Sherry Chandler

Dorothy Sutton

Women writing in Kentucky today share two themes.

One is a loss of culture. Not nostalgia precisely, though it can look a little like it. Rather an urgency to record what was of value about the older skower ways before they disappear.

The second is an honoring of our elders, a need to record the extraordinary heroism of their ordinary lives (a phrasing I think I may have stolen from my friend Georgia Green Stamper).

In Backing Into Mountains (Wind Publications, 2009), Dorothy Sutton explores these themes with extraordinary grace, whether it be the Appalachian schoolbus drivers and mechanics of the title poem:

Your life depends on brakes and lights
up here in these Kentucky hills.
The school bus whines and groans to climb
through hollers, with creek-beds the only roads.
. . .
We try to maintain machines that can roll
without crashing, hold the young ones
back from the edge . . .

or Uncle Lester in “No Man’s Land”

One day he was husking the corn,
feeding the greedy, muddy pigs,
. . .
the next day halfway around the world
in Paris with the prostitutes of Pigalle
. . .
The next day mired in confused
trough trenches of muddy slop
. . .
the next day back in Pike County
slopping the hogs, begging the world
to stop . . .

This selection shows not only Sutton’s great compassion but also her craft: the circling around the sounds and images of pigs and slop in a way that is both humorous and heartbreaking.

Sutton explores far and wide in the matter of Kentucky, from Gorgeous George and Casey Jones to Robert Penn Warren and George Keats.

“Casey Jones” is one of my favorite poems in this collection. Having grown up in a singing/strumming family, as many of us here in Kentucky did, I love the play on the theme of this most famous of all train ballads (not to be confused with the Grateful Dead’s Casey Jones) .

We’re the children of “Casey” Jones
from Cayce, Kentucky. In 1900,
Casey Jones died trying
to find the time he’d misplaced somewhere
between Memphis and Mississippi.
. . .
They dug him out, one legend says,
one hand on the throttle, to increase his speed,
the other hand firmly gripping the brake.

Here is the central dilemma of the theme of loss of culture. We tend, us older folk in Kentucky, to come from timeless sorts of places but now we are very much caught up in the rush of time. Our roots are in the folkways, our branches embrace Richard Dawkins and Picasso.

And right about now, Uncle Lester is crying “Whoa, damn you,” not just to the mule of the twentieth century but also to that last metaphor. Both of ‘em kind of got the bits in their teeth and took off.

Here’s a much better extended metaphor, from the Richmond Register:

Dublin poet Eileen Casey said recently of Sutton’s work: “The title poem of this collection pays tribute to the tenacity of the bus drivers of Appalachia, a cultural region in the Eastern United States, forced to breathtakingly negotiate very difficult terrain. In the same way, Dorothy Sutton takes each poem (and us) from one imaginative location to another, by the sheer force of her deep and intimate knowledge of what it is to be human. The poems are exquisitely crafted, steering through words, like those Appalachian bus drivers, trying to maintain machines that can roll without crashing, hold the young ones back from the edge, carry them all the places they need to go. These poems are a joy to read, in terms of capturing the cadences of lives lived and voices heard in the Kentucky of her childhood, different and yet the same as mine in Ireland. An emotional bridge is formed between Kentucky and the rest of the world, indeed a breathtaking reading experience.”

Dorothy Sutton is reading this Tuesday, March 9, at the Carnegie Center for Literacy and Learning’s Kentucky Great Writer series. It’s an evening to celebrate Wind Publications. Her fellow readers are J. Stephen Rhodes, author of The Time I Didn’t Know What to Do Next (my remarks here) and Normandi Ellis, author of Fresh-Fleshed Sisters. The festivities begin with open mic signups at 6:30, featured readings begin at 7:30.

Blood simple

Every now and then over the past several years, when I have cried out “I need escape reading,” my husband has proffered me a copy of Dashiell Hammet’s Red Harvest.

And I’ve always said some version of “I’m not that desperate.”

Published in 1929, Red Harvest is the granddaddy of what you might call American bloodbath fiction. It is the story of a man with no name, known only as the Continental Op, who goes into a town called “Poisonville” and triggers a gang war in which all the baddies kill one another off.

