Borrowed Horses

American Gods by Neil Gaiman

2012-01-14T13:06:00.000-05:00

I knew Loki was in the book--a friend had spilled as much--but he went right by me at first, as he'd gone by my friend, because, as in any good coin trick, I was looking at the wrong hand. I hadn't realized I was being played yet, though I'd volunteered myself to the con.

Fiction is a grift, and Gaiman does it exceptionally well. I've only met one person who read this book who was disappointed with it. His grounds? He felt Gaiman came up with an amazing premise (gods alive in America) but that he let it become the story become about a girl's murder and a car left on thin ice, waiting to stink. I see his point and why he wants more, and if anything, I'd want to book to go the other way. The murder was far more compelling than the gods. I'm more biased towards the living that way, and found the gods more difficult to connect to, slowing the book for me at the moment it was amping towards its climax.

But these are minor points. The main one is this: both of us read to the end, waiting to see what would unfold, not knowing where it would go. The world, fantastical as it was, was still too real to set aside.

Ultimately, this is what the book is about for me: the slight of hand a great fiction writer accomplishes. Gaiman does it again and again in clear prose that seems to hold no tricks in it. The honesty of the writing allows me to believe old gods walk the earth, even in America, along with dead girlfriends and embodied technological wonders and writers for whose grifts I'll again and again enlist.

The Beyonders: A World Without Heroes by Brandon Mull

2012-01-02T15:25:00.001-05:00

I have not finished this book, but I am finished with it. I made it 100 pages. As YA fantasy goes, perhaps it is better than most, though I would argue The Bartimaeous Trilogy and the His Dark Materials trilogy are both more inventive and better crafted. I just couldn't get into it. I kept missing major plot points and having to go back and re-read to figure out what was going on. Mull tries to avoid the cliches hurting the genre; for instance, his character enters a portal from one world to another through a hippopotamus's mouth--improbable but at least original, if originality is still a virtue when it goes so far. Even so, I wanted more out of the characters and the situation. As much as Mull tries to deliver, the book just never quite came together for me. Chalk it up to me not being the world's biggest fantasy fan. Chalk it up to me being a picky reader. Chalk it up to me being too steeped in/biased towards literary fiction. Whatever the cause, as much as I want to like this Utah writer and be able to support his work, I can't honestly do that with this one.

Sight Hound by Pam Houston

2012-01-01T23:26:00.000-05:00

I should start with a disclaimer: I'm feeling very lucky right now. This coming semester, I not only get to meet Pam Houston, and I not only get to have her come to talk to my short fiction writing class, but I also get to interview her for Weber: The Journal of the Contemporary West.

I should follow with another disclaimer: I have always wanted to own an Irish Wolfhound.

Early in the book, I discovered that I had to read it while sitting on the floor so that either Balto or Poppet could be laying against me. It is a book that requires you to be petting a dog while you read. Maybe a cat would work, but I don't think so. A three-legged Irish Wolfhound would be ideal, but any good dog will do. Houston writes dogs with such affection that to not be petting a dog as you read seems...ungrateful. She gets dogs right: their affection, patience, loyalty, but perhaps most importantly, their ability to teach us if we are open to listening. The book centers its story on an Irish Wolfhound battling cancer. The people who love him revolve as constellations, their plots unfolding along this trajectory.

I love how easy her writing is to read. I flew through this book. I know many a literature lover (Faulknerians in particular) who see that trait with skepticism, as if a book must be hard to read to have any depth, but I've always found that bias to be suspect. I see no reason to doubt clarity. What makes me suspect a book has depth isn't its obfuscations but rather that moment when I'm doing something that is totally not reading (driving a car, showering, rifling through the fridge in search of mayo) and I start thinking about the characters and the choices they make and what surprised me and why it was nevertheless fitting. I start thinking about the human (or the Wolfhound, or the Labrador) psyche and why we love as we do and what art means and what the West means and what it means to be a woman in a male-centric landscape. This book has me there, thinking about all these things in a way that is far from simple.

Houston's characters are amazing. In a world where people seem to be smoothing their differences away to better fit in with the crowd, Houston's people are notable for what is different: a second-rate actor who needs an audience in all aspects of life, who finds he has been crazy only because he was playing to one audience and who finds himself sane when a new audience requires that role of him; a middle-aged woman who makes one bad romantic decision after another in spite of all appearances of self sufficiency and strength; an ex-hockey star and religious fanatic who tries, in the most ill-advised ways, to convert those he loves. Houston doesn't judge her characters. She simply allows them to interact and give birth to a plot uniquely their own.

Re-purposing the blog

2012-01-01T22:52:00.000-05:00

I've had this blog for years now, and I am no closer to understanding what a blog is for than I ever was, but inspired by one of my students, who just blogged about all the books she read in the past year, I have decided to try using it to log book thoughts. My goal will be to post honest impressions of whatever book I've last read.

In an epic battle between Cotton Mather and Ziggy Stardust,

2011-10-23T00:21:00.001-04:00

her money was on Ziggy Stardust. If there was any one thing Britni knew, it was that. John had spent most of dinner last night trying to convince her that she undervalued Puritan work ethic and dogged perseverance in the face of multi-colored hairdos and gender neutrality, but John had funny lips, so it was hard to take his arguments too seriously. Besides, if it came down to it, anyone with an ounce of brains would know that Ziggy could call an army of space tigers to march at his side, and what could Cotton Mather bring in return? A flaming pulpit? Lame.

Britni ran green-lacquered nails through her platinum blonde curls and smiled. It was always a good idea to smile randomly at work. It confirmed everyone's suspicion that she was a ditz, and then no one asked too much of her. Since the pay was the same whether people expected brilliance from you or not, she thought it best to kept them thinking she was dumb. After all, she could play bimbo secretary with the best of them. Kept freaking Victoria off her back for one.

She'd spent most of the morning making espresso, grinding the beans, fiddling with the buttons, staring blankly at the machine for a good half hour while she hummed her way through most of Nirvana's Nevermind. Claire had been in a few times to check on her stupid cake, but other than that, no one had given her a second thought.

Mainly out of boredom, she decided she'd check to see if Victoria needed anything. She tightened the straps on her purple porno heels and picked up Victoria's now luke-warm mocha. Maybe she should give more consideration of Cotton Mather. I mean, yeah, Ziggy could deal with fire, but would brimstone pose more threat? Dude had a wicked head of hair, too. That powdered wig could make a bad ass weapon--like if the hair wasn't hair but actually spun glass? She imagined him flinging it like Odd Job's hat, slitting a neck clean open.

She swung Victoria's door wide and looked up from the mocha to see Victoria's eyes staring blankly over their own reflection in the blood. It made her giggle, the expression on her face, its pallor. Perhaps it was the sound of her own giggle that next made her recoil and scream before dissolving again into giggles as she slipped to her knees in a puddle of spilled mocha, saying between fits of laughter, "John was right. Cotton fucking Mather."

He hated it when she called him Twig.

2011-08-05T10:55:00.001-04:00

Victoria had started it, using it whenever she didn't feel he was moving fast enough, but it was River who used it most frequently. Ned wondered if she knew how much it hurt. He wasn't dumb, of course. He knew that a girl like River would never be interested in him, but he didn't need the constant reminder of his own ridiculousness.

He shuffled the papers around his desk again, in the hopes of looking busy. He needed to work on the inventory for the City Ballet's budget requests. Really, the amount they spent on costumes and scenery blew his mind, but Victoria had rolled her eyes when he commented on it. It was the spectacle that was important, she'd said as if she was explaining things to a five year old. As usual, he'd simply blushed and shut up. It was the only way he knew to respond to her. Now, he would never have to respond to him again. The thought opened an ache that he wouldn't have imagined possible. He hadn't liked Victoria, but he hadn't wanted her dead.

Anytime now, someone would open the door to Victoria's office and would know what he knew. He should have said something right away. They'd all seen him go in. Oh God--would they think he'd done it?

Claire heaved herself back from her desk and stood up. Ned stared at her horrified. Huge amounts of floral fabric stretched across her bulk. She caught him staring and glared back at him, her broad froggish face framed with stiff black curls. "What you looking at, Twig?" she snapped at him. He looked at the desk. He hated the way she said Twig most of all, drawing it out long. Twiiiiig.

She'd know now. She'd open the door and find out about Victoria and they would all think he did it. Twig, of all people, they would say, standing in corners and whispering as the building flooded with cops. If he were another person, it might give him some cool, but no. Ned knew they would only see him as the loser who hit his breaking point and couldn't take any more. They would see murder as more evidence of his weakness.

He pushed the papers around again, trying not to make it obvious that he was watching Claire as she walked towards Victoria's door. He turned right, moving towards the kitchen, and Ned breathed again. He realized now that her coffee mug hung from her fingers. Of course she was going to get coffee. Probably checking on Floyd's cake too. She'd been planning his party all week, not letting anyone forget about the office party. She made such a big deal of the parties, as if she needed anymore cake.

The numbers had never quite made sense. They looked good on paper, but Ned couldn't drop the sense that something was off. He stared at Victoria's door, thinking again of the sadness in her eyes. Strange that he'd never seen her as human until she was dead.

Human, he thought, and fallible. The thought settled in like a house guest on the living room sofa, comfy in its slippers. For all her polish, she was just another schmuck. He grabbed at the sheet of paper again and ran his eyes over the columns of figures. What if? he thought. Was it possible that Victoria had been embezzling? If he hadn't fried the laptop, he could've taken it home again tonight and made sure. And what did it matter anyway. She was dead. But why was she dead?

Ned looked up from his desk just in time to see Britni open the door to Victoria's office and let out a piercing scream.

[I may have to go back to Britni next and get her to the door, but I was too intrigued by Ned to leave him just yet. Awesome ideas in the last round. What next?]

Ned looked like he'd seen a ghost

2011-07-10T11:04:00.001-04:00

River glanced up from her desk, checking that Victoria wasn't coming before she leaned back in her chair and tried to think of what to write next. Ned looked like he'd seen a ghost, she thought. He closed Victoria's office door behind him and stood for a moment, as if to collect his wits. Whatever he'd done this time, Victoria must have really laid into him.

He needed to stand up to her. Her first day on the job, River had set that boundary. She would not be belittled, and if that was how Victoria intended to treat her, she could find another person to write the monthly newsletter and maintain the website. "I'm a professional and I expect to be treated like one," she had said.

To her credit, Victoria had smiled and thrust her hand forward. "That's exactly what I like to hear," she said, then turned on her heel and strode into her office, but they'd always gotten on well since then.You had to treat her like an equal, rather than a superior. Victoria was just one of those people who pushed you to see if you were someone worthy of respect. Ned hadn't passed the test.

God, he was pale, she thought. His skin always had that look of raw pizza dough, but now, it reached a new level of clammy. He needed some cheering up, she guessed. If he only had even the littlest bit of confidence...

She caught his eye and nodded him over to her desk. "Hey, Twig," she said, as he approached. "What happened? Victoria being a bitch again?"

