Sherry Chandler

This and that

Thanks to the Poetry Hut Blog for reminding me that time approaches for the National Book Awards. You can find the lists of finalists here, including the poets.

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Here’s something I picked up from Harry that I think you’ll love:

A spectacular and extremely rare textile, woven from golden-colored silk thread produced by more than one million spiders in Madagascar, goes on display Wednesday, September 23 in the Museum’s Grand Gallery. This magnificent contemporary textile, measuring 11 feet by 4 feet, took four years to make using a painstaking technique developed more than 100 years ago.

This unique textile was created drawing on the legacy of a French missionary, Jacob Paul Camboué, who worked with spiders in Madagascar in the 1880s and 1890s. Camboué worked to collect and weave spider silk but with limited success, and no surviving textile is now known to exist. Previously, the only known spider-silk textile of note was exhibited at the Exposition Universelle in Paris in 1900, and it was subsequently lost.

Click through and watch the video.

BTW, Harry recently celebrated his fifth blogiversary, so I invite you to go over and congratulate him. I remember when his blog was called Stormy Petrel.

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The Dead Mule has its October 2009 issue up. Bucha neat stuff, include three poems by my old buddy Charlie Hughes, who deserves an award for the best Southern Legitimacy Statement going.

A Starbucks by any other name . . .

Via Poetry Hut Blog, Starbucks Tests New Store Names, Alcohol Sales:

NEW YORK -(Dow Jones)- Starbucks Corp. (SBUX) is scrubbing its name from a Seattle location in favor of the store’s street address in a test that could sprout more stores that seem more like the corner coffee shop rather than the global coffee giant.

The store, a former Starbucks that had been targeted for closing, is called 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea. It will also serve wine and beer and host live music and poetry readings as it seeks to take on a more community vibe where neighbors can gather late into the night. Bagged coffee in the store will also be slapped with the 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea name.

The chain plans to start by remodeling at least three Seattle-area stores with names based on their addresses or neighborhood rather than the corporation. Aside from 15th Avenue Coffee and Tea, the two other locations have yet to be determined. If successful, Starbucks plans to expand the trial to other markets.

Make of this what you will.

I am particularly fond of this statement:

Operating a store under a different name could provide a fresh canvas for Starbucks to test a number of elements where consumers won’t be biased by the company’s name, says Ron Paul, president of Technomic Inc., a Chicago-based food consultancy. “It would only confuse the customer to put Starbucks on it,” Paul said.

Don’t let ‘em know you’re desperate?

Pretend to be a local store and not a chain?

The article says people are choosing not to spend their scarce dollars at Starbucks.

And, by the way, the Starbucks drive-through in Paris, Kentucky has closed. It’s a Long John Silver’s now.