When the publicity for “Bronze Inside and Out” reviews was sent out, the person in charge used her “usual list”, which means a lot of obscure Canadian journals, since normally the U of Calgary Press is of interest only to Canadian academics. She had no consciousness at all of the Western art scene. When I tried to argue, I was over-ruled as irrelevant and a beginner. So. . .
In spite of that, one review offer did go out to George Cole, who has an interview program on Yellowstone Public Radio, the public radio station in Bozeman/Billings. He’s about my age and has been bumping around the region for a long time, venturing as far west as Seattle. He did call to set up an interview time, but I let him know I was not financially or vehicularly prepared to drive to Bozeman. Nothing happened for a long time. Then suddenly I got an email: George would be in Great Falls on Valentine’s Day because he was attending a Merle Haggard concert the night before. Could I drive down to GF? Of course.
So all last week I watched the weather report and obsessed. As Saturday drew nearer, it got colder and snowier. He set the time from ten over to ten-thirty, which pleased me because the extra half-hour meant I could drive in daylight. Saturday morning I woke up at 2:30 AM and couldn’t get back to sleep. I’d open one eye to check the time and Crackers would be looking back at me, since she sleeps with her head on my arm. I swear she can hear my eyelids go up. They certainly felt as though they were creaking.
When I hit the road, it was warmer than forecasted (twenties f) and the driving lane had been well-plowed. Snow snakes were dancing, but the fluffy snow was not rising into the air. The only tricky parts were the transitions: on and off ramps, long swoops down into coulees. I was nearly the only one on the road except for snowmobilers heading in the opposite direction. I left at 8AM and pulled into the motel parking lot at 10:15 AM, just in time to make a quick gallop to the restroom due to coffee ingestion. (It’s eighty miles, usually takes an hour and a half.) When I came out, George was in the hallway extending his hand. “Mary?” I put out my hand, rather damp. “George?”
Rose was a little concerned that meeting in a motel implied rather a greater commitment than just an interview, but I never left the lobby. George and his brother-in-law, whose name I immediately forgot, packed while I watched CNN and then we went over to the Great Falls Public Radio to tape. We had a little time to gossip and I picked up fascinating indiscretions from George, who was once on the staff of Tom Judge, a former governor of Montana.
The actual interview went smoothly. George is very good at this. He had met Bob in 1976 and liked him. He was putting as much emphasis on the person of “me” as on Bob, worrying about whether I had any friends in Valier and whether there were trouble with Indians and WHY live in Valier??? The brother-in-law liked the interview, the tech guy liked the interview, and all was copacetic, except that George worried that there might be a little echo in the “cans.” (Those are the earphones: a “term of art.”) George doesn’t really grasp blogs and websites and all that jazz and was surprised that I have no television and no radio in the pickiup, though he said that when I pulled in, he recognized it at once as what I would drive. (Small, dirty, old and beat-up!) He doesn’t know that keeping in touch with friends on the computer has the advantage of not having to comb one’s hair or worry about housekeeping or having to provide refreshments. When it is time for them to go home, one hits a button.
When we said goodbye in the parking lot, George asked politely for a hug and I did. Then the brother-in-law wanted a hug and I did. They patted my back and I patted their back, which is a very interesting social reflex that means “no sex.” (If the patting hand begins to stroke or slide lower down the back -- well. . .) I explained that to them and they got into a friendly argument about which got patted more.
By this time it was noon and had warmed enough in Great Falls for the streets to be merely wet. I picked up some basics at the store (Oregon Hazelnut Bread and Ken’s Honey Mustard Steak Sauce plus the latest “Vanity Fair”) and hit the road, which was dry and bare in the driving lane. The latest installment of “House of Eliot” was waiting for me at the post office.
I was so elated and smug to have finally pulled off this rather important interview and also to have connected with George. For one thing the Bozeman UU group has always been a favorite, and for another the east end of the state is where the better growth and more reliable Important People are. The Flathead Valley on the west side is already choked with Californians, crooks, and pretentious women. I don’t want to circuit-ride anymore, but I like knowing what’s going on.
This morning there was frost on everything. Even the clothespins were furry as a row of white bunnies. Now the sun is out and the bunnies are throwing their coats on the ground. There’s little wind but now and then bits of white fur from the poplars drift by the window, glittering in the sun.
Tim asks, “What the interview fun?” Yes, it was. The show will air in two or three weeks. I’ll let you know. George Cole’s “Realtime” on Monday nights at 6:30 PM mountain time. More instructions later about how to stream Yellowstone Public Radio.
Showing posts with label BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT. Show all posts
Showing posts with label BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT. Show all posts
Sunday, February 15, 2009
Friday, August 01, 2008
REVIEW IN THE ALBERTA HISTORICAL SOCIETY MAGAZINE
BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT Review from “Alberta History”, Summer, 2008
Mary Scriver loves to write and she has chosen an ideal topic -- Bob Scriver, her late husband, a sculptor of international fame. A resident of Browning, Montana, he is particularly remembered for his bronzes of Indians, rodeo cowboys, and prominent figures, and prominent figures. Included among them is a 53 piece series of bronzes of Blackfoot culture entitled “No More Buffalo,” a 33 piece set entitled “Rodeo in Bronze,” and individual figures such as Eric Harvie of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, rodeo star Casey Tibbs, “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Teddy Roosevelt, and others.
In this book, Mary also tells her own story, of how she came to Browning and her experiences with the Blackfoot people. She met her husband there and tells of his life and accomplishments in an engaging and literary style.
Bob was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in 1914 where his father owned a store. After a stint at teaching, he opened a taxidermy shop which grew into a foundry for his sculptures. As one who grew up with the Blackfoot, he had a keen interest in their cultures, and participated with them in their ceremonies. His love for them is reflected in his many sculptures. He also collected many artifacts, as had his father, to preserve a disappearing culture.
In 1990 he became the centre of controversy when he feared his entire Indian collection would be seized from under a newly-passed “Repatriation of Indian Artifacts Act.” To prevent this from happening, he took his collection to Canada and sold it to the Provincial Museum of Alberta for $1 million.
This whole story of Bob Scriver is a fascinating one, and a good read.
Mary Scriver loves to write and she has chosen an ideal topic -- Bob Scriver, her late husband, a sculptor of international fame. A resident of Browning, Montana, he is particularly remembered for his bronzes of Indians, rodeo cowboys, and prominent figures, and prominent figures. Included among them is a 53 piece series of bronzes of Blackfoot culture entitled “No More Buffalo,” a 33 piece set entitled “Rodeo in Bronze,” and individual figures such as Eric Harvie of Calgary’s Glenbow Museum, rodeo star Casey Tibbs, “Buffalo Bill” Cody, Teddy Roosevelt, and others.
In this book, Mary also tells her own story, of how she came to Browning and her experiences with the Blackfoot people. She met her husband there and tells of his life and accomplishments in an engaging and literary style.
Bob was born on the Blackfeet Reservation in 1914 where his father owned a store. After a stint at teaching, he opened a taxidermy shop which grew into a foundry for his sculptures. As one who grew up with the Blackfoot, he had a keen interest in their cultures, and participated with them in their ceremonies. His love for them is reflected in his many sculptures. He also collected many artifacts, as had his father, to preserve a disappearing culture.
In 1990 he became the centre of controversy when he feared his entire Indian collection would be seized from under a newly-passed “Repatriation of Indian Artifacts Act.” To prevent this from happening, he took his collection to Canada and sold it to the Provincial Museum of Alberta for $1 million.
This whole story of Bob Scriver is a fascinating one, and a good read.
Wednesday, June 18, 2008
THE GRAND ILLUSION
No one deceived me. I deceived myself, or maybe I could defend my ego by saying it’s a systemic deception and not one confined to the United States. Maybe it’s a deception of white Euro-based culture. I mean the illusion that a person can make money by writing books. Another author came to visit and kindly explained to me what I sort of knew but had been steadily denying: “Bronze Inside and Out” will not make any money for me. Any. I have confirmed this with the new publisher who is not part of the deception and tells the truth. No money. Not ever. It will, however pay the salaries of the press employees.
It’s not their fault. The acquiring editors did not know what they had acquired, did not understand how to manage it, did not have the basic necessity of publishing: monetary capital. They were an “academic press,” meant to accommodate the need for proof of value of faculty after they had their degrees by publishing a book now and then. (The acquiring editor had a contract to supply a certain number of “Legacy” manuscripts about important locals every year and framed my manuscript that way.) In Canada they say, “Publish or prairies” because prairie colleges for a professor is banishment, where you go if no one respects you. And this particular university is focused tightly on the past -- narrow, hoarding, defensive. Like Montana.
In our culture the fact of “being published” is a stamp of value. And in our culture value means money. Not much more than that because not enough people are educated to know what “value” in intellectual endeavors might mean. Anyway, it used to mean conformity to those who had the power in the status quo. (Seminary taught me that.) Now it means almost anything from “I like it” to “it changed the world.”
So the truth of this is that I can no longer say to myself, “when the big check comes I’ll get the pickup fixed” or “the shower fixed” or “my teeth fixed.” I mean, when these things become intolerable, what WILL I do? In a world where bananas cost $10 a pound, will I be able to eat? In a place where all jobs are thirty miles away and gas costs almost as much as a banana, where’s the net gain of going back to work? With my ideas and personality I might only be repeating the Cut Bank High School fiasco.
But the deeper truth is something else: the validation. Now I’m back confronting the problem of how good a writer I am. Richard Stern, my most demanding professor, says, “I enjoyed your book a great deal. The picture of your husband is full and powerful. As for money, it's not in the literary cards. It's been 35 years since I made any -- even then it wasn't enough to live on.” He’s one of the best writers in America and has been telling me the truth gently all along and so have many others. In the end, how good a writer a person is has to be decided by the writer him or her self. I believe I have the skills and drive, I believe I have something to say.
One of my best efriends this past year has been (gasp) Tim Barrus. His aboriginal nom de plume, Nasdijj, was beside the point. (I also correspond with a Cree-Chippewa grandpa whose name is Nadjiwan.) Tim didn’t sound to me like a Navajo but he certainly knew what he was writing about. Maybe more than most “white ladies,” I’ve been in and out of derelict hotels, abandoned hulks of houses, tumbled and weathered shacks. Not because I lived there but because work took me there. I know one heckuva lot of Blackfeet mixed with other tribes. What Barrus wrote rang deeply true to me.
He was praised, certified, raised to the skies as an example of how people can rise from humble roots. Then some enterprising journalist not interested in revealing George Bush ripped away Barrus’ writing persona. Instead of the book world being embarrassed, they attacked him, reviled him. One minute he’s flying first class with his helper dog named Navajo, and the next he’s a pariah. But the man is so endearing to ME because he didn’t just lie down and beg for forgiveness like the shit-eating James Frey, so that the same people who had raised him up could throw him back down, so they could get their Jimmy Cho 4-inch heels embedded in the back of his neck. Instead he bitch-slapped them back with words. All the things you’re not supposed to say.
The sad part is that those (mostly) women were only a puppet front -- Stepford editresses -- for the corporation masters who have changed publishing from a gentleman’s business, which was a way of managing capital by seeking fine writers and selling fine books (the origin of the status of published authors as something like gentry) into an assembly line for profit, a thing they call “book packaging” where they steal words from formerly successful books, throw them together, invent a writer of some kind with ethnic difference and low class afflictions, and hire someone to pretend to be that person.
This is not what Tim Barrus did. (He does NOT write like Sherman Alexie.) Tim Barrus was mocking that whole patronizing concept, wiping it away and writing from his heart. He wrote the deepest life-problem a person can have, betrayal by a parent that is denied by everyone else including the other parent. Somehow, from somewhere, he got the strength to transform that with love. Is that why the book was published? No. It was sensational. It won a lot of prizes because it was sensational. But it was also damn good writing and it was deeply, deeply felt, so it couldn’t be controlled by publishers.
