My intention this morning was to reflect on the problem of the split between the kind of person who can create excellent works of art, full of meaning for everyone, and the kind who can promote such work so that the world even knows it exists. Even in Montana (tongue in cheek) we all know that Charlie Russell just wanted to paint, but his wife “Mamie” knew how to sell, both through her belief in the work and because she was good at the game of selling. She knew how to tempt, flirt, and reward the buyer. Charlie did the steak -- Mame did the sizzle.
I was going to say a few words about Al Tooley, who is another Montana artist, working in a cool medium: “CGE,” which is computer-generated environment. I THINK. The letters also seems to stand for other things, such as the Center for Gender Equity in SF. It’s a bit of acronym alphabet soup, but shucks, a bit of ambiguity and accident is good for us all.
Getting back to Tooley, he is the founder of a whole town: McKinley, MT, which is a town he made up. It’s virtual, but not necessarily virtuous. He sets out the nature of this town on his website, http://mckinleymontana.com/ and invites us all to contribute virtual history and stories and even artifacts that describe the place. My stories turned out to be suitable for a smaller town, so I invented “Twenty Mile,” a little satellite suburb that gradually gets absorbed by McKinley. I need to think up a new story for the place. Lance Foster is the person who told me about it. He writes scary stories with a sort of gothic tone. I guess this town amounts to a sort of organic anthology that generates itself. Al is the editor, of course, and might reject a story if it doesn’t fit.
http://www.ajtooley.com/wordpress/ is Al’s main website where he posts experiments and demos in CGE. Or is it CGI? Computer Generated Images. He makes scenes of dinosaurs that are highly realistic and then again a herd of bison that regroup themselves unrealistically to form a map of Montana! A lot of this expertise is meant for computer games, but also shows up in ads. A lot of this stuff appears on websites. I love checking out Tooley's hyper-scenery, which is intensified and augmented real landscape, rather like what Charlie did with paint. I think many of the images we see are altered and saturated without us realizing it, so that ordinary life can seem sort of . . . drained.
The thing is, such work requires intense concentration over long stretches of time, so Tooley and his computer are symbiotic. His personality is suited to that. I could (and do) sit at the computer for a long time but my writing is a matter of making a line of thought flower (sometimes way too florid for a scholar) and his image-making is much more dependent on detail and layers. At one time I thought I’d love to try that, over-laying images in the way that Tim and his boys do, but now it’s the words I want.
So I was intrigued by the Review of the Day, which arrives automatically from Powells in Portland. This time it was from ”The Nation” and the book was “Why This World: A Biography of Clarice Lispector” by Benjamin Moser. (Google Moser -- he replaced John Leonard as the New Books editor for Harpers and he is based in the Netherlands. He looks about twelve but he believes books will survive our tumbling business models.)
He really has the hots for Lispector, but it’s a little tough to understand why. She looked “like Marlene Dietrich” and the claim is that she writes like Virginia Wolff, but then they go on to say that she wrote about trying to lose consciousness, to be not so much transgressive as withdrawn. Of course, she got off to a bad start: the product of a WWII gang rape that gave her mother syphilis as well as herself and ended up in a bad near-end, going to sleep while smoking and waking too late to avoid crippling burns that ended her beauty. During the fifty years in between she was a sort of reclusive Mary Gaitskill person, writing beautifully about miserable subjects. This is a very extreme example of what I’m talking about: a creative person who would seem not only personally unsuited to self-promotion, but also not likely to produce marketable books.
Evidently she is written about as being “religious,” a mystic though variously described as Jewish, Christian or even atheist. A sort of self-afflicter in the way of saints. This reviewer of the biography is Rachel Aviv, described as a Rosalynn Carter Fellow in mental health journalism at the Carter Center. Who knew you could get a fellowship in “mental health journalism?” Googling HER is also rewarding. For instance, at http://www.poetryfoundation.org/journal/article.html?id=180239 she writes about a “poem” or trope that many people claim to have written. (It’s about footprints in the sand.) She quotes Jung, who’s hot right now: “In ‘Cryptomnesia’ (1905), a paper about accidental plagiarism, Carl Jung argues that it’s impossible to know for certain which ideas are one’s own. ‘Our unconsciousness . . . swarms with strange intruders,’ he writes. He accuses Nietzsche of unwittingly copying another’s work, and urges all writers to sift through their memories and locate the origin of every idea before putting it to paper: ‘Ask each thought: Do I know you, or are you new?’”
One of the “values” of creativity is supposed to be total originality, which may be why writing about formerly forbidden topics is so attractive, since even if someone wrote about -- as Lispector does -- the exaltation of licking pus off a cockroach, since one could hardly go lower, it’s not likely to have been published. (Personally, I’m not very curious about that.) Solitude would allow one to write in this way. Then promoting and selling it would be someone else’s problem, if anyone even knew it existed.
Which is a question that doesn’t seem to be included in this book/review/review-of-review -- how in tarnation did anyone know she existed? I gather that in certain circles her abruptness and mystery was magnetic and drew people to pursue her. The contradiction between her appearance and her “content” somehow hypnotized people. Maybe it was the period, or maybe that’s just the way people are wired: to be curious about what is different. . . or what is forbidden.
Al Tooley is not forbidden or gothic, just evasive, but CGI is certainly a curious medium and dinos are not cuddly. Worth checking out Tooley’s websites.
Tuesday, September 22, 2009
Monday, September 21, 2009
LANCE FOSTER, ARTIST & WRITER
Lance Foster's new book, "The Indians of Iowa," is now in print.
You can actually read the first 25 pages of this book online for FREE through Google books, and those pages have the chapter about the Ioway in it:
http://books.google.com/books?id=A5GqVzsxHp0C&dq=lance%20foster%20indians%20of%2\
0iowa&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=dC7rpHvxBo&sig=dDjTUhV9BqOBKY5r-Tsu5ijkZ\
YY&hl=en&ei=ud22SqX0GIeqtgOBt8zQDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onep\
age&q=&f=false
I doubt you can click right on this link. You'll have to cut and paste it or just search at Google books.
Lance says: “Nope. I don't get any money for this Google stuff. In fact, if I ever get any money for the book, maybe $1 for every book sold I hear, the Press only pays the royalties once a year-- and I won't know if/how much until next August (2010). Anyone who thinks authors of books get rich ---hahaha! --are sadly mistaken, unless that author is Stephen King!
“Oh well, the way I look at it is that it's not much different than someone reading a book in a bookstore...if they like it, usually they will buy it, and if they don't, then they saved their money :-)”
This is the link to an article in the Helena Independent Record:
http://www.helenair.com/articles/2009/07/24/local/top/49lo_090724_pwk.txt
This is Lance’s art blog:
http://lancemfosterstudio.blogspot.com
* * * * * * *
Going to the art blog site will give you access to photos, a mini-graphic legend, and other places that Lance Foster posts. Readers of “Prairie Mary” have become accustomed to his insightful comments, often daily monitoring which I appreciate very much. Lance’s great strength is that he is both multi-cultural (Native American + Euro) and multi-disciplinary: landscape architecture, archeology, NA history, and art plus a good deal of knowledge of Euro systems of legend and psychic theory. As is often typical of NA’s, he has a lively sense of of humor, for example this book cover which I hope will make it onto my blog. (Google has new rules about what images can be reproduced.)
If you can’t see it, a warrior on a galloping horse aims his nocked arrow at the sky. The moon that is his backdrop is a crescent holding the dark moon in its “arms.” The rider wears jeans and a t-shirt with a cell phone for a logo, as well as a ball cap with an eagle feather attached to the button. His horse is running down a highway with a tilting power pole in the background. A great image of syncretism in good humor!
Another of his entertaining images is an Indian offering Van Gogh, bandaged where he cut off his ear, a replacement ear -- of corn. His art is straightforward: strong lines and images, well-composed, and story-telling. He himself does not have the blade-like face we often associate with images of NA’s, so rather often his art shows massive monolithic faces like his own, especially when he is dealing with “spirits.” He has a profound interest in the supernatural, skeptical and believing at once. That is, he is strong in his belief that SOMETHING is there, but open-minded about what it might be or what it might mean.
Lance Foster is not recognized by the art power-brokers of the state of Montana, neither the cowboy art cartel that values 19th century images nor the humanities/academic gate-keepers who have a captive clientele that includes very few Indians. He has academic credentials: some of his degrees from the University of Montana. We sometimes talk about organizing a salon de refusee for artists, writers, and those who combine both categories. It’s hard to know why the exclusion: oversight? Failure to fit the stereotypes? Failure to flatter the right people? Politics? We don’t even know what our guest list might look like, just that we run into others all the time. Maybe blogging below the radar will bring us together. Or maybe it will break us apart into allegiance to larger networks, national, continental or even planetary.
Lance’s new book is an example of clarity after thorough research. He doesn’t try to include every fact known to historians, but there are some strong new ideas here, mostly about the swarm of explorers who came on the heels of Lewis & Clark & Sacajawea, destroying the ways of the People in decades. In fact, that may account for some of the lack of inclusion, since there are people invested in supporting the uniqueness and prowess of the two celebrated explorers. Lance talks about Moses Reed, who deserted the expedition and was captured by the Otoe. It was a military expedition and therefore could legitimately by Euro law have executed Reed, but the Otoe made a case for merely forcing him to run a gauntlet of the exploring party -- that is, running between two lines of the men who would strike him as hard as they could. This was their “gentler” convention.
Ioway Marie Dorion was the Sacajawea of the Oregon Trail, going with John Jacob Astor and barely escaping when the party was massacred on the way back. She had been the wife of Pierre Dorion, hired to be the interpreter, and she traveled with two small children plus being pregnant. After the escape with her children, she trekked 250 winter miles in near-starvation until they joined the Umatilla tribe where they stayed for the rest of their lives.
