WHAT CLASS IS "WEST WING"

"The P.M.C. are people whose economic and social status is based largely on education rather than capital ownership: teachers, managers, lawyers, doctors, and culture workers of various kinds. These professionals make up about twenty per cent of the country’s population."

You'll notice that this quick list doesn't include legislators.  I don't know what class they are in.  They ought to be educated managers and not just lawyers, but they are mainly money-raisers.  Some of them are ignorant, dependent on their staffs, leashed by big corporations and media.  In the beginning they were land-owners.  Everything is about assets, territory, ownership, and what the rules say.  The "rules" are more like parliamentary procedure than moral principles.  In short, legislators are a kind of capitalist owners who overlap with the people who are so wealthy that they have become self-perpetuating institutions.

In the evenings I've been marathoning "The West Wing" which is about the ivy-league educated managers just below the President.  One of the interesting dynamics is the "assistants" who are female and assist the men who assist the president.  The scripts move the wisdom and strength back and forth between the two.  In addition there are two very strong men, presidential advisors, who are almost co-presidents.  The president himself is very much idealized, NOTHING like Trump.  

It is said that this show tries to be at least believable if not realistic, that it is an echo of the Clinton Administration, at least the face of it.  NOT Bush, NOT Obama.  The question of bringing back a show that is like the Clinton Administration is ridiculous.  Sheen's version of the president is not a hound. We would not tolerate that now.  Not even if the hound were JFK.

The characters, as written, are self-conscious about their status but never quite believe that there are people who are very different: they never think of themselves as privileged financially or socially.  "Different drummer" doesn't cover it.  Some characters are a bit problematic.  Virtue signalling gets a little bent when dealing with "Charlie," the president's young Black "body man."  They're all so young, so looking for love, so bleached and shaven.  No one is funky.  Even if they sleep in the office, all they need for renewal is a clean shirt.

This essay is particularly thought provoking because it takes on the impact of casting, esp. in the case of the president.  To cast a minority or a negative character will totally change the show.  (The deaths of the actual actors also changed the plot line.  Few episodes were as grand as the cathedral memorial for the President's secretary.  (The real actress died of cancer rather than a car crash.) And yet it challenges religion in an upper middle class way.

https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-real-reason-the-west-_b_14286

Even this far out of the actual time of the show, the episodes addressed classic enough situations for them to be almost eerie in terms of what's happening with Trump right now.  They never thought of a pandemic on our scale -- it was inconceivable at that time, in particular for the Professional Managerial classes who thought up this series pre-globalization.  All the characters, even Charlie, are members or aspirants to this class.  However, the "middle class" is actually a very broad "continent" and people work hard to move up in it.  The highest class seem to be mostly born into money, inheriting from resource exploitation, faking college through "heritage".

Another level of watching drama rests on the technique of the actors and the shaping of their material, though they must share with directors.  This paragraph is from Wikipedia's Aaron Sorkin entry.

"Sorkin's trademark rapid-fire dialogue and extended monologues are complemented, in television, by frequent collaborator Thomas Schlamme's characteristic directing technique called the "walk and talk". These sequences consist of single tracking shots of long duration involving multiple characters engaging in conversation as they move through the set; characters enter and exit the conversation as the shot continues without any cuts."

It would be interesting to know who wrote this whole entry since it has a distinct point of view.  The characters have few flaws except for drugs and smoking, which are also Sorkin's problems.  John Spencer, "Leo", was also alcoholic but came from down lower in terms of class.  His parents were blue collar which gave Spencer a ring of authenticity and practicality when he so convincingly portrayed Sheen's advisor.  He died of a heart attack before 59 so left some episodes unfinished, to be rewritten.  This sort of "class-assigning" discussion of characters and actors hasn't been done because both are assigned stereotypical characteristics and I'm doing that here.  It is "America."  

Most of the thought about "class" in regards to Hollywood refers to Jewish culture and connections, which are very powerful.  Outsiders don't think much about the difference between Hollywood and Broadway, and don't think of the "Method" school of acting being Russian in origin, part of that country's acute interest in the science of minds.  On film the director and editor can make actors of a dog because of the power of cuts and points of view.  I once had a student who could create a dialogue between some scissors and a stapler on a tabletop, with pauses, slow turns, super closeups.

To some people the point is sinking into the world of the story to the point of feeling it is real and they hate this kind of observation.  This is more true of movie theatre watching than of television watched at home with bathroom breaks and kids demanding attention.  Sorkin's long thoughtful speeches don't do as well in that medium, so another influence is the actual medium of a story.  He doesn't draw back in terms of using an easier vocabulary or more action to accommodate the people who are watching.  This is rarely true of money-based television.  

But "our class" is avid to watch Rachel Maddow in her long professorial speeches about history and complex forces.  More so as the seriousness of the subjects increase daily.  This doesn't mean she's dry and not impassioned.  In fact, the more I think about it, the more I see similarities with "West Wing."

MEDIA IS VENTURE CAPITAL

Aeon is an online magazine to which I subscribe.  It’s free but  the ideas are a cut above the usual repetitious junk.  So this morning I was reading Erika Vause article, not because I wanted to know about banks (I use credit unions) which I avoid when I can, but because of the “mistrust” element she is discussing.

https://aeon.co/ideas/many-people-mistrust-banks-but-not-for-the-same-reasons?utm_source=Aeon+Newsletter&utm_campaign=bc85560a93-EMAIL_CAMPAIGN_2016_11_14&utm_medium=email&utm_term=0_411a82e59d-bc85560a93-68600437

Erika Vause is assistant professor of history at Florida Southern College. She specialises in French history, and is currently working on a book project on debtors’ prison, bankruptcy and usury in early 19th-century France. 

She mentions “negotiable credit instruments” which in farming country is crucial to producing crops unless one is very rich.  Loans are a gamble on weather and the markets but the amounts of money necessary to grow wheat or beef are major.  No wonder that ranches are often owned by corporations, even foreign ones, or insurance countries.  Which, of course, gives them direct power over our lives.

Then she says this:   “In countries like the Netherlands and England, banks rose in tandem with constitutionalism. Governments that respected the rule of law inspired more confidence from lenders.”  This is the key to problems on Native American reservations: there isn’t enough stability to justify the investment of venture capital.  Money should have been invested by the government but they have no confidence in the stability of reservations either, though it is certainly influenced — if not controlled — by them.  It is realizing this that is driving the creation of a new constitution for the Blackfeet, but even then, one dominant tribe may not be enough to stabilize an environment with a lot of mixed heritage people: hispanic, Metis, other tribes, and white who are not directly governed by the tribal council.

Then I turned to reading the comments, which on Aeon are usually fairly pithy.  Lester Jones saying that media IS essentially a capitalist institution was to me a revelatory redefinition.  I don’t know who Lester Jones is (there are too many of them to google) but Lester Jones said:  “To be fair, the ‘media’ is essentially a capitalist institution that gives the banks a pretty good race in the unease and antipathy stakes.”  (I’d always thought of them as “arts”!  Naive me!  I put my trust in my own integrity, but was constantly dismayed that those who promote arts do not.  Their integrity is profit.)

