SOME TRUTHS ABOUT PUBLISHING ARRIVED AT THE HARD WAY
These reflections are somewhat prompted by Stephen Bodio at Querencia</a> (stephenbodio.blogspot.com) who is contemplating how an aging but perfectly viable writer can survive in the face of the disintegration of the publishing industry.
1. Publishing as we have known in for the last century or so is a form of capitalism. That is, a publishing house is a business based on capital, usually the capital supplied by a PERSON, often someone with deep pockets and equally deep interests and (one hopes) discrimination. This person has presumably sought out or invited writing of distinction, NOT “what will sell.” The point of the enterprise was not money but discernment. The motivation was not from the author but from the publisher, who might have to persuade or even commission writers.
In some quarters, organizations with principles may take the place of the publishing gentleperson with pockets by making grants or commissioning writing. Academic presses, the Sierra Club, “Green” bodies of one sort or another, and so on. But the corporations who now own publishing houses are pure capitalists -- no other motives.
Now that capitalism comes from investment money, the key idea is to turn a profit. The main way conservative investors can see to turn a profit is to stick to what worked last time, no matter what it was or what it’s quality. Also, they expect a return of ten percent or more. Otherwise, they will look for other investments.
2. Publishing has been traditionally seen as a way for a talented writer to (eventually) make money from his or her passions, working alone and then being “discovered” by the deep pockets publisher. This story is emphasized over and over and over in movies and books. But it is like a lot of other assumptions: no evidence is ever submitted about the talented person who worked passionately alone and died penniless -- totally unrecognized by definition. Unrecorded. Undefended.
But publishers have realized that this potent myth about “how it works” will cause talented persons to subsidize their own writing. So now, the writer not only has to pay rent and groceries, but also must pay the publisher. The publisher, who once employed a staff of editors to interface with the writers, now had laid off all the editors -- who have redefined themselves as agents who do the same filtering and locating. Now agents also require the writer rather than the publisher to pay them.
3. The technical part of publishing -- getting ink onto paper, editing in the larger sense of organization and content, proofing for accuracy and clarity, formatting, illustrating, printing and binding, and finally distributing -- have never been easier. If you have the money, the machinery is all there. In fact, it takes less money than ever before because printing can be done one copy at a time instead of in mass lots that must be stored until sale (and taxed as property) and distributing can be handled online.
4. There are more customers out there than ever before. But they read less. And no one is quite sure what they DO read, in spite of all the demographic studies. But there are technical ways to find readers for any genre or discipline -- just takes time, effort and maybe money. Rather like locating voters. Or consumers of any kind. Amazon uses the technique of the publishers: sell them what they bought last time. (If you liked X, buy X2.) But writing the same thing over and over is not good for authors.
5. The major problem is sorting and evaluating. Everyone wants to be an author, even if they have to pay to do it. Critics are less eager. “Branding” is how some publishers do -- one publishes thrillers, another publishes chick lit, etc. (Agents also “brand.”) See http://www.dennismcmillan.com/ for a fascinating analysis of the market. McMillan sells to high-end readers of thrillers. His books are fine objects but he gives no attention to editing and proofing, depending on the writers for that. He’s got a “chimney” relationship going: readers who are like the writers in tastes and assumptions. The result is that a few years after publication, the individual copies, the actual books, can be worth a lot of money, introducing the element of speculation that is characteristic of the arts these days.
6. This means that the reader who chooses his or her books carefully AS OBJECTS can actually MAKE money rather than only being a consumer. Originally, the readers were the ultimate source of money for everyone. This practice also moves the profit to the second-hand (“antique” or “collector” market if you think “second-hand” implies downscale) rather than the original publisher.
7. Since many of the “readers” now consume “writing” aurally, it is possible to sell podcasts or “books on tape” and so on, esp. for people who spend a lot of time driving. Not many writers have figured this out and adapted. Whiskey Prajer http://whiskyprajer.blogspot.com/ is one who has. The problem is that these are transmissable with no object at all. They travel untraceably on the Internet. And Google et al will find the downloadable original.
8. I persist in thinking there is an aural market for foreign languages. If kids and day labor have mp3 players, they can listen to writing whether or not they are literate. I haven’t the faintest idea what to do about it. But I do know that Lulu.com is as happy to duplicate DVD’s and so on as they are to “make books.” Video cameras are simple and easy. They also produce “texts.”
9. Probably no one writer can produce enough stuff (unless they have a backlog) to keep a website supplied, but “bundling” by genre or quality or some other criteria ought to work. It wasn’t until the Cowboy Artists of America banded together as a “bundle” that they began to make an impression on the public. The genres that corporate bookstores use to “bundle” their shelves are not very useful. Powells probably comes the closest to something new, hiring a person who is a kind of “concierge” for each section, which might be by subject matter. This person, who has some expertise, can find things, make suggestions, ask buyers helpful questions, and so on. In short, this is a person who serves some of the purposes critics once supplied. There is also an element of status: the person who does this at Powells makes you his friend and confidante, as though you belonged to a status confirming club.
10. On the other end, the author end, there needs to be some sort of coach for writing. Originally an editor and now normally an agent gives feedback, unless one is enrolled in a university course. Increasingly impatient testimony about the quality and usefulness of an MFA is accumulating. They seem to have assumed the role of the mail order course called “Famous Writers” that I once began -- along with thousands of others -- which gave a person (at considerable expense) a series of assignments to be mailed in to “teachers” whose job it was to insult you so severely that you would never complete another assigment but would be so humiliated that you would never ask for your money back. They made a LOT of money.
Hmmmmm. But, as an old English teacher, I know what the catch is: the bad writing sticks to you. Coaching writing is not the best thing for a producing author to do.
Monday, April 14, 2008
Sunday, April 13, 2008
CORRUPTION
Lately there seems to be a much greater willingness to talk about corruption and to point out examples. This muck-raking, esp. in the media and during a political season, may be self-serving and a corruption in itself with unjustified accusations and phony indignation. But today the GF Tribune took on a story about the Blackfeet tribe’s long struggle with corruption. Of course, this must be considered in terms of the birth of the reservation, which was accompanied by much hornswoggling and boundary gerrymandering, then continued by crooked Indian agents who sold food meant for the starving tribal members and local opportunists who soon held title to land patented by tribal members who should never have been certified competent (some retarded, some demented, some blackmailed), and finally crowned by the United States government -- as trustees of tribal assets -- embezzling the tribe’s legitimate income for its own ends, like bailing out Chrysler or New York City.
I often wonder WHY? WHY is corruption such an on-going problem here? These are some of my brainstormed possible answers.
1. The first is in my introductory paragraph: things have always been done this way here. But surely not before white contact? Wasn’t everything wonderful then? Buffalo and the other elements of existence were so plentiful that there was enough to go around unless there were weak and dependent people who couldn’t hunt or maintain their lodge. In that case, relatives or compassionate leaders helped them out. In any case, the ethic was that the band (more than the tribe, which is sort of a Euro-imposed notion) had to survive, not the individual. War or theft from another band, so long as it wasn’t closely related, was as close as things came to corruption. And there WERE strong religious precepts against the kind of hoarding that leads to corruption and in favor of generosity, even though it was a world in which one person was not notably living in more luxury than another.
2. The inflation of wealth fueled by horses -- which not only made it more possible to raid others but also made it easier to haul all the loot around -- took minds off survival in order to contemplate luxurious excess. Then domination by whites pushed survival down, down to refugee camp levels, when enough food to live through the day was the goal. Disease destroyed families, made people fear each other and avoid cooperation, undermined the sense of being one with the world. There appeared to be no future. It was decades before the agent was able to write, “This year is the first in which there were more births than deaths.”
3. Aside from teaching people in the most brutal way that they must compete or die, this dire strait left the people with the vengeful feeling that they “deserve” anything they can beg, borrow, or steal. This is not confined to reservations: think of people who shoplift from fancy stores, rationalizing that the stores can spare it and “owe” a person. Theft is a fine imposed by a wronged victim.
4. Everyone does it. There’s no shame in cheating the IRS, right? Just don’t get caught. But after all, they EXPECT cheating and set the rates to compensate for that. It’s a bit of a game to see if you can beat the system. Who can resist poker played against a fat capitalist? Hacking a system that is heartless? Isn't it a victimless crime?
5. The regulations, inspections, monitors, auditors and investigators are so underfunded, so unwilling to get to Browning, Montana, and stay for the time necessary that they are easy to evade.
6. It’s a sign of intelligence to be able to cook the books, control the odds, create new layers of profit -- just like the big boys do. The paper every day explains how real estate brokers, hedge fund analysts, bundlers, penny stocks, etc. managed to fool everyone into thinking there was profit in something that didn’t really exist. People show their friends how to do it.
7. Just plain simple perceived need, like all the people (especially women) across the state who are constantly caught embezzling and “borrowing” money from school or community programs and organizations -- not for themselves so much as for their families who think they MUST have so much more than they ever did before. (A Blackfeet friend of mine found that one of his grandkids had left his iPod at his house. He wasn’t sure which one of the several kids with iPods had left it. We pondered what he would have thought of an iPod in the Sixties: the technology of it, the cost of it. In those days he was overjoyed to get a free candy bar.) Now the scale of “need” is not a simple treat but for some expensive status toy. Maybe a handsome sports jacket with leather sleeves.
8. Every financial transaction is so dense with rules, all of them with complex footnotes and exceptions, that a person can hardly manage to do the right thing, for lack of being able to figure it out. Therefore consequences seem arbitrary and surprising.
9. The safeguards and oversights too easily become new ways of corrupting the system, either by hiding offenses, or by the enforcers using them for extortion. The ones in charge are the ones who become corrupt. School principals, for instance, have a myriad of opportunities to manipulate money, discipline, athletic rules, access to services, use of space, insurance contracts, kickbacks for materials and even grades. Teachers, less so. The janitor is probably reduced to simple theft and lies, same as the kids.
10. No one cares very much. They despair.
This story in the newspaper was about “Cameron,” the fossilized baby dinosaur lying in state at the Blackfeet Heritage Center, which was built as the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. The idea is that the tribe will have to sell the fossil to raise money because of huge debts.
In their October 18, 2007, audit report, Forensic Solutions LLC of Fargo, N.D. notes: “There is evidence of pervasive corruption in almost every department. The common theme for fraud appears to be personal use of tribal vehicles, credit cards, travel vouchers, abuse of grant money and political cronyism. ... Further investigations might uncover more schemes such as ghost employees, shell corporations, unauthorized bank accounts, and other criminal conspiracies.” My suspicion is that there are plenty of off-reservation non-Indian co-conspirators -- as there have been since the beginning.
Take the baby dino fossil. The up-front suggestion is to sell it as a fungible asset though it was a gift to the tribe to be kept in trust for people everywhere. The second level suggestion is that it could be the centerpiece of a dino museum that would raise lots of money. The third level suggestion (covert) is “give us money or we’ll shoot this baby dino. We’ll have no choice but to deprive the Montana people of this wonderful object by selling it on the open market.” This wouldn’t be a viable threat unless someone already wants to buy it.
I often wonder WHY? WHY is corruption such an on-going problem here? These are some of my brainstormed possible answers.
1. The first is in my introductory paragraph: things have always been done this way here. But surely not before white contact? Wasn’t everything wonderful then? Buffalo and the other elements of existence were so plentiful that there was enough to go around unless there were weak and dependent people who couldn’t hunt or maintain their lodge. In that case, relatives or compassionate leaders helped them out. In any case, the ethic was that the band (more than the tribe, which is sort of a Euro-imposed notion) had to survive, not the individual. War or theft from another band, so long as it wasn’t closely related, was as close as things came to corruption. And there WERE strong religious precepts against the kind of hoarding that leads to corruption and in favor of generosity, even though it was a world in which one person was not notably living in more luxury than another.
2. The inflation of wealth fueled by horses -- which not only made it more possible to raid others but also made it easier to haul all the loot around -- took minds off survival in order to contemplate luxurious excess. Then domination by whites pushed survival down, down to refugee camp levels, when enough food to live through the day was the goal. Disease destroyed families, made people fear each other and avoid cooperation, undermined the sense of being one with the world. There appeared to be no future. It was decades before the agent was able to write, “This year is the first in which there were more births than deaths.”
3. Aside from teaching people in the most brutal way that they must compete or die, this dire strait left the people with the vengeful feeling that they “deserve” anything they can beg, borrow, or steal. This is not confined to reservations: think of people who shoplift from fancy stores, rationalizing that the stores can spare it and “owe” a person. Theft is a fine imposed by a wronged victim.
4. Everyone does it. There’s no shame in cheating the IRS, right? Just don’t get caught. But after all, they EXPECT cheating and set the rates to compensate for that. It’s a bit of a game to see if you can beat the system. Who can resist poker played against a fat capitalist? Hacking a system that is heartless? Isn't it a victimless crime?
5. The regulations, inspections, monitors, auditors and investigators are so underfunded, so unwilling to get to Browning, Montana, and stay for the time necessary that they are easy to evade.
6. It’s a sign of intelligence to be able to cook the books, control the odds, create new layers of profit -- just like the big boys do. The paper every day explains how real estate brokers, hedge fund analysts, bundlers, penny stocks, etc. managed to fool everyone into thinking there was profit in something that didn’t really exist. People show their friends how to do it.
7. Just plain simple perceived need, like all the people (especially women) across the state who are constantly caught embezzling and “borrowing” money from school or community programs and organizations -- not for themselves so much as for their families who think they MUST have so much more than they ever did before. (A Blackfeet friend of mine found that one of his grandkids had left his iPod at his house. He wasn’t sure which one of the several kids with iPods had left it. We pondered what he would have thought of an iPod in the Sixties: the technology of it, the cost of it. In those days he was overjoyed to get a free candy bar.) Now the scale of “need” is not a simple treat but for some expensive status toy. Maybe a handsome sports jacket with leather sleeves.
8. Every financial transaction is so dense with rules, all of them with complex footnotes and exceptions, that a person can hardly manage to do the right thing, for lack of being able to figure it out. Therefore consequences seem arbitrary and surprising.
