York”) and over the years of a lifetime. They speak of loss and love, generations passed on and generations yet to come, thanatos and eros, the stuff of poetry.

Close observance finds the poem in simple, domestic items, as in “The Reading Lamp.”

On Grandfather’s eighty-eighth birthday
his children gave him a reading lamp,
which he trained on the newspaper
morning and evening. …

A situation mundane enough, but

On the shell a gold sticker glistened
embossed with a name,
a brand I can’t remember.
Whom shall I ask?

All are dead who had that small suddenly significant bit of knowledge: grandfather, aunts, uncles, father, mother…

I alone have lived to tell this
little story, and now I approach
the dark to which they’ve gone.
A last hope, that lamp
still shines, like silver,
gold, a wondrous light
which won’t yet yield its name.

If, as I have recently read, the “School of Quietude” is defined as prose broken into short lines, then there is some cause to place these poems there. It’s a school with some impressive alums, including Wendell Berry and Galway Kinnell. One might also label Jane an Imagist. Once, years ago, she told me that you find a poem in a thing accurately described. To me, though, she is Jane, a category unto herself.

And sometimes she grabs me by the heart and makes me see what I look at every day:

Realty

Rows of new homes, tidy in plastic siding, come
creeping over the hill toward the clapboard house
collapsing into its center under its own weight,
its porch barely clinging, that was built to fit exactly
the farmer’s rocker, the wife’s churn, her canning table.

This bulldozed valley, pocked with manholes,
will not be dark again for eons, its trees uprooted
that broke the winter wind and made the summer shade,
that stood beneath the fixed stars the farmer watched…

It’s been over 10 years since Jane published her first collection, A Garden in Kentucky (LSU Press, 1995), though she has had one letterpress chapbook, A Year in Kentucky (Press Eight Seventeen, 2005) in the interim. She is a poet who hones as carefully as the sculptor of the “Nike of Samothrace” who “laboriously discovered you, chip / by chip, inside the body of a stone.”

On Tuesday, Jane Gentry will be installed as Kentucky’s twenty-third Poet Laureate. If you are local, I hope you will attend. It’s at 10 a.m. in the State Capitol Rotunda.

Wherever you live, I hope you will consider adding this volume to your poetry collection.

In the morning they came out of the ravine and took to the road again. He’d carved the boy a flute from a piece of roadside cane and he took it from his coat and gave it to him. The boy took it wordlessly. After a while he fell back and after a while the man could hear him playing. A formless music for the age to come. Or perhaps the last music on earth called up from the ashes of its ruin. The man turned and looked back at him. He was lost in concentration. The man thought he seemed some sad and solitary changeling child announcing the arrival of a traveling spectacle in shire and village who does not know that behind him the players have all been carried off by wolves.

— Cormac McCarthy, The Road (Knopf 2006), p. 66

Spoiler warning:

After reading The Road, which he discovered before Oprah, my husband re-read The Odyssey, as, I suppose, the prototypical road novel. He told me he found The Odyssey more violent. As with Greek drama if not Greek poetry, most of the violence in The Road takes place off stage. The man and his son (of about ten) who are the nameless central characters trudge through their ashen world past mummified corpses, heads impaled on burned out trees, and, even once, a new-born human turning on a spit. But the would-be baby-eaters were frightened away by the approach of our heroes, and their other confrontations with humans-reverted-to-savagery are relatively mild and bloodless. We’re not dealing with a Conan story here. It’s not Quentin Tarrantino. The father constantly threatens to be savage in defense of his son, but always that son restrains him.

The Road is written in beautifully simple prose. Style is what keeps you reading this nearly 250-page story of an endless trudge across the eastern mountains to the sea. I think it may have been finding clever ways for the father to scavenge and scrounge that kept McCarthy writing. But that way lies blasphemy.

Whatever the apocalyptic tragedy, the man is mythically homeless, pushing his grocery cart of possessions along what’s left of the interstate highway system. There is, unfortunately, a tendency to toward sentence fragments that becomes almost a stylistic tic. It’s as though McCarthy avoided compound/complex sentences by breaking them up into their component parts. It got on my nerves a bit, but otherwise the prose is faultless.