Ned looked trapped. His mouth started to move, but no sound came out. His hair clung to his forehead in sweaty clump, frizzing at the ends where they began to dry. River hated to see him like this, poor guy. "Oh, hey now," she said, standing up, and laying her hand on his lumpy shoulder--nothing too committal. She'd seen him watching her and didn't want to encourage any wrong ideas about their future, but clearly, he needed some form of human touch.

Yet for once, Ned shrunk away, retreating to back to sit with the other junior accountants, turning on his desktop and opening the day's work. River watched him, musing. If she ever got around to writing the novel she wanted to write, maybe he could make a good main character. Not the way he was, of course. His life was too boring. Nothing ever happened to a guy like Twig. She could make him a super hero with a drinking problem! It could be a graphic novel! For just a moment, she allowed her thoughts to wander over plot points, arch villains and out-of-frame action, then she sunk back into her desk and turned again to the article she needed to write, laying her hands on her keyboard, letting the words come.

[All right, faithful readers! Which office worker should we hear from next--Floyd? Bernice? John? Britni? Claire? What elements should I work into their characters? Or should we go back to Ned/Twig for a while? Who will discover the body? What else is going on in the office this day? I'm thinking this might be a non-profit organization... what should they be raising money for?]

Murder, They Wrote

2011-07-05T22:37:00.002-04:00

OK, here's the idea: I want to write an interactive murder mystery. That is, I'll write the novel with the help of the readers. The idea is inspired by the "Choose Your Own Adventure" books I loved as a child, but rather than any one reader determining the novel's path, it will be determined and shaped by the collective response of the readers. Your comments will influence where this plot goes.

So, without further ado, here's the first installment, mostly off the cuff. Please do send comments to let me know where you think it should go from here.
------------------------------------

At one point, buying a Vespa had seemed like a good idea. He'd wanted one for a while, thinking it was not only the perfect, fuel-efficient way to get around town but a way to the hipster-chic style he'd wanted. It was going to do nothing less than change his life. No longer would he be a sad, lumpy guy in a wrinkled shirt riding a bus. The Vespa would make the wrinkles read as intentional and ironic. He wouldn't look like he needed a haircut but instead like a man who scorned haircuts. He'd be free not only of bus schedules but of those moments when he missed the bus and had to wait half an hour for another, all the while constructing what Victoria, his boss, would say when he finally arrived. It was never pretty.

He hadn't owned it for a full week before he realized how ridiculous the Vespa made him, the breadth of him drawfing the little machine. And if it wasn't bad enough to have to ride his under-sized and under-powered Vespa to work, now he had to tell Victoria that he'd fried the office laptop he'd borrowed to update the department's accounts. Technically, it was Mittens who knocked over the paper-cupped latte, rubbing up against it in search of love, but that wouldn't matter to Victoria. He'd worried over it for hours with a towel, then a spongue, whispering pleas for it to work again, but nothing.

She'd make him pay for it. Literally and metaphorically, she would make him pay. The only thing was, he'd wiped out his savings buying the Vespa.

He puttered up Ventura Boulevard, conscious of the stares of the car drivers who whipped past, occasionally yelling insults, more than occasionally laughing at him. Sweat was already trickling down his temples and under the arms of his shirt, hardly the picture of corporate success.

The building was all too soon in front of him, a looming grey block of a building that no number of palm trees could improve. Almost no one was in the office yet. Bernice, John, Clair, Floyd, Britni, River. Not one of them looked at him as he skulked past their cubicles to tap at Victoria's closed door. She didn't answer.

He waited, staring at his reflection in the curtained glass partition as he waited. The buttons of his Oxford shirt strained around his middle, his tie was crooked, and his hair was still Vespa-helmet damp. He sighed and knocked again, knowing that she was in, that she was always in. This was just another test of his manhood. How long was he willing to wait for her to grant him entrance, and what would he do if she never gave it?

The reflection that looked back at him was pathetic. That was how Victoria would see him, too. That was how she saw all of her employees. They were, none of them, good enough.

He knocked again, louder this time. If he was going to get sneered at, he wanted to get it over with, to get on with his day. Emasculation was a band-aid best torn off quickly. Hatred was welling in him. She was doing it again, just like she always did. She was making him aware of all his short-comings, all the reasons why he was a peon and she was an executive. He could just see her on the other side of the door, her hair twisted up, sitting in one of her multitude of expensive, nearly identical gray suits, sneering at him for being too afraid to turn a door knob and let himself in.

He would show her. He grasped the brass doorknob, closed his eyes, turned it, and opened the door. He stood there with his eyes closed a moment, waiting for her to scoff or snicker or yell him back out of the room, but it was silent. He opened his eyes.

The thick white carpet of the room was flooded with a reddish brown. For a moment, he could make no sense of this, but he forced his eyes upward, following the stain back to its source.

Victoria was not sneering. If anything, the look in her eyes was one of incredible sadness. Her face was a ghastly white, and he realized that, of course it would be: all the blood that had once given it color was now coloring that lush white carpet. Her lips were still painted with the brilliant red lipstick she'd always worn, but on her neck, as if in parody of her mouth, a second red mouth opened, a gash from which all the blood had spilled.

She was more beautiful now, in death, than she'd ever been in life. The harshness was gone from her expression, and the smooth pallor reminded him of china dolls, perfectly sculpted.

[What does our un-named hero do next? What does he do for a living? What is his name?]

Things I Love

2011-06-13T09:50:00.000-04:00

As a rule, I don't believe I should love things. People, yes. Animals, yes. Places, yes. Things, no. ...But since I'm moving in a month, I've been going through all of my possessions deciding what is worth the money and gas to haul across the country, and I keep being struck by how irrational my choices are and how much my decisions are based on what I love. For example, I'm definitely taking this:

I am not exactly certain how old this towel is, but I know that we had it when I was a child, and I suspect it may well be older than I am. Who moves a forty year old towel across the country? Surely, this should have gone to Goodwill years ago. And yet, every day, I step out of my shower onto the towel and it makes me happy. I don't think I could find its equal at any high end retailer--in fact, I'm sure I couldn't. They're too concerned with thread count and cotton genealogy. This towel belongs to a different era and aesthetic. Who now would make a flaming blue flower towel? No one, that's who. But I own one, and I'm not giving it up.

So I guess I have to face the fact that I am materialistic after all. As much as I would like to believe that I could blithely walk away from my stuff without missing it, there are things I love. Some of them are things that make sense--things that are hand made, or have sentimental value, or are valuable to others besides myself--but then, there are old towels that our mothers purchased in the 1970s and that we love because it adds brightness and charm to an otherwise normal morning.

So, here's to old junk that brightens our lives and sees us through our transitions.

Patching the Sofa

2011-06-08T13:54:00.000-04:00

I did not set out to make a stand. I set out broke, and that was all. The sofa was torn and tearing. I tried a slip cover, but lasted only a week of constantly rearranging and re-tucking before I went to the fabric store and purchased several yards of canvas.

The cushions had gone first. When the first tear grew across the breadth, I merely flipped them. When the other side tore as well, well, there wasn't much else to be done. My idea was simple: I would make a pillow case. I can't sew much, but that much I can do. My mother-in-law, who quilts, was coming to visit, so I waited a week and asked her help. She looked at me skeptically, annoyed, I believe, that I wanted to work without a pattern, but she improved on my plan, creating tucks in the corners to give edges to the cushions. In the end, we had this:

The irony was, I found I actually liked this sofa better than the original. It didn't look as nice--I wouldn't argue that. It would never look nice again. It was more mine, though, because I had put something into it, and it was comfortable in a way that it hadn't been before. It invited one to flop.

When the arms started to tear, I got out my needle and my stock of canvas again, and went to work. Again, the result was not pretty, but again, I liked it better. Even more than the sofa cushions, patching the sofa arms put me in touch with my people. As I carefully made each stitch, I suddenly understood why there were doilies on the arms and head of every chair in Nana's house. We were poor but proud people. There is more dignity in patching the arm of a worn sofa than there is in hurrying to buy a new one. Only I didn't hide my patches with doilies. The were cleanly done and evenly stitched and spoke of me and my heritage, and in these patches, I find no shame.

Now that I'm getting ready to move across the country, I'm facing the fact that it's not worthwhile to bring the sofa with me. I'm better off to sell it here and it them with something unexpected on the other side of my journey. It won't go into a landfill, but into the home of some college student in need of a place to read, a place to crash, a place to snuggle with a loved one. This sofa is meant for loving and living.

It is also, I've come to realize, a part of a larger ethic. I live among friends whose houses seem like showrooms, filled with the trendiest colors and fabrics. I want to stand for something different. I believe that there is honor is using things longer and loving them harder. This may be out of line with the latest episode of Extreme Home Makeover, but I believe there is more happiness to be found in the things we have than in the things we want.

Making a patch is a political statement. It doesn't ultimately matter that I hadn't meant to make one, because life isn't about what you know but what you discover. If I'm lucky, I'll have patched sofas for years to come.

The Beautiful People

2011-06-06T13:14:00.002-04:00

The beautiful people stand with skewed hips, contemplating their grandeur in their dark sunglasses. They are wealthy and hip. They shine with the satisfaction of knowing they are better than you.

Sometimes, the beautiful people are old. Sometimes the beautiful people have strange facial features. The beautiful people are able to pull these things off, as if other people’s faults were merely interesting in the face of pure beauty.

Sometimes, I pretend that I am one of them. For minutes at a time, I can decide to be a beautiful person, wearing my sunglasses just so, practicing nonchalance. Except, I tell myself, for the bit about being better than everyone. I don’t want to believe that.

If you let that thought in, the illusion collapses in paradox. I would like to say that the collapse is beautiful, but it is not. It is dusty and mothy and leaves a cloud that makes me cough. The collapse creates a vacuum, a black hole of confidence.

If there is beauty here, it is in the way the smoke curls near the end of its settling. It is a vision allowed in rather than one projected.

Writing here feels like a howl into nothing

2011-06-02T13:50:00.000-04:00

Only, that makes it sound cooler than it is. Like a coyote
only there's not even a moon. There's
only you, who may not be reading this because God
only knows if anyone is.

I suppose the question is, are you moon enough?
If you shine on me, will I illuminate and burst
into a sorrowful song? The kind that's so true
it can be understood across species?
If you exert your gravity, will you pull the water
into a drowning tide?

Because that's your job, reader, whether you're there or not.
I used to think that poets wrote of women when they said "moon,"
only I know better now. What we're hoping for is softer,
more apocalyptic, unreachable.

Going through old paperwork

2011-04-14T06:47:00.000-04:00

I found the insurance guidelines: "Pregnancy will be treated
like any other disease."