Back to the question, banks can’t be trusted because, like all capitalist institutions, they utilize the needs and values of society at large to create income flows for themselves. And in doing so they place their own profit over and above the outcome for society.”

Following now is my comment, which rather departed from the idea of banks being sources of suspicion.  “It’s Lester Jones’ comment that made the lights go on and the bells ring for me. It was his claim that the “media” is essentially a capitalist institution, which seems quite obvious when one considers the obvious television and newspaper connection to politics as money-making, money-drawing, election-controlling. But it’s even subtler. How do we know anything without interpretation by some reporter, editor, publicist, aggregator, media owner, critic? Half-qualified scientist. (Who IS qualified to judge climate change? Some almanac writer?)

“All those people out there writing as fast as they can, trying earnestly to get at the truth as they know it, feeling proud of their increased skills, are doomed unless they align with venture capital. It’s a form of crowd-sourcing, with the side benefit of shaping the cloud if they can escape the tyranny of the contract. Alongside the suspicion and resentment of banks, politics, and whatever forms of culture one doesn’t know. is writing – like the constant insistence on hoaxes and ghost writers, shadow play in elections.”

There are many things that I know from experience that contradict or merely depart from the received wisdom of my community and family.  There are many ideas they stubbornly grip that have been proven untrue — not by some rhetorical flourish, but because of solid data responsibly interpreted.  But there are far MORE things that they just don’t know, that they don’t know they don’t know, because the concepts are outside their experience and expectations.  They can’t be persuaded of something they don’t even know exists.  It’s their raw perception, not their interpretation or even their preferences that made trouble.  They don’t have the information, particularly the felt experiences that would give meaning.  On the rez stupid people are called “ignorant.”  But we are all ignorant to different degrees and on different subjects.

The most frequent comment I get on what I write is “I never thought of that.”  That’s because I push all the time to try to think across the boundary of my limits and partly because the internet, though the physical structure of the system is controlled by venture capital to build transmission towers and cyber-instruments, what I’m typing on this keyboard is not subsidized and therefore not controlled by the need to please a provider of money.  But because knowledge of my efforts IS controlled by other media and organizations, I’m not making any money and few know I’m writing.

Still, over the past decades of my life, I’ve made strong investments in a form of wealth known as education.  Not the earning of degrees which are supposed to guarantee an income on all the charts, but the absorption of knowledge, strategies and possibilities.  (If you want to earn a good living, become a plumber.  I’m serious.  (People will pay you well because they have no choice.)  

Because of this kind of progressive education and because I’ve always been interested in those who are different — particularly if sequestered — and because I’ve learned that people who are stigmatized are usually NOT a monoculture, but in fact complexes with therefore complex relationships to the mainstream  (like Vause’ mention of Jews and Gays as accommodating universal needs though considered untrustworthy).  Something similar applies to religious institutions, universities and other paper tigers meant to be equivalent to constitutional nations, i.e. by providing stability.

One of the big problems of our political leaders is that they live in monocultures with very little awareness of what else is out there.  On election night the media slowly realized that same thing as their smug expectations fell away and they became visibly shocked.  (I was watching PBS.)  Clinton still hasn’t gotten the picture.  Everyone assumes that other people are basically like their own group, but they’re not.  How could they be?  How can leaders represent people they don’t know, unless someone writes about them?  And investors venture capital for the publishing of risky but pithy truth instead of sure-return dead-end repetitions.

STUMBLING INTO KONY 2012

It was one of those accidental juxtapositions that my post about the Rwanda genocide yesterday, prompted by a series of movies I’d ordered from Netflix a year or more ago, and then a comment in the form of a url from a friend who’s more alert to social networks than I, has involved me in thinking about Kony 2012. This publicity event sets up opposition between some handsome young “millennials” and a “heart of darkness” warlord who hijacks, mutilates, and murders youngsters as part of his terrorism against villages while claiming to be a freedom guerilla. It’s a confrontation of video against guns and machetes. (Just google to save me from listing ten url’s, please. Or consult the New York Times. Even the Great Falls Tribune has picked it up now.

I began this post with ideas about the warring YouTubes and blogs trying to figure out why Kony 2012 went viral, whether it will do any good, whether to contribute, whether these filmmakers are just getting rich, and the true nature of Kony. It’s a much larger and more dramatic version of things like, for example, the quarrel over Mortenson and his teacups. (Friends in Bozeman say forget the books and money -- some people just don’t like Mortenson’s personal attitude.) The arguments range all the way from the highest political philosophy (Why is the white West once again trying to step in and solve African problems versus only a few years ago begging the West to send troops to resolve the Rwanda genocide) on down to Millennial name-calling which is strangely low-class sexual (cunt, douchebag).

It’s one of those situations that can either be an opportunity to learn or a mudfest that can damage philanthropic efforts for decades. “Invisible Children,” which is the name of the idealistic organization, is taking the high road, making everything “transparent,” meaning disclosing their money sources, expenses and salaries. (This is as much political as factual. And whether $80,000 annual salaries sound high or low to you will be relative.)

I’m going to do my usual attempt to come in from the side, horizontal drilling, you might say. First of all, the REAL money is in the harvest of email addresses that “Invisible Children” is compiling -- not just a select group of YouTubers (young, prosperous, educated) but also the fan lists of every celebrity involved. These addresses are worth BIG money and are the main way that social networks can monetize their web presence. A big adversarial issue inflates that list beyond understanding. These lists are power and they are going into the hands of international corporations who do more damage than Kony could do in a lifetime.

Which takes me to my second point. Humans see danger in terms of individuals. The superintendent when I taught in Heart Butte kept a list of ten kids he wanted to get rid of, no matter how he had to do it. When the boy at the top of the list tried to fight adults, he was arrested and removed in handcuffs. No attempt to counsel. This is the heart of rebellion. That superintendent also had a list of trouble-making teachers: I was on it. To him I was Kony. He did not grasp that getting rid of me only replaced me with others, maybe more powerful and resourceful than I.

My conviction, experience, and training is that rebellion arises out of the structure of the situation (often unjust), not from the orneriness of disaffected individuals who simply get pulled into alignment by the circumstances. In short, I would say that Kony is the product of whatever complex situation exists where he is (and in the six years since the Invisible Children film was made he has moved to a different area with a different government). The Rwanda genocide was an opportunity to identify many of those forces, many of them the debris of the colonial era and the excesses of the post-colonial decades. I suspect that Kony is part of that as well.

My point is that if someone managed to murder Kony tomorrow (the bin Laden solution) he would soon be replaced by another smart handsome ruthless fellow who has found the formula. It amounts to a big game of whack-a-mole unless the ecology is changed to eliminate mole-ness. Otherwise, the game of predator/prey simply continues with the younglings merely “mushrooms” as some in the drug wars call them. Collateral damage.