The mother in this trinity, having stuck around long enough to give birth to and suckle the son (a familiar pattern), has opted out, using one of their three bullets to kill herself rather than face rape, slavery, and worse for herself and her son. This self-immolation creates, as my son pointed out to me this last Easter weekend, a holy ghost (and also relieves McCarthy of the burden of creating a believable woman).

The trinitiy symbolism is appropriate. We may be looking at an allegory here.

All through the book the reader is faced with the question: to what possible good end can this struggle lead? Why not use their last two precious bullets to do the deed for which they’re being horded.

But there is also the sense that this pair is somehow exceptional. The son has an extraordinary moral sense for a child, especially a child who has known only deprivation and savagery. His lessons are the stories his father tells him of the civilized world. They are the “good guys” (another phrase that grates a little in the current political climate); they “carry the fire.” (A redundant burden, perhaps, in a burnt and burning world.) Always they experience hair-breadth escapes. Starved and sick, they always find that last cache of canned goods. Wounded, they escape capture and the degradation it would bring.

Do they come to a good end? That would be telling. But keep in mind that Oprah chose this book and she is not much into hopelessness.

I find myself, in writing this mini-review, more negative than I’d realized. In part, I think it’s reaction to the lionizing of this novel. But also, I think it’s because there is little of the feminine principal here. On one level, it’s just another romance of the road, no women need apply.

When questioned about her dark outlook last week in Louisville, Louise Glück said something like this: If hope is to be found, it must be found after facing up to the worst. I think Mr. McCarthy may have flinched.

We received Reginal Hill’s latest novel last week, airmail from Britain, and it is a pure delight.

The main question is: Has Our Goateed Author finally tired of having his plump child abused in a telly series and decided to round out Fat Andy’s existence with a little slap at conventions? We remain mute about that, but can say that unplumbed depths of all his regular characters surface in this novel even as should the Kraken at the End of Times.

Not least of these revelations are those concerning PC Hector, whose very inablility to communicate verbally is part of a special gift of genius–a secret only DCI Pascoe knows and which nearly gets them both killed after he incautiously vouches for Hector’s powers of observation to certain Funny Buggers.

After Dalziel is severely injured in a blast outside a Terrorist warren, Pascoe fixes on the superstitious notion that only if he can uncover those responsible for the blast–a newly reconstitued Knights Templar revenge sect that targets British Muslims– will Andy survive his coma. But is this simple revenge, no better than the acts of the Templars themselves? Pascoe, always feeling like an attendant lord regardless of how well he channels himself in to Andy’s 7-league boots, worries that he is not a Red-Cross Knight but a Quixote, “creating confusion rather than resolving it”. And he may indeed have run a bit mad like Hieranymo. He argues with Wield and even betrays Ellie’s trust to get at the truth. So she in turn witholds some information which could resolve all mysteries, principally to protect Peter’s mental and physical wellbeing. Personal concerns can outweigh those of the Job, a lesson Andy had given many living examples of through the years.

Tony Hillerman is fond of noting in his novels that Navaho culture explains criminal actions by an individual by saying “he acts as if he has no kin.” Reginald Hill’s mythic mid-Yorkshire must contain more inbreeding than Faulkner’s Yoknapatawpha Co. Not since the novels of Dickens are there so many coincidences and close ties of family–part of the delight in these novels, which are subtle but unashamed parodies of most of the forms of Western literature and several of the East.

When injured Pascoe gimps out with his daughter’s little dog for an unauthorized root around in the debris of the blast site, and the dog finds an Important Clew, Hill invites us to laugh at the improbability of this event–straight out of Boy’s Own by way of Dickens, or mebbe Pratchett. But there is a grim delight in this tale and it bears as much comparison to that of the Pardoner’s. It is as well crafted as any of Chaucer’s.

This post was written by poppysmatus.