About the only names that pop up as familiar in my mind are Black Hawk, a war chief, and Spirit Lake, a massacre made famous by MacKinley Cantor’s massive novel of that name. As usual, we cling to the sensational. But Lance has supplemented each historical chapter with a more personal and contemporary reflection about something like mixed blood people or modern pow wows.
The principal of the high school in Heart Butte, Robin Krantz, is one of the Ioway Sioux Lance describes. The tribespeople there have been using “Ioway” to designate the tribe and Iowa for the state name to keep them separate. She is married to a white man but both have lived in Heart Butte a long time so they are woven into community life. I don’t think anyone in that community knows Lance or his work, so I’ll have to make sure I get a copy of this blog to Robin.
Lance Foster is not getting rich, but he is not giving up. He is rich in ideas, living “the life” without knowing the future -- a modern hunter-gatherer. We can learn a lot from him.
You can actually read the first 25 pages of this book online for FREE through Google books, and those pages have the chapter about the Ioway in it:
http://books.google.com/books?id=A5GqVzsxHp0C&dq=lance%20foster%20indians%20of%2\
0iowa&printsec=frontcover&source=bl&ots=dC7rpHvxBo&sig=dDjTUhV9BqOBKY5r-Tsu5ijkZ\
YY&hl=en&ei=ud22SqX0GIeqtgOBt8zQDA&sa=X&oi=book_result&ct=result&resnum=1#v=onep\
age&q=&f=false
I doubt you can click right on this link. You'll have to cut and paste it or just search at Google books.
Lance says: “Nope. I don't get any money for this Google stuff. In fact, if I ever get any money for the book, maybe $1 for every book sold I hear, the Press only pays the royalties once a year-- and I won't know if/how much until next August (2010). Anyone who thinks authors of books get rich ---hahaha! --are sadly mistaken, unless that author is Stephen King!
“Oh well, the way I look at it is that it's not much different than someone reading a book in a bookstore...if they like it, usually they will buy it, and if they don't, then they saved their money :-)”
This is the link to an article in the Helena Independent Record:
http://www.helenair.com/articles/2009/07/24/local/top/49lo_090724_pwk.txt
This is Lance’s art blog:
http://lancemfosterstudio.blogspot.com
* * * * * * *
Going to the art blog site will give you access to photos, a mini-graphic legend, and other places that Lance Foster posts. Readers of “Prairie Mary” have become accustomed to his insightful comments, often daily monitoring which I appreciate very much. Lance’s great strength is that he is both multi-cultural (Native American + Euro) and multi-disciplinary: landscape architecture, archeology, NA history, and art plus a good deal of knowledge of Euro systems of legend and psychic theory. As is often typical of NA’s, he has a lively sense of of humor, for example this book cover which I hope will make it onto my blog. (Google has new rules about what images can be reproduced.)
If you can’t see it, a warrior on a galloping horse aims his nocked arrow at the sky. The moon that is his backdrop is a crescent holding the dark moon in its “arms.” The rider wears jeans and a t-shirt with a cell phone for a logo, as well as a ball cap with an eagle feather attached to the button. His horse is running down a highway with a tilting power pole in the background. A great image of syncretism in good humor!
Another of his entertaining images is an Indian offering Van Gogh, bandaged where he cut off his ear, a replacement ear -- of corn. His art is straightforward: strong lines and images, well-composed, and story-telling. He himself does not have the blade-like face we often associate with images of NA’s, so rather often his art shows massive monolithic faces like his own, especially when he is dealing with “spirits.” He has a profound interest in the supernatural, skeptical and believing at once. That is, he is strong in his belief that SOMETHING is there, but open-minded about what it might be or what it might mean.
Lance Foster is not recognized by the art power-brokers of the state of Montana, neither the cowboy art cartel that values 19th century images nor the humanities/academic gate-keepers who have a captive clientele that includes very few Indians. He has academic credentials: some of his degrees from the University of Montana. We sometimes talk about organizing a salon de refusee for artists, writers, and those who combine both categories. It’s hard to know why the exclusion: oversight? Failure to fit the stereotypes? Failure to flatter the right people? Politics? We don’t even know what our guest list might look like, just that we run into others all the time. Maybe blogging below the radar will bring us together. Or maybe it will break us apart into allegiance to larger networks, national, continental or even planetary.
Lance’s new book is an example of clarity after thorough research. He doesn’t try to include every fact known to historians, but there are some strong new ideas here, mostly about the swarm of explorers who came on the heels of Lewis & Clark & Sacajawea, destroying the ways of the People in decades. In fact, that may account for some of the lack of inclusion, since there are people invested in supporting the uniqueness and prowess of the two celebrated explorers. Lance talks about Moses Reed, who deserted the expedition and was captured by the Otoe. It was a military expedition and therefore could legitimately by Euro law have executed Reed, but the Otoe made a case for merely forcing him to run a gauntlet of the exploring party -- that is, running between two lines of the men who would strike him as hard as they could. This was their “gentler” convention.
Ioway Marie Dorion was the Sacajawea of the Oregon Trail, going with John Jacob Astor and barely escaping when the party was massacred on the way back. She had been the wife of Pierre Dorion, hired to be the interpreter, and she traveled with two small children plus being pregnant. After the escape with her children, she trekked 250 winter miles in near-starvation until they joined the Umatilla tribe where they stayed for the rest of their lives.
About the only names that pop up as familiar in my mind are Black Hawk, a war chief, and Spirit Lake, a massacre made famous by MacKinley Cantor’s massive novel of that name. As usual, we cling to the sensational. But Lance has supplemented each historical chapter with a more personal and contemporary reflection about something like mixed blood people or modern pow wows.
The principal of the high school in Heart Butte, Robin Krantz, is one of the Ioway Sioux Lance describes. The tribespeople there have been using “Ioway” to designate the tribe and Iowa for the state name to keep them separate. She is married to a white man but both have lived in Heart Butte a long time so they are woven into community life. I don’t think anyone in that community knows Lance or his work, so I’ll have to make sure I get a copy of this blog to Robin.
Lance Foster is not getting rich, but he is not giving up. He is rich in ideas, living “the life” without knowing the future -- a modern hunter-gatherer. We can learn a lot from him.
Sunday, September 20, 2009
SELVEDGE MAGAZINE
My cousin, Diane, who is two years older than me and therefore wiser, has come to visit overnight with her husband, Ham (short for Hamilton). More about this later maybe, but right now I’m in an kind of ecstatic trance induced by a pile of magazines called “Selvedge” which describes itself as “the fabric of your life: textiles in fashion, fine art, interiors, travel and shopping.” The website begins with an animated flip-through of the mag which will tell you more than any description of mine. A quick set of other websites is below, each a delight to look at and think about, regardless of what you might actually order from them. I included a short snippet of their self-descriptions.
www/selvedge.org
Selvedge Magazine... offers the world’s finest textile photography, unparalleled design and peerless writing
Open a copy of Selvedge and you sense there is a philosophy that Selvedge readers subscribe to. A belief system based on a cerebral and sensual addiction to textiles in all forms. Readers share a belief in the importance of their material surroundings and a passion for the beautiful and beautifully made.
Our aim is simple: to provide a textile publication which fits seamlessly into their creative lifestyle. Directed towards an international, discerning audience, Selvedge covers fine textiles in every context: fine art, interiors, fashion, travel and shopping. Selvedge Magazine... offers the world’s finest textile photography, unparalleled design and peerless writing.
http://www.loopknitting.com
Loop is a knitters heaven that has to do with all things 'knit', with knitting and crochet classes, gorgeous and quirky knit homeware, knit accessories, haberdashery and vintage buttons.
What is your dream fibre?
I have so many favourite fibres, it's hard to choose. But if I were pressed, I would have to say our Synchcronicity. A blend of silk and merino, aran weight, it is a single ply fibre with unbelievable luminosity and depth.
http://www.alchemyyarns.com
Alchemy is the creation of Gina Wilde, a sculptor, painter and fibre artist; and Austin Wilde, a former marketing executive and musician. Nestled in the rolling hills of Sonoma County, California, between the vineyards and the old apple orchards, Alchemy is a funky little fibre farm. As a work family, we custom create every skein of Alchemy with love and attention. Our intent is to share our passion for colour, natural fibre, and contemporary design with artists around the world.
http://www.rickettsindigo.com/
Contemporary science tells us that color is a sensation experienced because of the differing wavelengths of light waves. To me this is only part of the story. As an artist, my sensation of color is also informed by that color's material substance and the process that gives color form for me to reflect upon.
Materialized from the soil, rain, and air around them, plants physically embody place. Plants also embody their individual histories, as well as the history of their species and its interactions with humans. Using gathered and cultivated plants as dyes I transfer their color to cloth with traditional dyeing techniques honed over centuries. The colors obtained are enriched by each plant's historical, cultural, and physical substance as well as by the connection across time to all who ever worked within these traditions.
www.clothalolics.com
We sell authentic vintage and new Japanese silk kimono, imported from Japan so that you can buy with confidence, knowing that you are purchasing not just an elegant piece of clothing, but a future heirloom. We have a wide range of Japanese silk kimono fabrics in various weights and weaves: damasks, crepes, ikats, tie-dyes, etc. We've also got a small selection of hemp/cotton blends and fine wool fabrics.
http://foglinenwork.com/
Fog Linen Work produces a large line of linen products for the home and linen clothing.
Its products are leading and defining the natural life style trend in Japan today.