But we react to babies with their lips cut off. We don’t react to corporate machinations or the internal politics of African nations. So why not use this point of entry that the Millennials can understand? If Invisible Children is willing to take the issue to the level of Jason Russell’s small son, they do it because it works, but also it is an irritatingly smarmy use of sentimentality to oppose reptilian opportunism. (That child is amazing and MUST be getting offers to be in the movies.)

Everything we do in this culture is monetized. Even Romeo Allaire, whose true bravery SHOULD be celebrated, can be opposed by Belgian senators who want to attract voters by using dissension. By choosing social media as their means, Invisible Children is in danger of making the heart of darkness into a “like” issue with thumbs up or down buttons. (I never get over the echo of the Roman coliseum in those thumbs.) Idealism is a precious commodity and should never be discouraged, but it can be twisted into a new excuse for domination.

The United States IS part of this problem. “Occupy” is responding to systemic forces in the same way as African guerrillas and Israeli politicians and Canadian resource developers crossing Montana with their big pipe-lines, electrical transmission lines, gigantic hauling loads. The same as the environmental citizen groups increasingly organizing and hardening to push back against a multitude of invasions. The same as mayors determined to make their towns centers of profit. Personally, I thought “The Constant Gardener” did a better job of lining out the forces and the price of opposing them, but that was a big-time movie -- not three guys and a camera.

I was interested to be able to watch Kony’s face as he was questioned. He was concentrating hard to mind-read these white boys who had come to confront him and play with his guns. What do they want? Can they come up with money or arms? What would happen if he just killed them? I’ll say this for sure: if Kony kills those handsome boys now, the stakes will be entirely changed. But maybe the stakes for a child in Africa are the same.

ALL THE NEWS THAT'S CAREFULLY FILTERED

When I blogged about violence on reservations, it attracted a New York Times reporter. “I am working on an article about the prevalence of violence against women in Native American communities and the various efforts by Native American law enforcement and the federal government to address the problem.” I sent him my long article about this subject, which I hope to publish someplace and did post on this blog and on iNewp.com. We spent a good part of the morning talking. He had not googled to find out about me, but I had googled him.

It soon became clear that he was looking for a sensational story. He had no idea about the cat’s cradle of jurisdictions on a reservation nor what distinguishes Blackfeet as a tribe -- like their form of government or the Baker Massacre or what buffalo meant to them. He thought the photo of Heart Butte I sent (the one at the top of the page) was “beautiful” but had no sense that this reservation once included the part of the Rocky Mountains that became Glacier National Park. He grew up in Fresno.

Same old, same old. Plenty of Hollywood images, grade school level assumptions, and just plain blanks. Too much please-the-informant (me) with a quick readjusting of assumptions. Too much put-down-the-reporter impatience on my part. I feel a little guilty now. Not much.

Among the things I knew that he didn’t was that reporters come through here all the time, along with academics, bureaucrats, photographers, and so on. They are more numerous in summer. We’re not much impressed. A thing I know that he didn’t know I knew is that reporters only do the dirty work of asking questions. The power is in the editors, who will assign a point of view and outcome before the reporter ever starts and completely rewrite the story once it is brought home. This reporter seemed to think that the New York Times could go up against the FBI and make them toe the mark. I read the NYTimes online -- used to subscribe to the book review when there was one. I have watched the Times shudder, stumble and shrink, just like all the other newspapers and publishers. What they need is something to increase circulation -- NOT a confrontation with the FBI.

Another thing reporters don’t think of is that reservations are not “print cultures.” The NYTimes does not register. Few people sit down to go over every page in the GF Tribune, which is the biggest regional paper. (They might hit the sports section.) They are very aware that the local newspaper is controlled by a white family in Cut Bank, not notably Indian friendly but slowly beginning to be Indian aware since so many enrolled people have been elected to the county commission and so on. The radios, including the local tribal station which is run by the Browning mayor, are always on and so are the television sets, but the real news comes by word-of-mouth.

The reporter was after a perfect case that would reveal that the FBI does not investigate murders on reservations. He didn’t want Marie Heavyrunner’s case after all because arrests have been made. (He doesn’t know that an arrest is only the beginning of a new phase.) “Perfect” meant that I would be able to produce documents and witnesses who could show that evidence existed for a murder that the FBI had failed to pursue. The reporter, of course, would then muster the power of the press. Did I know of any such cases? Off the top of my head?

That’s when I decided I’d get into my two-box card file of obits and pull all the ones that were murder or suicide or simply undetermined, though most of those last will turn out to be tragic but not criminal. This is rough country with dangerous jobs and a lot of alcoholism and diabetes. But also it is a place where people still have nomadism in their blood and no particular reason to stay home. Marie evidently died in the summer, but no one missed her until late October. I blogged the list and will try to keep it current. Three new cards yesterday, only one undetermined. The obits are published early for the sake of those wanting to attend the funeral and console the family.

I have no desire to draw the interest of “gangs.” 2,700,000 hits on Google. One in 2009 at the NY Times. A good YouTube story at: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=gd8m0Z2Sdww Not by the NY Times -- by Al Jazeera. (Not about Blackfeet, but Sioux, not so different.) So I thought I would try using “The Wire,” the much-praised series about Baltimore, as a way of talking about realities. But the reporter thought “The Wire” was not real. “Journalism is about facts that can be proven with print evidence,” he said. Video narrative is too easy to falsify. Right. Unlike print. Sure. Where are my card files? But even the clips are GF Tribune obits, not the “real story.” The old-fashioned idea is that if it’s in print, it’s true. Aren’t we over that yet?

The fifth year of "The Wire" is about the media. ALL the episodes are about the shortage of money; the ubiquity of bribes; and how that shapes institutions and politics. I tried to talk to this reporter about how when money is short, there are parallel economies of secrets and sex, but he couldn’t get the concept, even though he was wanting me to tell him “secret” things and promising not to let anyone know he had talked to me. He doesn’t understand that in small towns and on reservations there is no such thing as keeping thing secret. The struggle is to keep them accurate. He said he would "protect me," but he's the biggest danger.

“The Wire” was mostly written by people who have been “in the trenches” as teachers and street cops, BUT it was some years ago and it was in Baltimore which is different from here, different from itself over time -- one of the points of the story. I’m sure most people who watch are not aware of any of this. I’m also confident that the ONLY way to get people to understand a world they would never enter and don’t want to is by telling them stories. They don’t react to statistics and, anyway, one of the problems of all this is “juking the stats,” meaning redefining categories, “losing” records, or even simply failing to record them in the first place.

