Word reached me this week about two deaths from early parts of my life, which means both men are close to me in age. Rick Lucke was among the first students I taught in Browning, Montana, on the Blackfeet Reservation. I don’t think he was Blackfeet though an outsider couldn’t have told. He was a tall, lean, humorous cowboy-type like Gary Cooper, Randolph Scott, or Sam Eliot.
The very first funeral I ever attended in Browning was for Rick’s father, Herman, who had been logging and was killed by an unpredictably falling tree. The funeral was in the Browning Methodist Church, where I served for a year after leaving the Unitarians in 1988, and I attended back then in 1962 or so because Bob was a friend of Herman’s. The minister in those years was Jim Bell, a Texan who was also of the long, lean, humorous mold, and what he said has affected me throughout my lifetime. He said, “Herman Lucke never came around this church or any other in his lifetime, but he spent his life in God’s church out in the mountains and forests. He was close to God up there every day and therefore, a place was made for him in Heaven, which we hope is a lot like the places Herman roamed.”
Earl Benson was from the class ahead of me, though he was my age. At Jefferson High School in Portland, Oregon, we had a near-professional drama department and music program. Earl, an extra-large man, vertically, horizontally, intellectually -- and big-hearted besides, excelled in all the programs we produced: skits, plays, assemblies, concerts. He’d be the magician in “Maker of Dreams” or the caterpillar in “Alice in Wonderland.”
Earl claimed the right to be different. The quotes below are from columns and blogs off Google. I never saw him perform at this level. In high school he was like a big kindergarten kid, bouncy and jovial with hair like Woody Woodpecker. His obit photo shows an old man both long hair and full beard now gray. He has the same slightly bemused eyebrows, tilted up in the middle.
"Portland music icon, Earl Benson died November 26, 2007. He was 68 years old. Earl graduated from Jefferson High School in 1956, where he was a tenor in the school choir and acted in various plays both at Jefferson and in Portland Parks productions. It was during his high school years that he began his extensive collection of recordings covering a wide range of musical genres. He pursued a music degree at Lewis and Clark College and graduated in 1963. Earl, house musician at Cafe Espresso, was a pivotal presence on the coffeehouse/folk scene in the 60s, as a solo act, singing and playing autoharp, or in duet with Molly Malarkey on bass, and later with rock band, Sterling Stem and the Bumcounts. It was at the 9th Street Exit coffeehouse that Earl, Steve Bradley and Bill Wyatt formed the core that became the Sleezy Pieces, one of Portland's legendary bands of the 70s.
"Earl was a prolific songwriter and the band performed many of his originals as well as some brilliant medleys and old standards that were early influences. He could croon Red Foley's hit "Midnight" and turn around and belt out Dylan's "Come Crawl Out Your Window", totally comfortable in either genre. His eclectic repertoire and harmony singing added much to the band's sound, where all 5 players shared the lead vocal work. Sleezy Pieces had a great following and the many fans will remember Earl: stage left, shades on, cigarette in hand, dancing to the music."
“Longtime Portland music critic SP Clarke writes: “[Benson’s] delivery was something to behold—a bearded boyscout in Bermuda shorts and a wrinkled sportscoat singing in a rich falsetto, while quoting St. Paul, fronting one of the best bands the city has ever seen. In the annals of Portland weirdness, Earl Benson stood apart. Way apart. ”
Here’s Rick’s obit:
Feb. 16, 2008 Great Fall Tribune
Rick Lucke, 1947-2008
Richard Allen “Rick” Lucke, 60, of East Glacier, an Army veteran and co-owner and operator of Lucke Construction Co., died of pulmonary fibrosis Wednesday at his home.
A celebration of his life is 2 PM Monday at the East Glacier Community Hall with a potluck feed to follow. Cremation has taken place under the direction of Hi Line Funeral Home in Cut Bank.
Survivors include his mother, Shirley Melton of Kalispell; his children, John Lucke of East Glacier, Bobbi (Myron) Lucke of Browning, and Monty Montana Lucke of East Glacier; a step-daughter, Sarah Augare of Browning; brothers LeRoy Lucke of Kalispell and Don Lucke of Bigfork; a sister, Georgia Eckerson of Kalispell; and his grandchildren, Rylee, Ryana, Cody and Jeremiah.
He was preceded in death by his father, Herman Lucke; his stepfather, Bud Melton; a step-son, Cole Augare; and infant grandson, Chace Ryan; and a nephew, Eric.
Rick was born March 6, 1947, in Glasgow to Herman and Shirley (Oliver) Lucke. he worked in his family’s outfitter business providing packtrips into the backcountry. Rick served with the U.S. Amry from 1964 to 1966 and later became co-owner and operator of Lucke Construction Co.
An avid outdoorsman and horseman, he enjoyed fishing, hunting, and snowmobiling. Rick was a member of the Warrior Society Veteran organization in Browning.
My life has brought me into contact with a broad spectrum of people who have challenged my idea of what success might be, or even good health. I don’t know whether Rick and Earl would even have liked each other, but I liked both of them. When I was in Portland, it didn’t occur to me to go looking for Earl Benson -- I didn’t even know he was still there. I don’t know what he was doing in his later years or how it was he died young. Rick, I know about. His was a working man’s death, brought on by exposure to dust and other particles, maybe intensified by smoking. It’s an alluring fantasy to imagine a long chat with both these guys. Maybe that’s the seed of a story.
Saturday, February 16, 2008
Friday, February 15, 2008
AMAZON ANACONDA
It's all very interesting.
Amazon is offering "Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver" for a cheaper price than they are buying the book for. Evidently they are using it as a "loss leader" to get your name and address into their database.
But there were too many buyers! They had not realized that there are a few hundred people who want to buy this book! They were losing money!
So they said they'd run out of copies because they were "unavailable" and they didn't know when any would ever be available again. They made the book sound like some sort of mirage.
So I posted an "author's review" of Amazon on the Amazon website.
Shortly, one (ONE, UNO) copy reappeared on the database. No message to me. The nonsense about "not being available" went away.
My publisher doesn't tell me what she had to do with this. I told her. Then she took the afternoon off.
Normally U of Calgary Press authors get a 40% discount on any U of Calgary Press books, including the ones they write. BUT because I want to sell my own books at readings and book-signings around the state and the national distributor, Michigan State University, doesn't want to mess around with me because they don't quite believe that Montana really exists anyway, the U of Calgary Press will ship me books direct BUT my discount will be diminished to 30%. No royalty, of course. (My royalty is 5% of the U of Calgary Press NET profit. That is, for every $1,000 they make, I make $50.)
You know that song, "Mothers, Don't Let Your Sons Be Cowboys"? Well, it's good advice for the mothers of potential authors as well. You won't be the ant -- you'll be the aphid.
Amazon is offering "Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver" for a cheaper price than they are buying the book for. Evidently they are using it as a "loss leader" to get your name and address into their database.
But there were too many buyers! They had not realized that there are a few hundred people who want to buy this book! They were losing money!
So they said they'd run out of copies because they were "unavailable" and they didn't know when any would ever be available again. They made the book sound like some sort of mirage.
So I posted an "author's review" of Amazon on the Amazon website.
Shortly, one (ONE, UNO) copy reappeared on the database. No message to me. The nonsense about "not being available" went away.
My publisher doesn't tell me what she had to do with this. I told her. Then she took the afternoon off.
Normally U of Calgary Press authors get a 40% discount on any U of Calgary Press books, including the ones they write. BUT because I want to sell my own books at readings and book-signings around the state and the national distributor, Michigan State University, doesn't want to mess around with me because they don't quite believe that Montana really exists anyway, the U of Calgary Press will ship me books direct BUT my discount will be diminished to 30%. No royalty, of course. (My royalty is 5% of the U of Calgary Press NET profit. That is, for every $1,000 they make, I make $50.)
You know that song, "Mothers, Don't Let Your Sons Be Cowboys"? Well, it's good advice for the mothers of potential authors as well. You won't be the ant -- you'll be the aphid.
MISS POTTER
“Miss Potter” was listed in Netflix as being so popular that there would be a “very long wait.” So I waited and now it’s come and I’ve seen it. I’m disappointed, partly because my expectations were so out-of-sync with everyone else’s. Walt Disney meets Jane Austen: lots of dressups, not much introspection, bland acting, predictable events, and no attention whatsoever to Potter’s uncle and his attempts to get her very real scientific insights into the science circles for which she was qualified. Rather, her “feminism” was portrayed as a desire to have her own way and to not have to take care of her aging parents in their spoiled little lives. (They had family fortunes that meant they didn’t have to do anything for a living.) Emphasis was given to her own personal fortune from writing the Peter Rabbit books. No reflection was expressed on why they sold so well. Her life, according to this movie, consists of two romances: one ended when the young man died and the other a practical arrangement entered into at age 47.
It’s a beautiful movie, of course, because it’s filmed in the English Lake Country, though that place is really rather sombre and had to be tarted up with garden flowers unnatural enough to probably have been silk. And then there was a recreation of Farmer MacGregor’s garden. The only dark elements were the duenna who accompanied her everywhere as a young woman, an animated fish that grew bigger and bigger until it threatened to swallow a frog, and a raven shadow that flew through her animated drawing. These were supposed to indicate her state of mind, as though it weren’t enough that she was locked in her room, frantically drawing and not changing her clothes.
Zellweger, whom I saw in “White Oleander” but don’t remember maybe because it was another sentimental movie, is said to be “cherubic.” She played Potter with her mouth pursed up, making bird-like quick movements and squinting. She was best when she was drawing. Evidently they gave her drawing lessons and she quite enjoyed them. I always love to watch movie depictions of drawing and painting, but I’m divided about the animations. They were ever-so-slightly corny. Just a touch too twee.
One of the problems with the work of Beatrix Potter is that it has been so commodified with figurines, toys, games, stuffed animals, and the like -- some better and some worse -- that we’re weary. In fact, one might suspect that this movie was designed to give a shot in the arm to the marketing empire. Evidently Potter herself participated in this, was not above making enough money to be a potent conservationist, buying land to save it from development. This IS in the movie, though not really explored -- like everything else.
Infantilization is the opposite of feminism. It’s a long fight to keep women from being seen as children, to keep animals from being seen as children’s toys, to see “little” books as not being therefore trivial if cute -- fit mostly for children’s birthday party gifts. The serious messages of Felix Saalten’s “Bambi” or Carlo Collodi’s “Pinocchio” are lost in the Disneyfied versions. I suspect that the reason so many men are sexual predators of little children, esp. girls, is this belief that children are toys, harmless, with no will of their own. In short, SAFE, unlike the terrifying women unleashed by feminism: women who can refuse pregnancy and earn their own living. I suspect this wide-spread and deeply rooted conviction in our culture is a reaction to the shadow predator fishes and birds of our times, now so immense and alien that they are submarines and satellites -- both with malicious goals, terrorist intent. Being childish is meant to be a flight to safety, a denial of danger.
When I was a Unitarian minister, I constantly came up against this drive towards candified life, all sweet and bright. One Christmas I gave a series of meditations on “light” and spoke about the impressive sight of nuclear missile being loaded into it’s silo within sight of a Montana highway about 3AM -- a slender white missile bathed in white spotlight. The next day a delegation arrived to say I had destroyed their Christmas which was meant to be like “The Nutcracker Suite,” all innocent and prosperous. (No Freudian stuff please.) In short, Victorian -- though entirely neglecting some of the truly vicious and oppressive aspects of the Victorian world, the British Empire. So much of our sentimentality is, like white weddings, a valuing of ostentation that began in the Victorian era.
When I was in the “Wings of the Dove” bookstore in Lethbridge on Monday, I was impressed by how pastel everything was. Many little figurines of sentimental subjects like mothers with babies. Silk flowers everywhere. Bits of inspiring advice lettered onto the walls. Books about how to stay happy and find one’s inner child. Christian romances about how girls found perfect husbands by being virtuous (a quick perusal suggested virtue was largely a matter of obedience and self-sacrifice). Meanwhile, two doors up, messy animals and an equally messy tumble of interesting books engaged me far more.
Emily Watson is entirely wasted in this movie as the sympathetic sister of Potter’s doomed publisher boyfriend. Some reviewers have suggested that Watson, in spite of her Valentine face, would have made a more complex Potter. Zellweger was, after all, a “reach” since she is a Texan. Certainly Watson would have been a more complex figure and possibly she took this secondary role after being considered as the heroine and dismissed because of some of the high-tension and risky work she’s done in the past. But I’d like to see her cast in a new version, one NOT directed by the director of “Babe.” One that neither infantilizes nor commodifies her original work on plants, fungus, and algae.
It’s a beautiful movie, of course, because it’s filmed in the English Lake Country, though that place is really rather sombre and had to be tarted up with garden flowers unnatural enough to probably have been silk. And then there was a recreation of Farmer MacGregor’s garden. The only dark elements were the duenna who accompanied her everywhere as a young woman, an animated fish that grew bigger and bigger until it threatened to swallow a frog, and a raven shadow that flew through her animated drawing. These were supposed to indicate her state of mind, as though it weren’t enough that she was locked in her room, frantically drawing and not changing her clothes.
Zellweger, whom I saw in “White Oleander” but don’t remember maybe because it was another sentimental movie, is said to be “cherubic.” She played Potter with her mouth pursed up, making bird-like quick movements and squinting. She was best when she was drawing. Evidently they gave her drawing lessons and she quite enjoyed them. I always love to watch movie depictions of drawing and painting, but I’m divided about the animations. They were ever-so-slightly corny. Just a touch too twee.
One of the problems with the work of Beatrix Potter is that it has been so commodified with figurines, toys, games, stuffed animals, and the like -- some better and some worse -- that we’re weary. In fact, one might suspect that this movie was designed to give a shot in the arm to the marketing empire. Evidently Potter herself participated in this, was not above making enough money to be a potent conservationist, buying land to save it from development. This IS in the movie, though not really explored -- like everything else.
Infantilization is the opposite of feminism. It’s a long fight to keep women from being seen as children, to keep animals from being seen as children’s toys, to see “little” books as not being therefore trivial if cute -- fit mostly for children’s birthday party gifts. The serious messages of Felix Saalten’s “Bambi” or Carlo Collodi’s “Pinocchio” are lost in the Disneyfied versions. I suspect that the reason so many men are sexual predators of little children, esp. girls, is this belief that children are toys, harmless, with no will of their own. In short, SAFE, unlike the terrifying women unleashed by feminism: women who can refuse pregnancy and earn their own living. I suspect this wide-spread and deeply rooted conviction in our culture is a reaction to the shadow predator fishes and birds of our times, now so immense and alien that they are submarines and satellites -- both with malicious goals, terrorist intent. Being childish is meant to be a flight to safety, a denial of danger.
When I was a Unitarian minister, I constantly came up against this drive towards candified life, all sweet and bright. One Christmas I gave a series of meditations on “light” and spoke about the impressive sight of nuclear missile being loaded into it’s silo within sight of a Montana highway about 3AM -- a slender white missile bathed in white spotlight. The next day a delegation arrived to say I had destroyed their Christmas which was meant to be like “The Nutcracker Suite,” all innocent and prosperous. (No Freudian stuff please.) In short, Victorian -- though entirely neglecting some of the truly vicious and oppressive aspects of the Victorian world, the British Empire. So much of our sentimentality is, like white weddings, a valuing of ostentation that began in the Victorian era.
When I was in the “Wings of the Dove” bookstore in Lethbridge on Monday, I was impressed by how pastel everything was. Many little figurines of sentimental subjects like mothers with babies. Silk flowers everywhere. Bits of inspiring advice lettered onto the walls. Books about how to stay happy and find one’s inner child. Christian romances about how girls found perfect husbands by being virtuous (a quick perusal suggested virtue was largely a matter of obedience and self-sacrifice). Meanwhile, two doors up, messy animals and an equally messy tumble of interesting books engaged me far more.
Emily Watson is entirely wasted in this movie as the sympathetic sister of Potter’s doomed publisher boyfriend. Some reviewers have suggested that Watson, in spite of her Valentine face, would have made a more complex Potter. Zellweger was, after all, a “reach” since she is a Texan. Certainly Watson would have been a more complex figure and possibly she took this secondary role after being considered as the heroine and dismissed because of some of the high-tension and risky work she’s done in the past. But I’d like to see her cast in a new version, one NOT directed by the director of “Babe.” One that neither infantilizes nor commodifies her original work on plants, fungus, and algae.
Thursday, February 14, 2008
BREAKING BREAD IN THE PUBLISHING WORLD
Having “broken bread” with the University of Calgary Press staff this week, I’m looking at some of the complexities of the new changes in publishing with their eyes. Last night I watched “Miss Potter,” the very embodiment of the still-standing mythology of what the relationship between author and publisher is (rather like the phenomenon of falling in love with one’s obstetrician) and what life-changing effects being a published author creates (Beatrix Potter bought thousands of acres of English Lake Country farm land with her fortune and gave it to the people of England!) so that even her MOTHER was finally impressed. These days that’s as much a fairy tale as a talking rabbit.