This same plot, more or less, also drives Akira Kurosawa’s Yojimbo, Sergio Leone’s A Fistful of Dollars, and Walter Hill’s Last Man Standing. The Coen Brother’s Blood Simple takes its title from one of the Op’s lines

This damned burg’s getting me. If I don’t get away soon I’ll be going blood-simple like the natives.

Since I have enjoyed most, if not all, of these movies, there is some argument that my cultural education is incomplete if I refuse to read the source material.

That seems like a good enough reason to give for the fact that this week I finally gave over and read the thing.

Samuel Dashiell Hammett worked for the Pinkertons through some pretty rough stuff between 1915 – 1921, especially their strikebreaking activities. He was possibly himself the model for his most famous detective, Sam Spade.

Certainly the Continental Op has more in common with Humphrey Bogart than with men like Clint Eastwood and Bruce Willis. In Red Harvest, the Op describes himself as 40 years old, about 5′ 6″, weighing 190 pounds, and not really in shape to walk several blocks.

Hammet served in both World Wars and there’s no doubt that, having worked for the Pinkertons, he had some knowledge of the mean streets. After 1934, he gave up writing and became a left-wing activist. He spent time in prison and was blacklisted for his activities and his refusal to testify to more than his own activities.

Hammett was not highly educated but he’s a great stylist. Red Harvest is lean and quick-moving and there’s none of the male sentimentality in it that I sometimes see in Hammett’s followers, like RAymond Chandler and Ross MacDonald. At Time magazine. Lev Grossman and Richard Lacayo included it on a list of the 100 best English-language novels published between 1923 to 2005, along with The Great Gatsby, The Invisible Man, and Are You There, God, It’s Me, Margaret.

So it’s a very readable novel, engaging in the beginning. (The version I read was published by Vintage Crime in 1989.) But the more I read, the less interested I became. The novel isn’t really about solving a mystery. It’s more like the old Renaissance revenge dramas, something by Thomas Kyd or Kit Marlowe. For all the theme goes all the way back to Seneca, it’s not a genre I’ve ever cared much for, Hamlet being the exception that proves the rule.

And by the time we get to the final puzzle — did the Op do it? — and the dying man’s confession, the suspension on my disbelief is completely sprung. The explanation is rigged and silly.

(Added: I do have to say somewhere in here that the Op has qualms about the violence he has unleashed. He is not blood-simple. And because of the violence, he is compromised and loses what you might call the moral high ground if you spoke in such clichés. His position becomes ambiguous.)

Good enough for whiling away a rainy afternoon. Not as nuanced as The Maltese Falcon (but there I may be influenced by the Bogart performance). Not as contrived as an episode of Alfred Hitchcock Presents. I wouldn’t put it on the same list with The Sound and the Fury and Mrs. Dalloway.

Cat and Golden Apples

from “Music from Spain,”

A tortoise shell cat pillowed in apples gazed at him from a grocer’s window. She pulled her round eyes closed as on little drawstrings. Eugene recollected that one street back a plaster bull dog, cerise with blue rings around the eyes, which ordinarily sat in the ground floor window of a hotel between the drawn shade and the glass, had this morning been taken away. Eugene had missed it—been cheated of it. As the cat opened her eyes again, he had a moment of believing he would know anything that happened, anything that threatened the moral way, or transformed it, even, in the city of San Francisco that day: as if he and the city were watching each other—without accustomed faith. But with interest . . . boldness . . . recklessness, almost.
— Eudora Welty, The Golden Apples (Harcourt, Brace, Jovanovich, 1947)

One I know, admire, respect, remarked a while back that s/he had undertaken to include The Golden Apples in a literature course but would not do so again because Welty uses the N word way too much.

The remark aroused my curiosity, so I pulled our copy off the shelf. I don’t remember having read this collection of connected short stories before. It is true that it has frequent use of the N word and appearances of African-American characters that seem caricatured. I think it might be a very difficult book to take into the classroom today, especially in an area that doesn’t tend to be what you might call culturally enlightened.

On the other hand, all the characters in the book are sometimes treated like caricatures. It is not a strictly realistic work. The stories refer to folklore and mythology.