After a while I had exhausted the supply of rez stories I wanted to tell and anyway, he didn’t much want to hear the long explanations, so I reached for the most shocking story I know. It’s not about the rez, but about Great Falls where a guy named Bar Jonah showed up, a squat little madman who had served time in Massachusetts for capturing and tormenting boys and then had been told to get out of town. So he came here, because here no one knew him and it was the "wild west." By the time people figured it out, he had hung boys from a ceiling hook in his kitchen (one boy escaped and told), tortured them, butchered them, cooked them, and served them to the neighbors. He never was convicted, because the mother of the alleged victim refused to admit her son was dead. Police found plenty of reasons to keep him in custody until he died of a heart attack. The reporter didn’t want to hear about it. I admit it was totally irrelevant. I never did tell him how a damaged young Blackfeet woman kept her dead autistic child in the trunk of her car for months and months. I’m sure she didn’t mean to kill him.

Bob Scriver used to say a person was much more likely to get away with a totally outrageous crime than an ordinary crime, because people wouldn’t be able to get their heads around it. The reporter and his editor already knew what sort of article they wanted and reality could only get through that filter if something changed their filters.

When I googled this reporter, I discovered an amazing website called “Dowser” after those water-finding sticks that point to underground aquifers. www.dowser.org

They say: We’re living through a global social change renaissance. Millions of people are building organizations and social enterprises, attacking problems with new ideas and models.

But most of this activity is hidden. The news is better at telling us what went wrong yesterday than what’s being done to make tomorrow better.

At Dowser, we present the world through a ‘solution frame,’ rather than a ‘problem frame.’ We’re interested in the practical and human elements of social innovation: Who’s solving what and how. We want to know how people come up with ideas, how they put them into practice, how they pay the bills, and what fuels their fire.

Hey, NOW we’re cookin’ with gas! I had ended my article about violence against women on the rez with a few sentences of suggestions. I should expand that.

JESUS THE APOCALYPSE

People have mystical experiences that convince them of a powerful source of inspiration, an awareness of power that is entirely “other” whether it’s another mental/emotional state or a supernatural dimension. The question we used to visit at seminary was whether “the Holy Spirit” could be “called” by devotion or discipline. (We didn’t count drugs.) Can you MAKE it happen? Recently a poll in the United States (the United States loves to ask itself about religion) said that institutional religion is shrinking but individual mystical experience is growing. It was suggested that religious institutions usually try to suppress mysticism because obviously it encourages people to go off on their own and ignore dogma, much less the building fund.

There’s a parallel here with art and schools. Conventional art schools are institutions, like it or not, and they always tend toward orthodoxy, the endorsement of a “right” way to do things, which can become confining. On the other hand, if an artist plunges off in pursuit of his or her own vision, their work can become inaccessible to others, impossible to market. So what is the right balance between the individual and the institution?

Possibly it is something we could call community, which is people together out of common vision but not hardened into an institution exists for its own sake rather than for the participating individuals. A community will form spontaneously among people who share interests or goals. A friendship circle, we might say. Or maybe a cluster of disciples around a charismatic person. Then the next person who is visionary will be received according to his relationship to that community: Jesus’ vision is the whole point; Judas’ vision is an anti-vision in the terms of the group and they will try to discredit it. Herod, the baby killer, is the institution personified.

This country tends to see art as an individual gift that is unrelated to either community or institution and yet it values “art school.” Most of us don’t trust ourselves to work out what materials to buy, how to solve practical problems of construction or procedure, or what sort of subjects to portray. We WANT to be told that if you work in oils, you should lay in the dark shapes first and then work towards white with final impasto while in watercolor you should start with the most pale areas and then get darker with thicker paint. It saves a lot of time to be told such things. And then you’ll have something to react against.

There is a puzzling phenomenon of the person who simply wants to be seen as an artist for the glamour of it all -- forget about having to stand in front of an easel all day. That’s quite a lot like the person who wants to be seen as a religious figure, but is not interested either in personal devotion or the improvement of other lives. Institutional schools can be useful in pointing out humbuggery in either art or religion, so long as they are responsible about certifying their students. But there is a sort of feral talent for art or even religion that institutional schools simply can’t see and always interpret as rebellion. Why would such a person stick around anyway?

Institutions lean to bureaucracy and hierarchy, which I tend to see as necessary evils. Bureaucracy, to my mind, is largely record-keeping and organizing for the sake of efficiency and a sort of group memory. It’s valuable when it provides clarity, guidance and some kinds of restraint for the greater good, like permitting systems or budgets. Hierarchy is also a move towards efficiency, but one even more prone to being subverted as the higher authorities get more and more out of touch with the lower levels and fringier functions. Dogma, when it really works, helps to hold the point of focus to prevent what has come to be called “mission drift.” An institution that supports both community and individuals is making their lives easier, more pleasant and more productive. An institution that uses bureaucracy and hierarchy to simply preserve the institution has betrayed the cause that founded it. (Yes, I’m talking about my seminary. And the U.S. Congress.)

Mysticism breaks out of all categories, escapes all institutions, accounts to no one. It goes beyond talent or desire and doesn’t always stop on this side of madness. By its very nature it is mysterious and unaccountable, belonging to that fourth pane of the Johari window where nothing is known -- not even ways to describe what has been touched. Some individuals seek it and some fear it. Institutions and communities may talk about it, but mysticism as an experience is individual, which makes it easy to burn mystics at the stake in medieval times or contemporaneously just ignore them.

I’m intrigued by the writing of S. Brent Plate, partly because he works on film and material culture, both of which interest me. In today’s “Religion Dispatches” (an automated aggregator) he quotes:
“The witty classics professor Norman O. Brown, in his brilliant little essay from 1960, ‘Apocalypse: The Place of Mystery in the Life of the Mind’ . . .[says]

“’I sometimes think I see that civilizations originate in the disclosure of some mystery, some secret; and expand with the progressive publication of their secret; and end in exhaustion when there is no longer any secret, when the mystery has been divulged, that is to say, profaned.’

“Brown is playing on the roots of the term apocalypse as a “re-vealing,” an “un-covering.” When all is revealed, when we are out of secrets and the sacred totally profaned, the world comes to an end.

“Norman O. Brown continues his discussion, offering some suggestions:
‘ And so there comes a time (I believe we are in such a time) when civilization has to be renewed by the discovery of new mysteries, by the undemocratic but sovereign power of the imagination, by the undemocratic power which makes poets the unacknowledged legislators of mankind, the power which makes all things new.’”


In GNXP.com, one of my favorite blogs (an interpretive aggregator of genetically based studies), it is remarked that it has been 1500 years since the birth of a new major world religion, which happened to be Islam. In some ways it was a return to Old Testament theism and the claim that “God” is an unknowable mystery that ought not to be depicted or interpreted because it CANNOT be.

Plate cautions: “. . . New media enable reformations by publishing, or making public, what was once private. In this way, new media act to reveal what was once hidden, and thus enable the world to continue to end.” This is the doctrine of “continuous apocalypse,” otherwise as known as housekeeping. (One of his examples is Gutenberg revealing the Bible to the masses.)

We must “acknowledge our need for the poet and the prophet, potentially some crazy-haired, locust-eating maniac who comes in from out of the wild to reveal something to us—a monster who de-monstrates.” Bring ‘em on.