There are categories and distinctions (implying possibilities) that are lost to public consciousness. First of all, we must separate PRINT from PUBLISH, which have been carelessly used as synonyms in the past. Now there are TWO kinds of print: electronic and, as they say, “hard copy.” (Never mind that an electronic screen, being glass, is hard and paper is generally on the soft side.) If one writes a blog like this one, the print is PRINTED but only published in the sense that anyone can get access and read it. No one does all the accessory things necessary for a book.
Most people have little notion of what those accessory things are, so I’ll list them:
1. Soliciting excellent material. (Janice Dickson was contracted to do this for the "Legacies Series" that included "Bronze Inside and Out.")
2. Developing a collection of such material so that the publishing “house” has a mission, a personality, or purpose. The missions of a comic book publisher, a regional academic press, a young adult publisher, a reference publisher, a novel publisher, a history “press”, and so on are quite different. The big Manhattan publishers serve an audience that is quite invisible to most Montana readers. Likewise, few in Manhattan grasp that there is a world apart from them.
3. Both publisher and author are aided by “agents,” who are essentially match-makers and now, increasingly, filter writing in the way that publishers’ editors used to do, imposing their tastes and beliefs on both sides. Many of them ARE former editors who have lost their jobs with the shrinking number and scale of publishing houses. Some might be disappointed writers themselves. So very many people are writing now that this interstitial layer of free-lancers or businesses that just act as agents seems necessary, but so far they tend to be a mono-culture.
4. Once accepted, whether through an agent or some other way, the publishing house will make suggestions about structure, actively edit, compile the index, preface, foreword, bibliography, footnotes and so on that accompany a book that is not fiction. Also, the manuscript will be proofed -- not on paper now but in the computer which will go to the actual printing press. There are enough people who make their living “indexing” books for them to have an association and written standards of performance. A layout must be designed, placing photos or graphics and creating the style, chapter headings, divisions among chapters, and so on.
5. When the actual writing -- now normally a computer document -- is sent to the printer, it must be checked and checked again for errors. Because it is a computer document, rather than metal plates as used to be the case, the number of copies made can be ANY number. With metal plates, the setup was so arduous and expensive that the only way to get the costs down was to make a lot of copies. Then they required storage (as did the plates) so a publisher needed to own or rent warehouses until all the books were sold. In the United States these copies are considered financial assets and are taxed as property.
6. Getting the copies out to the bookstores (who order them but basically have them on consignment until they are sold) is a matter of creating catalogues and publicity stories as well as working with regional salesmen who actually drive around with the books to show them to the bookstores. (In Montana few are willing to take on such a task.) Once people have bought the book, and if they like it, then word of mouth begins to build and this is the true key to book success. Interviews, newspaper follow-up, and possibly new possibilities in other media (movies, television appearances) begin to accrue. A chief means of publicity used to be magazine ads and ads in the big book review sections that major newspapers publish. Now both magazines and newspapers have been badly injured by the switch of public attention to iPods and blogs and also the high cost of paper and ink. They are entirely closing down many book review sections.
7. When supplies of the book get down to a small number, the publisher must normally decide whether to make another printing, what size it ought to be, and so on. If the copies are selling quite slowly, they might be sent to a remainder house where they are sold for a low price. Some of the big used bookstores also accept remainders.
8. If the bookstore sells on the Internet, this is a great way for anyone anywhere to pick up books (often wonderful and precious specialty books) at a low cost. In fact, one can buy from foreign countries and expect quick delivery because of the huge infrastructure of delivery systems and money management credit systems. Books hardly die anymore -- they just enter this realm of “free trade” that -- so far -- no one has been able to sort out very well. A giant Gorilla like Amazon is no less confused than the rest of us, esp. since it is separated into different Internet realms: Amazon.ca (Canada) as well as a division for Australia, Great Britain, and so on.
All of these elements above, like pop-it beads, can be separated into contracted separate businesses. Some do nothing but layout or proofing, some package for delivery, some pretend they are whatever company is involved -- like a faux Starbucks in Barnes & Noble. This is made practical because of the huge volume involved. But it can run aground, as when Amazon declared this week that my book was no longer available! It just hadn’t gotten through the layers of distributors in a second wave after the first wave was all sold.
Alongside the mass work are little free-lance operators selling their own libraries at home, mailing out a few books at a time from their garage or basement. Then someone like Alibris or Abebooks contracts with them to maintain a database of what is where, how much, who’s selling, whether you ought to trust them (based on customer feedback) and so on. Also, there are home publishers who only put out a very few new books yearly. Some of these folks are pretty naive and unschooled, and others are VERY sophisticated indeed. We still need more discriminating advisors who can tell one from the other and the public needs more ways of getting access to this advice. A major help is online eNewsletters. Buckingham, a used bookstore, sends me lists and lists of what they have via email. Their lists include "ephemera," meaning old posters or theatre programs and exhibit brochures: any thing "printed."
How is a small, quiet university press like the one at the University of Calgary meant to compete in a world like this? Focus. Specializing. High quality. Networking. Internet savvy. Flexible staff. Administration resourceful enough to contract out when necessary.
And an eye for the opening: their territory is continuous with Montana but Montana has no university press. Michigan State University is the U of Calgary Press stateside distributor, but they have no presence (mailing list, representative or depot) or interest in Montana. (Those interested should make a proposal NOW!) The University of Nebraska Press, which used to dominate the regional history market, has largely withdrawn from that area, declaring they are now a “world press.” The University of Oklahoma Press has also devolved. The entity that seems to be picking up the regional market is the University of New Mexico, which ignores the northern Plains. The Western art movement that so dominates the SW US is only beginning to unfold up north. “Bronze Inside and Out” is only one of several art books that the U of Calgary Press offers and they could easily expand in that direction. So far the University of Washington has dominated the art book scene, but they are more interested in the Asian-influenced work. The door is standing open, though it takes courage to walk through into an unknown country.
There are categories and distinctions (implying possibilities) that are lost to public consciousness. First of all, we must separate PRINT from PUBLISH, which have been carelessly used as synonyms in the past. Now there are TWO kinds of print: electronic and, as they say, “hard copy.” (Never mind that an electronic screen, being glass, is hard and paper is generally on the soft side.) If one writes a blog like this one, the print is PRINTED but only published in the sense that anyone can get access and read it. No one does all the accessory things necessary for a book.
Most people have little notion of what those accessory things are, so I’ll list them:
1. Soliciting excellent material. (Janice Dickson was contracted to do this for the "Legacies Series" that included "Bronze Inside and Out.")
2. Developing a collection of such material so that the publishing “house” has a mission, a personality, or purpose. The missions of a comic book publisher, a regional academic press, a young adult publisher, a reference publisher, a novel publisher, a history “press”, and so on are quite different. The big Manhattan publishers serve an audience that is quite invisible to most Montana readers. Likewise, few in Manhattan grasp that there is a world apart from them.
3. Both publisher and author are aided by “agents,” who are essentially match-makers and now, increasingly, filter writing in the way that publishers’ editors used to do, imposing their tastes and beliefs on both sides. Many of them ARE former editors who have lost their jobs with the shrinking number and scale of publishing houses. Some might be disappointed writers themselves. So very many people are writing now that this interstitial layer of free-lancers or businesses that just act as agents seems necessary, but so far they tend to be a mono-culture.
4. Once accepted, whether through an agent or some other way, the publishing house will make suggestions about structure, actively edit, compile the index, preface, foreword, bibliography, footnotes and so on that accompany a book that is not fiction. Also, the manuscript will be proofed -- not on paper now but in the computer which will go to the actual printing press. There are enough people who make their living “indexing” books for them to have an association and written standards of performance. A layout must be designed, placing photos or graphics and creating the style, chapter headings, divisions among chapters, and so on.
5. When the actual writing -- now normally a computer document -- is sent to the printer, it must be checked and checked again for errors. Because it is a computer document, rather than metal plates as used to be the case, the number of copies made can be ANY number. With metal plates, the setup was so arduous and expensive that the only way to get the costs down was to make a lot of copies. Then they required storage (as did the plates) so a publisher needed to own or rent warehouses until all the books were sold. In the United States these copies are considered financial assets and are taxed as property.
6. Getting the copies out to the bookstores (who order them but basically have them on consignment until they are sold) is a matter of creating catalogues and publicity stories as well as working with regional salesmen who actually drive around with the books to show them to the bookstores. (In Montana few are willing to take on such a task.) Once people have bought the book, and if they like it, then word of mouth begins to build and this is the true key to book success. Interviews, newspaper follow-up, and possibly new possibilities in other media (movies, television appearances) begin to accrue. A chief means of publicity used to be magazine ads and ads in the big book review sections that major newspapers publish. Now both magazines and newspapers have been badly injured by the switch of public attention to iPods and blogs and also the high cost of paper and ink. They are entirely closing down many book review sections.
7. When supplies of the book get down to a small number, the publisher must normally decide whether to make another printing, what size it ought to be, and so on. If the copies are selling quite slowly, they might be sent to a remainder house where they are sold for a low price. Some of the big used bookstores also accept remainders.
8. If the bookstore sells on the Internet, this is a great way for anyone anywhere to pick up books (often wonderful and precious specialty books) at a low cost. In fact, one can buy from foreign countries and expect quick delivery because of the huge infrastructure of delivery systems and money management credit systems. Books hardly die anymore -- they just enter this realm of “free trade” that -- so far -- no one has been able to sort out very well. A giant Gorilla like Amazon is no less confused than the rest of us, esp. since it is separated into different Internet realms: Amazon.ca (Canada) as well as a division for Australia, Great Britain, and so on.
All of these elements above, like pop-it beads, can be separated into contracted separate businesses. Some do nothing but layout or proofing, some package for delivery, some pretend they are whatever company is involved -- like a faux Starbucks in Barnes & Noble. This is made practical because of the huge volume involved. But it can run aground, as when Amazon declared this week that my book was no longer available! It just hadn’t gotten through the layers of distributors in a second wave after the first wave was all sold.
Alongside the mass work are little free-lance operators selling their own libraries at home, mailing out a few books at a time from their garage or basement. Then someone like Alibris or Abebooks contracts with them to maintain a database of what is where, how much, who’s selling, whether you ought to trust them (based on customer feedback) and so on. Also, there are home publishers who only put out a very few new books yearly. Some of these folks are pretty naive and unschooled, and others are VERY sophisticated indeed. We still need more discriminating advisors who can tell one from the other and the public needs more ways of getting access to this advice. A major help is online eNewsletters. Buckingham, a used bookstore, sends me lists and lists of what they have via email. Their lists include "ephemera," meaning old posters or theatre programs and exhibit brochures: any thing "printed."
How is a small, quiet university press like the one at the University of Calgary meant to compete in a world like this? Focus. Specializing. High quality. Networking. Internet savvy. Flexible staff. Administration resourceful enough to contract out when necessary.
And an eye for the opening: their territory is continuous with Montana but Montana has no university press. Michigan State University is the U of Calgary Press stateside distributor, but they have no presence (mailing list, representative or depot) or interest in Montana. (Those interested should make a proposal NOW!) The University of Nebraska Press, which used to dominate the regional history market, has largely withdrawn from that area, declaring they are now a “world press.” The University of Oklahoma Press has also devolved. The entity that seems to be picking up the regional market is the University of New Mexico, which ignores the northern Plains. The Western art movement that so dominates the SW US is only beginning to unfold up north. “Bronze Inside and Out” is only one of several art books that the U of Calgary Press offers and they could easily expand in that direction. So far the University of Washington has dominated the art book scene, but they are more interested in the Asian-influenced work. The door is standing open, though it takes courage to walk through into an unknown country.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
AUTHOR ADVENTURES
An author’s life is not all sitting at the computer keys, tapping out masterpieces. I’d been invited to speak at the Glenbow Museum yesterday but the weather has been fierce and I was wary of actually guaranteeing that I’d go. I sent the Ed Mitch DVD of Bob talking about his work as a backup. Early Monday morning Sue McConnell, scout and wife for Clyde who upgraded all the photos in the book, sent an email saying the forecast up there was good. I looked out the window, saw a clearing sky, and sent Bob Pearson -- who organizes the Glenbow “Terrific Tuesdays” -- a message “missile launch is go.” The postmaster promised that if I never came back (might get storm-stayed, might elope, might be killed on the road) she’d adopt the cats.
At the border (Sweetgrass) the bored Canadian officer didn’t even want to see my birth certificate, which is really quite splendid since it’s the full-page original with gold seal and my teeny footprints. In fact, I joked that it was the same age as me but it looked a lot better. (Sue suggested that maybe if I wore a gold seal...)
Lethbridge is a major city, bigger than any in Montana, and I stopped at my favorite bookstore: ABC Books which has tumbles and stacks and towers of books everywhere and also a little white grandmother bunny named “Blossom,” two quite social cockatiels, and some unidentified reptiles. The owner told me about his favorite customer, now deceased, a polymath who bought Chinese philosophy among other things. I had a bracing cup of coffee at the Wings of the Dove Christian Bookstore two doors down and used their powder room which had elegantly painted inspirational sentences on the wall and a big bouquet of silk magnolias.
Then I set out for Fort Macleod, thinking it was a truck route and would probably be cleared. I had not bet on hundred mile an hour winds blowing snow over the road at a temperature that mixed water and ice. Ten miles would be dry as summer, then another half mile of tractionless adrenaline-shooting life-risk -- while the 18-wheelers zoomed through the slush, throwing it all up on my windshield. If I’d hit the ditch then, at least I’d never have seen it coming.
When I got to Fort Macleod, I talked to the police chief who said that if I could make it to Claresholm, I would be safe the rest of the way. He was right. I also found out my gas card wouldn’t work in Canada. Evidently Esso and Exxon are not getting along. (Chavez is mad at Exxon, too.) In Calgary the roads had been graveled so traction was good but visibility was intermittent because mud was being thrown up everywhere. I also gained some windshield dings. I hadn’t gotten a good mesh between my gas station road map and my Google-generated map to McConnell’s house, but I managed to blunder across the two rivers, past the Stampede grounds, past the Unitarian church, past the University of Calgary, and to the right house only five minutes late.
McConnells and I became friends through the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment listserv on the Internet. When they come down this way, they stop for tea and scones. We have many life experiences in common, are about the same age, and share interests. They’ve lived on the West Coast and in Saskatoon. Sue cooked the perfect meal for diabetics: roast, three veggies, lots of nuts. Clyde was pleased because it was a colorful meal! (They’re both originally art majors.) Orange carrots, green peas, etc. Sue noticed there was no red, so fetched a tomato!
CELESTE
Celeste, who is visiting, is a sandy-colored muscular little cat with huge ears and eyes who surely must be carrying some of the originally evolved desert genes. Boots, a satiny black cat with a splendid plume of a tail and a neat little white bib is in permanent residence and came to watch Celeste chase her cat toy. Celeste spent part of the night sleeping with me, but she’s a very busy cat.
Next morning Sue came up with a fancy brand of oatmeal full of flax, wheat germ, sunflower seeds, and other nutritious things. She came with me as guide through Calgary traffic and reassurance in the parking labyrinth which always gives me flashes of old sinister movies. The museum staff was ready, provided coffee and a welcome, and we stopped to give a rub to the bust of Colonel Harvie which Bob had made. It was the Colonel’s oil fortune that paid for the museum.
The presentation went beautifully. Friends and colleagues were in the audience, everyone laughed at my jokes and we projected the Ed Mitch DVD of Bob talking about his work onto a huge wall where it was VERY impressive. The University of Calgary Press arrived en masse -- they simply locked the office door and all came! I’d never met any of them, so when they were standing in a circle introducing themselves to the host, I just got on the end of the line. Great to have faces for all the names!
At lunch we were all feeling like family and the event had become so much like a book launch that we all went to lunch in a posh hotel where we were seated at a high table in the bar and ordered very fancy things like “summer squash ravioli” and “southwest corn soup.” No alcohol, lots of coffee. I don’t know who picked up the tab -- it wasn’t me. The Glenbow host was there, as well as Sue and my fellow writer Ray Djuff.
Sue piloted me back down to the street -- after a brief blunder when we all suddenly found ourselves in the restaurant kitchen -- and headed me south. This time I had used Sue’s laptop (Oh, sigh! What a terrific little instrument: a Mac of the white and ice persuasion!) to get the highway report and stayed to the east far enough to dodge all the problems. Summer-dry roads, no trucks, zippety doodah. At Sweetgrass the American officer examined my birth certificate VERY carefully and agreed that I had cute little feet. On to Shelby where I stopped at Pamida to buy drain opener, hoping that I wouldn’t need it. The toilet was stopped up when I left, but I thought it might be merely frozen and open itself while I was gone.