The whites in this complex collection of interconnected stories are not admirable. The stories seem to be about the way your culture catches you, drags at you, keeps you to their expectations of you. Morgana, Mississippi is a closed decaying culture that does not embrace difference. Or change. If you are poor white, you are to remain poor white. If you are “class” then you must act a certain way, even in the face of disaster. All the stories on some level are about those who attempt to escape and fail. In the story “Moon Lake,” three girls flee the confines of summer camp, find an old boat, and think they will use it to float out into the middle of the lake, outside the carefully marked off swimming area of the camp. But the boat turns out to be tethered and locked and they can’t get more than a chain’s length from the shore.

“Moon Lake” is anthologized elsewhere and it is one story from the collection that I had read. Like everything in Welty, it is beautifully written, but it always puzzled me. In context of The Golden Apples, its themes are much more resonant.

I didn’t resolve my own questions about treatments of race. It is not a modern book, times have changed, and the racial attitudes in The Golden Apples seem shocking. Maybe that’s not a bad thing. Maybe we weren’t meant to take that stuff for granted. Maybe we were. The white people of Morgana, Mississippi did. Welty doesn’t treat her African-American characters as wise, the way Faulkner did. But they aren’t any sillier than the white people.

A different kind of birdsong?

From Heraclitean Fire, who says:

The set-up in the video isn’t exactly the same as the one in the gallery, but it gives you the idea: a flock of zebra finches in a room with electric guitars and up-turned cymbals, who ‘play’ the instruments by hopping around and perching on them. They are free-flying in the gallery, and you can walk on paths between the instruments.

It’s an immediately appealing idea and quite memorable, so it will probably be something of a hit, at least by the standards of contemporary art installations. To be honest, though, I thought it was less striking in reality than it was in neatly-edited little close-ups on YouTube. It was more like being in a slightly odd aviary than in some kind of extraordinary art-place. People did seem to be enjoying it, though. I slightly wonder how much of that was just the pleasure of being in among all these very tame little birds, but perhaps I’m just projecting my own reactions.

I’ll have to admit to zebra finch envy. They are lovely little birds. But like Harry, I wonder if they wouldn’t be happier left alone. And can they hear all that racket?

27 February 2010 – 23 May 2010
The Curve, Barbican, London

In search of the sublime

Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden has been around long enough to be considered a classic in American Studies. In fact, I think it helped define the discipline.

Marx is an “increasingly militant” environmentalist, a choice of words I found in Jeffrey L. Meikle’s article, Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden [Technology and Culture 44.1 (2003) 147-159]. It seems an odd choice to describe one who

appeal[s] to a broad spectrum of scholars and teachers of American studies, especially those of the author’s own generation who shared his anxiety about a postnuclear world dominated by the technological systems of what became known as the military-industrial complex

A casual Google search seems to indicate that Marx’s argument has become the one to refute. He is accused of skewing his argument toward the garden and also of basing it too much in high culture and literature. Meikle enumerates several of the counter arguments. I was particularly struck by this one:

Even more dismissive, John Lark Bryant faulted Marx for “tacitly assuming the essentially Arnoldian premise that a literature reflects its society.”*

I guess I myself always took that premise as a given. Seems to me that we were a nation born in literature. Names lilke Thomas Paine and Thomas Jefferson do pop up.

On the other hand, I suppose one must recognize that there are cultural forces that march on, for good or ill, in spite of theorists and politicians.

Meikle points toward another couple of post-Marx books that sort of take up where Marx left off: John F. Kasson, Civilizing the Machine: Technology and Republican Values in America, 1776-1900 and David E. Nye, American Technological Sublime .

. . . a wide-ranging study whose dramatic dust-jacket photograph exemplified the central paradox of the machine in the garden. The image foregrounds three men looking out from a precipice over a vast mountainous landscape, in the midst of which rises the massive concrete structure of the Hoover Dam, a gleaming artificial white slash across the rugged gorge of the Colorado River. . . .Surrounded by the desert landscape of the Southwest, the dam can hardly be termed a machine in a garden. Yet its reservoir, only beginning to fill at the time of the photograph, would create lush gardens, whose inhabitants would further benefit from the hydroelectric power it generated. Here was a case of the machine creating a garden—about as close a collaboration of nature and technology as one can imagine. When he took a long view, Nye observed that “Americans looked for sublimity in both realms” and concluded that “each was interpreted as a sign of national greatness.”