SEX AT THE BIG BOX STORE DEVELOPMENT

At the laundromat I read the magazines I usually never read. Family Circle, Women’s Home Companion, and maybe some tracts of some kind. This time I found a nice big juicy copy of Vogue and stole it. Even when I had money I stopped buying this magazine when their target demographic went to sixteen year olds. Of course, they do put out a “beauty at any age” issue in the fall for women who are sixty but through the judicious use of surgery, exercise, botox, cosmetics and non-eating somehow manage to look sort of like sixteen-year-olds. In certain lights.

The issue was the famous “Sex and the City” wedding dress layout with the skeletal Sarah Jessica Parker photographed in designer wedding dresses that cost as much as some people’s first house. They are gigantic, extravagant, and more or less white, though the girls in this series which became this movie which prompted this Vogue issue (that’s packaging!) are anything but virgins. Although, there is a lady lawyer who never gets around to sex with her husband. It’s the CITY! A woman’s got to move fast and put in 18 hour days! Beautifully dressed!

The whole movie is just a less witty version of Jane Austen’s novels with the subterfuge that it’s about sex when it’s really about money, status, and “love sweet love.” Austen didn’t have to include the down-to-earth black girl, though she may have smuggled in a few practical aunts and servants. One thing Austen’s girls has in common with this bunch is bosom-centered clothes. In fact, if you know Empire gowns, they sometimes spilled the boobs right on out of the top, not just bulged up by tight corsets. No corsets on gauzy high-waisted Empire gowns. In my estimation Mr. Big doesn’t quite measure up to the best of the Austen men, especially since he has no title. He’s only a contractor of some vague sort.

When I was a kid, the equivalent of this trope was Brenda Starr, top-notch reporter, and her mystery man was a doctor who did mysterious and dangerous research. He gave her black orchids to wear with her flaming and frothing red hair. In those days the girl across the street and I drew paperdolls, very sexy as I look back on it, and clearly a transition between babydolls and the search for a man. It was much simpler to just draw some. All the paperdolls stood with their hands flung out to the sides, their feet together (the men had a wide stance, as was suitable), and a minimum of underwear over their big boobs.

We colored them with pencils after drawing them in ink. My most fabulous number was a Brenda Starr ball gown with a strapless top, an out-of-control black tulle skirt caught up here and there with black orchids and -- ha, ha -- a giant black orchid as a corsage, as big as Sarah Jessica Parker’s giant flower dress in the first scene of the movie. Any Freudian would recognize a vulva symbol. Even I do now, but then I was really into displacement, sublimation, suppression -- whatever worked to get through life. I may have overdone it a little.

I never watched “Sex and the City” on television. The wrong demographic and bad timing. By the time it came around I’d been there and done that, just not in the city. I ran across references to the series here and there but in general I never watch TV anyway. So I ordered it on Netflix. It was a little fluffy. Kinda “the four little kittens have lost their mittens,” except for the conformist who wanted babies. (Isn’t there a message there?) The character who is “like a man” -- meaning a sex addict -- can’t resist an Italian stallion who showers in public. That’s not quite like the liberated Jo March falling for Rozzano Brazzi as Professor Bhaer, but close enough, given that times change. Of course, Alcott wrote a character more like Walt Whitman (older, bearded), which would have been interesting considering the lightweight gay moths flying around the flames in this movie.

What I really liked was the “extra” material on a separate disc, all about the costumer. I’ve read about her before with her leather face, penciled eyebrows and intensely bright crimson hair. She’s got the gift of being outrageous and glamorous at the same time, but she doesn’t design -- she finds. And she has a closet that’s practically a warehouse, though not so elegant as the one Mr. Big builds for his true love in the penthouse that is their sign of true love.

All this was on my mind when I went to Great Falls yesterday where I did not buy a Vogue. But my eye was caught by another mag, which I didn’t buy either, but I did stand and look at it for a while. It’s that outrageous imposter who fools everyone with his pretences, using the illusion that he’s just an innocent foreigner -- maybe a Martian -- to ask insulting and way-too-personal questions, usually cleverly calculated to cause the unwitting stooge to give away his or her prejudices. This time he’s nude on the cover of a man’s magazine, beautifully made up and lit. Since his legs are demurely curled to the side, we cannot see what sort of wax job he has. (The lady lawyer in the movie is stingingly criticized for wearing a bathing suit without proper waxing.) He’s quite appealing. In fact, he looks a whole lot like Sarah Jessica Parker, which was no doubt intended.

SJP, as she is often referred to, for her part bravely discusses the raw courage it took to appear in the movie with NO makeup, though she reports wonderful support and tact from the crew -- in fact, as much as if she had been bodily instead of facially nude. She looks AWFUL. But real.

What struck me down there in the Big Box Store development was the real fashion statement. This is worn by everyone of every age and gender: baggy shorts, camp shirts, ball caps and either big harness leather sandals or big rubber tennies. Everyone looked like students at an English summer school session for four year old boys about 1940. What does it mean for everyone, large and small, to go around looking like Christopher Robin? Is the new demographic four years old? Can Pooh be far behind? More likely Eeyore these days. Sixteen and female. I recommend sublimation.

THE NEW PORN

Reading about Caravaggio (“M -- The Story of the Man Who Became Caravaggio) plus the movie, as well as reading Jeremy Biles’ essay about J.G. Ballard in “Sightings” which is an automated essay that comes from the University of Chicago Divinity School, I’ve managed to make a lot of inchoate and troublesome ideas fall into place. (Don’t worry. My domestic life remains calm and regular.)

First of all, I begin to see how in Caravaggio’s day the main privileged class was high church officials plus a few landed individuals. Their markers of privilege were anything of great cost, including jewels and precious metals (hello, Cellini) and art but also human beings for sexual use -- ANY sexual use -- and also secrecy enforced with violence. The biggest power of all was to break the rules that were enforced on “lesser” folk. Ironically, someone like Caravaggio or Cellini, who paid no attention to the rules at least in part because they could make valuable things, were thus able to be “free spirits,” their own kind of power that exposed them to violence. These convictions persist, which partly explains our problems with priests and politicians today. And perhaps also explains the origin of our idea that all artists are somehow entitled to be untamed, exceptional, tantamount to geniuses.

So being middle class, as we know it now, came later. I wonder whether a case could be made linking it to industrialization: people coming in from the country and making it in the city Dickens-style, either through bookkeeping or through machine-enhanced manufacturing or small shops. These are pursuits that depend upon attention to detail, consistency, persistence, watching the clock. This could produce wealth, or has until lately. Part of being middle-class was limiting children to the number who could be educated, since skill was now the way to make money. Simple untrained child labor became less and less useful and therefore children were easy to abandon. Respectability then became linked with repression, so that extra sexuality -- with no birth control -- had to be siphoned off to disreputables whose lives didn’t matter. People became much more guarded and more easily discarded.