It did not. I had 358 new messages, almost entirely SPAM. The cats rushed to greet -- not me, but the pickiup! I know they were hoping to hurt my feelings for leaving them overnight! Among the messages were anguished cries from a dozen friends who had just gotten emails from Amazon saying that my book was not available! I tried Barnes & Noble who said the same thing. Has the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel found a way to stifle me? Or is it the kafuffle over international book prices now that loonies are at par? Or is it the fact that Amazon was selling the book at an excellent price and suddenly realized that they were selling a LOT of copies and losing profit? (Hundreds of books were pre-ordered.)
Dunno. Used my camping potty and went to bed. Woke up when the carbon monoxide monitor shrieked at 5AM. No carbon mono. It shrieked because the electricity had died. Outside there is an ice storm raging. Back to sleep. At 5:30AM, the monitor shrieked again because the electricity came back on. Started coffee and ten minutes later another shriek as it all died again. I think I’d better bring in my camp stove. Another ten minutes and the electricity was back, and the newspaper came. We don’t have boys delivering papers: we have a tough woman in a hoodie. Just in time for two cups of coffee and a lot of boring news. Now back to bed. Then I’ll work on the toilet some more.
One of this morning’s message was that my cousin’s husband, our much loved “Ham” (short for Hamilton), might have a curable kind of lymphoma instead of a racing version of lung cancer. While the electricity was off, I stood at the kitchen picture window for a while. With all the town lights blacked out, the sky was full of stars.
At the border (Sweetgrass) the bored Canadian officer didn’t even want to see my birth certificate, which is really quite splendid since it’s the full-page original with gold seal and my teeny footprints. In fact, I joked that it was the same age as me but it looked a lot better. (Sue suggested that maybe if I wore a gold seal...)
Lethbridge is a major city, bigger than any in Montana, and I stopped at my favorite bookstore: ABC Books which has tumbles and stacks and towers of books everywhere and also a little white grandmother bunny named “Blossom,” two quite social cockatiels, and some unidentified reptiles. The owner told me about his favorite customer, now deceased, a polymath who bought Chinese philosophy among other things. I had a bracing cup of coffee at the Wings of the Dove Christian Bookstore two doors down and used their powder room which had elegantly painted inspirational sentences on the wall and a big bouquet of silk magnolias.
Then I set out for Fort Macleod, thinking it was a truck route and would probably be cleared. I had not bet on hundred mile an hour winds blowing snow over the road at a temperature that mixed water and ice. Ten miles would be dry as summer, then another half mile of tractionless adrenaline-shooting life-risk -- while the 18-wheelers zoomed through the slush, throwing it all up on my windshield. If I’d hit the ditch then, at least I’d never have seen it coming.
When I got to Fort Macleod, I talked to the police chief who said that if I could make it to Claresholm, I would be safe the rest of the way. He was right. I also found out my gas card wouldn’t work in Canada. Evidently Esso and Exxon are not getting along. (Chavez is mad at Exxon, too.) In Calgary the roads had been graveled so traction was good but visibility was intermittent because mud was being thrown up everywhere. I also gained some windshield dings. I hadn’t gotten a good mesh between my gas station road map and my Google-generated map to McConnell’s house, but I managed to blunder across the two rivers, past the Stampede grounds, past the Unitarian church, past the University of Calgary, and to the right house only five minutes late.
McConnells and I became friends through the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment listserv on the Internet. When they come down this way, they stop for tea and scones. We have many life experiences in common, are about the same age, and share interests. They’ve lived on the West Coast and in Saskatoon. Sue cooked the perfect meal for diabetics: roast, three veggies, lots of nuts. Clyde was pleased because it was a colorful meal! (They’re both originally art majors.) Orange carrots, green peas, etc. Sue noticed there was no red, so fetched a tomato!
CELESTE
Celeste, who is visiting, is a sandy-colored muscular little cat with huge ears and eyes who surely must be carrying some of the originally evolved desert genes. Boots, a satiny black cat with a splendid plume of a tail and a neat little white bib is in permanent residence and came to watch Celeste chase her cat toy. Celeste spent part of the night sleeping with me, but she’s a very busy cat.
Next morning Sue came up with a fancy brand of oatmeal full of flax, wheat germ, sunflower seeds, and other nutritious things. She came with me as guide through Calgary traffic and reassurance in the parking labyrinth which always gives me flashes of old sinister movies. The museum staff was ready, provided coffee and a welcome, and we stopped to give a rub to the bust of Colonel Harvie which Bob had made. It was the Colonel’s oil fortune that paid for the museum.
The presentation went beautifully. Friends and colleagues were in the audience, everyone laughed at my jokes and we projected the Ed Mitch DVD of Bob talking about his work onto a huge wall where it was VERY impressive. The University of Calgary Press arrived en masse -- they simply locked the office door and all came! I’d never met any of them, so when they were standing in a circle introducing themselves to the host, I just got on the end of the line. Great to have faces for all the names!
At lunch we were all feeling like family and the event had become so much like a book launch that we all went to lunch in a posh hotel where we were seated at a high table in the bar and ordered very fancy things like “summer squash ravioli” and “southwest corn soup.” No alcohol, lots of coffee. I don’t know who picked up the tab -- it wasn’t me. The Glenbow host was there, as well as Sue and my fellow writer Ray Djuff.
Sue piloted me back down to the street -- after a brief blunder when we all suddenly found ourselves in the restaurant kitchen -- and headed me south. This time I had used Sue’s laptop (Oh, sigh! What a terrific little instrument: a Mac of the white and ice persuasion!) to get the highway report and stayed to the east far enough to dodge all the problems. Summer-dry roads, no trucks, zippety doodah. At Sweetgrass the American officer examined my birth certificate VERY carefully and agreed that I had cute little feet. On to Shelby where I stopped at Pamida to buy drain opener, hoping that I wouldn’t need it. The toilet was stopped up when I left, but I thought it might be merely frozen and open itself while I was gone.
It did not. I had 358 new messages, almost entirely SPAM. The cats rushed to greet -- not me, but the pickiup! I know they were hoping to hurt my feelings for leaving them overnight! Among the messages were anguished cries from a dozen friends who had just gotten emails from Amazon saying that my book was not available! I tried Barnes & Noble who said the same thing. Has the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel found a way to stifle me? Or is it the kafuffle over international book prices now that loonies are at par? Or is it the fact that Amazon was selling the book at an excellent price and suddenly realized that they were selling a LOT of copies and losing profit? (Hundreds of books were pre-ordered.)
Dunno. Used my camping potty and went to bed. Woke up when the carbon monoxide monitor shrieked at 5AM. No carbon mono. It shrieked because the electricity had died. Outside there is an ice storm raging. Back to sleep. At 5:30AM, the monitor shrieked again because the electricity came back on. Started coffee and ten minutes later another shriek as it all died again. I think I’d better bring in my camp stove. Another ten minutes and the electricity was back, and the newspaper came. We don’t have boys delivering papers: we have a tough woman in a hoodie. Just in time for two cups of coffee and a lot of boring news. Now back to bed. Then I’ll work on the toilet some more.
One of this morning’s message was that my cousin’s husband, our much loved “Ham” (short for Hamilton), might have a curable kind of lymphoma instead of a racing version of lung cancer. While the electricity was off, I stood at the kitchen picture window for a while. With all the town lights blacked out, the sky was full of stars.
Monday, February 11, 2008
A FRENCH RESPONSE TO "BRONZE INSIDE & OUT"
A French video group has posted a response to "Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver" on YouTube.
"Bronze: L'interieur et Hors" is registered under the ARTBRONZE account at YouTube as a FANVID.
It is QUITE remarkable!
"Bronze: L'interieur et Hors" is registered under the ARTBRONZE account at YouTube as a FANVID.
It is QUITE remarkable!
Sunday, February 10, 2008
LAST TRIBAL OFFICIAL STANDING
One of Langdon Gilkey’s very best books -- perhaps the least theological -- is “Shantung Compound.” Gilkey, who was one of my professors at the University of Chicago Divinity School and a whole lot besides, was a child in a mission family in China when that country was invaded by Japan. The family was interned in a compound in Shantung where the other Westerners rounded up were the best and the worst: several kinds of Christian missionaries and a slew of dock and black-market toughs and sex workers.
The book, while a memoir, is also a reflection on the moral capacities of this mixed bag when put under severe pressure to survive. It turned out that the only person who could be trusted to guard the precious food supply was a hardened criminal sailor who knew that if the food were lost, the whole community was lost -- so he slept at the door, preventing theft by the hungry or by the greedy who would sell it. The Trappists, who suffered the most from the loss of their vows of silence, were big, bearded, robed bears of men who were indistinguishable from each other to the Japanese and therefore got away with small acts for the benefit of the whole.
The most troublesome people were the Protestant missionaries who had families to think of and who constantly agitated for more food, more space, more fuel, for their children and wives. The compound had its own internal Westerner’s government, but at least on one occasion the leaders had to go to the Japanese head of the guards and ask him to have soldiers come to settle quarrels at gunpoint.
That’s background. The Rocky Boy’s Reservation in Montana was originally federal land because it was a fort. When the Indian Wars ended, Rocky Boy’s people had been left with no land of their own and were making trouble on the Blackfeet Reservation where they had been unceremoniously shoved in. So the old fort was converted to the use of Rocky Boy’s people, to be their own reservation with their own sovereign tribal government as well as Federal BIA oversight. Tribes are proud of their sovereignty, which sometimes means economic advantage since they can choose not to accept some state laws. But there is a dark side.
When sovereign tribes turn against members of their own tribes, there is no recourse except the tribal council and tribal courts who may have decided to penalize their members for their own selfish reasons. So Jeanne Hobbs, a Chippewa-Cree elder, has been accused of “slander” and the possible penalty includes the sale of all her property (home, possessions, horses, vehicles), a declaration that she is dead, and banishment from the reservation. Oh, plus a $5,000 fine. Hobbs is accused of writing anonymous letters with copies of canceled checks proving misappropriation of funds. She says she didn’t write the letters.
State supreme courts have no jurisdiction over reservations unless specifically given it in a contract with the tribe. Federal courts and the BIA are very reluctant to get involved. I suspect they feel rather like the Japanese did when trying to pin down the Trappists who defied them.
Reservations were created out of the realization that indigenous peoples with their own culture could not be fairly judged by a dominant invading culture, particularly one that had been trying to eliminate them from existence. But as Indians have assimilated to white ways, they have absorbed the bad with the good. What would once be settled by people going off to cool down or join another band, is now confined to the social pressure cooker that is a reservation with too few resources for the people expected to live there. Leaders have taken on the strategies of the white men they have observed in the school systems, the hospitals, and the businesses of the high dry prairie. As one nursing home administrator put it, “If anybody gives you trouble, fire the sunnavabitch. Plenty of other people need jobs.”
My sympathy with Jeanne Hobbs is born of experience, not with a sovereign tribe but with bullying administrators who keep control through threats and punishment -- following by firing if they can swing it. What will prevent that, and possibly lead to the leaving of the administrator, is a strong local coalition of family members. Thus, I know that probably if Jeanne Hobbs has a strong family that wants her protected, it will be the criticized leadership that may find themselves “declared dead” and ordered to leave.
Thus such strategy leads in circles, feeding back bitterness on itself and often fomenting violence in a place that can ill afford it. There’s not a lot of difference -- except for the naked naivete of tribal leaders doing such a thing as compared with the sly behind-the-scenes pit traps invented by Washington D.C. lawyers -- from the sort of thing the Bush administration has been doing: marking internal critics (ie. enemies) for destruction. I’ve taken to quoting over and over whoever it was who said that Russia’s fatal flaw is their belief that “the last man standing” is the way to define superiority. Sure, if you don’t mind standing there all by yourself in a howling flat lonesome snowscape, having destroyed everything else.
In 1961 when I first came to teach in Browning, I had a speech and drama class and was quick to launch what I had just learned from Dean Barnlund at Northwestern University. Discussion techniques like “bird-caging,” repeating opinions back to the expressor of them, summarizing what had been said so far, pointing out agreement, making an opening for the quiet or shy, were -- we hoped -- the salvation of democracy. But you couldn’t learn these techniques without issues that the discussers cared about. The kids wanted (BADLY) to discuss being beaten up by the cops. So we did. But the chief of Tribal Police immediately showed up at my classroom door with his citation book out, another version of “beating up,” though he had no jurisdiction over white people.
The superintendent, Phil Ward, had a long talk with this man -- pointing out that the defense for slander and libel is simply proof that the allegation is true. But he also ordered me to drop the topic. Later, one of the students witnessed a beating in the jail -- her bedroom overlooked the jail window. By that time I was with Bob Scriver (city magistrate and justice of the peace) and he stepped in. I don’t know what he did, but the cop in question stopped. At least for a while. That’s how things work on a reservation -- or did then.
In the past there have been efforts to organize a National Tribal Supreme Court that could adjudicate sovereignty gone haywire. It hasn’t worked, probably at least in part because threats like those against Hobbs are so useful to some people. What they don’t see is that eventually the erosion of sovereignty will end tribal courts, tribal justice, and possibly reservations. Then they can stand with pride on a flat, howling, lonesome snowscape -- all alone.
The book, while a memoir, is also a reflection on the moral capacities of this mixed bag when put under severe pressure to survive. It turned out that the only person who could be trusted to guard the precious food supply was a hardened criminal sailor who knew that if the food were lost, the whole community was lost -- so he slept at the door, preventing theft by the hungry or by the greedy who would sell it. The Trappists, who suffered the most from the loss of their vows of silence, were big, bearded, robed bears of men who were indistinguishable from each other to the Japanese and therefore got away with small acts for the benefit of the whole.
The most troublesome people were the Protestant missionaries who had families to think of and who constantly agitated for more food, more space, more fuel, for their children and wives. The compound had its own internal Westerner’s government, but at least on one occasion the leaders had to go to the Japanese head of the guards and ask him to have soldiers come to settle quarrels at gunpoint.
That’s background. The Rocky Boy’s Reservation in Montana was originally federal land because it was a fort. When the Indian Wars ended, Rocky Boy’s people had been left with no land of their own and were making trouble on the Blackfeet Reservation where they had been unceremoniously shoved in. So the old fort was converted to the use of Rocky Boy’s people, to be their own reservation with their own sovereign tribal government as well as Federal BIA oversight. Tribes are proud of their sovereignty, which sometimes means economic advantage since they can choose not to accept some state laws. But there is a dark side.
When sovereign tribes turn against members of their own tribes, there is no recourse except the tribal council and tribal courts who may have decided to penalize their members for their own selfish reasons. So Jeanne Hobbs, a Chippewa-Cree elder, has been accused of “slander” and the possible penalty includes the sale of all her property (home, possessions, horses, vehicles), a declaration that she is dead, and banishment from the reservation. Oh, plus a $5,000 fine. Hobbs is accused of writing anonymous letters with copies of canceled checks proving misappropriation of funds. She says she didn’t write the letters.
State supreme courts have no jurisdiction over reservations unless specifically given it in a contract with the tribe. Federal courts and the BIA are very reluctant to get involved. I suspect they feel rather like the Japanese did when trying to pin down the Trappists who defied them.
Reservations were created out of the realization that indigenous peoples with their own culture could not be fairly judged by a dominant invading culture, particularly one that had been trying to eliminate them from existence. But as Indians have assimilated to white ways, they have absorbed the bad with the good. What would once be settled by people going off to cool down or join another band, is now confined to the social pressure cooker that is a reservation with too few resources for the people expected to live there. Leaders have taken on the strategies of the white men they have observed in the school systems, the hospitals, and the businesses of the high dry prairie. As one nursing home administrator put it, “If anybody gives you trouble, fire the sunnavabitch. Plenty of other people need jobs.”
My sympathy with Jeanne Hobbs is born of experience, not with a sovereign tribe but with bullying administrators who keep control through threats and punishment -- following by firing if they can swing it. What will prevent that, and possibly lead to the leaving of the administrator, is a strong local coalition of family members. Thus, I know that probably if Jeanne Hobbs has a strong family that wants her protected, it will be the criticized leadership that may find themselves “declared dead” and ordered to leave.
Thus such strategy leads in circles, feeding back bitterness on itself and often fomenting violence in a place that can ill afford it. There’s not a lot of difference -- except for the naked naivete of tribal leaders doing such a thing as compared with the sly behind-the-scenes pit traps invented by Washington D.C. lawyers -- from the sort of thing the Bush administration has been doing: marking internal critics (ie. enemies) for destruction. I’ve taken to quoting over and over whoever it was who said that Russia’s fatal flaw is their belief that “the last man standing” is the way to define superiority. Sure, if you don’t mind standing there all by yourself in a howling flat lonesome snowscape, having destroyed everything else.
In 1961 when I first came to teach in Browning, I had a speech and drama class and was quick to launch what I had just learned from Dean Barnlund at Northwestern University. Discussion techniques like “bird-caging,” repeating opinions back to the expressor of them, summarizing what had been said so far, pointing out agreement, making an opening for the quiet or shy, were -- we hoped -- the salvation of democracy. But you couldn’t learn these techniques without issues that the discussers cared about. The kids wanted (BADLY) to discuss being beaten up by the cops. So we did. But the chief of Tribal Police immediately showed up at my classroom door with his citation book out, another version of “beating up,” though he had no jurisdiction over white people.
