BLOG LIFE

I’ve been offline for a week.  Here I am again.  I resurrected these glasses from the past because the new fashionable small lenses are bad for computer work.  In the summer I am a ruddy person as you can see.  And skeptical.  And aging.   A little goofy.

You might know that I have a double blog-life and that while I quit this one for a while, the other life went on behind the scenes with Tim Barrus.  “Prairie Mary” attracts readers who want to know about romantic and historical subjects: landscape, Blackfeet, Western artists and authors, small towns, geology, and so on.   They buy into the “regional” scene, find it appealing and manageable, and are happy to think about big frogs in a small pond.  For a while Montana was awash with this sort of writer, but now they’ve mostly moved to Portland.  There are two local bloggers I follow:  Kari Dell who works in Cut Bank  http://montanaforreal.blogspot.com/  and Lisa Schmidt who ranches in Conrad http://www.a-land-of-grass-ranch.com/category/musings-from-ranch   Kari comes from a rodeo family (I taught with her father) and Lisa raises sheep.  They are funny, intelligent, young, and very much focused on what they’re doing.  I’m nothing like them at all.

The other life is international and shared with Tim and his “guyz.”  It’s not about sex.  It’s about human society and how some parts prey on the other parts and how (whether) we can help each other survive.  This other life is as much video and still photography as print.  I don’t do much with a camera -- I’m a print shepherd.

I am so deeply ambivalent about publishing.  On the one hand e-publishing is exciting and promising and we’re really UP for it.  But it hasn’t really gelled yet and won’t without a universal format consensus that works on every device.   I see ominous signs like the beginning of infrastructure failure and national/corporate censoring.  Maybe taxation. There are times when I think that the reason someone in the Congo appears to be reading my blog (click on the map with red dots down low on the right hand column to get the particulars) is that my computer has been hijacked and has a life of its own.  (Now and then I get lists of Somali pirate seized ships that have been returned ??!!  I don’t know where they come from and can’t get rid of them -- the emails, not the pirates, though them, too.)

It’s so hard to give up the wonderful fantasy that “publishing” is an honorific event that can justify a life.  Even knowing that it probably “means” something meaningless.   At rock bottom it is only the manufacturing of objects with your words in them, promoted enough to make some money -- less and less of it for the writer. Once read, either discarded or stored. 

Fame based on a publisher’s advertising promotion means nothing.  Fame based on touching hearts doesn’t have to be conveyed in a bound paper book.  Promotion that has somehow become the responsibility of the writer rather than the publisher strikes me as rot.  Once sneering arrogantly at vanity publishing, now the publishers themselves are forcing writers into it.  Intelligent criticism and analysis of writing has fled from the newspapers to untraced locations.

I appreciated the time “off” but didn’t spend much of it “catching up.”  I did work on my two dozen two-inch three-ring-binders containing conversation with Tim over the past four years.  It has been more than the equivalent of a university education.  I feel compelled to get it organized and distilled, maybe into the hands of others.  It’s an archive that cries out for sharing.  So many need this thinking. 

It helps that “Bronze Inside and Out” is appreciated by Brian Rusted, a professor at the University of Calgary with a Ph.D. in performance arts from Northwestern University, my own undergrad alma mater.  He sees that I was trying to look at Bob Scriver’s work through the actual creation of it -- not the subject matter or how much it’s worth in dollars.  My approach to my Tim Barrus archive is likewise through the creation of it and the creation of his extraordinary life.  Tim’s focus is justice, social prophesy, living at the edge.

Mostly I resist dichotomies but some distinctions are useful so, in the spirit of means versus ends, I will use that very binary.  What means do I have?  What ends am I after?  My means are blogging -- obviously -- backed up with a specific kind of education (pastoral/prophetic/mythic).  My end is . . .   Well, the reason I didn’t stick in the ministry (this is my REAL reason and I’m being honest) is that it turned out that the “ends” of most ministers are to make money and achieve high status.  I didn’t care about those two things, though they are also the goals of many writers.

One “end” is a certain sensory life which I have here on the prairie.  The weather, crazy as it is, suits me.  The people leave me alone -- I knew their grandparents.  Low income is not a handicap.  I can keep cats.  If the internet disappeared (it nearly did when my computer died) I would be crippled but the internet is a means to the end, a kind of publishing, a speaking to the world at large.  Preaching, if you take an exceptionally broad view.