Poetry Daily has a link up to The First American Modernist, Ernest Hilbert’s review, in The New York Sun, of Scott Donaldson’s biography, “Edwin Arlington Robinson: A Poet’s Life” (Columbia, 2006), from which I lift this passage:

His career enjoyed numerous boosts from dedicated friends in New York, Boston, and his hometown of Gardiner, Maine. The most famous of these supporters was [Theodore] Roosevelt, who, in 1905, learned of the struggling poet from his son, Kermit. The president was an avid reader — devouring a book daily, according to some accounts — and offered to help Robinson in any way he could. He located a sinecure for Robinson in a Lower Manhattan customs house and even went so far as to review Robinson’s books in Outlook, the only known example of literary criticism by a sitting president. A duly grateful Robinson said that Roosevelt “fished me out of hell by the hair of my head.” Unfortunately, the four years at the customs house were perhaps the least productive for Robinson. He believed the struggles that characterized his younger years had inspired him.

Maybe it isn’t always a good thing to have a president for a fan.

BTW, I notice this article uses two versions of Robinson’s name. I do think it is Edwin.

Before we leave February’s dark chill for March’s bluster, I want to mention one last delight that came to my winter mailbox: Jane Kretschmann’s chapbook. Number 63 in FootHills’s Springfed Chapbook series, Imagining a Life is a gift of 21 poems in Jane’s deceptively quiet voice. Filled with wonderfully realized details of ordinary life, the poems are small stories told in plain language without verbal or metric pyrotechnics. And yet, there is often an edge (quite literally), as in “October Sadness”:

A woman coming home
reaches for a sweater
before beginning supper,

then stands at the counter,
as though reluctant to feel
the refrigerator’s chill.

…

The doctor’s report weighs
on her mind. In the darkening
room, she avoids slicing

the raw meat, anesthetized
by the cold light
invading the kitchen.

Jane often brings a wry smile, as in “Sweet Relief,” where the speaker finds a rustic form of pay toilet while walking in the woods, or “Eve Teaches Adam About Naming,” where a culinary lexicography (who knows what a gilhoolie is?) ends with a twist:

Come on, brother/lover/husband, have
some fruit, whatever you call it.

Some of the poems I would call quietly raucous, if you’ll forgive me the oxymoron: “Psalm for the Full-Figured Woman,” “Wedding Reception at the American Legion” (which gives us that southern tradition, the biker wedding), and “Return Policy:”

“Well, I wouldn’t exactly call it a marriage,
considering that we lived together
longer before the wedding than after,”
she says, setting down her beer mug.
“It was like buying something
you can take back if it doesn’t work.”

“Yeah,” she says with a nod, “more like
a vacuum cleaner than a marriage.
Sweaty, spermy nights—easy to suck up…

But this little book is not all Southern charm. It takes on hard subjects, too, like slavery, homelessness, and the hard child labor that is farm life.

Imagining a Life is, like all FootHills chapbooks, a handsome handstitched volume on heavy cream paper. It’s a bargain at $6.00.

I recommend it to you.

Quite a few goodies in my mailbox recently. Among them, the latest issue of Tears in the Fence, with 140 pages of poetry and reviews and a couple of short stories thrown in. Not a volume to work through in an hour. I was interested to learn, from editor David Caddy’s afterword, that the 2006 version of The Oxford Book of English Poetry (Oxford University Press, 2006) includes lyrics by Robert Johnson, Bessie Smith, Bob Dylan, and Patti Smith (the Smith girls, huh?) along with the more usual cast of characters.

To some extent, I find reading reviews of English poetry collections is a little like feeling my way through a woods in the dark. I’m really very ignorant of who’s who in contemporary English poetry once you get beyond a few lions. But there is much to be learned and the writing is good. Tom Chivers, for example, has an essay on war poetry in what I think is his regular column, “From the Other Side of the Fence.” Consider this passage:

The outpouring of anger before and during the US-led war in Iraq re-established poetry as a medium for political protest. Writers like Adrian Mitchell and Christopher Logue — who marched with CND in the 60s and were jailed for it — were back on the streets, performing anit-war poetry to crowds of thousands. 100 Poets Against the War (Salt 2003) and 101 Poems Against War (Faber, 2003) were hastily published and widely read. Across the pond, a group of poets were invited to a reading at The White House, then swiftly uninvited once Laura Bush discovered that they were against the war. This was exciting — for the first time in decades poets had a real opportunity to bring a high level of debate and exploration to the often black and white politics of the anti-war movement. But, instead, poetry stepped down to the level of the slogan. In this age of soundbites, a “political poem” has become something you can write on a placard.