Sekine continues to be inspired to create beautiful simple products for daily use.
Ads always include linens and yellow cats:
* * * * * * * * * *
My aesthetic innards are torn between the simple, spare, enduring, pale lines of a Montana winter horizon and the hysterical, brilliant, pow-in-the-eye of Blackfeet fancy dancers. I mean, I really cannot decide which is my true preference and I don’t want to. But I want to run my hands and eyes over all these surfaces from French ticking pocket dolls to living Japanese yellow cats on linen squares. This mag gives me Russian peasants so swaddled in layers of quilted coat that they look like matryoshka dolls, all in red, yellow, purple; and then desert nomads draped in taureg blue.
Also, a lot of really weird stuff that is pretty much of a puzzle when one tries to figure out what to do with it. A lot of strange spindley coffee-brown rag dolls in intricate dresses and at least once a row of lambs in bright sweaters with pompoms on them. Things are both witty and comforting, as in the felted wool tea cosies in the shape of sheep with black velvet faces and ears. Once was a series of knitted balls, each with an exquisitely embroidered bright “moth” or “butterfly” on it. Calling them “mothballs,” the creator could suggest no particular uses. Mary Emmerling, my fav interior decorator, would put them on a brass tray in front of the sofa, just to admire and touch. Isn’t that enough?
These are items of “material” culture: silk, wood, bamboo, alpaca fibers plus whatever else an inventive person could think of. But for me, here in this village, it puts my hands on the kind of yarn worth working with. I can find ideas for things like used denim, either to overlay into a bricolage of patches or to tear into strips sewn together to make a rag rug. Recycling is in, but with a luxury touch, maybe a little gleam of something copper-colored, a brass button.
Diane remembered my reading chair, which was once my mother’s chair bought when she married in 1938. Right now it sports an unfinished corduroy slipcover, bright orange, overlaid with the Navajo blanket Tina Giovanni sent me, and fortified with a down pillow for the small of my back. The pillow is covered and ruffle-edged with orange material I bought so many years ago that it’s faded, which we think adds to the richness. The images on it are from India: elephants, flowering trees, and men in turbans. Diane and I like is the textures -- velvety cotton, strong wool, shiny cotton -- the various oranges, and the jokes of India Indian on Navajo Indian and of sweet and puffy ruffles against severe geometry.
The magazine called Selvedge (self/edge) is expensive but, oh, what a wealth of networking! I don't know how Diane could bear to give me so many issues! Thanks, Diane!
www/selvedge.org
Selvedge Magazine... offers the world’s finest textile photography, unparalleled design and peerless writing
Open a copy of Selvedge and you sense there is a philosophy that Selvedge readers subscribe to. A belief system based on a cerebral and sensual addiction to textiles in all forms. Readers share a belief in the importance of their material surroundings and a passion for the beautiful and beautifully made.
Our aim is simple: to provide a textile publication which fits seamlessly into their creative lifestyle. Directed towards an international, discerning audience, Selvedge covers fine textiles in every context: fine art, interiors, fashion, travel and shopping. Selvedge Magazine... offers the world’s finest textile photography, unparalleled design and peerless writing.
http://www.loopknitting.com
Loop is a knitters heaven that has to do with all things 'knit', with knitting and crochet classes, gorgeous and quirky knit homeware, knit accessories, haberdashery and vintage buttons.
What is your dream fibre?
I have so many favourite fibres, it's hard to choose. But if I were pressed, I would have to say our Synchcronicity. A blend of silk and merino, aran weight, it is a single ply fibre with unbelievable luminosity and depth.
http://www.alchemyyarns.com
Alchemy is the creation of Gina Wilde, a sculptor, painter and fibre artist; and Austin Wilde, a former marketing executive and musician. Nestled in the rolling hills of Sonoma County, California, between the vineyards and the old apple orchards, Alchemy is a funky little fibre farm. As a work family, we custom create every skein of Alchemy with love and attention. Our intent is to share our passion for colour, natural fibre, and contemporary design with artists around the world.
http://www.rickettsindigo.com/
Contemporary science tells us that color is a sensation experienced because of the differing wavelengths of light waves. To me this is only part of the story. As an artist, my sensation of color is also informed by that color's material substance and the process that gives color form for me to reflect upon.
Materialized from the soil, rain, and air around them, plants physically embody place. Plants also embody their individual histories, as well as the history of their species and its interactions with humans. Using gathered and cultivated plants as dyes I transfer their color to cloth with traditional dyeing techniques honed over centuries. The colors obtained are enriched by each plant's historical, cultural, and physical substance as well as by the connection across time to all who ever worked within these traditions.
www.clothalolics.com
We sell authentic vintage and new Japanese silk kimono, imported from Japan so that you can buy with confidence, knowing that you are purchasing not just an elegant piece of clothing, but a future heirloom. We have a wide range of Japanese silk kimono fabrics in various weights and weaves: damasks, crepes, ikats, tie-dyes, etc. We've also got a small selection of hemp/cotton blends and fine wool fabrics.
http://foglinenwork.com/
Fog Linen Work produces a large line of linen products for the home and linen clothing.
Its products are leading and defining the natural life style trend in Japan today.
Sekine continues to be inspired to create beautiful simple products for daily use.
Ads always include linens and yellow cats:
* * * * * * * * * *
My aesthetic innards are torn between the simple, spare, enduring, pale lines of a Montana winter horizon and the hysterical, brilliant, pow-in-the-eye of Blackfeet fancy dancers. I mean, I really cannot decide which is my true preference and I don’t want to. But I want to run my hands and eyes over all these surfaces from French ticking pocket dolls to living Japanese yellow cats on linen squares. This mag gives me Russian peasants so swaddled in layers of quilted coat that they look like matryoshka dolls, all in red, yellow, purple; and then desert nomads draped in taureg blue.
Also, a lot of really weird stuff that is pretty much of a puzzle when one tries to figure out what to do with it. A lot of strange spindley coffee-brown rag dolls in intricate dresses and at least once a row of lambs in bright sweaters with pompoms on them. Things are both witty and comforting, as in the felted wool tea cosies in the shape of sheep with black velvet faces and ears. Once was a series of knitted balls, each with an exquisitely embroidered bright “moth” or “butterfly” on it. Calling them “mothballs,” the creator could suggest no particular uses. Mary Emmerling, my fav interior decorator, would put them on a brass tray in front of the sofa, just to admire and touch. Isn’t that enough?
These are items of “material” culture: silk, wood, bamboo, alpaca fibers plus whatever else an inventive person could think of. But for me, here in this village, it puts my hands on the kind of yarn worth working with. I can find ideas for things like used denim, either to overlay into a bricolage of patches or to tear into strips sewn together to make a rag rug. Recycling is in, but with a luxury touch, maybe a little gleam of something copper-colored, a brass button.
Diane remembered my reading chair, which was once my mother’s chair bought when she married in 1938. Right now it sports an unfinished corduroy slipcover, bright orange, overlaid with the Navajo blanket Tina Giovanni sent me, and fortified with a down pillow for the small of my back. The pillow is covered and ruffle-edged with orange material I bought so many years ago that it’s faded, which we think adds to the richness. The images on it are from India: elephants, flowering trees, and men in turbans. Diane and I like is the textures -- velvety cotton, strong wool, shiny cotton -- the various oranges, and the jokes of India Indian on Navajo Indian and of sweet and puffy ruffles against severe geometry.
The magazine called Selvedge (self/edge) is expensive but, oh, what a wealth of networking! I don't know how Diane could bear to give me so many issues! Thanks, Diane!
Saturday, September 19, 2009
LOCAL NEWS IN THE SUMMERTIME
The Golden Triangle newspapers are a regional group of papers all owned by the Kavanagh family. The news in them often overlaps and the classified ads are the same. Valier is thirty miles from Browning and only a few miles from the boundary of the reservation, but the ordinary word-of-mouth generally stops at that line. People in Valier rarely know what’s going on in Browning and vice versa. However, the news for Cut Bank, which is in the same county as Browning, tends to be more the same, except that there is always more news in Browning and more advertising. It is an awkward truth that the small white towns around the rez are collapsing while Browning and environs expands both in population and prosperity.
When I came in 1961, Browning had its own separately owned newspaper and Milo Fields was quite an active reporter/photography/editorialist. At that time the white population of Browning was strong and owned most of the businesses and professions. Also, the Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrats were mostly white. All that has changed and now the town, to an outsider, looks solidly Indian. Mostly that’s true.
Even when Milo was the editor, one of the most interesting and controversial features of the paper was the report of arrests and trial results. It would run for a couple of months, and then someone’s relative would awkwardly end up on the list (white as well as red) and the list would disappear. Then after a year or so, someone would manage to beg for it to be reinstated on grounds that it was a deterrent to crime. These days the Sheriff’s Log runs consistently, partly because the editors are in Cut Bank where they are somewhat shielded from rez politics and partly because the sheriff’s report conflates the reports for the whole county so that Cut Bank’s escapades are hidden in among the reports for the rez. (The Pondera County sheriff converts everything to numbers: so many arrests, so many horses struck by cars, so many dogs at loose, etc.)
Just as in Portland, some people can’t wait for the printed news, so they follow dispatch along on a radio monitor of their own. The dispatchers, who have long boring stretches to deal with, are aware they are broadcasting and sometimes the sheriff’s log reflects the same consciousness. All that said, sometimes the reports are pretty vivid and the reader is easily drawn into the situation by curiosity.
