Sherry Chandler

Drunk with spring

One plant that thrives on our place with no attention whatsoever — in fact, with some discouragement — is catmint/nip. Which makes this patch beside the garden a favorite place for our old black cat, Baxter, to take the sun and a nip.

In this particular shot, you’ll see a plant we had broken off. (There’s also a sprig of creeping charlie; we’re a haven for mints of all kinds.) When I first noticed Baxter over there, he was vigorously rubbing his face on the broken stems, but by the time I retrieved the camera, he was just mellow.

Cats left behind on the hearth

In Pioneer Life in Kentucky 1785-1800, Daniel Drake tells us that when he was 9 years old, his family left the metropolis of Mayslick and moved to a farmstead a mile away from any neighbor, where

For the first years [mother] felt to solitude in which we were entombed, more severely than any other member of the family. She could not go much from home, like father whom business would frequently call away, nor like myself, who was the errant boy, and tehrefore, sent frequently into the “Lick” & to our neighbors, from the first day of our removal. [p.119]

Unlike his mother, however, Daniel liked the woods well enough

If I were to write a recipe for making great and good men and women, I would direct the family to be placed in the woods . . . The very loneliness of our situation led me to seek for new society & amusement in the woods, as often as opportunity offered. But they were, in themselves, attractive. To my young mind there was in them a kind of mystery. They excited my imagination. They awakened curiosity. They were exhaustless in variety. There was always something ahead. Some new or queer object might be expected, and thus anticipation was sustained. To go from the family fireside—from the midst of large and little babies, and cats and kittens—into the woods for society, may seem to you rather paradoxical, but it was not so in fact. Familiar objects lost their wonted effect, and we may become soliltary in their midst. [pp. 119-120]

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A couple of my buddies on Accents this afternoon on WRFL (88.9 FM) 2:00 – 3:00 p.m. Steve Rhodes will be interviewd and Mark Brown’s poetry will be featured. Tune in.

Green towel, Goldbarth

Photograph by TR Williams

from The Leave-Taking

. . .

I’m going to the hills for a while, I hear
you can spear down game there with a toothpick,
and if you leave the door unlatched, your only skulking in
will be the night air’s, not a chill air, it curls
on your chest like a kitten. . . .

— Albert Goldbarth, Comings Back (Doubleday, 1976)

By the way, Poetry Daily this week features Why All This Music?

Wherein Goldbarth, Badgered by The Georgia Review into Conducting a Version of an Interview, Sighs and Accepts a Few Queries from Poets in the Audience, on the Condition that These Questions Come from the Bodies of Their Poems, and the Answers (Such as They Are) Come from the Bodies of Goldbarth’s Poems (with a little verbal glue in non-poem form in italics)

Black cat on Friday the 13

Stuff

Via Ron K. Jeffries, 12-year-old cat commutes by bus in England

Update: And this one: Florida man blames cat for downloading child pornography

You can generate your own Kenyan birth certificate at this link. And you can watch Bill Maher ridicule the birthers at this link. Thanks to The Sideshow.

Also via The Sideshow, A French Revelation, or The Burning Bush, in which James A. Haught describes how George W. Bush told Jacques Chirac that Gog and Magog were at work in Iraq and that’s why we had to invade.

Malcolm Gladwell deconstructs To Kill A Mockingbird in The Courthouse Ring.

Via Corrente, The Health Insurers Have Already Won or How UnitedHealth and rival carriers, maneuvering behind the scenes in Washington, shaped health-care reform for their own benefit Meanwhile, via Hippy Steve, DN! Nine Arrested in Iowa Single-Payer Protest. And lies Republicans tell here and here.

From tinydoctor, it was Russia killed Twitter. Or was it Georgia? Update: More on this story.

And this may be my favorite headline of the day: Ky. jailer resigns after rape conviction

Some views of Peanut

Peanut has appeared on the pages of this blog many times. Here are a few of my favorite shots revisited.

Cat with Barnyard Revolution

The two horses had just lain down when a brood of ducklings, which had lost their mother, filed into the barn, cheeping feebly and wandering from side to side to find some place where they would not be trodden on. Clover made a sort of wall round them with her great foreleg, and the ducklings nestled down inside it and promptly fell asleep. At the last moment Mollie, the foolish, pretty white mare who drew Mr. Jones’s trap, came mincing daintily in, chewing at a lump of sugar. She took a place near the front and began flirting her white mane, hoping to draw attention to the red ribbons it was plaited with. Last of all came the cat, who looked round, as usual, for the warmest place, and finally squeezed herself in between Boxer and Clover; there she purred contentedly throughout Major’s speech without listening to a word of what he was saying.

— George Orwell, Animal Farm