Words for Shane Mosley, July 20, 1991-March 18, 2011

2011-03-25T08:07:00.001-04:00

I first met Shane last semester when he enrolled in my freshman English class. Most students in that class know me as Dr. Griffiths, but not him. Because we share the same first name, Shane always called me simply “the other Shane.” In class, as students were meeting in groups, I’d hear him calling out “hey other Shane,” and I would turn to find him smiling away, pleased as could be that, to him, I would never be some stuffy “Dr. Griffiths.”

There was no disrespect. I’ve been thinking about him a lot these past few days, hearing his voice and seeing that bright smile—thinking about how even when he wasn’t smiling, you could see that contagious smile just underneath the surface, waiting for any excuse to break out and make everyone in the room smile with him.

Most people would have looked at the two of us and seen only our differences. Me: an Idaho white woman, too prone to be serious about abstract things like poetry and grammar. Him: a fine young man from Georgia who was more concerned with people than paper. But Shane didn’t stop at differences. What he saw was what we shared. With a smile and a name, he built a bridge that could span any cultural divide.

This is what I’ll remember most about him, because it wasn’t only me that felt that way. He was forever building bridges, befriending people of all ages, all races, and all beliefs. There was no difference so great that it couldn’t be overcome. He loved people, no matter what, and we loved him back.

I know that teachers are supposed to teach lessons to their students, but, when we are lucky—when we are very lucky—we are taught in return. Shane’s life was too brief, but in that time, he taught us all a great deal. He touched our lives, and we will miss him.

The Records

2011-02-10T07:08:00.000-05:00

It's the glossiest kind of lie:
Written on black vinyl and spun out
With needles, the warm sound
Of all the old singers insisting
You are not alone.

Character Sketch: Sloan Gustafson

2011-01-31T15:55:00.000-05:00

Each year, my fiction class invents a city and we populate it with characters by each creating a sketch. The following is my contribution to this year's city:

Sloan Gustafson had never liked her name, inspired as it was by all her mother’s upper class aspirations. Sloan was a miner’s child just as her mother was a miner’s child and her mother’s mother was a miner’s child. A hopeful name didn’t change that, and her mother, of all people, should have understood. Instead, she married a mining man just like all the generations of women before her and spent her days paging through home magazines, looking at pictures of dark-stained furniture and rich silk pillows.

Sloan’s childhood was one of white dresses and frilly socks that she tore off again and again to play stickball, barefooted, with the boys. Her mother would gasp over her feet, made hard and brown with imbedded dirt that no amount of soaking would clean.

Now, years later, Sloan was a miner herself—one of the few women who worked underground. She loved her job, spent in the company of the same boys with whom she’d once played, telling dirty jokes to brighten the darkness. There were rumors, she knew, that she was a lesbian, but she let people talk. Better they believe what they want, she decided. They would leave her alone that way. They wouldn’t notice if she looked a little too long at Hank, her old playmate, who had never seen her as anything but a pal, who had married their friend Gretel. Gretel, who in high school, had always kept her dresses pressed and who now subscribed to magazines full of dark-stained furniture and rich silk pillows.

Fun with Research

2011-01-20T06:51:00.003-05:00

I started doing more research into novel #3 yesterday--which is putting the cart WAY ahead of the horse when I have about 100 pages left to write for novel #2, but when I need to put so much into the cart before the horse can be hitched, this is a good way to spend time. The facts are slightly different than I want them to be, but I'll change them as needed, which is the convenient thing about being a fiction writer. Facts serve story, not the reverse.

Cool facts about Moscow AKA Paradise Valley--or, for my purposes, simply "Paradise."

A visitor in 1880 described Moscow as "just a lane between two farms with a flax field on one side and a post office on the other." During the next five years the town grew to a population of 300 and a branch of the Oregon Railroad and Navigation Co. (Union Pacific) linked Moscow to the rest of the country.

(Wikipedia, Moscow, Idaho, 1-19-11)

Moscow was made Latah County seat and in 1889 Moscow became the site for Idaho's land grant college, the University of Idaho. In exchange, Moscow had to agree to drop its support for the movement to join Washington in statehood. Latah County may be the only county ever formed by an act of Congress.

(http://the.palouse.net/moscow/history/history_beginnings.htm 1-19-11)

I *love* this history. There is so much humanity in it--so much negotiation and intrigue. I keep coming back to "you stop trying to join Washington and we'll give you a university." I want to know about time zones, now. Moscow and northern Idaho runs on a different clock than the South--we run on the clock of the Western states rather than that of the Mountain states. There's a rapids on the Salmon river which I've traveled many times named "time zone." When did it become the case, I wonder, that Moscow became an hour ahead of Boise? Curiouser and curiouser. I can't want to visit the Historical Society and Latah Co library next time I'm in Moscow to learn more.

Paradise

2011-01-19T10:53:00.000-05:00

Paradise was nothing like he expected. For one thing, it was brighter. Sunlight stretched the blue sky high and thin and lit every dark hill. Also, there was more pine, and where the pine was cleared, wheat and peas grew profusely. There were more cattle and more horses than version of heaven he had ever conjured.

“Hog Heaven” someone told him. That had been the name because the pigs loved the Camas bulbs that grew everywhere, but they soon found that the fertile soil was more generally Providential, and changed the name accordingly.

Of course, there was no rail line yet to Paradise. Perhaps that was fitting. Paradise was only to be reached by stagecoach and uneven roads. “Narrow is the path,” Peter thought as the coach jolted in yet another rut, but he knew, too, that this Paradise held no guarantees of happiness.

A sudden and savage gust of September wind hit the side of the coach like a punch to the gut, and outside the un-curtained windows, dirt devils ran along the road. A hawk screeched above, voicing his irritation as the uncertainty in the currents he road. No, this Paradise was beyond anything Peter would have imagined.

Notes on a Cowgirl

2011-01-16T11:55:00.003-05:00

Somewhere between this

and this

there was a cowgirl. Her name was Jane.

Her name was Calamity--which I like better. It serves my purposes.

We've been inventing cowboys and cowgirls since the first cowboys and cowgirls existed to re-invent. Mine will be attractive. Mine will be distant. The leather she wears will have metaphorical significance. Leather always does.

Enough with short sentences because what we need here is a level of complexity. Nuance. (The shortest sentence of all, but incomplete.) The stereotype will be all too easy to fall into, and I don't want another Sharon Stone or Drew Barrymore or Jane Fonda cowgirl. What I want is, in fact, more cowboy than cowgirl, because I want to shun all the gendered assumptions of weakness. What I need is more calamity than jane but more control than calamity.

The foil, of course, will be my railway novelist: a man who keeps cats. He is easier to nuance. My first attempt at his character:

Peter spent most of the trip from Chicago to Paradise missing his cat. She had been a standard black tabby with mustard yellow eyes and a torn right ear, the type of cat one might find anywhere on any street. Even in Chicago, his neighbors found it strange that he should have taken her in. She was a stray, flea-ridden kitten when he found her thirteen years earlier, inexplicably alone and quivering in the drainpipe of his boarding house. He knew he should leave her, as anyone would, to feed the local dogs. Instead, he picked her up on impulse and dropped her into his pocket, where, of all things, she began to purr. He hadn’t known then what he would do with her—Mrs. Vincent, the owner of the house and his housekeeper, would surely not like an animal in the house—but he cast thoughts of Mrs. Vincent momentarily aside, washed the surprisingly complacent kitten in a basin of warm water, and fed her warm milk. A week later, he was surprised to find himself so ridiculously attached to the little beast that he found a new room to rent (in a decidedly rougher part of town, at an increased rate) rather than meet Mrs. Vincent’s demand that he give her up.

Over the years, the two had spent many a quiet evening together. She would greet him when he came home from the press, and he would feed her cheap canned sardines that left his fingers slightly yellow and smelling of fish, in spite of his cat’s careful cleaning. The memory of her prickly tongue scouring the groves of his fingertips now brought the ache of her loss to him afresh. He knew now, just as he had known thirteen years ago, that it is absurd to love a cat. They are foreign creatures. One look in her eyes with their vertical pupils dilated in the lamp light reminded him that she was nothing like him. Yet that was what fascinated him most. Cats looked foreign and surprised one with their familiarity. Humans seemed familiar, and shocked one with their alien nature.

Perhaps my cowgirl has an element of cat, but only in ounces, not pounds. Much drafting still to go on the characters for this one... (Luckily, New Brighton is purring along.)

This morning I made a rib cage by accident

2011-01-02T16:50:00.000-05:00

I stuffed it with apples and sprinkled it with sugar and fed it to my children. This is not disturbing. The knife through the pastry, the cracking of sugar crust: this is what feeds, what creates. A rib cage for a rib cage. A breath for a breath.

The accident was remembering. While my head thought "breakfast," my hands thought "pulmonary" and brought me aware.

There are things the body knows. Sweetness, for example, which exists only where tongues can recognize it. And now, mindlessly folding and slashing pastry, my hands surprise me not at the moment of creation but after, when I pull open the oven and slide it, piping hot, to board.

As I looked, the steam lifting through vents kissed my cheek. It is no dark thing to build a ribcage for breakfast.

Old Kitchen

2010-12-30T15:19:00.000-05:00

They moved towards the darkness, feeling their way forward with their feet as they directed the dim beam of the flashlight around the wall. Unless they pried more wood from the walls, there was nothing in the living room. Robert turned towards the pitch dark doorway that led to the kitchen, but Jerome hesitated. “Come on,” Robert said.
Jerome took a small step forward and paused. “What do you think is in there?”
“I don’t know.”
“What if it’s rat city?”
“I thought you weren’t afraid of any of this stuff.”
“I’m not.”
“You were the one who got us under the plywood in the first place.”
“That was before I knew there were rats. I can take one or two, but what if it’s crawling with them.”
“I don’t see why it would be. I bet the food’s been gone for years.” Robert walked over to where the dead rat lay and picked up the chunk of concrete. “If there are any rats, we’ll be ready.”
“Give it here,” said Jerome. “You aren’t the only one who can kill a rat.”
“Yeah?”
“Yeah.” Jerome didn’t sound like he was fully convinced, but taking the concrete, he turned and, without another moment of hesitation, walked through the doorway.

The flashlight's beam reflected dully off the broken windows blacked out by plywood. The glass was filthy, covered in years of unwashed dirt and cobwebs.

Robert Flannigan: Talking Himself Out of a Stake Out

2010-12-30T14:40:00.002-05:00

Consider the rat: how you killed it by hucking an old bit of concrete. You hadn't guessed the power of your arm. You hadn't calculated the fulcrum of it, the length it gained this year as you turned thirteen and stretched towards man-size. Everything has felt awkward lately, but not that throw. And now, contemplating a way to find what's missing (a brother--no small thing), you confront the fact that maybe what is required is not a stakeout after all. Rats watch from shadows, but you? You are a killer of rats--an inadvertent killer but a killer nonetheless--which is not such a shadow-thing as it sounds. Concrete: that which can be touched.

Knock and ask. There is no rock her mother can sling so very hard. Go on and ask her where your brother is and why he left.