For instance, a Friday night report: A man calling from a bar says his son is beating up his wife. He’s drunk so the dispatcher is a little skeptical. Three hours later a call comes in that a woman in the East Glacier cemetary is getting beat up. (Cell phones mean calls can come from anywhere. The only cemetary I know of up there is way back in the trees.) At 8AM a man in Heart Butte says his sister is trying to attack him. He is handicapped, at the other end of the rez, and holding his oxycodone pills which his sister wants, but he’s escaped the house and is up on the hill. The cops come. They arrest him.
The next afternoon the airport (in Cut Bank) calls to say they canceled the drag races so the ambulance doesn’t have to be on standby.
Someone called to say girls in Cut Bank were kicking the planters in front of a business out into the sidewalk. The investigating officer says the girls were chasing a mouse so it was not vandalism.
A caller reported a “bright flash and three pieces of metal hanging from the substation across from the wrecking yard on US Highway 2 eastbound. [next to Cut Bank]. Advised GEC [Glacier Electric Company] and are experiencing a power outage. May be vandalism. Officer checked it out. There is a crispy pigeon on the ground. It is smoking but there is no fire. Officer advised he’s hungry and to pick up the crispy bird for lunch. On another day a Hutterite colony called to advise they have no electricity and are running a generator. A bird on fire was seen flying away from the “transistor pole” and the wheat crop is just ripe, so everyone be on the lookout for smoke.
Many complaints are about drunks fighting, but there are also many problems with non-human animals. Dogs bark and one “boxer” which “looks like it has a family” [they don’t mean human] has been chasing joggers. The officer has returned it home, talked to the family, and issued warnings. This time he takes it to the animal shelter. It was a black and white pit bull. On another day there is a complaint about two dogs traveling together: one is small and fuzzy and the other is “big and dumb-looking.” On still another day a cougar invites itself to the Chewing Black Bone campground alongside St. Mary’s lake. The complainant is camping in a yellow tipi. Many bears are clipped by cars, mostly driven by tourists, but they have sense enough to not check for damage to their vehicles until they are a few miles away. Carcasses rarely found.
A complaint comes in that a tourist family with little kids is chasing a grizzly bear up by Many Glacier. Call referred to the Glacier Park rangers. In the summer there are regularly tragedies but they are usually people falling over cliffs. This August it was a motorcycle that went over a cliff, killing the operator. On a lighter note, a “tall blonde male from Washington and Alaska left his backpack with his undies alongside on the steps of the Job Service office in Cut Bank.” They consider this objectionable. Another backpacker has been sleeping at night in the Babb Post Office.
There are always complaints about noise from parties at the Pine Tree Apartments and fighting at the Bear’s Den. These businesses have no listed telephones, so I can’t confirm their location and my knowledge of them is hazy since I don’t patronize them, but I believe they’re in Cut Bank. If not, I may find out who reads this blog. These days they are more likely to egg my car than break in all the windows with a baseball bat.
The Cut Bank kids are always at war with the cops. Someone calls in to complain that the kids have stretched Saran Wrap across the street. Dispatch records that the officer already knows: he just hit it and it is wrapped around his squad car. (Cut Bank is where a MacDonald’s employee put ag chemicals in a border patrolman’s food, which nearly killed him. Last I heard neurological damage had put him in a wheelchair, maybe permanently. Years ago they used to just put Ex-lax in their food.)
There is a strongly defensible theory that addressing these sorts of calls promptly and efficiently will prevent more serious crime and this is probably true, but it takes time and money. The claim that serious crimes are insufficiently investigated and prosecuted is a different problem but it has my sympathy.
When I came in 1961, Browning had its own separately owned newspaper and Milo Fields was quite an active reporter/photography/editorialist. At that time the white population of Browning was strong and owned most of the businesses and professions. Also, the Bureau of Indian Affairs bureaucrats were mostly white. All that has changed and now the town, to an outsider, looks solidly Indian. Mostly that’s true.
Even when Milo was the editor, one of the most interesting and controversial features of the paper was the report of arrests and trial results. It would run for a couple of months, and then someone’s relative would awkwardly end up on the list (white as well as red) and the list would disappear. Then after a year or so, someone would manage to beg for it to be reinstated on grounds that it was a deterrent to crime. These days the Sheriff’s Log runs consistently, partly because the editors are in Cut Bank where they are somewhat shielded from rez politics and partly because the sheriff’s report conflates the reports for the whole county so that Cut Bank’s escapades are hidden in among the reports for the rez. (The Pondera County sheriff converts everything to numbers: so many arrests, so many horses struck by cars, so many dogs at loose, etc.)
Just as in Portland, some people can’t wait for the printed news, so they follow dispatch along on a radio monitor of their own. The dispatchers, who have long boring stretches to deal with, are aware they are broadcasting and sometimes the sheriff’s log reflects the same consciousness. All that said, sometimes the reports are pretty vivid and the reader is easily drawn into the situation by curiosity.
For instance, a Friday night report: A man calling from a bar says his son is beating up his wife. He’s drunk so the dispatcher is a little skeptical. Three hours later a call comes in that a woman in the East Glacier cemetary is getting beat up. (Cell phones mean calls can come from anywhere. The only cemetary I know of up there is way back in the trees.) At 8AM a man in Heart Butte says his sister is trying to attack him. He is handicapped, at the other end of the rez, and holding his oxycodone pills which his sister wants, but he’s escaped the house and is up on the hill. The cops come. They arrest him.
The next afternoon the airport (in Cut Bank) calls to say they canceled the drag races so the ambulance doesn’t have to be on standby.
Someone called to say girls in Cut Bank were kicking the planters in front of a business out into the sidewalk. The investigating officer says the girls were chasing a mouse so it was not vandalism.
A caller reported a “bright flash and three pieces of metal hanging from the substation across from the wrecking yard on US Highway 2 eastbound. [next to Cut Bank]. Advised GEC [Glacier Electric Company] and are experiencing a power outage. May be vandalism. Officer checked it out. There is a crispy pigeon on the ground. It is smoking but there is no fire. Officer advised he’s hungry and to pick up the crispy bird for lunch. On another day a Hutterite colony called to advise they have no electricity and are running a generator. A bird on fire was seen flying away from the “transistor pole” and the wheat crop is just ripe, so everyone be on the lookout for smoke.
Many complaints are about drunks fighting, but there are also many problems with non-human animals. Dogs bark and one “boxer” which “looks like it has a family” [they don’t mean human] has been chasing joggers. The officer has returned it home, talked to the family, and issued warnings. This time he takes it to the animal shelter. It was a black and white pit bull. On another day there is a complaint about two dogs traveling together: one is small and fuzzy and the other is “big and dumb-looking.” On still another day a cougar invites itself to the Chewing Black Bone campground alongside St. Mary’s lake. The complainant is camping in a yellow tipi. Many bears are clipped by cars, mostly driven by tourists, but they have sense enough to not check for damage to their vehicles until they are a few miles away. Carcasses rarely found.
A complaint comes in that a tourist family with little kids is chasing a grizzly bear up by Many Glacier. Call referred to the Glacier Park rangers. In the summer there are regularly tragedies but they are usually people falling over cliffs. This August it was a motorcycle that went over a cliff, killing the operator. On a lighter note, a “tall blonde male from Washington and Alaska left his backpack with his undies alongside on the steps of the Job Service office in Cut Bank.” They consider this objectionable. Another backpacker has been sleeping at night in the Babb Post Office.
There are always complaints about noise from parties at the Pine Tree Apartments and fighting at the Bear’s Den. These businesses have no listed telephones, so I can’t confirm their location and my knowledge of them is hazy since I don’t patronize them, but I believe they’re in Cut Bank. If not, I may find out who reads this blog. These days they are more likely to egg my car than break in all the windows with a baseball bat.
The Cut Bank kids are always at war with the cops. Someone calls in to complain that the kids have stretched Saran Wrap across the street. Dispatch records that the officer already knows: he just hit it and it is wrapped around his squad car. (Cut Bank is where a MacDonald’s employee put ag chemicals in a border patrolman’s food, which nearly killed him. Last I heard neurological damage had put him in a wheelchair, maybe permanently. Years ago they used to just put Ex-lax in their food.)
There is a strongly defensible theory that addressing these sorts of calls promptly and efficiently will prevent more serious crime and this is probably true, but it takes time and money. The claim that serious crimes are insufficiently investigated and prosecuted is a different problem but it has my sympathy.
Friday, September 18, 2009
QUANTUM IDENTITY
This week has been a bit of a Charlotte Rampling festival in honor of older women. Last night was “The Duchess.” Tonight was “Swimming Pool.” The two movies could not be more different in one way: “The Duchess” is based on historical fact, heavily overlaid with modern bodice-ripper interpretations. “Swimming Pool” is . . . well, what is it? An erotic thriller? A psychological philosophical mind game? A French excuse for toplessness? Charlotte was absolutely believable in both, without any extravagance or obvious tricks.
The interesting movie is the latter. I’ve been reading about “quantum mechanics” (finally got around to “The Dancing Wu-Li Masters,” which I suppose is already obsolete since there appears to be an additional “force” in the cosmos -- we’re up to five now. Quantum mechanics are for particles so teeny they are indefinable, not quite perceptible: energy in both wave and particle which has the potential to be two places at once, possibly in multiple parallel universes, and -- on the Newtonian level -- to make our solid world. At least as we perceive it. Human identity appears to operate on a quantum basis.
We know that the brain takes in all the sensory information of our bodies, sorts it, throws out some, makes up some, and creates from the result a reality of its own. One for the daytime, one for sleep, maybe one for school and one for home, and slides into the identities in books and movies with no trouble at all. Writers? Oh, my. It’s clear that a world summoned up in a book and worked through (a virtual world) is real to both the writer and the reader and capable of changing them in the same way as real experience. And actors? Sometimes they’re lucky if they stay on the functional side of insanity, especially when they’re starting out. When I was taking acting classes and hanging around actors as an undergrad, there were several who wavered back and forth over the line between their own identities and those in the play. Actually, it didn’t seem to hurt them but it was hard on the people who were intimate with them. How do you know to whom you are really relating?
