BOOKS -- WHAT ABOUT 'EM?

Famous bookstore in Paris

Mike Shatzkin is a book dealer and so was his father before him.  In those days there were “books” which were “published” and “distributed” to “book stores”.  They were reviewed by “book reviewers” and “promoted” according the kind of books they were.  Promoters might be something broad like “Book of the Month Club” which also distributed, or something narrow like a trade group that needed handbooks for best practices.

All these parts of getting books out there were industrial and capital-based, expansions of Gutenberg’s printing press, still using ink and paper just like Benjamin Franklin.  The only advance was power-cranked presses.  If I could insert an audible voice here, it would be the big impressive announcement that begins movies with “In a world where. . .”  Where what?  Everything is X’s and O’s, even hugs and kisses.  We are all molecule synergies supported by the atomic nature of the cosmos, spiraling ever into more complexity.  A hundred people in a hundred locations on the planet can be brought together in one big song, so long as everyone has the sheet music and the techie stuff is compatible. 

Cell phone and t-shirt entrepreneur

This means that terrorists in Africa are about to be undone by moms with cell phones in their apron pockets.  People who had thought they were trapped will look at the images of Times Square and it will be as though we were finally discovering life on Mars.  For them, anyway.  There IS some other life in some other place.  ISIS may end up presiding over a depopulated caliphate.

Most people have not been paying attention to is content.  Where is the content coming from?  We’ve been so impressed by the big clanking machines, from the first frontier hand printers and boxes of fonts to the massive newspaper series printers, we haven’t thought much about how the times and possibilities affect what’s being printed.  Not all of us want to read romances about falling in love and getting married, which fewer people actually do.

In the beginning books were hand-printed, hand-assembled, hand-bound.  This was expensive.  Rich people could afford them.  Church officials.  Special gifts.  Pretty soon there’s a political connection.  Inevitably, whatever is taboo, sinful, prosecutably secret, really dangerous, is ripe for making into a book that can be tucked away.  As an object it can become jeweled, gilded, with a silk and gilt book mark.

One of Norman Rockwell's neighbors

Or the binding might be sentimental.  I have a copy of Walt Whitman’s “Leaves of Grass” with a binding that looks like woven green grass.  Bob Scriver made presentation copies of “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains,” which had a slip-case with a shallow box built onto the front and in each box was a stalk of sage he had picked himself.  But his buyers weren’t always educated enough to understand.  Several people who have inherited this book have called me up, puzzled about what it was.  They had thrown the “weed” away.

Which makes the point that any book, no matter how valuable it is, needs a knowledgeable appreciator.  Today Barrus’ handmade erotic poetry books stapled together with wallpaper bindings, are worth hundreds of dollars to collectors.  If you were one of those who bought them from the author on the SF waterfront in the days before HIV, you don’t just have a marker of one person, but a memory of a brief but golden time, a climax culture.  You don’t have to be gay anymore than you have to be tribal to understand what that brief brilliance means.  It was like the Left Bank of Paris, but bigger.  A “hotbed” in several senses.

Um, might be a cold frame.

The real value, of course, is in the contents, but today’s reader is not always capable of seeing the qualities that make thought valuable.  They think real means “actual” and go off on witch hunts, junior G-men journalists, looking for documentation -- which is pretty easy to fake or misinterpret.  

Or they have a state university undergrad’s grasp of French Algerian structuralism and go around talking about Foucault and Derrida as if they understood.  That stream of thought is as hard to figure out as Process Theology.  It IS hard to grasp, an interpretation of Christianity through quantum physics, but it did well enough to kick off “Physics for Poets” and so on.  You can leave these books around for visitors to be impressed.  They don’t change your life.

"Sex" by Madonna

Because books as objects are markers for the arrogant, implying that they have enough money to buy expensive things, that they have enough education to read difficult books, and maybe even that they are “in,” part of the social group that knows what’s important.  Maybe even banned because of being daring.  In some crowds, one could leave a copy of Madonna’s photo book called “Sex” on one’s coffee table.  You might want to put something under it to protect the surface, since it was metal with the title stamped into it.

A whole mystique, derived from the same sources as “Downton Abbey,” (the British class system) has infused books with a dusty romantic security/captivity fantasy esp. appealing to young women.  Over the centuries many middle-class paintings show pretty girls in upscale clothes reading books.  This pleasing image was felt as a loss when the trendier and more snobbish way to get one’s stories was through a tablet.  Of course, the problem of protecting fancy and expensive clothes was eliminated when everyone under thirty was wearing sweats anyway.