Economics in a city meant that the primary male was far more important than on a farm. In fact, he was SO important that a woman had to be very careful about choosing him and then commit to him utterly. The law conspired with this. Men owned women. (I just saw “Iron-jawed Angels” and highly recommend it: a lively contemporary interpretation of the securing of women’s right to vote.) WWII inflated the national image of men into heroes of nearly god-like proportions. I just watched “A Bridge Too Far” and was startled to see how many of our major movie stars in the Boomer generation picked up their images from this war story. It’s not one of those black-and-white gritty WWII movies, though there are there are included newsreels, and not the carnegraphic (new word -- isn’t it great?) post-Vietnam movies of more recent times. "Bridge" includes a lot of spectacular Technicolor blood and explosions, then a series of vignettes of wry, brave, handsome men. Little of the dismemberment that since become popular.

When birth control, women’s rights, and female economic empowerment, are in place, the previous system is pretty well sabotaged. The paycheck power that entitled Pa to everything is now at least undermined as Ma finds work as well. National cynicism and corruption follow the chaos -- don’t cause it. People feel that relationships won’t last, that jobs won’t last -- and they’re right. So everyone presses for the moment. And that means in sex, too. Now that having babies won’t kill women, they don’t mind having more sex. And Dad was kinda pressured until they invented Viagra. Now it’s a checkmate: no babies, no necessity for arousal, no game, no fun.

All along the way the sex that Victorians tried to keep under control had been leaking out, mostly as a matter of commodification -- mercantilism. Sex sells. Movies, newspapers, books, and so on. Guys look at gals in terms of how much money it would take to get her to come across. Gals -- did they ever stop -- size guys up according to their prospects for income. Ma and Pa get so absorbed in this that they forget all about the kids who DO somehow manage to come along despite every safeguard.

The bottom line is that culture loses meaning, power is gone, family loyalty evaporates except among those only a generation or so from the land like Hispanics or Asians. (Which gives them a big advantage.) The power to attach is weakened because, to many, jobs mean moving, so people abandon what they have if they see something better. Sex and drugs combined become a “kratophany” (another new word -- it means an experience of great power -- in this case, a fantasy) because both are so denied and confined and yet so saleable, so ubiquituous and yet (for some) so elusive. The two interact.

But that’s beginning to wane. Familiarity, maybe. Maybe an actual physiological shift from modern diet and chemical ingestion, actual gender blurring. Sex is now all over the place and we’ve explored every orifice. What was porn is now “erotic” or maybe just an “R” rating that everyone ignores. The discussion of it no longer needs to be in Latin -- all the kids say fuck. Violence and pain enter the mix.

But there’s another real porn now, something nice people don’t talk about: the limits of human life. Not just us as individuals, though that keeps people glued to their science news and helps to sell ridiculously high-priced and bug-ridden machines that often divulge nothing or very little about ailments. (We’ve nearly translated to a higher plane: from mechanics to techtronics -- except we still think in terms of industrial mass-production.)

We are beginning to realize that humans are animals with no privilege, that all animals have genetic drift and that outliers are always falling off the edges, that something so subtle as climate change or a virus can extinguish (HAS extinguished) whole species, and that there is no assurance that humans will even exist on this planet more than a few thousand years into the future. Thus the huge interest in religion.

“Do you believe in God” is just code for “Do you believe in Life after Death.” Spirituality is the feeling that one belongs, but also the conviction that something never dies.

The enormous power of AIDS to tap human consciousness is that it wraps up mortality and sex together, though one could just as easily catch some other virus and just as easily catch it through a blood transfusion or a needle poke. And yet AIDS has not captured the budget; it doesn’t get as much money as it takes to develop a cure. The power has no shape, no direction. It’s not yet personal. While the “grownups” were busy thinking up reasons to resist a cure -- like, won’t it solve the Africa problem by depopulating the continent? Won't it wipe out perverts? In fact, won’t it just solve the overpopulation of the earth by weeding out all the people we don’t much like? -- the younger people of the planet have been quietly growing “secret” layers of planetary culture. One is the response to the criminalization of drugs, which has acted just as alcohol criminalization did to web together gangs, dictators and opportunists in a new mafia that ignores national boundaries. (The total value of marijuana transactions alone last year is estimated to exceed the value of corn, wheat and soy combined.) Another network is the war profiteering, which is now morphing around to escape control by the new administration. Not much difference except they can’t be so out-in-the-open. I think the high tech network is about to be forced underground by efforts to control all this as well as the need to make money. The results won’t be pleasant.

So we’ve entered a world that the punk sci-fi writers have inhabited for a long time: post-apocalypse. A time when place is a labyrinth, survival is the goal, and humans are voluntary cyborgs. J. G. Ballard and T.P. Barrus have lived in this world a while. They can tell us about it.

ROW, ROW, ROW YOUR BOAT

Maybe it’s it’s a sign of old age or maybe it’s just the times we’re in or maybe it’s just too much coffee, but whenever there’s a disruption in my regular routine, I find myself -- not entrapped -- maybe becalmed for a day or so. Though I’m about as calm as a duck -- looking peaceful up top, but paddling away down below. Dave Lull, librarian extraordinaire, sent me a link this morning to a Wall Street Journal review by David Myers, addressing a book by Winifred Gallagher called “Rapt” in which she wraps up some concepts about how minds work. She evidently talks about Mihaly Csikszentmihalyi’s idea of “flow,” that state in which your mind is truly engaged, neither overtaxed nor bored. Finding the occupation and context that will keep you in that state is one of the secrets of happiness. There’s a lot of other good stuff about how the part of one’s mind that one can’t really access except indirectly does a lot of shaping and guiding.

That part of my mind really likes routine and quiet, which is why I thrive in Valier. A trip like yesterday’s trip to Great Falls will disrupt my pill intake, my sleep patterns, the level of household cat contentment, where I put my keys, and blogging. Just the seasonal changes, which happen on the hour this time of year, keep me a little too preoccupied. This morning’s dawn sky was a heap of red embers, which is supposed to signal wind. The only trouble with that theory is that the wind had already come, raked the town, and left again an hour earlier. Now we’ve moved along to low dark clouds. It’s warm.

Since I must’ve woken up with the wind, partly because I got back from Great Falls stunned enough by driving to need a long nap, I brought in the paper. Something has changed to cause it to come much earlier than it used to -- maybe it’s just so much smaller that it’s printed faster. Bits of the news are distressing: my friends Kip and Odette Mortenson are suing to protect their organic beef ranch from weed eradication efforts that the state is determined to fulfill by spraying along road right-of-ways through their ranch. That in itself is enough to make me grumble, but the community has been so resistant and the weather so severe that it looks as though Mortenson’s may decide this is not a good place to age out. When they go, they will take their excellent bookstore with them. Oasis Books, Choteau, Montana, focused carefully on quality first edition used hardbacks about the West. The locals would rather have a big jumble of paperback ephemera.