And that’s the premise of this movie. Charlotte is playing an abrupt, impatient, productive writer who has a testy relationship with her publisher. (PUBLISHER now, not editor -- I’m not sure most people would see the difference. Publishing is about money; editing is about the product.) Slender, short-haired, Charlotte is the sort of person who goes abroad in khaki trousers, as opposed to the kind of older woman who wears black jersey skirts and keeps an eye out for attractive waiters. Except that Charlotte DOES keep an eye on the waiter. In a restrained English way.
The publisher lends Charlotte his house in the south of France -- everyone is more “themselves” in the south of France -- and mentions a daughter. Expecting a spotty half-grown girl, we and Charlotte are dazzled by a daughter with a fabulous body, a golden girl far more sophisticated than anyone of the type in California. She is outrageous, sexual, seemingly all surface and no boundaries and yet . . . The writer is intrigued. She reads the girl’s diary. The girl reads the writer’s manuscript, which is about the diary. The two fantasies entwine until -- well, you have to remember that this writer’s specialty is Brit murder mysteries and they always include someone being buried in the garden. I loved all the footage of Charlotte at her laptop, though the outtakes show many didn’t get included.
Viewers of this movie decide for themselves what it is all about. (One must remember that a movie is quick flickers of still photos which only seem to move because the eye is not fast enough to see them separately, and then one “take” is edited with another in a sequence as little attached to Newtonian rules of reality as any other art form, so that one must fill in for oneself a good deal of information. Anyway, in the first place the movie was shot by a camera that changes the light, distorts distances and proportions, and can only see what the cinematographer allows. One is probably viewing on a computer or TV screen, depending on one’s eye NOT to see individual pixels.) Some thought it was a straight mystery story. Some thought Charlotte was inventing a book as we watched what was in her writing. Some thought it was a little lesson in expectations, a joke really. Some worried about what the director thought he was doing. (A director is sort of combination writer/editor.)
Reality is equally a matter of selecting identity through perception of many options, many of them involuntary and unconscious. Women are forced into awareness of their bodily swings over a month’s period. Even at seventy that constant tide affects me, but I was never so aware as in 1990 when I was taking hormones. I was controlling the swings consciously. I hated it -- not the high-awareness, over-emotional part, but the nesting week when I purred and cuddled and didn’t want anything. Now I take daily pills for high blood pressure and diabetes, neither of which is very accessible to consciousness but both of which affect everything from eyesight (the thin film of the retina swells up with extra sugar and loses focus) to patience. A ten minute walk makes me different because it changes my blood glucose by twenty points.
On blood tests I test high-normal in androgens (yes, the testosterone male stuff, though I don’t look at all male) and cortisol which is self-made cortisone and meant to go high after emergencies. These are about high energy, passion, willingness to risk. Forget the pharm people’s pills. These inside chemicals, like adrenaline, respond to and create the world.
There’s a focus of auto-chemical studies that is about the gut. The brain is evolved from the gut. Emotions (which are chemical) are in the gut first, then recognized and responded to by the brain. Pay attention to your digestion, because it is part of your whole autonomic sympathetic/parasympathetic feedback system, on its own to keep your heart beating, your blood circulating, your cells getting their energy, the whole chem lab inside human individual bodies which is the foundation of identity. We’ve learned how to intervene with powerful drugs, both legal and illegal, but also we are flooding our minds with media images and ideas that get us in the gut: fear, contempt, hatred, rage. As one film character asked (in another movie), “Where’s the love, baby?”
This interests me. If I weren’t living in a quiet village, I would be so flooded I wouldn’t be able to think about it clearly. It’s only barely possible now. Like Charlotte or an actor, I go in and out of roles. I don’t need the south of France. A publisher wouldn’t hurt.
The interesting movie is the latter. I’ve been reading about “quantum mechanics” (finally got around to “The Dancing Wu-Li Masters,” which I suppose is already obsolete since there appears to be an additional “force” in the cosmos -- we’re up to five now. Quantum mechanics are for particles so teeny they are indefinable, not quite perceptible: energy in both wave and particle which has the potential to be two places at once, possibly in multiple parallel universes, and -- on the Newtonian level -- to make our solid world. At least as we perceive it. Human identity appears to operate on a quantum basis.
We know that the brain takes in all the sensory information of our bodies, sorts it, throws out some, makes up some, and creates from the result a reality of its own. One for the daytime, one for sleep, maybe one for school and one for home, and slides into the identities in books and movies with no trouble at all. Writers? Oh, my. It’s clear that a world summoned up in a book and worked through (a virtual world) is real to both the writer and the reader and capable of changing them in the same way as real experience. And actors? Sometimes they’re lucky if they stay on the functional side of insanity, especially when they’re starting out. When I was taking acting classes and hanging around actors as an undergrad, there were several who wavered back and forth over the line between their own identities and those in the play. Actually, it didn’t seem to hurt them but it was hard on the people who were intimate with them. How do you know to whom you are really relating?
And that’s the premise of this movie. Charlotte is playing an abrupt, impatient, productive writer who has a testy relationship with her publisher. (PUBLISHER now, not editor -- I’m not sure most people would see the difference. Publishing is about money; editing is about the product.) Slender, short-haired, Charlotte is the sort of person who goes abroad in khaki trousers, as opposed to the kind of older woman who wears black jersey skirts and keeps an eye out for attractive waiters. Except that Charlotte DOES keep an eye on the waiter. In a restrained English way.
The publisher lends Charlotte his house in the south of France -- everyone is more “themselves” in the south of France -- and mentions a daughter. Expecting a spotty half-grown girl, we and Charlotte are dazzled by a daughter with a fabulous body, a golden girl far more sophisticated than anyone of the type in California. She is outrageous, sexual, seemingly all surface and no boundaries and yet . . . The writer is intrigued. She reads the girl’s diary. The girl reads the writer’s manuscript, which is about the diary. The two fantasies entwine until -- well, you have to remember that this writer’s specialty is Brit murder mysteries and they always include someone being buried in the garden. I loved all the footage of Charlotte at her laptop, though the outtakes show many didn’t get included.
Viewers of this movie decide for themselves what it is all about. (One must remember that a movie is quick flickers of still photos which only seem to move because the eye is not fast enough to see them separately, and then one “take” is edited with another in a sequence as little attached to Newtonian rules of reality as any other art form, so that one must fill in for oneself a good deal of information. Anyway, in the first place the movie was shot by a camera that changes the light, distorts distances and proportions, and can only see what the cinematographer allows. One is probably viewing on a computer or TV screen, depending on one’s eye NOT to see individual pixels.) Some thought it was a straight mystery story. Some thought Charlotte was inventing a book as we watched what was in her writing. Some thought it was a little lesson in expectations, a joke really. Some worried about what the director thought he was doing. (A director is sort of combination writer/editor.)
Reality is equally a matter of selecting identity through perception of many options, many of them involuntary and unconscious. Women are forced into awareness of their bodily swings over a month’s period. Even at seventy that constant tide affects me, but I was never so aware as in 1990 when I was taking hormones. I was controlling the swings consciously. I hated it -- not the high-awareness, over-emotional part, but the nesting week when I purred and cuddled and didn’t want anything. Now I take daily pills for high blood pressure and diabetes, neither of which is very accessible to consciousness but both of which affect everything from eyesight (the thin film of the retina swells up with extra sugar and loses focus) to patience. A ten minute walk makes me different because it changes my blood glucose by twenty points.
On blood tests I test high-normal in androgens (yes, the testosterone male stuff, though I don’t look at all male) and cortisol which is self-made cortisone and meant to go high after emergencies. These are about high energy, passion, willingness to risk. Forget the pharm people’s pills. These inside chemicals, like adrenaline, respond to and create the world.
There’s a focus of auto-chemical studies that is about the gut. The brain is evolved from the gut. Emotions (which are chemical) are in the gut first, then recognized and responded to by the brain. Pay attention to your digestion, because it is part of your whole autonomic sympathetic/parasympathetic feedback system, on its own to keep your heart beating, your blood circulating, your cells getting their energy, the whole chem lab inside human individual bodies which is the foundation of identity. We’ve learned how to intervene with powerful drugs, both legal and illegal, but also we are flooding our minds with media images and ideas that get us in the gut: fear, contempt, hatred, rage. As one film character asked (in another movie), “Where’s the love, baby?”
This interests me. If I weren’t living in a quiet village, I would be so flooded I wouldn’t be able to think about it clearly. It’s only barely possible now. Like Charlotte or an actor, I go in and out of roles. I don’t need the south of France. A publisher wouldn’t hurt.
Thursday, September 17, 2009
RISKY OLD MEN
I once said the name “Peter Beard” in the presence of Peter Matthiessen and saw that it had roughly the same effect on the latter as being plugged into a wall socket. “What?” he demanded. “What about him?” I love both Peters, though I’ve only met Peter M. and own all his books but have never owned any of Peter B’s photo books. Just now I googled Peter Beard and discovered that he is the great-grandson of James Jerome Hill, the founder of the Great Northern Railroad which opened the northern prairie to homesteading and provoked the creation of Glacier National Park, which means that he relates to the past of this part of the world in much the same way as Barnaby Conrad III. But Peter Beard himself has become greatly identified with the Kenya of Isak Dinesen. They were only alive at the same time for a brief period, but their spirit was similar. He met her the same year I came to Browning, Montana.