Notes from a Floating Carnival

2010-08-12T10:23:00.002-04:00

Over the ocean salt smell, the cloying scent of handspun cotton candy--how the air itself cuts the tender red skin of nasal passages and throat, aerated shards of glass. Elephant ears and funnel cakes. Or, what remains of elephant ears and funnel cakes after being ourselves handspun on tea cups or the Octopus. The "hand" has always meant a machine. There are things the human body cannot take. We pay dollar by dollar at a time to fail to take such things. To eat what we can't digest. To be handspun until our wallet is empty of all but worn receipts. The lights continue to flash their frenetic, epileptic flash. The sea laps more slowly at the piers. At such times, it is difficult to believe we are not all doomed. The ocean does not go on forever, nor do we. There is a bottom to all this.

Sunset, sunrise

2010-06-24T16:46:00.000-04:00

Since the wild west class has now ridden off into the sunset and an ample mourning time has transpired, I suppose it is high time to put some fresh writing back into the world. The other day, I started back on the novel I set up last summer, writing the following bit. It's invigorating to be writing again.

For those who follow me, the agent hunt continues for Borrowed Horses, AKA novel #1, but I have more full MS requests every week and I'm hopeful that soon those requests will turn into an actual agent. Time will tell. For the mean time, though, there's plenty to write.
-----------

(Some background: Thirteen year old Robert, the protagonist, is trying to figure out what has happened to his older brother Sean, who abandoned his two children and disappeared. Robert is going to the high rise apartment building where Sean lived in hopes of finding clues to where and why he went.)

The air in the building was suffocating. Judging from the smell of old sweat, mildew, and urine that hung in the air, Robert guessed the air conditioner had been broken for some time. He wondered how long. Weeks? Months? Years? Robert pressed the call button for the elevator. It was sticky and a thin level of grime made it difficult to make out the arrow. An old lady came up and stood next to him, dark skinned and very prim in her flowered housecoat and wire-framed glasses, with a small canvas bag of groceries hanging from her arm. A white man came in behind her. He wore no shirt and continuously mumbled something Robert couldn’t hear. His hair was long and bedraggled, and his chest was dirty. If his mother was there, Robert might have taken a step closer to her, but here there were only strangers. The man was standing so close that his arm brushed Robert’s sleeve. His words were all hissing, the volume dropping and raising like a man in an argument with himself. The black woman only stared forward, waiting for the doors of the elevator to open and let them in.

No one spoke, and the only sound was the squeaking and rattling of the elevator as it approached. Anger began to rise within him again: Sean had no right to do this, to make him come here. “Whatever, geek,” his brother would say if he were here. “You came here on your own—I had nothing to do with it.”

You left, and now I have to pick up the pieces.

The elevator door opened and Robert, the lady, and the shirtless man walked into its box of stale air and flickering lights. Robert pressed the button for the 17th floor and silently prayed the elevator would make it that far. A fourth person, a girl with a nose ring and purple hair, squeezed through the doors as they closed and punched the button for the third floor. “Sup, Matilda?”

The older lady nodded at the girl and then stared at the elevator doors.

The girl turned to Robert. “Haven’t seen you here before.”

“I’m, um.” Robert faltered. “I’m looking for my brother.”

“OK, I’m-Um. I’ll let you know if I see him around.” She grinned broadly, and Robert wondered if she was making fun of him.

But would it matter if she was? Would it change anything? She might know something. Robert cleared his throat and tried again, “Sean Baxter. My brother Sean.”

The girl’s smile dropped a little. “Sean, huh?” She looked at Robert quietly for a moment, as if sizing him up, then shrugged. “Haven’t seen him.”

Robert stared into the corner of the elevator so he wouldn’t have to say anything else. Stupid, he thought. Stupid to think some stranger on a rusty old elevator would know something.

The doors opened and the girl stepped out. “Catch you later, I’m-Um,” she said, laughing lightly.

Robert felt himself blush, but concentrated his gaze on the graffiti covering the walls. Most of it was unreadable, the letters curved like scimitars and ending in arrow points. He had the sense again that he needed a whole different school to understand this city. What he could read was profanity, some of it misspelled and some not really all that profane, “eat this” or “suck it.” Sometimes an adjective added more color, “suck it hard.” With an elevator this slow, hadn’t they had time to come up with something better? And did these ghost people, the ones who had written these things, always carry black markers for this purpose? Did they wait until the elevator was empty? If he were to pull out a marker now, say, and write “F you, Sean,” on the panel by the door, would the lady or the shirtless man say a word against it?

His eyes traveled over the panel, reading note after note, until he saw it, there, in the corner, the tight cramped writing that he’d know since childhood. “The pilot is dead and we’re all going down,” Sean had written.

Rage

2010-04-06T21:57:00.001-04:00

I was listening to Rage Against the Machine on my way into school this morning, and "Settle for Nothing" really made me think again of Sherman Alexie's Smoke Signals, so I thought I'd post the lyrics and a link to the video (don't click on this link if you prefer not to listen to hard music--it's not easy listening by any stretch of the imagination).

The lines in particular that got me thinking were, "Read my writing on the wall/ No-one's here to catch me when I fall/ Caught between my culture and the system." In Rage Against the Machine, the anger transforms into a call to action, and yet the anger is also laced with a sense of despair. To be caught between one's culture and the system seems in this song to be an almost hopeless position--one that leads to crime, suicide, and other forms of violence against the self and others.

It seems to me that Victor is fighting against this same type of despair, but he uses humor to keep him level. Of course, he hasn't exactly become a productive citizen--Thomas reminds him that he hasn't got a job and has been "moping around the reservation" for years--but he has resisted the alcoholism and other self-destructive behaviors that so many of his peers fall victim to. ("Hatred passed on, passed on and passed on.")

At any rate, for what it's worth, I thought I'd post the connection to music from a difference cultural experience since it seemed to tap into the same emotional well.

(I suppose I should add a disclaimer to say I don't endorse any of their views, etc, etc, but I do recommend thinking about them--but hopefully you all know me well enough by this point to know that this is how I feel about texts in general. Anthony Kiedis of the Red Hot Chili Peppers once sung about listening to Public Enemy, saying "I listen to the music that makes me think." Amen, brother. Amen.)

-----

A jail cell is freedom from the pain in my home
Hatred passed on, passed on and passed on
A world of violent rage
But it's one that I can recognize
Having never seen the color of my father's eyes
Yes, I dwell in hell, but it's a hell that I can grip
I tried to grip my family
But I slipped

To escape from the pain in an existence mundane
I got a 9, a sign, a set and now I gotta name

Read my writing on the wall
No-one's here to catch me when I fall
Death is on my side....suicide!

A jail cell is freedom from the pain in my home
Hatred passed on, passed on and passed on
A world of violent rage
But it's one that I can recognize
Having never seen the color of my father's eyes
Yes, I dwell in hell, but it's a hell that I can grip
I tried to grip my family
But I slipped

To escape from the pain in an existence mundane
I got a 9, a sign, a set and now I gotta name

Read my writing on the wall
No-one's here to catch me when I fall
Caught between my culture and the system....genocide!

Read my writing on the wall
No-one's here to catch me when I fall
If ignorance is bliss, then knock the smile off my face
Yeah!

If we don't take action now
We settle for nothing later
Settle for nothing now
And we'll settle for nothing later
If we don't take action now
We settle for nothing later
We'll settle for nothing now
And we'll settle for nothing later

If we don't take action now
We'll settle for nothing later
We settle for nothing now
And we'll settle for nothing later
If we don't take action now
We settle for nothing later
We'll settle for nothing now
And we'll settle for nothing later

Smoke Signals

2010-03-31T10:50:00.000-04:00

If you’re considering writing about Smoke Signals, you may want to think about some of the following and consider how you might put some of these ideas together to make a coherent argument about what the movie suggests about America, about fathers and sons, about friendship, about journeys, and so forth. I’ve broadly grouped thoughts here, but you could easily link quotations from different groups. For example, the thoughts on “Learning to be an Indian” might tie into the section on “Fathers/Fatherlessness.”

FIRE
              House fire—Fourth of July party (fireworks)
              Thomas Build-the-Fire
              Thomas’s opening voice over: “You know, there are some children who aren’t really children at all. They’re just pillars of fire that burn everything that they touch. And there are some children who are just pillars of ash that fall apart when you touch them. Me and Victor, we were children born of flame and ash.”
              Pheonix (city, bird reborn in flame—on rising from dead, Thomas: “Victor, I’m going to travel to Spokane Falls one last time and toss the ashes into the water. And your father will rise like a salmon”)

FATHERS/FATHERLESSNESS
              Thomas and Suzi—Arnold like a father
              Generational—roots, ancestry
              Thomas’s final voice over: (“How do we forgive our fathers? Maybe in a dream. Do we forgive our fathers for leaving too often or forever when we were little? Maybe for scaring us with their unexpected rage or making us nervous because there never seemed to be any rage at all? Do we forgive our fathers for marrying or not marrying our mothers? For divorcing or not divorcing our mothers? And shall we forgive them for their excesses of warmth or of coldness? Shall we forgive them for pushing or leaning? For shutting doors? For speaking only through layers of cloth, or never speaking, or never being silent? Do we forgive our fathers in our or in theirs? Or in their deaths? Saying it to them or not saying it? If we forgive our fathers, what is left?”)
              Bequest, inheritance, what do our fathers leave/give us? (things both unexpected and the expected)

MAGIC/DISAPPEARANCE
              Arnold Joseph on Fourth of July: “Happy Independence Day, Victor. You feeling independent? I’m feeling independent. I’m feeling extra magical today, Victor. Like I could make anything disappear. Houdini with braids, you know? Wave my hand and poof! The white people are gone, sent back to where they belong. Poof! Paris, London, Moscow. […] Poof! Poof! Poof! Wave my hand and the reservation is gone. The trading post and the post office, the tribal schools and the pine trees, the dogs and the cats, the drunks and the Catholics and the drunk Catholics. Poof! And all the little Indian boys named Victor. […] I’m so good, I can make myself disappear.”
              Arlene Joseph: “Yeah, your father is magic, enit? A real Houdini, huh? He sawed us into pieces, didn’t he? I feel like my head is in the kitchen, my belly’s in the bathroom, and my feet are in the bedroom.”
Young Thomas: “When Indians leave, they never come back: last of the Mohicans, last of the Winnebago…”
Arlene’s magic fry bread
              Thomas’s voice over: “I don’t remember that fire. I only have the stories. And in every one of those stories, I could fly.”