The advantage to reading ebooks is that there’s no cover to hide while you read on the commuter train.  But that’s kind of the problem, too.  Books are like dogs and children, conversation starters.  Another convenience is converting print to spoken words, so you can “read” while doing some kinds of work.  Even in a monastery of the Medieval times, a lector read aloud from an improving book while the monks ate.  Audible books are classier than  the radio and you get to pick the story.  On the “iPods” you don’t even have to accommodate a lot of slippery plastic containers.

Enlightenment gets to Denmark

Blah, blah, blah.  The obvious.  But content is not always obvious and some people still buy for content.  Shatzkin and company have not figured this out and bluntly say so.  Ideas are a lot more slippery than media kinds.  My last night’s movie was “A Royal Affair,” Danish: “En kongelig affære”) is a 2012 historical drama film. To the informed, it is a depiction of how sweeping philosophical ideas -- esp those of Rousseau -- affected Denmark in the 18^th century, so that it went from being a church-dominated feudal society to the present tolerant and progressive nation.  The plot is about lovers, who connect through books.  Why were those people (the queen and the king’s physician) ready and hungry for books that had to be kept hidden? 

Shatzkin’s strength is fearless analysis of the actual process that used to work with books.  Take American Indians -- why are there so few books of any sort about their modern lives?  Is it because there is no capital in the hands of people who can finance publishing?  But ebooks don’t cost much to publish.  Is it because books of that sort are still on paper and sold in “book stores” of which there are none on reservations?  But that hasn’t slowed down music.  Why doesn’t literature follow music onto tablets or as audible stories?  Is it lack of promotion?  But word-of-mouth is the tried-and-true means of popularity.

Three Blackfeet Readers in the early days

Why do “Laughing Boy” or “The Way to Rainy Mountain” take off and win major prizes?  One was white-written and the other was Indian-written.  What makes Jim Welch such a favorite?  Why do so many whites want to write about Indians but so few Indians do the same?  Is getting off the “rez” of predictability too dangerous?  

Personally, I think it’s just that American Indians don’t have that British Empire worship of the class status of books.  People who don’t read don’t write.  Now that books aren’t physical anymore and the XO revolution has removed print anyway but added music and image, there may be more American Indian books than we think -- but they’re on YouTube, Vimeo, Tumblr, and so on.  This is what publishing is today.  Not everyone is “getting” what they are saying.  They are missing the revolution.

MY OWN LIBRARY

The main reason I have a house is to shelter my books and the main reason I bought THIS house is that it has one long wall I could put bookshelves on.  In fact, there are bookshelves on every wall in the main room.  Over the years, since I moved a lot, I went to a module concept of frames and shelves.  The shelves are all as long as a 1”X 12” pine board can be without sagging and the frames are 7’ 6” tall which is the height of most modern apartment ceilings.  This house has an 8’ ceiling so my eventual intention is to fill in that top space.  In the meantime it’s a spider penthouse.

The section above is my Indian books, mainly Blackfeet.  I thought that instead of posting another bibliography, I would pretend you had come to visit and we could pull books down to look at them.  If my camera will cooperate, I know that there are blog people out there who love to look at bookshelves and piles of books.  The ones that are sideways are that way because I’ve had them down for reference recently.  (The Navajo rug is a valued gift from a valued friend.)

You’ll see that I ignore the US/Canada border, Homeland Security be damned.  And I value ALL the Hungry Wolf books from the very beginning -- including the homemade stapled ones and the ones that Beverly wrote by herself.  My four Hungry Wolf archive books and some others are on a separate “tall” shelf.  I do not scoff at Doug Gold’s “A Schoolmaster Among the Blackfeet Indians” -- I just note he was embedded in his times, which were close enough that his daughter lives in Valier just down the street a ways.  I’m an includer.

I had “Mean Spirit” down not long ago because it is about the oil boom in Oklahoma that set off waves of murder that made the modern jogger murder look incidental.  The Oklahoma murders were systematic marriages by predatory whites (sometimes Indians) to eventual inheritors of oil fortunes and then the sly destruction of all intervening inheritors.  The first comparable murder here has got to be Marie Heavyrunner.  A big check came to Marie -- then she disappeared only to be found months later under her own house.  The murderer has been tried and incarcerated.  The fate of the check and estate was not investigated -- at least not the last I heard.  