The superintendent, Phil Ward, had a long talk with this man -- pointing out that the defense for slander and libel is simply proof that the allegation is true. But he also ordered me to drop the topic. Later, one of the students witnessed a beating in the jail -- her bedroom overlooked the jail window. By that time I was with Bob Scriver (city magistrate and justice of the peace) and he stepped in. I don’t know what he did, but the cop in question stopped. At least for a while. That’s how things work on a reservation -- or did then.
In the past there have been efforts to organize a National Tribal Supreme Court that could adjudicate sovereignty gone haywire. It hasn’t worked, probably at least in part because threats like those against Hobbs are so useful to some people. What they don’t see is that eventually the erosion of sovereignty will end tribal courts, tribal justice, and possibly reservations. Then they can stand with pride on a flat, howling, lonesome snowscape -- all alone.
Saturday, February 09, 2008
THAT WAS THEN -- THIS IS NOW
Now that I have a genetic niece as well as a by-marriage niece, I’ve been thinking about generations again. I was reading in Virginia Heffernan’s media blog in the New York Times, “The Medium,” about the little $100 computer (now double the price) which is meant for Third World kids with an operating system all its own and some features and capacities unlike other computers: it networks to other nearby machines and does noises and flashes, etc. for games and art. She speculated on how this will affect the kids of that generation and what it will mean in terms of their ability to relate to their parent generation.
Barrus, her faithful commentator, who is a grandfather, pointed out that by the time this set of kids using the little green and white laptops have figured them out, grown up, and are changing the world “for reals,” their own children will be born and using some new kind of phenomenal networking that we can’t even imagine now. Because this is the way it always is. Simple Simon could tell you so. (Remember him? The guy who always did what he ought to have done last time, instead of what he should do this time?)
The kids on the Blackfeet rez now are quite different than their parents or grandparents and not just because of computers. When I describe what it was like in the Sixties, a time universally considered disastrous when we were in it, today’s teens sigh and express envy! When the Blackfoot exhibit at the Glenbow in Calgary (where I’ll be day after tomorrow if the temp and snow cooperate -- we’re at four below with six inches of new snow at the moment) was designed by the tribe itself, they did not choose to replicate tipis (one was put up anyway) -- what they wanted were the little one-room shacks with wood stoves that they remembered fondly from their earliest childhood -- the very housing that was deplored in Congress when Kennedy wanted funding for “proper” houses. (This generation born since 1980 or so has grown up in split level houses with multiple bedrooms.)
What I’m sneaking up on is the idea that part of the MONAC problem was that they were already behind the times, aside from being burdened by the idea of the “Cabinet of Curiosities” always dear to Popes since the days of Cellini being commissioned to devise fabulous gold and jewel objects to be given to that pontiff. They were convinced that owning rare things, valuable things, exotic things, meant homage, recognition that they were the best and the highest. There was no concern about the origins of these objects, whether they were surrendered or made willingly, or -- indeed -- what their uses were, least of all their religious uses.
Then there’s the idea that “we’re the best” which is why “we” deserve to be in the missionary position on top and are entitled to tell these heathens what they are doing wrong and how they can get to heaven, which is -- of course -- just where all good heathens want to go. I notice that short or alcoholic or slightly nuts people love a heathen culture where they can reassure themselves by looking in the mirror and saying, “At least I’m white.”
These two convictions blind religious persons to corruption in those around them and even more so to the worldview of said heathens, which matters not at all to wheeler-dealers. MONAC began to collect artifacts just as the Indian empowerment movement began, which flipped the respect for priests (because they brought food, medicine and lots of used clothing alongside a certain amount of religious juju) onto its head (because they used painful force, denied the people’s culture, and individuals victimized little children for twisted purposes). Tribes were moving into the ambivalent period when they wanted things in their own hands -- but with fail-safe protection from the powerful, mostly in the form of money. Like teenagers. Often they screwed up, but these were the people (in the Sixties) who were born when their dads got home from WWII and told them how they had been considered worthy and powerful during the war, but dumped out broken and drunk afterwards.
Revenge and determination was on the minds of the men in particular. The women, who had gotten perms, learned to type, and moved to the city as President Eisenhower wanted them to, watched their white bosses and took notes for their own uses. These were “boomer” Indians (in their Sixties now), and they have mixed a fair amount of failure and success into their doin’s for the last fifty years or so. Little was wasted. Many would not be perceived as “Indians” if they didn’t self-identify and more are doing that now. When they come home to the rez, they look around and say, “What the...?”
So today’s Blackfeet, the ones taking the reins, are the children of the Boomers, born in the Sixties and Seventies, veterans of Head Start who now willingly send their children to charter schools, religious or not. They are the ones who can see that the Repatriation Act, well-meant as it was, had some very strange consequences. All those donated artifacts went right on out the loading dock to the thriving black market that is always created when something is suppressed. The objects that were ceremoniously but quietly returned to tribes went into the hands of individual prosperous Indians, mostly good Catholics.
The art is easier to follow because of all the auction websites and catalogues as it goes up and down in a profit rollercoaster. Schoenberg writes very little about the artists. Mostly he describes in tedious detail the efforts of “the Indians” to get control of MONAC because it was originally named a “center” but a movement to create service-based “centers” in those cities where Ike’s policy had created Indian ghettoes meant that the MONAC “center” was misnamed, causing Indians to not understand that this was meant to be an elite, priest-controlled “cabinet of curiosities.” The photosin the book are almost all of board members or other important white men who helped create the museum. A few Indian women are scattered here and there, but VERY few Indian men. The only artists pictured are the ones Van Kirke Nelson kept in his pocket, the alcoholic ones easy to control.
That era of Indians and artists is over. These days both categories are both genders and all are sharp cookies with a lot of data and experience. But the wheeler-dealers go on, like used book sellers profiting from the computers driving books out of public libraries. I’m VERY curious about what will happen next. And I’d LOVE to have one of those little green and white computers! Anyway, what would those people smarter than Simple Simon do right now? Elect Barack Obama? Could be. I keep hearing Blackfeet say, "I like that Obama guy -- he looks like ME."
Barrus, her faithful commentator, who is a grandfather, pointed out that by the time this set of kids using the little green and white laptops have figured them out, grown up, and are changing the world “for reals,” their own children will be born and using some new kind of phenomenal networking that we can’t even imagine now. Because this is the way it always is. Simple Simon could tell you so. (Remember him? The guy who always did what he ought to have done last time, instead of what he should do this time?)
The kids on the Blackfeet rez now are quite different than their parents or grandparents and not just because of computers. When I describe what it was like in the Sixties, a time universally considered disastrous when we were in it, today’s teens sigh and express envy! When the Blackfoot exhibit at the Glenbow in Calgary (where I’ll be day after tomorrow if the temp and snow cooperate -- we’re at four below with six inches of new snow at the moment) was designed by the tribe itself, they did not choose to replicate tipis (one was put up anyway) -- what they wanted were the little one-room shacks with wood stoves that they remembered fondly from their earliest childhood -- the very housing that was deplored in Congress when Kennedy wanted funding for “proper” houses. (This generation born since 1980 or so has grown up in split level houses with multiple bedrooms.)
What I’m sneaking up on is the idea that part of the MONAC problem was that they were already behind the times, aside from being burdened by the idea of the “Cabinet of Curiosities” always dear to Popes since the days of Cellini being commissioned to devise fabulous gold and jewel objects to be given to that pontiff. They were convinced that owning rare things, valuable things, exotic things, meant homage, recognition that they were the best and the highest. There was no concern about the origins of these objects, whether they were surrendered or made willingly, or -- indeed -- what their uses were, least of all their religious uses.
Then there’s the idea that “we’re the best” which is why “we” deserve to be in the missionary position on top and are entitled to tell these heathens what they are doing wrong and how they can get to heaven, which is -- of course -- just where all good heathens want to go. I notice that short or alcoholic or slightly nuts people love a heathen culture where they can reassure themselves by looking in the mirror and saying, “At least I’m white.”
These two convictions blind religious persons to corruption in those around them and even more so to the worldview of said heathens, which matters not at all to wheeler-dealers. MONAC began to collect artifacts just as the Indian empowerment movement began, which flipped the respect for priests (because they brought food, medicine and lots of used clothing alongside a certain amount of religious juju) onto its head (because they used painful force, denied the people’s culture, and individuals victimized little children for twisted purposes). Tribes were moving into the ambivalent period when they wanted things in their own hands -- but with fail-safe protection from the powerful, mostly in the form of money. Like teenagers. Often they screwed up, but these were the people (in the Sixties) who were born when their dads got home from WWII and told them how they had been considered worthy and powerful during the war, but dumped out broken and drunk afterwards.
Revenge and determination was on the minds of the men in particular. The women, who had gotten perms, learned to type, and moved to the city as President Eisenhower wanted them to, watched their white bosses and took notes for their own uses. These were “boomer” Indians (in their Sixties now), and they have mixed a fair amount of failure and success into their doin’s for the last fifty years or so. Little was wasted. Many would not be perceived as “Indians” if they didn’t self-identify and more are doing that now. When they come home to the rez, they look around and say, “What the...?”
So today’s Blackfeet, the ones taking the reins, are the children of the Boomers, born in the Sixties and Seventies, veterans of Head Start who now willingly send their children to charter schools, religious or not. They are the ones who can see that the Repatriation Act, well-meant as it was, had some very strange consequences. All those donated artifacts went right on out the loading dock to the thriving black market that is always created when something is suppressed. The objects that were ceremoniously but quietly returned to tribes went into the hands of individual prosperous Indians, mostly good Catholics.
The art is easier to follow because of all the auction websites and catalogues as it goes up and down in a profit rollercoaster. Schoenberg writes very little about the artists. Mostly he describes in tedious detail the efforts of “the Indians” to get control of MONAC because it was originally named a “center” but a movement to create service-based “centers” in those cities where Ike’s policy had created Indian ghettoes meant that the MONAC “center” was misnamed, causing Indians to not understand that this was meant to be an elite, priest-controlled “cabinet of curiosities.” The photosin the book are almost all of board members or other important white men who helped create the museum. A few Indian women are scattered here and there, but VERY few Indian men. The only artists pictured are the ones Van Kirke Nelson kept in his pocket, the alcoholic ones easy to control.
That era of Indians and artists is over. These days both categories are both genders and all are sharp cookies with a lot of data and experience. But the wheeler-dealers go on, like used book sellers profiting from the computers driving books out of public libraries. I’m VERY curious about what will happen next. And I’d LOVE to have one of those little green and white computers! Anyway, what would those people smarter than Simple Simon do right now? Elect Barack Obama? Could be. I keep hearing Blackfeet say, "I like that Obama guy -- he looks like ME."
Friday, February 08, 2008
BET ON THE BLACKFEET GRANDMA
Wilfred P Schoenberg, S.J., never got no respect though he was a Jesuit which showed he was not stupid and was part of a long tradition of dealing with Native Americans. However, he was no match for a determined Blackfeet woman, Mae Williamson (Many Victories, a name she bestowed on Barbara Stanwyck when the latter was on the rez filming “Cattle Queen of Montana.”) Here’s a story that is NOT in Schoenberg’s book, “Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: A History of MONAC.” (Museum of Native American Culture)
Schoenberg had a vision for a museum next to Gonzaga University and covered the country begging and leveraging donations, either of objects themselves or for donors, subsidizers, benefactors, etc. He heard that Mae Williamson had an exquisite elk-tooth-decorated traditional dress. When he came to Browning, Montana, in search of it, he stopped at the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife where he saw a sculpture called “Transition,” which depicted Mae -- who was an official interpreter as well as being the first female member of the Blackfeet Tribal Council back in the Thirties -- standing in the middle with one hand on Chewing Black Bone, ancient blind warrior, and the other on a school boy. It’s a very fine piece and Schoenberg felt he just had to have it. He wanted a bronze, $3500, and soon realized that Bob Scriver had NO intention whatsoever of giving a casting to any itinerant priest intent on creating a competing museum, though it would be in Spokane. But at Mae’s house he saw a casting of “Transition” and expressed desperate interest in both that and the dress. She put him off. He went home to search for money.
In those days Bob always gave his models a hydrocal casting of the piece for which they posed. Hydrocal ™ is a very hard form of plaster which sets up to be something like china, but is never fired in an oven. It is susceptible to shattering and chipping, but if that doesn’t happen, hydrocal should last indefinitely: forever. They were finished to look like bronzes and sold for 10% of the price of a bronze: $350. This was how Bob got started before he could afford to cast bronzes. Local people and George Montgomery bought hydrocal castings made by Bob himself.
At this point Mae brought into the shop her casting of “Transition,” complaining that it had a few unsightly chips in it where the white hydrocal showed through and would Bob fix those places? It only took a few moments to repair the damage and Mae took her casting home. When Schoenberg showed up again, hoping for the best, Mae sold him her hydrocal for $2000, which the Father thought was a wonderful bargain. Until he got it back to Spokane, went to unload it from the car and dropped it. Then he was probably more shattered than the sculpture, esp. since he had twisted the arm of some donor for the $2,000 who was shortly coming to view it.
The chances of getting the money back from Mae were nil. In the first place she was in residence on the reservation and had put her land and house back into trust with the US Government. In the second place, he had never asked what the sculpture was made of though he should have realized it if he’d had any background in art. In the third place she’d already spent the money on a splendid coffin for her newly deceased husband -- it had a tooled leather cover lining that said “Empty Saddles.”
At an early point in her life Mae had been married to a white lawyer and ran rather a splendid household by local standards. (She was Gary Schildt’s grandmother and had a hand in raising him.) When Bob and I married, her gifts to us included a purple Hudson’s Bay blanket created to honor Queen Elizabeth II at the time of her coronation. It’s in the artifact book, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains,” so it ought to be in the collection of the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton now.
I have no idea where the elktooth gown went. Schoenberg managed to ace out the Buffalo Bill Historical Society for the entire Sherburne Collection of artifacts -- a far more splendid, complete and historic collection than the Scriver Collection that raised such a furor. It was transferred to MONAC with no publicity at all, despite Eula Sherburne’s daughter Faith objecting even as she wrote an expensive insurance policy for the transfer, which Father S. resented. Not the insurance, the cost. Eula was the wife of J.L. Sherburne, the second generation trader who had a hand in almost everything financial around the reservation, quite unlike his father, J.H. Sherburne who was the original owner of the collection.
When MONAC went belly up, the collection, along with everything else, went to Cheney-Cowles, a second Spokane museum, and from there it has wandered in de-accessioned bits throughout the world. A Blackfeet man who tried to trace as much as he could said he located one piece in a collection in Chile. The inventory listed it as “a duplicate.” What Father Schoenberg achieved, in essence, was to create a depot for fine things where wheeler-dealers could find them. He is deceased. I hope Saint Peter has him by the nape of the neck and is forcing him to look.
Father S. reports that his health was bad his whole life -- terrible headaches coming from a drive to overachieve, weak lungs, etc. -- and the book mixes accounts of terrible bouts of vomiting with marathon narrow escapes in millenial storms driven through in faulty old cars -- regular Oregon Trail stuff, easily rivaling the exploits of Father DeSmet if not his achievement. There is constant noting of his poverty, the lack of heat where he worked, the various injustices and misunderstandings imposed by his superiors. He was evidently a veritable Rodney Dangerfield of Jesuits.
But oddly, the foreword, written by Van Kirke Nelson and Paul Masa, appeals to a quote in a letter from Charlie Russell to the Methodist Brother Van, who didn’t even have a second-hand car but walked everywhere. “Saints and Sinners were gathered there that night.” I didn’t identify any known saints. Plenty of sinners. These years were the beginnings of the Flathead Valley Art Mafia, a subsidiary of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. A little cadre of physician opportunists stripped several artists. Tom Sander paid the highest price: his wife, his house and his son, now attached to Dr. Vranish.
The trouble with Father Schoenberg, and many another, was that he knew nothing about art except what he was told by wheeler-dealers, whom he believed because they flattered him. Fortunes were made, but not by MONAC.
Schoenberg had a vision for a museum next to Gonzaga University and covered the country begging and leveraging donations, either of objects themselves or for donors, subsidizers, benefactors, etc. He heard that Mae Williamson had an exquisite elk-tooth-decorated traditional dress. When he came to Browning, Montana, in search of it, he stopped at the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife where he saw a sculpture called “Transition,” which depicted Mae -- who was an official interpreter as well as being the first female member of the Blackfeet Tribal Council back in the Thirties -- standing in the middle with one hand on Chewing Black Bone, ancient blind warrior, and the other on a school boy. It’s a very fine piece and Schoenberg felt he just had to have it. He wanted a bronze, $3500, and soon realized that Bob Scriver had NO intention whatsoever of giving a casting to any itinerant priest intent on creating a competing museum, though it would be in Spokane. But at Mae’s house he saw a casting of “Transition” and expressed desperate interest in both that and the dress. She put him off. He went home to search for money.
