Sherry Chandler

A salmagundi

Harry Rutherford, of Heraclitean Fire, has started a new blog interprise called A London Salmagundi: Being a Hotchpotch or Gallimaufry of Divers Things etc. It’s the place to go to find your photo of the Common Potoo (which I think is a bird) or a photomicrograph of a dinosaur bone. or a YouTube of Jerry Lee Lewis on the Steve Allen show in 1957.

It was through Harry’s Salmagundi that I discovered F*ck Yeah, Victorians, a tumblr site that has been fascinating my husband for about a week now. it’s not a site for the squeamish, but it is certainly a window into the wierder side of Victorian culture.

If you think you might prefer to do something wholesome, like crochet, look to Pocahontas County Fare for your links to Free Crochet Patterns, Especially Old Ones .

Thinking about old crochet, old lace, I thought I might go looking for an old poem on the subject. Here’s what I found:

Old Flemish Lace

A LONG, rich breadth of Holland lace,
A window by a Flemish sea;
Huge men go by with mighty pace,—
Great Anne was Queen these days, may be,
And strange ships prowled for spoil the sea—
For you—old lace!

Stitch after stitch enwrought with grace,
The mist falls cold on Zuyder-Zee;
The silver tankards hang in place
Along the wall; across her knee
Dame Snuyder spreads her square of lace,
A veil—for me?

The Holland dames put by their lace,
The bells of Bruges ring out in glee;
The mill-wheels move in sluggish race:—
Farewell, sweet bells! Then down the sea
The slow ship brings the bridal grace—
The veil—for me!

Manhattan shores—a New World place,
The Pinxter-blows their sweetest be:
And now—come close, O love-bright face—
Bend low—…
        Nay, not old Trinity,
To Olde Sainte Marke’s i’ the Bowerie,
Dear Hal,—with thee!

—Amelia Walstien Carpenter, Stedman, Edmund Clarence, ed. An American Anthology, 1787–1900. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1900; Bartleby.com, 2001

Dear Hal, I’m guessing, is the proposed bridegroom. And a pinxter here, I think may be the pinxter azalea.

And then I found this, which sort of pulls it all together, except maybe for the bawdy Victorians:

That Nature is a Heraclitean Fire and of the comfort of the Resurrection

CLOUD-PUFFBALL, torn tufts, tossed pillows ‘ flaunt forth, then chevy on an air-
built thoroughfare: heaven-roysterers, in gay-gangs ‘ they throng; they glitter in marches.
Down roughcast, down dazzling whitewash, ‘ wherever an elm arches,
Shivelights and shadowtackle in long ‘ lashes lace, lance, and pair.
Delightfully the bright wind boisterous ‘ ropes, wrestles, beats earth bare
Of yestertempest’s creases; in pool and rut peel parches
Squandering ooze to squeezed ‘ dough, crust, dust; stanches, starches
Squadroned masks and manmarks ‘ treadmire toil there
Footfretted in it. Million-fuelèd, ‘ nature’s bonfire burns on.
But quench her bonniest, dearest ‘ to her, her clearest-selvèd spark
Man, how fast his firedint, ‘ his mark on mind, is gone!
Both are in an unfathomable, all is in an enormous dark
Drowned. O pity and indig ‘ nation! Manshape, that shone
Sheer off, disseveral, a star, ‘ death blots black out; nor mark
Is any of him at all so stark
But vastness blurs and time ‘ beats level. Enough! the Resurrection,
A heart’s-clarion! Away grief’s gasping, ‘ joyless days, dejection.
Across my foundering deck shone
A beacon, an eternal beam. ‘ Flesh fade, and mortal trash
Fall to the residuary worm; ‘ world’s wildfire, leave but ash:
In a flash, at a trumpet crash,
I am all at once what Christ is, ‘ since he was what I am, and
This Jack, joke, poor potsherd, ‘ patch, matchwood, immortal diamond,
Is immortal diamond.

— Gerard Manley Hopkins, Poems. London: Humphrey Milford, 1918; Bartleby.com, 1999.

Mr. Snowflake Bentley has a birthday

Here’s something to think about when you’re shoveling your driveway — each one unique. This little clip of Wilson Bentley’s snowflake photography brings that home in the way the grade school teacher could not. And today is his birthday, too.

I found this at Pocahontas County Fare, where Rebecca has posted another of her Currier & Ives views. I especially love the snow-covered Ford tractor.

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By the way, I’ve just forgotten my fifth blogiversary (there’s a word for you, Charlie Hughes!), It happened on February 4. I always forget.

In the past, I’ve marked the anniversary by changing blog templates but this year I’ve had other things to think about and will stick with this one. People who are using one of the older templates, let me know how they’re working.

Thanks for sticking with me all these years, folks! Let’s see what the sixth year brings.