Another is that in spite of the best efforts of the GF Ad Club, attendance is down so much at the CM Russell Museum that three staff people have been laid off. The complaint I hear is not so much that the staff is shrinking but that the wrong people have been let go: the dedicated and long-term people who make things work. Historical and art museums have some major vulnerabilities, one of which is an exaggerated respect for academia, probably in an effort to prove that the local vernacular is just as valid as the elite city stuff. So they hire people with fancy credentials but not much real love or enthusiasm for the subject. Also, their boards tend to sun themselves in the honor of it all instead of understanding that their duty is to raise money, even if that means writing a nice fat check.

That said, the “Bison” exhibit is quite beguiling. The most impressive part, I thought, was walking through the midst of a virtual buffalo stampede. One goes through a dark, narrow and short passage with a video of rampaging animals on one side and a mirror showing the same rampage on the other. The sound effects and the shaking underfoot are pretty convincing and I’ve BEEN in a buffalo stampede! The life-sized “diorama” of an Indian on a horse taking down a buffalo didn’t impress me much. The rest of the information and materials are familiar, but won’t be for tourists.

The “Big R” ranch supply store is now so big it’s easier to get lost in than the buffalo exhibit maze. There are still chicks for sale, so tiny and busy they hardly seem real. One longs to cuddle them in spite of the signs begging people not to. If you think all chicks are yellow, there are surprises here. No ducks, geese or turkeys are left. Over in the ranch tools section with huge levers and wheels, enameled bright red except for cutting edges and teeth which glittered steely, there was a big old rancher in his cowboy hat, puttering around amongst things, singing “salakadoola, michigaboola, bibbety-bobbity boo! Put ‘em together and what’ve you got . . .?” I haven’t heard that one for a long time. They did NOT have what I went there for: a fly trap that’s a little plastic bag with a baffle on top. I bought a fancier one -- it’s important to start early before they lay eggs. I gather the simple ones didn’t sell because they stink so bad -- but that’s what made them work!

Nor were there any magazines I really wanted at Barnes & Noble, which has always been one of my motivators for driving so far. The books weren’t interesting either. I’m way out of step with corporate American publishing on all levels and have a hunch I’m not the only one. It’s the same problem I work on when managing my own consciousness: to keep moving. The book and magazine (AND newspaper) industries are so locked into what they’ve always done -- no, that’s wrong. They haven’t always done what they’ve done in the last decade or so, which is to become dominated by corporations that demand unreasonable returns and who depend upon market research instead of thought and observation. Since the market research is also based on unexamined assumptions, they are winding in on themselves ever more tightly until they will probably (hopefully) disappear in a little black dot of cynicism. The good part of it is that they have left so much territory untouched that the rest of us have lots to lift up via the New Media.

My cousin asked me about my interview with George Cole. She is sometimes concerned about revealing things that are too intimate and wondered whether I had. Oh, my. There is so much more under the surface that remains to be said that my becalmed little boat will soon be propelled on its way, rapt with possibility, going with the flow.

BOOKS ON THE FLY

Here are the choices for ways to acquire “Stargirl” by Jerry Spinelli. It’s a YA (young adult) about a nonconformist who comes to a super-conservative little “area” high school in Arizona. She dances in the rain -- there’s rain? Must be sci-fi. Anyway, you recognize this creature: the innocent but knowing young girl who wakes everyone up to the possibilities of life.

But who knew there were this many possibilities in acquiring a book? Twenty-two. Four require expensive electronic machines to access. YouTube is not listed, but no doubt if the book is a hit, it’ll get into the act.
Used, Hardcover, $9.00
Used, Hardcover, $6.95
New, Trade Paper, $9.95
New, Mass Market, $9.95
Used, Trade Paper, $6.00
Used, Trade Paper, $5.50
New, Trade Paper, $8.95
Used, Trade Paper, $6.50
Used, Trade Paper, $5.95
Used, Hardcover, $9.95
Used, Book Club Hardcover, $5.95
New, Mass Market, $12.57
New, Mass Market, $12.98
New, Compact Disc, $25.00
Used, Trade Paper, $5.00
New, Mass Market, $6.99
Microsoft Reader Ebooks, Electronic, $7.94
Adobe Digital Editions, Electronic, $7.94
Palm Reader Ebooks, Electronic, $7.94
Used, Book Club Paperback, $2.50
New, Library Bound, $21.50
New, Library, $20.50

What does this imply, not in terms of the sales of books though it clearly will mean a whole lot more bookkeeping and monitoring of agencies plus mastering more technology, but in terms of impact on the actual writing?

First, authors will need to be aware of how their words sound. Good writers already read their own work to themselves. The more the writing is shaped by listener accessibility, moving back towards ballads and poetry, the less the use of the long, intricate, subtle sentence a la Faulkner or Proust. BUT the fact that it is more restricted and maybe more rare will make it more a sign of sophistication to read what cannot really be appreciated out loud. Maybe some of that is already in place.

Stories read out out by their authors are good, but not all authors are good readers and, anyway, a trained actor can mean a major jump in effectiveness, as listeners to “Selected Shorts” know. Whether such a strategy adds enough value to a story to allow for paying the actor is a different question.

They say that Young Adult is the hot category and Sci-fi/fantasy is as well, so I’m sure there will be many coming of age in the galaxy or “zits in space” stories. I predict they’ll want sound effects. Maybe you remember reading comics out loud and adding all the “pow blam” stuff with mouth noises. But now even little kids can run a sound board. Why stop there? Why not go to video? Maybe not with actors, but with suggestive images. Will this mean a new emphasis on description and metaphor in writing? Or will there be more interest in a radio-type approach like Prairie Home Companion where the dialogue leads in and out of fantasy, enabled by sound effects?

Okay, turn the page. Most of good writing hinges on experience by the author, either real or imagined. Maybe it is the access to imagery and travel and class mobility that has made people so moralistic about what is memoir-as-remembered versus memoir-as-proven-fact, without ever questioning the value of proven fact. But it seems clear to me that the more people have had access to intense and surprising experience, the more many have avoided and denied it. It scares them. BUT they like to read about it, so it’s shaped, buffered, and ends well -- if you consider a book a good end.

One of the bits I ran across long ago and have never been able to find again was an Ed Hoagland review of Peter Matthiessen’s “The Snow Leopard” in which he took Peter to task for going off to Tibet, leaving his children behind when his wife had just died. Yet the stunning value of the book is that it confronts the death of Deborah Love, the Buddhist poet who was Peter’s wife, which is something I suspect she would have valued. Read the book, see what I mean. But maybe it wasn’t even Hoagland. As I say, I’ve never found it again.

I’m reading “Proust and the Squid” (Maryanne Wolf) which is about reading, how the brain does it, and makes the suggestion that writing things down (like keeping a decent set of notes) makes it possible to think things impossible to think in spoken words. It’s like math, which requires blackboards of symbolism. I certainly know it’s hard to keep track of a novel or even a memoir. Holes. Repetition loops. Chronology is the least of the problems and it IS a problem if you are pursuing a developmental sequence that depends on it.

