PYRRHIC SUCCESS

I’ve never had a clear sense of how good is good enough and I’m not sure many other people do either. Is there such a thing as Pyrrhic success? A Pyrrhic victory means winning the battle but in a way that is discouraging. This is from Wikipedia:

“A Pyrrhic victory is a victory with devastating cost to the victor. The phrase is an allusion to King Pyrrhus of Epirus, whose army suffered irreplaceable casualties in defeating the Romans at Heraclea in 280 BC and Asculum in 279 BC during the Pyrrhic War. After the latter battle, Plutarch relates in a report by Dionysius:

“The armies separated; and, it is said, Pyrrhus replied to one that gave him joy of his victory that one more such victory would utterly undo him. For he had lost a great part of the forces he brought with him, and almost all his particular friends and principal commanders; there were no others there to make recruits, and he found the confederates in Italy backward. On the other hand, as from a fountain continually flowing out of the city, the Roman camp was quickly and plentifully filled up with fresh men, not at all abating in courage for the loss they sustained, but even from their very anger gaining new force and resolution to go on with the war.”

I hadn’t thought of it quite that way before looking it up. When I say Pyrrhic success, I mean something more like uncelebrated, or so expected as to seem unremarkable, or having success come too late to be useful or in the wrong way. Part of the problem is expectations, of course, and sometimes other people have expectations so much lower than one’s goals for oneself -- or so different -- that celebration is confused.

Looking back, eighth grade graduation was blunted by terror of high school. But high school graduation was a matter of having assumed it would happen. I’ve forgotten what “order” I was in according to my grade point average, but it wasn’t that high. On the one hand, I wrote our little program for the actual event -- on the other hand, it wasn’t that great and we were too distracted to remember it properly anyway. On the one hand I was Betty Crocker Homemaker of the Year, on the other hand it was almost accidental as I’d never taken Home Ec and was the least domestic of young women. College graduation meant leaving the people I cared most about, without any prospects for a job or new life. Even marriage was kind of a compromise. The love affair was NOT. It was extreme, impossible, romantic, and the marriage probably ended it by reducing the romance to obligation and exhaustion, Pyrrhic fashion. To turn this around a bit, how big a success did Bob Scriver have to be to justify the sacrifice of my personhood? I overheard an old lady from around here scoff, “Oh, Bob Scriver was never that famous.” (They judge mostly by money. Fame=fortune. I’ll never fit into that pattern.)

What have I done that has felt like a total success, a vindication? Getting this book, “Bronze Inside and Out,” actually written felt pretty good. Getting it published has been a series of compromises. Buying this house was like winning the lottery -- i didn’t expect it and now, just about at the ninth anniversary of moving to Valier, it is still a joy. But it was essentially a gift from my mother -- I bought it with my part of her estate. I didn’t earn it with writing, but it made my writing possible.

I had thought the ministry would be a validation, a success, but it never felt that way. Too many mixed demands, but beyond that I’ve about decided that a ministry has to be a lifelong vocation. One cannot just step into it in middle age and expect to be more than a sort of social worker. Done properly, it shapes the person as the person shapes the role: the two make each other. It’s like ballet or opera: a discipline that enables. This view is far too idealistic, I grant.

So what am I doing? Undercutting every success by raising my own standards? Both my father and Bob Scriver did that to me. If I brought home a report card that was all A's with one B, my dad would pounce on the B. If I could do something by stretching hard, that became my new standard and because improvement, growth, progress were values, then I must achieve more, better -- jump higher. Until I failed. My father never imposed that on himself, but Bob Scriver did and he went far because of it. In art or music or writing these values are part of the vocation: experience, practice, is expected to result in insight, control, and wisdom. And they do, mostly. Except that people age or become injured. Or bitter.

Or sometimes the world falls out from under your feet. Like the publishing world totally reconfigured by digitization. The higher the aim, the more vulnerable the success.

Bob’s solution was the rodeo cowboy’s mantra: give it an honest try. If you do that, it’s all you can do. The best you can do is all anyone can do. But there’s always that little niggle of thought that maybe you COULD have tried a little harder, maybe if you’d had more support, maybe if you . . . No way to know. Not many do-overs in a Pyrrhic victory -- who would want one? Is Iraq a success or a failure? Was Vietnam? Was WWII? Or WWI? Or the Civil War? Is a war any way to judge anything anyhow? How many wars are NOT Pyrrhic?

Is this biography of Bob a success or a failure? It will take years to find out. I might not be here long enough, so it will depend on maybe the grandkids or great-grandkids to decide -- if they care. Did Bob himself feel like a success at the end, with all his awards and shows and recognition? I think it stopped mattering very much. I think what mattered was the animals, the mountains and the few old friends who were still living. Maybe the judgment of success is always something that belongs to other people, so that it’s always necessarily Pyrrhic. But if success is meant to be the point when you say, “Okay. That’s good enough. I can stop now,” then Bob never reached that point until a week or so before he died. I figure I’ve got a long way to go.

In the meantime, there’s a dead branch I want to saw off one of the trees in the front yard. I’ll get at it tomorrow, maybe, and when it thumps to the ground, that will be a solid victory.

WHAT MUST WE DO TO BE SAVED?

I’ve got to get back to typing out my paternal grandmother’s diary of 1935, an economically terrifying year that the family survived only by teamwork and hard labor. They had one secret weapon: movies. No matter how tough things got, they always had a few cents to go to a movie. And they weren’t bashful about saying what was good and what was bad.

My father, who was on the road as a wool buyer and then as a “field representative” (which was a kind of promoter, as nearly as I can tell, for a wholesale ag co-op) came home on the weekend ready to celebrate by taking the family to a movie on Saturday night. In Portland, the way he did it, this meant going to Broadway downtown and then visiting “Jolly Joan’s” afterwards for a soda. (I mean with ice cream in it, a “float.”) This is the way I saw most Westerns and musicals. I vividly recall the “shift of consciousness” which some call the “willing suspension of disbelief” and which I experienced as a palpable shift of viscera: heart in the throat.

By 1957 I had grown older and more sophisticated, going off to Northwestern University’s theatre department secure in the fragile belief that I knew everything. This coincided with a wave of foreign films so powerful they blew everything away. A buddy of mine was a film student and took me along on treks across Chicago to basements and auditoriums showing strange and nearly unintelligible movies. I was returned to the state of not-quite-comprehension, wonder and heart-elevation that I’d felt as a child. I loved the sensation and went off on my own to the art-movie houses. Now I sit in Valier gloating over Netflix for the same reasons.

One of the first of these movies I saw alone was “Wild Strawberries,” where I arrived a little late, just after the nightmare sequence that begins the movie had begun. I could NOT understand what was happening. I thought it might be a commercial and craned my neck around at others to see whether they thought it normal. Eventually I figured it out. Then at the end I burst into tears at the image of the Victorian family picnicking across a body of water: beautiful, precious and inaccessible. But the middle was so explanatory. This was the first time I’d ever thought about men so frozen by rationality and status that they lost all connection with other humans. I’m still thinking about it. So is Ingmar Bergman.

The DVD of “Wild Strawberries” is sitting here alongside me, but so far I’ve only watched the interview with Ingmar Bergman, shockingly aged, willingly talking about the “damage from his upbringing,” the blessing of his puppet theatre and music, his “too frequent marriages” and nonexistent private life in the early years, his insanity, his country “trying to kill him,” his final successful marriage for 24 years and his failure at coming to terms with his wife’s death. The interview is more interesting than the movie -- maybe -- but I still haven’t watched the movie.

I won’t watch it tonight because I want to rewatch “The Widow of St. Pierre,” which is a tragic costume drama -- French with subtitles. (The imdb critics confide that the dubbed version is a disaster.) This is also also about redemption by heart-softening and repentance but in the present rather than through reliving the past. Is there another formal religion that asks us to be saved by becoming more vulnerable and forgiving? I can’t think of any but Christianity where it is embodied in Jesus. Confucius advised wisdom and Buddha spoke of detachment.

“The Widow of St. Pierre” is about the military captain of an island as foreboding and sea-locked as Bergman’s beloved island home. This captain has a wife he loves but there are no children. Perhaps for this reason, the cherishing/nurturing woman takes on the project of redeeming a killer, a simple man who gut-stabbed another for no good reason except that he was drunk. Such projects always end badly -- in this case for all three. They don’t say a lot. (The interviews with the director and actors says plenty.) The woman doesn’t go to bed with anyone but her husband. She watches the killer as though he were her child, even teaching him to read, attending his wedding, and taking him a blanket. The husband, seeing how necessary this is to her, protects her. He is a brave and gallant man who rides a gorgeous, curvetting black horse: he is not impotent. All three have chosen their inevitable fates -- fatal fates -- and slide toward them past all complexity. No choices are even considered. The people of the village, who DO have choices, refuse them.

So put THIS up against “The Searchers” or any other American film I can think of! Even the ones with the theme are not up to the acting and the northern Atlantic is one of the few places on the globe that can match Monument Valley for power and vastness. One of the reviewers suggested that this film is equal to the Truffault-led renaissance of French film that I witnessed back in the Fifties and may herald a new rebirth of fine film. Not that they all should be so serious and fatalistic as this one or as Bergman’s great examinations of the inner life in a dark climate. But we could use a little of that level of “gravitas” in a world where we let an essentially immature set of punishing, over-rational, control-mad politicians lead us into death and debt even as we begin to short-circuit the planetary cycles that keep us alive. They exemplify the stupid villagers, not the protective captain and his loving wife. They don't even have the stature of the murderer.