STORIES
              Thomas’s continual story telling
              Trading stories (girls in backwards-driving car, Suzi Song and Thomas)
              Suzi: “You want me to tell you the truth? Or do you want lies?” Thomas: “I want both” (this seems to tie in to ideas in The Things They Carried)
              Incorporating other stories (e.g. the Biblical story of the loaves and fishes à Arlene and fry bread feast)

NAMES
              Victor (Thomas’s grandmother: “A good name. It means he’s going to win, enit?”)
              Joseph (Biblical—father of Jesus, Chief Joseph)
              Thomas (Biblical—doubting, )
Builds-the-Fire

LEARNING TO BE AN INDIAN
              Cultural pictures (Thomas: “The only thing more pathetic than Indians on TV is Indians watching Indians on TV.”
After accident: “It’s like you’re the Lone Ranger and Tonto.” Thomas: “It’s more like we’re Tonto and Tonto.”
References to John Wayne, Custer, Geronimo, etc)
              Victor’s lesson to Thomas on bus after accusing Thomas of having watched Dances With Wolves two hundred times (Victor: “You got to look mean or people won’t respect you. You got to look like a warrior. You got to look like you just came back from killing a buffalo.”)

JOURNEYS
              What is Victor’s journey?
              What is Thomas’s journey?
              What is the function of each in the other’s journey?

Sherman Alexie

2010-03-28T22:25:00.001-04:00

So far, we've read one or two Alexie poems and an Alexie essay and we've watched an Alexie interview. Tonight, you read an Alexie story and tomorrow, we'll begin watching an Alexie film. Had enough yet?

I think this is a great opportunity to look at how one writer explores issues by using different genres. Alexie's voice is much different in each piece. The two we'll look at this one make this especially clear. On the surface, each tells the same story...but that's ONLY on the surface. You'll notice he makes different choices in each, starting with the title and going far deeper than that.

For instance, I love that we get to hear his dialogue with the Tribal Council in the story, even though it is shorter and would seem to have more time/space limitations. I love, too, that almost every line spoken by the Council starts with, "Now, Victor..." I imagine that every one of us, regardless of our cultural background, knows what it means when someone says, "Now, [insert your name here]..." The subtext is universal: we, the wiser, will instruct you, the over-reaching, on how to get back in touch with reality as we see it...."

That said, I have to acknowledge how very different the story "This is What It Means to Say Pheonix, Arizona" and the film Smoke Signals are from one another. Part of me wants to compare and contrast, and part of me wants to separate them entirely into two pieces that need to be treated as distinct bodies. After all, though there names remain the same, even the characters seem different (notice how Victor treats the gymnast in the story vs. the film, for example). Much of the film draws from other stories in the collection as well as this one, but even with that in mind, I'm not sure if I want to treat the film as an adaptation of the collection or as whole new material treating a similar topic. I'm inclined toward the latter. I'm interested to hear what you think.

Louise Erdrich

2010-03-28T16:42:00.000-04:00

I'm so pleased by the class's positive response to Louise Erdrich! I was especially pleased by the things you noticed about this story. For instance, Caitlin mentioned that both the ice that kills the men trapped in the cooler and the rainstorm/tornado all involve danger via water, which seem appropriate for Fleur, with her history of drownings and her relationship with the river demon. It was a clever thing to notice, and I have no doubt Erdrich was thinking along precisely these lines when she was thinking about the form Fleur's retribution might take.

I promised I would upload a few book recommendations and links for those of you interested in learning more about Louise Erdrich.

I've read nearly everything she's written, and I have loved every one of them. My two favorites so far are probably The Master Butchers Singers Club and The Last Report on the Miracles at Little No Horse, both of which came out in the last ten years or so. Love Medecine is among her most famous works, and it's also excellent.

Links:
Faces of America Interview with Louis Gates (four parts--each connects you with the next in the series; about 20 minutes total)
2009 Commencement Address at Dartmouth (about 20 minutes)
Democracy Now! Interview talking about her newest novel Plague of Doves (about 9 minutes)
Democracy Now! Interview talking about Leonard Peltier's conviction (less than 5 minutes)

Of these, I highly recommend the Dartmouth Commencement address. It shows her at her most relaxed and humorous of the three. The Faces of America interview with Henry Louise Gates is also excellent.

Ghettos, Sterilization, and Other Things We Might Consider

2010-03-23T21:48:00.000-04:00

I've been having some lingering thoughts about Monday's discussion and since Wendy Rose's poem touch on issues of appropriation as well, I thought I'd stay with the already established topic and go deeper.

I've noticed that a number of students felt that Churchill was going too far in supposing that mascots could *really* be a problem, so I wanted to add a couple points to consider in our discussion:

1) The history of ghettoization. Many students associate the word "ghetto" with the inner city and, in this country, tend to think of Watts, Compton, Harlem, Skid Row, and so forth, but the term itself was first used in Venice to describe neighborhoods in which Jewish people were compelled to live. The term came into more widespread use during WWII when the Nazi party ghetto-ized the Jewish people in Germany, Poland, etc. I bring this up because it might make Churchill's comparison of mascots to the case of Julius Stricher more poignant if we consider the fact that Native Americans in this country are, to some extent, a ghetto-ized people.

2) An argument was raised that, if Native Americans left the reservation, they could better themselves, but of the nation's 2.1 million Native Americans, only 400,000 live on reservations. Many living off the rez still face problems with poverty. Those on the reservation have some help in the way of tribal support, government assistance, health care, and the like, but those services only go so far to help. According to a 1997 article in the Washington Post, "Pine Ridge, which is in Shannon County, S.D., [is] the poorest county in America, a place where unemployment hovers around 80 percent, where the per capita income is $3,417 a year, the lowest in the nation, where two out of three people live below the federal poverty level" (Carlson). We should not over-simplify the difficulty of a decision for a person or family to leave their home in hopes of a better life that may not be available to them.

3) Many of us are not fully aware of the extent of anti-Indian prejudice because it isn't a part of our daily lives, but the writers we're examining this semester are more fully educated on the topic. This isn't a matter of simply having their feelings hurt. They're looking not only at a history of genocide against their people, but know that much of the attempt to wipe them out has continued into the present day. Both Alexie and Churchill mention the sterilization of Native American women through the 1970s, for example. (To find a more comprehensive list of links, look at the bottom of Churchill's essay.)

This is by no means a comprehensive list of factors we should consider when we read Churchill's article, but it's a good place to start. Perhaps it makes it a little easier to see why these writers are offended by the cartoonish representation of their people--a representation that makes it easier to ignore them and the continued threats they face.

Balancing on the wire separating "culture" and "stereotype"

2010-03-21T22:07:00.000-04:00

As many of you know, this course evolved from much of the reading I did when I was first drafting my novel, Borrowed Horses. The main character of the novel, Joannie Edson, is a white woman living in Idaho, and her love interest is Timothy, the son of a Welsh father and Spokane mother. Because I've long been an admirer of Alexie's work, it was impossible for me to write without his poem, "How to Write the Great American Indian Novel" in my mind, and I still read it, thinking of my own book, and wondering if I've been careful enough to create a character that feels real and whole and that represents some of this rich culture without seeming stereotyped.

This is a devilish hard line to walk. I'll give an example from my own culture to illustrate--

When shopping for houses, we stumbled upon one that might have been nice if its previous owner hadn't chosen to cover all the walls of one room with plastic wood laminate paneling (gag). Someone who I will not identify here jokingly commented that the previous owners must have been Irish because the Irish love fake wood paneling. "Hey!" I yelled, wanting to launch a protest in defense of my mother's people, but then I remembered my grandmother and grandfather, who pulled down the solid mahogany wainscoting in their turn of the century semi-detached in Philly and replaced it with (cringe) fake wood paneling. And then I thought of one uncle's home, and another. Paneling, paneling, paneling.

So, would I have been right to call this person out for a stereotype, or had s/he simply located an aspect of the culture? (Immigrant practicality? Too much time spent scrubbing the darned wood in other, wealthier people's homes?) If I wrote about a character who was born of Irish immigrants, would placing paneling on the walls of her childhood home be stereotyping or merely a nod to a cultural phenomenon?

To get back to my own novel, if Timothy has a dream (as he, like Joannie, does), then am I giving him a vision and violating my own desire to avoid stereotyping? And are then Joannie's dreams, the white girl who, according to Alexie's satiric poem, is "Indian by proximity" [line 27] affected by this, too? Do I remove the dreams? But, then, don't people have dreams? And aren't those dreams sometimes oddly telling of the knowledge that we carry subconsciously? And does it matter that some of the dreams were written before the character Timothy was introduced to the novel?

I am not so naive a writer as to believe that, just because some of the sections predate Timothy's creation, that his presence won't affect how they're read, and much of my revision has been dedicated to the task of separating him as far from stereotype as possible and creating a character that readers will sympathize with and admire. Still, I read my own work with Alexie very much in mind. I want him to approve.

How current is THIS.

2010-03-19T22:07:00.001-04:00

Check it:
The Good, the Bad, the Weird
this link gets you to the trailer of...

a brand spanking new Asian remake of Leone's The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly!!!

We are on the edge, my friends. We are the zeitgeist.

Tuco

2010-03-19T10:21:00.002-04:00

I've written before about how Leone doesn't allow his characters to hold true to stereotypes of white = good and dark = bad. In class, we've talked specifically about Tuco and how interesting it is that this character, the brownest of the three major characters, gets more backstory and a more complex characterization than perhaps any other. At the time, this was ground-breaking, and I've always seen it as a real mark of Leone's excellence that he would challenge this long-customary western stereotype. Tuco is the first fully developed Latino character I can remember seeing in a movie of any genre.

But I need to complicate even this because, as ground-breaking as it is, Leone also chooses to cast a white actor (Eli Wallach) in the role, just as John Ford cast a white actor to play the Native American, Scar, in The Searchers (a move we've already talked about when we read Alexie's "I Always Hated Tonto").

Why on earth do we make of Leone's choice? Leone is too intelligent and too aware of his own choices not to have been conscious of the political implications... What do you make of this?

Eyes

2010-02-24T12:03:00.002-05:00

Sometimes, fate works against a director's vision. Often, this hurts the film. In this case, though, fate worked in its favor. Henry Fonda wasn't available, nor was Charles Bronson, so instead of those iconic actors we have Clint Eastwood as Blondie and Lee Van Cleef as Angel Eyes, and I couldn't imagine it any other way.

Eastwood is a perfect actor for Leone's extreme close-ups. He acts with his eyes in a way few actors are capable. Clint's now famous squint lends itself perfectly to Leone's style and vision. In a film that puts so little emphasis on dialogue, the action becomes all the more eloquent. Eastwood's way of moving his eyes, squinting or relaxing his squint, looking or not looking at someone, speaks far more than his words do.

Christopher Frayling on ONCE UPON A TIME IN THE WEST

2010-02-19T15:45:00.000-05:00

We're not watching Once Upon a Time in the West because we don't have enough time and because, as clever as the cinematic choices are, I think The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is the better film, but what I hope you get from Frayling is just how conscious Leone is of the choices he makes and their effects. The man is a craftsman par excellence.

Complicating Easy Categorization

2010-02-19T15:31:00.001-05:00

One of the things I most love about The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly is the way it breaks down easy categories. From the first moments of the film (the titles, the labels good, bad, and ugly), we’re instructed how we should think of each man. The men themselves construct binary definitions for one another: “There are two kinds of men…” is a refrain throughout the film.