“Red, White and Black” was helping me figure out how to write an entry about NA demographics for an encyclopedia being compiled.  No one wanted to take on what they thought would be a boring matter of graphs and numbers, but the subject is revealing and dynamic -- a key to a lot of things.  Huxley’s classic “Doors of Perception” was down because I was writing about “entheogens” -- spiritual experience enabled by drugs -- for my manuscript about liturgy:  “The Bone Chalice.”  I include analysis of Blackfeet ceremonies.  They didn’t use substances so much as meditation, fasting, thirst, high exertion or self-torture, so I didn’t spend much time on Huxley.

I take down the two studies of GLBTX customs among the original NA tribes, put them back up, then end up pulling them down again.  “The Spirit and the Flesh: Sexual Diversity in American Indian Culture” by Walter L Williams is well-known and often used for reference.  “Two-Spirit People: Native American Gender, Identity, Sexuality and Spirituality” is an anthology of essays.  Mostly I take them down when I have visitors with questions.  They are a little shy, since I am straight.  They are reassured when they see “The Fancy Dancer” by Patricia Nell Warren, a Montana writer shunned by the “nice” Montana literati.  But I have to make sure they don’t leave with my copy because this book about a priest and a motorcyclist (a leatherman) is PASSIONATELY loved by the people who found it at the right stage of their lives.  I gave her other novels, equally powerful, to a man who will loan them around the state where they’ll do some good.  They’re not about Indians, just gay young men.

You’ll see some spiral bound “books” and binders.  For me they work better than folders in file cabinets where pages can slip out.  I’ve learned to download some manuscripts and then get them bound at a business supply big box store.  I use a lot of clear sleeves in the binders.  For Indian materials, esp. contemporary issues from mags and newspapers, this is a necessity.  It’s not that there aren’t writers out there creating books, it’s that the publishers are so short-sighted, academic presses included, that they won’t fund what they think won’t reflect well on them.  I’ve put my own Blackfeet books on www.lulu.com/prairiemary/  and set some of them so you can download pdf’s for free.

I hope I’m answering the two questions I’m asked most about my books.  The first is,  “Have you read all these books?”   The second is “If you have read these books, why do you keep them?”  These people are usually reading in what has come to be called an “immersive” way.  They read for story, to escape into another world, to “become” other people.  Many of them read three to five books a week, will repeat-read a book they really like, and hunt for books by the same writers.  They like fiction, biography, accounts of disasters.  This is where all the ebook action is.  They're often library users who don't buy or keep books.

This kind of book stream was the goal of many NA writers writing during the American Indian Literary Renaissance of the Seventies:  Welch, Erdrich, and Alexie managed to pul it off, though probably not so well as Hillerman.  The whites who write about Indians, immersively playing into the Wannabe Tribe and what they stereotypically want, are the ones who really cash in. 

There are books on my shelf that I really dislike, though I’d be a fool to point them out to you.  They tend to be highly political in a romantic way -- that is, the point of view that thinks the world should be forced into an ideal, according to the plan THEY want.  Very self-righteous, entitled, indignant, and naive.  I am NOT talking about Vine Deloria, Jr. or even Ward Churchill.  But I don't mind saying that Richard Lancaster was a monster who should have been nailed.

When I buy NA books, I’m mostly after theory and history.  I don’t care whether or not they are written by Indians, though it’s great when they’re by friends.  I wish there were more overviews like “Smoke Signals,” a terrific sampling of the outstanding writers of the Renaissnce period.  I wish Carter Revard were better known.  Leslie Marmon Silko did some crucial work, still relevant in PTSD circles.  Ted Bennema is currently recovering invaluable material about the ecology of Plains tribes.  Hugh Dempsey seems to penetrate the glass wall at the border between Canada and the US, thank goodness.  In fact, one of the best things about focusing on Blackfeet is that it is ecologically based rather than nationally.  Nations are frail containers. 

Nothing is more personal than one’s books.  No one should try to tell you what you want or how to read.  The problem, as always, is discovery -- what’s out there?  The best moment is finding a book that was totally unexpected but hits you dead center.  I’m finding they are most often used books.  Insert song:  “The sadder but wiser book’s the book for me . . .”  You remember, "Music Man?"