There have been a few times when I’ve had to choose principle over self-protection. So far, it’s all worked out, but there was damage. I’ve tried not to pass it on. I’d like to think that some of my moral courage came from the movies. Not much of it came from the church, you can be sure. In fact, the pressure to conform when one is in the ministry is stronger than I’ve felt anywhere else. The punishment is the end of one’s professional life.

THE BACK OF THE MOON

Humans have always wanted to know about ways of life very different from their own: perhaps that is one of the secrets of the genre of “novel” but certainly it goes far back into the ancient world of history -- I’m thinking of Herodotus, though I’ve never sat down to read him. Today, with reality TV probing every corner, it becomes harder and harder to even think of a “world” that’s not homogenized by TV, music, and simple commerce. Maybe this is why we are so interested in sequestered worlds like the Mafia, the underculture of discarded kids, the drug culture, brothels, harems, slavery, witness protection program, spies, combat troops, and so on. I suppose these are mostly transgressive worlds because what causes them to be sequestered is the need to avoid law enforcement or at least social censure. But we also seem to have a craving for religious cults, mythical contexts like vampires and werewolves, and accounts of drug adventures. Some of them seem to concentrate on “super-virtue” like nuns or “super-justice” like, well, Superman but also various scientific and otherwise “super” entities.

Lately everyone seems to take an equal and opposite pleasure in the unmasking of a memoir as pure invention. It’s as though some people are trying to prove there is no alternative world, no privilege. Today on a NPR show a woman in the publishing world suggested that memoirs tap into a “self-help” vein which people hope will show them how to succeed, or at least prevail. But others want to say, “You’re just making it up. I know the world.”

Equally contradictorily, it is often the memoirist’s own family who object that the memoir is not true -- even calling the publisher to rat out the writer -- but they are equally opposed to anyone writing the truth about that person or that family. They don’t want to be seen as wicked, but neither do they accept the idea of being banal. They seem to need cover of some kind -- a “cloak of virtue.” “We’re just like everyone else, but in a superior way.”

Book Daddy (website) says that the moral sticking point about memoir is that people will pay MUCH more for a memoir than for a novel or even for a “factual” documented autobiography. His implication is that all this fakery comes simply from the desire to make more money. It is a venal marketing ploy. This certainly applies to the books that are “packaged” by publishers' teams pretending to be, say, an ethnic teenaged girl and paying someone to pretend she wrote a book largely assembled by plagiarizing parts of earlier books. Not much seems to happen to those culprits.

The NPR program suggested that there are legal issues in pretending to be someone that one is not. Certainly we seem to be obsessed with the idea of “real ID” and NAIS, which means numbering all the domestic animals so they can be traced. We seem to think that tells us something, makes us safer. as though the tricky world were out to get us through deception which we could eliminate if we just had everything in a database. The media uncovers one example after another of deceptive advertising. We worry about identity theft. Is that what a false memoir is? Identity theft? Even if the purported author doesn’t exist and never did?

But the people involved seem to think of their stories as more like Sim City, an avatar that might be more like their true selves than what one sees in this concrete world. So why can’t we accept that? Why can’t we accept something like a dream life, an inner truth of the soul? Especially if it sells well!

There is something parallel in the Christian world which is based on four gospels that don’t agree with each other, so that Gary Wills has to explain how it is that they are NOT false memoirs, since so much is built on the assumption that they are literally true, at least in the more naive Christian circles. If they aren’t big T, True, is anything True? Only Unitarians like the idea of a lot of little t truths running around loose! (That’s a joke. Actually, they are prone to Big T Truth, they just choose different ones.) And then science keeps telling us all this weird stuff about how solid objects are really assemblages of whirling atoms and our bodies, our very identities, are produced by four molecules wrapped in a double-helix. All this confusion has got to be STOPPED! And the feeling seems to be that the place to stop it is the false memoir. Forget global warming!

I’ve spent a lot of time reflecting on Native Lit “first person” stories. Take these two examples: Richard Lancaster wrote “Piegan,” an account of his relationship with Old Jim Whitecalf (now “gone on ahead”) that is presented as an accurate journal/memoir but doesn’t ring true to me. (Lancaster is dead, I’m told.) Adolf Hungry Wolf (living) also wrote about his relationship with Old Jim Whitecalf. Adolf is a far more exotic character (a white man who married an Indian and lives in the old Indian way) but in my opinion he’s telling the truth. Yet “Piegan” is the book that won the prizes and Adolf is the one constantly accused of being a pretender.

To complexify the issue even more, Jim Welch’s early books about a young man on the Fort Belknap reservation, “Winter in the Blood” and “The Death of Jim Loney,” are true-to-life stories with touches of magic realism that are consistently taken to be autobiographical, which they are not. So far as I know, Jim never wrote an autobiography, though his cousin Sidner Larson did. (“Catch Colt,” published by the U of Nebraska Press.) Jim is “gone-on-ahead;” Sid is still a living college professor in Iowa. How is anyone who doesn’t live here supposed to figure all this out?

It appears to me that as readers we have two courses of action, neither of which we will probably take: a gnostic tolerance for good stories, regardless of whether they can be factually verified; or a Dragnet insistence on “just the facts” verified by documents, interviews, and certifying bodies. I suspect that what we really prefer is to muddle along, guessing, playing hide-and-go-seek. As Richard Little Dog used to say when we asked him if something were true, “Could be.”

People were once very curious about what was on the back of the moon and proposed cities, strange beings, evidence of mystic doings. When the satellites finally managed to get back there and take a look, the mysterious back looked pretty much like the well-known front. A disappointment. Or was it a relief?

MYSTERIOUS SKIN: A Review

Roger Larson: What I Know Now - A beautiful novel intended for young adults which also qualifies as one of the best books this old adult has read. It has warmth, wit, wholesome eroticism, and a way of teaching us how to lovingly guide children through their pain and toward freedom. A fine book and a fine writer. I couldn't put it down ... and I'm off to buy copies to share with the children, adults, and libraries in my life. A boy falling in love with a man anyone would fall in love with. A man who can nurture and guide a boy, with love, and safety, and the boy's emotional well-being always primary. (This review is from a website called "Review Centre.")

When I was an animal control officer in Portland, Roger Larson was the foreman of Laurelhurst Park. When I joined the First Unitarian Church, he was the father of a young girl and seemed to be happily married. In a few years he surfaced again as the “out of the closet” author of “What I Know Now.” I agree with the reviewer quoted above. When I preached for a new Unitarian congregation that rented a graceful old neighborhood building from the Metropolitan Community Church, there was Roger again with his partner Andy. With beards and tummies, they were “teddy bear gays,” avuncular, protective, non-threatening. They had succeeded in being gay without accepting the outside-society, wicked, dangerous image that attracts some men whom I suspect are not so much gay as craving or justifying rejection.

“Mysterious Skin” is a movie that I would very much like to discuss with Roger and Andy. (http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0370986/ I rented the DVD from Netflix.) It is the story of two boys who were molested in childhood -- yes, by the coach -- and their very different reactions. The movie follows the consequences into their young adulthood, when they find each other and have at least that comfort. One doesn’t know whether this will amount to the first steps towards recovery. Nor does one really know whether the two boys are gay. Nor does the movie necessarily suggest that if they are gay it is the consequence of abuse.

Nothing in the movie is explicit -- actual contact is always just outside the camera frame. There are two characters who accept and try to protect both boys. They are classmate “phreaks” or punks (I don’t have the terms technically correct)-- pierced, painted, chained, and with extraordinary hair. They have set themselves outside society and yet in contact with it enough to have jobs and cope with life. They are like “shamans” who have been to the land of the dead, survived, and now qualify as guides. (How about a movie explaining how they got to this place?) Both the boy and girl punks relate earliest to Neil, the older, more charismatic and defiant of the boys, whose response to the coach is positive -- in fact, he chooses hustling as a lifestyle. His mother has done something similar, except that she doesn’t ask for money -- she’s simply promiscuous. A boy hustler, however, can ask for a lot of money and Neil is prosperous.

Brian, who was very young at the time of his abuse, interprets the whole thing as a visitation from a flying saucer. In fact, he finds a girl who also proposes this to be a persuasive explanation of something she represses. Not hard to figure out what or by whom. But she only frightens Brian.

This is far from being a defense of abuse. Even Neil, who thinks he can handle anything, gets pushed way out on the edge where he is nearly killed. In the end he seems to understand that there’s something to worry about after all. Not the loss of innocence -- we don’t value innocence much in our culture except that we are always interested in how it is lost. But that he’s out of control, at the mercy of some very strange men. At least one has overt AIDS, another is full of homicidal rage. Yet the coach is movie-star handsome and attractive in a “het” way. Hard to give him up.

This is a nearly schematicly plotted movie, drawn from a book which I haven’t read. I don’t even know where the title comes from, though I’ve always told kids (appalling my principals when they found out by accident) that humans' two most important sexual organs are their skin and their brain. Neil has a childish drifting mother (no sign of any father) and Brian has a law enforcement controlling mother and a runaway father. Maybe because of this, in the right sort of context it’s excellent for discussion .

DVD’s are great for their extras and this one is no exception. Quite simply, since the book starts with a chapter about Brian and then a chapter about Neil, the actors read “their” chapters from the book in someone’s back yard with airplanes overhead and traffic going by. They are just themselves, not the characters, and we suddenly see two ordinary kids -- not very polished readers -- stumbling along in front of a single unblinking camera. They are entirely lovable, nonthreatening, even run-of-the-mill. We realize that they were ACTING, which helps pull us back to ordinary life.