9. The safeguards and oversights too easily become new ways of corrupting the system, either by hiding offenses, or by the enforcers using them for extortion. The ones in charge are the ones who become corrupt. School principals, for instance, have a myriad of opportunities to manipulate money, discipline, athletic rules, access to services, use of space, insurance contracts, kickbacks for materials and even grades. Teachers, less so. The janitor is probably reduced to simple theft and lies, same as the kids.
10. No one cares very much. They despair.
This story in the newspaper was about “Cameron,” the fossilized baby dinosaur lying in state at the Blackfeet Heritage Center, which was built as the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife. The idea is that the tribe will have to sell the fossil to raise money because of huge debts.
In their October 18, 2007, audit report, Forensic Solutions LLC of Fargo, N.D. notes: “There is evidence of pervasive corruption in almost every department. The common theme for fraud appears to be personal use of tribal vehicles, credit cards, travel vouchers, abuse of grant money and political cronyism. ... Further investigations might uncover more schemes such as ghost employees, shell corporations, unauthorized bank accounts, and other criminal conspiracies.” My suspicion is that there are plenty of off-reservation non-Indian co-conspirators -- as there have been since the beginning.
Take the baby dino fossil. The up-front suggestion is to sell it as a fungible asset though it was a gift to the tribe to be kept in trust for people everywhere. The second level suggestion is that it could be the centerpiece of a dino museum that would raise lots of money. The third level suggestion (covert) is “give us money or we’ll shoot this baby dino. We’ll have no choice but to deprive the Montana people of this wonderful object by selling it on the open market.” This wouldn’t be a viable threat unless someone already wants to buy it.
Saturday, April 12, 2008
MEME: PASSION QUILT
I don’t usually respond to “memes” which are little games, a set of questions usually, meant to encourage links among blogs and get people acquainted with each other. The kind of blogging that I do, which is essentially publishing 1,000 word essays, doesn’t really lend itself and I’m a lousy linker, as several complainants have pointed out. After all, a “weblog” or “blog” is supposed to be a summary of visits to other people’s blogs, complete with links. The only person I know of who does this in a pure sense is Michael Blowhard, especially when he makes an outright set of links and calls it “Elsewhere.” I know that many of my readers have come from this list, which are taken as recommendations, I guess.
So this meme comes from Chas, whose blog “Letter from Hard Scrabble Creek” directed me to 2.blowhards.com in the first place, as well as Stephen Bodio’s Querencia at
Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.
Give your picture a short title.
“The Boy and his Dog are Thinking.”
Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."
Done.
Link back to this blog entry.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008 entry for “Letter from Hardscrabble Creek” See above.
Include links to 5 (or more) educators.
This one won’t work. I don’t think I know any educators with blogs except for Richard Stern at the University of Chicago who publishes his in the rarefied context of “The New Republic,” far over my head. Other than Tim, who vlogs rather than blogs anyway, and whose mention would chase all sorts of coyotes my way. The teachers I know are at the secondary level, which means they are lucky to have time to sleep, much less blog.
So instead I’ll tell you about this photo. It’s Leland, my student in the 7th grade in Browning, Montana, standing beside the dog of the band teacher who has such a dog because he’s on the Blackfeet Reservation and was scared of Indians. (His wife probably was not.) However, Leland knows dogs have always been friends of the Blackfeet and is not intimidated. He sometimes uses his great-grandfather’s name: Eagle Calf. Also, he has been given the traditional name, “Jumps Up.”
The scene is just outside my classroom at the back of the school built by Doug Gold, another highly controversial white fellow. His father was the local Presbyterian minister, a Scotsman, but that is forgotten. Gold is accused of politically incorrect things but was Bob Scriver’s revered superintendent of schools. Gold’s daughter lives here in Valier. For a while it was suggested that this school be renamed for Gold, but the Neo-Traditionalists rose up in horror. It ended up being “Napi School,” which means it is named for a much more indecent and incorrect fellow than Gold could hope to be. (Napi is the mythological trickster.)
Leland is a massive grandfather now and runs a medical supply business out of the house where Bob Scriver was born and grew up. Both Bob’s parents came to the house as newlyweds and died of old age there many decades later. Just a few days ago Leland and his friend came by my house in Valier and helped to assemble the stovepipe on the little wood stove in my garage so I can burn up the sticks I’ve been pruning from my yard trees.
Leland is one of the most curious-minded and reaching-out students that I’ve taught. When he knew me, I was 21 and just forming my two big rules for life:
1. If you must choose between education and money, choose education.
2. If you must choose between adventure and security, choose adventure.
This has brought me near the end of my seventh decade broke but full of wild stories. No regrets. Leland, who was maybe 12 when I was 21, never made such formal rules but has had a similar life. His dedication to Pentecostal evangelism has taken him far to the north. His love of traditional Blackfeet ways, his family, and this place have brought him back here. He has made his living mostly as a hospital accountant, because he loves math. I think we independently reached the same conclusion about what is worthwhile in life. Sometimes a teacher is most effective by example.
Bob Scriver also taught on this reservation and there was a time when we went to events that if his voice was heard, heads of grandparents who had been his students went up, and when my voice was heard, the heads of the grandchildren went up. It was simple conditioning, not any kind of homage. Sometimes they were very angry at us and other times they weren’t. Now when I go to events alone, people throw their arms around me and exclaim, “teacher!” because they came from a time when teachers were at least respected. Often I don’t recognize them because we’re changed by time passing. Sometimes they are people whom I would have cheerfully strangled in the classroom. Other times students I loved have turned away with contempt.
Alvina Krause, legendary acting teacher at Northwestern University, used to say that both the tragedy and comedy of teaching was that one would never know the results until decades later. Which the rose and which the skunk cabbage? Who would earn the Nobel Prize and who would be killed in a drunken car crash two years after high school graduation? They’ve pretty much sorted themselves out by now.
If I knew a former student of mine who blogged, I would link him or her now. Some became teachers but none became bloggers -- that I know of. But we never exhaust our knowledge of each other. Leland and I have a lot to talk about because we both followed my Rules for a Life and now we’ve become equals. We both like to sit by a warm woodstove and tell stories. Maybe now that Chas is retiring, he'll drop by.
So this meme comes from Chas, whose blog “Letter from Hard Scrabble Creek”
Post a picture or make/take/create your own that captures what YOU are most passionate for students to learn about.
Give your picture a short title.
“The Boy and his Dog are Thinking.”
Title your blog post "Meme: Passion Quilt."
Done.
Link back to this blog entry.
Wednesday, April 02, 2008 entry for “Letter from Hardscrabble Creek” See above.
Include links to 5 (or more) educators.
This one won’t work. I don’t think I know any educators with blogs except for Richard Stern at the University of Chicago who publishes his in the rarefied context of “The New Republic,” far over my head. Other than Tim, who vlogs rather than blogs anyway, and whose mention would chase all sorts of coyotes my way. The teachers I know are at the secondary level, which means they are lucky to have time to sleep, much less blog.
So instead I’ll tell you about this photo. It’s Leland, my student in the 7th grade in Browning, Montana, standing beside the dog of the band teacher who has such a dog because he’s on the Blackfeet Reservation and was scared of Indians. (His wife probably was not.) However, Leland knows dogs have always been friends of the Blackfeet and is not intimidated. He sometimes uses his great-grandfather’s name: Eagle Calf. Also, he has been given the traditional name, “Jumps Up.”
The scene is just outside my classroom at the back of the school built by Doug Gold, another highly controversial white fellow. His father was the local Presbyterian minister, a Scotsman, but that is forgotten. Gold is accused of politically incorrect things but was Bob Scriver’s revered superintendent of schools. Gold’s daughter lives here in Valier. For a while it was suggested that this school be renamed for Gold, but the Neo-Traditionalists rose up in horror. It ended up being “Napi School,” which means it is named for a much more indecent and incorrect fellow than Gold could hope to be. (Napi is the mythological trickster.)
Leland is a massive grandfather now and runs a medical supply business out of the house where Bob Scriver was born and grew up. Both Bob’s parents came to the house as newlyweds and died of old age there many decades later. Just a few days ago Leland and his friend came by my house in Valier and helped to assemble the stovepipe on the little wood stove in my garage so I can burn up the sticks I’ve been pruning from my yard trees.
Leland is one of the most curious-minded and reaching-out students that I’ve taught. When he knew me, I was 21 and just forming my two big rules for life:
1. If you must choose between education and money, choose education.
2. If you must choose between adventure and security, choose adventure.
This has brought me near the end of my seventh decade broke but full of wild stories. No regrets. Leland, who was maybe 12 when I was 21, never made such formal rules but has had a similar life. His dedication to Pentecostal evangelism has taken him far to the north. His love of traditional Blackfeet ways, his family, and this place have brought him back here. He has made his living mostly as a hospital accountant, because he loves math. I think we independently reached the same conclusion about what is worthwhile in life. Sometimes a teacher is most effective by example.
Bob Scriver also taught on this reservation and there was a time when we went to events that if his voice was heard, heads of grandparents who had been his students went up, and when my voice was heard, the heads of the grandchildren went up. It was simple conditioning, not any kind of homage. Sometimes they were very angry at us and other times they weren’t. Now when I go to events alone, people throw their arms around me and exclaim, “teacher!” because they came from a time when teachers were at least respected. Often I don’t recognize them because we’re changed by time passing. Sometimes they are people whom I would have cheerfully strangled in the classroom. Other times students I loved have turned away with contempt.
Alvina Krause, legendary acting teacher at Northwestern University, used to say that both the tragedy and comedy of teaching was that one would never know the results until decades later. Which the rose and which the skunk cabbage? Who would earn the Nobel Prize and who would be killed in a drunken car crash two years after high school graduation? They’ve pretty much sorted themselves out by now.
If I knew a former student of mine who blogged, I would link him or her now. Some became teachers but none became bloggers -- that I know of. But we never exhaust our knowledge of each other. Leland and I have a lot to talk about because we both followed my Rules for a Life and now we’ve become equals. We both like to sit by a warm woodstove and tell stories. Maybe now that Chas is retiring, he'll drop by.
Friday, April 11, 2008
VALIER WATER INFRASTRUCTURE
In a small prairie town the level of infrastructure improvement is not necessarily representable in statistics. For instance, a recent accomplishment of the town of Valier water-master was finally potting the muskrat that had taken up residence in the sewage lagoon and was busy tunneling through the retaining dikes.
A shrinking community faces problems invisible to outsiders. Consider that the Valier churches, an important infrastructure, struggle to meet their expenses. The Catholics and Lutherans have given up their resident pastors, now depending on visiting clergy already stretched thin or on volunteer leaders from within the congregation. The Methodists, when I came, had a pastor who put much energy into the community in subtle ways, like attending the Senior Citizen lunches to energize the conversation and stay aware of personal situations. He overachieved and was moved to a livelier and more populous community. When he left, I considered taking on this little volunteer “ministry” (I spent ten years in the clergy) but found that even those subsidized lunches are too expensive for me and anyway not planned for a low-carb Diabetes 2 diet like mine, in spite of the number of people in town who share this condition.
Originally, when I retired here to follow my lifelong desire to write, there was a laundromat, a car dealer, two grocery stores, and two service stations. The laundromat and the car dealer are gone, one grocery store is now a custom cutter meat store and one service station is private while the other is a “Quick Stop.” At one point the bread wholesaler announced he would quit delivering to the remaining grocery store because it wasn’t worth the long drive to sell a few loaves. When we cast around for solutions, it became clear that though many of us could use the extra money and some had the necessary skills, no one would be able to bake and sell from home because of stringent state rules about food service.
But this is part of a long trend. There are no pay phones, because “everyone has cell phones.” There is no bus because “everyone” has cars. The TV transmitter is not maintained because “everyone” has gone to satellite discs. Many things must be done over the Internet because “everyone” has computers. But this is not true: there is always a minority that does NOT have the latest technological improvements.
It is assumed that the safety dimension of phones or the comfort of television chatter is replaced in small towns by close community ties and neighbors who, as the joke goes, know when you change toothpaste brands. This isn’t always true. When the proportion of oldsters is high, they can’t always look out for each other -- call for help when an old lady falls on the ice or know if flu has kept someone in bed. Anyway, the women and younger people who used to shovel walks and carry casseroles are now holding down jobs, most likely in towns thirty miles away.
Ironically, Valier housing has recently had a bit of a boom from at least three sources: displaced low income folks from the Flathead Valley where property values and population density have skyrocketed, reservation families looking for good schools and neighborhood safety, and law officers attached to homeland security, the Shelby prison, or county sheriff’s office. From its earliest existence Valier has believed that some day there would be a boom that brought in respectable prosperous people. But there remains quite a contrast between people like me in my ancient decrepit house and the homes of professionals like the architects at Swank Construction, one of the most successful businesses in the state.
In the past, water bills were paid by making a total of the system costs and then simply divving them up among the consumers. At one time there were meters, but in a time when everyone was at about the same level of use, they were considered unnecessary. Today, some people are supplying three bathrooms, a hot tub, an underground lawn irrigation system (and lawns are bigger than they used to be), a dishwasher, and a clothes washer (running constantly to keep up with kids). This is quite different from my own lack of dishwasher or clothes washer, one bathroom with a shower rather than a tub, and “xeriscaped” yard. I wash clothes at a laundromat thirty miles away, trying to combine the trip with a grocery buy -- not good for the Valier economy. But I pay the same water bill as everyone else who has my inlet pipe size. It appears that re-installation of water meters has been put off so long that they are incredibly expensive, but the advantage is that they can be “read” from the street easily and quickly, which is not an advantage to the populace, but easier for town employees.
What is slowly being revealed is that over the years the water services themselves have become tangled. Persons building “granny houses” ran the water lines off their own houses so only one service would be registered. Persons installed lawn or garden watering systems on the same line as a neighbor’s waterline. One of my neighbors has two structures on one water line but has to pay for two services. Struggle and hard feelings are inevitable. There are constant accusations of careless abuse and undetected leaks.
But the prospect of having to pay as much as $2,000 per household, as rumor suggests, evokes pure raw fear in many of us. In 1999 I could pay my bills and have a little left over. Now I come up fifty dollars short every month and have to juggle bills until I find a windfall or sell something.
This town was founded by dryland farmers, mostly Belgian families from the same area in Europe so they had pre-existing ties and standards. Now we have many kinds of people in town who do not know each other or share values. Some of those dryland farmers have had the advantage of irrigation, which is now being hit by both drought and the necessity of legalizing and codifying water rights. These folks must get their household water through the Valier water system and though it only accounts for 2 or 3% of total use, it is constantly questioned. The airport business in ag chemicals diluted by the city water system is also challenged. The feeling is that something somewhere must be responsible, but surely not global warming.
Dissension and distrust are as damaging to the functioning of a community as -- well, I’ll say “water shortage.” But no amount of meetings, surveys, and statistics by engineers and interface contractors can magically smooth the way. The least we can do is appeal for mitigation for what looks to be a costly process.
Thursday, April 10, 2008
VALIER AND WATER
VALIER AND WATER 4/10/08
LAKE FRANCIS, NEITHER SUMMER NOR WINTER
VALIER’S WATER HISTORY
In the beginning was the prairie, shaped by run-off from the Rocky Mountains. The Blackfeet knew the waterways, the coulees they made, and grassy meadows good for horses. When the reservation was marked out, the rivers formed the boundaries. The fact that rivers sometimes changed channels was not helpful, but at least a stream was a clear marker. Birch Creek -- just north of Valier -- has been the southern boundary for many years, since it was moved back for the third time under pressure from ranchers.
At the end of the War Between the States, two young Confederate veterans, William and Charles Conrad (Charles having been a member of Mosby’s Raiders at age sixteen) from a Virginia plantation came to the east slope of the Rockies. They were tough opportunists who soon made a fortune among the freighters who as often carried alcohol to Indians as not. Using the capital thus acquired, the two filed homestead claims on what had been reservation, using their employees in tricky ways to file on every source of water, so that they had a monopoly and no one else could ranch there.
Employees married to Piegan women managed to get control of water rights even on the reservation. When Birch Creek moved north in some places, the Conrads were quick to claim the land that changed sides. These were open range years, but the Seven Block claimed enormous acreage. When the ranches began to fence, the Conrads moved to the new scheme of irrigating land.
Ignoring any laws (there were few then anyway) except maybe a handshake agreement with the Indian Agent and a few other bigshots, the Conrads (with federal subsidies) built Swift Dam and doing business as the Pondera County Canal and Reservoir Company constructed a complex of ditches and impoundments all along the south side of Birch Creek. (They later sold out.) In 1965 the ambiguity over who owned and should maintain Swift Dam resulted in a lack of maintenance that allowed the structure to be overtopped and washed out, sending a deadly thirty foot wall of water downstream where it killed many people. The dam was rebuilt.
Next to the little town of Valier, named for an engineer, was a small lake on the south side of today’s little “island” in Lake Frances, named for one of the Conrad wives. This became the property of the Pondera County Canal and Reservoir Company for the purpose of selling shares that divvy up the water rights. The water in that lake belongs to the Canal Company and could not, for instance, be pumped out to water yards in Valier. There is presently muttering that irrigation has been expanded and additional shares quietly sold, but this is a minor problem compared to two others.
The first is climate change which has not only much diminished snowfall that once left a huge reservoir of water in the mountains, but also causes much moisture to fall as rain rather than snow, so that it is not kept in the mountains. The prairie is also droughty, so that the need is higher and evaporation loss is greater.
The second is that the movement to regularize and legalize water rights has meant that the original Piegan peoples who needed only small amounts of water are now ready to begin irrigating their own alfalfa fields and they have first claim on the water, according to the Winters decision which gives all federally established entities as much water as they need to function according to their purpose. The purpose of the reservation is to support the tribal members. Settling this now might mean as much as a 30% loss of water for the Pondera Canal Company. The tribe knows it will only get one shot at setting the terms of this negotiation and they are good “bone game” players, so they are deliberately as ambiguous and slow as they can be, which wears on the nerves of the ranchers.
Once “Lake Frances” had been established, it attracted the attention of fishermen, whom the town businessmen see as a source of income, buying bait and meals. A little campground is constantly under pressure to expand and upgrade, with fishermen sometimes helping. Because the east front temperature sinks way below zero in the winter, ice fishing is as popular as small boat fishing in summer.
Other water-based recreation -- sail-boarding in summer and ice-sailing in winter (the constant winds clean snow off the ice but are sometimes too overpowering), jet-skiing, and so on -- brings in customers for the cafes and motels and sometimes claims lives. The emotional investment in Lake Frances is high, but locals don’t always remember that it is privately owned. Because the state plants fish, there are rules to follow.
When water levels were high, there was a genuine small island in Lake Frances where waterfowl and herons could nest in the small grove. Seagulls have also chosen the protection of the island to nest. But recently there is never enough water in the lake to keep the island separate and the fishermen have become fond of driving their boat trailers out there to launch from a dock brought from Bynum by the fishermen. A local construction company owner helpfully graveled the little trail so people wouldn’t get stuck.
Valier has been shrinking. Young people leave, ranches go into CRP, dealers dependent on ranches go out of business -- it’s a familiar pattern across the West. People seem to be moving in, but they are as different from the locals as the first Belgians brought in by their priest were from their Piegan predecessors. These new people have money, are attracted by scenery and lofty sentiments, but do not understand drought. Among them are bird-lovers, who recently discovered that there are many dead birds on that island -- whether shot, run-over by ATV’s, trampled by teens, or what. They have national connections and resources and do not hesitate to invoke the federal laws (actually international treaty laws) that impose felony penalties of fines and jail on any unlawful killing of just about any bird you could name, including the seagulls that many of the cleanliness-obsessed locals despise as messy garbage eaters.
So now we have a rich tangle of precedents, feelings, laws and preferences that date back to the beginning and that affect everyone local. The Pondera Canal Company claims it will simply shut down the island and the little campground -- maybe bulldoze the island out of existence, but it has a federal sanctuary designation which locals had thought was more of an honor than a restriction. The mayor will erect signs and barriers and suggests siccing the fishermen on the bird-lovers. The constant arguments are beginning to start feuds around town.
There is only one kind of person who benefits from all this -- the writer, especially the historian. I’ll keep you posted. No use letting it go to waste. Shall I post a bibliography?
LAKE FRANCIS, NEITHER SUMMER NOR WINTER
VALIER’S WATER HISTORY
In the beginning was the prairie, shaped by run-off from the Rocky Mountains. The Blackfeet knew the waterways, the coulees they made, and grassy meadows good for horses. When the reservation was marked out, the rivers formed the boundaries. The fact that rivers sometimes changed channels was not helpful, but at least a stream was a clear marker. Birch Creek -- just north of Valier -- has been the southern boundary for many years, since it was moved back for the third time under pressure from ranchers.
At the end of the War Between the States, two young Confederate veterans, William and Charles Conrad (Charles having been a member of Mosby’s Raiders at age sixteen) from a Virginia plantation came to the east slope of the Rockies. They were tough opportunists who soon made a fortune among the freighters who as often carried alcohol to Indians as not. Using the capital thus acquired, the two filed homestead claims on what had been reservation, using their employees in tricky ways to file on every source of water, so that they had a monopoly and no one else could ranch there.
Employees married to Piegan women managed to get control of water rights even on the reservation. When Birch Creek moved north in some places, the Conrads were quick to claim the land that changed sides. These were open range years, but the Seven Block claimed enormous acreage. When the ranches began to fence, the Conrads moved to the new scheme of irrigating land.
Ignoring any laws (there were few then anyway) except maybe a handshake agreement with the Indian Agent and a few other bigshots, the Conrads (with federal subsidies) built Swift Dam and doing business as the Pondera County Canal and Reservoir Company constructed a complex of ditches and impoundments all along the south side of Birch Creek. (They later sold out.) In 1965 the ambiguity over who owned and should maintain Swift Dam resulted in a lack of maintenance that allowed the structure to be overtopped and washed out, sending a deadly thirty foot wall of water downstream where it killed many people. The dam was rebuilt.
Next to the little town of Valier, named for an engineer, was a small lake on the south side of today’s little “island” in Lake Frances, named for one of the Conrad wives. This became the property of the Pondera County Canal and Reservoir Company for the purpose of selling shares that divvy up the water rights. The water in that lake belongs to the Canal Company and could not, for instance, be pumped out to water yards in Valier. There is presently muttering that irrigation has been expanded and additional shares quietly sold, but this is a minor problem compared to two others.
The first is climate change which has not only much diminished snowfall that once left a huge reservoir of water in the mountains, but also causes much moisture to fall as rain rather than snow, so that it is not kept in the mountains. The prairie is also droughty, so that the need is higher and evaporation loss is greater.
The second is that the movement to regularize and legalize water rights has meant that the original Piegan peoples who needed only small amounts of water are now ready to begin irrigating their own alfalfa fields and they have first claim on the water, according to the Winters decision which gives all federally established entities as much water as they need to function according to their purpose. The purpose of the reservation is to support the tribal members. Settling this now might mean as much as a 30% loss of water for the Pondera Canal Company. The tribe knows it will only get one shot at setting the terms of this negotiation and they are good “bone game” players, so they are deliberately as ambiguous and slow as they can be, which wears on the nerves of the ranchers.
Once “Lake Frances” had been established, it attracted the attention of fishermen, whom the town businessmen see as a source of income, buying bait and meals. A little campground is constantly under pressure to expand and upgrade, with fishermen sometimes helping. Because the east front temperature sinks way below zero in the winter, ice fishing is as popular as small boat fishing in summer.
Other water-based recreation -- sail-boarding in summer and ice-sailing in winter (the constant winds clean snow off the ice but are sometimes too overpowering), jet-skiing, and so on -- brings in customers for the cafes and motels and sometimes claims lives. The emotional investment in Lake Frances is high, but locals don’t always remember that it is privately owned. Because the state plants fish, there are rules to follow.
When water levels were high, there was a genuine small island in Lake Frances where waterfowl and herons could nest in the small grove. Seagulls have also chosen the protection of the island to nest. But recently there is never enough water in the lake to keep the island separate and the fishermen have become fond of driving their boat trailers out there to launch from a dock brought from Bynum by the fishermen. A local construction company owner helpfully graveled the little trail so people wouldn’t get stuck.
Valier has been shrinking. Young people leave, ranches go into CRP, dealers dependent on ranches go out of business -- it’s a familiar pattern across the West. People seem to be moving in, but they are as different from the locals as the first Belgians brought in by their priest were from their Piegan predecessors. These new people have money, are attracted by scenery and lofty sentiments, but do not understand drought. Among them are bird-lovers, who recently discovered that there are many dead birds on that island -- whether shot, run-over by ATV’s, trampled by teens, or what. They have national connections and resources and do not hesitate to invoke the federal laws (actually international treaty laws) that impose felony penalties of fines and jail on any unlawful killing of just about any bird you could name, including the seagulls that many of the cleanliness-obsessed locals despise as messy garbage eaters.
So now we have a rich tangle of precedents, feelings, laws and preferences that date back to the beginning and that affect everyone local. The Pondera Canal Company claims it will simply shut down the island and the little campground -- maybe bulldoze the island out of existence, but it has a federal sanctuary designation which locals had thought was more of an honor than a restriction. The mayor will erect signs and barriers and suggests siccing the fishermen on the bird-lovers. The constant arguments are beginning to start feuds around town.
There is only one kind of person who benefits from all this -- the writer, especially the historian. I’ll keep you posted. No use letting it go to waste. Shall I post a bibliography?
Wednesday, April 09, 2008
THE EDGE OF THE CRAZIES by Jamie Harrison
“The Edge of the Crazies” by Jamie Harrison is the perfect crime noir comparison for “Cottonwood,” except that it’s really more Navy Blue because of the “star” light. Jamie is the daughter of Jim Harrison, a Montana notable, so her literary “uncles” are Matthiessen, Crumley, McGuane, Chatham, et al. She has been the editor of the Clark City Press. “Blue Deer” is quite transparently Livingston, the arts town that makes Missoula look morose. No David Lynch or Sweeney shenanigans here -- most of the main people are like Jamie: “Class X,” meaning highly educated but happy to work at low salaried meaningful labor like gardening and cooking, reporting and policing..
In contrast to “Cottonwood,” this is contemporary (well, ten years old now which probably makes some difference but not enough to worry about) and the criminals are not degenerates unless you have a low opinion of Hollywood and Manhattan. In fact, the two Blackwater brothers who form the spine of the crimes, both as victims and perps, rather suggest the Weinstein Brothers (NOT the Coen brothers), except that their women tend to be “tirebiters,” that is, the kind of pit bulls who run out from behind rural houses and puncture the tires of police cars. We don’t feel much grief or pity for any of them.
The sheriff in this town grew up here but has been gone and then has returned, as have the crime brothers, but the latter have become rich and famous so when the sheriff -- who has not -- wants to know where they are, he calls their agents -- though they never know either. But this is an egalitarian sort of town, so everyone drinks at the Blue Bat, the scene of much of the action. Upscale offices tend to be on the upper floors of renovated warehouses. Very nice paintings hang on the walls and everyone has computers, one of which is the first victim of the crime wave in this story. It is shot through the monitor by a .30-.30 from across the way. The writer seated at the keyboard is shot but not killed. The computer hard drive also survives to provide plot points.
Alice and Peter are living together, with Peter scraping most of the living by working for the local newspaper and Alice picking up catering work with the help of her friend, Edie. These are friends acquired by Jules Clement out in the “real world” who have followed him home. Jules became sheriff in part because his father had been the sheriff in his boyhood. Rita is a wild card, slender with a mass of auburn hair and very nice lingerie, which turns out to be a clue.