“The sea is calm tonight”

Matthew Arnold was born on Christmas Eve, 1822, but the fact didn’t seem able to rescue him from his high Victorian mournfulness. Not a poet to make one feel all warm and sentimental. I picked the poem below for no better reason than it is NOT “Dover Beach,” and being about birds, it gives me a chance to link to Harry’s Advent Calendar of Birds, where you will find some lovely photographs, including this one of the spotted nightjar. It reminds me of the whippoorwills that used to sing on my parents’ doorstep. That’s how far back in the country we lived. My brother used to joke that we lived so far back in the sticks, we had to pipe in daylight.

Rebecca has some lovely Courier & Ives-ish photos of the 30-inch snowfall on Droop Mountain that should put sleighbells into your head.

Speaking of which, here’s my favorite version of “Jingle Bells.”

Oh — and here’s the poem, and just in case you wonder what the poem’s on about, the story is here. Ovid’s version is here, scroll down. And no reference to Matthew Arnlod is complete without a link to “The Dover Bitch:”

Philomela

HARK! ah, the nightingale—
The tawny-throated!
Hark, from that moonlit cedar what a burst!
What triumph! hark!—what pain!
O wanderer from a Grecian shore,
Still, after many years, in distant lands,
Still nourishing in thy bewilder’d brain
That wild, unquench’d, deep-sunken, oldworld pain—
Say, will it never heal?
And can this fragrant lawn
With its cool trees, and night,
And the sweet, tranquil Thames,
And moonshine, and the dew,
To thy rack’d heart and brain
Afford no balm?

Dost thou to-night behold,
Here, through the moonlight on this English grass,
The unfriendly palace in the Thracian wild?
Dost thou again peruse
With hot cheeks and sear’d eyes
The too clear web, and thy dumb sister’s shame?
Dost thou once more assay
Thy flight, and feel come over thee,
Poor fugitive, the feathery change
Once more, and once more seem to make resound
With love and hate, triumph and agony,
Lone Daulis, and the high Cephissian vale?
Listen, Eugenia—
How thick the bursts come crowding through the leaves!
Again—thou hearest?
Eternal passion!
Eternal pain!

— Matthew Arnold, The Norton Anthology of English Literature, 1962

Do I get points for having Willie Nelson, Matthew Arnold, and Ovid all in one post?

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Via Morris Book Shop, the most literate cities in the U.S. Lexington/Fayette County rank # 15. But hey! We’re ahead of NYC.

Holy Geez????

Okay, okay, I give.

I was going to like totally ignore Sarah Palin and her “book,” even bypassing a chance to indulge in schadenfreude when she got booed for stiffing some of her fans.

But you have to go look at Rebecca’s index of indices.

Miffed that Sarah Palin’s new book was published index-less, several people have posted their own indices. It’s unlikely that Palin will thank them for their trouble, given that I laughed aloud at the first two listed below. At the risk of joining the ranks of the lonely and shallow people who don’t admire poor Sarah, here are the indices I’ve seen so far.

Click on over there and give it a look.

On a more serious note, Matt Taibbi has a frightening take on what the Palin phenomenon really means. By way of The Sideshow.

More on Deliverance

A few days ago, I posted about the silly people I worked with in Chicago who got scared of the South after watching Deliverance. I should have known that Rebecca Clayton of Pocahontas County Fare had already visited this territory.

In a thread I’ve traced back to May 2006, Rebecca features Deliverance as entertainment suitable for discouraging unwanted tourism. Or, as she says in her “review” of the inbred-hillbilly-cannibal movie Wrong Turn:

…the trailers revealed it was set in West Virginia and featured frightening hillbillies doing terrible things to vacationing suburbanites. With all the tourists visiting Pocahontas County (especially the despised skiers throwing their Starbucks cups and other trash out the car windows as they drive home from Snowshoe Resort) some local residents consider such cinema wish fulfillment. …Here on Droop Mountain, in the Greenbrier backcountry, we consider Wrong Turn propaganda for our cause. We’d like to have it played continuously on cable TV at Snowshoe Resort, or perhaps it could alternate with “Deliverance.”

And from today’s post, which started it all, a review of Wrong Turn 2:

One of the things I liked best in the original was the parking lot the hillbilly cannibals kept by their house, filled with the SUV’s and cars of the tourists they’d devoured. Mountain bikes and ski equipment filled the luggage carriers and back seats. Pocahontas County is being promoted as a tourist destination, and much of the real estate changing hands becomes vacation property. While the Tourism Board probably wouldn’t agree, I think many natives might like to see a DVD three-pack in every ski condo rental unit: Deliverance, Wrong Turn, and this new movie, Wrong Turn 2 – Dead End. Y’all come back now, hear?

Read also Lies, Deliverance, and James Dickey