The child actors who play these two characters as small children are not present and evidently were shielded from what it was they were portraying. But I wonder about the wisdom of always shielding kids from everything. Just enough scrappy and “hot” information gets through to them to make them curious and therefore vulnerable. Most of all, like all kids, they think everything is all about them in the sense that if things go wrong, it’s their fault. This is not helpful. They might not have parrot-colored and jingling punk friends to explain what it all means. Anyway, it seems to me that Neil was exceptionally lucky to have attracted these two. They may be more an author’s need for dialogue partners than realistic portrayals of who’s out there.

Is it so impossible for a sympathetic and sensible mom or dad or uncle or aunt to give a little advice to a kid as flaunting as Neil or as suppressed as Brian? Maybe it IS too risky for an adult, since the public most often suspects that the helper is really another molester. Certainly school authorities were always terrified when I identified a student I thought could use some help. We are so ambivalent about the idea that the truth shall set us free. Or do we just reject the truth?

DESERT RATS by Martin Murie

Kids learn how they ought to “be” from watching the kids around them, but if they live in a big city or are fairly isolated, esp. from kids that are not like themselves, what can they do? Even TV kids seem to be come from a can -- at least in sit coms. But there are always books. So I learned a great deal about how to “be” from Anne of Green Gables, though I also dipped into Penrod and Sam and found Two Little Savages to be very helpful. For a while I tried to emulate Dick and Jane, but they were far too boring. My aunt as a child was so intense about Rebecca of Sunnybrook Farm that she earned the nickname “Becky.”

“Desert Rats” by Martin Murie is not quite on so grand a scale -- more like the small stories of Beatrix Potter -- though the characters in Murie’s book are not animals. (I could argue that neither are Potter’s characters though they LOOK like animals.) “Desert Rats” is a small book -- easy to hold -- with a vivid torn paper cover that simulates desert landscape (NOT flat, but buttes, ridges and arroyos). The insides are likewise modest but vivid. Simply, a little cluster of kids begin to explore the desert near their homes. They see intriguing things, a few dangerous things (and since they use common sense, no one is hurt), and a remarkable character named Sunny. Thickly throughout the books are charming pencil drawings by Martin.

This is a kind of chapbook, simple enough for a child to emulate while developing their own sense of recorded exploration, but also rather sophisticated. Besides using big words -- big enough that it might be a good idea for an adult to read the book out loud several times before a younger child tackles it alone -- the story doesn’t stoop to patronizing the reader. Plenty of what seems simple has enough subtext to keep an adult reflecting for a while.

What I especially like about self-publishing is the freedom to do things one’s own way. This book could have been rejected by publishers for a dozen different reasons. There seems to be little interest in editing as seeking to understand the author’s goal and supporting or even developing it further. Instead the whole goal is to produce something that conforms to what sold “last time.”

What came to mind when I reflected on this book was one of my favorite childhood picture books, maybe one that Martin also remembers. It was very simple: pencil drawings about a batch of coyote pups that were found by Indians of the SW sort. I “read” it for long periods of time, going back to the library to check it out yet again. It created a mood, a sympathy, an understanding, that stuck with me -- is still with me in my attitudes and willingness to reach out to animals. I don’t remember any lecturing or angst about it -- just a kind of harmony. I wish I could find it again.

Normally I write a blog of at least 1,000 words, but I think I’ll let this stand at about half that -- a small review for a small book.

SEARCHING FOR FRENCHIE

The Westlit listserv -- a “bulletin board” for academics who study Western literature at the college level -- burst briefly into flames of a mild sort over whether “The Searchers” was worth writing about. Clearly it IS. HAS been. My personal notion, however, is that so MUCH has been written about “The Searchers” and then written about the writing about “The Searchers” -- both why Native Americans feel it is racist and why others feel it is NOT (because John Wayne makes a conversion) -- that it might be worth moving on. This is a 1956 movie probably reflecting concern about Korean wives (war, even Indian war, always means women from the other side get pulled into American lives or vice versa). Both IMDb and Wikipedia have excellent and lengthy discussions of “The Searchers” which has risen up and up the list of “best all time movies” until the actual subject matter -- that “Ethan” intends to kill his niece because she has gone Indian -- gets lost.

If one were making a movie with the shock value of “The Searchers” today, it would probably have to be a story about a Middle Eastern girl killed by a member of her tribal family because of having been seen in public talking to an American soldier. It’s a “blame-the-victim” story with titillating erotic overtones. I would leave in the part about Ethan also having a “forbidden” love: his brother’s wife -- and not unrequited, either, just unspoken and unconsummated. Today probably a feminist approach would “fly” better than the racist angle. We’re obsessively opposed to genocide, though we don’t do much about it. We NEVER try to justify it. Probably other changes would have to be made to a plot line over fifty years old. Society has changed.

What is mostly praised is the fabulous scenery (therhttp://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gife must be something equivalent in Afghanistan or Iraq!) and the complexity of character in the others. I don’t remember whether this was before or after Jeffrey Hunter played Jesus.
http://www.blogger.com/img/gl.link.gif
Links:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/The_Searchers_(film)

In the course of trying to make light of the surprisingly strong feelings about “The Searchers”, I brought up “Frenchie.” “Searchers” has page after page of comment, but Frenchie has this lone comment:

"Frenchie" (1950) is based loosely on the western classic "Destry Rides Again" only this time featuring a woman as the heroine. In her prime the shapely and gorgeous Shelley Winters as Frenchie Fontaine returns to her town and opens a saloon as a front to avenge her father’s murder. Besides the usual gun play there is an old fashioned saloon fight when Frenchie tangles with another woman which is a hoot. Rounding out the cast of this technicolor co-feature are Joel McCrea, John Russell, Paul Kelly, Elsa Lanchester, John Emery and the ever dependable Marie Windsor.

I saw this movie when it was released. I was eleven and thought it was great fun. Sort of a precursor to the John Ford/John Wayne “The Quiet Man,” which featured a spunky Irish woman (Maureen O’Hara), Frenchie was a spunky French woman who didn’t wait around for a man to provide her revenge. I can’t remember the rest of the movie very well, but the famous “cat fight” was lots of fun and our family joked about it for years. It was a “Taming of the Shrew” sort of scene. It’s a bit puzzling that Frenchie hasn’t attracted the attention of a feminist academic who wants to look at role reversals and independent frontier women.

Also, I’ve never seen writing about Ford or other directors (or the screen writers who supplied them with yarns) about the use of national stereotypes: the amorous French, the drunken Irish, the thick Norwegian, etc. In the Fifties these folks were around and still discernibly immigrants, but not quite in the way of today’s perceptibly “different” (i.e. darker) immigrants. There were Mexican spitfires like Katy Jurado then, but it would be hard to get away with that now. And Indian maidens were likely to be simply brunette white girls. The broad comedy of the Fifties Westerns depended on drunkenness, blunders, and offenses -- but they weren’t seen as politically incorrect.

Given all that, when whites write about Indians they almost always write apologetics. Not “apologies” but “apologetics” in the sense that Christian “apologists” explain Christianity: a formal argument explaining the circumstances and defending the beliefs. This makes many Indians go cross-eyed with frustration. They see that “Ethan” softens and changes, etc., but to them that doesn’t excuse his early attitude and they don’t like such an anti-hero made into an ideal. Political Indians don’t care how beautiful the scenery, how influential the camera placements and pacing, or what Spielberg says about the movie: they want the focus to remain on the atrocity of the blame-the-victim attitude that demands the death of a woman “sullied” by her relationship with an Indian. So the two positions are irreconcilable because they are referring to two different things.

I suspect that was also what was happening on the listserv. I was talking about the real and authentic feelings of Indians I know. (Actually, what I said was that when I showed “The Searchers” in a classroom of young Indians, they couldn’t understand what the fuss was about. They never really grasped that Ethan intended to kill his niece. Miscegenation was an unknown concept to them.) Other people were talking high lit theory that I can’t understand (I'm approaching 70 and it wasn't taught in my day) and that I feel (from the outside) reduces people to chess pieces, markers for ideas. It was as though two gunslingers paced off the distance between them, but never turned around to face each other -- instead, each fired at a horizon the other couldn’t see.

ADVENTURES IN SHIPPING LAND

Last week I spattered a bit of coffee into my keyboard, rendering the entire bottom line of letters inoperable, along with the space bar and a few other vital functions: the period, the comma, the question mark. For a while it was kind of fun to substitute ^ for N and ^^ for M and 6 for b, but then people began to send me replies saying, “Hey, I can wait for you to get a new keyboard!” At first it was funny, but not if you really wanted to know what I was saying.

Locally there are no MAC products, not even in Great Falls. (I haven’t tried Lethbridge.) When you ask the computer people, they draw themselves up and say, “MAC’s are not REAL computers.” (Wait till I can afford one of those little green Third World “kid” computers!) So I went back to trusty old Mac Mall, where the only difficulty was that the person taking the order was unintelligible until I finally managed to twist my head into “Mexico-speak” by pretending I was in an old Western, talking to Katy Jurado. She said, “Two beezeenees days,” meaning Tuesday delivery, but I had a hunch that the weekend airplanes kept flying and indeed, the Fed Ex man was just here.

I didn’t really expect him today because I saw a Fed Ex truck this morning and it’s 3:30 PM now -- there wouldn’t be enough deliveries for the truck to still be in town. But the delivery man who came just now was in a much bigger truck and said the little truck in the morning did ground deliveries but HE does AIR deliveries. (The truck doesn’t have wings.) Both trucks come out of Great Falls, but the air division is based in Memphis. The drivers don’t even know each other. They are not “really” the same company, sort of like the faux Starbucks in Barnes & Noble.

So I took the occasion to ask about DHL, which is how my shipment of books came from Calgary -- at least they took the books as far as Billings and then mailed the box. Somewhere along the way the end of the box was torn off and two books were lost. Fed Ex says this company was American Airborne or something like that, which was then bought out by a German air company -- it’s very big Back East but has little presence in the West. DHL must stand for something in German. Deutsche-something.

Anyway, speaking of Barnes & Noble (which we weren't) I’ve continued to try to puzzle out why you can’t buy a copy of “Bronze Inside and Out” off the shelves of Barnes and Noble, but you CAN buy a copy from their website. In fact, their website seems to be somehow attached to the Amazon website -- same info, same updates, etc. I begin to suspect that they are one company pretending to be two for the sake of name recognition, but the physical stores and the online store are TWO different companies pretending to be one. I strongly suspect that a little well-placed payola would make “Bronze Inside and Out” suddenly appear on bookshelves throughout the Barnes & Noble shelf franchise, but how does one know to whom to pay the money? And which one is it that claims that there is no way to order Canadian books, not even through the Michigan State University American distributor?

Anyway, I’m back on the keyboard again and whether that’s a good thing depends upon who you are!

I was surprised by some of the problems. I could do anything the mouse would do, so I ended up sending some messages that looked like ransom notes with words cut out of magazines. But my passwords contained letters and elements from the bottom line, so I couldn’t get into my bank account, for instance, or post comments on some blogs where you have to prove you’re not a machine by imitating wobbly letters. There were some websites I had never bookmarked because they were simple to spell, like imdb.com.

One of the major advantages was that I was in the midst of arguments on a couple of listservs and not having a keyboard made me stop and think for a few days. Always a good thing. I thought of going to the library and using their computer, or down the street to Jack’s art gallery where he has a setup for tourists to use, but I still wouldn’t have been able to access listservs. Also, I get quite shocking spam and wouldn’t want to wish that on the library. And it was a good excuse to phone up relatives, some of whom were raised when phone calls were considered a luxury or emergency expense.

Another advantage is that the keyboard is a discrete part to itself, so it could be swapped out -- it's not integrated into the machine as it would be with a laptop. My new house rules (no coffee, toast or cats at the keyboard) would almost eliminate the advantages of a laptop! No more composing in Starbucks! (As if I ever did.)

One of the more shocking bits of techie advice that I got was to run the old keyboard through a modern dishwashing machine with a dry cycle. I don’t have such a machine -- my idea of high tech is a “boughten” dishcloth instead of an old piece of T-shirt. Others told me they’d successfully recovered keyboards by sloshing them in distilled water and airdrying them! Won’t work on wireless, they say. The techie said to throw in the mouse as well, since it has a wire tail. Certainly counter-intuitive given that the problem was liquid in the first place!

But I’d worn all the letters off the keys and there was really QUITE a bit of cat hair, toast crumb, etc. in there, so maybe it was just “time.”

TAXIDERMISTS, SAINTS, MASSACRE, WOLVES...

Given the surprising comment I got on my review of “Effigy,” which had seemed to be about a unique confluence of subjects -- the Mountain Meadow massacres and taxidermy -- but is evidently not that unique, according to Kathleen Matheson Weber, I’ve been thinking about story “concepts.” Certainly they run in clusters in Hollywood where people talk plot lines when they “do lunch.” Maybe there’s something in the news or a general mood of something like apocalypse that stirs up story ideas so there's a little flurry of competing movies. Personally, I don’t mind the same concept being used by different writers since each is bound to develop it in a unique and interesting way -- assuming they are GOOD writers! A concept does not a story make.

I always have too many “concepts.” Today I read Terrierman’s post and could immediately see what a good plot line was embedded in this off-beat “sport” wherein people use a terrier to chase a pesky animal down a hole and then dig them back up -- both terrier and quarry. The best stories have three corners, like the “games alcoholics play” which always involve a miscreant, a savior, and a persecutor, the point of the game being that the three participants change roles but never the underlying three-hand structure because that ends the game.

So: a small terrier-like woman chases some varmint into the “underground” (an exhibitionist, a drug peddler, a thief?) and a man tries to save her, but his wife objects. Or his buddy, who doesn’t approve of rescuing troublesome women when there are so many others around who are less trouble.

Or what if the varmint is a child, a miserable little wart left over from a previous marriage and the genetic parent wants to get rid of him, but the step parent takes the role of the terrier, going “down the hole” to try to understand and to save the child.

Or maybe the varmint is a feral illegal immigrant, adult or child or male or female, and he/she has a terrible disease -- maybe AIDS or TB or both -- and the authorities want to stuff he/she down some institutional hole so it is the “hero” who tries to prevent this, maybe with the help of a real Jack Russell terrier who leads cops and social workers down the wrong labyrinths of flop house hallways and sordid back alleys.

My own method when starting a story is to try to determine these patterns beforehand. Other people start with the characters and then try to imagine what happens to them in certain environments. I’m afraid I tend to have a “moral” in mind -- a point about an injustice or a prescription for what ought to happen. But often the moral is that life is ambiguous and it’s hard to know what’s actually right or wrong. And surprises often happen on the way to the supposed goal. That’s always a lot of fun in a plot.

Richard Stern used to go research some exotic field of endeavor, because so many people really enjoy learning all about -- well, maybe taxidermy, though “Effigy” won’t teach you much about anything contemporary since the methods are so old-fashioned. New-fangled wouldn’t have worked: “arsenic” is a metaphor for strychnine in the story, but the modern borax-based methods wouldn’t work since borax is not poisonous except to insects. (Works on all ants but the ones in my house.) But I suppose one could design a story in which a woman kills the cockroaches in her dump of an apartment, thus becoming like a wolf-hunter using strychnine. It’s better to work from one’s own expertise, like Melville telling about whaling, but it’s also a lot of fun and stirs up ideas to study stamp-collecting or the making of silicon chips.

A new setting might also be a good idea, but I find that editors and readers have stubborn ideas about some places -- like Indian reservations or animal control locker rooms -- and simply will NOT accept reality. A little tricky to persuade them. Strangely, there is a kind of person (quite a few individuals, judging from sales) who love to read about near-unsurvivable settings and incidents: massacres, bombings, mass murder. Are they trying to understand how to survive them -- getting braced the future? Or it is a kind of voyeurism? What attracts the writer and how could anyone possibly KNOW what it’s like unless they were there. Thus the fufaraw over memoir.

Readers and so on -- should I say “consumers”? -- also differ in their appetite for analysis. Some just want the plain facts, baldly put, and let be. Others enjoy the process of speculating on a verbal exchange or a glimpsed juxtaposition over and over, trying to turn up different sides, possible alternatives, relationships to other events, possible causes. I’m reading “Monsieur” by Laurence Durrell (remember that I alternate the two Durrell’s for my throne room meditations) in which he presents a constant stream of possibilities: his main character who is a writer is developing a book about a writer named THIS and his character is like THAT; no, actually, the writer in the writer’s story is not at all that way. He’s called THAT and is like THIS. Then there will be a paragraph or two of exquisitely written description about nothing much: sitting in a cafe drinking, usually. And then maybe a quick observation about human nature or perception per se. A person can have limited tolerance for this and since it doesn’t matter a whole lot to keep track of a narrative through-line, it’s good for episodic reading. On the other hand, what Durrell is really working on is gnostic (supernatural and deceptive) philosophy for those who have enough background to find their way. A much less desultory reading would be necessary to do this.

Since I’m wandering around, I’ll confide to you that I had a hard time keeping all the biographical sketches in “Bronze I&O” from being just a jumble. Ironically -- and I think happily -- I’m discovering that the readers are “hypercarding” (linking) their way through the book, reading episodes in their own invented order because of their own relationship to Bob Scriver or myself or Browning or cowboy art. No two people seem to be reading the same book, which is always the case anyway.

Given that, I wonder what a book I wrote would be like if I used the premise of a man with multiple wives, one of whom does taxidermy, and involves Indians and wolves. Maybe I’d throw in a fox and a fox terrier. How many times in my life have I been saved by the idea that dangerous as the actual living moment might be, it was great research for a book?

GIMME A T! A GREAT BIG T!!

If the research is valid, testosterone levels in Browning should be elevated today: they won the District boys’ basketball tournament yesterday. Success makes T go up, failure makes it go down, even in the onlookers, BOTH genders. It’s only a molecule, but it sure seems wired to the human (esp. male) identity and psyche.

Yellowstone Public Radio used to play the opera on Saturday, which I’ve been used to listening to since I was a high school kid in Portland eons ago, but now they’ve begun playing “This American Life” at lunchtime. I hear it by accident. Yesterday the show was on testosterone. You can play it at home or order a CD at this url: http://www.thislife.org/Radio_Episode.aspx?episode=220

220: Testosterone

Stories of people getting more testosterone and coming to regret it. And of people losing it and coming to appreciate life without it. The pros and cons of the hormone of desire.

Prologue.

This American Life producer Alex Blumberg explains that he wanted to do this show because of his conflicted relationship with his own testosterone. He tells host Ira Glass that the reasons go back to a girl in his eighth-grade homeroom and the 1970s seminal feminist novel The Women's Room. We also hear from a man who stopped producing testosterone due to a medical treatment and found that his entire personality was altered. (9 minutes)

Act One. Life at Zero.

The interview with a man who lost his testosterone continues. He explains that life without testosterone is life without desire—desire for everything: food, conversation, even TV. And he says life without desire is unexpectedly pleasant. The man first wrote about his experiences, anonymously, in GQ Magazine. (7 minutes)

Act Two. Infinite Gent.