Nye’s book dates from 1994. Not everyone would now agree that creating a garden out of a desert is necessarily a good thing. But a cultural ideal does not necessarily consider right and wrong. Meikle concludes:

The Machine in the Garden remains the undisputed starting point for all attempts to understand the complex connections among developing technologies, their representations in text and image, and the multiple realities of American cultural experience. Marx might appreciate the irony that the text to which he has devoted a lifetime of thinking, shaping, commenting, and re-visioning has itself become a classic whose continuing influence cannot be ignored.

I don’t know why that’s an irony.

Maybe because a “classic” is no longer a living text?

Oh well.

I am not, at this point, even looking at Marx’s whole premise. I’m only about 125 pages into the book. I’m just sharing the parts that cause me to pay close attention. Sort of thinking out loud on the blog. Writing and thinking are often the same thing for me. It’s one of the functions this blog serves in my life.

Here is more of Marx on de Crèvecoeur’s Letters:

Without the sense of the landscape as a cardinal metaphor of value, the Letters could not have been written. Indeed, for the farmer it is the metaphoric even more than the physical properties of land which regenerate tired Europeans by filling them to overflowing with exuberancy. We are reminded of Robert Beverley’s exuberant style, not to mention Melville’s and Whitman’s — Whitman, whose hero will move from the contemplation of a single spear of grass to his barbaric yawp. It is not surprising that Crèvecoeur was one of the writers who convinced D. H. Lawrence that only the “spirit of place” really can account for the singular voice we hear in American books. In the Letters, as elsewhere in our literature, the voice we hear is that of a man who has discovered the possibility of changing his life. Landscape means regeneration to the farmer. In sociological terms, it means the chance for a simple man, who does actual work, to labor on his own property in his own behalf.[pp. 110-111]

__________
John Lark Bryant, “A Usable Pastoralism: Leo Marx’s Method in The Machine in the Garden,” American Studies 16 (1975): 63

The middle way

I have been reading Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden. Technology and the Pastoral Ideal in America (Oxford University Press, 1964), a book recommended to me by that mad Kayaker John Lane.

Marx defines the pastoral ideal as a middle way between the evils of the city (oversophistication) and the equal evils of wild nature (this might be seen as Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forest). He traces the ideal back to Virgil’s Eclogues and begins his examination of how the pastoral plays out in America by looking at The Tempest as “Shakespeare’s American Fable.” It always comes as a surprise to me to realize that the mythologizing of the New World reaches as far back as Shakespeare, but, as Marx points out, the promotion of the New World paradise had begun this early not only because Europe needed hope but also because men like Sir Walter Raleigh needed to raise money for their expeditions.

For Englishmen of Raleigh’s ilk, this New World paradise was Virginia. The other story, that of Puritans braving wilderness for their religious ideals, must also be factored in, but it is not the only American story.

In his chapter “The Garden,” Marx examines what has come to be called Jeffersonian agrarianism. But Jefferson had precursors and one of them was J. Hector St. John de Crèvecoeur. In Letters from an American Farmer (1782), de Crèvecoeur’s farmer finds in his Virginia farm the pastoral “oasis of rural pleasure” described by Virgil. But while Virgil’s shepherd lolled under a beech and played his pipes between Rome and the marshland, de Crèvecoeur’s farmer has

Eastward . . . Europe, encompassing l’ancien régime, an oppressive social order of “great lords who possess everything, and of a herd of people who have nothing.” Westward . . . the dark forest frontier where something “very singular” happens to Europeans. Their lives being “regulated by the wildness of the neighbourhood,” ther become “ferocious, gloomy and unsociable.” As he describes the frontiersmen, they are “no better than carnivorous animals of a superior rank, living on the flesh of wild animals” — native American Calibans. [p. 111]

I have been spending a lot of time with these Calibans in the West of Virginia (Kentucky) in the last year and de Crèvecoeur had a point. Frontier Kentucky was a brutal place but the brutality, it seems to me, came not from men who had gone native but from those who were determined to drive the natives out in pursuit of de Crèvecoeur’s ideal.