There is certainly plenty of sex, but it’s described the old-fashioned way: the lovers go home together, they unbutton and unzip, and that’s it until they either wake up happy and cook a fine breakfast in the sunshine or wake up with a hangover at 4AM and somehow end up naked and miserable on the porch. Before we get to the end, there are also plenty of bodies, which tend to be portrayed in the Montana way: toes bitten off by feral dogs or backbone exposed by ravenous magpies. The coroner is also the local family doctor. (I’m sure he washes his hands a lot.) When Jules, looking at the objects associated with a woman’s autopsy, asks, “What’s that little thing?” “An IUD,” says the doctor. “I put it in her myself.”
There are fistfights, predictable, sometimes with female sluggers. The scenery is exquisite (some people think the Crazies are more spectacular mountains than the Tetons), but there are no horses. I have never read about so many gourmet dinner parties in any other Western or mystery book and there is a great deal of drinking, specified in detail. But what makes this book a charmer is partly the stubborn naivete of Jules (who’s meant to become a series) and, more than that, the banter of the characters. Sometimes I never did figure out the slang, but I always got the irony. In Montana a “character” is not just someone in a book but someone colorful and maybe goal-driven enough to make them hard to cope with. They tend to have personality quirks. (When someone says, “You CHARACTER!” they are usually fond but a little exasperated.) In this book they have dreadful clothing taste, though the editor wears Prada. Even the sheriff is mostly around in t-shirt, jeans and tennie runners.
They say, “Oh, the local guys spend the winter bumping the uglies.” (We soon know specifics. One bonking session turns up on the security camera at the local ATM.) Ray Blackwater, one of the bad guys, remarks to Jules that he heard about him being involved in a case featuring a “farmer eaten by his cows.” Jules calmly corrects him: “It was pigs. Cows are not omnivorous.” These educated folks know a lot of stuff and use a lot of big words. They have attitude -- not quite cynical, more like wry.
This is also true of the police clerk, a sensible sixty year old “queen of the pink slips” (phone messages), who writes up the weekly police report to put in the newspaper. These reports are chapter headings and sometimes clues, but -- believe me -- they are also realistic in terms of small Montana town newspapers: “A report was recieved of an apparently unconscious man in the alley behind the Big Steer. An officer responded and the man said he was taking a nap.” If I’d written this, I’d have called the joint “The Bum Steer.” There’s a running gag about skunks: “A report was received of a skunk in a garbage can. An officer responded. He left the skunk in the can and the lid on the can. A note was left for the garbage men to be aware of the situation.” It’s characteristic that these reports are always in the passive voice.
As we work our way through Senior Skip Day, Annual Bird Counts, and river floats, information is threaded subtly through until when the final crime and the clinching clues show up, we’re there. The river floods at the end, but it seems like sort of an anticlimax. We end up in the Blue Bat where the wounded sheriff is tendered whiskey though he's hoping for some wide open spaces. In the next book of the series, “Going Local,” we find out the point of that flood.
In contrast to “Cottonwood,” this is contemporary (well, ten years old now which probably makes some difference but not enough to worry about) and the criminals are not degenerates unless you have a low opinion of Hollywood and Manhattan. In fact, the two Blackwater brothers who form the spine of the crimes, both as victims and perps, rather suggest the Weinstein Brothers (NOT the Coen brothers), except that their women tend to be “tirebiters,” that is, the kind of pit bulls who run out from behind rural houses and puncture the tires of police cars. We don’t feel much grief or pity for any of them.
The sheriff in this town grew up here but has been gone and then has returned, as have the crime brothers, but the latter have become rich and famous so when the sheriff -- who has not -- wants to know where they are, he calls their agents -- though they never know either. But this is an egalitarian sort of town, so everyone drinks at the Blue Bat, the scene of much of the action. Upscale offices tend to be on the upper floors of renovated warehouses. Very nice paintings hang on the walls and everyone has computers, one of which is the first victim of the crime wave in this story. It is shot through the monitor by a .30-.30 from across the way. The writer seated at the keyboard is shot but not killed. The computer hard drive also survives to provide plot points.
Alice and Peter are living together, with Peter scraping most of the living by working for the local newspaper and Alice picking up catering work with the help of her friend, Edie. These are friends acquired by Jules Clement out in the “real world” who have followed him home. Jules became sheriff in part because his father had been the sheriff in his boyhood. Rita is a wild card, slender with a mass of auburn hair and very nice lingerie, which turns out to be a clue.
There is certainly plenty of sex, but it’s described the old-fashioned way: the lovers go home together, they unbutton and unzip, and that’s it until they either wake up happy and cook a fine breakfast in the sunshine or wake up with a hangover at 4AM and somehow end up naked and miserable on the porch. Before we get to the end, there are also plenty of bodies, which tend to be portrayed in the Montana way: toes bitten off by feral dogs or backbone exposed by ravenous magpies. The coroner is also the local family doctor. (I’m sure he washes his hands a lot.) When Jules, looking at the objects associated with a woman’s autopsy, asks, “What’s that little thing?” “An IUD,” says the doctor. “I put it in her myself.”
There are fistfights, predictable, sometimes with female sluggers. The scenery is exquisite (some people think the Crazies are more spectacular mountains than the Tetons), but there are no horses. I have never read about so many gourmet dinner parties in any other Western or mystery book and there is a great deal of drinking, specified in detail. But what makes this book a charmer is partly the stubborn naivete of Jules (who’s meant to become a series) and, more than that, the banter of the characters. Sometimes I never did figure out the slang, but I always got the irony. In Montana a “character” is not just someone in a book but someone colorful and maybe goal-driven enough to make them hard to cope with. They tend to have personality quirks. (When someone says, “You CHARACTER!” they are usually fond but a little exasperated.) In this book they have dreadful clothing taste, though the editor wears Prada. Even the sheriff is mostly around in t-shirt, jeans and tennie runners.
They say, “Oh, the local guys spend the winter bumping the uglies.” (We soon know specifics. One bonking session turns up on the security camera at the local ATM.) Ray Blackwater, one of the bad guys, remarks to Jules that he heard about him being involved in a case featuring a “farmer eaten by his cows.” Jules calmly corrects him: “It was pigs. Cows are not omnivorous.” These educated folks know a lot of stuff and use a lot of big words. They have attitude -- not quite cynical, more like wry.
This is also true of the police clerk, a sensible sixty year old “queen of the pink slips” (phone messages), who writes up the weekly police report to put in the newspaper. These reports are chapter headings and sometimes clues, but -- believe me -- they are also realistic in terms of small Montana town newspapers: “A report was recieved of an apparently unconscious man in the alley behind the Big Steer. An officer responded and the man said he was taking a nap.” If I’d written this, I’d have called the joint “The Bum Steer.” There’s a running gag about skunks: “A report was received of a skunk in a garbage can. An officer responded. He left the skunk in the can and the lid on the can. A note was left for the garbage men to be aware of the situation.” It’s characteristic that these reports are always in the passive voice.
As we work our way through Senior Skip Day, Annual Bird Counts, and river floats, information is threaded subtly through until when the final crime and the clinching clues show up, we’re there. The river floods at the end, but it seems like sort of an anticlimax. We end up in the Blue Bat where the wounded sheriff is tendered whiskey though he's hoping for some wide open spaces. In the next book of the series, “Going Local,” we find out the point of that flood.
Tuesday, April 08, 2008
WIELDING POWER: The Essence of Ritual Practice
WIELDING POWER: THE ESSENCE OF RITUAL PRACTICE by Charles R. Tetworth
Most books about ritual, like most theologies, are defenses of existing practices, based on historical and cultural assumptions. Therefore, little effort is made to go deeper to a kind of meta-level, which is what interests me. I’m after the kinds of change in the worshiper that shows up on a functional MRI (fMRI). But, in fairness, functional MRI’s (Magnetic Resonance Images that show brain activity as it happens in various locations of the structure) are very new and it would be rather remarkable to perform a liturgy in the donut-hole where a person must lie still to be “read.” Nevertheless, there’s a bit of data beginning to appear.
My premise is that worship, a sense of transcendence, the feeling of communicating with something beyond the ordinary, an inner reconciliation, is real and actually in relationship to something that DOES exists (the argument of the atheist being that nothing is “out there”), but that worship -- like theology -- evolves for the same reasons that anything else evolves, human or not. What helps life and supports an “economy” will survive. What does not, dies out. And some things, which don’t put weight either way, just fall in or out by accident. However, things that have little impact in one culture and ecology may become meaningful in another context, either in a positive or in a negative way.
In pursuit of examples (I hardly dare expect “proofs”) I’m continuing down a shelf of books about liturgies of various sorts. “Wielding Power: The Essence of Ritual Practice” is from the Lindisfarne tradition. I’ll go to Wikipedia for a bit of explanation about Lindisfarne, which is an island when the tide is in, but a peninsula when the tide is in and has been considered holy for centuries.
“Recently Lindisfarne has become the centre for the revival of Celtic Christianity in the North of England; a former minister of the church there, David Adam, is a well-known author of Celtic Christian books and prayers. Following from this, Lindisfarne has become a popular retreat centre, as well as holiday destination.”
“In 1972, poet William Irwin Thompson named his Lindisfarne Association after the monastery on the island.
“The Lindisfarne Community is a network of people, communities, churches and groups committed to the idea of "New Monasticism."
In short, Lindisfarne is a small community at the margins of things that has come to be a focus of spirituality and a place of pilgrimage with special attention to the concept of “tides.” Tetworth suggests that the ancient cultures of Britain were primarily wood-based, rather than stone-based, because in those times the land was thickly covered with timber, now mostly used up. The wooden artifacts and traces of that time have been mouldered away by the wet and salt cliimate, but the first Christian influence goes back to the 7th century and survives in people.
Tetworth focuses for his examples on “the Order of Sentinels,” but his foreword is by a practitioner of the Kabbalistic tradition and in his introduction he thanks a woman named Singh, so plainly he intends to be an inclusive thinker. This “Order” turns out to be a little confusing to research in a scholarly way since the system and terminology has been co-opted by the video game world. To me, this is a good sign that it taps into a deeper sort of “mind” than just history and politics -- that it is valid on a “meta” level, but that doesn’t mean I recommend this system over others.
One of the interesting and, so far as I know, unique aspects of what Tetworth describes is the necessary preparation for a student who wishes to become adept. It consists not just in the management of one’s faiths and attitudes, but also in the preparation of the basic tools: a black-handled knife, a thread, a cloth, a cup, a wand, a cord and a sword. The directions and the materials needed are given. In the course of the repetitious, energetic, and focused tasks of creating these objects, a person should achieve an ability to focus, meditate, pace, and merge that will be basic to worship or liturgy. He or she becomes acutely aware of human relationship to material objects such as used in liturgy, both sensory and symbolic, and -- I’m confident -- deeply bonded with his objects.
Because Tetworth is British, he gives a long and fascinating example of this using the Investiture of the Queen (or King) of England, which is a ritual meant to persuade the common people of the legitimacy of their monarch, because consciousness of “Common Law” and memory of Charlemagne is so strong that anything less than the solemn ceremony and all its components will leave grumbling, balking and eventually revolution. He points out that if they go to a Presidential system at some point in the future, it will be necessary to devise or quickly evolve an equivalent ceremony.
Then he lists all the many objects, garments, and procedures that are included in the Crowning of the Queen, some of the elements so heavy that when Elizabeth II was crowned, there was some worry that her slender neck would be damaged by the weight of crowns and robes. These fabulous things are put on, taken off, carried before, touched to various parts, and sat upon (the Stone of Scone) in a sequence meant to evoke the history and parts of Britain. (I was tempted to list them all here, but there are a LOT!) Tetworth suggests that even in collapse, the remnants of the British Empire constitute a consensus and network comparable to the United Nations!
But he yields this British particularity when he describes ritual. His sequence of “Clearing the Space, Sealing the Space, Preparing the Instruments, The Preparation Within, The Temple Within ‘ are exactly the sequence that I propose, except that I add “Leaving the Space.”
He says: “Ritual is an external form that enables inner change to take substantial shape.” ...”If someone is standing facing the sunrise, there is that which in front and can be seen, there is that which is behind and is hidden from view, and there is that which is to the left and that which is to the right. There are also the heaven above and the place where one stands.” Many Native American and other systems lay out these compass points in ritual. But what interests me is that scientific research suggests that we think “topographically,” that is, in terms of traveling mentally in this “direction” or that. We draw diagrams of our ideas. Our ability to use space metaphorically as a way of making order is basic. For beginning writers we teach “webbing” or “mapping” or “storyboarding” which sequences scenes.
Tetworth speaks little about gesture or posture in worship: bowing, holding hands together, lying flat, standing with arms extended, making a wide gesture of inclusion, and so on. But this is a modest book and his advice is always to simplify, so I presume this was a decision rather than an oversight. He also barely touches smell or taste.
His biggest weakness is his understanding of science, which he suggests may be a religion and uses as the authority for some faith-ideas: the personalizing of the planet as Gaea, the notion that DNA can cry out from one being to another, and so on. Science and faith constantly misunderstand each other since our culture has separated them so long and so deeply that few people are educated to understand both.
Anyway, science is NOT a content. Science is a method. The Scientific METHOD! I aspire to develop a “Ritual Method,” that would be a PROCESS and not a content, NOT a religion. As in science, the content evolves with the economy and the ecology. In both disciplines, as we go through the planetary level to the cosmic level, the challenges of achieving human sensory grasp become greater.
Most books about ritual, like most theologies, are defenses of existing practices, based on historical and cultural assumptions. Therefore, little effort is made to go deeper to a kind of meta-level, which is what interests me. I’m after the kinds of change in the worshiper that shows up on a functional MRI (fMRI). But, in fairness, functional MRI’s (Magnetic Resonance Images that show brain activity as it happens in various locations of the structure) are very new and it would be rather remarkable to perform a liturgy in the donut-hole where a person must lie still to be “read.” Nevertheless, there’s a bit of data beginning to appear.
My premise is that worship, a sense of transcendence, the feeling of communicating with something beyond the ordinary, an inner reconciliation, is real and actually in relationship to something that DOES exists (the argument of the atheist being that nothing is “out there”), but that worship -- like theology -- evolves for the same reasons that anything else evolves, human or not. What helps life and supports an “economy” will survive. What does not, dies out. And some things, which don’t put weight either way, just fall in or out by accident. However, things that have little impact in one culture and ecology may become meaningful in another context, either in a positive or in a negative way.
In pursuit of examples (I hardly dare expect “proofs”) I’m continuing down a shelf of books about liturgies of various sorts. “Wielding Power: The Essence of Ritual Practice” is from the Lindisfarne tradition. I’ll go to Wikipedia for a bit of explanation about Lindisfarne, which is an island when the tide is in, but a peninsula when the tide is in and has been considered holy for centuries.
“Recently Lindisfarne has become the centre for the revival of Celtic Christianity in the North of England; a former minister of the church there, David Adam, is a well-known author of Celtic Christian books and prayers. Following from this, Lindisfarne has become a popular retreat centre, as well as holiday destination.”
“In 1972, poet William Irwin Thompson named his Lindisfarne Association after the monastery on the island.
“The Lindisfarne Community is a network of people, communities, churches and groups committed to the idea of "New Monasticism."
In short, Lindisfarne is a small community at the margins of things that has come to be a focus of spirituality and a place of pilgrimage with special attention to the concept of “tides.” Tetworth suggests that the ancient cultures of Britain were primarily wood-based, rather than stone-based, because in those times the land was thickly covered with timber, now mostly used up. The wooden artifacts and traces of that time have been mouldered away by the wet and salt cliimate, but the first Christian influence goes back to the 7th century and survives in people.
Tetworth focuses for his examples on “the Order of Sentinels,” but his foreword is by a practitioner of the Kabbalistic tradition and in his introduction he thanks a woman named Singh, so plainly he intends to be an inclusive thinker. This “Order” turns out to be a little confusing to research in a scholarly way since the system and terminology has been co-opted by the video game world. To me, this is a good sign that it taps into a deeper sort of “mind” than just history and politics -- that it is valid on a “meta” level, but that doesn’t mean I recommend this system over others.
One of the interesting and, so far as I know, unique aspects of what Tetworth describes is the necessary preparation for a student who wishes to become adept. It consists not just in the management of one’s faiths and attitudes, but also in the preparation of the basic tools: a black-handled knife, a thread, a cloth, a cup, a wand, a cord and a sword. The directions and the materials needed are given. In the course of the repetitious, energetic, and focused tasks of creating these objects, a person should achieve an ability to focus, meditate, pace, and merge that will be basic to worship or liturgy. He or she becomes acutely aware of human relationship to material objects such as used in liturgy, both sensory and symbolic, and -- I’m confident -- deeply bonded with his objects.
Because Tetworth is British, he gives a long and fascinating example of this using the Investiture of the Queen (or King) of England, which is a ritual meant to persuade the common people of the legitimacy of their monarch, because consciousness of “Common Law” and memory of Charlemagne is so strong that anything less than the solemn ceremony and all its components will leave grumbling, balking and eventually revolution. He points out that if they go to a Presidential system at some point in the future, it will be necessary to devise or quickly evolve an equivalent ceremony.
Then he lists all the many objects, garments, and procedures that are included in the Crowning of the Queen, some of the elements so heavy that when Elizabeth II was crowned, there was some worry that her slender neck would be damaged by the weight of crowns and robes. These fabulous things are put on, taken off, carried before, touched to various parts, and sat upon (the Stone of Scone) in a sequence meant to evoke the history and parts of Britain. (I was tempted to list them all here, but there are a LOT!) Tetworth suggests that even in collapse, the remnants of the British Empire constitute a consensus and network comparable to the United Nations!
But he yields this British particularity when he describes ritual. His sequence of “Clearing the Space, Sealing the Space, Preparing the Instruments, The Preparation Within, The Temple Within ‘ are exactly the sequence that I propose, except that I add “Leaving the Space.”
He says: “Ritual is an external form that enables inner change to take substantial shape.” ...”If someone is standing facing the sunrise, there is that which in front and can be seen, there is that which is behind and is hidden from view, and there is that which is to the left and that which is to the right. There are also the heaven above and the place where one stands.” Many Native American and other systems lay out these compass points in ritual. But what interests me is that scientific research suggests that we think “topographically,” that is, in terms of traveling mentally in this “direction” or that. We draw diagrams of our ideas. Our ability to use space metaphorically as a way of making order is basic. For beginning writers we teach “webbing” or “mapping” or “storyboarding” which sequences scenes.
Tetworth speaks little about gesture or posture in worship: bowing, holding hands together, lying flat, standing with arms extended, making a wide gesture of inclusion, and so on. But this is a modest book and his advice is always to simplify, so I presume this was a decision rather than an oversight. He also barely touches smell or taste.
His biggest weakness is his understanding of science, which he suggests may be a religion and uses as the authority for some faith-ideas: the personalizing of the planet as Gaea, the notion that DNA can cry out from one being to another, and so on. Science and faith constantly misunderstand each other since our culture has separated them so long and so deeply that few people are educated to understand both.
Anyway, science is NOT a content. Science is a method. The Scientific METHOD! I aspire to develop a “Ritual Method,” that would be a PROCESS and not a content, NOT a religion. As in science, the content evolves with the economy and the ecology. In both disciplines, as we go through the planetary level to the cosmic level, the challenges of achieving human sensory grasp become greater.
Monday, April 07, 2008
"COTTONWOOD" by Scott Phillips
“Cottonwood” by Scott Phillips is a thoroughly nasty little book. Billed as a “different kind of Western,” the cover blurb says: “Scott Philiips is dark, dangerous, and important. ‘Cottonwood’ is crime fiction at its best.” I suppose that’s why I bought it -- aside from it being cheap and from my fondness for cottonwoods.
In the first place, it’s not a Western -- it’s a MID-Western in the days when small towns were forming and trying to align themselves for prosperity. In this case, a prosperity that never comes. But the plot is right out of a contemporary Broadway musical: “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” It is also “ripped from the headlines” of old Kansas newspapers: the story of the Bender family, who evidently refrained from eating their butchered victims but drained their blood into their cellar hole and buried them in shallow graves in an orchard which thrived with such fertilizer. An awful lot of recycling going on here.
What the author did was to tell the story of the crimes in the first part of the book, so embedded in screwing, murder, filth and degeneracy that the Benders are hardly noticed, and then revisit the town years later when the early corruptions and thefts have bankrolled a conventional town which is prepared to hang the Bender women for their crimes. The only trouble is that they have the wrong women and the real criminal casually tells the protagonist what happened, without any courtroom dramatics. The protagonist is all that holds the book together.
Bill Ogden, the hero of sorts, is a man on the make, a photographer who spends so much time dipping his wick in any willing female’s reservoir of good times that it’s amazing he has time for anything else. He is made presumably superior, presumably a more reliable and likable witness, only because he reads Greek and Latin and is capable of appreciating fine French food. His adventures provide a very thin narrative trail through the ghastly accounts of frontier life.
This book subscribes to the smart-aleck intelligentsian revelation that those old times were hard and therefore abundantly miserable and disgusting. The criterion appears to be “Deadwood,” the TV show that is actually “NYPD Blue” but with less appeal and very little law and order. In short, “Cottonwood” is evidently expected to be a best seller by pandering to tastes for sensationalism, porn, and violence, all the while clucking with disapproval and superiority. If it is politically incorrect to those these assumptions onto modern urban ghettoes, then they will simply be transferred over to the small town white people of the past, the ancestors of authors like Sherwood Anderson or Sinclair Lewis. If challenged, these authors -- often with strong academic connections and a few literary prizes -- claim they are revealing the awful truth, that they are muck-rakers, and they point to those old stories about the Benders, which have already been recycled through two non-fiction books. (Just Google “the Benders.” I’m not going to help you out.)
There’s plenty of fancy writing and bits of foreign language, natural considering that the plains were largely populated by immigrants. There’s plenty of small detail such as genre writers use as signs of authenticity. The motives of the people are always venal, without explanation, and subject to sudden shifts for no apparent reason. I think the idea is that small town people are just that way and educated people would join in sneering at them.
This sort of writing -- sordid and cynical -- seems to have been much encouraged by the career trajectory of Cormac McCarthy who began as a “Southern Gothic” author (His first book was called “The Orchard Keeper.”) describing such phenomena as necrophilia. He progressed to using antique language to tell SW history in the most shocking possible detail, which some think of as being “unblinking.” Now, of course, he’s much admired and has backed off from the horror of the past to imagining the horror of the future.
There is one passage of “Cottonwood” that shows what the author COULD do if he thought it would be popular, i.e. sell. In his wanders Ogden stumbles into a greenhouse made entirely of old glass negatives, so that he looks up at a ceiling of faces and figures. “...I looked timorously back up to find the transparent lady still staring at me, her wistful smile as faint and pretty as condensed breath on the pane, tendering grace and unearned absolution.” This passage occupies two pages, but he makes nothing of it. Nor does he make much of the popularity of photographing dead people -- whether babies or famous criminals -- and crime scenes. Ogden makes a little money from them now and then -- that’s about it. If a person were doing a serious literary and academic study of the times, it would seem the matter deserves a bit of reflection, even by a participant in the scene. But these people are remarkably incurious, which is lucky for the flimsy plot.
We readers must be leading really boring lives to reach out for such books even after consuming a newspaper full of atrocities and watching television saturated with blood and showered with body parts. Or are we trying to de-sensitize ourselves? Are we depending on ghoul humor (people singing about making other people into pies) to decompress our own feelings? When I was teaching high school in the Sixties, the highway patrol commissioned a horrible movie of car crashes -- the sort of thing that “Lookie Lou’s” gawk at, even when they’re blocking traffic. The films were shown to the kids in hope that it would deter them from drinking and driving. Instead, the reaction was hilarity. The big kids got off for days retelling about the tire tracks across babies, the limbs torn off and the guts unraveled, while the little kids listened with their mouths hanging open.
Lately in Montana there has been a similar campaign revealing the horrors of meth, but the kids seem to be responding more as desired: staying away from meth. I think the difference is that the meth ads, which ARE horrible, are stories. They’re on billboards so they’re short, but they say things like, “I’d do anything for my boyfriend. Then he asked me to sleep with strange men for money.” They are about idealism gone wrong. “I thought nothing could come between me and my mom -- then she tried to stop me from going out.” Mom has a black eye and broken arm.
Authors take note: it’s the story that makes a book. “Cottonwood” is just old news.
In the first place, it’s not a Western -- it’s a MID-Western in the days when small towns were forming and trying to align themselves for prosperity. In this case, a prosperity that never comes. But the plot is right out of a contemporary Broadway musical: “Sweeney Todd: The Demon Barber of Fleet Street.” It is also “ripped from the headlines” of old Kansas newspapers: the story of the Bender family, who evidently refrained from eating their butchered victims but drained their blood into their cellar hole and buried them in shallow graves in an orchard which thrived with such fertilizer. An awful lot of recycling going on here.
What the author did was to tell the story of the crimes in the first part of the book, so embedded in screwing, murder, filth and degeneracy that the Benders are hardly noticed, and then revisit the town years later when the early corruptions and thefts have bankrolled a conventional town which is prepared to hang the Bender women for their crimes. The only trouble is that they have the wrong women and the real criminal casually tells the protagonist what happened, without any courtroom dramatics. The protagonist is all that holds the book together.
Bill Ogden, the hero of sorts, is a man on the make, a photographer who spends so much time dipping his wick in any willing female’s reservoir of good times that it’s amazing he has time for anything else. He is made presumably superior, presumably a more reliable and likable witness, only because he reads Greek and Latin and is capable of appreciating fine French food. His adventures provide a very thin narrative trail through the ghastly accounts of frontier life.
This book subscribes to the smart-aleck intelligentsian revelation that those old times were hard and therefore abundantly miserable and disgusting. The criterion appears to be “Deadwood,” the TV show that is actually “NYPD Blue” but with less appeal and very little law and order. In short, “Cottonwood” is evidently expected to be a best seller by pandering to tastes for sensationalism, porn, and violence, all the while clucking with disapproval and superiority. If it is politically incorrect to those these assumptions onto modern urban ghettoes, then they will simply be transferred over to the small town white people of the past, the ancestors of authors like Sherwood Anderson or Sinclair Lewis. If challenged, these authors -- often with strong academic connections and a few literary prizes -- claim they are revealing the awful truth, that they are muck-rakers, and they point to those old stories about the Benders, which have already been recycled through two non-fiction books. (Just Google “the Benders.” I’m not going to help you out.)
There’s plenty of fancy writing and bits of foreign language, natural considering that the plains were largely populated by immigrants. There’s plenty of small detail such as genre writers use as signs of authenticity. The motives of the people are always venal, without explanation, and subject to sudden shifts for no apparent reason. I think the idea is that small town people are just that way and educated people would join in sneering at them.
This sort of writing -- sordid and cynical -- seems to have been much encouraged by the career trajectory of Cormac McCarthy who began as a “Southern Gothic” author (His first book was called “The Orchard Keeper.”) describing such phenomena as necrophilia. He progressed to using antique language to tell SW history in the most shocking possible detail, which some think of as being “unblinking.” Now, of course, he’s much admired and has backed off from the horror of the past to imagining the horror of the future.
There is one passage of “Cottonwood” that shows what the author COULD do if he thought it would be popular, i.e. sell. In his wanders Ogden stumbles into a greenhouse made entirely of old glass negatives, so that he looks up at a ceiling of faces and figures. “...I looked timorously back up to find the transparent lady still staring at me, her wistful smile as faint and pretty as condensed breath on the pane, tendering grace and unearned absolution.” This passage occupies two pages, but he makes nothing of it. Nor does he make much of the popularity of photographing dead people -- whether babies or famous criminals -- and crime scenes. Ogden makes a little money from them now and then -- that’s about it. If a person were doing a serious literary and academic study of the times, it would seem the matter deserves a bit of reflection, even by a participant in the scene. But these people are remarkably incurious, which is lucky for the flimsy plot.
We readers must be leading really boring lives to reach out for such books even after consuming a newspaper full of atrocities and watching television saturated with blood and showered with body parts. Or are we trying to de-sensitize ourselves? Are we depending on ghoul humor (people singing about making other people into pies) to decompress our own feelings? When I was teaching high school in the Sixties, the highway patrol commissioned a horrible movie of car crashes -- the sort of thing that “Lookie Lou’s” gawk at, even when they’re blocking traffic. The films were shown to the kids in hope that it would deter them from drinking and driving. Instead, the reaction was hilarity. The big kids got off for days retelling about the tire tracks across babies, the limbs torn off and the guts unraveled, while the little kids listened with their mouths hanging open.
Lately in Montana there has been a similar campaign revealing the horrors of meth, but the kids seem to be responding more as desired: staying away from meth. I think the difference is that the meth ads, which ARE horrible, are stories. They’re on billboards so they’re short, but they say things like, “I’d do anything for my boyfriend. Then he asked me to sleep with strange men for money.” They are about idealism gone wrong. “I thought nothing could come between me and my mom -- then she tried to stop me from going out.” Mom has a black eye and broken arm.
Authors take note: it’s the story that makes a book. “Cottonwood” is just old news.
Sunday, April 06, 2008
PROOF: the movie
“Proof” is an intriging movie in part because it proves nothing -- in fact, it persuades one that the only proof possible is often proof that the negative is not true. This is explicit in the dialogue. And it flirts with the line between sanity and insanity -- sometimes sanity is only proved by a lack of proof that it is insane.
This is a story/play/movie creation arc, so there were many chances for the imdb.com crowd to say how they equated in their opinions, but I’ve only seen the movie, so that comparison line of thought is not possible. I would have guessed that the movie was written specifically for Gwyneth Paltrow, particularly given the amount of time she was on the screen, and I would have been wrong. Many commenters objected to Jake Guydenhall on grounds that he was too “hunky” to be a convincing mathematician -- but he doesn’t “read” as hunky to me, not because of the star turn with “Brokeback Mountain” but because I’m imprinted with someone more like Anthony Hopkins as attractive. Which goes to show that this movie was not aimed at my demographic, widely rumored to read books instead of watching movies and not eager to see a rock band at a wake.
I have to say that I enjoyed and admired the movie, but what I was really getting off on was the U of Chicago campus where I earned my MA and MDiv, even though some of the places in this movie didn’t exist on the campus when I left in 1982. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, in spite of longing to go there, and it was partly because doing theology is as crazy-making as doing mathematics. One of the similarities is the meritocracy that puts old guys in charge of young guys so the power-struggle can be deadly: that which doesn’t kill your career makes you tenure. Given the overheated atmosphere, the older sister’s defection to the media-controlled life of a Manhattanite, considered “normal,” seems smart. Though all she would really have had to do is transfer to the MBA program to have achieved the same thing.
A few moments were break-your-heart, the most moving being when the mad old mathematician, believing he has leapt to sanity, that his “machinery” is again pumping and brilliant, forces his daughter to read out loud his “proof” which reveals it to be the kind of thing one writes at 2AM, thinking it’s the secret of the universe, but turns out to be unintelligible. It is indeed an accurate account of what a dysfunctional brain pursues: trivia arranged in Gertrude Steinish patterns that mean nothing. Realizing that, precisely because he has been so confident that he forced his daughter to read it out, was the end for him. Standing out in his yard at night in the cold and snow, he couldn’t even perceive his own insanity, so he was done. This was a moment of sanity. Cold hard rationality.
Another of the moments comes when the young male mathematician realizes the brilliance of the “final proof” and believes it is the nova-burst of a brain about to burn out: the old man’s. But it is the daughter’s work (she’s too “dishy” to be a mathematician, despite her lack of makeup, right?). No one believes her. She doubts herself -- did she really work that out? It’s an insanity-making proposition when everyone in one’s world insists you are wrong, that your own inner proof of existence and effectiveness is false.
Likewise, when the memorial for the dead mathematician unfolds in Rockefeller Chapel -- the very peak of American wealth and prestige, the location of the awarding of high degrees and honors, a demonstration of Euro architecture celebrating American religion, the height of culture and sophistication -- the daughter dares to walk to the lecturn (NOT the pulpit) interrupting the inevitable string quartet, in order to tell the truth. Where were all these “friends” when her father needed them? Why is he suddenly valued now that it does him no good? Why has she sacrificed so much of her life (she can tell you how much, right down to the quarter-hour) to take care of a cranky, demanding, insane old man? She says bluntly, “I’m glad he’s dead.” And the U of Chicago audience, paid extras though they may be, show no emotion -- but I’d bet you ten dollars on each of them that they understood exactly and quite sharply. Happens there. Other places as well, of course. Society puts this in the insane column when it’s made explicit.
To me the montage of math department people working at the “proof notebook,” their excitement and enthusiasm over the “beauty” and humorous exasperation at the “awkward” parts were really the essence of why anyone wants to get to that level of accomplishment in that kind of setting. The rewards of elegant thought, shared with others, is a kind of deep intimacy that exceeds the obligatory physical comforting in the bedroom included for the target demographic. If the actors or script don’t quite get there, at least they were close. At least they knew it existed.
To people who feel lucky to finish high school, such arcane and seemingly cold grad school lives are as alien as life on Mars. To the therapists around the university trying to keep people somewhat emotionally attached and functioning on this planet, they are certainly high-maintenance. This movie goes a long way to presenting the case for worthiness. To outsiders it may be the grand Gothic architecture, the change-ringing bells, the bright horn fanfares, the gowns and receptions that mark the value of such an institution. But to the truly functional thinkers, it is the meshing of minds over tables and blackboards, the seeking of proofs of no less than the design of the universe, that is both the high honor and the reward.
If it doesn’t drive you crazy. And maybe one of the tests of sanity is honesty. The other might be what Kenner Swain (my former classmate) constantly asked: “What does it mean?” And the only rational answer to that is, “it depends.” Or if you’re attending the U of Chicago, “What is your method?” Cinematic narration is a pretty effective method when it’s done well.
This is a story/play/movie creation arc, so there were many chances for the imdb.com crowd to say how they equated in their opinions, but I’ve only seen the movie, so that comparison line of thought is not possible. I would have guessed that the movie was written specifically for Gwyneth Paltrow, particularly given the amount of time she was on the screen, and I would have been wrong. Many commenters objected to Jake Guydenhall on grounds that he was too “hunky” to be a convincing mathematician -- but he doesn’t “read” as hunky to me, not because of the star turn with “Brokeback Mountain” but because I’m imprinted with someone more like Anthony Hopkins as attractive. Which goes to show that this movie was not aimed at my demographic, widely rumored to read books instead of watching movies and not eager to see a rock band at a wake.
I have to say that I enjoyed and admired the movie, but what I was really getting off on was the U of Chicago campus where I earned my MA and MDiv, even though some of the places in this movie didn’t exist on the campus when I left in 1982. I couldn’t get out of there fast enough, in spite of longing to go there, and it was partly because doing theology is as crazy-making as doing mathematics. One of the similarities is the meritocracy that puts old guys in charge of young guys so the power-struggle can be deadly: that which doesn’t kill your career makes you tenure. Given the overheated atmosphere, the older sister’s defection to the media-controlled life of a Manhattanite, considered “normal,” seems smart. Though all she would really have had to do is transfer to the MBA program to have achieved the same thing.
A few moments were break-your-heart, the most moving being when the mad old mathematician, believing he has leapt to sanity, that his “machinery” is again pumping and brilliant, forces his daughter to read out loud his “proof” which reveals it to be the kind of thing one writes at 2AM, thinking it’s the secret of the universe, but turns out to be unintelligible. It is indeed an accurate account of what a dysfunctional brain pursues: trivia arranged in Gertrude Steinish patterns that mean nothing. Realizing that, precisely because he has been so confident that he forced his daughter to read it out, was the end for him. Standing out in his yard at night in the cold and snow, he couldn’t even perceive his own insanity, so he was done. This was a moment of sanity. Cold hard rationality.
Another of the moments comes when the young male mathematician realizes the brilliance of the “final proof” and believes it is the nova-burst of a brain about to burn out: the old man’s. But it is the daughter’s work (she’s too “dishy” to be a mathematician, despite her lack of makeup, right?). No one believes her. She doubts herself -- did she really work that out? It’s an insanity-making proposition when everyone in one’s world insists you are wrong, that your own inner proof of existence and effectiveness is false.
Likewise, when the memorial for the dead mathematician unfolds in Rockefeller Chapel -- the very peak of American wealth and prestige, the location of the awarding of high degrees and honors, a demonstration of Euro architecture celebrating American religion, the height of culture and sophistication -- the daughter dares to walk to the lecturn (NOT the pulpit) interrupting the inevitable string quartet, in order to tell the truth. Where were all these “friends” when her father needed them? Why is he suddenly valued now that it does him no good? Why has she sacrificed so much of her life (she can tell you how much, right down to the quarter-hour) to take care of a cranky, demanding, insane old man? She says bluntly, “I’m glad he’s dead.” And the U of Chicago audience, paid extras though they may be, show no emotion -- but I’d bet you ten dollars on each of them that they understood exactly and quite sharply. Happens there. Other places as well, of course. Society puts this in the insane column when it’s made explicit.
To me the montage of math department people working at the “proof notebook,” their excitement and enthusiasm over the “beauty” and humorous exasperation at the “awkward” parts were really the essence of why anyone wants to get to that level of accomplishment in that kind of setting. The rewards of elegant thought, shared with others, is a kind of deep intimacy that exceeds the obligatory physical comforting in the bedroom included for the target demographic. If the actors or script don’t quite get there, at least they were close. At least they knew it existed.
To people who feel lucky to finish high school, such arcane and seemingly cold grad school lives are as alien as life on Mars. To the therapists around the university trying to keep people somewhat emotionally attached and functioning on this planet, they are certainly high-maintenance. This movie goes a long way to presenting the case for worthiness. To outsiders it may be the grand Gothic architecture, the change-ringing bells, the bright horn fanfares, the gowns and receptions that mark the value of such an institution. But to the truly functional thinkers, it is the meshing of minds over tables and blackboards, the seeking of proofs of no less than the design of the universe, that is both the high honor and the reward.
If it doesn’t drive you crazy. And maybe one of the tests of sanity is honesty. The other might be what Kenner Swain (my former classmate) constantly asked: “What does it mean?” And the only rational answer to that is, “it depends.” Or if you’re attending the U of Chicago, “What is your method?” Cinematic narration is a pretty effective method when it’s done well.
Saturday, April 05, 2008
THE WRITER EXPOSED
A poem by Sharon Brogan (see www.sbpoet.com)
What's In My Journal
after William Stafford
for Niki Robinson
Bits of bone. Smeared snot
and belly-button lint. A few
bells and wind-chimes. Cat
cries; dog dreams. Scraps
of night: train whistle, stars,
early and late snow.
Snippets of the seasons: wild
tulips, roses, chrysanthemums.
Sea salt. The taste of pineapple.
Supple limbs, and stiff joints.
Crows, crows' nests, crows feet.
Crystal candle holders.
Candles burnt down to wax puddles.
Oil lamps. Flashlights. Heather.
Goldfish slipping through water
of all colors. A color that has no
name. Spider webs. Spirals. Maps
and charts of faraway
underneath caverns and caves.
Feathers. Beads. Pebbles and stones
from rivers and seas. Fingernail
clippings. Sharp-toothed beasts.
Tribbles. Bonds, thick and broken.
Shells. More spirals.
Sharon says:
The first handout for the Life Writing: Journal & Memoir class that I'll be taking (starting Thursday!) is this poem. William Stafford was one of the first 'professional' poets to look at my work. He liked it. He told me to send it out, and I did. It was accepted, and published, and I felt -- exposed.
I haven't seen other poets write about this; most write about the effort to get published. But surely my reaction can't be unique?
Of course, this was many years ago, and now I put my poems out there every day. And I think of Stafford often, with gratitude for his kindness and encouragement. He advocated writing a poem every day, even in months that are not April.
_______________
Sharon is about my age, about my same Myers-Briggs (either INTP or INTJ), and similar in other ways except that her solitude is enforced by chronic illness and mine is a matter of choice and practicality. There are no tribbles in my dreams. Quite a lot of cat hair, though.
I, too, haven’t seen other poets write about this phenomenon of feeling exposed -- which isn’t quite the same as wanting to assume a false identity as so many writers purporting to write nonfiction appear to be doing lately. At least two of my email correspondents regularly disguise themselves to others and, of course, those who successfully disguise themselves to me are unknown. But I have my suspicions.
What about me? On ASLE some years ago someone pretended I was two gay men who built a straw bale house on the East Front of the Rockies so they could go hunting together. Only a few days ago I pretended I was a seven-foot, three-hundred pound former basketball star -- that was transparently defensive. Of course, if I told you who I really am, you wouldn’t believe it anyway. People have their standards and stereotypes.
After my mother died and I was looking through her daybook for ideas for a eulogy, I found she had saved and repeated a line from Maya Angelou to the effect that somewhere down in the very heart of her, there was a secret part that no one knew or would expect or could share. I’ve preached about the impossibility of anyone REALLY ever knowing about the inmost part of another human being, even if we show and explain it to someone, even if we are skillful writers.
It is the essential loneliness of each of us to which we are doomed at the level of the zygote, when the brain begins to form, because we are created out of the dice-throw of meiosis, not cloning, and because every environment is a process and that changing set of influences molds and edits what our genes cause to form, so that we, too, are processes with only enough consistency to have an identity. Like shells, we add new layers. Like shells, we protect our soft inner parts that other entities might eat. It’s simple self-preservation, but not our only strategy.
Writers, of course, are skilled at producing so many alternatives and misleading clues and invented points of view (though what is being viewed may not be invented at all) that they are like those insects that imitate sticks or the moth wings with huge staring owl eyes. And then the reader’s inner filter and viewpoint, especially the “moral” ones that pass judgment, may prevent access to what the writer is “showing -- not telling.” It’s pretty easy to hide “in plain sight.”
What makes us want to hide? I know my bio of Bob also reveals me and that in rejecting my portrait of him, some people will also reject me. I know very well what I intentionally hid and why -- but there are other things that other people spot that I’ve never suspected. Oddly, they are as likely to be good things as bad. In fact, we often hide good things about our selves from our selves. In therapy groups, this is often the information that is hardest to get to people who need to have it.
But the literary scandals about false memoirs, at least the ones that the media identifies as false since memory is always limited, are all about people who pretend to be much worse than they are: they are criticized for being nice people in reality, or at least coming from “nice” backgrounds instead of being addicts and criminals. A few writers are smart enough to go with it, add to the dance of the seven veils with even more layers of deception, hints at abuse, psychosis, evil twins, Kabuki masks and costumes. The TRUTH, you can’t HANDLE the Truth!! Especially if it’s not sensational.
William Stafford has been exposed as a thoroughly decent pacifist who deeply cared about his students and who rose early every morning to lie on his couch and catch bits of the real world in words. SB has explained who she is on long lists of factoids (see her website) and facts (unsorted) that are amusing and in the end... not enough for you to find her in her apartment.
And me? Enough people in my life have said, “Oh, I know YOU! I know ALL about you!” when they didn’t at all. They wanted to control me. Not that I controlled what they knew -- it was limited by their own agenda and knowledge of the world. They only saw small parts and when they tried to add them up, much was always missing. So why should a writer worry? It’s really a publicist’s problem: how to position the “product.”
DNA would prove my bits of bone, smeared snot and belly button lint are mine alone. It snowed again this morning. Look for Sharon’s poem about snow at her website.
...What would I want from you
if you came to me now?
To lie together, comforted
by feathers. To speak quietly...
No need to tell the truth. What is it anyway?
What's In My Journal
after William Stafford
for Niki Robinson
Bits of bone. Smeared snot
and belly-button lint. A few
bells and wind-chimes. Cat
cries; dog dreams. Scraps
of night: train whistle, stars,
early and late snow.
Snippets of the seasons: wild
tulips, roses, chrysanthemums.
Sea salt. The taste of pineapple.
Supple limbs, and stiff joints.
Crows, crows' nests, crows feet.
Crystal candle holders.
Candles burnt down to wax puddles.
Oil lamps. Flashlights. Heather.
Goldfish slipping through water
of all colors. A color that has no
name. Spider webs. Spirals. Maps
and charts of faraway
underneath caverns and caves.
Feathers. Beads. Pebbles and stones
from rivers and seas. Fingernail
clippings. Sharp-toothed beasts.
Tribbles. Bonds, thick and broken.
Shells. More spirals.
Sharon says:
The first handout for the Life Writing: Journal & Memoir class that I'll be taking (starting Thursday!) is this poem. William Stafford was one of the first 'professional' poets to look at my work. He liked it. He told me to send it out, and I did. It was accepted, and published, and I felt -- exposed.
I haven't seen other poets write about this; most write about the effort to get published. But surely my reaction can't be unique?
Of course, this was many years ago, and now I put my poems out there every day. And I think of Stafford often, with gratitude for his kindness and encouragement. He advocated writing a poem every day, even in months that are not April.
_______________
Sharon is about my age, about my same Myers-Briggs (either INTP or INTJ), and similar in other ways except that her solitude is enforced by chronic illness and mine is a matter of choice and practicality. There are no tribbles in my dreams. Quite a lot of cat hair, though.
I, too, haven’t seen other poets write about this phenomenon of feeling exposed -- which isn’t quite the same as wanting to assume a false identity as so many writers purporting to write nonfiction appear to be doing lately. At least two of my email correspondents regularly disguise themselves to others and, of course, those who successfully disguise themselves to me are unknown. But I have my suspicions.
What about me? On ASLE some years ago someone pretended I was two gay men who built a straw bale house on the East Front of the Rockies so they could go hunting together. Only a few days ago I pretended I was a seven-foot, three-hundred pound former basketball star -- that was transparently defensive. Of course, if I told you who I really am, you wouldn’t believe it anyway. People have their standards and stereotypes.
After my mother died and I was looking through her daybook for ideas for a eulogy, I found she had saved and repeated a line from Maya Angelou to the effect that somewhere down in the very heart of her, there was a secret part that no one knew or would expect or could share. I’ve preached about the impossibility of anyone REALLY ever knowing about the inmost part of another human being, even if we show and explain it to someone, even if we are skillful writers.
It is the essential loneliness of each of us to which we are doomed at the level of the zygote, when the brain begins to form, because we are created out of the dice-throw of meiosis, not cloning, and because every environment is a process and that changing set of influences molds and edits what our genes cause to form, so that we, too, are processes with only enough consistency to have an identity. Like shells, we add new layers. Like shells, we protect our soft inner parts that other entities might eat. It’s simple self-preservation, but not our only strategy.
Writers, of course, are skilled at producing so many alternatives and misleading clues and invented points of view (though what is being viewed may not be invented at all) that they are like those insects that imitate sticks or the moth wings with huge staring owl eyes. And then the reader’s inner filter and viewpoint, especially the “moral” ones that pass judgment, may prevent access to what the writer is “showing -- not telling.” It’s pretty easy to hide “in plain sight.”
What makes us want to hide? I know my bio of Bob also reveals me and that in rejecting my portrait of him, some people will also reject me. I know very well what I intentionally hid and why -- but there are other things that other people spot that I’ve never suspected. Oddly, they are as likely to be good things as bad. In fact, we often hide good things about our selves from our selves. In therapy groups, this is often the information that is hardest to get to people who need to have it.
But the literary scandals about false memoirs, at least the ones that the media identifies as false since memory is always limited, are all about people who pretend to be much worse than they are: they are criticized for being nice people in reality, or at least coming from “nice” backgrounds instead of being addicts and criminals. A few writers are smart enough to go with it, add to the dance of the seven veils with even more layers of deception, hints at abuse, psychosis, evil twins, Kabuki masks and costumes. The TRUTH, you can’t HANDLE the Truth!! Especially if it’s not sensational.
William Stafford has been exposed as a thoroughly decent pacifist who deeply cared about his students and who rose early every morning to lie on his couch and catch bits of the real world in words. SB has explained who she is on long lists of factoids (see her website) and facts (unsorted) that are amusing and in the end... not enough for you to find her in her apartment.
And me? Enough people in my life have said, “Oh, I know YOU! I know ALL about you!” when they didn’t at all. They wanted to control me. Not that I controlled what they knew -- it was limited by their own agenda and knowledge of the world. They only saw small parts and when they tried to add them up, much was always missing. So why should a writer worry? It’s really a publicist’s problem: how to position the “product.”
DNA would prove my bits of bone, smeared snot and belly button lint are mine alone. It snowed again this morning. Look for Sharon’s poem about snow at her website.
...What would I want from you
if you came to me now?
To lie together, comforted
by feathers. To speak quietly...
No need to tell the truth. What is it anyway?
Friday, April 04, 2008
ALL IS WHIRL
Since getting “Bronze Inside and Out” actually out there on the bookshelves, I’ve become caught up in the amazing issues of publication these days. “Publishing a book” is such an icon of achievement and success, and of course it IS, that the mere technical fact tends to dominate everything else in most people’s minds. They ASSUME it means money, honor, and so on and may even become a little resentful since they don’t have much idea of how to write -- it seems to them like magic.
It’s not just that the technical advances of the Internet and digital print have thrown a monkey wrench in all the book systems, it’s not just that somehow bloggers have knocked all the professional reviews of books, of movies and of music out of the newspapers and magazines so that suddenly all is a catch-as-catch-can free-for-all. It’s that the politics/economics of Everything have fallen into doubt -- most obviously the assumption that experts know what we are doing and know how to prevent disaster. Clearly, they don’t. As one of the bloggers who seems to really know what happens “in the world” says (I’m paraphrasing), “All our systems of government, of feedback, of prediction, and so on have rolled into a big self-perpetuating feedback loop.” It fuels itself, shapes itself, and takes no care for human intervention or consequences. The forces look a whole lot like the Four Horses of the Apocalypse: plague, starvation, war, and oppression.
One of the ideas I’ve been thinking about quite a bit, in an incoherent and not-very-helpful way, is that our sudden huge preoccupation with religion (the true nature of Islam, atheism, creationism -- the subjects that sell books -- and how it comes to bear on international politics -- more books) an interest which I cannot help but endorse, given four years of seminary, is actually only a distraction. While we dither over theological abstractions, it is the OTHER hand, the economic/political forces -- specifically the fascist diversion of laws and military force for the benefit of international corporations -- that is the real Fourth Horseman.
In Great Falls I went into Barnes & Noble to buy Western art magazines -- about the only thing I buy there now. I don’t patronize their faux Starbucks since the quality of the coffee has sunk even as they add more panninis and cheesecakes. At the book checkout counter were two new clerks, both girls and probably from back east some place. They were talking about job conditions, evidently as arbitrary and procrustean as the B&N refusal to sell local books. I said something casual, and the closest clerk (intensely dressed and cosmetized just short of Goth) said, “Well, it’s a corporation.” I suggested maybe they ought to protest, that we ought to drive the corporations rather than the other way around. She sighed, “Oh, it’s just not worth it.” Then she wanted to know whether I had my discount card, which means that I would be entered into a relentless database. I don’t.
“Maybe we’re getting close to the point where it WOULD be worth it to redefine corporation law,” I suggested. She shrugged.
Everybody shrugs. They “know.” They know we invaded Iraq, not in retribution for 9/ll and not to liberate the citizens, but to secure the oil for ourselves. But how many years down the road and no oil yet? It goes to pirates who sell it to our enemies. We can’t even get the oil wells back on line. So why did we REALLY invade Iraq? Maybe to drive up the price of oil so high that dissenters and webways will be willing to accept draconian laws? To scare us all into surrendering Social Security and Medicare? To drive private and public wealth into corporate hands? I’m not a subtle enough thinker to follow these things, but I have always remembered that Bush’s strategy all his life has been to ask for three times what he wants, knowing that if he settles later for only twice what he wants, the other guy will think HE won.
What the Iraqi war did more than anything else was throw chaos into many systems of the country by cutting off funds, sending needed men overseas, and imposing limits everywhere. It’s characteristic that when Governor Schweitzer, backed by the full unanimous vote of the Montana government, told the Homeland Security people to “go to hell,” in just those words, because we weren’t going to participate in the super-ID cards, and then later sent a letter saying what Montana WAS willing to do, the feds simply declared that this letter of dissent was in fact a letter of participation and took Montana off the “hell, no” list.
The medical world is deeply affected by all this. The Diabetes 2 renegades (I'm with'em!) constantly complain about the big hospital/pharmaceutical collaborations, very much disguised by books and then revealed by other books. (My so-called insurance policy looks more like a book.) Last year there wasn’t enough flu vaccine. This year there was so much that they were pushing people to get the shots, but it didn’t protect anyone from the kinds of flu actually going around. The only person I know who hasn’t had flu is me -- and I didn’t get the shot.
Where does religion come into it? Some would get distracted by the idea of religion as morality, which they normally think of as rules for behavior and declare that we need more regulation, more control, more inspection. (I’m not objecting, esp. when it comes to airplanes.) But corruption and sex are rampant!! Egad!!
Consider the idea of religion as authorization, God as the Ultimate Supreme Commander who authorized the organizing of this country as a breakaway, who authorized the Queen of England to take her throne, and who authorizes us to win at all costs. God is the guy that George W. purportedly consults for guidance. This use of religion is authoritarian. This God is the Ultimate Dictator -- the same guy who ordered Abraham to murder his son, calling it a “sacrifice,” a devotion. Of course, Bush doesn’t sacrifice his daughters. That’s Greek -- Iphigenia and all that. Not Christian. Those Greeks thought about hubris and tragedy too much. It's in the books.
I can’t bring this to a conclusion. There’s no end to it. At least none I can see. So far. The weather forecast is snow. Then maybe there will be grass.
It’s not just that the technical advances of the Internet and digital print have thrown a monkey wrench in all the book systems, it’s not just that somehow bloggers have knocked all the professional reviews of books, of movies and of music out of the newspapers and magazines so that suddenly all is a catch-as-catch-can free-for-all. It’s that the politics/economics of Everything have fallen into doubt -- most obviously the assumption that experts know what we are doing and know how to prevent disaster. Clearly, they don’t. As one of the bloggers who seems to really know what happens “in the world” says (I’m paraphrasing), “All our systems of government, of feedback, of prediction, and so on have rolled into a big self-perpetuating feedback loop.” It fuels itself, shapes itself, and takes no care for human intervention or consequences. The forces look a whole lot like the Four Horses of the Apocalypse: plague, starvation, war, and oppression.
One of the ideas I’ve been thinking about quite a bit, in an incoherent and not-very-helpful way, is that our sudden huge preoccupation with religion (the true nature of Islam, atheism, creationism -- the subjects that sell books -- and how it comes to bear on international politics -- more books) an interest which I cannot help but endorse, given four years of seminary, is actually only a distraction. While we dither over theological abstractions, it is the OTHER hand, the economic/political forces -- specifically the fascist diversion of laws and military force for the benefit of international corporations -- that is the real Fourth Horseman.
In Great Falls I went into Barnes & Noble to buy Western art magazines -- about the only thing I buy there now. I don’t patronize their faux Starbucks since the quality of the coffee has sunk even as they add more panninis and cheesecakes. At the book checkout counter were two new clerks, both girls and probably from back east some place. They were talking about job conditions, evidently as arbitrary and procrustean as the B&N refusal to sell local books. I said something casual, and the closest clerk (intensely dressed and cosmetized just short of Goth) said, “Well, it’s a corporation.” I suggested maybe they ought to protest, that we ought to drive the corporations rather than the other way around. She sighed, “Oh, it’s just not worth it.” Then she wanted to know whether I had my discount card, which means that I would be entered into a relentless database. I don’t.