Can I come up to that standard? I don’t know where to look for the markers except within myself. My more literary cousins have been highly supportive. My money-centered cousins want nothing to do with me. My brother wants nothing to do with me. My best undergrad friend who always said I was a great writer now tells me he’s dyslexic: he buys the books but that’s it. No reading. MANY people tell me they bought the book but have only read parts or just look at the pictures. I had no idea I knew so many non-readers. They say they don’t have time. They have to be in the mood. The review copies sent to eloquent people were read, but then no reviews were written. How do I interpret that?
Another writer, who wanted me to help him, offered in return to show me how to form a nonprofit corporation and use it to get grants from foundations established by easy-money guilty millionaires because that’s where the money is, not in publishing. One thinks up a lofty purpose, milks it, does a minimum of work. I could name several of these. One was going to be a great boon to Montana humanities, a quarterly that would showcase excellent work. So far it’s more of an annual, while the directors on salaries flog their own work. Classic reservation boondoggle. The humanities scene in Montana is controlled by people serving their own interests, which they fancy are the same as serving others but have the effect of closing out a great many or trivializing those they serve. The Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel -- don’t ask.
Someone asked Mary Clearman Blew, an honest person, whether it were possible to earn a living by writing. She said no, but that the peripherals paid well: teaching, panels, speeches. But they are peripheral and they may be on their way out, since they are funded by benevolent non-profits and universities which are less and less benevolent. And then there’s the price of travel now.
Barrus says his central focus is survival and he does this by going to video instead of print, publishing on the Internet (the publishers are dying, the bookstores are dying), and gathering a posse of young men who take care of him when he’s away from his wife. (Don’t think dirty thoughts about it. They are learning to be good fathers.) I’m about to the point where I don’t care about survival. I’ve tipped my hat to what I think will sell, but not really compromised. Now I won’t compromise at all. No more looking for publishers. No books, just writing. I’ll publish my words for a damned Kindle and learn to make Podcasts so commuters can listen to them. No scandals will ensue. This is who I really am: no mask. Like it or not.
It’s not their fault. The acquiring editors did not know what they had acquired, did not understand how to manage it, did not have the basic necessity of publishing: monetary capital. They were an “academic press,” meant to accommodate the need for proof of value of faculty after they had their degrees by publishing a book now and then. (The acquiring editor had a contract to supply a certain number of “Legacy” manuscripts about important locals every year and framed my manuscript that way.) In Canada they say, “Publish or prairies” because prairie colleges for a professor is banishment, where you go if no one respects you. And this particular university is focused tightly on the past -- narrow, hoarding, defensive. Like Montana.
In our culture the fact of “being published” is a stamp of value. And in our culture value means money. Not much more than that because not enough people are educated to know what “value” in intellectual endeavors might mean. Anyway, it used to mean conformity to those who had the power in the status quo. (Seminary taught me that.) Now it means almost anything from “I like it” to “it changed the world.”
So the truth of this is that I can no longer say to myself, “when the big check comes I’ll get the pickup fixed” or “the shower fixed” or “my teeth fixed.” I mean, when these things become intolerable, what WILL I do? In a world where bananas cost $10 a pound, will I be able to eat? In a place where all jobs are thirty miles away and gas costs almost as much as a banana, where’s the net gain of going back to work? With my ideas and personality I might only be repeating the Cut Bank High School fiasco.
But the deeper truth is something else: the validation. Now I’m back confronting the problem of how good a writer I am. Richard Stern, my most demanding professor, says, “I enjoyed your book a great deal. The picture of your husband is full and powerful. As for money, it's not in the literary cards. It's been 35 years since I made any -- even then it wasn't enough to live on.” He’s one of the best writers in America and has been telling me the truth gently all along and so have many others. In the end, how good a writer a person is has to be decided by the writer him or her self. I believe I have the skills and drive, I believe I have something to say.
One of my best efriends this past year has been (gasp) Tim Barrus. His aboriginal nom de plume, Nasdijj, was beside the point. (I also correspond with a Cree-Chippewa grandpa whose name is Nadjiwan.) Tim didn’t sound to me like a Navajo but he certainly knew what he was writing about. Maybe more than most “white ladies,” I’ve been in and out of derelict hotels, abandoned hulks of houses, tumbled and weathered shacks. Not because I lived there but because work took me there. I know one heckuva lot of Blackfeet mixed with other tribes. What Barrus wrote rang deeply true to me.
He was praised, certified, raised to the skies as an example of how people can rise from humble roots. Then some enterprising journalist not interested in revealing George Bush ripped away Barrus’ writing persona. Instead of the book world being embarrassed, they attacked him, reviled him. One minute he’s flying first class with his helper dog named Navajo, and the next he’s a pariah. But the man is so endearing to ME because he didn’t just lie down and beg for forgiveness like the shit-eating James Frey, so that the same people who had raised him up could throw him back down, so they could get their Jimmy Cho 4-inch heels embedded in the back of his neck. Instead he bitch-slapped them back with words. All the things you’re not supposed to say.
The sad part is that those (mostly) women were only a puppet front -- Stepford editresses -- for the corporation masters who have changed publishing from a gentleman’s business, which was a way of managing capital by seeking fine writers and selling fine books (the origin of the status of published authors as something like gentry) into an assembly line for profit, a thing they call “book packaging” where they steal words from formerly successful books, throw them together, invent a writer of some kind with ethnic difference and low class afflictions, and hire someone to pretend to be that person.
This is not what Tim Barrus did. (He does NOT write like Sherman Alexie.) Tim Barrus was mocking that whole patronizing concept, wiping it away and writing from his heart. He wrote the deepest life-problem a person can have, betrayal by a parent that is denied by everyone else including the other parent. Somehow, from somewhere, he got the strength to transform that with love. Is that why the book was published? No. It was sensational. It won a lot of prizes because it was sensational. But it was also damn good writing and it was deeply, deeply felt, so it couldn’t be controlled by publishers.
Can I come up to that standard? I don’t know where to look for the markers except within myself. My more literary cousins have been highly supportive. My money-centered cousins want nothing to do with me. My brother wants nothing to do with me. My best undergrad friend who always said I was a great writer now tells me he’s dyslexic: he buys the books but that’s it. No reading. MANY people tell me they bought the book but have only read parts or just look at the pictures. I had no idea I knew so many non-readers. They say they don’t have time. They have to be in the mood. The review copies sent to eloquent people were read, but then no reviews were written. How do I interpret that?
Another writer, who wanted me to help him, offered in return to show me how to form a nonprofit corporation and use it to get grants from foundations established by easy-money guilty millionaires because that’s where the money is, not in publishing. One thinks up a lofty purpose, milks it, does a minimum of work. I could name several of these. One was going to be a great boon to Montana humanities, a quarterly that would showcase excellent work. So far it’s more of an annual, while the directors on salaries flog their own work. Classic reservation boondoggle. The humanities scene in Montana is controlled by people serving their own interests, which they fancy are the same as serving others but have the effect of closing out a great many or trivializing those they serve. The Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel -- don’t ask.
Someone asked Mary Clearman Blew, an honest person, whether it were possible to earn a living by writing. She said no, but that the peripherals paid well: teaching, panels, speeches. But they are peripheral and they may be on their way out, since they are funded by benevolent non-profits and universities which are less and less benevolent. And then there’s the price of travel now.
Barrus says his central focus is survival and he does this by going to video instead of print, publishing on the Internet (the publishers are dying, the bookstores are dying), and gathering a posse of young men who take care of him when he’s away from his wife. (Don’t think dirty thoughts about it. They are learning to be good fathers.) I’m about to the point where I don’t care about survival. I’ve tipped my hat to what I think will sell, but not really compromised. Now I won’t compromise at all. No more looking for publishers. No books, just writing. I’ll publish my words for a damned Kindle and learn to make Podcasts so commuters can listen to them. No scandals will ensue. This is who I really am: no mask. Like it or not.
Sunday, May 18, 2008
I HAD EXPECTED A BOOK READING, BUT...
Book publishing has for a long time been seen as a sort of combination redemption/prestige act: a way of reforming reprobates through confession like St. Augustine or a way of certifying skill, like a college degree. The publisher was the go-between like a university, guiding and funding. No more. Today anyone gets into print and the ways of publishing are so accessible and inventive -- not even printed on paper -- that publishers, authors and consumers are at a loss to know what the new meaning of the act might be.
Yesterday at Barnes & Noble in Great Falls my publisher (U of Calgary Press) and I had scheduled a reading and book signing. In the old paradigm, this would have meant a famous writer, a swarm of admiring fans, and a novel. But the weather was terrific, there was a big air show, it’s graduation season, and no one came except the people I’d invited to do introductions: Dona Stebbins, the mayor of Great Falls; Leland Ground whom I had invited to give a blessing in Blackfeet; and my publisher, Donna Livingstone. A few others like the husbands of the two Donnas; Leland’s family; Norma Ashby; and some other former students who happened in by chance: Stan Juneau and his wife, Carol, who is a state legislator. Amazingly, it turned out that all those empty chairs were an advantage. This mix of people needed to talk to each other, both about Bob Scriver and about books and life and Blackfeet and... well, the new paradigm.
I see that in this version of “publishing” the focus is on the real lives of people, national borders mean little, the land itself is part of the community, and one of the things a publisher does is to network among media and people. It was remarkable that the people with power in this conversation were mostly older, highly experienced women who were used to working with potent men. They had taken the burden of what some men consider to be beneath them and now that has turned out to be the more important part of public life. (Okay, go ahead and invoke Hilary Clinton. Pretend Leland is Obama -- he’d like that!)
So after Leland did his blessing, I did my reading -- forgetting that I was supposed to be introduced by Dona Stebbins, who gracefully slipped herself into the conversation and did it anyway -- and then we did something that I’d call “idea jazz.” Someone would make a statement about Bob Scriver or art or life in general, someone else would pick that up and do a “riff” on the subject, then the next person, until there was a seamless multi-voiced piece of verbal music going on.
This used to happen occasionally in the Unitarian context and it’s one of the phenomena that just absolutely lifts me up by the hair roots when it happens. Forget the pattern we were supposed to follow! It turned out that Donna Livingstone had attended a Blackfeet “Horn” Ceremony (it’s about buffalo), so she and Leland clicked right away; Dona Stebbins and her husband are musicians and really understood those dynamics, Edward Cavell (Donna L’s husband) once dated Charlie Beil’s daughter (!!! Beil was one of the key figures in Bob’s beginnings) and Norma Ashby has been a long-time and passionate Bob Scriver supporter. (Bob loved this sort of idea session!) So we were explaining, asking, dreaming, elaborating together as fast as we could. I kept nudging things towards the idea of a culture tie between Calgary and GF equivalent to the electrical power tie-line between GF and Lethbridge.
Even urban and sophisticated people like Michael Blowhard and Tim have become increasingly disappointed and even enraged by the hegemony of Manhattan publishing where something originally a gentleman’s work, done with dignity and high standards, has been made into a profit machine like everything else. They've drained out the heart’s blood and strangled the authors, which ironically has only helped the little grass roots operations to see that their work was important and could be unique. Small printing “publishers” now abound everywhere, esp. if you count blogs which are a sort of daily publishing that is rapidly replacing newspapers. And if you look to video, as Tim has done, and frankly admit that we’re all learning how to make music/image/word compositions so that young people’s input is just as valuable as that of the old tweedy “club” editors, then suddenly the world doesn’t seem to be contracting after all -- indeed, expanding rather more rapidly that we can assimilate, which makes us underestimate what’s happening.