This speaks to me because I was privileged to be among those 100 Poets Against the War and for many months felt a compulsion and a duty to voice my outrage in the form most natural to me. But it was all, to some extent, occasional poetry, or what Poppysmatus would call rhetoric, ephemeral and probably worthy of obscurity in a few years. I knew that at the time.

Well, no, at the time I thought that adding my voice to the other voices being raised in protest might do some good, might change the course of events. I felt an urgency to write it and get it out somewhere immediately where it would be seen. And I also needed to find a community of like-minded people, to sort of huddle with my own against the great beating of drums and waving of flags.

I feel less urgency these days. I roared my great NO to the heart of the world and it was to no avail, and now I can only view events in both Iraq and Afghanistan with confusion and a great sadness. Also, I think, I have found this blog to vent my outrage. It is perhaps a better venue for that sort of thing.

And, to be honest, I find much of the protest poetry I read lately either posturing and rhetorical or sincere but naive and uncrafted. (Actually this is true of most of the poetry I read, protest or not.) Neither is really engaging in the aggregate.

Perhaps Azar Nafisi is right to view fiction, and by extension poetry, as most subversive when it is least moralistic. Which is not to put me in Dana Gioia’s camp, that poetry doesn’t do war and politics. Of course poetry does war and politics but it doesn’t preach well. I think the best anti-war poem I ever wrote was my tribute to my uncle, “Walking Taft Highway,” which wasn’t outraged at all, but lovingly devoted to its subject.

The power of the “oblique approach,” a version of Emily Dickinson’s “Tell the truth but tell it slant,” is Chivers’s point.

In an age of anxiety — of war, global terrorism and climate change — the artists among us represent a vital alternative voice. But in our efforts to be heard, let’s make sure the message is not cheapened.

I have not given up political poems. It’s in my nature, part of my being. But I struggle always to find a deeper truer craft. That struggle is what it’s about. Craft is what poetry is always about, above all things.

I always loved Loretta Young when she came whirling through that door to introduce The Loretta Young Show. She was like a grown-up princess. And with her high cheekbones and sweet smile, she always reminded me a bit of my Aunt Gladys, whose photo you see on my chapbook in the sidebar and who, my mother tells me, used to tapdance up and down the woodpile.

But I only ever remember one of Loretta Young’s movies and that is The Bishop’s Wife. Who wouldn’t remember being visited by an angel in the shape of Cary Grant?

If you’re looking for a Christmas classic, Verlyn Klinkenborg makes a good case for choosing this one:

Most Christmas movies are tales of redemptive hysteria — witness the stuttering ecstasy of Alastair Sim in “A Christmas Carol” or Jimmy Stewart’s desperate happiness in the last scenes of “It’s a Wonderful Life.” I always wonder how the world looked to them a few weeks later, once the giddiness wore off. But “The Bishop’s Wife” is not about redemption. It is about understanding your choices or, perhaps, knowing the true implications of your desires. It alludes to the past but does not depend on recovering it. It looks around this grim world and sees that what it needs is not a cathedral but charity.

I love that slight back-hand dismissal of “It’s a Wonderful Life,” which I’ve always found cloying. When I think of it, Jimmy Stewart may be said to have made a career of redemptive hysteria. Certainly of giddiness.

I also love the way this essay begins:

We watched “The Bishop’s Wife” at our house the other night. Some years at Christmas we hang a wreath from the kitchen door, and some years we decorate a tree. But we always find an evening to watch “The Bishop’s Wife.”