In those days Bob always gave his models a hydrocal casting of the piece for which they posed. Hydrocal ™ is a very hard form of plaster which sets up to be something like china, but is never fired in an oven. It is susceptible to shattering and chipping, but if that doesn’t happen, hydrocal should last indefinitely: forever. They were finished to look like bronzes and sold for 10% of the price of a bronze: $350. This was how Bob got started before he could afford to cast bronzes. Local people and George Montgomery bought hydrocal castings made by Bob himself.
At this point Mae brought into the shop her casting of “Transition,” complaining that it had a few unsightly chips in it where the white hydrocal showed through and would Bob fix those places? It only took a few moments to repair the damage and Mae took her casting home. When Schoenberg showed up again, hoping for the best, Mae sold him her hydrocal for $2000, which the Father thought was a wonderful bargain. Until he got it back to Spokane, went to unload it from the car and dropped it. Then he was probably more shattered than the sculpture, esp. since he had twisted the arm of some donor for the $2,000 who was shortly coming to view it.
The chances of getting the money back from Mae were nil. In the first place she was in residence on the reservation and had put her land and house back into trust with the US Government. In the second place, he had never asked what the sculpture was made of though he should have realized it if he’d had any background in art. In the third place she’d already spent the money on a splendid coffin for her newly deceased husband -- it had a tooled leather cover lining that said “Empty Saddles.”
At an early point in her life Mae had been married to a white lawyer and ran rather a splendid household by local standards. (She was Gary Schildt’s grandmother and had a hand in raising him.) When Bob and I married, her gifts to us included a purple Hudson’s Bay blanket created to honor Queen Elizabeth II at the time of her coronation. It’s in the artifact book, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains,” so it ought to be in the collection of the Royal Alberta Museum in Edmonton now.
I have no idea where the elktooth gown went. Schoenberg managed to ace out the Buffalo Bill Historical Society for the entire Sherburne Collection of artifacts -- a far more splendid, complete and historic collection than the Scriver Collection that raised such a furor. It was transferred to MONAC with no publicity at all, despite Eula Sherburne’s daughter Faith objecting even as she wrote an expensive insurance policy for the transfer, which Father S. resented. Not the insurance, the cost. Eula was the wife of J.L. Sherburne, the second generation trader who had a hand in almost everything financial around the reservation, quite unlike his father, J.H. Sherburne who was the original owner of the collection.
When MONAC went belly up, the collection, along with everything else, went to Cheney-Cowles, a second Spokane museum, and from there it has wandered in de-accessioned bits throughout the world. A Blackfeet man who tried to trace as much as he could said he located one piece in a collection in Chile. The inventory listed it as “a duplicate.” What Father Schoenberg achieved, in essence, was to create a depot for fine things where wheeler-dealers could find them. He is deceased. I hope Saint Peter has him by the nape of the neck and is forcing him to look.
Father S. reports that his health was bad his whole life -- terrible headaches coming from a drive to overachieve, weak lungs, etc. -- and the book mixes accounts of terrible bouts of vomiting with marathon narrow escapes in millenial storms driven through in faulty old cars -- regular Oregon Trail stuff, easily rivaling the exploits of Father DeSmet if not his achievement. There is constant noting of his poverty, the lack of heat where he worked, the various injustices and misunderstandings imposed by his superiors. He was evidently a veritable Rodney Dangerfield of Jesuits.
But oddly, the foreword, written by Van Kirke Nelson and Paul Masa, appeals to a quote in a letter from Charlie Russell to the Methodist Brother Van, who didn’t even have a second-hand car but walked everywhere. “Saints and Sinners were gathered there that night.” I didn’t identify any known saints. Plenty of sinners. These years were the beginnings of the Flathead Valley Art Mafia, a subsidiary of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. A little cadre of physician opportunists stripped several artists. Tom Sander paid the highest price: his wife, his house and his son, now attached to Dr. Vranish.
The trouble with Father Schoenberg, and many another, was that he knew nothing about art except what he was told by wheeler-dealers, whom he believed because they flattered him. Fortunes were made, but not by MONAC.
Thursday, February 07, 2008
A BITTER STUDY OF DIABETES 2
In the last few days there has been something akin to panic in the Diabetes 2 community. A study by the National Institute of Health called ACCORD was meant to prove that if people diagnosed with Diabetes 2 were given drugs for high blood sugar, high blood pressure and high lipids, they would be healthier. The opposite turned out to be true. Fifty-some more people died in the group with the “best” (lowest) scores for these factors. YIKES!
None of the subjects were controlling their “Diabetes 2” with diet and exercise. They were on American Diabetes Association diets which despise low-carb strategies that depend on high meat and fat and pitch processed foods for diabetics.
In this last year or so, reading a lot of blogs by and about diabetics, I have formed the strong opinion that Diabetes 2 is NOT diabetes at all, but only framed that way because it is usually discovered through blood glucose tests given with the intention of detecting diabetes. THEN they find out you have high blood pressure and a high lipid count, which somehow leads them to the assumption that the low blood glucose has caused the other problems. There is a huge industry based on the treatment of diabetes and providing special foods and things like special shoes for feet in trouble. Because high glucose is countered by insulin, the idea has been to administer more insulin and more insulin -- without ever testing to see what levels of insulin there are in the blood, existing right alongside the high glucose.
Few people have tried to look at all this from a deeper, cell-level, metabolic approach. The pharma people like traveling down the tracks they’ve already established: more insulin, different kinds of insulin, new delivery systems for insulin -- though some had begun to protest that insulin, esp. at high blood levels, is damaging to organs. When pharma got off their insulin obsession, they went to lipid obsession: first cholesterol and then trans-fat. The magic bullet was supposed to be statins. The more the better, until people in some of the statin trials died. No one wants to talk about an earlier obsession with estrogen -- I had to fight hard to prevent doctors from putting me on estrogen and at one period I DID take estrogen with not-very-nice results. Some of the side effects of these drugs are mood and thought-altering, so naturally anti-depressants, etc., are also prescribed.
“17 million Americans have diagnosed diabetes and more than 90% of them have type 2 diabetes.” The doctors do what they are supposed to do for diabetes, it doesn’t work, the doctors ascribe it to failure to stay on diets and take meds (which they call “lifestyle changes”) and get mad at their patients -- shutting them out of discussion. Doctors these days must hew to the prescriptions of the insurance companies, the state, and whatever institutions employ them -- few have independent offices. Mostly they depend upon prescriptions: get a diagnosis, run your finger down and across to the proper med, and then the only concern is titrating the dose. Insulin levels, vitamin D levels, or any other variables not on the list are not addressed.
Meanwhile people have begun experimenting on themselves and discussing with friends. Some researchers have begun to strongly suspect that Diabetes 2 should be called “metabolic dysfunction” and are labeling their work that way, so that Googling the latter might get you better information than “Diabetes 2.” These researchers find a high correlation between metabolic dysfunction and blood levels of pthalates, dioxin, and other organophosphates used in manufacturing and agriculture. One study found this correlation in sea turtles, which never come to land except to lay eggs. Fewer than ten per cent of the creatures on this planet have undetectable levels of these chemicals. They are in the breast milk of Inuit women.
While global warming is attracting a lot of attention, our constant molecular meddling is seeding all living creatures with subtle poisons that derange the delicate balances that control our inner workings. The Vietnam vets and Vietnamese peasants who were exposed to Agent Orange found this out in very unpleasant ways. The rest of us will soon learn a lot more. In regard to Diabetes 2/Metabolic Dysfunction, we are about where AIDS was a couple of decades ago. But you can’t evade this by using a condom. This is in the water, the air, our bottles and dishes, our furniture and carpets, our food, and our pills. The Chinese contaminations of food and paint are only exaggerations of what is true everywhere.
So what can we do? How much of this constant warning and doom-saying can we stand without running screaming over the horizon? Not much, if you ask me, unless there is a redirection of funding towards positive ends: first, to understand the molecular interference in our blood and cells, and second, to greatly diminish the amounts of these substances in the world. We DID save the raptors, remember? We DID bring the robins back after a silent spring or two.
If we leave the problem as it is, simply wailing and wringing our hands, it will solve itself by diminishing the population. Eventually, there will be only the tough and adaptive left to continue with what we call “civilization.”
At the moment there is a movement -- evidently driven by insurance and government bureaucracy -- to discover who costs the most over a lifetime. The assumption had been that fat people are more expensive in terms of health care and pressure on welfare, emergency rooms, and nursing care. The impulse was to just get rid of fat people -- put them in some kind of concentration camp where they would be FORCED to lose weight. But now another reversal research study reveals it is THIN people who live on and on and on in nursing homes, demented but vigorous. So maybe there will be a movement towards force-feeding them at MacDonalds. Underlying this is the hope that one group (one’s own) will be genetically privileged for survival and that others can defined in some mathematical and objective way as “unthriving” meaning “unworthy.” Then you can at the least keep your children from marrying them and at the most perhaps shut them out of society altogether so they’ll just disappear. What if it turns out that only hunchbacks or blind people can live in this chemical soup we’ve created?
In the meantime, all these social and psychological forces aside, perhaps each of us had better keep track of the best evidence we can find and make our own decisions about our strategies. Doctors can just get used to it.
None of the subjects were controlling their “Diabetes 2” with diet and exercise. They were on American Diabetes Association diets which despise low-carb strategies that depend on high meat and fat and pitch processed foods for diabetics.
In this last year or so, reading a lot of blogs by and about diabetics, I have formed the strong opinion that Diabetes 2 is NOT diabetes at all, but only framed that way because it is usually discovered through blood glucose tests given with the intention of detecting diabetes. THEN they find out you have high blood pressure and a high lipid count, which somehow leads them to the assumption that the low blood glucose has caused the other problems. There is a huge industry based on the treatment of diabetes and providing special foods and things like special shoes for feet in trouble. Because high glucose is countered by insulin, the idea has been to administer more insulin and more insulin -- without ever testing to see what levels of insulin there are in the blood, existing right alongside the high glucose.
Few people have tried to look at all this from a deeper, cell-level, metabolic approach. The pharma people like traveling down the tracks they’ve already established: more insulin, different kinds of insulin, new delivery systems for insulin -- though some had begun to protest that insulin, esp. at high blood levels, is damaging to organs. When pharma got off their insulin obsession, they went to lipid obsession: first cholesterol and then trans-fat. The magic bullet was supposed to be statins. The more the better, until people in some of the statin trials died. No one wants to talk about an earlier obsession with estrogen -- I had to fight hard to prevent doctors from putting me on estrogen and at one period I DID take estrogen with not-very-nice results. Some of the side effects of these drugs are mood and thought-altering, so naturally anti-depressants, etc., are also prescribed.
“17 million Americans have diagnosed diabetes and more than 90% of them have type 2 diabetes.” The doctors do what they are supposed to do for diabetes, it doesn’t work, the doctors ascribe it to failure to stay on diets and take meds (which they call “lifestyle changes”) and get mad at their patients -- shutting them out of discussion. Doctors these days must hew to the prescriptions of the insurance companies, the state, and whatever institutions employ them -- few have independent offices. Mostly they depend upon prescriptions: get a diagnosis, run your finger down and across to the proper med, and then the only concern is titrating the dose. Insulin levels, vitamin D levels, or any other variables not on the list are not addressed.
Meanwhile people have begun experimenting on themselves and discussing with friends. Some researchers have begun to strongly suspect that Diabetes 2 should be called “metabolic dysfunction” and are labeling their work that way, so that Googling the latter might get you better information than “Diabetes 2.” These researchers find a high correlation between metabolic dysfunction and blood levels of pthalates, dioxin, and other organophosphates used in manufacturing and agriculture. One study found this correlation in sea turtles, which never come to land except to lay eggs. Fewer than ten per cent of the creatures on this planet have undetectable levels of these chemicals. They are in the breast milk of Inuit women.
While global warming is attracting a lot of attention, our constant molecular meddling is seeding all living creatures with subtle poisons that derange the delicate balances that control our inner workings. The Vietnam vets and Vietnamese peasants who were exposed to Agent Orange found this out in very unpleasant ways. The rest of us will soon learn a lot more. In regard to Diabetes 2/Metabolic Dysfunction, we are about where AIDS was a couple of decades ago. But you can’t evade this by using a condom. This is in the water, the air, our bottles and dishes, our furniture and carpets, our food, and our pills. The Chinese contaminations of food and paint are only exaggerations of what is true everywhere.
So what can we do? How much of this constant warning and doom-saying can we stand without running screaming over the horizon? Not much, if you ask me, unless there is a redirection of funding towards positive ends: first, to understand the molecular interference in our blood and cells, and second, to greatly diminish the amounts of these substances in the world. We DID save the raptors, remember? We DID bring the robins back after a silent spring or two.
If we leave the problem as it is, simply wailing and wringing our hands, it will solve itself by diminishing the population. Eventually, there will be only the tough and adaptive left to continue with what we call “civilization.”
At the moment there is a movement -- evidently driven by insurance and government bureaucracy -- to discover who costs the most over a lifetime. The assumption had been that fat people are more expensive in terms of health care and pressure on welfare, emergency rooms, and nursing care. The impulse was to just get rid of fat people -- put them in some kind of concentration camp where they would be FORCED to lose weight. But now another reversal research study reveals it is THIN people who live on and on and on in nursing homes, demented but vigorous. So maybe there will be a movement towards force-feeding them at MacDonalds. Underlying this is the hope that one group (one’s own) will be genetically privileged for survival and that others can defined in some mathematical and objective way as “unthriving” meaning “unworthy.” Then you can at the least keep your children from marrying them and at the most perhaps shut them out of society altogether so they’ll just disappear. What if it turns out that only hunchbacks or blind people can live in this chemical soup we’ve created?
In the meantime, all these social and psychological forces aside, perhaps each of us had better keep track of the best evidence we can find and make our own decisions about our strategies. Doctors can just get used to it.
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
WHOA! SLOW DOWN!
Things are going to slow down a bit blogwise around here. First, because now that “Bronze Inside and Out” is beginning to hit the bookshelves (already there in Canada -- another two weeks in the US), there are inquiries and side-deals to think about. People are re-aligning their relationship to me, depending on what they think of the book itself or what they figure will change in their world because of it. Should they kiss up or kiss off? Or do they need to do a bit of research: see if I remember them, figure out if I’m still mad at them (they usually know why), ask if it changes how I feel about them now that I’m a “famous author.” I don’t necessarily mean on a national basis! I mean, a poster about me speaking at the library next week went up in the post office this morning and it has changed the way some local people act already.
My cousins insist on the idea that “being published” by someone respectable like the University of Calgary Press is a great event that should make my life from here on worthwhile and respectable. My Lulu.com books mean nothing to them. Only one reads my blog. The great plot event is “being published” which means to them that I’m stamped as super-intelligent, since they don’t know that lots of super-intelligent people can’t write worth beans and some rather below the 100 IQ mark are dynamic and much-treasured writers. Yet they’re readers -- they read all the time, novels mostly. They’re pretty Jane Austeny.
In Manhattan right now there is a hustle about the “best books” of the year, just like the best movies and best actors at the Oscars. The initiated know that movie prizes are awarded by a process more webbed than any spider could manage, compounded by what other movies were released, how old the actor might be, whether they were unjustly passed over ten years ago, and so on. But it is frank and open that these awards are by movie people for movie people. The most interesting ones are probably the “craft” awards about lighting, sets, costumes, and all that great stuff you aren’t really supposed to notice while watching the movie.
There is a certain set of publishers who look for and solicit certain kinds of writing -- either smart political stuff or novels of a kind, often international these days, maybe confessional from the lower classes -- and then promote it to a set of people they believe they know about. Educated, Eastern, dressed a certain way, drinkers of certain beverages -- in case they don’t have a clue there are lists in magazines like Vanity Fair to tip them off so they won’t be stupid consumers of wristwatches or shampoo. People make fun of them and they make fun of each other, but in the end they are a tribe. Maybe a bit cross-Atlantic. No consciousness at all of any kind of life outside of that bent-back-on-itself context.
My book will never touch them. On the other hand, those who feel they are entitled to this book, say, Western art aficionadoes esp. in Montana, will find that they don’t quite find what they want in it (how much Scriver bronzes are worth) and more than they can quite assimilate (Beaux Arts equestrian monuments back east). The old girl friends, related or not, are going to be equally disappointed by what’s in and what’s out. A lot of people will say it’s too much about me, the author. And the same people as usual will cry incredulously, “But he’s not that FAMOUS!!!” Their point of reference will be Charlie Russell, who ranks as an obsession -- his actual personhood long since trampled.