Even more exciting, national boundaries no longer count (I look for nations to take a Chinese view of this and put some hard pressure on the Internet in the near future), so one culture can be just as meaningful as another because we aren’t bound by a particular language or medium, and -- what’s most important of all, the real “cassowary” event -- is the formation of a new cultural ecology that includes everything that has happened in this galaxy so far. God is dead, hello Cosmos! (And if you want to call the Cosmos “God,” that’s your choice.) There is a future after all!
Well, I could read about all this in the New York Times (ha!) and on Manhattan-focused blogs (double ha), but to have it right here in “River City,” weaving together people I’ve known for half a century with others who say, “Oh, that’s so much like MY life,” even though we’ve just met --- well, the evidence is just too strong to be denied. Something is happening that has nothing to do with conventional politics, though it's affecting them as well. No one can figure out where the money is going to come from or how we’re going to survive until it does. We still don’t know how to educate people for their lives.
But if there’s anything I learned in the ministry and from Bob Scriver, it is the great counseling truth that “focus gives power.” The more a person or a society can get focus -- not a hokey mission statement someone developed with Magic Marker and newsprint taped to the walls -- but a from-the-heart understanding of what it means to be human on the prairie along the Rockies, the more powerful the idea becomes without anyone having to force anything. Whateveritis comes THROUGH us, not from our pushing.
The biggest risk is that the Status Quo might try to stamp out this gathering power, so it’s a good thing to be disguised as merely a little book reading on the first really fine Spring day, such good weather that no one attended except those who were somehow guided to be there. For all I know, one of Leland’s grandsons might catch fire and write a book or make a video that changes everything. Or it might be the Coburn family, who came after the reading and sat quietly talking about Bob Scriver, continuing the conversation even though they hadn’t been there earlier. They are a dance family, composing a celebration of Lewis & Clark in ballet terms. Last year’s Sacajawea/ballerina loved her first year of college in Purchase, N.Y., where two classes were academic and the rest was ballet. I asked to see her toes after that much en pointe and was pleased to see that modern tech materials have gotten to those classic pink satin slippers: silicon padding and restructured support are saving her Blackfeet toes.
While all this was happening, my poplars finally unfurled their leaves. Archibald Macleish, addressing the despair of his own times in J.B., said, “I would not stay here if I could...” meaning that he was tempted by suicide, “except for the little green leaves in the Spring and the wind on the water.” Today is gray and softly warm, good for planting the hollyhocks and nicotiana I bought in Great Falls.
Yesterday at Barnes & Noble in Great Falls my publisher (U of Calgary Press) and I had scheduled a reading and book signing. In the old paradigm, this would have meant a famous writer, a swarm of admiring fans, and a novel. But the weather was terrific, there was a big air show, it’s graduation season, and no one came except the people I’d invited to do introductions: Dona Stebbins, the mayor of Great Falls; Leland Ground whom I had invited to give a blessing in Blackfeet; and my publisher, Donna Livingstone. A few others like the husbands of the two Donnas; Leland’s family; Norma Ashby; and some other former students who happened in by chance: Stan Juneau and his wife, Carol, who is a state legislator. Amazingly, it turned out that all those empty chairs were an advantage. This mix of people needed to talk to each other, both about Bob Scriver and about books and life and Blackfeet and... well, the new paradigm.
I see that in this version of “publishing” the focus is on the real lives of people, national borders mean little, the land itself is part of the community, and one of the things a publisher does is to network among media and people. It was remarkable that the people with power in this conversation were mostly older, highly experienced women who were used to working with potent men. They had taken the burden of what some men consider to be beneath them and now that has turned out to be the more important part of public life. (Okay, go ahead and invoke Hilary Clinton. Pretend Leland is Obama -- he’d like that!)
So after Leland did his blessing, I did my reading -- forgetting that I was supposed to be introduced by Dona Stebbins, who gracefully slipped herself into the conversation and did it anyway -- and then we did something that I’d call “idea jazz.” Someone would make a statement about Bob Scriver or art or life in general, someone else would pick that up and do a “riff” on the subject, then the next person, until there was a seamless multi-voiced piece of verbal music going on.
This used to happen occasionally in the Unitarian context and it’s one of the phenomena that just absolutely lifts me up by the hair roots when it happens. Forget the pattern we were supposed to follow! It turned out that Donna Livingstone had attended a Blackfeet “Horn” Ceremony (it’s about buffalo), so she and Leland clicked right away; Dona Stebbins and her husband are musicians and really understood those dynamics, Edward Cavell (Donna L’s husband) once dated Charlie Beil’s daughter (!!! Beil was one of the key figures in Bob’s beginnings) and Norma Ashby has been a long-time and passionate Bob Scriver supporter. (Bob loved this sort of idea session!) So we were explaining, asking, dreaming, elaborating together as fast as we could. I kept nudging things towards the idea of a culture tie between Calgary and GF equivalent to the electrical power tie-line between GF and Lethbridge.
Even urban and sophisticated people like Michael Blowhard and Tim have become increasingly disappointed and even enraged by the hegemony of Manhattan publishing where something originally a gentleman’s work, done with dignity and high standards, has been made into a profit machine like everything else. They've drained out the heart’s blood and strangled the authors, which ironically has only helped the little grass roots operations to see that their work was important and could be unique. Small printing “publishers” now abound everywhere, esp. if you count blogs which are a sort of daily publishing that is rapidly replacing newspapers. And if you look to video, as Tim has done, and frankly admit that we’re all learning how to make music/image/word compositions so that young people’s input is just as valuable as that of the old tweedy “club” editors, then suddenly the world doesn’t seem to be contracting after all -- indeed, expanding rather more rapidly that we can assimilate, which makes us underestimate what’s happening.
Even more exciting, national boundaries no longer count (I look for nations to take a Chinese view of this and put some hard pressure on the Internet in the near future), so one culture can be just as meaningful as another because we aren’t bound by a particular language or medium, and -- what’s most important of all, the real “cassowary” event -- is the formation of a new cultural ecology that includes everything that has happened in this galaxy so far. God is dead, hello Cosmos! (And if you want to call the Cosmos “God,” that’s your choice.) There is a future after all!
Well, I could read about all this in the New York Times (ha!) and on Manhattan-focused blogs (double ha), but to have it right here in “River City,” weaving together people I’ve known for half a century with others who say, “Oh, that’s so much like MY life,” even though we’ve just met --- well, the evidence is just too strong to be denied. Something is happening that has nothing to do with conventional politics, though it's affecting them as well. No one can figure out where the money is going to come from or how we’re going to survive until it does. We still don’t know how to educate people for their lives.
But if there’s anything I learned in the ministry and from Bob Scriver, it is the great counseling truth that “focus gives power.” The more a person or a society can get focus -- not a hokey mission statement someone developed with Magic Marker and newsprint taped to the walls -- but a from-the-heart understanding of what it means to be human on the prairie along the Rockies, the more powerful the idea becomes without anyone having to force anything. Whateveritis comes THROUGH us, not from our pushing.
The biggest risk is that the Status Quo might try to stamp out this gathering power, so it’s a good thing to be disguised as merely a little book reading on the first really fine Spring day, such good weather that no one attended except those who were somehow guided to be there. For all I know, one of Leland’s grandsons might catch fire and write a book or make a video that changes everything. Or it might be the Coburn family, who came after the reading and sat quietly talking about Bob Scriver, continuing the conversation even though they hadn’t been there earlier. They are a dance family, composing a celebration of Lewis & Clark in ballet terms. Last year’s Sacajawea/ballerina loved her first year of college in Purchase, N.Y., where two classes were academic and the rest was ballet. I asked to see her toes after that much en pointe and was pleased to see that modern tech materials have gotten to those classic pink satin slippers: silicon padding and restructured support are saving her Blackfeet toes.
While all this was happening, my poplars finally unfurled their leaves. Archibald Macleish, addressing the despair of his own times in J.B., said, “I would not stay here if I could...” meaning that he was tempted by suicide, “except for the little green leaves in the Spring and the wind on the water.” Today is gray and softly warm, good for planting the hollyhocks and nicotiana I bought in Great Falls.
Saturday, March 15, 2008
THE CMR AD CLUB AUCTION: 2008
Like the proverbial elephant, the way a person understands the CMRussell Ad Club Auction depends on where you have ahold of the beast. So I’ll tell you about my day there from a few different points of view.
INDIANS
One of the unique aspects of this shindig is that the main auction has brought in what amounts to a captive audience of people who care about art depicting Western subject matter. Some of these very high-end people fly in on their own or specially chartered small jets, so many that it’s a problem up at the airport to find good places to put them. A new hangar is under construction. At the other end of the economic scale -- which is not the only scale one can use -- is the guy who drives down in his pickup from the rez with a lot of beadwork, carvings, dream-catchers with baseballs in the middle (a big hit this year), and modern ledger art that explores a genre invented by captives at Army forts who begged for paper to draw on and were given old bookkeeping ledgers.
I swung by the Indian Art show first because I wanted to give Carl Cree Medicine a copy of “Bronze Inside and Out,” since he’s in it. In fact, as he says, he’s at the beginning and the end. In Browning when you need more help, you don’t interview prospects or call the job bank -- you just add the brother of the guy already working there. They’re likely to have the same aptitudes and get along well together. (An old Indian chief advised that success in polygamy comes from marrying sisters for the same reasons.) If your business persists long enough, you begin to hire the sons of the men who work for you and the enterprise turns generational.
Carl came to work for Bob Scriver a year or so before I got to Browning, but he stayed for twenty-five years -- I only lasted a little over ten. David Cree Medicine, Carl’s son, became the foundry foreman when Bob went back to casting at the end of his career. Carl and I are about the same age, but he had a hard fight with the demon rum and other apocalyptic horsemen in his younger life, and now he’s on a walker and brought a “chauffeur.” Nevertheless, I gave him a book and got him to sign mine. We had a few minutes to remember old times.
This show is organized and mentored by Gladys Cantrell, who took care of Jim Welch Jr.’s father in his last years. No spring chicken herself, she never runs out of passion and the show reflects her constant urging towards more sophistication and skill. I’m of two minds about this keeping Indians apart in their own show: on the one hand, it means that they don’t have to compete with the top artists of the country, but on the other hand, if they DID compete, they would come off very well. The fact remains that the Russell Auction is a whitebread event except when Earl Old Person brings along the Blackfeet dancers to do their pow-wow stuff.
But then one must consider that the other satellite shows include an antiques and collectible gun show, sometimes a female artists’ show, “the friends of Jay Contway,” and other sub-categories and clubs that come and go. This year Pacific Galleries, which is a permanent antiques and art arcade in Great Falls, had a show, but I ran out of time and energy to get to it.
The BIG TENT
The Ad Club, which has a fine eye for the needed extra, runs a “trolley” among the various venues, so once a person finds a parking place, it’s possible to leave the vehicle all day. Security personnel on ATV’s patrol the “big” show parking which always fills blocks of lots and curbs. Two huge bronzes were being exhibited in the parking lot: a life-sized elk and a flight of huge ducks. It seemed to me that there were fewer exhibitor rooms -- the motel furniture is stored in big semi-trailers for the duration and the artists bring “liners” and screens for hanging their art work. The work was uniformly excellent. I would say there was a little less cowboy stuff and about the same amount of Indian images, but FAR more animals and scenery than ever. The animal bronzes were huge, best placed in public spaces or outside. It appears that even cowboy art is going green.
I don’t go to the big expensive events: brunches and dinners and cocktails, all with vigorous presentations by and for the Ad Club, wedged in among the actual auctions. A big crew of beefy guys do nothing but arrange and reconfigure the tables and chairs through the big indoor plaza of the motel where the swimming pool is. I associate this show with the smell of chlorine, which is NOT green.