Second, I focus on a few causes:  Blackfeet, high prairie environment, Tim Barrus in the broad sense (his work).   (I’ve discarded other causes, like animal control, teaching English, ministry.) I want to keep alive the powerful access to ideas given to me by education.  That is, causes are occasions for me to focus and organize, mustering up a net of thought about them that relates to my own belief and value system.  When I was formally preaching, people paid very close attention.  I could see that they were.  Afterwards they had nothing to say.  When I asked them, they said they were still thinking about it.  My blogging seems to work the same.  I get few comments.

But I do make friends, find lost relatives, get access to materials, and so on.  The aspect most like “publishing” is that I get responses to things I wrote years ago.  Writing persists as much online as it would if it were a library book, maybe more, considering the number of used books I buy for literal pennies that turn out to have been culled from libraries.

I formed a little email group of women pretty much like me: age, education, interests.  I’m very fond of them, they came to the rescue when my computer crashed, and we visit back and forth, but some do not relate to this blog.  They don’t have time.  They don’t like risk.  My true peer group seems to be sort of edgy middle-aged men with big questions about life and human identity.  More like Tim Barrus.   Not gay, but then he's not either. 

Lately I find myself sitting, staring.  I never seem to get enough sleep and my dreams are crowded.  Through experience I know I’m working on issues at a deep subconscious level that will probably surface in this blog.  But at least for the rest of the summer, I’m going to stick to a M-W-F-Sunday pattern of posting.

DISGUSTING!

Martha Nussbaum is suddenly the legal/religious thinker du jour, a writer of such fearlessness and logical clarity that she takes on the really impossible subjects without flinching.  At the moment Gerald Fetz on the Montana Humanities Roundtable is trying to get a reading discussion going, based on her book called “Not for Profit.”  The subject is  really why we are discarding the arts/humanities, but so far everyone is mostly praising each other and the humanities.  Kim Anderson has doubts but is not expressing them yet.

I’m reading Nussbaum's “From Disgust to Humanities: Sexual Orientation and Constitutional Law.”  She’s a very clear writer, but it’s probably easier to get a sense of her thought by watching YouTube videos of her.  This book is part of a series from Oxford University Press and she was asked to write it.  Her ideas of disgust come in large part from thinking about untouchables in India, who were originally “untouchable” because they handled excrement and the dead, among other “lowly” and repetitious jobs.  Now that even much of India has proper plumbing, the names identified in the public mind as “untouchables” remain a stigma.  There is even more disapproval of people who change their names.

The basic idea is that considering the nature of some people to be “disgusting” is a way of controlling them, keeping them in their place.  Though it seems as though the objectionable qualities are objective descriptions, justified in the public mind by associating them with nastiness like excrement, stink, bugs, ooze, slime, disease  (J.K. Rowling’s “mud people”) , it often becomes obvious that calling them disgusting is a prelude to treating them like animals, excluding them, beating up on them, defunding them, and -- in the most extreme -- herding them into the prison camps and gas chambers of the Holocaust.  Retarded and otherwise disabled or crippled people, gypsies, gays, Jews, dissidents, and so on were all considered “disgusting” and therefore their extermination could be called “cleansing.”

My own most vivid witness has been to the stigmatizing of Native Americans and part of the counter-battle has been getting tribal children to give up their internalized self-definition of “disgusting.”  Missionaries of various kinds used this to force change in the lives of tribal people.  They combined the “cleansing” idea of baptism with the “cleansing” of eternal fire in the Afterlife and linked two words into a phrase I still hear:  “dirty Indians.”  The push-back, both by Indians themselves and by guilt-stricken idealists (mostly back East), was to make them so ethereally noble that they were hardly physical, defined as spiritual beings with connections to Another World.  

In the practical world, a stigmatized person is thought to deserve punishment for the original sin of being dark-skinned or poor.  A couple of decades ago an enrolled Blackfeet drunk (oh, disgusting!) pestered around a bar until the bar owner simply shot him dead.  The tribal people started out being indignant but pretty soon they drifted back to the bar, saying that the drunk asked for it with his disgusting behavior.  Times have changed.  Not long ago three brothers who liked violence picked out what they thought was a likely victim in the parking lot of a bar at quitting time: a drunk Indian ranch hand.  But in the middle of their melee, another Indian -- a tribal council member and his wife -- tried to stop it, so the fun-lovers turned their fists and boots on them.  The interveners  were not powerless.  They knew how to use the law.  The brothers are serving jail time.  But even the tribal council member was accused of the disgusting practice of hanging around in a bar until closing time.