Not that there might not be a another way to go. I clustered the memoir about Bob Scriver by topics, three organized chronologically (the steps of casting a bronze, several hunting episodes in calendar order, and the sequence of wives), and the rest governed by an image suggesting incidents: miserable black molding material stood for all the things that went wrong. This was not so much like the outlining they used to teach us in school as like the “mapping” or “webbing” they teach kids now. Older readers complain they are confused.

“Proust and the Squid” suggests that what we do and learn shapes our brains, which seems unarguable at this point. Brains are spontaneously responsive, wiring and rewiring themselves, more like linked blogs or continually edited videos than the stable page.

I’ve been thinking about the industrial revolution and the remark in something I read that high schools are an invention of the industrial revolution: assembly lines, uniformity, staged development, imposed quality control, assigned departments. It seems clear to me that high schools have about reached their limits. But books have not.

No longer does the idea of “books in print” apply because much “writing” is no longer in ink-on-paper print and, anyway, maybe some of these phenomena aren’t books at all. But they don’t REPLACE books. Maybe schools will transform in a similar way, multiplying out into many forms. Maybe it’s already happened. If half the school-aged population leaves high school before graduation but still goes on learning and working, what is that? Self-teaching? Rock n’ Roll education? On the fly? What about “magnet schools” for pre-med or the arts?

NOT AS MUCH ABOUT PENELOPE REEDY AS I'D INTENDED

This blog was supposed to be about Penelope Reedy, the founder, owner, chief writer, and impassioned believer in the “Redneck Review of Literature,” dedicated to the idea that Western lit mattered, published from 1975-1995. But Penelope herself keeps chiming in from her place in Idaho where she’s a college professor these days and reports that this morning it’s bitter cold. Archived at Boise State University’s Idaho Writer’s Archive, the Review is accompanied by “myriad letters showing just how crazy I was/am during all those years and years of ranching, divorce, returning to university, raising 4 kids, hauling my printing press all around the west and Milwaukee while I was at Marquette U.”

I’m quoting an email from 2004 but she says virtually the same thing on this morning’s post to West Lit, the listserv. “I always thought of literature as holy work, sacred words. I guess because it was something I could always participate in whether as writer, reader or publisher, and possible as long as paper and ink survive.”

She adds: “When I was hauling my press around, spending hours typing manuscripts and making plates, collating, stapling, addressing, etc. I felt involved in a holy tradition, almost sacrificial in profundity. I was connecting with virginia and leonard woolf [Aquarian-style, Penelope doesn’t always cap.] and their early projects with the basement letter presses and harry crosby and Idaho’s cantankerous ezra pound and wyndham lewis. I was engaging in tradition, a tradition of exposing/introducing my beloved land and people to the world.”

The world didn’t pay attention. It was a “neighborhood” enterprise to them. But Penelope says, “It’s really computers that killed the review.” . . . “this technology wasn’t the one I/we expected would cause the demise of a literary dream, especially when it was heralded as making it all easier to produce, and that’s precisely what killed it.” Today you can add that the post office has piled on, plus the cost of paper, but the spread of the Internet would make it possible to run “The Redneck Review of Western Literature” economically as an eZine. There are plenty of them out there: many disguised as blogs.

What would the Woolf’s do with a blog? I have no idea, but I think Gertrude Stein would fall upon the idea with glee. The difference might be in the willingness to step outside the grand traditions of British literature that are so fortified by academia and historical publishing. There are still nodes of genius everywhere, many among quite young people in the West, but they carry laptops under their arms and they are as likely to work with images -- including the moving images of video -- and sound as much as print.

Check out a venue like “Querencia,” Stephen Bodio’s blog at http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/ It is clearly land-based, organized around hunting with sight hounds and hawks, so mostly about high prairie grasslands and, because there are similar ecologies elsewhere, it is global. We hear about the “istans” (Afghanistan, Turkistan, et al) where this hawk/hound synergy is millennia old. That means there is a time dimension to the discussion, emphasized by the blogger Reid Farmer, who is an archeologist. In fact, my first contact with this blog was talking to him about the historical range of condors. The third dimension, I would say, is fine writing. The newest member of the group, Cat Urbigkit, absolutely blows me away -- not just with writing: her photos are excellent. Her world is ranching, with a strong scientific background. Matt Mullenix is in the South rather than the West; he's also a fine writer, and the blog’s tech-head. They do indeed feel they are pursuing a sacred trust, a holy work, and their incomes suffer the same as always for such work.

For a book collaboration with Tim Barrus, I’m working with materials about Gay San Francisco and the fate of “Drummer” which was a focused publication for “leathermen,” which are defined by being hypermasculine. (For them, wearing motorcycle leathers was de rigeur.) I’m struck by how “Western” their assumptions are, though they migrated in from all over America, only to be dispersed by HIV in a few decades. But I hesitate to even MENTION this to the West Lit bunch. Brits don’t discuss poofters in front of ladies! Heavens! Not even the Woolfs! Ernest Hemingway, surely, but not Gertrude Stein!

Leaving out some intense nodes of creation like Querencia (and Bodio is also a legit Montana writer due to his novel, “Querencia,” published by Russ Chatham in Livingston) and “Drummer” as well as the counter-mythic “Redneck Review of Literature,” reduces the category of Western Literature to the same old names, the same old tropes, and dwindling influence. I believe it also gives way too much power to academia’s interest in respectability and wealth.

In the end it is the passionately obsessed people working at the margins-- people like Reedy and her heroes as well as Norman Maclean, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Tom Savage, Jack Fritscher, Tim Barrus, the Querencia bloggers -- the rule-breakers and double-uppers who could save West Lit from the lifestyle packaging of slick magazines. Oh, man [sic], are they going to town! But they DO buy fine writing about the West and they do get into the pockets of the fabulously rich.

Western small-world publishers aren’t in touch with each other -- even if they’re in the same country, they don’t live in the same part of town. I’m not sure they’d like each other or would be helped by awareness of each other’s work, much less sharing a listserv. I’m not sure that the magazine stand won’t follow the bookstore out of existence. An intelligent and “literate” truck driver told me that he doesn’t even subscribe to Sirius, the single-interest satellite-based radio network. As he drives, he streams radio stations from across North America through his onboard computer or listens to novels on his iPod. They tell me to forget CD’s. (No, no, no! Not my fav CD’s!!) They tell me Netflix-by-mail will wink out as soon as enough people have broadband so they can stream their movies. They tell me that an extra-strong sun flare or an unusually vindictive high-tech country could wipe out the satellite system that supports all this streaming. Kindle is most likely to be done in by software changes or battery frustration.

Then we’ll be back to Penelope Reedy’s way: ink on paper, the way Benjamin Franklin taught his Native American helpers to compose print on a typestick. Then all the chess men will be on the floor. To continue that metaphor, I think we’re at “check” but not at “check mate.” Don’t despair, Penelope! The game goes on!

Feel free to chime in via the comments.