This time I located Dave and Sasha Powell right away, so there was enough time among potential customers to visit for a bit. At last I got the real story of an event in the Sixties that has become famous over the years. We were in the front of the Scriver Museum during North American Indian Days, which is analgous to the Russell Auction in some ways, when someone came running in the front door puffing, “Jimmie Welch just punched out Richard Lancaster at the campgrounds!” Good news! We heartily disliked Lancaster, author of one of those tarted-up Indian books (“Piegan.”) But puzzling -- Jim Welch was not a likely street fighter. Years later I asked him whether it was true and he laughed, but said it wasn’t him. I didn’t press any further.
But now I find out that Jim was THERE on the campgrounds among a little group of loungers among the lodges, a favorite occupation of young Indian men since long before forts. Along came Lancaster with his usual self-important swagger. He was a big guy, very full of himself. The guys began to call out, “How ya’ doin’, Moochie? Where did you mooch your breakfast this morning?” His nickname on the rez was “Moochie” because that’s pretty much how he lived.
Lancaster took offense and came over to demand that they stop calling him that. Eddie Livermore stood up to him, Lancaster spat on Eddie, and it was Eddie who laid him out on the ground. Then the others, except Welch I’m sure, put the boots to him. Since he was so proud of the effect of his face on the ladies, they gave it special attention. It was a while before he’d be back in action. This guy left single mothers and traumatized daughters all over the West. We’re told that now he’s dead or as good as.
A little before lunchtime, in order to beat the rush, I slipped into the motel cafe for a sandwich and found Brian and Ann Elliott just finishing up. Brian and Ann own The Blackfeet Trading Post in Browning, which locals call “Faughts” because of the previous owner, and have been trying to order my book from Michigan State University, where they evidently don’t teach geography as the distribution people couldn’t find Montana. That’s been straightened out now. They were just headed over to the Indian show and then to the Browning basketball game in town.
REMINISCENCE
Right after lunch was the seminar about the forty years that the Ad Club has presented this event. Bob Morgan, Ginger Renner, Steve Seltzer and Van Kirke Nelson formed a panel and Norma Ashby moderated from a lecturn. The swapping of stories, often corrected or contradicted by the others, was augmented by two video compilations of events over the years. Bob Scriver appeared in quite a few, partly because back in the beginning he refused to give them art work to auction but offered to make a bison skull on a plaque for an annual award and in later years he sometimes presented it himself.
So here’s the straight story on how the auction got started. Norma Ashby had been to a ranch estate auction sale, because her husband worked for a bank. Sad as these dispersals can be, she had had a marvelous time looking at old things and schmoozing with the characters. So when the Ad Club’s annual money-raising event selling raffle tickets for a donated Cadillac was ruled illegal, she suggested an art auction instead. There were a lot of wrinkles and objections, but when Norma has an idea, she doesn’t let it go.
What I didn’t know at the time was the extent of the involvement of Van Kirke Nelson, a gynecologist/obstetrician in Kalispell who was also, to quote Norma “a wheeler/dealer and conniver.” He and his doctor buddies had a profound effect on cowboy art in Montana. Nelson, at the heart of what I call the Flathead Art Mafia, had a gallery (His family also owns Manitou.) and found that he could scoop up quite a lot of respectable art if he bought from hard-up artists, esp. someone like Ace Powell who had “shaken hands with the Devil alcohol and was sometimes pulled into hell.” But then how could he sell it? Auctions turned out to be the answer: locals understood them, they could provide drama, they weren’t just for snobs, and they only lasted a couple of days -- then most of the participants could get out of town. He had organized a few in Kalispell, and lead Father Schoenberg out into the swamp for the sake of the big Indian Arts center (MONAC) he was building next to Gonzaga University. It was Nelson’s gallery’s paintings and those of his buddies that were at the core of the first auction. The Russell Auction is juried, but many times the art sold there is recycled a few years later through the satellite auction sponsored by Coeur d’Alene and Manitou Galleries, with luck at much higher prices. To Nelson it was a poker game: Montana Hold'em!
But it was Norma that made the Russell Auction into a smash hit, a pattern now followed all over the country. Father Schoenberg was invested in keeping control. I just finished reading his analysis of what went wrong, eventually crashing both his auctions and his institution. (“Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: a History of MONAC”) He felt it was politics, since Red Power was at its peak then and the surrounding tribes ungratefully demanded that THEY have control. Norma had the Ad Club at her side and the CM Russell Museum already existed -- the Club was only contributing funds to it, plus the glamour, of course. But the Ad Club folks were shrewd, hip, plugged-in people, with no specific political ax to grind. Brilliant ideas came a’poppin’ and they knew how to make them work. Every year they rejiggered the whole thing, reconsidering every small practice so that flow and liveliness has been kept vital for forty years. They dressed up as Russell characters, they invented things like “quick draw,” or artists swapping each other’s paintings mid-creation and finishing them, and once Arlene Hooker Fay created a “paint by numbers” portrait of an Indian cherub which Norma filled in while everyone watched.
One of the results that I doubt anyone really anticipated was that for some high-income customers, who at first thought that traveling to Great Falls, Montana, in the middle of March was an insane idea, gradually became emotionally invested in Russell and the other art work to the point that Ginger Renner, a tough gallery owner and wife of the foremost CMR art expert (Fred Renner, whose profession was NOT art and who courted Ginger at the Auction), said with wet eyes, “This is a beloved community and a family. I have never felt so loved and safe in my life as I do here.” Plainly this was true for others as well, especially Norma. It’s a white-haired bunch of folks, but they function very much as a once-a-year congregation in a near-religious sense. Now they tire easily, walk with canes and sometimes oxygen, wear hearing aids, but somehow manage to get to the auction. Events happen earlier in the evening to keep them from wearing out too soon. The glow from them spreads to people who are not part of their group.
Norma knows everyone and introduced many luminaries, asking them to stand. She included her daughter -- and me, to my surprise, whom she calls “Bob Scriver’s widow,” though there’s really no term for what I am really: “Bob Scriver’s third-wife of four, divorced thirty years ago, childless, nothing to do with the estate, the only survivor.” We only have circumlocutions, though such relationships become more common every day.
I sold a book to each of three of what I call “white hat cowboy artists,” guys who don’t participate in the seething mass of jostling, jealous, conniving, money-obsessed Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel bigshots. One went to Don Greytak’s wife for a gift to him. She says he’s so content with his life and what he has that it’s tough to buy him anything. He does graphite pencil drawings of real ranch and ag scenes, not excluding the tractors and thrashing machines. Gentle and accurate, they are much underestimated by the people going after technicolor special effects. (I’m a little surprised as how many of the cowboy artists these days formerly worked in Hollywood as background painters rather than the generation before them who got their training doing magazine illustration and advertising in New York City or Connecticut.)
Another book went to Joe and Margaret Halko. Joe is a sculptor who does mostly animals these days. He began as a taxidermist like Bob Scriver and they’ve always had respect for each other. Halko has probably exceeded Bob in his skill and the grace of his work. He hasn’t gotten so deeply into casting. They live in Choteau, not far from me.
The third went to Rex and Judy Rieke, my all-time favorite art couple since I first met Bob in 1961. Rex has a music connection with Bob and still plays with his son and their combo, but they also run a ranch over by Garrison where they raise threatened domestic animal breeds like Joseph’s sheep -- or is it Joseph’s goats? (The Joseph in the Bible, the one with the coat, got all the spotted ones, you’ll remember.) Rex paints in several different modes, but he brought to the show his landscapes which have a lot of Maynard Dixon influence. The young artist sharing his room, Higgins(?), was more modern, less “cowboy art,” but very skillful. His slices of watermelon and jagged abstract mountains are more like what most contemporary artists in Southwest Art magazine or on the Art and Perception blog are doing. [Rex says that Judy reads my blog every day and believes everything I say, so I promised Rex to mention that “Rex Rieke is a great guy!” It comes from the heart!]
These three sets of artists and non-artist but participating wives are all native Montana folks living quiet lives without any pretenses or feverish pursuits. If I had a windfall of money, it is their works I would buy. I passed through the rooms of the Black Hats, but was not tempted.
SATELLITE AUCTION
At a different, more low-rent, motel there is a small version of the big Heritage Inn auction. The sponsoring galleries (usually Coeur d'Alene and Manitou) shift around a bit, as do the dealers in the rooms which are not usually artists. These folks sell books, Indian regalia, some art, ephemera, jewelry, and other debris from the early days in the West. Many are single guys and I noticed this year that two had canine companions: one was an exceedingly clean and fluffy Australian shepherd who came to say hello and the other was an Italian greyhound, graceful and loyal. Neither of them has written a book, unlike the governor’s dog.
In an end room, quietly sitting among his things, was Adolph Hungry-Wolf. He is subdued. People have not realized what an amazing achievement his four archive books about the South Piegans really is. They haven’t grasped the lesson that the art purveyors have got hold of: the paintings that sold in the early days of the auction are now quadrupled and more in value. Books do the same. Bob’s book about his art collection, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains,” originally sold for sixty dollars and now sells on the Internet for $800 -- IF you can find a copy. If a person bought these four books and salted them away, they would amount to an excellent investment. Part of the problem is that the Blackfeet Heritage Center had a gifted and well-connected Indian manager who had agreed to publicize and distribute the book in the US, but he left the position too soon. A repeating reservation problem. No solutions.
I did a bad thing. A woman and several kids came in and for some reason they kept asking me their questions instead of Adolph. I ought to have diverted them over to him, but I wanted to talk to him, so I gave the answers hoping they’d be quick. There was a photo on the wall of Adolph next to a real wolf that fascinated the little boy. “Is that a real wolf? Would he attack Adolph?” Etc. But then, I was asking MY questions when in walked a beautiful young Indian woman all in red and that was the end of his attention to me!
THE WAY HOME
By this time it was late afternoon and I left for home. Only two books unsold from this shipment. A year to the next CMR auction and not all of that “beloved community” will make it back. Norma Ashby and Bob Morgan, who has also been a state-wide force for good since the very early days and who is the sparkplug for the Western Art Rendezvous in Helena (an August show which happens as much “en plein air” as indoors), have written a book about all this which will be out in August. That ought to be well worth buying and reading! This has been a significant era in Montana, quite apart from the main engine of the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel in the SW.
I often use the drive back as a kind of metaphor. This time the sky was full of moving March clouds that appeared to be battles at sea, erupting geysers, prairie fires, hurricanes, and dragging gray gauzes of rain streaks. No wind. When I got home, to unwind enough to sleep, I watched “3:10 to Yuma,” in which the oddly noble anti-hero (Russell Crowe) is an artist who draws birds. He’s not quite ready for the Auction yet.
Friday, February 15, 2008
AMAZON ANACONDA
It's all very interesting.
Amazon is offering "Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver" for a cheaper price than they are buying the book for. Evidently they are using it as a "loss leader" to get your name and address into their database.
But there were too many buyers! They had not realized that there are a few hundred people who want to buy this book! They were losing money!
So they said they'd run out of copies because they were "unavailable" and they didn't know when any would ever be available again. They made the book sound like some sort of mirage.
So I posted an "author's review" of Amazon on the Amazon website.
Shortly, one (ONE, UNO) copy reappeared on the database. No message to me. The nonsense about "not being available" went away.
My publisher doesn't tell me what she had to do with this. I told her. Then she took the afternoon off.
Normally U of Calgary Press authors get a 40% discount on any U of Calgary Press books, including the ones they write. BUT because I want to sell my own books at readings and book-signings around the state and the national distributor, Michigan State University, doesn't want to mess around with me because they don't quite believe that Montana really exists anyway, the U of Calgary Press will ship me books direct BUT my discount will be diminished to 30%. No royalty, of course. (My royalty is 5% of the U of Calgary Press NET profit. That is, for every $1,000 they make, I make $50.)
You know that song, "Mothers, Don't Let Your Sons Be Cowboys"? Well, it's good advice for the mothers of potential authors as well. You won't be the ant -- you'll be the aphid.
Amazon is offering "Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver" for a cheaper price than they are buying the book for. Evidently they are using it as a "loss leader" to get your name and address into their database.
But there were too many buyers! They had not realized that there are a few hundred people who want to buy this book! They were losing money!
So they said they'd run out of copies because they were "unavailable" and they didn't know when any would ever be available again. They made the book sound like some sort of mirage.
So I posted an "author's review" of Amazon on the Amazon website.
Shortly, one (ONE, UNO) copy reappeared on the database. No message to me. The nonsense about "not being available" went away.
My publisher doesn't tell me what she had to do with this. I told her. Then she took the afternoon off.
Normally U of Calgary Press authors get a 40% discount on any U of Calgary Press books, including the ones they write. BUT because I want to sell my own books at readings and book-signings around the state and the national distributor, Michigan State University, doesn't want to mess around with me because they don't quite believe that Montana really exists anyway, the U of Calgary Press will ship me books direct BUT my discount will be diminished to 30%. No royalty, of course. (My royalty is 5% of the U of Calgary Press NET profit. That is, for every $1,000 they make, I make $50.)
You know that song, "Mothers, Don't Let Your Sons Be Cowboys"? Well, it's good advice for the mothers of potential authors as well. You won't be the ant -- you'll be the aphid.
Wednesday, February 13, 2008
AUTHOR ADVENTURES
An author’s life is not all sitting at the computer keys, tapping out masterpieces. I’d been invited to speak at the Glenbow Museum yesterday but the weather has been fierce and I was wary of actually guaranteeing that I’d go. I sent the Ed Mitch DVD of Bob talking about his work as a backup. Early Monday morning Sue McConnell, scout and wife for Clyde who upgraded all the photos in the book, sent an email saying the forecast up there was good. I looked out the window, saw a clearing sky, and sent Bob Pearson -- who organizes the Glenbow “Terrific Tuesdays” -- a message “missile launch is go.” The postmaster promised that if I never came back (might get storm-stayed, might elope, might be killed on the road) she’d adopt the cats.
At the border (Sweetgrass) the bored Canadian officer didn’t even want to see my birth certificate, which is really quite splendid since it’s the full-page original with gold seal and my teeny footprints. In fact, I joked that it was the same age as me but it looked a lot better. (Sue suggested that maybe if I wore a gold seal...)
Lethbridge is a major city, bigger than any in Montana, and I stopped at my favorite bookstore: ABC Books which has tumbles and stacks and towers of books everywhere and also a little white grandmother bunny named “Blossom,” two quite social cockatiels, and some unidentified reptiles. The owner told me about his favorite customer, now deceased, a polymath who bought Chinese philosophy among other things. I had a bracing cup of coffee at the Wings of the Dove Christian Bookstore two doors down and used their powder room which had elegantly painted inspirational sentences on the wall and a big bouquet of silk magnolias.
Then I set out for Fort Macleod, thinking it was a truck route and would probably be cleared. I had not bet on hundred mile an hour winds blowing snow over the road at a temperature that mixed water and ice. Ten miles would be dry as summer, then another half mile of tractionless adrenaline-shooting life-risk -- while the 18-wheelers zoomed through the slush, throwing it all up on my windshield. If I’d hit the ditch then, at least I’d never have seen it coming.
When I got to Fort Macleod, I talked to the police chief who said that if I could make it to Claresholm, I would be safe the rest of the way. He was right. I also found out my gas card wouldn’t work in Canada. Evidently Esso and Exxon are not getting along. (Chavez is mad at Exxon, too.) In Calgary the roads had been graveled so traction was good but visibility was intermittent because mud was being thrown up everywhere. I also gained some windshield dings. I hadn’t gotten a good mesh between my gas station road map and my Google-generated map to McConnell’s house, but I managed to blunder across the two rivers, past the Stampede grounds, past the Unitarian church, past the University of Calgary, and to the right house only five minutes late.
McConnells and I became friends through the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment listserv on the Internet. When they come down this way, they stop for tea and scones. We have many life experiences in common, are about the same age, and share interests. They’ve lived on the West Coast and in Saskatoon. Sue cooked the perfect meal for diabetics: roast, three veggies, lots of nuts. Clyde was pleased because it was a colorful meal! (They’re both originally art majors.) Orange carrots, green peas, etc. Sue noticed there was no red, so fetched a tomato!
CELESTE
Celeste, who is visiting, is a sandy-colored muscular little cat with huge ears and eyes who surely must be carrying some of the originally evolved desert genes. Boots, a satiny black cat with a splendid plume of a tail and a neat little white bib is in permanent residence and came to watch Celeste chase her cat toy. Celeste spent part of the night sleeping with me, but she’s a very busy cat.
Next morning Sue came up with a fancy brand of oatmeal full of flax, wheat germ, sunflower seeds, and other nutritious things. She came with me as guide through Calgary traffic and reassurance in the parking labyrinth which always gives me flashes of old sinister movies. The museum staff was ready, provided coffee and a welcome, and we stopped to give a rub to the bust of Colonel Harvie which Bob had made. It was the Colonel’s oil fortune that paid for the museum.
The presentation went beautifully. Friends and colleagues were in the audience, everyone laughed at my jokes and we projected the Ed Mitch DVD of Bob talking about his work onto a huge wall where it was VERY impressive. The University of Calgary Press arrived en masse -- they simply locked the office door and all came! I’d never met any of them, so when they were standing in a circle introducing themselves to the host, I just got on the end of the line. Great to have faces for all the names!
At lunch we were all feeling like family and the event had become so much like a book launch that we all went to lunch in a posh hotel where we were seated at a high table in the bar and ordered very fancy things like “summer squash ravioli” and “southwest corn soup.” No alcohol, lots of coffee. I don’t know who picked up the tab -- it wasn’t me. The Glenbow host was there, as well as Sue and my fellow writer Ray Djuff.
Sue piloted me back down to the street -- after a brief blunder when we all suddenly found ourselves in the restaurant kitchen -- and headed me south. This time I had used Sue’s laptop (Oh, sigh! What a terrific little instrument: a Mac of the white and ice persuasion!) to get the highway report and stayed to the east far enough to dodge all the problems. Summer-dry roads, no trucks, zippety doodah. At Sweetgrass the American officer examined my birth certificate VERY carefully and agreed that I had cute little feet. On to Shelby where I stopped at Pamida to buy drain opener, hoping that I wouldn’t need it. The toilet was stopped up when I left, but I thought it might be merely frozen and open itself while I was gone.
It did not. I had 358 new messages, almost entirely SPAM. The cats rushed to greet -- not me, but the pickiup! I know they were hoping to hurt my feelings for leaving them overnight! Among the messages were anguished cries from a dozen friends who had just gotten emails from Amazon saying that my book was not available! I tried Barnes & Noble who said the same thing. Has the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel found a way to stifle me? Or is it the kafuffle over international book prices now that loonies are at par? Or is it the fact that Amazon was selling the book at an excellent price and suddenly realized that they were selling a LOT of copies and losing profit? (Hundreds of books were pre-ordered.)
Dunno. Used my camping potty and went to bed. Woke up when the carbon monoxide monitor shrieked at 5AM. No carbon mono. It shrieked because the electricity had died. Outside there is an ice storm raging. Back to sleep. At 5:30AM, the monitor shrieked again because the electricity came back on. Started coffee and ten minutes later another shriek as it all died again. I think I’d better bring in my camp stove. Another ten minutes and the electricity was back, and the newspaper came. We don’t have boys delivering papers: we have a tough woman in a hoodie. Just in time for two cups of coffee and a lot of boring news. Now back to bed. Then I’ll work on the toilet some more.
One of this morning’s message was that my cousin’s husband, our much loved “Ham” (short for Hamilton), might have a curable kind of lymphoma instead of a racing version of lung cancer. While the electricity was off, I stood at the kitchen picture window for a while. With all the town lights blacked out, the sky was full of stars.
At the border (Sweetgrass) the bored Canadian officer didn’t even want to see my birth certificate, which is really quite splendid since it’s the full-page original with gold seal and my teeny footprints. In fact, I joked that it was the same age as me but it looked a lot better. (Sue suggested that maybe if I wore a gold seal...)
Lethbridge is a major city, bigger than any in Montana, and I stopped at my favorite bookstore: ABC Books which has tumbles and stacks and towers of books everywhere and also a little white grandmother bunny named “Blossom,” two quite social cockatiels, and some unidentified reptiles. The owner told me about his favorite customer, now deceased, a polymath who bought Chinese philosophy among other things. I had a bracing cup of coffee at the Wings of the Dove Christian Bookstore two doors down and used their powder room which had elegantly painted inspirational sentences on the wall and a big bouquet of silk magnolias.
Then I set out for Fort Macleod, thinking it was a truck route and would probably be cleared. I had not bet on hundred mile an hour winds blowing snow over the road at a temperature that mixed water and ice. Ten miles would be dry as summer, then another half mile of tractionless adrenaline-shooting life-risk -- while the 18-wheelers zoomed through the slush, throwing it all up on my windshield. If I’d hit the ditch then, at least I’d never have seen it coming.
When I got to Fort Macleod, I talked to the police chief who said that if I could make it to Claresholm, I would be safe the rest of the way. He was right. I also found out my gas card wouldn’t work in Canada. Evidently Esso and Exxon are not getting along. (Chavez is mad at Exxon, too.) In Calgary the roads had been graveled so traction was good but visibility was intermittent because mud was being thrown up everywhere. I also gained some windshield dings. I hadn’t gotten a good mesh between my gas station road map and my Google-generated map to McConnell’s house, but I managed to blunder across the two rivers, past the Stampede grounds, past the Unitarian church, past the University of Calgary, and to the right house only five minutes late.
McConnells and I became friends through the Association for the Study of Literature and the Environment listserv on the Internet. When they come down this way, they stop for tea and scones. We have many life experiences in common, are about the same age, and share interests. They’ve lived on the West Coast and in Saskatoon. Sue cooked the perfect meal for diabetics: roast, three veggies, lots of nuts. Clyde was pleased because it was a colorful meal! (They’re both originally art majors.) Orange carrots, green peas, etc. Sue noticed there was no red, so fetched a tomato!
CELESTE
Celeste, who is visiting, is a sandy-colored muscular little cat with huge ears and eyes who surely must be carrying some of the originally evolved desert genes. Boots, a satiny black cat with a splendid plume of a tail and a neat little white bib is in permanent residence and came to watch Celeste chase her cat toy. Celeste spent part of the night sleeping with me, but she’s a very busy cat.
Next morning Sue came up with a fancy brand of oatmeal full of flax, wheat germ, sunflower seeds, and other nutritious things. She came with me as guide through Calgary traffic and reassurance in the parking labyrinth which always gives me flashes of old sinister movies. The museum staff was ready, provided coffee and a welcome, and we stopped to give a rub to the bust of Colonel Harvie which Bob had made. It was the Colonel’s oil fortune that paid for the museum.
The presentation went beautifully. Friends and colleagues were in the audience, everyone laughed at my jokes and we projected the Ed Mitch DVD of Bob talking about his work onto a huge wall where it was VERY impressive. The University of Calgary Press arrived en masse -- they simply locked the office door and all came! I’d never met any of them, so when they were standing in a circle introducing themselves to the host, I just got on the end of the line. Great to have faces for all the names!