An interview with Griffin Hansbury, who started life as a woman, but began taking massive testosterone injections seven years ago, and now lives as a man. He explains how testosterone changed his views on nature vs. nurture for good. (17 minutes)

Song: "To Sir With Love," Lulu


Act Three. Contest-osterone.

The men and women on staff at This American Life decide to get their testosterone levels tested, to see who has the most and least, and to see if personality traits actually do match up with hormone levels. It turns out to be an exercise that in retrospect, we might not recommend to other close-knit groups of friends or co-workers. (12 minutes)

Song: "What Kind of Man Are You?," Ray Charles


Act Four. Learning to Shut Up.

Novelist Miriam Toews, author of The X Letters (which appeared in an earlier episode of the show), tells the story of a recent road trip she took with her fifteen-year-old son. (11 minutes)

Song: "That's Alright, Mama," Elvis Presley


These programs are always narcissistic, wry, inconclusive, halting, earnest, and ultimately hard to resist. I personally am always fascinated by issues of identity: how much is “us” and how much is our bodies doing their own thing, or the context in which we exist? How much can we change without losing our identity? And, of course, the puzzle of bisexuality -- whether coexistent or sequential -- goes all the way back to Teiresias. I’m told I’m high testosterone, but they don’t say that. They say “high androgen,” which I suppose they think sounds better since there are a lot of jokes about testosterone and it’s a kind of symbol for a sort of brutal, loathsome, overpowering man, a victim of testosterone poisoning.

My attention is drawn to testosterone because of hereditary male pattern baldness accompanied by a fuzzy chin. I’ve only actually taken hormones once, while I was teaching in Heart Butte between 1989 and 1991. The gynie gave me a rather large-dose sequence to definitively end a dawdling menopause. First I took estrogen, which made me feel like an old broody hen, a purring sleepy cat. Then I took progesterone which made me into a screaming monster. I never renewed the prescription or went back to the doctor. Forget psycho-active. Think psycho.

The people on this radio show either lost all T out of their system for medical reasons or had major doses in order to flip their gender. They were caught by surprise when their personalities also changed, evem when they were so stereotypically altered -- or close to that. But it was coming up against the cultural assumptions about T that made more trouble. Not only does T make a person competitive, but people are competitive ABOUT who has more T!

And there were puzzlers: the most high-T person on the staff for this show was a woman called Julie. Everyone agreed that she was likely to be the “winner” because she was so focused, driven, aggressive, passionate. And she did score highest among the women -- but she was seven months pregnant at the time! So what did THAT mean? She’s even good at fertility? Doesn’t that mean she ought to be more high estrogen? They didn’t measure E, so we don’t know. She wondered what it was doing to the baby and there are studies about that. The GUY who had the most T, twice as much as any of the other guys, was a total surprise. He was gay, Jewish and -- good grief! -- CANADIAN!! Aren’t they supposed to be laid-back pacifists? How is it that a high T guy is gay? Aren’t gays all girly-men?

The woman who took so much T in order to become a man said the biggest surprise to her was the enormous waves of erotic hits she got off even machinery. She said the xerox machine turned her on with its warm rhythmic throbbing. She started to stare at women’s bottoms and fronts in the way she’d always considered despicable when men did it. Well, it was an adolescence, wasn’t it?

The man who lost all testosterone was more surprising. He described a kind of detachment, a meditative state where he was happy to just sit and stare, a kind of lack of passion or judgment in which everything seemed to him indiscriminately “beautiful.” Since much of his personality was built on desire for goals, on liveliness, humor and choices, he wasn’t himself. He said his voice even changed.

Maybe it’s a little surprising that an alteration in T levels is not prescribed by doctors more. Maybe it’s because it’s hard to know whether T should be reduced, to cool a man down a bit, or increased to get him out of that recliner in front of the TV. And what woman would be willing to go to the doctor for T shots unless she were into gender change? Still, it would be nice to know what one’s levels really ARE, at least most of the time, since the level goes up and down.

REBOOTING GOVERNMENT

When I was in high school and an aspiring balletomane (more suitable to my physique than being an aspiring ballerina) I went to the public library downtown and discovered that most of the best stuff was in French. So I sat there under the MacNeil bronze of a faun, and puzzled through the sentences, remembering how I’d learned to read English. But, alas, I couldn’t SPEAK French as I had spoken English, so the magic never happened. There are two blogs that I read in something like the same way, though I do manage to pick up nuggets now and then. Both are written by extraordinarily intelligent and intense younger men and then heavily annotated by their community. One is “Gene Expresssion” at www.gnxp.com, about genetics, and the other is “Unqualified Reservations” at http://unqualified-reservations.blogspot.com/ about politics.

I spent nearly an hour last night wrestling with Mencius Moldbug’s ideas on “Unqualified Reservations,” trying to make my limited ability to reason and my even more limited background in history come to life as understanding. Here’s the main thing I got, a realization that made me laugh out loud. The first thing you need to grasp is that “Specifically: demotism is inseparable from the Whig theory of history, in which history is the story of political forms evolving, Great Chain of Being style, toward our present perfection.” I got that: onward and upward ever, progress is our true religion, we’re the best. (Hold up forefinger to signal “number one.”) Evolution wins: since we survived, we must be the fittest.

Then he begins his deconstruction: “Briefly, hominids exhibit what might be called a default pattern of government. In the default pattern, the basic unit of government is the tribe, which controls a well-defined territory and defends it from other tribes. The tribe has a chief, generally male, whose decisions are final. He maintains power by using it to reward his friends, relations, henchmen, lackeys, etc.” Tell me about it! I’ve spent a LOT of time on the reservation, not that it’s any different from Valier except that our current “chief” is female and her decisions are rarely final.

“Hominids are very flexible and intelligent animals. They can exist in a wide variety of cultural configurations, with all kinds of weird power dynamics. The default pattern (which we see even in chimpanzees) is not inevitable.” This is very good news. (And he resists dragging bonobos into it -- everyone loves bonobos. Well, not Puritans.)

“But it gives us a concise definition of government. A government is either (a) the default pattern, or (b) whatever organization militarily suppresses the default pattern.” This is very clear in Iraq, Serbia, etc. The rez’s military (the police) is very weak unless a white person is threatened. Valier’s military is informal and omnipresent, since so many kinds of officers live here: deputies, border security, prison guards. But the real reason it’s peaceful enough for officers to want to live here is that it’s small and the most senior generation maintains conservative standards of behavior internalized waaaaay back in Europe and maintained by traditional church congregations. Unfortunately, those sources didn’t emphasize the importance of protecting infrastructure like water and sewer. And they’re aging right out of the picture.

Now you need one of Mencius’ helpful invented terms: Washorg-4. “Since sovorgs [soveriegn organizations] are territorial by definition, we can name them by location. Thus, for example, there is a very important sovorg on the Potomac. We can call it Washorg. Furthermore, while heeding Dean Tucker's wise warning against inquiring too closely into "original title," we can distinguish four discrete revisions of Washorg, separated by breaches of legal continuity - in 1789 (Confederation to Constitution), 1861 (state to national sovereignty), and 1933 (limited to unlimited government). So our present lovely confection is Washorg-4.” He identifies both place and time, which suggests a through-line to the future, thank God or Whomever.

This is where I laughed out loud: “The truth is that no one is in control. In Washorg-4 and its global friends and relations, we are looking at a gigantic, spontaneously evolving, uncontrolled system. The decision-making process we call "democracy" is best seen as part of this system, as are the "voters" whose opinions guide Washorg-4's decisions. Since Washorg-4 is a massarchy, since it guides public opinion as well as being guided by it, it can only be seen as a dynamic feedback loop.” Take that, presidential candidates! Not even Karl Rove is in control! Not even the media!

“If our feedback loop is converging on any attractor, our only way to predict it is to study the dynamics of the loop itself. The assertion that any stage in this loop - mass opinion, the official information organs, or Washorg-4 proper - has any tendency to converge on sanity and good sense is unsubstantiated at best. It could even be described as laughable. The system could be fluctuating randomly and unpredictably, or it could be headed for some stable point that almost everyone in 2008 would consider horrifying and unbearable.”

“This is why I am so keen on finding a way to terminate Washorg-4. It is extremely dangerous and completely out of control. What else do you need to know?” Well, of course, what we need to know is how to design Washorg-5, including whether it should be based on the Potomac anymore at all. What comes AFTER democracy to keep us from endlessly and cyclonically (destructively) circling while people need service and guidance?

Mencius despairs of what can break into the cycle. I have a suggestion, having just watched “The Hanging Gale” which describes the circle as it existed during the time of the potato famine. The movie suggests that emigration is the solution and so they hoped. But all they did was export the whirlwind to the Native Americans. Still, there is a transformative force illustrated here, which is the environment, not just global warming but also global contagion. We need a suprahuman intervention and that is exactly what the planet is doing. (Note: I do not claim that planets are divine, though there are spots on this one that feel that way.)

Government is entangled with economics (not QUITE the same thing) and economics are environmental. If Ireland had not been an acid and peaty saucer -- due to its geology and climate -- that had to be drained to grow aught but potatoes and oats, then the people would not have been so vulnerable to poverty and domination from outside, both by King and by Pope. It was the adoption of drainage that made flax a viable crop and gave rise to the linen industry. It was the freedom from “place” that made cyberindustry possible both in Ireland and India. Education is the equivalent of draining acid soil and of making cyberwork possible. Education lets Mencius think through the problems of government, but Washorg-4 has seriously neglected and bungled education, in my opinion.