I have always said that this part of Montana was my Africa. Peter B. is a year older than me and very, very rich to say nothing of being very very well connected. He takes fabulous photos with magnificent cameras and then besmirches and adorns the enlarged photos with bloody handprints, tiny India ink drawings, glued on bugs and leaves, anything. He’s a little like Robert Kennedy (who was a friend) crossed with (if you must know) Tim Barrus. And not terribly unlike his Yale compatriot, Peter Matthiessen, except that everyone loves Peter M. and some people think Peter Beard is, well, too much the free spirit. He probably has as much of what he calls “jewelry” in his hips as Tim Barrus does, but because an elephant trampled him, an event that was filmed, right out to the moment he actually died as he was wheeled into the Nairobi hospital. They did revive him and he’s still out there having art shows and getting into trouble, which is like Tim Barrus.
Beard’s specialty is photos of supermodels, meaning very skinny and young women with long necks, like gracile gerenuks, who are willing to take all their clothes off and stand against a background of the least modern African people Beard can find. Splashed with paint, encouraged into extreme poses, adorned with extravagant objects, they are quite stunning. Beard says they are NOT fashion photos and one has to agree. Who would show up at a cocktail party looking like that? The Africans are terrific -- work-worn, humorous, always up for anything. The most famous photo of Beard is the one he took of himself half-inserted into a dead croc. It had only been dead a short time and some of its reflexes remained, so he ended up with painful tooth marks. I’ll bet his toenails got bleached as well. I just rented “Peter Beard Scrapbooks: Africa and Beyond” from Netflix.
I love these kinds of wild and original guys. Yesterday one of our local examples (a good reason for loving Montana), Rib Gustafson, took me to lunch at the Panther Cafe. 84, Rib and his beautiful artistic wife have raised five kids, four of them men, two of those veterinarians like their dad, in addition to a famous singer (Wiley) and a math teacher. They all write, especially Sid. The daughter is a lawyer who has just finished a book on maritime law.
Rib met Bob Scriver for the first time in what must have been the late Fifties after a rousing bar fight that caused him to be jugged until he sobered up. Bob was the City Magistrate who tried Rib's case, but I didn’t ask what the sentence was. The other story Rib told happened in the Nineties. Bob had a pet badger, which can be thought of as either a weasel on steroids or a mini-grizzly. The badger had caught one of its formidable claws under a piece of heavy machinery in the shop and was so frantic that Bob couldn’t get near it to help. So at midnight, happily asleep, Rib’s phone rings and Bob wants help -- NOW. It’s an eighty mile drive, but Rib gets up and heads to Browning where he rendered the badger comatose with a shot. Even the two men working together had to remove the wedged claw to get the animal loose. Rib said when he left Bob was holding “Badgie” on his lap, soothing his beloved pet.
It’s not that I love these extravagant guys because I want a romantic relationship with them. Been there, done that. My thing is that I wish I could live the risky life as they do. I wish I were them. But women in bar fights end up dead and I’m not willing to go that far. The next best thing is to sit across a table or in front of a fireplace and hear all about it. Not that I haven’t managed to do a few far-out things, but it doesn’t matter how liberated a woman is, she still can’t live quite so “large.” Of course, men die along the way, too. Now and then.
Rib has the great advantage of being in a position to do a great deal of good for people and they reward him by watching out for him. In his several books Rib tells about some of his strategies. For instance, once he was called by a threadbare rancher with a cow teetering on the edge of oblivion, a man too proud to go into debt. So Rib proposed that the rancher make him the half-owner of the cow as payment. That way there was a chance the cow would be saved and the rancher would have half a cow -- without treatment he would have nothing. When word got around, Rib accumulated quite a little herd of half-cows.
Society theoretically likes the dependable wage-earner who protects his children and comforts his wife and we do, we do. But we also love the guy who gets out there and tastes everything the world has to offer, risks big-time pain but also big-time gain, and then can tell us all about it. I’m going to watch this movie from Netflix about Peter Beard about five more times before I send it back. Then I’ll try to buy the disc. In the meantime, I’ll watch for Rib or any of his sons, or any of a dozen other resourceful reprobates around here. And, of course, I can email Barrus any time and I do, I do.
I have always said that this part of Montana was my Africa. Peter B. is a year older than me and very, very rich to say nothing of being very very well connected. He takes fabulous photos with magnificent cameras and then besmirches and adorns the enlarged photos with bloody handprints, tiny India ink drawings, glued on bugs and leaves, anything. He’s a little like Robert Kennedy (who was a friend) crossed with (if you must know) Tim Barrus. And not terribly unlike his Yale compatriot, Peter Matthiessen, except that everyone loves Peter M. and some people think Peter Beard is, well, too much the free spirit. He probably has as much of what he calls “jewelry” in his hips as Tim Barrus does, but because an elephant trampled him, an event that was filmed, right out to the moment he actually died as he was wheeled into the Nairobi hospital. They did revive him and he’s still out there having art shows and getting into trouble, which is like Tim Barrus.
Beard’s specialty is photos of supermodels, meaning very skinny and young women with long necks, like gracile gerenuks, who are willing to take all their clothes off and stand against a background of the least modern African people Beard can find. Splashed with paint, encouraged into extreme poses, adorned with extravagant objects, they are quite stunning. Beard says they are NOT fashion photos and one has to agree. Who would show up at a cocktail party looking like that? The Africans are terrific -- work-worn, humorous, always up for anything. The most famous photo of Beard is the one he took of himself half-inserted into a dead croc. It had only been dead a short time and some of its reflexes remained, so he ended up with painful tooth marks. I’ll bet his toenails got bleached as well. I just rented “Peter Beard Scrapbooks: Africa and Beyond” from Netflix.
I love these kinds of wild and original guys. Yesterday one of our local examples (a good reason for loving Montana), Rib Gustafson, took me to lunch at the Panther Cafe. 84, Rib and his beautiful artistic wife have raised five kids, four of them men, two of those veterinarians like their dad, in addition to a famous singer (Wiley) and a math teacher. They all write, especially Sid. The daughter is a lawyer who has just finished a book on maritime law.
Rib met Bob Scriver for the first time in what must have been the late Fifties after a rousing bar fight that caused him to be jugged until he sobered up. Bob was the City Magistrate who tried Rib's case, but I didn’t ask what the sentence was. The other story Rib told happened in the Nineties. Bob had a pet badger, which can be thought of as either a weasel on steroids or a mini-grizzly. The badger had caught one of its formidable claws under a piece of heavy machinery in the shop and was so frantic that Bob couldn’t get near it to help. So at midnight, happily asleep, Rib’s phone rings and Bob wants help -- NOW. It’s an eighty mile drive, but Rib gets up and heads to Browning where he rendered the badger comatose with a shot. Even the two men working together had to remove the wedged claw to get the animal loose. Rib said when he left Bob was holding “Badgie” on his lap, soothing his beloved pet.
It’s not that I love these extravagant guys because I want a romantic relationship with them. Been there, done that. My thing is that I wish I could live the risky life as they do. I wish I were them. But women in bar fights end up dead and I’m not willing to go that far. The next best thing is to sit across a table or in front of a fireplace and hear all about it. Not that I haven’t managed to do a few far-out things, but it doesn’t matter how liberated a woman is, she still can’t live quite so “large.” Of course, men die along the way, too. Now and then.
Rib has the great advantage of being in a position to do a great deal of good for people and they reward him by watching out for him. In his several books Rib tells about some of his strategies. For instance, once he was called by a threadbare rancher with a cow teetering on the edge of oblivion, a man too proud to go into debt. So Rib proposed that the rancher make him the half-owner of the cow as payment. That way there was a chance the cow would be saved and the rancher would have half a cow -- without treatment he would have nothing. When word got around, Rib accumulated quite a little herd of half-cows.
Society theoretically likes the dependable wage-earner who protects his children and comforts his wife and we do, we do. But we also love the guy who gets out there and tastes everything the world has to offer, risks big-time pain but also big-time gain, and then can tell us all about it. I’m going to watch this movie from Netflix about Peter Beard about five more times before I send it back. Then I’ll try to buy the disc. In the meantime, I’ll watch for Rib or any of his sons, or any of a dozen other resourceful reprobates around here. And, of course, I can email Barrus any time and I do, I do.
Wednesday, September 16, 2009
IS KNOWLEDGE POWER?
First comes commodification, then comes status, and next comes equity. So first a town library is a commodity: worth a certain amount of money, supposed to help the children grow up to make money, and maybe to be a resource for community people who either need it to make money or need it because they have no money. An accumulation of books as wealth.
A library is a good middle-class sign of a prosperous community. People move to towns that have libraries -- I did. (It had a laundromat then, too. Even a car dealer.) High school kids use libraries. Story hour. We have no street people taking refuge in this library. I was very grateful to blog on the Valier library’s computers when mine broke. I’ve checked out books; I’ve given them books, as well as videos. They actually have my book about Bob Scriver on the shelf, but I’m not sure what they did with the Blackfeet history POD books I gave them.
For some reason, they broke up the Indian history section and distributed those books into the regular shelves. I think the issue was equity. When the state passed a law that all children in Montana would have to study Indian history, the previous librarian said to me, “I don’t see why I should have to study THEIR history!” I think that since then she has come to understand that at least in theory we are one people, so their history needs to be learned. But in a sort of revanchist spirit, that means the Indians get no “special” section because they’re “just like everyone else.”
The issue at last night’s meeting between the Conrad and Valier library boards was financial equity. The Conrad library, which sometimes sees itself as the Pondera County library, has decided that the way to solve their constant money problems is to revisit a split in funding that dates back to 1961. Half a century. But that wasn’t what really had tempers hot.