At lunch we were all feeling like family and the event had become so much like a book launch that we all went to lunch in a posh hotel where we were seated at a high table in the bar and ordered very fancy things like “summer squash ravioli” and “southwest corn soup.” No alcohol, lots of coffee. I don’t know who picked up the tab -- it wasn’t me. The Glenbow host was there, as well as Sue and my fellow writer Ray Djuff.
Sue piloted me back down to the street -- after a brief blunder when we all suddenly found ourselves in the restaurant kitchen -- and headed me south. This time I had used Sue’s laptop (Oh, sigh! What a terrific little instrument: a Mac of the white and ice persuasion!) to get the highway report and stayed to the east far enough to dodge all the problems. Summer-dry roads, no trucks, zippety doodah. At Sweetgrass the American officer examined my birth certificate VERY carefully and agreed that I had cute little feet. On to Shelby where I stopped at Pamida to buy drain opener, hoping that I wouldn’t need it. The toilet was stopped up when I left, but I thought it might be merely frozen and open itself while I was gone.
It did not. I had 358 new messages, almost entirely SPAM. The cats rushed to greet -- not me, but the pickiup! I know they were hoping to hurt my feelings for leaving them overnight! Among the messages were anguished cries from a dozen friends who had just gotten emails from Amazon saying that my book was not available! I tried Barnes & Noble who said the same thing. Has the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel found a way to stifle me? Or is it the kafuffle over international book prices now that loonies are at par? Or is it the fact that Amazon was selling the book at an excellent price and suddenly realized that they were selling a LOT of copies and losing profit? (Hundreds of books were pre-ordered.)
Dunno. Used my camping potty and went to bed. Woke up when the carbon monoxide monitor shrieked at 5AM. No carbon mono. It shrieked because the electricity had died. Outside there is an ice storm raging. Back to sleep. At 5:30AM, the monitor shrieked again because the electricity came back on. Started coffee and ten minutes later another shriek as it all died again. I think I’d better bring in my camp stove. Another ten minutes and the electricity was back, and the newspaper came. We don’t have boys delivering papers: we have a tough woman in a hoodie. Just in time for two cups of coffee and a lot of boring news. Now back to bed. Then I’ll work on the toilet some more.
One of this morning’s message was that my cousin’s husband, our much loved “Ham” (short for Hamilton), might have a curable kind of lymphoma instead of a racing version of lung cancer. While the electricity was off, I stood at the kitchen picture window for a while. With all the town lights blacked out, the sky was full of stars.
Monday, February 11, 2008
A FRENCH RESPONSE TO "BRONZE INSIDE & OUT"
A French video group has posted a response to "Bronze Inside and Out: A Biographical Memoir of Bob Scriver" on YouTube.
"Bronze: L'interieur et Hors" is registered under the ARTBRONZE account at YouTube as a FANVID.
It is QUITE remarkable!
"Bronze: L'interieur et Hors" is registered under the ARTBRONZE account at YouTube as a FANVID.
It is QUITE remarkable!
Wednesday, February 06, 2008
WHOA! SLOW DOWN!
Things are going to slow down a bit blogwise around here. First, because now that “Bronze Inside and Out” is beginning to hit the bookshelves (already there in Canada -- another two weeks in the US), there are inquiries and side-deals to think about. People are re-aligning their relationship to me, depending on what they think of the book itself or what they figure will change in their world because of it. Should they kiss up or kiss off? Or do they need to do a bit of research: see if I remember them, figure out if I’m still mad at them (they usually know why), ask if it changes how I feel about them now that I’m a “famous author.” I don’t necessarily mean on a national basis! I mean, a poster about me speaking at the library next week went up in the post office this morning and it has changed the way some local people act already.
My cousins insist on the idea that “being published” by someone respectable like the University of Calgary Press is a great event that should make my life from here on worthwhile and respectable. My Lulu.com books mean nothing to them. Only one reads my blog. The great plot event is “being published” which means to them that I’m stamped as super-intelligent, since they don’t know that lots of super-intelligent people can’t write worth beans and some rather below the 100 IQ mark are dynamic and much-treasured writers. Yet they’re readers -- they read all the time, novels mostly. They’re pretty Jane Austeny.
In Manhattan right now there is a hustle about the “best books” of the year, just like the best movies and best actors at the Oscars. The initiated know that movie prizes are awarded by a process more webbed than any spider could manage, compounded by what other movies were released, how old the actor might be, whether they were unjustly passed over ten years ago, and so on. But it is frank and open that these awards are by movie people for movie people. The most interesting ones are probably the “craft” awards about lighting, sets, costumes, and all that great stuff you aren’t really supposed to notice while watching the movie.
There is a certain set of publishers who look for and solicit certain kinds of writing -- either smart political stuff or novels of a kind, often international these days, maybe confessional from the lower classes -- and then promote it to a set of people they believe they know about. Educated, Eastern, dressed a certain way, drinkers of certain beverages -- in case they don’t have a clue there are lists in magazines like Vanity Fair to tip them off so they won’t be stupid consumers of wristwatches or shampoo. People make fun of them and they make fun of each other, but in the end they are a tribe. Maybe a bit cross-Atlantic. No consciousness at all of any kind of life outside of that bent-back-on-itself context.
My book will never touch them. On the other hand, those who feel they are entitled to this book, say, Western art aficionadoes esp. in Montana, will find that they don’t quite find what they want in it (how much Scriver bronzes are worth) and more than they can quite assimilate (Beaux Arts equestrian monuments back east). The old girl friends, related or not, are going to be equally disappointed by what’s in and what’s out. A lot of people will say it’s too much about me, the author. And the same people as usual will cry incredulously, “But he’s not that FAMOUS!!!” Their point of reference will be Charlie Russell, who ranks as an obsession -- his actual personhood long since trampled.
But that’s not entirely what will be taking up my time. There are family matters to address and some have registered fears that I might blog about them. Clearly there is a deep concern for what they call “privacy,” and how people “deserve” it. I disagree, but there is a level at which blogging about someone or something begins to interfere with it, to change the terms of what’s going on. That raises moral stakes pretty high. I’ve already blurted out a few things (not about relatives) that I should not have, not that those involved didn’t deserve it. I doubt it affected their lives.
More than that, I have a lot to think about as I come close to seventy: how to spend the next ten years. So far, publishing a book is much less than I thought it would be. It will not get me out of debt. How much should I strip down my housekeeping? How much should I defend my monastic existence? Which books should I tackle next? The fiction in hopes of maybe attracting a bit of notice from the Montana simulation of Manhattan? Do I care? Or should I take on some of the things to which I am initiated and that people don’t even know there is anything to know about -- but that might matter to people a century from now. An interesting split is developing between the people who were around fifty years ago, but don’t understand computers and so never pick up information from blogs or databases, and new players who can search the Internet far and wide but never know what it was like on the rez in the Sixties.
Part of this reflection is prompted by reading “Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: A History of MONAC,” by Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J., wily old Jesuit who has gone to his reward -- or whatever. MONAC was the Museum of North American Culture built next to Gonzaga. It rose, largely entangled with the Flathead Valley Art Mafia, and fell. Cheney-Cowles tried to blackball them in the beginning and Cheney-Cowles ended up with their art and artifacts. “Schonie,” as he insists he was called affectionately, uses the book (which was self-published, printed by Thomas Printing in Kalispell, MT) to canonize those he loves (Gary Schildt!) or wants something from and to pour scorn on everyone who ever resisted or criticized him. You will not find Bob Scriver anywhere in the book -- at least I’m halfway through without his name being mentioned and he’s not in the index. I didn’t expect that he would be.
The trouble with writing something, whether it’s a book or a blog, is that it generally reveals a lot of connections and insights that the writer had no idea were being recorded, for good or for ill. Of course, readers are also apt to see ghosts from their own minds projected into what they read. I may need to take more daily walks to clear my head. On the other hand, it will be fun to report what I can as this unfolds -- excluding anything impinging on the privacy of innocents. Those that there are.
My cousins insist on the idea that “being published” by someone respectable like the University of Calgary Press is a great event that should make my life from here on worthwhile and respectable. My Lulu.com books mean nothing to them. Only one reads my blog. The great plot event is “being published” which means to them that I’m stamped as super-intelligent, since they don’t know that lots of super-intelligent people can’t write worth beans and some rather below the 100 IQ mark are dynamic and much-treasured writers. Yet they’re readers -- they read all the time, novels mostly. They’re pretty Jane Austeny.
In Manhattan right now there is a hustle about the “best books” of the year, just like the best movies and best actors at the Oscars. The initiated know that movie prizes are awarded by a process more webbed than any spider could manage, compounded by what other movies were released, how old the actor might be, whether they were unjustly passed over ten years ago, and so on. But it is frank and open that these awards are by movie people for movie people. The most interesting ones are probably the “craft” awards about lighting, sets, costumes, and all that great stuff you aren’t really supposed to notice while watching the movie.
There is a certain set of publishers who look for and solicit certain kinds of writing -- either smart political stuff or novels of a kind, often international these days, maybe confessional from the lower classes -- and then promote it to a set of people they believe they know about. Educated, Eastern, dressed a certain way, drinkers of certain beverages -- in case they don’t have a clue there are lists in magazines like Vanity Fair to tip them off so they won’t be stupid consumers of wristwatches or shampoo. People make fun of them and they make fun of each other, but in the end they are a tribe. Maybe a bit cross-Atlantic. No consciousness at all of any kind of life outside of that bent-back-on-itself context.
My book will never touch them. On the other hand, those who feel they are entitled to this book, say, Western art aficionadoes esp. in Montana, will find that they don’t quite find what they want in it (how much Scriver bronzes are worth) and more than they can quite assimilate (Beaux Arts equestrian monuments back east). The old girl friends, related or not, are going to be equally disappointed by what’s in and what’s out. A lot of people will say it’s too much about me, the author. And the same people as usual will cry incredulously, “But he’s not that FAMOUS!!!” Their point of reference will be Charlie Russell, who ranks as an obsession -- his actual personhood long since trampled.
But that’s not entirely what will be taking up my time. There are family matters to address and some have registered fears that I might blog about them. Clearly there is a deep concern for what they call “privacy,” and how people “deserve” it. I disagree, but there is a level at which blogging about someone or something begins to interfere with it, to change the terms of what’s going on. That raises moral stakes pretty high. I’ve already blurted out a few things (not about relatives) that I should not have, not that those involved didn’t deserve it. I doubt it affected their lives.
More than that, I have a lot to think about as I come close to seventy: how to spend the next ten years. So far, publishing a book is much less than I thought it would be. It will not get me out of debt. How much should I strip down my housekeeping? How much should I defend my monastic existence? Which books should I tackle next? The fiction in hopes of maybe attracting a bit of notice from the Montana simulation of Manhattan? Do I care? Or should I take on some of the things to which I am initiated and that people don’t even know there is anything to know about -- but that might matter to people a century from now. An interesting split is developing between the people who were around fifty years ago, but don’t understand computers and so never pick up information from blogs or databases, and new players who can search the Internet far and wide but never know what it was like on the rez in the Sixties.
Part of this reflection is prompted by reading “Indians, Cowboys and Western Art: A History of MONAC,” by Wilfred P. Schoenberg, S.J., wily old Jesuit who has gone to his reward -- or whatever. MONAC was the Museum of North American Culture built next to Gonzaga. It rose, largely entangled with the Flathead Valley Art Mafia, and fell. Cheney-Cowles tried to blackball them in the beginning and Cheney-Cowles ended up with their art and artifacts. “Schonie,” as he insists he was called affectionately, uses the book (which was self-published, printed by Thomas Printing in Kalispell, MT) to canonize those he loves (Gary Schildt!) or wants something from and to pour scorn on everyone who ever resisted or criticized him. You will not find Bob Scriver anywhere in the book -- at least I’m halfway through without his name being mentioned and he’s not in the index. I didn’t expect that he would be.
The trouble with writing something, whether it’s a book or a blog, is that it generally reveals a lot of connections and insights that the writer had no idea were being recorded, for good or for ill. Of course, readers are also apt to see ghosts from their own minds projected into what they read. I may need to take more daily walks to clear my head. On the other hand, it will be fun to report what I can as this unfolds -- excluding anything impinging on the privacy of innocents. Those that there are.
Thursday, January 17, 2008
SAVED BY PUBLICATION?
Last thing at night now I Google “Bronze Inside and Out” to see what I get. For a while the number of hits kept going up and up until they were about 1200 or more, but now they’ve sunk back down below a thousand, maybe 800 or more. I have no idea why this happens. I’m cheered to see that the Calgary Public Library has ordered two copies, one for the history shelves and one for the biographies. But there’s no notice that they’ve arrived yet.
I do know that one of the Calgary newspapers has received a review copy and staff are discussing among themselves who is competent to review it. Now that’s a new thought. They want someone sensitive and insightful, but actually my premise in writing it was to create a book that would be funny and a little wicked! I mean, there are patches of discussion of the history of art or immigration patterns from Europe to Indian reservations in Montana, but they’re clearly labeled so a person can skip them. On the whole there is a lot of romance and ingenuity among a bunch of people who don’t always know what they’re doing. I mean, I think it sometimes kills art to be too respectful.
I’m dividing my desk time among my new niece (lots of family info and photos flying back and forth), a big zoning war brewing in the town of Valier, and the follow-up on this book. Letters to old friends to let them know it’s coming. I made a set of postcards to send to people around the state who ought to be notified -- I put the cover of the book on them. I’m posting emails to the people who have inquired over the past decade and trying to keep an accurate list of all these people.
In between I’m using my sharp stick on the shippers and the distributors of books. On January 2 the books were delivered from the printer. On January 15 the American copies were packed and waiting on the loading dock. About the same time I received my five complimentary copies. (What a compliment.) Michigan State University is the distributor on the American side, which confuses all the people who think Canadian publishers can just merrily distribute books on the US side without thinking of customs and all the people who think Canada is just another state, so why would a person need a second press to be a distributor? Can’t they just pop them in one of those padded envelopes and throw them in the USA mail? Michigan tells me it takes about about three weeks for the shipper to get the books to them. Then they ship to the American bookstores from there.
Amazon was saying that the books would be sent in March, so the U of Calgary Press said, “Oh, no! They’ll be out much sooner!” So Amazon changed the delivery date to Feb. 28 which shows they still haven’t realized this is a leap year but they know to be sceptical of shipping dates. They are still showing the discarded cover for the book, though the new proper cover image has been sent to them. (Or so the U of Calg Press claims.) Whoever was typing in my name got distracted somehow so I’m listed as Mary Stracha. My new nom de plume. Maybe I’ll be unmasked by the usual energetic and misguided NYTimes reporter -- if they aren’t all busy working to whip up a good fight among the Presidential candidates.
But I enjoy seeing the Google entries that are in foreign languages. I can’t tell whether there are errors or not.
I have a champion here in Montana who wanted to help me use my author’s discount to buy more books so I could sell them at readings and signings. I’m not allowed to do it in a town with a bookstore, but that’s not much of a constraint in Montana. I told him he was not to get involved until he’d read the book, so I sent him a copy several days ago. No word yet. 400 pages of fine print. I don’t know whether he’s a fast reader. It’s not his main line of work.
The book is priced at $45 which was assigned when Loonies were still at 80% or so. Now that they are at par, there is consternation all over the Canadian publishing sphere because suddenly Canadian books are extremely expensive. Amazon, however, is selling my book at $30, a nice discount -- almost as good as my own as author. When I asked, the U of Calgary Press told me, “Amazon does whatever it wants to do.” Googling reveals other discounts. I don’t know what’s happening in England or Australia, much less Japan -- but the book may be of interest to them.
So far I’m speaking at the Glenbow Museum on February 12 and will send them the DVD of Bob talking about his work in case the weather goes rotten and I end up in the ditch. The honorarium is not enough to pay for the gas ($4 in Canada -- at par) but friends will house me for the night. Anyway, the Glenbow is a beloved institution in the Scriver career and I'm very pleased to be there first.
Then I speak again at the Valier Library on February 16 and they say they will put up posters through the area. I had originally put out feelers in Browning but was met with no enthusiasm. However, I tipped off the man who’s been selling my homemade books about Bob for the last few years so that he’ll get copies for this summer without having to wait for a second printing. We all feel pretty confident there WILL be a second printing. They only ordered a thousand copies.
I sold 350 copies of my homemade 70-page trial balloon bio of Bob. As it turns out this has confused some people, who think this big formal book is the same. Also, people keep wanting to buy “Bronze Inside and Out” from me because I sold the homemade ones personally and they think my writing is just a hobby. At the other extreme, “Twelve Blackfeet Stories,” a Print On Demand book that I wrote and produced but that is printed in Britain and mailed to the customer, is not being linked to “Bronze Inside and Out” by the book suppliers who should be able to tell by the ISBN and other info that it’s the same author. Montana, the Magazine of Western History is supposed to review “Twelve Blackfeet Stories” in this issue. That might help.
At the moment publishing is so confused that not even the publishers really understand what’s happening -- maybe them especially. I commented to Whiskey Prajer, who self publishes through Lulu.com the same as me, “Most people get their information about publishing from the same source that they get their information about Christianity: the movies! It's a plot device. The result is that they only know about a much-desired letter that arrives with an epiphany, life is changed from then on, and all is well.”
But it’s more like marriage: a beginning. And in my case, one of the drawbacks is that Bob isn’t here to know about it, so I’ve been making phone calls to his grandkids. Next best thing.
I do know that one of the Calgary newspapers has received a review copy and staff are discussing among themselves who is competent to review it. Now that’s a new thought. They want someone sensitive and insightful, but actually my premise in writing it was to create a book that would be funny and a little wicked! I mean, there are patches of discussion of the history of art or immigration patterns from Europe to Indian reservations in Montana, but they’re clearly labeled so a person can skip them. On the whole there is a lot of romance and ingenuity among a bunch of people who don’t always know what they’re doing. I mean, I think it sometimes kills art to be too respectful.
I’m dividing my desk time among my new niece (lots of family info and photos flying back and forth), a big zoning war brewing in the town of Valier, and the follow-up on this book. Letters to old friends to let them know it’s coming. I made a set of postcards to send to people around the state who ought to be notified -- I put the cover of the book on them. I’m posting emails to the people who have inquired over the past decade and trying to keep an accurate list of all these people.
In between I’m using my sharp stick on the shippers and the distributors of books. On January 2 the books were delivered from the printer. On January 15 the American copies were packed and waiting on the loading dock. About the same time I received my five complimentary copies. (What a compliment.) Michigan State University is the distributor on the American side, which confuses all the people who think Canadian publishers can just merrily distribute books on the US side without thinking of customs and all the people who think Canada is just another state, so why would a person need a second press to be a distributor? Can’t they just pop them in one of those padded envelopes and throw them in the USA mail? Michigan tells me it takes about about three weeks for the shipper to get the books to them. Then they ship to the American bookstores from there.
Amazon was saying that the books would be sent in March, so the U of Calgary Press said, “Oh, no! They’ll be out much sooner!” So Amazon changed the delivery date to Feb. 28 which shows they still haven’t realized this is a leap year but they know to be sceptical of shipping dates. They are still showing the discarded cover for the book, though the new proper cover image has been sent to them. (Or so the U of Calg Press claims.) Whoever was typing in my name got distracted somehow so I’m listed as Mary Stracha. My new nom de plume. Maybe I’ll be unmasked by the usual energetic and misguided NYTimes reporter -- if they aren’t all busy working to whip up a good fight among the Presidential candidates.
But I enjoy seeing the Google entries that are in foreign languages. I can’t tell whether there are errors or not.
I have a champion here in Montana who wanted to help me use my author’s discount to buy more books so I could sell them at readings and signings. I’m not allowed to do it in a town with a bookstore, but that’s not much of a constraint in Montana. I told him he was not to get involved until he’d read the book, so I sent him a copy several days ago. No word yet. 400 pages of fine print. I don’t know whether he’s a fast reader. It’s not his main line of work.
The book is priced at $45 which was assigned when Loonies were still at 80% or so. Now that they are at par, there is consternation all over the Canadian publishing sphere because suddenly Canadian books are extremely expensive. Amazon, however, is selling my book at $30, a nice discount -- almost as good as my own as author. When I asked, the U of Calgary Press told me, “Amazon does whatever it wants to do.” Googling reveals other discounts. I don’t know what’s happening in England or Australia, much less Japan -- but the book may be of interest to them.
So far I’m speaking at the Glenbow Museum on February 12 and will send them the DVD of Bob talking about his work in case the weather goes rotten and I end up in the ditch. The honorarium is not enough to pay for the gas ($4 in Canada -- at par) but friends will house me for the night. Anyway, the Glenbow is a beloved institution in the Scriver career and I'm very pleased to be there first.
Then I speak again at the Valier Library on February 16 and they say they will put up posters through the area. I had originally put out feelers in Browning but was met with no enthusiasm. However, I tipped off the man who’s been selling my homemade books about Bob for the last few years so that he’ll get copies for this summer without having to wait for a second printing. We all feel pretty confident there WILL be a second printing. They only ordered a thousand copies.
I sold 350 copies of my homemade 70-page trial balloon bio of Bob. As it turns out this has confused some people, who think this big formal book is the same. Also, people keep wanting to buy “Bronze Inside and Out” from me because I sold the homemade ones personally and they think my writing is just a hobby. At the other extreme, “Twelve Blackfeet Stories,” a Print On Demand book that I wrote and produced but that is printed in Britain and mailed to the customer, is not being linked to “Bronze Inside and Out” by the book suppliers who should be able to tell by the ISBN and other info that it’s the same author. Montana, the Magazine of Western History is supposed to review “Twelve Blackfeet Stories” in this issue. That might help.
At the moment publishing is so confused that not even the publishers really understand what’s happening -- maybe them especially. I commented to Whiskey Prajer, who self publishes through Lulu.com the same as me, “Most people get their information about publishing from the same source that they get their information about Christianity: the movies! It's a plot device. The result is that they only know about a much-desired letter that arrives with an epiphany, life is changed from then on, and all is well.”
But it’s more like marriage: a beginning. And in my case, one of the drawbacks is that Bob isn’t here to know about it, so I’ve been making phone calls to his grandkids. Next best thing.
Thursday, January 03, 2008
AUTHORS ARE MOTHERS; PUBLISHERS ARE FATHERS
Publishers are fathers, authors are mothers -- printers are... obstetricians? This observation is prompted by the reaction of the University of Calgary Press to -- at last! -- the appearance of “Bronze Inside and Out” yesterday, which was, “It’s beautiful!” Kind of what a father would say on seeing his newborn. When I complained about the lateness of the printer (which had the manuscript -- ready to go -- in October), the same U of Calgary Press person sympathized, “Oh, it must be like waiting for a baby to be born!” Implying that pregnancy is uncomfortable and the end is wanted -- but at least acknowledging that though the publisher is responsible for the original impetus, it is the mother/author who gestates the baby.
But that’s not how I feel now, though this book is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh and the “pregnancy” has been about fifty years long. I could keep it safe while it was unborn. Now I’m feeling like a parent whose child has just started school, going off alone into adventures. I want to be a “helicopter author,” hovering over the book and trying to guide it along. I know what sorts of pitfalls and burnings are out there waiting for it, some wanting to destroy it and some wanting to exalt it beyond common sense. Who should I alert? What follow-up articles should I write? What speeches should I make?