“Maybe we’re getting close to the point where it WOULD be worth it to redefine corporation law,” I suggested. She shrugged.
Everybody shrugs. They “know.” They know we invaded Iraq, not in retribution for 9/ll and not to liberate the citizens, but to secure the oil for ourselves. But how many years down the road and no oil yet? It goes to pirates who sell it to our enemies. We can’t even get the oil wells back on line. So why did we REALLY invade Iraq? Maybe to drive up the price of oil so high that dissenters and webways will be willing to accept draconian laws? To scare us all into surrendering Social Security and Medicare? To drive private and public wealth into corporate hands? I’m not a subtle enough thinker to follow these things, but I have always remembered that Bush’s strategy all his life has been to ask for three times what he wants, knowing that if he settles later for only twice what he wants, the other guy will think HE won.
What the Iraqi war did more than anything else was throw chaos into many systems of the country by cutting off funds, sending needed men overseas, and imposing limits everywhere. It’s characteristic that when Governor Schweitzer, backed by the full unanimous vote of the Montana government, told the Homeland Security people to “go to hell,” in just those words, because we weren’t going to participate in the super-ID cards, and then later sent a letter saying what Montana WAS willing to do, the feds simply declared that this letter of dissent was in fact a letter of participation and took Montana off the “hell, no” list.
The medical world is deeply affected by all this. The Diabetes 2 renegades (I'm with'em!) constantly complain about the big hospital/pharmaceutical collaborations, very much disguised by books and then revealed by other books. (My so-called insurance policy looks more like a book.) Last year there wasn’t enough flu vaccine. This year there was so much that they were pushing people to get the shots, but it didn’t protect anyone from the kinds of flu actually going around. The only person I know who hasn’t had flu is me -- and I didn’t get the shot.
Where does religion come into it? Some would get distracted by the idea of religion as morality, which they normally think of as rules for behavior and declare that we need more regulation, more control, more inspection. (I’m not objecting, esp. when it comes to airplanes.) But corruption and sex are rampant!! Egad!!
Consider the idea of religion as authorization, God as the Ultimate Supreme Commander who authorized the organizing of this country as a breakaway, who authorized the Queen of England to take her throne, and who authorizes us to win at all costs. God is the guy that George W. purportedly consults for guidance. This use of religion is authoritarian. This God is the Ultimate Dictator -- the same guy who ordered Abraham to murder his son, calling it a “sacrifice,” a devotion. Of course, Bush doesn’t sacrifice his daughters. That’s Greek -- Iphigenia and all that. Not Christian. Those Greeks thought about hubris and tragedy too much. It's in the books.
I can’t bring this to a conclusion. There’s no end to it. At least none I can see. So far. The weather forecast is snow. Then maybe there will be grass.
Thursday, April 03, 2008
LUCY MAY PINKERTON
April 2, 2008, is the tenth anniversary of my mother’s death. She was one month short of 90 years old and died at home with her three children in attendance, just as she wanted. She said, “If life on the next planet is half as much fun as it was on this one, I’ll have a great time.” She said, “I did so much more in my life than I ever expected -- taught for a long time, went clear around the world, rode a camel...”
1909 - 1998 just about covers the 20th century, a most amazing time to be alive, not least because it was documented all along the way with photos. Here’s my mother on a postcard, which is the way people used photos in those days. The message was from her mother (my grandmother) to her prospective sister-in-law, Florence.
And here’s the entire family in the way that rural people lived in those days. I’d love to live in those clothes, that house, right now. In fact, I’m coming as close as I can.
John Pinkerton did the best he could with his oldest daughter: sent her off to college in Albany to attend what would become Lewis & Clark in Portland. But the Depression hit and the tuition money was just gone. One day John came home with this big mule and a sack of seed corn. “Lou,” he said, “I’ve leased a field for you and if you can use this mule to raise a crop of corn, it will pay your tuition.” She did it.
But it was only enough for another half-year. She’d planned on being a math teacher. Instead she ended up working for small businesses in Roseburg. She was a member of the Businesswomen’s Club and a “career girl” on a small scale.
One day she was working for the newspaper and a wool buyer came in to place an ad. He was a city man from Portland, or so it seemed. (Actually he was a homesteader’s kid from the prairie.) He had a Master’s Degree. (His thesis was on the price of potatoes.) And he had a house. Partly she married him (I believe) to live in Portland in that house, thinking it was moving to sophistication in the Big City.
It was less than that. I was born when she was thirty. Paul was born when she was 35. Soon there were three of us. And she was realizing that she’d married a bibliomaniac. (I’m the one who got that gene.)
The opinion of the time was that was old to be a mother and that three was an excessive number of children. Not because the pill was available, but because it was wartime and there was a certain amount of rationing.
By the time of this photo (taken at Wallowa Lake) she had survived a radical mastectomy and a broken arm and returned to college at Portland State University where she graduated at the same time I graduated from high school. It was 1957.
From then until retirement she taught elementary school, moving from classroom to library. One day she came home and said to my father, “Let’s go around the world.” So they did. The photo of her on a camel was her Christmas card that year.
A few years later, after my father had died, she went to the part of the world she had fancied since listening to missionaries as a little girl. Asia. This is in Singapore.
There was a lot more to it, of course, but this is a quick visual sketch of one woman and the distance she managed to travel in her lifetime. She died quietly, as she wished, in the house she had entered as a bride.
1909 - 1998 just about covers the 20th century, a most amazing time to be alive, not least because it was documented all along the way with photos. Here’s my mother on a postcard, which is the way people used photos in those days. The message was from her mother (my grandmother) to her prospective sister-in-law, Florence.
And here’s the entire family in the way that rural people lived in those days. I’d love to live in those clothes, that house, right now. In fact, I’m coming as close as I can.
John Pinkerton did the best he could with his oldest daughter: sent her off to college in Albany to attend what would become Lewis & Clark in Portland. But the Depression hit and the tuition money was just gone. One day John came home with this big mule and a sack of seed corn. “Lou,” he said, “I’ve leased a field for you and if you can use this mule to raise a crop of corn, it will pay your tuition.” She did it.
But it was only enough for another half-year. She’d planned on being a math teacher. Instead she ended up working for small businesses in Roseburg. She was a member of the Businesswomen’s Club and a “career girl” on a small scale.
One day she was working for the newspaper and a wool buyer came in to place an ad. He was a city man from Portland, or so it seemed. (Actually he was a homesteader’s kid from the prairie.) He had a Master’s Degree. (His thesis was on the price of potatoes.) And he had a house. Partly she married him (I believe) to live in Portland in that house, thinking it was moving to sophistication in the Big City.
It was less than that. I was born when she was thirty. Paul was born when she was 35. Soon there were three of us. And she was realizing that she’d married a bibliomaniac. (I’m the one who got that gene.)
The opinion of the time was that was old to be a mother and that three was an excessive number of children. Not because the pill was available, but because it was wartime and there was a certain amount of rationing.
By the time of this photo (taken at Wallowa Lake) she had survived a radical mastectomy and a broken arm and returned to college at Portland State University where she graduated at the same time I graduated from high school. It was 1957.
From then until retirement she taught elementary school, moving from classroom to library. One day she came home and said to my father, “Let’s go around the world.” So they did. The photo of her on a camel was her Christmas card that year.
A few years later, after my father had died, she went to the part of the world she had fancied since listening to missionaries as a little girl. Asia. This is in Singapore.
There was a lot more to it, of course, but this is a quick visual sketch of one woman and the distance she managed to travel in her lifetime. She died quietly, as she wished, in the house she had entered as a bride.
Tuesday, April 01, 2008
BLOOD TRAIL by Gary J. Cook (Note the J.)
First digression:
Enough has already been said about what genre this book is. Suffice it to say that I consider it a book about “back of the moon” things: Vietnam, Japan, and Missoula. You can figure out for yourself whether it’s “noir” or “adventure” or “crime” or something else. A little bit “Legends of the Fall,” a little bit “The Spy Game.” Spies and international cartels and gorgeous, brilliant women and US government whatsises who are universally blundering pricks. Wise old men, both Japanese and Montanan. And a spook who is a spade and the hero’s shadow. Lots of inside stuff about guns and nicknames and acronyms. Plenty of well-described scenery, including quite a few snakes and a couple of bears. Many surprises that are signaled just enough to make a reader wary.
Second digression:
One of my pet theories is that the wave of Westerns in the Fifties were “stand down” films, meant (maybe unconsciously) to persuade WWII soldiers attuned to violence that they should put aside their weapons -- or at least use them only in extreme cases to defend the community. They were about looking for a moral center. At the same time that Americans were glued to our new black and white TV sets watching “Gunsmoke” and “Paladin” enforce justice and law, the Japanese were making movies about a far larger kind of cultural change, usually using historical and mythic material. I just watched two of them, both directed by Mizoguchi: “Sansho Dayu” and “Ugetsu.” They’re not samurai movies with people flying around in the bamboo. Both are about greed, feudal systems that treat people like “product,” and what it takes for an individual to cause change. They are on a far more philosophical, far-reaching scale than most Westerns, meant to be ideas for a whole culture, one just then stunned by defeat and the need to rebuild. It’s remarkable how modern they sound. “Blood Trail” is carefully enough written and inspired enough to -- well, not to be compared to Japanese masterpieces exactly -- but it’s more than a trashy thriller. It’s certainly as good as the better Westerns.
This book, like classic Japanese movies from the Criterion Collection, is presented as well made: bound beautifully, gold foil embossed stamp, nice paper and type. But someone didn’t shell out enough money for a proof reader who knew the subject. Little missteps like “beetle” for “betel.” ("Bloody Mary" never chewed no ladybugs.) The English spelling of judgement. (US: one “e”). If a publisher is expecting an educated reader, such glitches need to be addressed. On the other hand, Dennis McMillan, who is a publisher in the old-fashioned personal-pride way, may not realize that old English teachers ever read such books or that Spell Check is not magic. These books are sold like Western Art books: a small edition with a hundred copies bound in morocco leather and slipcased. They cost plenty. If you can find them. I had to borrow via Interlibrary Loan from Minnesota.
Third Digression:
In Montana there are only a few ways for people who are ordinary local guys to “strike it big:” rodeo, art, writing, maybe military -- it won’t happen by ranching unless you cash the land out for subdivisions. People who write are often driving hard for success, sometimes harder than their writing or life-experience will take them. That is not the case here. I mean, this is highly commercial writing -- saleable.
Writing about violence and grisly stuff is hard because few people really experience much of it. I’ll say right here that I’ve seen a lot of destroyed animals but the dead people were mostly in photos. Beyond a certain point, once the creature is dead, it can be hard to interpret, like the furry disc I once impounded from a street -- only identifiable by a puppy paw sticking out one side that somehow escaped the tires. Or the tiny photo “Time” magazine once printed of a plastic surgeon who had altered the appearance of a mob boss and was no longer needed: the doc’s body had been packed into a steel drum that was filled with cement and thrown into a lake. Fished out months later and separated from the cement, the doc looked... well, rag and bone come to mind. Of course, nowadays, we’d pick up that photo on the Internet, enhance and analyze it until we could count his dental fillings. We have an unholy appetite for this stuff. Hard to shock us. Even the worst crimes in this book are things we see in the newspaper, no detail spared. Writing about destroyed flesh is a narrow line to walk. If there’s too much detail, it gets confused. If it’s undercut too far, the reader doesn’t get impact. If it’s too bizarre, we just won’t get it. Actual violence, if one is in the middle of it, taking and giving damage, is very hard to interpret. If one has been trained properly, training takes over and hopefully will carry one through. Otherwise, the brain goes into overload and responds erratically -- if it doesn’t freeze. It’s all BamSplatRipBoomWha?
Cook handles both violence and sex well in this book: they are intelligible, intelligent and credible. The violence gets the ritual preparation and the sex just happens, but without TOO much detail and believably. Probably for the best. His playful dialogues, whatever the context, are great fun.
Fourth digression:
There is a lot of technical stuff about weapons and modern tech gear that I’m not equipped to judge but it sounded okay to me. There was a good deal about using the landscape, all specific and sometimes scary, like the two signature cobras that stick their heads up above the elephant grass in the prologue. Both the Asian scenes and the Montana scenes were convincing. “Social terrain,” houses and towns, are laid out so we can picture them and imagine a “map” when people are pursuing each other. From Missoula bar versus a Japanese coffee shop to an old Montana house versus an old Japanese house. Photos on the wall or ratty old mounted heads on the wall -- we can see it, we smell it, and it’s not random. They are threads in the story.
Getting closer to the point:
On a higher level yet is the philosophical discussion that stays pretty much in the background until near the end of the novel. Drug-based as so much of International Asian corruption has been, how does one kick the deepest drug that can hook a person: the adrenaline that comes from killing people? How do you keep ‘em under control once they’ve been to Hell? (How do you like your employees now, Mr. Blackwater?)
So there’s all that. How does a person write such a book? I think to write it this well a person has to actually be driven by the issues under the plot, an awareness of how deeply this Death Monster has ahold of us all right now. Nowhere to go to get away from it.
But I have a phrase to offer: “defiant exceptionalism,” the belief that one can go to Hell, beat the odds through skill and heart, and come out of it not only a better self but also a better person than the clods around one. This is a bit tricky. You want those clods to feel included enough to put their money down for the book. They’re paying to participate in the ability to survive. Even I am taking notes on how to survive. Might need it. (Why do you think I’m living in Valier? Well, now that they’ve disarmed the missile silo just over the hill. I think. We DO get the occasional black helicopter at our teeny airport.) In some ways this book is preparation for Destroyed World scenarios, sci-fi dystopias. It helps us believe we can make it through and -- I hope -- it motivates us to action before it’s too late.
The irony -- and I find it a harsh one -- is that when the hero gets back to Missoula they’ve sold out. It’s a resort high-dollar town now. Giant refrigerators, slate countertops, international tourists, and Moose Drool beer. I suppose some will think that’s a happy ending.
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