And yet, the ideal itself doesn’t seem so evil.

Though it may be that it is an aristocratic ideal. And always, even as far back as Virgil, one that is somehow exclusive. See this passage from Moses Austin’s journal:

I cannot omitt Noticeing the many Distress.d families I pass.d in the Wilderness nor can any thing be more distressing to a man of feeling than to see woman and Children in the Month of Decembr Travelling a Wilderness Through Ice and Snow passing large rivers and Creeks without Shoe or Stocking, and barely as maney raggs as covers their Nakedness, with out money or provisions except what the Wilderness affords. . . . can any thing be more Absurd than the Conduct of man, here is hundreds Travelling hundreds of Miles, they Know not for what Nor Whither, except its to Kentucky, . . . the Promis.d land . . . Milk and Honey. and when arriv.d at this Heaven in Idea what do they find? a goodly land I will allow but to them forbiden Land. exausted and worn down with distress and disappointment they are at last Oblig.d to become hewers of wood and Drawers of water.

In the end, even de Crèvecoeur’s farmer has to pull up stakes and light out for the territory, driven out by the hostilities of the American Revolution. de Crèvecoeur himself went home to France, where he got caught up in the French Revolution. He was a French aristocrat and he had his problems there, though he managed to survive with help from his American connections.

John Lane suggested that I read both Robert Pogue Harrison’s Forests. The Shadow of Civilization (Univ Chicago Press, 1992) and Leo Marx’s The Machine in the Garden, and though I am not very far into the Marx book, I think I can see why. Harrison begins Forests by saying “The story is full of enigmas and paradoxes.” And so it seems is the story of America.

Monday musings

Well, it’s Monday and a brand new month, which so far seems to be coming in like a lamb, St David’s day, and the first day of meterological spring. So there must be something to celebrate, though there are still dirty drifts piled up here and there and snow is back in the forecast for midweek.

I’ve tried to be patient with this winter. We do, after all, live in a temperate zone, and a certain amount of winter is a pre-requisite. Freezing is good for keeping pests in control. And at least this year hasn’t — so far — gifted us with ice storms like we had last year. Ice is hard on trees and other living things.

But I am hungry for the sun. Such a gray winter we’ve had.

But Stoney has a photo to cheer my heart.

It occurs to me that it’s been a long time since I’ve talked about movies here. It’s not that we haven’t been watching movies. Just that none of the ones we watched seemed worth the energy of writing a post about.

I make an exception for Crazy Heart. It’s a fine movie, and well worth writing about, but it has been written about at length, and beyond the fact that I think it’s worthy of all the praise it’s gotten, I don’t see that I need to add much.

The Dresser is a fine movie and so is The Lion in Winter but nobody needs me to tell them so.

Mr. Thank You (Arigatô San) is a pellucid black and white movie from 1936 Japan. Directed by Hiroshi Shimizu, it’s a portrait of rural Japan in depression. Mr. Thank You is a bus driver and some of the shots of that bus on mountain highways is worthy of anything Eastern Kentucky can produce. Some excellent photography and some geography and culture lessons for me.

The movie we watched this week, 1941’s Man Hunt was directed by Fritz Lang and I know it must have been recommended somewhere as a masterpiece of its time. Certainly it’s remarkable for being anti-British propaganda made in Hollywood by a German director. But I found the propaganda over the top, the plot fantastic, and the classism and sexism difficult to ignore. Otherwise there is a wide-eyed Roddy McDowell as a clever plucky cabin boy and a young John Carradine as a villain of the Reich, complete with swordstick.

One delightful gem we stumbled across was Ginny Mule’s The Accountant, which won the 2002 Oscar for Best Live Action Short. I refer you to Yellowhammer Press for a good review/description of this film. They say:

This film masterfully expresses something about the rural South that is so necessary, so utterly visceral, and yet something that is captured so rarely — that the disappearance of the family farm, the corporatization of food production in America, and the caricaturization of the Southern farmer and his culture have acted in concert to destroy a way of life. In short, it’s a movie about the end of a South in which small farmers are still financially viable and culturally necessary.

But it is also a wildly quirky comedy. Here’s a taste: