This blog was supposed to be about Penelope Reedy, the founder, owner, chief writer, and impassioned believer in the “Redneck Review of Literature,” dedicated to the idea that Western lit mattered, published from 1975-1995. But Penelope herself keeps chiming in from her place in Idaho where she’s a college professor these days and reports that this morning it’s bitter cold. Archived at Boise State University’s Idaho Writer’s Archive, the Review is accompanied by “myriad letters showing just how crazy I was/am during all those years and years of ranching, divorce, returning to university, raising 4 kids, hauling my printing press all around the west and Milwaukee while I was at Marquette U.”
I’m quoting an email from 2004 but she says virtually the same thing on this morning’s post to West Lit, the listserv. “I always thought of literature as holy work, sacred words. I guess because it was something I could always participate in whether as writer, reader or publisher, and possible as long as paper and ink survive.”
She adds: “When I was hauling my press around, spending hours typing manuscripts and making plates, collating, stapling, addressing, etc. I felt involved in a holy tradition, almost sacrificial in profundity. I was connecting with virginia and leonard woolf [Aquarian-style, Penelope doesn’t always cap.] and their early projects with the basement letter presses and harry crosby and Idaho’s cantankerous ezra pound and wyndham lewis. I was engaging in tradition, a tradition of exposing/introducing my beloved land and people to the world.”
The world didn’t pay attention. It was a “neighborhood” enterprise to them. But Penelope says, “It’s really computers that killed the review.” . . . “this technology wasn’t the one I/we expected would cause the demise of a literary dream, especially when it was heralded as making it all easier to produce, and that’s precisely what killed it.” Today you can add that the post office has piled on, plus the cost of paper, but the spread of the Internet would make it possible to run “The Redneck Review of Western Literature” economically as an eZine. There are plenty of them out there: many disguised as blogs.
What would the Woolf’s do with a blog? I have no idea, but I think Gertrude Stein would fall upon the idea with glee. The difference might be in the willingness to step outside the grand traditions of British literature that are so fortified by academia and historical publishing. There are still nodes of genius everywhere, many among quite young people in the West, but they carry laptops under their arms and they are as likely to work with images -- including the moving images of video -- and sound as much as print.
Check out a venue like “Querencia,” Stephen Bodio’s blog at http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/ It is clearly land-based, organized around hunting with sight hounds and hawks, so mostly about high prairie grasslands and, because there are similar ecologies elsewhere, it is global. We hear about the “istans” (Afghanistan, Turkistan, et al) where this hawk/hound synergy is millennia old. That means there is a time dimension to the discussion, emphasized by the blogger Reid Farmer, who is an archeologist. In fact, my first contact with this blog was talking to him about the historical range of condors. The third dimension, I would say, is fine writing. The newest member of the group, Cat Urbigkit, absolutely blows me away -- not just with writing: her photos are excellent. Her world is ranching, with a strong scientific background. Matt Mullenix is in the South rather than the West; he's also a fine writer, and the blog’s tech-head. They do indeed feel they are pursuing a sacred trust, a holy work, and their incomes suffer the same as always for such work.
For a book collaboration with Tim Barrus, I’m working with materials about Gay San Francisco and the fate of “Drummer” which was a focused publication for “leathermen,” which are defined by being hypermasculine. (For them, wearing motorcycle leathers was de rigeur.) I’m struck by how “Western” their assumptions are, though they migrated in from all over America, only to be dispersed by HIV in a few decades. But I hesitate to even MENTION this to the West Lit bunch. Brits don’t discuss poofters in front of ladies! Heavens! Not even the Woolfs! Ernest Hemingway, surely, but not Gertrude Stein!
Leaving out some intense nodes of creation like Querencia (and Bodio is also a legit Montana writer due to his novel, “Querencia,” published by Russ Chatham in Livingston) and “Drummer” as well as the counter-mythic “Redneck Review of Literature,” reduces the category of Western Literature to the same old names, the same old tropes, and dwindling influence. I believe it also gives way too much power to academia’s interest in respectability and wealth.
In the end it is the passionately obsessed people working at the margins-- people like Reedy and her heroes as well as Norman Maclean, A.B. Guthrie, Jr., Tom Savage, Jack Fritscher, Tim Barrus, the Querencia bloggers -- the rule-breakers and double-uppers who could save West Lit from the lifestyle packaging of slick magazines. Oh, man [sic], are they going to town! But they DO buy fine writing about the West and they do get into the pockets of the fabulously rich.
Western small-world publishers aren’t in touch with each other -- even if they’re in the same country, they don’t live in the same part of town. I’m not sure they’d like each other or would be helped by awareness of each other’s work, much less sharing a listserv. I’m not sure that the magazine stand won’t follow the bookstore out of existence. An intelligent and “literate” truck driver told me that he doesn’t even subscribe to Sirius, the single-interest satellite-based radio network. As he drives, he streams radio stations from across North America through his onboard computer or listens to novels on his iPod. They tell me to forget CD’s. (No, no, no! Not my fav CD’s!!) They tell me Netflix-by-mail will wink out as soon as enough people have broadband so they can stream their movies. They tell me that an extra-strong sun flare or an unusually vindictive high-tech country could wipe out the satellite system that supports all this streaming. Kindle is most likely to be done in by software changes or battery frustration.
Then we’ll be back to Penelope Reedy’s way: ink on paper, the way Benjamin Franklin taught his Native American helpers to compose print on a typestick. Then all the chess men will be on the floor. To continue that metaphor, I think we’re at “check” but not at “check mate.” Don’t despair, Penelope! The game goes on!
Feel free to chime in via the comments.
2 comments:
Seriously and relatedly to the techno-West part of the equation, I have a few thoughts:
1.) Oral cultures including but far from limited to Native American ones were long suspicious of the technology of writing and printing. We know little from "inside" about the more ancient Celts, led by the Druids, for instance, because written language was seen as destructive to memorization and the oral which was hugely interwoven with every aspect of life. So our accounts of them come from Outsiders only (that and anthropology/archaelogy) and ultimately from some degree of interpolating later known history and such back onto the past.
2.) A prime example of this change from print to web is Jim Stiles's (in-process) move of the Zephyr, after 20 years of print, to the I-Net. (And of course he's had a degree of hybridization for some time now, as does about everybody else, from HCN to Orion.) Jim's operation, though, has always been closer to what Penelope's was than most of these others have been: essentially one driven person, little to no staff. And it's a tough move to make, both ideologically and practically (finances in particular).
3.) Mary's question about "solutions" is a good one, though like any to the financial mess they will be difficult, include many mistakes, and may not prove up much at all. And I'm always amazed at how American Society tends to call for critique-less solutions (I'm not saying Mary's guilty of that, but problematizing solutions). Let me elaborate further: We tend to have that tendency as humans to think we can "fix" everything, and most fixes (this is one of Mander's driving points) instead further the potential for destruction. I love seeing Postman and Mander mentioned--we should look at least in part to them as we construct. But relative to the "joy" end of thing in environmental writing, I think Ed Abbey and others have long been right: we need prophets calling us to account more than propagators. The merely "joyous" stuff is all over the place, and most of it is abusive of the earth, directly and indirectly furthering the commodification of nature. Nor is joy a necessarily or in practice missing from much of the prophetic stuff (Abbey himself certainly exercises plenty--some might claim too much--of it, and I think writers like TT Williams and Vine Deloria Jr. and Bowden and Peacock and Stiles and others have a great deal of joy embedded in their prophetic works, too).
David N. Cremean
(At the request of Dave, I've posted with a tiny trace of editing.)
There's a resurgent interest in Marshall McLuhan's ideas about the media affect the content, partly do to the recent explosion of wireless technologies. McLuhan predicted most of these, but he didn't live to see their fruition, making him truly a prophet. But McLuhan also pointed out that new technologies are always layers on top of old ones; the old tech never fully goes away or gets destroyed, because it stays around as "hobby" technology. So if and when something takes out the topmost recent layers of technology, reversion to older forms of communication is not at all difficult, and is very feasible.
So, I don't worry about change, even when it goes faster than I can keep up with. My blog(s) isn't(aren't) that different from what I used to hand-write in my journal-books, which I've been doing since 1981 or so; and still when I travel on a long road-trip, I usually write entries out by hand, and type them into the laptop later, back when I've returned to Snivellization and its conveniences.
A few writers who I think are (occasionally very very) good and who fall into your more open category of West Lit are Jim Harrison, Linda Hasselstrom, Barry Lopez, Annie Proulx, among others. If we must limit the category to mountain/prairie regionalist criteria, we also eliminate some great writing about the West from people who don't necessarily live there full-time; I'm thinking of Loren Eiseley, or John McPhee's "Annals of the Former World." I'm also thinking of Robinson Jeffers.
I have no doubt great writing about the West, and produced in the West, will continue on no matter what the academic and publishing trends towards homogenization do, or desire to do. Great writing has often been off the radar.
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