Yet also from the film’s first moments, the categories break down. The first words spoken to Tuco are “You have such a beautiful face, it’s word two thousand dollars”—so is he ugly? Angel Eyes, the “bad,” does not kill out of malice but because he is a mercenary, and in his profession, he seems to behave honorably, always finishing a job. Blondie, the “good,” aids a known felon to escape over and over.

The movie makes it easy to label people while simultaneously showing the labels to be false. The audience is left wondering who defined these people to begin with and by what arbitrary markers. I’m curious to see whether, ultimately, the class thinks all three men are good, bad, and ugly as labeled, or whether none of them are, or whether some are and some aren’t—and if so, which are what?

I wonder too if this the idea of categorization and identity extends into some of the film’s artistic choices. For example, the over-dubbed sound makes it seem as if the character’s voice is coming from something beyond them rather than exactly meshing with their own voices in the same way identity seems at least partially proscribed by some outside, unnamed narrative force. I thought too of the rope, which ties things together in the same way prejudice does but also can kill, leaving each man facing his completely individual demise. (Note: even I feel I’m stretching on this last one.) Better, what about the cinematography? It alternates from extreme close-up to panorama, from the individual to the grouped. (Note: here, I’m being very clever, just as I was when discussing the sound, and you should all be totally impressed with my brilliance.) The fact that many of these men having multiple names (Jackson/Ben Carson, Tuco Benedicto Pacifico Juan Maria Ramirez) or no name at all (Blondie, Angel Eyes) also seems to hint at the impossibility of knowing anyone on an individual level.

SUCH a great movie, no? So much packed in to such beautiful images.

The first paper is coming up

2010-02-13T18:50:00.000-05:00

and I'm looking forward to seeing what everyone can do!

A few of reminders:

1) Don't forget to write about a TEXT. You can write about more than one if you like, but if you do, make sure your focus is narrow. If your thesis does not make an argument about a text, the paper will not pass. If you have any concerns, e-mail me. I'd be happy to chat with you either face-to-face or online to help you refine your thesis.

2) Use Writing about Literature to help you. The essay on "The Yellow Wall-paper" and "The Storm" provides an excellent model. It makes a clear, narrowly focused argument and it supports that argument with quotations and other textual evidence. Remember, writing a literary essay is a lot like being a lawyer: you need to make a case.

3) Don't forget to cite your sources. Your Bedford Handbook gives detailed information on how to cite sources, as do many online sources, such as the OWL at Perdue. If you've looked at the Bedford and you're still confused, e-mail me.

Write on, my friends.

Clint Eastwood v. John Wayne

2010-02-09T08:23:00.001-05:00

I promised the class I would post this link to the Clint Eastwood v. John Wayne grudge match I found on line while researching the class. This is hardly a scholarly site, but it might be useful to help try to conceptualize what two roles these dominant figures play in the history of the American western genre.

(Note: I do not endorse or condone any of the views held on this site.)

I don't want to believe that John Wayne represents America

2010-02-09T08:19:00.000-05:00

but he does, doesn't he? I mean, I read the infamous 1971 Playboy interview, and I'm sickened by his racism, his homophobia, his paranoia of communism and liberal teachers (that would be me, right?). This is the last person on Earth I want to associate with my country because I love my country. My grandfather and uncles fought for this country and my cousins are actively serving at this very moment. My father immigrated here because he saw the potential of America's ideals of a class-free democracy. I was raised on the yet unrealized ideal that we strive to let all men be created equal as well the belief that you loved your country best by speaking out when things could be improved--that's what democracy is, right? Being active, voting, demonstrating, speaking.

Not, perhaps, if you're John Wayne. For him, those whose views were not his should be silenced. Those whose skin was too dark or whose sexuality was different needed to be suppressed. Those who believed in communism should be run out of his business and preferably run out of the country altogether. To my mind, this sounds a lot closer to dictatorship and imperialism than it does to democracy. And yet, looking at the historical record--genocide of Native American tribes, slavery, institutional racism and Jim Crow, Japanese internment, McCarthyism, the Patriot Act, the continued bans on gay marriage--John Wayne looks a lot closer to what America has acted like than I want to believe.

Is it his charm that lets him get away with this? Hi bravado? His sexuality? Is it America's swagger that allowed it to be a world power even when it didn't act on its own ideals? Teaching this essay yesterday, I was struck by how conflicted we were about his character. At one moment, we want to disown him; at another, he becomes everyone's grandfather--while we don't like what he's saying we admire him for saying it. He's honest. He doesn't hide. He says what we know people are thinking. In a democracy, we need this if open debate is to be possible. Yet it's not debate that Wayne advocates but dogmatism. The brave don't exile those whose views are different from theirs. John Wayne shows little courage in the convictions of democracy.

As troubled as I am by the interview, I think it is important reading because none of the views he holds have disappeared. If we are a democracy, they must be given voice. I only hope that saner voices bring reason and logic to combat the *fear* that ultimately drives so much of this "bravado."

The Searchers: paper topic ideas

2010-02-05T13:17:00.002-05:00

Just a few rough ideas off the top of my head that could be honed if anyone's interested:

Treatment of Christianity--positive or negative? how so? explain.

Racism in Ethan Edwards--how do we resolve it, or do we?

Fair fights--Martin v. Charlie--and "manly" behavior

Evolution of female characters in Westerns--can we get to the "truth" about frontier women or are we always invested in the cultural expectations of those writing the history?

Cultural identity: inborn or acquired? (What do you make of Ethan scalping Scar???)

Ties to Western tradition (dime novels, radio, TV, etc)--trace the evolution of an idea you see carried from one text to another.

Intelligence/Education/Literacy--how important is it in a man in the West? The suitors both seem less intelligent than Laurie Jorgensen--just as her mother seems more intelligent than her husband. Why? (What is the purpose of marriage in this setting?)

What cultures mix and which are excluded? (Mexican, Norwegian, Confederate, Commanche... and what happens to those of mixed race?)

Scar, the blue-eyed Commanche (HUH???)--connection with Alexie's essay "I Always Hated Tonto"?

The impact of The Searchers on future films and why this relationship is important to recognize

Hero: which character is the hero? why? what are the pros and cons of each option we're offered? why this cast of such problematic heroes?

Ethan Edwards: Anti-Hero

2010-02-04T23:06:00.001-05:00

What do we do with John Wayne's character Ethan Edwards in The Searchers (1956)? Even in the movie posters, he's larger than life, but he never stops being a problem. His racism is part of his character, but are we to accept it in this hero? The movie never seems to resolve this issue. On the one hand, we see (suggestions of) the type of violence that has lead to his anger, but ultimately, is that an excuse for wanting to starve and kill an entire race? Does this movie want to explore the genesis of genocidal thinking, or do we merely accept this ugliness as part of an otherwise good character, or did the film's first audience even question his hatred and desire for murder? Was racism so accepted as a part of human nature that it wasn't seen as a flaw? I'm very interested to see what my students have to say.

I watched John Wayne's 1939 film Stagecoach this evening, and it's fascinating to see him playing such a different role. He's pure good guy* in this one--not to mention young, fresh-faced, and good-looking. He's hero through-and-through here. But is he a less rounded character for lacking a fatal flaw? He fights for women, for the under-class, for the down-trodden, and all in the context of a society that's falsely branded him a villain.

On a totally different note, I was noticing tonight how many Westerns center on a quest story. The quest for Deborah is the driving narrative of The Searchers, but other westerns too seem to share this theme--as does Smoke Signals.

(* pure good guy: He does shoot and kill Native Americans in this one, but he shoots only when attacked, which seems to be a legitimate distinction in the violent world of the west. He also seems willing to overlook race, class, and any perceived moral superiority to judge people instead on their actions, which contrasts strongly with the other characters in the film who use moral superiority as a premise to be hateful. John Wayne's character in Stagecoach treats the Native American woman in Apache Wells with civility--something I can't see from old Uncle Ethan. The movie itself is not quite so kind to her. She betrays the trust of the characters and tells her people of their presence.)

The Matrix, too, is a Western

2010-01-29T20:37:00.000-05:00

Dusters and boots:

Evil Mining Company:

Showdown:

Town that needs to be saved:

Lots of guns:

Alexie's "I Hate Tonto (Still Do)"

2010-01-28T20:34:00.004-05:00

I have a friend whose favorite question to ask, upon meeting a new person, is "what is your theme song?" This question usually confuses the heck out of the person he asks, so he continues, "in the movie version of your life, what song would be playing behind you when you enter a room?"

It's a great question, and I've long struggled to decide what my theme song is. I'd love it to be something edgy and dangerous that makes you want to strut just a little more--Nirvana's "Pennyroyal Tea," for example. Or perhaps, in my more romantic modes, it could be something heart-rending and full of longing, like Mother Love Bone's "Chloe Dancer." Or maybe even something peppy, but peppy out of desperation at the madness of the world: "Birdhouse in your Soul" (They Might Be Giants) or "Gone Out the Window" (Violent Femmes) or "Should I Stay or Should I Go?" (The Clash) or "Story of My Life" (Social Distortion) or "Steady as She Goes" (The Racontuers) or any other song that says or implies "This is not my beautiful house; this is not my beautiful wife."

Tonight, reading Alexie, I'm realizing that my long-standing debate over the question reveals the privilege I enjoy because of the culture into which I was born. For him, that music has already been provided. He writes, "In the movies, Indians are always accompanied by ominous music. And I've seen so many Indian movies that I feel like I'm constantly accompanied by ominous music. I always feel that something bad is about to happen."

I can't think of a single other American culture who has so consistently been scripted as brutal. Tonto is one of the few exceptions, yet even though Sherman Alexie doesn't give his reasons for rejecting Tonto, I feel like I already know them. There's an "Uncle Tom" quality to Tonto that the more savage images of Indians wholly reject--which makes Alexie's identification in the final line all the more painful.

The strange thing is, having grown up with the same stereotypes, I remember as a child how badly I wanted to be "Indian." One summer I walked barefoot daily on my gravel driveway because I'd convinced myself that Native Americans could do so, and I wanted to be that tough. I wanted to be able to sneak soundlessly along a ridge and descend on unsuspecting settlers. Though I never wanted to actually enact any violence, I wanted to be fearsome and ominous. They were never quite human, were they? Those soundless beings in the hills--they were more than human, and no degree of violence quite disturbed their silent *power*. I wonder if part of the reason its so hard to let these stereotypes and prejudices go is that, as abhorrent as they are, we have fallen in love with our own mythologies?

Of course, though, the power is only an illusion of the film. The reality was a far cry.

Calamity Jane

2010-01-27T16:29:00.001-05:00

On finding that her fiance, Deadwood Dick, appears to have drowned in quicksand, Calamity Jane is described as follows: "When he had told her to come to Death Notch to become his wife, all the bitterness of her strange young life had seemingly melted into glorious sunshine, and she was happy. Little wonder, then, that bitter grief now returned to torture her, when they told her that the famous brave-knight had met so terrible a fate, after so many years of safe passage through constant peril" (Chapter VI).

We've talked a lot about how the damsel-in-distress is the dominant narrative regarding female characters in 19th century texts. (We'll ignore the Becky Sharpes of the world for now.) Deadwood Dick opens with three such ladies: Vergie Verner, Siska, and Calamity Jane. Of these, only Jane seems at first to be able to hold her own in the rough company of Death Notch. It's ironic then that she, of all the characters, is the one whose narrative specifically references "brave-knights" who promise to rescue damsels.

I keep having the sense that these damsels in their various states of distress are offered to challenge the old, potent mythology of chivalry. Already, by chapter 5, the most feminine of the bunch, Vergie Verner, has pulled a gun on a man offering to marry her, telling him, "I comprehend your magnanimous offer, but emphatically decline. When in need of a husband, I shall select a man-not a wolf in the guise of a man. You may inform Carrol Carner of my presence here, if you like, and tell him, also, that I have been taking daily practice with the revolver, lately, and I shall take advantage of the first opportunity to blow his brains out. Now, or I'll open up practice on you. Go! I mean biz!"

In some ways, she's a typical Romantic heroine, fending off the evil-intentions of unworthy men, but with a very important difference: this girl fights for herself. In fact, in each of the three dime novels we have read, we find guns in the hands of women--often, these damsels are saving the knights-in-distress.

Ultimately, I don't know if dime novels are ever fully able to offer a fully independent woman, but the steps they take towards this strike me as fairly radical for the time.

First Impressions of Deadwood Dick's Last Adventure

2010-01-25T20:19:00.001-05:00

Each of the first two chapters is dedicated to a damsel in distress, which is interesting for a novel which names Calamity Jane, one of the West's famous cowgirls, in its title. Death Notch is a town full of men of dubious character, and any women in the area are at risk for rape and perhaps worse--and I couldn't argue with this as a danger of the west, but I'm growing ever more curious to see how Jane will fit into this world of oversexed miscreants.

The racial politics of the early chapter also raises one's eyebrow. Siska, the distressed damsel of chapter II, is half white, half Native American, which seems to make her all the more alluring and vulnerable. The vengeful chief of the tribe who had possessed Death Notch before its capture is also an interesting figure. They note early on that he speaks English well, showing that he's"not untutored, like many of his race," and yet the dialogue that's written for him is strange to say the least. Take this speech: "Red Hatchet once great brave, but his limbs no longer strong for war-path. He can only meditate vengeance upon his enemies, instead of performing it." His first sentence reads like the worst of stilted "Indian" dialect ever written for fiction, but the second seems to come from a university scholar. It's like the writer couldn't decide how to write Red Hatchet. He wants him to be "tutored," but didn't know how to show his racial heritage without corrupting his dialogue.

I'm very curious to see how Red Hatchet develops. His character, along with the introduction of Hank Shakespeare in Chapter I, seems to highlight an interest in the presence of educated men in the West. I wonder how their education will help or hinder them?

Jesse James, the Outlaw--More Human than Human?

2010-01-25T17:13:00.000-05:00

"But there was no "standing to it" for more than a few moments. That would have been beyond human, or even outlaw, endurance." (Chapter XI)

The way this sentence is phrased caught my eye. "Beyond human, or even outlaw, endurance"--are outlaws more than human? Is Jesse James not only an early Western but an early superhero?

Jesse James, the Outlaw

2010-01-25T10:49:00.000-05:00

"Curse you! do you carry a charmed life?" he hissed, through his gnashing teeth. "But now -- this time you are doomed!"

But again he reckoned without my lucky star. A carwindow was suddenly slid up but two or three feet away and a woman's jeweled hand was thrust out, holding a small pocket-revolver in its delicate but firm grip.

"Ha, ha, ha!" laughed a silvery voice, as the timely little weapon flashed and barked in the outlaw's face. "I owe you an old score, Jesse James, on Dick's account, and here's one toward liquidation."

(Ch VIII)
----------

In reading these dime novels, I am over and over again discovering that it's a mistake to believe that women were seen only as damsels in distress. The 1950s TV westerns may portray them so, but in these 19th century novels, women are *savior* as well as saved.

I especially love the witty remark this woman makes as she takes a shot at Jesse James. The present day action and thriller flicks are indebted to lines like this from the Penny Dreadfuls, but typically, it seems to be the men that get to speak them. There's a delight here in the violence about to be committed that I don't believe was normally associated with women, even if they were allowed a role in the action.

Jesse James, the Outlaw

2010-01-25T10:04:00.000-05:00

"Then I simultaneously drew my pistol and bounded toward my horse, while giving utterances to an Apache yell." (Ch V)

Interesting that, as the detective is freed from his bonds and runs from the James brothers (who have discovered his deceit and are ready to kill him), he gives an Apache yell. If Deloria is right about whites "playing Indian" to get access to traits they associate with Native Americans, then what traits is the detective trying to access here? Rebellion? Obstinacy? The refusal to give up in the face of overwhelming odds?

I love that it's the figure of *law and order* who gives this yell here as he's freed. Perhaps, "civilization" needs its "savagery" if its to survive its own brutality--but then, that's not really the binary working here. I'd be better to say order must have its chaos if its own structures of good and evil are going to compete on more equal terms. After all, if the James brothers were as savage/brutal/evil as they seem to be proving themselves to be, then this detective should be as dead as those killed in Chapter 1, and good--or, at least, lawfulness--doesn't stand a chance.

Jesse James, the Outlaw

2010-01-24T20:41:00.000-05:00

"Personally, I don't dislike you. I admire your boldness and decision of character, in spite of your crimes." (Narrator to Jesse James)

This strikes me as the crux of every relationship with a good western outlaw. Despite their savagery and brutality, there is something compelling about these figures. A good outlaw attracts us at the same time his actions repulse us. Is it this "boldness and decision of character" that make us fall in love?

Shakespeare in the Wild West

2010-01-21T11:16:00.007-05:00

California Joe reflecting on the Native Americans he has just duped: "It's a pity they don't know English so that they can cuss, for I know they is that mad to make me sorry for 'am."

Caliban in William Shakespeare's The Tempest (I, ii)
"You taught me language; and my profit on't
Is, I know how to curse. The red plague rid you
For learning me your language!"

We talked in class yesterday about how Western film picks up on many of the conventions first established in dime novels. This quotation in California Joe about learning to curse instantly recalled Shakespeare's quotation in The Tempest about learning to curse, and it got me thinking about how much these dime novel authors were influenced by their great literary forebears. (Most people who were educated enough to write novels would have been well-versed in their William Shakespeare, though their characters and their readership might not be.) Caliban, of course, is a prototypical "savage," so perhaps it's not surprising that, of all Shakespeare's characters, he is the one who would be invoked here--but if it isn't surprising, it is nonetheless interesting. The inter-textuality of these fun little books is striking, and I suspect scholars could (or have?) produced dozens of papers on the application of Caliban to the image of Native Americans and all that it implies.

On a different note, I'm also noticing how, like the longer, popular novels of the time, the dime novels tend towards sentimentality. Joe is always whooping for Joe, crying in anguish, and so forth. Unlike the great stoic heroes of John Wayne and Clint Eastwood, the dime novel heroes wear their emotions on their sleeves. Showing emotion is an expectation of these novels that has since gone out of fashion. Again, the culture creating the myth of the West seems to reflect as much or more about itself than it does the West whose "history" it tries to capture. What is it about 1970-present that demands a silent, seemingly unfeeling hero? What was it about the Victorians that demanded a feeling, reacting one?

More on California Joe

2010-01-20T10:27:00.001-05:00

from California Joe:

Urging his white horse to a still greater speed, which the splendid animal seemed readily capable of, he soon drew within close pistol range of the two red-skins.

"It don't seem exactly right to shoot 'em, when they won't shoot back, thinking I'm a spook; but they'll report mighty soon that I was coming from the pale-face camp, and then they won't believe I'm an evil spirit, so I guess I'd better kill 'em.."

With this, Joe threw his hand forward quickly, and it held a revolver, a weapon at that time almost unknown upon the plains.

Instantly followed two sharp reports, and the two riders fell from their saddles without a cry, for Joe's aim was deadly.

--------------------

I was thinking about Clint Eastwood this morning, as usual.

More specifically, I was thinking about a story I'd heard about him and John Wayne. Apparently (and I need a source for this!!), as a young actor, Eastwood idolized John Wayne and had always wanted to work in a film with him, but the love was not mutual and Wayne refused. From what I understand, he objected to the characters Eastwood tended to play. An Eastwood character would shoot a man in the back, whereas a Wayne character would not.

This scene in California Joe seems to conjure similar questions of morality in the west. What particularly intrigues me is Joe's recognition that he's shooting unarmed men. I'm guessing Wayne would hold his fire here, if there stories are true. At least this early on, Joe is more the prototype of the Eastwood style cowboy... though I have to say, for a silent and mysterious figure, he talks a good deal more than the modern icons of mysterious cowboyness. That part of the mythology seems to be evolving.

I wonder if Joe's moral ambiguity is also what makes him so promptly enlist women and children in the fight against Bad Blood's gang of Indians--a move that obviously gives the leader of the settlers some pause. It made me so happy to see a dime novel that put rifles in the hands of women, as they surely were in the actual west. If so, moral ambiguity has lead to a social good--a more equal treatment of female characters--than the traditional notions of chivalry would have allowed. It's something to think about, at any rate.

Of course, the treatment of the Native American characters isn't nearly so forward-looking. He scalps the two he kills here then steals from their corpses, and he has already robbed the tribe of the rest of its herd of horses. What ever are we to make of this kid? He is a strange hero indeed.

California Joe

2010-01-19T21:47:00.000-05:00

"There, some hundred paces distant from where they stood, was what appeared to be a horse and rider.

The animal was snow-white, and stood as motionless as though carved from marble.

The rider was dressed in deep black from boots to hat, and sat silent and still." (California Joe)

Black hats, white hats. I love how this texts puts the black and white all in one character--of course he's mysterious. How could he not be? What visual clue do we have to his morality? Italian westerns pick right up on the icon of the mystery man--but instead of mixed signals they give us the brown hat, the ultimate muddied morality.

I have to admit, I'm curious as heck about this mysterious plainsman and all he may or may not reveal about the history of the Western in literature.

Crime and Civilization

2010-01-16T14:00:00.000-05:00

A few quotations having been haunting my thoughts—

“Is his prayer his promise—a trust of the wind?” (Charlot 385)

“There has been all the time, in the white American soul, a dual feeling about the Indian […] The desire to extirpate [him]. And the contradictory desire to glorify him” (D.H. Lawrence qtd. in Deloria 4)

“The Whites, by law of conquest, by justice of civilization, are masters of the American continent, and the best safety of the frontier settlements will be secured by the total annihilation of the few remaining Indians. Why not annihilation? Their glory has fled, their spirit broken, their manhood effaced; better that they die than live the miserable wretches that they are” (Baum).

“Yet, they [white settlers] say we are not good. Will he tell his own crimes?” (Charlot 387).

“Savage Indians served Americans as oppositional figures against whom one might imagine a civilized National self” (Deloria 3).

“Having wronged them for centuries we had better, in order to protect our civilization, follow it up by one more wrong and wipe these untamed and untamable creatures from the face of the earth” (Baum).

“Disguise readily calls the notion of a fixed national identity into question. At the same time, however, wearing a mask also makes one conscious of the real “me” underneath” (Deloria 7).

---
If we define civilization in opposition to savagery as something that values law and life, as a moral force that overcomes violence in favor of reason, then what must we make of the policy of genocide so readily embraced by our government? And yet, if accounts are true of slain settlers, can we not also understand the fear that prompted these abhorrent policies? Haven’t we seen a return to such modes of thinking as recently as 9-11? Are we civilized even yet? Or is civilization—and, on a more personal scale, civility, a constant struggle against the savage instincts we continue to feel in the face of threat? As much as I’m sickened by calls for genocide, I also understand how fear prompts that thinking. I’ve always thought civilization was instituted to help us contain our own savagery, but when civilizations clash, it seems they can also cause savagery.

In my post on Dickens I argued that Sioux writer Zitkala Sa’s memoirs of her girlhood show ample evidence that Native American tribes in the 1800s were civilized and mannerly. She gives us pleasant domestic scenes from her childhood. Yet the Sioux were regarded as a fierce tribe. The tranquility of her domestic scenes has everything to do with feeling safe. In the absence of threat, people are peaceful. White writings from the same period offer portraits of similarly peaceful domesticity, yet Frank L. Baum’s editorials, like Dickens essay “The Noble Savage,” display how savage Europeans became when trying to protect their “civilization.” It seems each person holds within him/herself measure of savagery and civility that wax and wane in response to perceptions of outside threat.

And still, I’ve oversimplified. There are always individuals in are cultural who are more prone to violence and those prone to less. What then?

Charlot puts the question better than I: “Is his prayer his promise—a trust of the wind?”

Playing Village People

2010-01-14T21:09:00.002-05:00

In class the other day, Corey mentioned that he was thinking about our class while he was at gym. Specifically, he was thinking about the Village People, whose group members all wore costumes, including that of a cowboy and an Indian. It's a wonderful connection, and one I hadn't though of, so I was especially glad he brought it up. I've been thinking about it ever since.

The Village People were one of the first openly gay bands to gain widespread acceptance. Being "out of the closet" is very much a part of their group's identity, and their openness contributed greatly to the growing acceptance of a wrongly hated and valuable portion of American culture. Yet at the same time they were publicly out of the closet, they were also wearing the closet. Why the costumes? Why these costumes?

If Philip Deloria is right that non-Native American "play Indian" to try to access a set of values that they're assumed to have (rebellion, dignity, environmentalism, etc, etc, etc), then what does this particular grouping enact and why? Why cop? Why biker? Why soldier? Why construction worker? Are these collectively our most manly figures? Is there a conscious attempt to make these guys opposite to one another--the biker and the cop in opposition, like the cowboy and Indian? Is there an attempt to choose figures who are traditional enemies so that they might bring them into unity?

I honestly don't know enough about the Village People to begin to answer, but I'm betting there are others who do and might comment here. Their website offers this tidbit of history into the groups start: "Producer/Composer Jacques Morali, with partner Henri Belolo, found Felipe dancing in his Indian costume in a crowd in NY's Greenwich Village. Felipe's special visual attraction brought the idea to mind to put together a group of Village icons from various American social groups." (Note that they started with the Indian costume.) They say nothing, though, about why they selected the other iconic figures. Curiouser and curiouser.

One layer more, though: the Village People fansite contains a link to photos of fans dressing up as the band. Now, not only are we playing Indian, but we're playing musicians who are playing Indian. What do we do with that?

Confronting a Prejudiced Dickens

2010-01-11T17:58:00.005-05:00

In his 1851 essay “The Noble Savage” published in Household Words, Charles Dickens scathingly reacts against the art of painter George Caitlin and others (http://www.readbookonline.net/readOnLine/2529/). Perhaps Dickens’s anti-American writing in American Notes should have in some degree prepared me, but I have to admit I was surprised by the depths of Dickens’s ire. Unlike his portraits of uncouth white Americans who are over-fond of spittoons, this essay offers no humor to off-set its bitterness.

Dickens is blatantly and unapologetically racist, and as deeply as I admire his novels, I have no desire to apologize on his behalf. Dickens got this one wrong. We can see just how narrow his thinking is when he tries to use specific examples to back his views. He lumps African and American Indian cultures together, blurring not only tribal differences but the distinction between two wholly different continents.

What is more interesting to me is the basis of his complaint. He rails against what he sees as a false portrait of “nobility” in “savage” races, which makes me want to question his definitions of both terms. Dickens seems to attribute nobility to European culture exclusively because of its laws, customs, and manners—traits he feels that Native Americans and Africans lacked.

Dickens opens the essay with this paragraph:

TO come to the point at once, I beg to say that I have not the least belief in the Noble Savage. I consider him a prodigious nuisance, and an enormous superstition. His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale face, wholly fail to reconcile me to him. I don't care what he calls me. I call him a savage, and I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth. I think a mere gent (which I take to be the lowest form of civilisation) better than a howling, whistling, clucking, stamping, jumping, tearing savage. It is all one to me, whether he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees through the lobes of his ears, or bird's feathers in his head; whether he flattens his hair between two boards, or spreads his nose over the breadth of his face, or drags his lower lip down by great weights, or blackens his teeth, or knocks them out, or paints one cheek red and the other blue, or tattoos himself, or oils himself, or rubs his body with fat, or crimps it with knives. Yielding to whichsoever of these agreeable eccentricities, he is a savage - cruel, false, thievish, murderous; addicted more or less to grease, entrails, and beastly customs; a wild animal with the questionable gift of boasting; a conceited, tiresome, bloodthirsty, monotonous humbug.

His final sentence offers a catalogue of his discontents, centering mainly on his discomfort with the difference in customs. I almost laugh at some of the charges he levels, which mainly boil down to irritations over language use (“His calling rum fire-water, and me a pale face, wholly fail to reconcile me to him”—surely this is more of a translation issue than an intentional slight on the speaker’s behalf) and objections to their fashion-sense (“he sticks a fish-bone through his visage, or bits of trees through the lobes of his ears,” etc)—until I remember the net result of these prejudicial statements: hatred and the perpetuation of racial prejudice.

Of course, the customs he attributes to Native Americans show his ignorance and the same tendency towards caricature rather than characterization that many readers complain about in his novels. It is unfortunate that Sioux writer Zitkala Sa would not publish her memoirs for another fifty years. Her accounts of her childhood with its emphasis on manners (serving coffee to visitors, for example—see IV “The Coffee-Making” in Impressions of an Indian Childhood, 1900) and her mother’s insistence that her daughter not “intrude herself upon others” (“My Mother,” Impressions) seem like precisely the type of traits Dickens valued in his own heroines.

Perhaps what it most interesting, however, is Dickens’s failure to recognize his own incivility. He levels the charge that Native Americans are “murderous” only sentences after he himself has advocated the annihilation all non-European Native American and African cultures, writing, “I call a savage a something highly desirable to be civilised off the face of the earth.” True, he hasn’t called for genocide per se. He wants them civilized away rather than killed, by which I take it that he would have supported the kind of Indian boarding schools in which Sa and many of her contemporaries found themselves. Yet his attitude here is hateful, and I can’t help but feel the link between it and the attitudes of the murderous white soldiers about which George Caitlin had written (quoted in Helen Hunt Jackson’s Chapter IV “The Poncas” in Century of Dishonor).

I’d like to believe that Dickens would have rethought his over-simplified notions that European = civilized = morally good and that non-European = savage = morally corrupt if he had read the accounts of broken treaties and the murder of American Indian women and children by US citizens and soldiers, but I doubt this for two reasons: 1) Dickens never would acknowledge that an Englishmen was capable of cannibalism after it came to light that the members of the failed Franklin Expedition had been reduced to this extreme, and 2) his portrait of Americans in American Notes gives me some doubts as to whether he would qualify Americans as civilized or savage.

Dickens over-simplified defamation of Native American and African tribes seems largely prompted by what he saw as the over-simplified praise of the same people, evidenced in Caitlin’s portraits and Pope’s famous passage in “Essay on Man”:

Lo, the poor Indian! whose untutor'd mind
Sees God in clouds, or hears him in the wind;
His soul proud Science never taught to stray
Far as the solar walk or milky way;
Yet simple Nature to his hope has giv'n,
Behind the cloud-topp'd hill, a humbler heav'n;
Some safer world in depth of woods embrac'd,
Some happier island in the wat'ry waste,
Where slaves once more their native land behold,
No fiends torment, no Christians thirst for gold!
To be, contents his natural desire;
He asks no angel's wing, no seraph's fire:
But thinks, admitted to that equal sky,
His faithful dog shall bear him company.

But by embracing the extreme opposing opinion, Dickens ultimately commits the same fault of failing to see the complexity of each individual human’s character. How sad, really, that a writer famous for the world of characters he invented was so tragically limited in imagination when it came to recognizing the complications and contradictions of the diverse array of people that made up each side of his binary.

This blog is about to become the wild west

2010-01-01T09:05:00.003-05:00

A quick heads up--
This semester, I'll be teaching a theme-based composition course entitled "Cowboys and Indians: Inventing America's Wild West." I will be asking my students to create reading blogs to comment upon their readings, and because I believe that a professor should never assign work s/he is unwilling to do, I'll be chronicling my own thoughts and impressions of course readings here.

Fistful

2009-07-26T21:37:00.004-04:00

I got a piece of really great news the other day: I was asked permission for "Fistful," a poem I published in Ninth Letter a few years back, to be re-printed in the latest forth-coming edition of Janet Burroway's Imaginative Writing. It's both flattering and humbling. Mainly, it reminds me that I need to get busy again with my own writing.

I thought I'd put the poem up, in case anyone's curious.

Fistful

"The dead can be very useful sometimes."
-Clint Eastwood, A Fistful of Dollars

Sometimes, it's all about how you wear your poncho,
or the layering of dust on your boots.

or how you sit a bucking mule
while five men scoff from a high-barred gate.

Where words unhinge from speaking mouths,
it's useful to be the man with no name
or the dark-eyed woman, clamped in a locket that laments its own opening.

Engineer the corpses,
and the dead are only sleeping,
secrets ever-burning on their cold parched lips.

All the Winchesters, all the Remingtons,
all the six guns unholstered in this border town
are not enough to kill the dead;
their stories hide in the sheepskin vests
of the nameless living.