Some years ago the Conrad library lost their humanist, inclusive, progressive librarian. She was replaced by a woman who has made a good thing better by setting her salary at $34,000, which around here is teacher’s wages, more than the median income in Pondera County, $29,432 per household according to Google sources. Then, since she prepares the budget herself, she increases the salaries by 3% every year, without increasing her duties, her hours, or her qualifications. One employee was dropped. (Local teachers have been foregoing raises.) She has a bachelor’s degree in business management. She has no library degree. Montana requires librarians to earn credits. The Valier librarian just returned from a class in Indian education. She has an associate degree in business management. Clearly libraries here are in a business paradigm.
But my interest at this meeting was not the money. I wanted to rethink the whole ball game from the point of view of quality of services and inclusion of the whole county, if they really think of themselves as a county library with a county population as a monetary per capita base. They don’t. Their heads were firmly planted on charts, calculators, proportions, and monetary equity. FIRMLY. They didn’t want to think of the other small villages in the county, but were very aware of the Hutterite colonies. The word “Indian,” as in Heart Butte which is in Pondera County, froze them in their seats.
And yet now and then we came back around to glancing off of the real issue: hard feelings, mostly relating to the arrogance of this librarian. My opinion is contaminated. She gored my ox, the one with “Bob Scriver” painted on the side. I suggested that I do a reading of “Bronze Inside and Out” -- no. I’d bet you five dollars she hasn’t even bought a copy of “Bronze Inside and Out” for the library. She’s got some kind of fantasy going because her doctor daddy used to stop by to see Bob Scriver and Bob would make a fuss over her to get her daddy’s checkbook out of his pocket. She thought it was personal. Bob Scriver was the same marker for middle class status as a library.
The previous librarian had found an old microfiche machine and installed it in the library. The backbone of “Bronze Inside and Out” was what I gained from reading all the microfiches the Montana Historical Society had of newspapers from the very beginning. In fact, the notes I took are on this blog and people have used them over and over. At the time, that far-sighted Conrad librarian understood that there are some materials that can only be accessed that way and the Montana Historical Society was willing to put the microfiches in the custody of the Conrad library where I could read them without driving the 200 miles to Helena. (I could read two years a day, which took about four hours plus the thirty mile drive for months.) She was a service-based librarian. And that library could have taken credit for the publication of the book. A reading there seemed natural. The present librarian would have nothing to do with it.
In my allotted 3 minutes at the meeting I spoke about bookmobiles, about that microfiche reader, about the arrogance and snubbing that I meet in the Conrad library now (People piped up to say I'm not alone.), and about the Choteau library as worthy of inquiry. (That librarian used to run a dress shop.) They objected to everything. “But those things will all cost MORE!” Their idea is to pinch and scrimp and drop services to match their budget, rather than think of ways to generate interest and energy -- which always leads to more money coming in.
But the most daunting and maybe typical aspect of this was that the Conrad board admitted that they had discouraged people from coming to the meeting, telling them that they couldn’t attend. That they wouldn’t be welcome. Hell’s bells. It’s a public meeting! Public business! It’s ILLEGAL to keep people out. It’s always a scandal if they are barred. What is the person who is told not to come supposed think about why he’s not welcome?
The more that come, the more that get invested in what’s happening. The Valier people came, but only the same ones, the previous board members. Both boards expressed surprise that the other board was, well, HUMAN! And maybe even REASONABLE! And some of the Conrad board members grew up in Valier!
The more people are kept out, the more they go underground and get more sore and have more fantasies and vote down all levies. The rumors fly. Pretty soon the Conrad/Valier “library money grab” could be on NPR, just like Choteau where the superintendent tried to cancel, suppress, control, deny, and otherwise consolidate power. It ALWAYS backfires.
I thought I had heard the Valier board recommend that Conrad drop Interlibrary Loan, because Valier had, and it saved money. So I had to do a little research this morning. Neither library has cut themselves off that way, but Valier has imposed a fee if more than five books a month are ordered.
Then the librarian took me out to the storage to show me Valier’s microfiche machine! I had no idea it existed. What’s that old library motto: “knowledge is power?” I sure could have saved gas if I’d asked. And the Valier library was happy to schedule a reading. They know that readings get people coming in. They might even get their checkbooks out.
A library is a good middle-class sign of a prosperous community. People move to towns that have libraries -- I did. (It had a laundromat then, too. Even a car dealer.) High school kids use libraries. Story hour. We have no street people taking refuge in this library. I was very grateful to blog on the Valier library’s computers when mine broke. I’ve checked out books; I’ve given them books, as well as videos. They actually have my book about Bob Scriver on the shelf, but I’m not sure what they did with the Blackfeet history POD books I gave them.
For some reason, they broke up the Indian history section and distributed those books into the regular shelves. I think the issue was equity. When the state passed a law that all children in Montana would have to study Indian history, the previous librarian said to me, “I don’t see why I should have to study THEIR history!” I think that since then she has come to understand that at least in theory we are one people, so their history needs to be learned. But in a sort of revanchist spirit, that means the Indians get no “special” section because they’re “just like everyone else.”
The issue at last night’s meeting between the Conrad and Valier library boards was financial equity. The Conrad library, which sometimes sees itself as the Pondera County library, has decided that the way to solve their constant money problems is to revisit a split in funding that dates back to 1961. Half a century. But that wasn’t what really had tempers hot.
Some years ago the Conrad library lost their humanist, inclusive, progressive librarian. She was replaced by a woman who has made a good thing better by setting her salary at $34,000, which around here is teacher’s wages, more than the median income in Pondera County, $29,432 per household according to Google sources. Then, since she prepares the budget herself, she increases the salaries by 3% every year, without increasing her duties, her hours, or her qualifications. One employee was dropped. (Local teachers have been foregoing raises.) She has a bachelor’s degree in business management. She has no library degree. Montana requires librarians to earn credits. The Valier librarian just returned from a class in Indian education. She has an associate degree in business management. Clearly libraries here are in a business paradigm.
But my interest at this meeting was not the money. I wanted to rethink the whole ball game from the point of view of quality of services and inclusion of the whole county, if they really think of themselves as a county library with a county population as a monetary per capita base. They don’t. Their heads were firmly planted on charts, calculators, proportions, and monetary equity. FIRMLY. They didn’t want to think of the other small villages in the county, but were very aware of the Hutterite colonies. The word “Indian,” as in Heart Butte which is in Pondera County, froze them in their seats.
And yet now and then we came back around to glancing off of the real issue: hard feelings, mostly relating to the arrogance of this librarian. My opinion is contaminated. She gored my ox, the one with “Bob Scriver” painted on the side. I suggested that I do a reading of “Bronze Inside and Out” -- no. I’d bet you five dollars she hasn’t even bought a copy of “Bronze Inside and Out” for the library. She’s got some kind of fantasy going because her doctor daddy used to stop by to see Bob Scriver and Bob would make a fuss over her to get her daddy’s checkbook out of his pocket. She thought it was personal. Bob Scriver was the same marker for middle class status as a library.
The previous librarian had found an old microfiche machine and installed it in the library. The backbone of “Bronze Inside and Out” was what I gained from reading all the microfiches the Montana Historical Society had of newspapers from the very beginning. In fact, the notes I took are on this blog and people have used them over and over. At the time, that far-sighted Conrad librarian understood that there are some materials that can only be accessed that way and the Montana Historical Society was willing to put the microfiches in the custody of the Conrad library where I could read them without driving the 200 miles to Helena. (I could read two years a day, which took about four hours plus the thirty mile drive for months.) She was a service-based librarian. And that library could have taken credit for the publication of the book. A reading there seemed natural. The present librarian would have nothing to do with it.
In my allotted 3 minutes at the meeting I spoke about bookmobiles, about that microfiche reader, about the arrogance and snubbing that I meet in the Conrad library now (People piped up to say I'm not alone.), and about the Choteau library as worthy of inquiry. (That librarian used to run a dress shop.) They objected to everything. “But those things will all cost MORE!” Their idea is to pinch and scrimp and drop services to match their budget, rather than think of ways to generate interest and energy -- which always leads to more money coming in.
But the most daunting and maybe typical aspect of this was that the Conrad board admitted that they had discouraged people from coming to the meeting, telling them that they couldn’t attend. That they wouldn’t be welcome. Hell’s bells. It’s a public meeting! Public business! It’s ILLEGAL to keep people out. It’s always a scandal if they are barred. What is the person who is told not to come supposed think about why he’s not welcome?
The more that come, the more that get invested in what’s happening. The Valier people came, but only the same ones, the previous board members. Both boards expressed surprise that the other board was, well, HUMAN! And maybe even REASONABLE! And some of the Conrad board members grew up in Valier!
The more people are kept out, the more they go underground and get more sore and have more fantasies and vote down all levies. The rumors fly. Pretty soon the Conrad/Valier “library money grab” could be on NPR, just like Choteau where the superintendent tried to cancel, suppress, control, deny, and otherwise consolidate power. It ALWAYS backfires.
I thought I had heard the Valier board recommend that Conrad drop Interlibrary Loan, because Valier had, and it saved money. So I had to do a little research this morning. Neither library has cut themselves off that way, but Valier has imposed a fee if more than five books a month are ordered.
Then the librarian took me out to the storage to show me Valier’s microfiche machine! I had no idea it existed. What’s that old library motto: “knowledge is power?” I sure could have saved gas if I’d asked. And the Valier library was happy to schedule a reading. They know that readings get people coming in. They might even get their checkbooks out.