But that’s not entirely what will be taking up my time. There are family matters to address and some have registered fears that I might blog about them. Clearly there is a deep concern for what they call “privacy,” and how people “deserve” it. I disagree, but there is a level at which blogging about someone or something begins to interfere with it, to change the terms of what’s going on. That raises moral stakes pretty high. I’ve already blurted out a few things (not about relatives) that I should not have, not that those involved didn’t deserve it. I doubt it affected their lives.
More than that, I have a lot to think about as I come close to seventy: how to spend the next ten years. So far, publishing a book is much less than I thought it would be. It will not get me out of debt. How much should I strip down my housekeeping? How much should I defend my monastic existence? Which books should I tackle next? The fiction in hopes of maybe attracting a bit of notice from the Montana simulation of Manhattan? Do I care? Or should I take on some of the things to which I am initiated and that people don’t even know there is anything to know about -- but that might matter to people a century from now. An interesting split is developing between the people who were around fifty years ago, but don’t understand computers and so never pick up information from blogs or databases, and new players who can search the Internet far and wide but never know what it was like on the rez in the Sixties.
Part of this reflection is prompted by reading “Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: A History of MONAC,” by Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J., wily old Jesuit who has gone to his reward -- or whatever. MONAC was the Museum of North American Culture built next to Gonzaga. It rose, largely entangled with the Flathead Valley Art Mafia, and fell. Cheney-Cowles tried to blackball them in the beginning and Cheney-Cowles ended up with their art and artifacts. “Schonie,” as he insists he was called affectionately, uses the book (which was self-published, printed by Thomas Printing in Kalispell, MT) to canonize those he loves (Gary Schildt!) or wants something from and to pour scorn on everyone who ever resisted or criticized him. You will not find Bob Scriver anywhere in the book -- at least I’m halfway through without his name being mentioned and he’s not in the index. I didn’t expect that he would be.
The trouble with writing something, whether it’s a book or a blog, is that it generally reveals a lot of connections and insights that the writer had no idea were being recorded, for good or for ill. Of course, readers are also apt to see ghosts from their own minds projected into what they read. I may need to take more daily walks to clear my head. On the other hand, it will be fun to report what I can as this unfolds -- excluding anything impinging on the privacy of innocents. Those that there are.
My cousins insist on the idea that “being published” by someone respectable like the University of Calgary Press is a great event that should make my life from here on worthwhile and respectable. My Lulu.com books mean nothing to them. Only one reads my blog. The great plot event is “being published” which means to them that I’m stamped as super-intelligent, since they don’t know that lots of super-intelligent people can’t write worth beans and some rather below the 100 IQ mark are dynamic and much-treasured writers. Yet they’re readers -- they read all the time, novels mostly. They’re pretty Jane Austeny.
In Manhattan right now there is a hustle about the “best books” of the year, just like the best movies and best actors at the Oscars. The initiated know that movie prizes are awarded by a process more webbed than any spider could manage, compounded by what other movies were released, how old the actor might be, whether they were unjustly passed over ten years ago, and so on. But it is frank and open that these awards are by movie people for movie people. The most interesting ones are probably the “craft” awards about lighting, sets, costumes, and all that great stuff you aren’t really supposed to notice while watching the movie.
There is a certain set of publishers who look for and solicit certain kinds of writing -- either smart political stuff or novels of a kind, often international these days, maybe confessional from the lower classes -- and then promote it to a set of people they believe they know about. Educated, Eastern, dressed a certain way, drinkers of certain beverages -- in case they don’t have a clue there are lists in magazines like Vanity Fair to tip them off so they won’t be stupid consumers of wristwatches or shampoo. People make fun of them and they make fun of each other, but in the end they are a tribe. Maybe a bit cross-Atlantic. No consciousness at all of any kind of life outside of that bent-back-on-itself context.
My book will never touch them. On the other hand, those who feel they are entitled to this book, say, Western art aficionadoes esp. in Montana, will find that they don’t quite find what they want in it (how much Scriver bronzes are worth) and more than they can quite assimilate (Beaux Arts equestrian monuments back east). The old girl friends, related or not, are going to be equally disappointed by what’s in and what’s out. A lot of people will say it’s too much about me, the author. And the same people as usual will cry incredulously, “But he’s not that FAMOUS!!!” Their point of reference will be Charlie Russell, who ranks as an obsession -- his actual personhood long since trampled.
But that’s not entirely what will be taking up my time. There are family matters to address and some have registered fears that I might blog about them. Clearly there is a deep concern for what they call “privacy,” and how people “deserve” it. I disagree, but there is a level at which blogging about someone or something begins to interfere with it, to change the terms of what’s going on. That raises moral stakes pretty high. I’ve already blurted out a few things (not about relatives) that I should not have, not that those involved didn’t deserve it. I doubt it affected their lives.
More than that, I have a lot to think about as I come close to seventy: how to spend the next ten years. So far, publishing a book is much less than I thought it would be. It will not get me out of debt. How much should I strip down my housekeeping? How much should I defend my monastic existence? Which books should I tackle next? The fiction in hopes of maybe attracting a bit of notice from the Montana simulation of Manhattan? Do I care? Or should I take on some of the things to which I am initiated and that people don’t even know there is anything to know about -- but that might matter to people a century from now. An interesting split is developing between the people who were around fifty years ago, but don’t understand computers and so never pick up information from blogs or databases, and new players who can search the Internet far and wide but never know what it was like on the rez in the Sixties.
Part of this reflection is prompted by reading “Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: A History of MONAC,” by Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J., wily old Jesuit who has gone to his reward -- or whatever. MONAC was the Museum of North American Culture built next to Gonzaga. It rose, largely entangled with the Flathead Valley Art Mafia, and fell. Cheney-Cowles tried to blackball them in the beginning and Cheney-Cowles ended up with their art and artifacts. “Schonie,” as he insists he was called affectionately, uses the book (which was self-published, printed by Thomas Printing in Kalispell, MT) to canonize those he loves (Gary Schildt!) or wants something from and to pour scorn on everyone who ever resisted or criticized him. You will not find Bob Scriver anywhere in the book -- at least I’m halfway through without his name being mentioned and he’s not in the index. I didn’t expect that he would be.
The trouble with writing something, whether it’s a book or a blog, is that it generally reveals a lot of connections and insights that the writer had no idea were being recorded, for good or for ill. Of course, readers are also apt to see ghosts from their own minds projected into what they read. I may need to take more daily walks to clear my head. On the other hand, it will be fun to report what I can as this unfolds -- excluding anything impinging on the privacy of innocents. Those that there are.
Monday, February 04, 2008
WHY DO BAD THINGS HAPPEN IN GOOD DEMOCRACIES?
Mencius Moldbug, who writes the blog “Unqualified Reservations” (http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com) wrote an entry on the last day of January entitled “How I Stopped Believing in Democracy.” He begins with a conversation:
The other day I had lunch with an old friend, Erik, whom I hadn't seen in a few years. Erik is five or ten years older than me, has a philosophy degree from Berkeley, writes Internet standards for a living, and is generally a very stable, responsible and successful guy, unlike of course yours truly. He lives in Germany and is married to a German, and his politics are quite solidly progressive.
I was confident that I had informed Erik of this blog. But I think it got lost in a long email. So I had the rare opportunity of really solidly failing to explain the point of UR.
"It's a neo-f -," I said. "Um, no, it's not really a neofascist hate blog. I just call it that sometimes to shock people. It's a, what it is, is an anti-democracy blog."
"An anti-democracy blog. Well, that's certainly..."
"You've got to admit, it's an under-served market," I said.
"Well, I'd certainly agree with that."
"Yeah," I said. "It was actually about a year and a half ago, I decided I didn't believe in democracy anymore. It was great. Just like deciding not to believe in God."
"More like deciding not to believe in God about 250 years ago," Erik said. He actually said this. I don't believe I've cut a single line from this exchange.
In fact, I had actually never thought of quite it this way. But yes - disbelieving in democracy in 2008 is a lot like disbelieving in God in 1758.
Mencius ends his reported conversation there, so that’s where I’ll pick it up, though my background is so very different that we may end up entirely talking past each other. Still, I think it’s useful for me, even if no one else likes it or “gets it.”
Mencius and his friend were referring (I think) to the idea that God at the time of the founding of this country was a kind of Big Principle good for arguments and not to be contradicted, if needing a lot of explanation. Just so is “democracy” now a sort of motto that no one dares contest, but that is getting rather shaky. Mencius reports that he was taught to nearly worship democracy, partly because his parents worked for the State.
Personally, I was taught that democracy was pretty faulty, but the best idea anyone had come up with so far. In truth, the best government is always a benevolent dictatorship, except that the dictators have a way of drifting into malevolence, if not meaning harm to most people, still tending to choose a scapegoat somewhere -- like Jews or Native Americans or Illegal Immigrants --which is one of the seemingly inevitable problems with democracy as well. After all, it’s pretty tough to be “for” all peoples of all kinds in all situations. One must choose one’s occasions for benevolence. The other problem, of course, is that once someone gets power, their grip has to be pried off -- like, say, Bush, Kennedy, or Clinton in a democracy.
Going back to the comparison, Mencius says:
What's amazing about the whole God thing is that people actually used to believe in God. Almost no one believes in God today. The most they are willing to give Him is that he "exists." Perhaps there is a Heaven and maybe even a Hell. But before you find people who actually believe that God actually uses His alien black-magic superpowers to actually affect events on Earth, you have to scrape pretty deep in the barrel. We are all deists now.
Before this change, there was an entire branch of philosophy called theodicy, whose goal was to figure out how God and evil could coexist. Doesn't it strike you as completely and utterly obvious that the answer is "they don't"? Why didn't all these incredibly smart people - Aquinas and Leibniz and Pascal and so forth - just consider the null hypothesis?
It certainly continues to be a major problem for theology that God is supposed to be good but at the very least allows the world to be a place full of cruelty and wickedness. “Free Will” is one big defense, but surely a murderous tsunami or earthquake doesn’t have a will at all. Strictly speaking, it cannot intend murder -- humans just happened to be there. The only way to give up theodicy is to give up the theos, as Mencius suggests. Luckily, this is not a problem for religious systems that don’t center, as all the Abrahamic religions do, on the Chief of the Tribe: Jehovah. You can say “science” is one of those religious systems if you want to -- I won’t object -- but what I’m thinking of is Buddhism, Taoism, the frames of mind that simply accept that really bad things happen, as do good, and human free will is mostly limited to a response -- if one has survived with the courage and energy to produce one.
Mencius suggests: I think the answer is that when you really believe in God, the belief that God is good and makes good things happen is completely woven into your cerebral cortex. If you were to stop believing in God, you would instantly solve the problem of explaining all the evil things that have happened in the world. You would also instantly create the problem of explaining all the good things that have happened. For which your present explanation is that they happened because they were good, and therefore God wanted them to happen.
I’ve mentioned before that the UUA kit for discussion groups that is entitled “Why Do Bad Things Happen?” ends in a unit on “Why Do Good Things Happen?” And I think I’ve said before that in my opinion “good” versus “bad” are human concepts imposed on what simply happens. Often the good is hard to sort from the bad or it depends upon who you are or maybe the real consequences aren’t clear for a decade or so. It’s crude, but the tractor hat that says “shit happens” may be the closest we can get to truth.
Then Mencius has his most useful insight: And there is an even more upsetting observation, which is that the process of explaining why democracy isn't perfect is remarkably similar to good old theodicy. Perhaps we could call it demodicy - the problem of explaining how democracy can coexist with evil.
If we’re such a great country, why do we convict innocents, neglect whole cities like New Orleans, cheat whole tribes by mismanaging their assets? Why do we have street people and starving people? How can we invade foreign countries on false pretenses and destroy whole economies for our own profit?
Here’s my “why” -- because the controlling ethos of today’s democracy (can you doubt it while listening to the news?) is not “protection of the minority” but rather “winner takes all.” And why is that our ethos? Because we don’t go to church anymore -- we go to the coliseum where the overwhelming need is to win, win, win!
Mencius again: For example, the first thing I remember from my first year in Maryland was something called a "pep rally." For those of you who did not attend an American public high school, a "pep rally" is basically a straight ripoff of what Albert Speer did at Nuremberg, except that (a) it is indoors, (b) there is not quite as much fire, and (c) there is less saluting, more screaming, and about the same amount of chanting.
If you are an American raising kids abroad and you want to reintroduce them to your country, I highly recommend this sort of shock-and-awe approach. Having to deal with an American high school was not pleasant, but it gave me a certain respect for America: it exists. Once you go to college, you are no longer in the real America. You are in a fortified outpost of future America, which has been planted in the real America to enlighten and assimilate it. Respect is not on the menu.
Yes. Win. Dominate. Number One. Forget respect. Who can respect losers? What the college-educated don’t realize is that now they are the losers. This is part of the demodicy. College is meant to train people to believe that if their college sports team is the top, nothing else matters. In case you didn’t “get it” in high school. As for the classes? Forget Free Will. The government will tell you what to teach so we can be Winners in the World -- BEST.
The other day I had lunch with an old friend, Erik, whom I hadn't seen in a few years. Erik is five or ten years older than me, has a philosophy degree from Berkeley, writes Internet standards for a living, and is generally a very stable, responsible and successful guy, unlike of course yours truly. He lives in Germany and is married to a German, and his politics are quite solidly progressive.
I was confident that I had informed Erik of this blog. But I think it got lost in a long email. So I had the rare opportunity of really solidly failing to explain the point of UR.
"It's a neo-f -," I said. "Um, no, it's not really a neofascist hate blog. I just call it that sometimes to shock people. It's a, what it is, is an anti-democracy blog."
"An anti-democracy blog. Well, that's certainly..."
"You've got to admit, it's an under-served market," I said.
"Well, I'd certainly agree with that."
"Yeah," I said. "It was actually about a year and a half ago, I decided I didn't believe in democracy anymore. It was great. Just like deciding not to believe in God."
"More like deciding not to believe in God about 250 years ago," Erik said. He actually said this. I don't believe I've cut a single line from this exchange.
In fact, I had actually never thought of quite it this way. But yes - disbelieving in democracy in 2008 is a lot like disbelieving in God in 1758.
Mencius ends his reported conversation there, so that’s where I’ll pick it up, though my background is so very different that we may end up entirely talking past each other. Still, I think it’s useful for me, even if no one else likes it or “gets it.”
Mencius and his friend were referring (I think) to the idea that God at the time of the founding of this country was a kind of Big Principle good for arguments and not to be contradicted, if needing a lot of explanation. Just so is “democracy” now a sort of motto that no one dares contest, but that is getting rather shaky. Mencius reports that he was taught to nearly worship democracy, partly because his parents worked for the State.
Personally, I was taught that democracy was pretty faulty, but the best idea anyone had come up with so far. In truth, the best government is always a benevolent dictatorship, except that the dictators have a way of drifting into malevolence, if not meaning harm to most people, still tending to choose a scapegoat somewhere -- like Jews or Native Americans or Illegal Immigrants --which is one of the seemingly inevitable problems with democracy as well. After all, it’s pretty tough to be “for” all peoples of all kinds in all situations. One must choose one’s occasions for benevolence. The other problem, of course, is that once someone gets power, their grip has to be pried off -- like, say, Bush, Kennedy, or Clinton in a democracy.
Going back to the comparison, Mencius says:
What's amazing about the whole God thing is that people actually used to believe in God. Almost no one believes in God today. The most they are willing to give Him is that he "exists." Perhaps there is a Heaven and maybe even a Hell. But before you find people who actually believe that God actually uses His alien black-magic superpowers to actually affect events on Earth, you have to scrape pretty deep in the barrel. We are all deists now.
Before this change, there was an entire branch of philosophy called theodicy, whose goal was to figure out how God and evil could coexist. Doesn't it strike you as completely and utterly obvious that the answer is "they don't"? Why didn't all these incredibly smart people - Aquinas and Leibniz and Pascal and so forth - just consider the null hypothesis?
It certainly continues to be a major problem for theology that God is supposed to be good but at the very least allows the world to be a place full of cruelty and wickedness. “Free Will” is one big defense, but surely a murderous tsunami or earthquake doesn’t have a will at all. Strictly speaking, it cannot intend murder -- humans just happened to be there. The only way to give up theodicy is to give up the theos, as Mencius suggests. Luckily, this is not a problem for religious systems that don’t center, as all the Abrahamic religions do, on the Chief of the Tribe: Jehovah. You can say “science” is one of those religious systems if you want to -- I won’t object -- but what I’m thinking of is Buddhism, Taoism, the frames of mind that simply accept that really bad things happen, as do good, and human free will is mostly limited to a response -- if one has survived with the courage and energy to produce one.
Mencius suggests: I think the answer is that when you really believe in God, the belief that God is good and makes good things happen is completely woven into your cerebral cortex. If you were to stop believing in God, you would instantly solve the problem of explaining all the evil things that have happened in the world. You would also instantly create the problem of explaining all the good things that have happened. For which your present explanation is that they happened because they were good, and therefore God wanted them to happen.