Following the example of blacks who resent the n-word and find that forbidding it is a powerful weapon in resisting disgust, some years ago the word “squaw” was fingered as a vehicle of disgust.  The associations with the word “squaw” had come to be pejorative: a squat, dark, old, dirty, possibly infected woman with no powerful husband who could legitimately be used by men as convenient and then discarded or killed.  Evidence is in the newspapers and police dossiers across both the United States and Canada.  (I suspect in Mexico as well.)  “Squaw” is considered by some to be equivalent to “whore”, not least because poverty and social disorder (as is often seen on reservations) is one source of sex workers.  Some of them have learned to be dangerous themselves.

Respectable Indian women who know how to use the system came to the conclusion that eliminating the epithet “squaw” -- which is scattered over all the maps of the continent as thickly as the words “willow,” “beaver” and “deer” -- would get rid of the stigma.  It did get rid of a lot of old maps and a lot of money necessary to rename everything on new maps.  This deed was done in part because of the conviction that “squaw” meant “cunt,” which is a forbidden dirty, slimy, disgusting word.  (Scholarship showed that “squaw” did NOT mean sexual parts but rather gender, which is as much a social role as an anatomical part.  A hard distinction to grasp.)  And this took the conversation to the familiar white man conviction that women in general are basically disgusting.  

Compare other epithets for Indian people:  “buck” or “papoose.”  Papoose is close to the European ‘puppet” or doll, making an Indian child less of a real human family member.  (Compare "pickaninny.")  “Buck” has implications of sexual potency and physical strength.  Those word-inventing men (because they wrote) boasted, half-sheepish/half-proud, “when I was a young buck,” meaning “when I got into fights, had adventures, and prowled for women.”  Like a dark-skinned man.  “Before I became civilized.”  Unlike that Indian buck idling on the porch.

Today’s civilized people do not use such words.  They come from hierarchal assumptions based on the European empires, particularly the English, who used stigma to control their subject countries.  But contemporary Native American people must still emphasize their professional, educated, and meticulously conventional qualities in order to get respect.  Even the school children respond to the advertising-driven obsession with cleanliness, not smelling, “proper” clothes and other appearance markers that are meant to prevent disgust.

But then a curious wave of resistance is always in such situations, used by those who either make victimhood into an entitlement or those who embrace the disgustingness with slogans, markers of the ghetto, flaunting sexuality of every kind, and shouting words used as markers, not just of filthiness but also of sex and evil.  

It is so powerful a kind of terrorism that it can drive the missionary-minded, empire-seeking, power-invested, domination-obsessed into apoplectic violence.  The law must deal with it constantly.  Literature and art address it everywhere.  But the academic “humanities” people are afraid to, which is why they’ve become irrelevant.  Except that they are now part of the problem, defining every nonconformity as “disgusting.”  Or to use their phrase, “so ugly.”

SCHOOLS OF WRITING ARE LIKE SCHOOLS OF FISH

Schools of writing are like schools of fish.  The authors are all pretty similar, they group up and move as one, and if you like that kind of fish, you should look for the school.  I could put in a quip about bottom-feeders or flying fish here, but I’ll refrain.  This time.

In the last few weeks in several literary contexts there have been “apples and oranges” arguments about schools of writing.  One was a small scale kafuffle within the “school” of Western writing (where they argue about things like regionalism and authenticity -- exemplified by the blog of the Western Literature Association) but it was actually kicked off by a fellow who scoffed at Cormac McCarthy, saying Larry McMurtry was far more Western and historically accurate.  By the time the “lit gang” got through with this innocent, he knew what “Southern Gothic” was all about and that it was a lot more vicious than Blue Duck, if not quite as Western.  http://www.thedailybeast.com/blogs-and-stories/2010-11-10/cormac-mccarthy-vs-larry-mcmurtry-best-western-novelist/

More recently and on a more elevated level, two schools of Fine Writing have run athwart each other.  Chad Harbach, writing in Slate http://www.slate.com/toolbar.aspx?action=print&id=2275733 on Nov. 26  did an intriguing job of describing how each works.  If you want to be a starving genius writing against the culture in a freezing garret, you will probably want to hasten to Manhattan where the assumption has been that publishers have a discerning eye, ably assisted by wise editors, who assured big advances.   For the initiated (i.e. “wised up”) his illusion went into the corporate conglomerate soup, but many casual readers out there still believe it and depend on advertising to reveal quality.  There are six “heritage” publishers left.  They tend to look longingly at Hollywood with its blockbusters and sexy women.  It’s not literary merit that counts so much as the film options.