What will change everything is that now we live in a global “place” with environmental issues that affect us all and will profoundly change government, perhaps creating one big dystopia or a million small organizations or something in between, maybe elaboration of the complicated overlapping bodies we have now: rezorg-3 or Valorg-2, alongside water-district-1 and fish-and-game-8. The environment always has the last word.

But I’m still giggling over the mental picture of Washorg-4 back there frantically throwing levers and pushing buttons, wondering why nothing works, never pausing to really analyze the feedback loops created by an overrich upper class, an underculture of poor people, a black market of drugs and immigration, an undereducated work force, and a media both commodified and sold to the highest bidder. A simple reboot will not do the job.

EFFIGY by Alissa York

“Effigy” is by Canadian author Alissa York. The novel is about a well-known atrocity in the American Southwest, the Mountain Meadows Massacre. It won’t get Mitt Romney any votes, nor are you likely to be told the story by a faithful Mormon. Briefly, the incident involves Indians and Mormons disguised as Indians attacking an emigrant wagon trail, murdering all but the small children, and looting the belongings. But this is not a history story (that’s been done): rather it is a reflection, a flight of fancy, and an occasion for poetic language describing intense scenes. The central character is a little girl who is rescued (though the rescue is not a particularly benign one in such a harsh world) and who grows up to be a taxidermist, thus producing the “effigies” of the title.

York’s reference bibliography is almost entirely American, though she started from an account of a B.C. Mormon community. She repeatedly draws on an old-fashioned guide to taxidermy methods. (These methods are no longer used and she occasionally skips a few steps, like tanning.) The only admirable full-grown male is not the Pater Familias who takes her as his fourth wife so she can “resurrect” his kills, but rather the Alpha wolf of a small family Dorrie is supposed to mount. He has survived but the female and cubs have become a blood sacrifice among many others.

The second epigram -- about effigies -- is from Sylvia Plath: “How I would like to believe in tenderness--/ the face of the effigy, gentled by candles,/Bending, on me in particular, its mild eyes.” “Bending” becomes “Bendy,” a contortionist and horse whisperer whose arrival sets the domestic plot in motion long after the massacre and who finally gives Dorrie her tenderness.

It is said that there are two kinds of literature these days: those that rely on plot and those that are an occasion for extraordinary language. This is clearly the latter. If you go to York’s website, www.elissayork.com, you’ll find examples. She works in an imagistic way, free-associating, relying on fine-grained senses to bring the bizaare alive. I have never before read a description of how to “mount” a silkworm. (The second wife of this man raises silk worms.) Sometimes she misses: a wolf’s nose is not “mushy” but leathery, just like a dog’s nose.

The 37-year-old author, who was born in Athabasca, Alberta, has lived all over Canada. From her home in Toronto, where she moved from Winnipeg two years ago, York says her goal is to provoke strong emotional reactions in her readers. "I want people to really feel a lot. It's not my goal to just make people think. I want them to think, but I want them, more than anything, to feel." (from a review in the Calgary Herald)

Critics compare her prose to Cormac McCarthy’s: there she is, writing about historic atrocities south of the border, weaving her suffering, barely surviving characters through events, using language that is old-fashioned, poetic, dripping with blood. The story is woven in sections as it follows different characters. There are four wives: the matriarch who was devoted to Brigham Young; the English girl who knows one thing, to raise silk; the stage discard who is proficient at erotics, right down to using an effective abortifacient so she’s never out of action; and the massacre survivor taxidermist who relates the massacre with a dreaming crow’s eye view. A Paiute Indian lends his skills to the Patriarch, Erastus Hammer, who is so near-sighted that the Indian, “Tracker,” must do his shooting for him, maintaining the fiction that Hammer is a crack shot. Hammer’s son, Lal, is stupid, unlike his conniving father.

The inevitable rebellion comes about when Lal begins to sleep with the former actress while yearning for the silk-maker. At the same time Tracker forms an alliance with the wolf. “Bendy” gentles the taxidermy wife, whose adopted mother provides the actual history in letters written as she dies. A person could get symbolic meanings out of all this, but as York herself says, no two people ever see it the same way. The story is dense, doubling back, moving slowly, recovering personal histories, sketching vignettes. But it rewards meditation, not just about religiously empowered imitations of Jehovah, but also about the relationships among women and the lives of animals. It is the CONTEXT of the powerful men that we don’t usually get in Westerns.

The formal “myth” of the West is that it was as empty a space as the moon, that heroic men came and built homes where they sheltered families, the beginning of patriotism and culture. In York’s version the anti-heroes come to a pre-existing land where they take what they want from the indigenous, the weak, the female, and the unwary newcomers. Hammer’s horse business is based on the animals he acquired at the massacre, and his business goes downhill because he does not take proper care of the animals. His first wife runs the dairy and the children; the second wife produces the silk and the pregnancies; the third wife entertains him in her fanciful and sterile way; the fourth wife is a resurrection artist who only produces simulacra of animals he needs Tracker to shoot. He is a contemptible and phony creature.

Not that York makes a big fuss about pointing it out. She assumes we can see for ourselves. Her task is to present evidence as vividly and in as much researched detail as she can. Her gift is the language that makes this possible as well as endurable. It’s interesting to speculate on what Wallace Stegner would think of this book -- I suspect he would dislike the writing but admire the writer, though she doesn’t seem so ladylike. I wonder what Stegner thought of Zane Grey -- whom I speculate would love both York's writing and York. Of course, each man loved the West.

SEND THEM PACKING!

Today I received a box of copies of “Bronze Inside and Out” which I can sign and sell to those who want personalized signed copies. I need forty bucks up front plus five more if I must mail the book. (I know some people are close enough to swing by the house.)

BUT the box was sent by a new competitor to UPS, called DHL. They have no delivery system in Montana -- they just take it all to Billings and mail it. It arrived with the box broken open, no bill of lading to tell me how many copies should be inside, no insurance, no addressee, and no post office box number. The post office is not supposed to deliver packages with no post office box number in towns where people get the mail at the post office rather than through home delivery, but the postmaster is on my side. He figured it out though it was marked “return to sender.” Just the same, he tells me that this practice of using the post office to deliver packages is one of the reasons the post office is losing money.

All this makes me think about the days at Scriver Studio when we were shipping and worrying about packing some very strange objects: like a moose head. Bob’s theory was that if the crate looked fragile, most people would be careful, but that if it looked armored and fortified, the handlers would feel free to throw and drop it, stand on it, and spill water on it. So we built strong but open-sided crates with heavy-gauge plastic sheeting around the actual head. I drove them down to Great Falls, steering right around behind the airport to the loading dock and then spending a LOT of time filling out papers. At the studio we had our own 4-copy recording system to create a bill of lading that showed contents, value, insurance info, times and dates, cost of shipping, and other details that I don’t remember anymore. We never had problems.

The sculpture was trickier, esp. in the days of shipping Hydrocal™ castings which were as fragile as china. Once I ran across a letter from Jeanette, Bob’s second wife, after she was living in LA, giving him detailed advice about how to pack them. Basically, they were immobilized in puffed rice. Popcorn was too oily. We’d clean out the supply of puffed rice in every small town nearby. Sometimes the castings were suspended in a web of string, but the string tended to stretch, allowing the figure to bump on the sides of the crate. And we packed in Zonolite, inhaling asbestos all unawares, and it was dusty stuff. On our end we had a constant supply of compressed air, piped through the building from a compressor out in the foundry that held the air in what Jeanette claimed was “her” propane tank (because she bought it to replace the old oil tank), so that it always smelled of the oniony additive that indicates a propane leak. We never would have detected a real propane leak. But what about the guy faced with all that carcinogenic dust on the other end?

The bronzes were a different problem: they are so heavy and some pieces have so many sharp points that they could destroy packing from the inside. Thin parts, like “blankets” or “flags” could bend. We bought a lot of cheap foam rubber and wrapped them in that with bungee cords. Or later we evolved a system that David Cree Medicine had to teach the Montana Historical Society crew when it came up to truck Bob’s estate to Helena. It was a custom plywood box equipped with rope handles, rather like a coffin, just big enough for the casting. Then the bronze was immobilized from side-to-side movement by adding small wooden “bumpers” screwed to the bottom. The biggest danger to an art bronze is scraping and scratching the patina, so sometimes the bumpers had bits of old inner tube between the bumpers and the bronze. The box had to be kept right-side-up, which is part of the reason for the handles so that lifters wouldn’t try to roll the box.

I’m always interested when I get books from the private booksellers who work through Alibris or Abebooks. Some just use boughten padded envelopes, which have evolved from messy shredded paper to bubble wrap, and almost everyone wraps the books themselves in plain white paper before putting them into the mailer. When I’m doing it, I sometimes repeat the mailing address on that plain white paper so that if the envelope is torn open, the address will still be there. Most people put a business card or a fancy little bookmark in between the pages of the book so it could be at least returned to the sender. Some insure, some do not. Few track unless the book is very valuable. Some have invented their own way of packing with recycled corrugated cardboard and newspaper wrappings, which tend to be inky.

There’s a certain kind of woman who loves to send “care packages.” I am not that sort and rather dread receiving them since they have more to do with the fantasies of the sender than the receiver -- some of whom don’t really know me. So foods I can’t eat, objects I never use, books I would never read, and so on arrive and I must invent tactful ways of responding as well as finding some new receiver victim.