I’ve mentioned before that the UUA kit for discussion groups that is entitled “Why Do Bad Things Happen?” ends in a unit on “Why Do Good Things Happen?” And I think I’ve said before that in my opinion “good” versus “bad” are human concepts imposed on what simply happens. Often the good is hard to sort from the bad or it depends upon who you are or maybe the real consequences aren’t clear for a decade or so. It’s crude, but the tractor hat that says “shit happens” may be the closest we can get to truth.
Then Mencius has his most useful insight: And there is an even more upsetting observation, which is that the process of explaining why democracy isn't perfect is remarkably similar to good old theodicy. Perhaps we could call it demodicy - the problem of explaining how democracy can coexist with evil.
If we’re such a great country, why do we convict innocents, neglect whole cities like New Orleans, cheat whole tribes by mismanaging their assets? Why do we have street people and starving people? How can we invade foreign countries on false pretenses and destroy whole economies for our own profit?
Here’s my “why” -- because the controlling ethos of today’s democracy (can you doubt it while listening to the news?) is not “protection of the minority” but rather “winner takes all.” And why is that our ethos? Because we don’t go to church anymore -- we go to the coliseum where the overwhelming need is to win, win, win!
Mencius again: For example, the first thing I remember from my first year in Maryland was something called a "pep rally." For those of you who did not attend an American public high school, a "pep rally" is basically a straight ripoff of what Albert Speer did at Nuremberg, except that (a) it is indoors, (b) there is not quite as much fire, and (c) there is less saluting, more screaming, and about the same amount of chanting.
If you are an American raising kids abroad and you want to reintroduce them to your country, I highly recommend this sort of shock-and-awe approach. Having to deal with an American high school was not pleasant, but it gave me a certain respect for America: it exists. Once you go to college, you are no longer in the real America. You are in a fortified outpost of future America, which has been planted in the real America to enlighten and assimilate it. Respect is not on the menu.
Yes. Win. Dominate. Number One. Forget respect. Who can respect losers? What the college-educated don’t realize is that now they are the losers. This is part of the demodicy. College is meant to train people to believe that if their college sports team is the top, nothing else matters. In case you didn’t “get it” in high school. As for the classes? Forget Free Will. The government will tell you what to teach so we can be Winners in the World -- BEST.
Sunday, February 03, 2008
REZ-DOGS, THE VIDEO
Strangely enough, it was someone in Paris who told me about a video made on the Blackfeet Reservation here by me. It’s called “Rez Dogs” and was a Documentary Production (March 495) at the University of Montana in 2007. Sean O’Brian directs the “Teaching with Film” program. This specific film can be found at http://www.reznetnews.org/multimedia/video/rez-dogs. I’m on dial-up, so I couldn’t download it very well. I asked for a DVD and Mo Mislivets sent me one, no questions asked. Robert Hall was the rez connection, but -- predictably -- no one is quite sure where he’s staying just now.
I chased this video because of a number of factors. One is that I have a few dog stories about Browning myself, dating back fifty years. Another is that I’ve just finished a book about my dog-catching days in Portland (available at www.lulu.com/prairiemary). In an earlier book, “Twelve Blackfeet Stories,” I put dogs in all the stories. And another reason is that the media spreads a wildly sentimental and unreal vision of pets demanding that they never suffer, be kept indoors, be given constant veterinary attention, and generally become children. This video is about grown up animals. There are no cute puppies.
But mostly I just thought this video was brilliant for the following reasons:
1. It was filmed in late winter when the land is still rawhide encrusted with snow and the wind has torn all flags back to mere strips along their ropes. But there are bare places and busy dogs traveling around both in town and across the hills. This is the rez that no tourist and few anthropologists ever see. The editing returns again and again to the Rockies, the Sun Dog in the sky, Chief Mountain, highways going on and on -- up and down over the hills and into the coulees, and the guardian warriors that stand at the borders.
2. It starts with a stereotypical street drunk -- they say “wino” -- hanging around snarling and knowing at all, about half dog himself. (He’s from a family that I know -- artisans, craftsmen.) Then there begins to weave in an old Blackfeet story about the “lost children,” kids who were so bad that the tribe moved on and left them behind. This is told in Blackfeet with subtitles -- sometimes the red subtitles linger after the image is gone, making them “rubrics” -- the red writing in the Bible meant to be emphasized. We never see this story teller.
3. But we watch serious interviews of people. One is an intelligent and handsome young man who speaks of the importance of dogs in Blackfeet history before the horse, about dogs in his own life (“Lucky” who survived one runover by a car, then succumbed to the next, so was renamed “Unlucky.”), and about “we’ve gotta love the doggies and not be sunnavabitches to them because they are our link to the land and the culture.”
An older man with a gray-streaked ponytail sits at his kitchen table, looking out the window, and explains the dogs he sees out there. (I think he’s in Starr School.) “That dog over there is really smart. Her real folks are in Cut Bank right now, so she comes here and we feed her or my mom’s over there and she can go there for food. A dog like that knows how to take care of herself.” He tells about a dog with a broken leg that he splinted and how the dog, in gratitude, now guards the place, feels a connection to the family. Might even run off bad spirits.
But a boy interrupted at a basketball court has the idea that, since the dogs always hang around the street drunks, they are in fact reincarnations of past drunks, hanging with their buddies, “chilling” just as they did when human. Why else would a person always see them near the places the drunks hang out?
The intelligent young man claims that rez dogs are different: “they walk different, they pack more weight.” But they are Blackfeet. “You don’t see them in the white towns.” The man at his window says, “Winter really thins them out” and speculates that they are all related in the same way as all the Blackfeet are somehow descendants of the 500 survivors of smallpox and starvation. The young man relates them to young people who can’t really nail down their Blackfeet identity because of mixed blood or not having local roots and how they become “lost mutts.”
4. Which brings us back to the legend of the “lost children” which in this version is eventually related to the acceptance of one-quarter blood quantum as the definition of “Indian.” A subtle point for white people far away, but a crucial and telling one for locals.
There’s a goofy conclusion in the parking lot by “The White House” or “Ick’s” which has devolved in my time from the best cafe in town (white-owned) to a source of alcohol and other things. Street toughs make a speech about how tough you have to be to survive in Browning, showing their muscles and fists, and then a last remaining guy -- after the others have left -- tells us “I love you, man, and we pray for you in a good way and hope you stay safe.” He knows what you’re supposed to do in show biz. The dogs look on, serene and patient.
That’s about as accurate a version of the reservation you’re likely to find. Full of contradictions and characters, swept by devastating political and climatological changes, watching from niches, going on about daily business. Tragedy walks with jokes. Sometimes the stories help. Always this self-consciousness: the world is watching. They judge us. They might come after us again.
There are people in Browning who scold careless pet owners, who try to rescue hurt animals and find homes for the puppies. There’s also a shelter for street people but they don’t like it much. Freedom is a way of life with its own reasons and pleasures. So what if it’s tough sometimes? The dogs understand. Survival of the most resourceful, man.
I chased this video because of a number of factors. One is that I have a few dog stories about Browning myself, dating back fifty years. Another is that I’ve just finished a book about my dog-catching days in Portland (available at www.lulu.com/prairiemary). In an earlier book, “Twelve Blackfeet Stories,” I put dogs in all the stories. And another reason is that the media spreads a wildly sentimental and unreal vision of pets demanding that they never suffer, be kept indoors, be given constant veterinary attention, and generally become children. This video is about grown up animals. There are no cute puppies.
But mostly I just thought this video was brilliant for the following reasons:
1. It was filmed in late winter when the land is still rawhide encrusted with snow and the wind has torn all flags back to mere strips along their ropes. But there are bare places and busy dogs traveling around both in town and across the hills. This is the rez that no tourist and few anthropologists ever see. The editing returns again and again to the Rockies, the Sun Dog in the sky, Chief Mountain, highways going on and on -- up and down over the hills and into the coulees, and the guardian warriors that stand at the borders.
2. It starts with a stereotypical street drunk -- they say “wino” -- hanging around snarling and knowing at all, about half dog himself. (He’s from a family that I know -- artisans, craftsmen.) Then there begins to weave in an old Blackfeet story about the “lost children,” kids who were so bad that the tribe moved on and left them behind. This is told in Blackfeet with subtitles -- sometimes the red subtitles linger after the image is gone, making them “rubrics” -- the red writing in the Bible meant to be emphasized. We never see this story teller.
3. But we watch serious interviews of people. One is an intelligent and handsome young man who speaks of the importance of dogs in Blackfeet history before the horse, about dogs in his own life (“Lucky” who survived one runover by a car, then succumbed to the next, so was renamed “Unlucky.”), and about “we’ve gotta love the doggies and not be sunnavabitches to them because they are our link to the land and the culture.”
An older man with a gray-streaked ponytail sits at his kitchen table, looking out the window, and explains the dogs he sees out there. (I think he’s in Starr School.) “That dog over there is really smart. Her real folks are in Cut Bank right now, so she comes here and we feed her or my mom’s over there and she can go there for food. A dog like that knows how to take care of herself.” He tells about a dog with a broken leg that he splinted and how the dog, in gratitude, now guards the place, feels a connection to the family. Might even run off bad spirits.
But a boy interrupted at a basketball court has the idea that, since the dogs always hang around the street drunks, they are in fact reincarnations of past drunks, hanging with their buddies, “chilling” just as they did when human. Why else would a person always see them near the places the drunks hang out?
The intelligent young man claims that rez dogs are different: “they walk different, they pack more weight.” But they are Blackfeet. “You don’t see them in the white towns.” The man at his window says, “Winter really thins them out” and speculates that they are all related in the same way as all the Blackfeet are somehow descendants of the 500 survivors of smallpox and starvation. The young man relates them to young people who can’t really nail down their Blackfeet identity because of mixed blood or not having local roots and how they become “lost mutts.”
4. Which brings us back to the legend of the “lost children” which in this version is eventually related to the acceptance of one-quarter blood quantum as the definition of “Indian.” A subtle point for white people far away, but a crucial and telling one for locals.
There’s a goofy conclusion in the parking lot by “The White House” or “Ick’s” which has devolved in my time from the best cafe in town (white-owned) to a source of alcohol and other things. Street toughs make a speech about how tough you have to be to survive in Browning, showing their muscles and fists, and then a last remaining guy -- after the others have left -- tells us “I love you, man, and we pray for you in a good way and hope you stay safe.” He knows what you’re supposed to do in show biz. The dogs look on, serene and patient.
That’s about as accurate a version of the reservation you’re likely to find. Full of contradictions and characters, swept by devastating political and climatological changes, watching from niches, going on about daily business. Tragedy walks with jokes. Sometimes the stories help. Always this self-consciousness: the world is watching. They judge us. They might come after us again.
There are people in Browning who scold careless pet owners, who try to rescue hurt animals and find homes for the puppies. There’s also a shelter for street people but they don’t like it much. Freedom is a way of life with its own reasons and pleasures. So what if it’s tough sometimes? The dogs understand. Survival of the most resourceful, man.
Saturday, February 02, 2008
PETER WARSHALL'S WATERSHED QUESTIONNAIRE
Decades ago I had a workshop that I took to UU meetings that was about knowing “where you are.” I thought it was a religious issue in a geo-sense and I used the questionnaire below. I got a little discouraged when some people insisted that under their house was “nothing,” because they lived in a subdivision. The mental image was too futuristic for me: floating in a vacuum.
The following exercise in watershed awareness was hatched 30 years ago by Peter Warshall, naturalist extraordinaire."
1) Point north.
Easy to do here. It’s on the side of the house with no windows because that’s where the really cold weather comes from.
2) What time is sunset today?
Had to cheat on this one. It's changing fast. GF Tribune says Sunset at 5:24pm. Sunrise today was 7:51am. Extras: Moonrise: 4:07am and Moonset 11:55am. I was up for moonrise, asleep again for sunrise; will be up for both moonset and sunset.
3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
It falls in the Rockies, east slope, filters through much glacial debris as well as the remnants of an ancient seabed. Shows up in a gravel aquifer about a hundred feet under the surface which we access through wells and pipe around to our houses. Some houses flood underneath. The connection to the irrigation system -- mountain impoundment, canals and rivers, second impoundment next to town (Lake Francis) and then ditch dispersal and pivot sprinklers -- has a controversal and unresearched relationship to our city water supply.
4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
Down my unreliable sewer connection which was luckily new enough that it didn’t have to be replaced when the new liner was put into the main town sewer that runs in front of my house and on out to the sewage lagoon where the water and solids gradually separate. I suppose the liquid soaks into the ground. Where do the solids go? Hmmm.
5) How many feet above sea level are you?
About 3500. One can grow tomatoes and corn, but only barely.
6) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?
“Crocus” or pasqueflowers, also called lambs ears or kitten ears because the pale lavender flowers are fuzzy. They are capable of melting the snow next to them and are poisonous to eat. When they show up on the town librarian’s counter in a bouquet, that means it’s time to buy an Easter bonnet.
7) How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours?
It might be eighty miles over the Rockies to the West side drainage. Maybe a little less to cross the Hudson's Bay divide that runs along the 49th parallel, where the water drains northeast. Over here Birch Creek drains into the Marias River which empties into the Missouri which joins the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. The Blackfeet want to claim water rights to the whole shootin’ match! As for the map, how much detail do you need?
8) Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt?
Gumbo AKA caleche. Miserable stuff. Originally aeolian sediments from the PNW volcanoes. There are gravel moraines buried under it.
9) Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves?
Hey, they did better than we do! Bison people living on meat and as much tuberous and rooty stuff as the women could dig.
10) Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available.
Wheat is not native, I guess. So -- biscuit root, camas (all year round but best in spring), sarvisberry, chokecherry (late June), and daylily buds, though I don’t see much about Indians eating them. They’d be in June.
11) From what direction do storms generally come?
Depends on the kind of storm. If it’s wet, it comes at least in part over the Rockies. If it’s cold it comes from the north. Most often they mix to some degree.
12) Where does your garbage go?
The “roll off” on the edge of town, then to a landfill where highway 44 joins I-15.
13) How many people live in your watershed?
Zillions. And they all want water.
14) Who uses the paper/plastic you recycle from your neighborhood?
I’m stumped here. One gets the impression that the wind uses it to festoon any barbed wire it comes across.
15) Point to where the sun sets on the equinox. How about sunrise on the summer solstice?
This far north it’s shocking how much the sun moves its arc across the sky. In midsummer the sun is over my neighbor’s house on the north side, but in the winter it’s very low in the south sky and comes through the house raked almost flat.
16) Where is the nearest earthquake fault? When did it last move?
We’re told there is a HUGE earthquake fault, plate tectonic division, right along the east side of the Rockies. It last moved about 3500 years ago and is scheduled to move again pretty soon. When it does, the results will be massive.
17) Right here, how deep do you have to drill before you reach water? Hundred feet.
18) Which (if any) geological features in your watershed are, or were, especially respected by your community, or considered sacred, now or in the past?
The whole thing, but esp. mountains like the Rockies or the Sweetgrass volcanic extrusions, streams and their floodplains.
19) How many days is the growing season here (from frost to frost)? The problem is that it varies so much, but usually the last frost is in June and the first again is in September, but we have the potential for hard frost right through summer.
20) Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put?
Migratory: robins, doves, flicker, meadowlark. Stay put: hawks, sparrows.
21) What was the total rainfall here last year?
Too depressingly low to keep track of. We’ve had drought for a long time now.
22) Where does the pollution in your air come from?
Farm chemicals. Dust. It leaves as quickly as it comes if it's airborne.
23) If you live near the ocean, when is high tide today? Not there.
24) What primary geological processes or events shaped the land here?
Plate tectonics, major glaciers, sedimentation, erosion, Very little volcanic.
25) Name three wild species that were not found here 500 years ago. Name one exotic species that has appeared in the last 5 years.
Not many people here making lists five hundred years ago. We’re drowning in exotic species. Dunno which is most recent.
26) What minerals are found in the ground here that are (or were) economically valuable? Oil and coal. Some gold.
27) Where does your electric power come from and how is it generated? Mostly coming from dams down by Great Falls.
28) After the rain runs off your roof, where does it go?
Into the ground right here. Not much run-off.
29) Where is the nearest wilderness? When was the last time a fire burned through it?
Thirty miles to the west. Last summer it burned again. It burns a lot these days.
30) How many days till the moon is full?
New Moon in four days, so full moon in fifteen days? Or twenty?
The Bigger Here Bonus Questions:
31) What species once found here are known to have gone extinct?
Most famously, dinosaurs. (Bison are not extinct.)
32) What other cities or landscape features on the planet share your latitude? (I cheated!) Paris, France! Stuttgart, Germany! Also, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China.
33) What was the dominant land cover plant here 10,000 years ago? Grass. The prairie evolved with grass and grass evolved as the prairie appeared.
34) Name two places on different continents that have similar sunshine/rainfall/wind and temperature patterns to here.