If you would like to have a lower profile but a salary and heated office, get an MFA, even in poetry.  Invented and sustained by Writers’ Workshops, notably the one at the University of Iowa or the one in Berzerkley that was founded by the quite sane Wallace Stegner, these programs are an industry.   The money has gone out of the Manhattan “school,” rather the way it has gone out of cod fishing, but those with boats have resourcefully migrated to university campuses, because the way to make money now is “farm fishing” -- hatcheries.  There aren’t enough readers and far too many writers, so instead of selling books, sell writing courses, in the way that people who get rich in gold rushes are not the miners but those who sell meat.   It’s all a matter of ecology, which is really just another way of looking at economics.  There are more than 800 formal MFA programs and in Harbach’s opinion, it’s an easy degree.  I wonder how easy they are to teach if you’re serious about it.

Outsiders think of Montana writing as all one thing, but in fact we have the same split plus more.  The academics, as elsewhere, divide between the MFA’s who write and teach writing and Ph.D.’s  who actually teach English courses.  The geniuses more dramatically split between the Hollywood “sailfish” (Tom McGuane and cohort) or a solitary like Peter Bowen, scribbling away as he babysits ranches for sympathetic rich women.  Or whatever it is he does to survive.  Both types are outside the experience of most Montana folks, who appreciate nice solid middle-class people, even if they drink a little too much.

It took me a while to realize that the Montana book scene, like the Montana Western Art scene, is essentially bourgeois.  Both are based in the Fifties genre we knew and loved at Saturday matinees and then on television (which persists on a website like http://www.ropeandwire.com)  but some have responded to demographic pressures to add sex and violence equivalent to what we see on television.  (The news is worse than the programs.)  Perhaps this is what has led us to believe that bad things are more “real” than good things and “exposees” are more accurate than regular news and to therefore impose those values on every narrative.

A gentler influence on the Western has been music and the philosophy of place.   http://www.ofthewest.net/    Bourgeois standards require enough safety and order for commerce to proceed: they are essentially capitalist and therefore want books that SELL, which are mostly those that fit the assumptions of the buyers.  Humanities projects are meant to keep the peace, so we can dress up and go out.  Identity, genre, schools -- they all must become platforms for sales.  Awards, exhibits, discussions, festivals.  The bourgeois need the Good Housekeeping Seal of Approval.

But there’s also a kind of counter movement that wants something gothic or punk or realitee or whatever it is that the bourgeois try to shut out.  Horror.  One wing opposes the iconoclastic Leslie Feidler (exemplified by Dirck Van Sickle’s “Montana Gothic”) to the Richard Hugo/William Kittredge school of pastoral familiarity.  But that creates a mirror image, not an innovation.

Another pairing is between those who feel themselves to be “native” Montanans (though they have Euro DNA) and who claim the place by “knowing” it, in contrast to those who come carrying a dream of what they think life ought to be, somehow persuaded that they can find it or make it here.  I used to think someone should write a novel about the many divorced women who brought their alimony to Missoula and started a small business which soon bankrupted them.  I saw the pattern over and over.  They rarely left, but went quietly on with stripped lives.  A few became writers. (Blunt, Blew)  Then there is the puzzle of Ivan Doig or Sherman Alexie who left their home ground as soon as they could in order to live the good life in Seattle, but found the only thing anyone would buy books about was fantasy about their original homes.

Doig describes the Montana prairie as a drumhead.  Maybe it’s a threshing floor, but the idea of threshing schools of fish is too ridiculous to be considered.  Still, these crowds of writers must be sorted and described somehow or how could we think about them at all?  The universities used to have that task, but now that the writers are on the faculty and have their ecological niche to defend, many others are at sea, unanchored, solitary.  But if you know how to catch them, those wild trout, it will be extraordinary.   Try fly-fishing the Internet.  Avoid nets and weirs.