Bob Scriver was not one of those easy-going sweetheart artists like maybe John Clymer or Tom Sander. Personally difficult, he seemed to have a gift for getting into scrapes and controversies. Maybe it was the times, maybe it was being white on the Blackfeet reservation, and maybe it was a factor of his success that he attracted coyotes. Anyway, some people will react to the book in about the same way that they reacted to the person.
The first reactions of another sort of reader were to get rid of me, to shut me up, to deny that I could write a book, to reduce me to a stenographer instead of a contributor, to grab my book and make it into something else. I’ve had to assert my participation in this story. Minor players have some questions to answer (like Phil Scriver’s pretense of being Bob’s cousin so as to get at his business affairs) but I’m not going to pursue them. Let some ambitious journalist do it -- that’s their job. Rather, I’m interested in the big institutions who control Bob’s estate. By delaying decisions in his lifetime and putting his work in the hands of his widow (the fourth wife, now deceased: I was the third), he essentially put everything in the hands of lawyers. (Insert lawyer joke here.)
The goal became the conversion of goods to cash as quickly as it could be done. In the process, value was lost. Collections like that of the huge Fery mural-like paintings that used to line the walls of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife were sold one-by-one at auction. If the collection of animals had been kept together and displayed with those paintings, it would have remained something of unique beauty and value. Now it will never exist again. A collection of John Sharp sketches of the Blackfeet reservation was dispersed at auction. I’m unable to find out what happened to the John Rogers sculpture collection, though I’ve asked.
The molds of the original animals that Bob collected and used to make the paper mache shells for these full-mounts had been carefully stored. They also had considerable value, but they were destroyed. They were NOT the molds that were intended to be destroyed, the molds for the sculptures. In any case, Bob had been selling the copyrights of many of his bronzes to entrepreneurs who set their own edition limits, contracted with foundries, and owned their molds: these were not destroyed. New castings are available today if you know whom to contact.
The Montana Historical Society, whose chief focus is the sorting and preserving of valuable documents, cannot locate the most crucial documents of the Scriver estate: the records of sales. Much of the value of art of any sort and especially sculpture comes from being able to trace the ownership of the specific piece from artist to current owner. Bob was meticulous about keeping these records and also gave bronze buyers a certificate confirming their ownership of that specific number of the limited edition, along with the number expected to be cast. The MHS says it “cannot locate” these papers because it doesn’t have enough money. Yet the papers they removed from the studio had already been sorted into files which the MHS archives lists. Perhaps the provenance records had been removed in the year or so that Bob’s lawyer managed the estate in situ. He is a dealer in Scriver bronzes. Perhaps there is a deeper and more sinister motive: I hear rumors that MHS removed bronzes that had been ordered and paid for by customers.
No provision was made for the continuing publication of the three books that Bob self-published about his work: “An Honest Try,” “No More Buffalo,” and “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains.” A copy of the latter is for sale in the gift shop of the CMR Museum for $550. I’ve seen it on the Internet for as much as $800. Bob accurately predicted that the artifact collection would not be kept together, but that the pictorial record would endure.
The original lawyer tried to keep the estate in Browning as a foundation with himself as the director. The lawyer who took the estate away from that first lawyer (professional courtesy?) was quick to broker a deal to break it up. Bob had wanted everything to go to the Royal Alberta Museum, which had bought the Scriver Artifact Collection. In the last decades of Bob’s lifetime, he had become much entwined with the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls, serving on their advisory board. They had made repeated offers of space for his work, but he was always talked out of it (By whom? His lawyer?) or became doubtful. He was extremely aware of art wheeling and dealing in the state (some would say “corruption”) and if he smelled it, he veered off. At one meeting he gave an impassioned scolding to all present, but everyone put it down to senile dementia. Indeed, he was not mentally or emotionally balanced in the last decades. Probably the stroke in 1988 pushed him over the edge. The lawyers, of course, don’t want anyone to think about this.
For a while there was a four-way deal: the RAM, the CMR, and the MHS with the full-mounts (oh, what a nuisance) dumped on the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. (As was Arnold Olsen, in time.) Then there was a quick shuffle of peas under walnut shells and the CMR was excluded. MHS became the legal owner of everything with long-term “loans” of the Blackfeet series of bronzes to the RAM and those full-mounts to the RMEF. The irony is that the MHS has failed to even unpack the estate in the building that was supposed to house it, a steel warehouse with gallery space out by the Helena airport. In the meantime, Ed Mitch -- one of those entrepreneurs who collaborated with Bob -- gave his collection of Scriver bronzes to the CMR where they are exhibited today.
The MHS, which is truthfully bursting at the seams, is now aspiring to a new building. The location and designing of this edifice is very much open to speculation and plotting, which renders the MHS more vulnerable to examination for its policies and capacities than it has ever been. Whatever plan is settled upon, it will take a huge funding drive. Other competing institutions may not be motivated to cooperate.
This book will be jostled and dissected. But -- there are a lot of less political things in it. Funny stories, hunting adventures, hair-raising foundry moments. Heart-breakers and spiritual uplifters. In many ways, it is a story of unrequited love: I loved Bob Scriver, who didn’t love me; Bob loved the Blackfeet, who didn’t love him; and all three of us loved the east slope of the Rockies which doesn’t have emotions -- only grandeur.
But that’s not how I feel now, though this book is bone of my bone and flesh of my flesh and the “pregnancy” has been about fifty years long. I could keep it safe while it was unborn. Now I’m feeling like a parent whose child has just started school, going off alone into adventures. I want to be a “helicopter author,” hovering over the book and trying to guide it along. I know what sorts of pitfalls and burnings are out there waiting for it, some wanting to destroy it and some wanting to exalt it beyond common sense. Who should I alert? What follow-up articles should I write? What speeches should I make?
Bob Scriver was not one of those easy-going sweetheart artists like maybe John Clymer or Tom Sander. Personally difficult, he seemed to have a gift for getting into scrapes and controversies. Maybe it was the times, maybe it was being white on the Blackfeet reservation, and maybe it was a factor of his success that he attracted coyotes. Anyway, some people will react to the book in about the same way that they reacted to the person.
The first reactions of another sort of reader were to get rid of me, to shut me up, to deny that I could write a book, to reduce me to a stenographer instead of a contributor, to grab my book and make it into something else. I’ve had to assert my participation in this story. Minor players have some questions to answer (like Phil Scriver’s pretense of being Bob’s cousin so as to get at his business affairs) but I’m not going to pursue them. Let some ambitious journalist do it -- that’s their job. Rather, I’m interested in the big institutions who control Bob’s estate. By delaying decisions in his lifetime and putting his work in the hands of his widow (the fourth wife, now deceased: I was the third), he essentially put everything in the hands of lawyers. (Insert lawyer joke here.)
The goal became the conversion of goods to cash as quickly as it could be done. In the process, value was lost. Collections like that of the huge Fery mural-like paintings that used to line the walls of the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife were sold one-by-one at auction. If the collection of animals had been kept together and displayed with those paintings, it would have remained something of unique beauty and value. Now it will never exist again. A collection of John Sharp sketches of the Blackfeet reservation was dispersed at auction. I’m unable to find out what happened to the John Rogers sculpture collection, though I’ve asked.
The molds of the original animals that Bob collected and used to make the paper mache shells for these full-mounts had been carefully stored. They also had considerable value, but they were destroyed. They were NOT the molds that were intended to be destroyed, the molds for the sculptures. In any case, Bob had been selling the copyrights of many of his bronzes to entrepreneurs who set their own edition limits, contracted with foundries, and owned their molds: these were not destroyed. New castings are available today if you know whom to contact.
The Montana Historical Society, whose chief focus is the sorting and preserving of valuable documents, cannot locate the most crucial documents of the Scriver estate: the records of sales. Much of the value of art of any sort and especially sculpture comes from being able to trace the ownership of the specific piece from artist to current owner. Bob was meticulous about keeping these records and also gave bronze buyers a certificate confirming their ownership of that specific number of the limited edition, along with the number expected to be cast. The MHS says it “cannot locate” these papers because it doesn’t have enough money. Yet the papers they removed from the studio had already been sorted into files which the MHS archives lists. Perhaps the provenance records had been removed in the year or so that Bob’s lawyer managed the estate in situ. He is a dealer in Scriver bronzes. Perhaps there is a deeper and more sinister motive: I hear rumors that MHS removed bronzes that had been ordered and paid for by customers.
No provision was made for the continuing publication of the three books that Bob self-published about his work: “An Honest Try,” “No More Buffalo,” and “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains.” A copy of the latter is for sale in the gift shop of the CMR Museum for $550. I’ve seen it on the Internet for as much as $800. Bob accurately predicted that the artifact collection would not be kept together, but that the pictorial record would endure.
The original lawyer tried to keep the estate in Browning as a foundation with himself as the director. The lawyer who took the estate away from that first lawyer (professional courtesy?) was quick to broker a deal to break it up. Bob had wanted everything to go to the Royal Alberta Museum, which had bought the Scriver Artifact Collection. In the last decades of Bob’s lifetime, he had become much entwined with the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls, serving on their advisory board. They had made repeated offers of space for his work, but he was always talked out of it (By whom? His lawyer?) or became doubtful. He was extremely aware of art wheeling and dealing in the state (some would say “corruption”) and if he smelled it, he veered off. At one meeting he gave an impassioned scolding to all present, but everyone put it down to senile dementia. Indeed, he was not mentally or emotionally balanced in the last decades. Probably the stroke in 1988 pushed him over the edge. The lawyers, of course, don’t want anyone to think about this.
For a while there was a four-way deal: the RAM, the CMR, and the MHS with the full-mounts (oh, what a nuisance) dumped on the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation. (As was Arnold Olsen, in time.) Then there was a quick shuffle of peas under walnut shells and the CMR was excluded. MHS became the legal owner of everything with long-term “loans” of the Blackfeet series of bronzes to the RAM and those full-mounts to the RMEF. The irony is that the MHS has failed to even unpack the estate in the building that was supposed to house it, a steel warehouse with gallery space out by the Helena airport. In the meantime, Ed Mitch -- one of those entrepreneurs who collaborated with Bob -- gave his collection of Scriver bronzes to the CMR where they are exhibited today.
The MHS, which is truthfully bursting at the seams, is now aspiring to a new building. The location and designing of this edifice is very much open to speculation and plotting, which renders the MHS more vulnerable to examination for its policies and capacities than it has ever been. Whatever plan is settled upon, it will take a huge funding drive. Other competing institutions may not be motivated to cooperate.
This book will be jostled and dissected. But -- there are a lot of less political things in it. Funny stories, hunting adventures, hair-raising foundry moments. Heart-breakers and spiritual uplifters. In many ways, it is a story of unrequited love: I loved Bob Scriver, who didn’t love me; Bob loved the Blackfeet, who didn’t love him; and all three of us loved the east slope of the Rockies which doesn’t have emotions -- only grandeur.
Wednesday, January 02, 2008
BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT
"BRONZE INSIDE AND OUT: A BIOGRAPHICAL MEMOIR OF BOB SCRIVER" has now been delivered to the officers of the University of Calgary Press and will be shipped out to buyers as quickly as possible. Bookstores in both Canada and the USA have access to wholesalers -- I don't have the books myself. Amazon.com has been taking orders since Thanksgiving.
I think the press has severely underestimated the number of copies that will sell, so it would be a good idea to order now. Otherwise it will mean waiting for them to get around to a second printing and if there is anything I'm learning, it's that Canadians don't hurry.
Prairie Mary
I think the press has severely underestimated the number of copies that will sell, so it would be a good idea to order now. Otherwise it will mean waiting for them to get around to a second printing and if there is anything I'm learning, it's that Canadians don't hurry.
Prairie Mary
Subscribe to:
Posts (Atom)