Asia, especially in the Siberian parts which were once connected to Montana and not just via the Bering Straits -- the supercontinent was torn in half. Once you get far east of the Rockies, it’s not unlike Russia. Is that the same continent?
The following exercise in watershed awareness was hatched 30 years ago by Peter Warshall, naturalist extraordinaire."
1) Point north.
Easy to do here. It’s on the side of the house with no windows because that’s where the really cold weather comes from.
2) What time is sunset today?
Had to cheat on this one. It's changing fast. GF Tribune says Sunset at 5:24pm. Sunrise today was 7:51am. Extras: Moonrise: 4:07am and Moonset 11:55am. I was up for moonrise, asleep again for sunrise; will be up for both moonset and sunset.
3) Trace the water you drink from rainfall to your tap.
It falls in the Rockies, east slope, filters through much glacial debris as well as the remnants of an ancient seabed. Shows up in a gravel aquifer about a hundred feet under the surface which we access through wells and pipe around to our houses. Some houses flood underneath. The connection to the irrigation system -- mountain impoundment, canals and rivers, second impoundment next to town (Lake Francis) and then ditch dispersal and pivot sprinklers -- has a controversal and unresearched relationship to our city water supply.
4) When you flush, where do the solids go? What happens to the waste water?
Down my unreliable sewer connection which was luckily new enough that it didn’t have to be replaced when the new liner was put into the main town sewer that runs in front of my house and on out to the sewage lagoon where the water and solids gradually separate. I suppose the liquid soaks into the ground. Where do the solids go? Hmmm.
5) How many feet above sea level are you?
About 3500. One can grow tomatoes and corn, but only barely.
6) What spring wildflower is consistently among the first to bloom here?
“Crocus” or pasqueflowers, also called lambs ears or kitten ears because the pale lavender flowers are fuzzy. They are capable of melting the snow next to them and are poisonous to eat. When they show up on the town librarian’s counter in a bouquet, that means it’s time to buy an Easter bonnet.
7) How far do you have to travel before you reach a different watershed? Can you draw the boundaries of yours?
It might be eighty miles over the Rockies to the West side drainage. Maybe a little less to cross the Hudson's Bay divide that runs along the 49th parallel, where the water drains northeast. Over here Birch Creek drains into the Marias River which empties into the Missouri which joins the Mississippi to the Gulf of Mexico. The Blackfeet want to claim water rights to the whole shootin’ match! As for the map, how much detail do you need?
8) Is the soil under your feet, more clay, sand, rock or silt?
Gumbo AKA caleche. Miserable stuff. Originally aeolian sediments from the PNW volcanoes. There are gravel moraines buried under it.
9) Before your tribe lived here, what did the previous inhabitants eat and how did they sustain themselves?
Hey, they did better than we do! Bison people living on meat and as much tuberous and rooty stuff as the women could dig.
10) Name five native edible plants in your neighborhood and the season(s) they are available.
Wheat is not native, I guess. So -- biscuit root, camas (all year round but best in spring), sarvisberry, chokecherry (late June), and daylily buds, though I don’t see much about Indians eating them. They’d be in June.
11) From what direction do storms generally come?
Depends on the kind of storm. If it’s wet, it comes at least in part over the Rockies. If it’s cold it comes from the north. Most often they mix to some degree.
12) Where does your garbage go?
The “roll off” on the edge of town, then to a landfill where highway 44 joins I-15.
13) How many people live in your watershed?
Zillions. And they all want water.
14) Who uses the paper/plastic you recycle from your neighborhood?
I’m stumped here. One gets the impression that the wind uses it to festoon any barbed wire it comes across.
15) Point to where the sun sets on the equinox. How about sunrise on the summer solstice?
This far north it’s shocking how much the sun moves its arc across the sky. In midsummer the sun is over my neighbor’s house on the north side, but in the winter it’s very low in the south sky and comes through the house raked almost flat.
16) Where is the nearest earthquake fault? When did it last move?
We’re told there is a HUGE earthquake fault, plate tectonic division, right along the east side of the Rockies. It last moved about 3500 years ago and is scheduled to move again pretty soon. When it does, the results will be massive.
17) Right here, how deep do you have to drill before you reach water? Hundred feet.
18) Which (if any) geological features in your watershed are, or were, especially respected by your community, or considered sacred, now or in the past?
The whole thing, but esp. mountains like the Rockies or the Sweetgrass volcanic extrusions, streams and their floodplains.
19) How many days is the growing season here (from frost to frost)? The problem is that it varies so much, but usually the last frost is in June and the first again is in September, but we have the potential for hard frost right through summer.
20) Name five birds that live here. Which are migratory and which stay put?
Migratory: robins, doves, flicker, meadowlark. Stay put: hawks, sparrows.
21) What was the total rainfall here last year?
Too depressingly low to keep track of. We’ve had drought for a long time now.
22) Where does the pollution in your air come from?
Farm chemicals. Dust. It leaves as quickly as it comes if it's airborne.
23) If you live near the ocean, when is high tide today? Not there.
24) What primary geological processes or events shaped the land here?
Plate tectonics, major glaciers, sedimentation, erosion, Very little volcanic.
25) Name three wild species that were not found here 500 years ago. Name one exotic species that has appeared in the last 5 years.
Not many people here making lists five hundred years ago. We’re drowning in exotic species. Dunno which is most recent.
26) What minerals are found in the ground here that are (or were) economically valuable? Oil and coal. Some gold.
27) Where does your electric power come from and how is it generated? Mostly coming from dams down by Great Falls.
28) After the rain runs off your roof, where does it go?
Into the ground right here. Not much run-off.
29) Where is the nearest wilderness? When was the last time a fire burned through it?
Thirty miles to the west. Last summer it burned again. It burns a lot these days.
30) How many days till the moon is full?
New Moon in four days, so full moon in fifteen days? Or twenty?
The Bigger Here Bonus Questions:
31) What species once found here are known to have gone extinct?
Most famously, dinosaurs. (Bison are not extinct.)
32) What other cities or landscape features on the planet share your latitude? (I cheated!) Paris, France! Stuttgart, Germany! Also, Czech Republic, Austria, Slovakia, Ukraine, Russia, Kazakhstan, Mongolia, China.
33) What was the dominant land cover plant here 10,000 years ago? Grass. The prairie evolved with grass and grass evolved as the prairie appeared.
34) Name two places on different continents that have similar sunshine/rainfall/wind and temperature patterns to here.
Asia, especially in the Siberian parts which were once connected to Montana and not just via the Bering Straits -- the supercontinent was torn in half. Once you get far east of the Rockies, it’s not unlike Russia. Is that the same continent?
Friday, February 01, 2008
LAST STAND AT THE LAUNDROMAT
Because I have no washing machine, I visit the laundromat thirty miles away. I have a choice of three, actually, but the one in Cut Bank (by the far the nicest) has attracted a guy who stalks me -- he’s a psychotic ex-schoolteacher who aggressively proselytizes his version of Christianity. His father is rich, so the people of Cut Bank cut him a LOT of slack. Too much, in my opinion. Conrad’s laundromat is old and worn. So is Shelby’s, but they have the most machines and a public bathroom. Since I’m more likely to have other errands in Shelby, that’s where I usually go.
In all of these laundromats I meet interesting people, because this is the Montana High-Line, a place where people pushed or pushing out to the edge come to make a stand. Once in Shelby I had a nice conversation with an enormous black man, complete with dreadlocks, who had wanted to start a bakery in town but was blocked by the mayor. Sometimes it’s people I know from long time ago in Browning. In summer there are likely to be tourists.
This time it was a rather slender, neatly bearded man with glasses. We exchanged pleasantries about the weather, since we’ve just returned to “normal” of about thirty degrees (dry roads) after a bubble of way-below-zero temps. Then we talked a bit about politics, making bitter jokes, and suddenly it occurred to me that we were sounding more like people in a West Coast laundromat than High-Line survivors. Sure enough, it turned out that this man (I never did get his name) had mostly lived in California but came back here to one of the tiny dwindling oil patch towns to take care of his mother in her final illness. She’s gone now.
He had made a good living in the wholesale food supply business in the San Francisco area, but found that everything was changing quickly and drastically -- mostly a matter of little guys being squeezed out by big guys who then set the terms of transactions to suit themselves. That is, for their own profit. We agreed that big money and evasion of regulation has made food dangerous, politically hot, and potentially devastating to the country.
We talked a bit about drug culture and he said he’d been quite a back packer “before this” and was willing to tolerate the pot growers (many of them alienated Vietnam veterans) except that they set booby traps along paths, things like fish hooks on monofilament hung at eye level. He had been to college, earned an AA degree, had been a reader “until now.” He’d recently lost a lot of weight.
I had noticed that he was wearing new but inexpensive clothing, probably from Pamida in Shelby. Heavy flannel shirt, sweat pants, padded jacket. (Mine differs only by being old.) We talked about the high cost of heating and the risk of having an all-electric house in a place where the electricity is often shut down by storms. I asked if he had gas, which I do. He did not. Did he have wood heat as a backup? He did, but the scrap wood in his yard -- plentiful -- he was not able to gather and cut up.
Then there was a pause while I digested this. And he said, “I have an incurable fatal disease. In fact, I was only diagnosed for sure this week.” What was it? Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as "Lou Gehrig's disease," is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually lead to their death. When the motor neurons die, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is lost. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected, patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed. (This description is from the ALS organization.)
So I swung into my social worker/minister mode and asked him about his plans now. We talked dispassionately, exploring options and comparing notes. He said it was too soon to make decisions since he still hadn’t really digested what was likely to happen. He showed me that his left arm and hand were curling, resistant, and said that the doctor (whom he likes, a neurologist who flies over from Kalispell) told him he was lucky that the first symptoms were there, since people who have it beginning in the neck and jaw are in major trouble much sooner.
He said that his girl friend back in San Francisco had offered to “take him in” and help him to the end, but he said, “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.” He will need professional help and equipment. He probably has about three to five years left. He’s 54, has no children, but lives near his brother and the brother’s family. He said he was grateful not to have had children because that means he doesn’t have to worry about them having those genes and because he really doesn’t have a much more optimistic view of society and the planet than he does for his own future. But actually, ALS is NOT hereditary in 90% of cases. It is MORE prevalent and faster than MS.
Money is important. Now that he has a diagnosis, he will qualify for help. Because he had no insurance, he has been paying for his own tests, thousands of dollars at a time, . He’s using up his retirement, but he won’t need it anyway now. The worst test was the MRI, which he took right there in Shelby, and though the technician was skillful and the nurses were kind, it was just hard to lie there in a machine for more than a half-hour, immobilized and told not to swallow. I assured him that there WERE resources to help him and that people around here would take good care of him. They know his relatives.
He didn’t cry. He didn’t ask if he could call me. We didn’t exchange phone numbers or email. When I began to pack my clean dry clothes out to the pickiup, he said he’d really enjoyed the conversation and I agreed. He said, “I hope we meet again.” I said, “Could happen!” He echoed, “Could happen.” He knows enough about me to find me, esp. now with publicity over “Bronze I&O” about to start and since I once worked at Marias Care Center.
Some scientists are saying we are now entering a new geological age: the Anthropocene, the era in which humans, their chemicals, their erosions, their pollutions began to change continents, ice-caps and ocean currents, to say nothing of weather patterns or species evolution. There is no doubt in my mind that this man’s ALS and my own Diabetes 2 are part of this evolution, that we are being extinguished as surely as dinosaurs. As individuals. We didn't have children anyway. Out there somewhere are the progenitors of the birds that dinos evolved into and the mammals who blossomed next. But they had a lot more time than we do.
This man said that as soon as he heard his diagnosis, he thought of the Gary Cooper movie in which Cooper played Gehrig. He said that both Cooper in the movie and Gehrig in real life, "died well" with courage and honesty. He said that was his goal now. I have no doubt that he will achieve it.
In all of these laundromats I meet interesting people, because this is the Montana High-Line, a place where people pushed or pushing out to the edge come to make a stand. Once in Shelby I had a nice conversation with an enormous black man, complete with dreadlocks, who had wanted to start a bakery in town but was blocked by the mayor. Sometimes it’s people I know from long time ago in Browning. In summer there are likely to be tourists.
This time it was a rather slender, neatly bearded man with glasses. We exchanged pleasantries about the weather, since we’ve just returned to “normal” of about thirty degrees (dry roads) after a bubble of way-below-zero temps. Then we talked a bit about politics, making bitter jokes, and suddenly it occurred to me that we were sounding more like people in a West Coast laundromat than High-Line survivors. Sure enough, it turned out that this man (I never did get his name) had mostly lived in California but came back here to one of the tiny dwindling oil patch towns to take care of his mother in her final illness. She’s gone now.
He had made a good living in the wholesale food supply business in the San Francisco area, but found that everything was changing quickly and drastically -- mostly a matter of little guys being squeezed out by big guys who then set the terms of transactions to suit themselves. That is, for their own profit. We agreed that big money and evasion of regulation has made food dangerous, politically hot, and potentially devastating to the country.
We talked a bit about drug culture and he said he’d been quite a back packer “before this” and was willing to tolerate the pot growers (many of them alienated Vietnam veterans) except that they set booby traps along paths, things like fish hooks on monofilament hung at eye level. He had been to college, earned an AA degree, had been a reader “until now.” He’d recently lost a lot of weight.
I had noticed that he was wearing new but inexpensive clothing, probably from Pamida in Shelby. Heavy flannel shirt, sweat pants, padded jacket. (Mine differs only by being old.) We talked about the high cost of heating and the risk of having an all-electric house in a place where the electricity is often shut down by storms. I asked if he had gas, which I do. He did not. Did he have wood heat as a backup? He did, but the scrap wood in his yard -- plentiful -- he was not able to gather and cut up.
Then there was a pause while I digested this. And he said, “I have an incurable fatal disease. In fact, I was only diagnosed for sure this week.” What was it? Lou Gehrig’s Disease. Amyotrophic lateral sclerosis (ALS), often referred to as "Lou Gehrig's disease," is a progressive neurodegenerative disease that affects nerve cells in the brain and the spinal cord. Motor neurons reach from the brain to the spinal cord and from the spinal cord to the muscles throughout the body. The progressive degeneration of the motor neurons in ALS eventually lead to their death. When the motor neurons die, the ability of the brain to initiate and control muscle movement is lost. With voluntary muscle action progressively affected, patients in the later stages of the disease may become totally paralyzed. (This description is from the ALS organization.)
So I swung into my social worker/minister mode and asked him about his plans now. We talked dispassionately, exploring options and comparing notes. He said it was too soon to make decisions since he still hadn’t really digested what was likely to happen. He showed me that his left arm and hand were curling, resistant, and said that the doctor (whom he likes, a neurologist who flies over from Kalispell) told him he was lucky that the first symptoms were there, since people who have it beginning in the neck and jaw are in major trouble much sooner.
He said that his girl friend back in San Francisco had offered to “take him in” and help him to the end, but he said, “She doesn’t know what she’s saying.” He will need professional help and equipment. He probably has about three to five years left. He’s 54, has no children, but lives near his brother and the brother’s family. He said he was grateful not to have had children because that means he doesn’t have to worry about them having those genes and because he really doesn’t have a much more optimistic view of society and the planet than he does for his own future. But actually, ALS is NOT hereditary in 90% of cases. It is MORE prevalent and faster than MS.
Money is important. Now that he has a diagnosis, he will qualify for help. Because he had no insurance, he has been paying for his own tests, thousands of dollars at a time, . He’s using up his retirement, but he won’t need it anyway now. The worst test was the MRI, which he took right there in Shelby, and though the technician was skillful and the nurses were kind, it was just hard to lie there in a machine for more than a half-hour, immobilized and told not to swallow. I assured him that there WERE resources to help him and that people around here would take good care of him. They know his relatives.
He didn’t cry. He didn’t ask if he could call me. We didn’t exchange phone numbers or email. When I began to pack my clean dry clothes out to the pickiup, he said he’d really enjoyed the conversation and I agreed. He said, “I hope we meet again.” I said, “Could happen!” He echoed, “Could happen.” He knows enough about me to find me, esp. now with publicity over “Bronze I&O” about to start and since I once worked at Marias Care Center.
Some scientists are saying we are now entering a new geological age: the Anthropocene, the era in which humans, their chemicals, their erosions, their pollutions began to change continents, ice-caps and ocean currents, to say nothing of weather patterns or species evolution. There is no doubt in my mind that this man’s ALS and my own Diabetes 2 are part of this evolution, that we are being extinguished as surely as dinosaurs. As individuals. We didn't have children anyway. Out there somewhere are the progenitors of the birds that dinos evolved into and the mammals who blossomed next. But they had a lot more time than we do.
This man said that as soon as he heard his diagnosis, he thought of the Gary Cooper movie in which Cooper played Gehrig. He said that both Cooper in the movie and Gehrig in real life, "died well" with courage and honesty. He said that was his goal now. I have no doubt that he will achieve it.
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