But what I ponder more than anything else when it comes to shipping is what will happen as time goes on and this petroleum-fueled delivery system becomes more and more expensive. Even now I often pay twice as much in shipping as for a book, esp. when I order from Britain. Probably the book problem will be solved by the Espresso machine, which is sort of like “Beam me up, Scottie.” That is, the directions for printing the book are sent via the Internet and the book prints for you while you enjoy your cappucinno. (Everyone seems to assume these machines will be in coffee shops.) But that's if you insist on a paper book instead of an ebook, which means no autograph.

Even then how will anyone get books signed by the author, except by going to the author’s book-signing? Driving to my house takes gas, too! And what if the author can no longer afford the gas to drive to a book-signing? Can I get away with sending a gum-back bookplate that I sign, the way Whisky Prajer does? (His are custom-designed: very nice.) A good entrepreneur might speculate that the value of signed books can only go up.

THE LABYRINTH OF STORIES...

Other people may depend upon conversation or formal reviews to decide on books or movies, but I tend to follow little trails in a way now made possible by www.imdb.com, Amazon and/or Google. This is what I mean: I’d been stalling about watching “Foyle’s War” though it’s listed over and over in the catalogues selling videos from the BBC. Finally, thinking of Michael Kitchen, I ordered the series from Netflix. It’s a quiet, understated sort of series, so in spite of having an aunt from my mother’s side and an uncle from my father’s side actually in WWII in England, I was slow getting engaged in it. After all, it’s not “Cracker,” which is where I started with these BBC serieses.

But the stories and Kitchen caught up with me and then gripped me tight. But I’d run out of episodes. Both Netflix and IMDB let a person search by actor, so I did that, besides going back to rewatch my favorite old MK videos: “Out of Africa,” “The Buccaneers,” and “Reckless.” Great fun and quite a different MK in each one! I can’t remember what else, but by now I’m up to “The Hanging Gale.” Commentors on my blog suggested others.

Along the way I came to “Falling,” billed as MK being a bad man. So I watched and was very much struck by the actress who played the protagonist who “fell.” Since this was based on a book, I checked out Amazon (and the UK bookstores -- very good luck there!) and discovered that the “writer” in the story was a real person, Elizabeth Jane Howard, and that she had indeed “fallen,” not as a “fallen woman” but as a woman who was vulnerable because of being hurt in a fall besides repeatedly “falling” for faulty men. Instead of ordering “Falling,” I ordered her memoir, “Slipstream.”

Elizabeth Jane Howard was at first married to Peter Scott, the son of one of my heroes, the man who died in pursuit of the South Pole. The movie about the explorer Scott was repeatedly shown to my brothers’ boy scout groups, which I was obliged to attend. When I taught at Heart Butte, my bitterest enemy was the principal who had been in the navy and had landed at the South Pole where he raided one of Scott’s supply cairns for souvenirs. He offered to give me a little box of matches from that cairn and could NOT understand why it only increased my bitterness and contempt for him.

As it turned out, Peter Scott was also emotionally blunt and the marriage ended. So did a series of other relationships though EJH’s marriage to Kingsley Amis lasted almost two decades, a marriage which he began totally besotted with her and ended curdled by contempt for her. It didn’t have anything to do with her -- it was just his usual pattern. (It’s a familiar pattern of mine, too. Not about lovers but about authority figures. I always begin full of hope and end seeing rotten betrayal.) Martin Amis, stepson, remained her friend, which tells you something about both Martin and EJH.

When I finished with “Slipstream,” I passed it on to Sue when I was in Calgary last week. She was reading another book from that “set” in that “era” and had to put the first one down briefly to keep from confusing the two stories. I went on to the BBC series called “The Cazalets,” based on the fictionalized books of EJH and her family that she called by that name. “Slipstream” gives the source material that EJH reshaped into “The Cazalets,” which makes it quite interesting for a writer.

EJH was a very beautiful woman with what seemed like advantages of birth and education, though they didn’t seem somehow effective. Maybe it was a lack of early nurturing that undermined her confidence. (I’d vote for that answer.) Maybe it was just the bad luck of being born into turbulent times on the brink of war. In “The Cazalets” she is scattered out into a number of characters in several generations. She is the young girl who wishes to act (and did), as well as the young girl who wishes to write (and did), and the beautiful woman who tolerates an unfaithful man while both are married to someone else. Bits of her own history crop up in everyone’s stories.

This is the same time period but not the same social class as “Foyle’s War” and the most obvious difference is double: Foyle is an absolute model of rock-ribbed rectitude and honor. “The Cazalets” appear to be morally hopeless, except for Jacqueline Tong’s character: evidently the parlor maid, Daisy, from “Upstairs/Downstairs” who has now taken on Mrs. Bridges’ role as cook and is the same sort of generous and devoted soul. The Cazalets are full of deceit, seize the moment, and think of no one but themselves -- no rules seem to apply to most of them. (As one reviewer wrote, “Hudson would NOT approve!”) But they are rarely happy.

The other difference is the material culture, since Foyle is living in a small coastal town and the Cazalets live on an ancient estate and in London. Of course, in reality the stories are filmed on a mixture of sets and real houses and they are probably both using the same historic cars and trains. The set dressing is sometimes similar. Somewhere there must be a vast warehouse of ancient chintz “puffs” and coverlets, wonderfully extravagant wallpaper in near-shocking colors, and furniture varying from Chippendale to the kind of solid stuffed monoliths that are “good value.” Since the actors are nearly always doing one of three things -- smoking, drinking alcohol, or taking tea -- there must be shelves and shelves of the proper accoutrements. (Actually, they have a lot of sex, too, but they only need each other for that.) They do keep the tea sets and ashtrays sorted within each film but I can sometimes recognize the bone china cups and wonderful silver from one movie to another. By now I recognize almost ALL the small bronzes used in set dressing. The same Greek youth with the same rearing horse and so on.

Tonight I watched the last episodes of “The Hanging Gale” which is rigorously and politically moral with MK this time caught between two forces, the Irish tenants suffering from the potato famine and the Lord who employs him to enforce his rules. It’s easy to see how this is the root of “Foyle’s War,” both in terms of acting and in the impelling force of the plot, although “The Hanging Gale” is meant to be the story of the four Phelan brothers and their fates. Michael Kitchen simply has an unsurpassed ability to express love, understanding and iron will at the same time. But then he can turn around and be a rotten sociopath as in “Falling.” The Phelan brothers would have made short work of him.

THE IMPORTANCE OF IONS

When I moved back to Valier, I had visions of a fabulous garden. They have not become real for a number of reasons, not least of them money. The problems with gardens here include: temp extremes (zone 3 plants are pretty dependable, Zone 4 will be killed in a hard winter, and Zone 5 need special protection); high winds; enough altitude for high ultra-violet light; clay soil; and both alkali water and alkali soil. The best seed catalogues (this year they’re coming online rather than hard copy, which is an improvement in terms of keeping the piles of things under control around here) will list the acid/alkali affinities of the plants in question, but all too many of them do not. There are alluring plants like winterberry and azalea that simply cannot be grown here because they demand acid soil. Most evergreens are always on the edge of being stressed because of not enough acid. The books caution not to use poplar leaves for compost because they are so alkaline. REAL gardeners use little kits to be sure about acid/alkali balance because it can vary all over the yard. I haven’t done that, but I notice that the best local gardeners use tons of peat moss.

I became aware that humans have to think about this stuff, when I did my hospital chaplaincy. There was a little girl brought in unconscious because she had spent a hot summer day swilling lemonade, to the point that her electrolytes (which depend upon acid/alkali balance) were out of whack enough to render her comatose and possibly permanently brain dead. Here’s an explanation from Wikipedia (okay, I’m lazy -- but I can usually understand Wikipedia and it’s handy): pH of the blood: The pH is usually maintained within a narrow range by a number of buffer systems in the body. A normal pH value may still be due to a well-compensated imbalance or a mixed acid base disorder and an abnormal value is definitely due to a poorly compensated acid base problem or due to both metabolic and respiratory derangements causing an imbalance in the same direction.

Some people are more acid than others. Ireland is an acid place where much of the soil is peat and maybe those of us with Irish genes tend to be a little acid in more than our outlook on the world. My brother Paul was acid enough that his skin chemicals destroyed metal watch bands. He could patine copper by simply rubbing it. But an accumulation of lactic acid, suspected of being at the root of fatigue and other metabolic problems, can raise havoc in a body by blocking “perfusion” or the flow of fluids. I myself am a little too acid and feel better over here on the alkali prairie.

Now consider this:

“Anion gap: Body fluids including blood may contain a variable number of ions, but the total number of anions (negative ions) and cations (positive ions) are roughly the same. The ions that are usually measured in blood are cations like sodium and potassium and anions including chloride and bicarbonate. There are unmeasured ions in both groups (cations and anions), which also contribute to the ionic constitution of blood. The measured cations are usually greater than the measured anions by about 8-16mmol/L. This is because the unmeasured anions constitute a significant proportion of the total number of anions in blood. Proteins make this up predominantly, but also included are sulphates, phosphates, lactate and ketones. Causes of a decreased anion gap include hypoalbuminaemia and severe haemodilution. Rarer causes include increase in minor cation concentrations like calcium and magnesium. Causes of a raised anion gap include dehydration and any cause of raised unmeasurable anions, like lactate, ketones and renal acids, along with treatment with drugs given as organic acids such as penicillin, salicylates and poisoning with methanol, ethanol and paraldehyde. Rarely it may be due to decreased minor cation concentrations such as calcium or magnesium.”

It’s from Wikipedia, but I can barely grasp it. The point is that “ions” are electrons and it is largely the management of ions among atoms and molecules that makes our bodies work properly. They are what digest food by assembling and reassembling molecules, they are what makes glue stick, they are what cause colors to fade, they are how genes work, they are how thinking works -- all on this electromagneticochemical level that was unsuspected until recently. A few extra ions here and there, a few missing where they ought to be, and the human body (like the bodies of other critters) will try to compensate, then begin to express distress, and finally simply stop functioning. Death.

I looked up those cow acids: acetic or ethanoic acid is just vinegar. “Acetic acid is one of the simplest carboxylic acids (the second-simplest, next to formic acid). It is an important chemical reagent and industrial chemical that is used in the production of polyethylene terephthalate mainly used in soft drink bottles; cellulose acetate, mainly for photographic film; and polyvinyl acetate for wood glue, as well as synthetic fibres and fabrics. In households diluted acetic acid is often used in descaling agents.”

The use of acetic acid in alchemy extends into antiquity. In the 3rd century BC, the Greek philosopher Theophrastos described how vinegar acted on metals to produce pigments useful in art, including white lead (lead carbonate) and verdigris, a green mixture of copper salts including copper(II) acetate. Ancient Romans boiled soured wine in lead pots to produce a highly sweet syrup called sapa. Sapa was rich in lead acetate, a sweet substance also called sugar of lead or sugar of Saturn, which contributed to lead poisoning among the Roman aristocracy.

In the 8th century, the Muslim alchemist Jabir Ibn Hayyan (Geber) was the first to concentrate acetic acid from vinegar through distillation. In the Renaissance, glacial acetic acid was prepared through the dry distillation of metal acetates. The 16th century German alchemist Andreas Libavius described such a procedure, and he compared the glacial acetic acid produced by this means to vinegar. The presence of water in vinegar has such a profound effect on acetic acid's properties that for centuries chemists believed that glacial acetic acid and the acid found in vinegar were two different substances. The French chemist Pierre Adet proved them to be identical.

In 1847 the German chemist Hermann Kolbe synthesized acetic acid from inorganic materials for the first time.

Propionic acid (systematically named propanoic acid) is a naturally-occurring carboxylic acid Propionic acid was first described in 1844 by Johann Gottlieb, who found it among the degradation products of sugar. Over the next few years, other chemists produced propionic acid in various other ways, none of them realizing they were producing the same substance. In 1847, the French chemist Jean-Baptiste Dumas established that all the acids were the same compound, which he called propionic acid, from the Greek words protos = "first" and pion = "fat," ... Bacteria of the genus Propionibacterium produce propionic acid as the end product of their anaerobic metabolism. This class of bacteria is commonly found in the stomachs of ruminants and the sweat glands of humans, and their activity is partially responsible for the odor of both Swiss cheese and sweat. Propionic acid inhibits the growth of mold and some bacteria. As a result, most propionic acid produced is used as a preservative for both animal feed and food for human consumption, and can be used as a preservative for Ballistics Gel. For animal feed, it is used either directly or as its ammonium salt. In human foods, especially bread and other baked goods, it is used as its sodium or calcium salt. Similar usage occurs in some of the older anti-fungal foot powders.

NOTE THIS ONE: A recent publication by MacFabe and colleagues found that intraventricular infusions of propionic acid produced reversible behavior that was very similar to that seen in autism. Behaviors included: hyperactivity, dystonia, turning, retropulsion. In addition, the treated rats demonstrated caudate spiking and the progressive development of limbic kindled seizures. The paper concludes that this is an excellent animal model of autism and warrants further study (MacFabe, 2007).

The human skin is host to a species of bacteria known as Propionibacterium acnes, which is named after its ability to produce propionic acid. This bacteria lives mainly in the sebaceous glands of the skin and is one of the principle causes of acne.

Butyric acid, (from Greek ???????? = butter) IUPAC name -Butanoic acid, or normal butyric acid, is a carboxylic acid with structural formula CH3CH2CH2-COOH. It is found in rancid butter, parmesan cheese, and vomit, and has an unpleasant odor and acrid taste, with a sweetish aftertaste (similar to ether).

Butyric acid is used in the preparation of various butanoate esters. Low-molecular-weight esters of butyric acid, such as methyl butanoate, have mostly pleasant aromas or tastes. As a consequence, they find use as food and perfume additives.

Dunno about you, but the ions are flyin' around in my head.

COW PUKE, SPIT AND POOP

Investigators of healthy food have pointed to the bovine feedlot as a prime suspect for nastiness, saying that cattle are so unsuited to the digestion of corn or other grains that the ground in feedlots is covered with cow vomit. Yuck. But WHY do they throw up? An article in my local ag rag is revealing. It was written by J. Wagner and T.L. Stanton, Animal Sciences professors at Colorado State University and is framed as advice to ranchers “finishing” by switching them to grain.

There are four points to the discussion:

1. If cows go from eating roughage (hay) to eating grain too quickly, they will suffer from acid indigestion (produced by rumen bacteria trying to digest the grain) so severe that the cow may stop gaining weight or die.

2. So the cows should be switched from hay to grain in steps, maybe as many as eighteen (!) so as to be gradual enough for the cow’s natural “buffering ability” to keep up.

3. The writers feel that successfully switching to grain is possible if it is done carefully. (I will refrain from cynicism at this point.)

4. The best way to tell whether the switch is gradual enough is by inspecting the cow’s dung. This is better than lab tests on fecal starch or pH, which is the acid/alkalai ratio. (It’s possible to be too scientific.)

If this is too much information for you, don’t keep reading.

Grain is used to “finish” cattle because it is usually more economical, depending on variables like cattle prices, cattle breeding, the price spread between good and choice (grain-fed) quality carcass grain and the price of grain. It’s possible that making grain into ethanol will take the price of grain high enough that feedlot grain feeding will be too expensive and we’ll all be treated to arguments about “healthier” hay-fed cattle. But the feedlot people will groan at the necessity of jacking the hay around to the cows. On the other hand, with modern hay managing equipment, it’s hardly like having to buck bales over a fence. There is some evidence that grain feeding is the source of the kind of e-coli that kills humans and that sticking to hay can clear e-coli out of the cow’s system.

When a cow has acid indigestion or the bovine equivalent of heliobacter pylori, it’s in more trouble than a human because it has more stomachs. Evolved to digest fiber of all kinds (organic) it is basically a series of fermentation tanks. (There used to be a guy downwind of Browning whose cows included a lot of wind-transported paper and cardboard in their diets. Of course, today’s plastic sacks would kill them.)

The key to this digestion system is pH, which should be neutral, or “7” on an arbitrary scientific scale. Below 7 substances are labeled acid and above 7 the substances are “base” or alkali, like TUMS. When the bacteria are happily living at 7, they make the stomach contents into volatile fatty acids of three kinds: acetic, propoionic and butyric. These are the sources of the cow’s energy and they are only mildly acid, taking the environment to 6.5 or 6.8. Other stuff in there, when the cow eats roughage, is fiber, lignin, cellulose, and hard-to-digest carbohydrates. I suppose you could call this “cud,” since the cow brings it up and rechews it.

But grain is starch and sugar, which go quickly to glucose (Tell me about it! I can see it on my meter!) and then to lactic acid. If the grain goes to lactic acid in amounts the bugs can handle, no problem. But a little too much makes the bugs sicken and die. Then the acid score goes to 4 or 4.5 and digestion stops. (Tell me about it! I take a Pepcid AC every night! And it used to be much worse before I eliminated all sugar, white flour, and corn syrup from my diet.)

But wait, there’s more. Cattle drool and their saliva is alkaline (8.4 - 8.7). When they chew their cud, the saliva acts like TUMS. It’s the chewing and saliva that liquefies the roughage so it flows smoothly through the system. (More than 70% of the liquid in a cow’s stomachs is from saliva. Like, 20 to 30 GALLONS of saliva!) But they don’t slobber much over grain, so it doesn’t get either buffered or liquified. Silage and green chop are wet but work like grain, besides being already acid.

That’s not all. Grain-type foods spoil easily and can’t be left in the feed bunks more than 12 hours without going moldy and stale, so the cows won’t eat it. “For every 1 percent reduction in intake, expect reduced gains of 1.5 to 2.0 percent.” Cows are SUPPOSED to gain weight -- at cross-purposes with human desire to LOSE weight. The Marine cafeteria idea (take all you want but eat all you take) works out to feeding cattle twice a day, but no more than they will clean up -- but feed them again within a half hour after the bunks are empty. But if a storm is coming, they will increase consumption by as much as 20% which means that they ought to be throttled back with hay rather than grain.

Every morning someone must calculate the food value of the feed as well as its moisture content (which can vary as much as 200%), check that the bunks are emptied and what the intake was, look at the weather, and make up a feed ticket for the day. Every evening the whole process must be repeated and any errors (over- or under-feeding) should be corrected. A 500-1,000 cow or steer should have a minimum of 8 inches of bunk space, but a foot is better. (I’d give ‘em more space that that, were I there! Like farther than the length of their legs.) If there’s not enough room so that they have to crowd in, they eat more food but less often, which hinders weight gain. And if they have a tummy ache, they will eat less. They might even throw up.

That’s ugly enough, but what you really want to pay attention to is the cow manure. You’re looking for “stools that are a little loose -- somewhere between one that is stacked or formed and loose -- with a little big of grain passing through. A bubbling loose stool or one with white caps indicates acidosis.”

This doesn’t address antibiotics, growth hormones, and other molecular fiddling with cows. But it seems to me that it clearly makes the point that if you eat cows, you should not eat as they do. And maybe eating feedlot cows is a lousy idea. If you do, eat a lot of spinach and All-Bran to make up for what the cow didn’t get.