Tuesday, September 15, 2009
EMBRACE LOVE
In this small city the minister had a very nice church, well-respected and generously funded by the congregation. The building was in good shape, social action was strong, religious education was progressive, and the sermons were admired. But the minister sometimes felt that they were a little -- well, maybe “slick” would be the word. It’s just that life was pretty good for everyone there. He felt the lack of chiarascuro, to be pretentious about it: not much dark. But he cheerfully received visitors in his comfortable office lined with theology tomes and listened to their thoughts and worries. They didn’t seem to have any dramatic sins. They were liberals: educated, prosperous, sometimes psychoanalyzed, always adjusted.
Down below the basement was a sub-basement that few people knew about. It was mostly a repository for old and broken stuff that somehow never quite got thrown away. Then there were bits of scenery and equipment, things like Christmas pageant sets and boxes of bunting to hang on Fourth of July. And the heating plant, of course. That corner of the sub-basement was warm and cozy. Someone in the past had partitioned off a room around the furnace room door, which the minister jokingly referred to as the door to Hell. He had made the space his unofficial back-up secret office where he actually got his work done amidst disorder and paper piles.
On the wall behind his desk hung a poster that he would never dared to have put up in his regular office. It said, “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no Evil, for I am the Meanest Sunnavabitch in the Valley.” The picture was of a scary man in clerical garb.
He kept slippers down there and his secret vices: cigarettes and even a bottle of therapeutic liquid to lubricate the mind. No one else knew except the janitor, a black man who had come to the church through some do-gooder program. He was a genuine African who had a hook instead of a hand on his left side because in some kind of war or revolution that no one really understood, his hand had been lopped off by a machete. When sympathizers tried to commiserate over such a horrible thing, he remarked that it was actually a kindness: his attacker had spared his right hand and he was right- handed.
He had renamed himself, since no one could pronounce African words with clicks in them anyway, and signed his checks “Embrace Love.” Mostly people called him “Em,” and gradually assumed it was an initial. They could never find him in the phone book because they were always looking for a first name that began with the letter “m.” The congregation never realized that he was a valuable advisor to the minister. The two would slump in their old comfortable chairs, producing a thin layer of tobacco smoke and sipping a little inspiration while they reflected on the problems of the day. The minister felt then that he touched on a world none of the church really knew, a depth of human extremes. It appeared that Em had not been made evil by all that had been done to him but he did talk about the Devil.
One day Em was fussing around about something to do with the men’s lavatory in the back hallway on the first floor, a convenience rarely visited by most parishioners. He wanted to keep it locked but was reluctant to say why until the whiskey did its work. Then he confessed that one of the men in the congregation, a rather prominent man actually and a big pledger, had been coaxing little boys into that bathroom. Em had no evidence that anything was happening. No boys ran out screaming. But he made it his business to go in to replace the paper towels or empty the wastebaskets whenever he saw the man head in with a child.
The two sat contemplating the problem. There was the publicity aspect. Any hint of what might be happening and it would immediately be exaggerated, augmented, and demonized. The man would retaliate, possibly blame the janitor, and the children would be withdrawn from the church, collapsing the religious education program. There would be lawsuits and, indeed, there was no evidence -- just suspicion. They could install a hidden camera. But it wasn’t a good idea to wait for some incident that would traumatize a child. And what kind of church had hidden cameras in its lavatories? What were they REALLY watching? Sex and religion, such an inflammatory combination. This was the kind of situation that would not yield to reason.
The conclusion they came to was physical threat. The minister was not large or athletic and had never been in playground fights. Em said he would back him up. They got the offender off to the side in that back hallway and the minister puffed himself up, used his strongest voice, and told the man that they knew what he was up to and that if he ever showed his face around that church again, the minister would beat the hell out of him. Em stood by with a broom that had a stout handle. The reaction of the man, guilty and anxious to escape, reassured the vigilantes that they had not been mistaken, which was one of their main worries.
That night the minister was restless. He was “up,” even “high,” and felt more powerful than he had ever felt in the pulpit. He went to his sub-basement office and stood smoking, looking at his poster. Is this what it felt like to be the meanest sunnava bitch in the valley? Not a bad feeling. But when Em opened the door, he jumped. Why should he? They hadn’t laid a hand on the man, they had not committed a violent act. Or had they? Was violence always physical?
Em laughed at him. “You’re not used to this!” Em was not high. He seemed relaxed but somehow gratified. “Think you might get hooked?”
“This congregation declares that it hates violence,” said the minister. “But it’s so effective! Much more than fund drives and marches and seminars. Just tell the bastards you’ll tear their heads off and they shape up!”
“Ah, yes. But then you are the bastard.” Em accepted a finger of whiskey in a rather cloudy glass. “And next comes the Devil.”
Years later when the minister had gone on to a finer and even more liberal church, he got word that Embrace Love had died. Of AIDS. He had no family. The minister never managed to get a sermon out of it. Long ago he had stopped putting up that poster about the Valley of the Shadow of Death, a lonesome and mysterious place no matter how loving or mean a person was.
Down below the basement was a sub-basement that few people knew about. It was mostly a repository for old and broken stuff that somehow never quite got thrown away. Then there were bits of scenery and equipment, things like Christmas pageant sets and boxes of bunting to hang on Fourth of July. And the heating plant, of course. That corner of the sub-basement was warm and cozy. Someone in the past had partitioned off a room around the furnace room door, which the minister jokingly referred to as the door to Hell. He had made the space his unofficial back-up secret office where he actually got his work done amidst disorder and paper piles.
On the wall behind his desk hung a poster that he would never dared to have put up in his regular office. It said, “Yea, though I walk through the Valley of the Shadow of Death, I shall fear no Evil, for I am the Meanest Sunnavabitch in the Valley.” The picture was of a scary man in clerical garb.
He kept slippers down there and his secret vices: cigarettes and even a bottle of therapeutic liquid to lubricate the mind. No one else knew except the janitor, a black man who had come to the church through some do-gooder program. He was a genuine African who had a hook instead of a hand on his left side because in some kind of war or revolution that no one really understood, his hand had been lopped off by a machete. When sympathizers tried to commiserate over such a horrible thing, he remarked that it was actually a kindness: his attacker had spared his right hand and he was right- handed.
He had renamed himself, since no one could pronounce African words with clicks in them anyway, and signed his checks “Embrace Love.” Mostly people called him “Em,” and gradually assumed it was an initial. They could never find him in the phone book because they were always looking for a first name that began with the letter “m.” The congregation never realized that he was a valuable advisor to the minister. The two would slump in their old comfortable chairs, producing a thin layer of tobacco smoke and sipping a little inspiration while they reflected on the problems of the day. The minister felt then that he touched on a world none of the church really knew, a depth of human extremes. It appeared that Em had not been made evil by all that had been done to him but he did talk about the Devil.
One day Em was fussing around about something to do with the men’s lavatory in the back hallway on the first floor, a convenience rarely visited by most parishioners. He wanted to keep it locked but was reluctant to say why until the whiskey did its work. Then he confessed that one of the men in the congregation, a rather prominent man actually and a big pledger, had been coaxing little boys into that bathroom. Em had no evidence that anything was happening. No boys ran out screaming. But he made it his business to go in to replace the paper towels or empty the wastebaskets whenever he saw the man head in with a child.
The two sat contemplating the problem. There was the publicity aspect. Any hint of what might be happening and it would immediately be exaggerated, augmented, and demonized. The man would retaliate, possibly blame the janitor, and the children would be withdrawn from the church, collapsing the religious education program. There would be lawsuits and, indeed, there was no evidence -- just suspicion. They could install a hidden camera. But it wasn’t a good idea to wait for some incident that would traumatize a child. And what kind of church had hidden cameras in its lavatories? What were they REALLY watching? Sex and religion, such an inflammatory combination. This was the kind of situation that would not yield to reason.
The conclusion they came to was physical threat. The minister was not large or athletic and had never been in playground fights. Em said he would back him up. They got the offender off to the side in that back hallway and the minister puffed himself up, used his strongest voice, and told the man that they knew what he was up to and that if he ever showed his face around that church again, the minister would beat the hell out of him. Em stood by with a broom that had a stout handle. The reaction of the man, guilty and anxious to escape, reassured the vigilantes that they had not been mistaken, which was one of their main worries.
That night the minister was restless. He was “up,” even “high,” and felt more powerful than he had ever felt in the pulpit. He went to his sub-basement office and stood smoking, looking at his poster. Is this what it felt like to be the meanest sunnava bitch in the valley? Not a bad feeling. But when Em opened the door, he jumped. Why should he? They hadn’t laid a hand on the man, they had not committed a violent act. Or had they? Was violence always physical?
Em laughed at him. “You’re not used to this!” Em was not high. He seemed relaxed but somehow gratified. “Think you might get hooked?”
“This congregation declares that it hates violence,” said the minister. “But it’s so effective! Much more than fund drives and marches and seminars. Just tell the bastards you’ll tear their heads off and they shape up!”
“Ah, yes. But then you are the bastard.” Em accepted a finger of whiskey in a rather cloudy glass. “And next comes the Devil.”
Years later when the minister had gone on to a finer and even more liberal church, he got word that Embrace Love had died. Of AIDS. He had no family. The minister never managed to get a sermon out of it. Long ago he had stopped putting up that poster about the Valley of the Shadow of Death, a lonesome and mysterious place no matter how loving or mean a person was.
Monday, September 14, 2009
UNDER THE SAND: A Review
Netflix-generated movie recommends are rarely helpful to me because their categories are based on commerce with people who are NOT like me or even like the people I would want to be. Evidently most people now watch videos according to divisions like “horror” or “Western” or “chick flic.” And evidently they use those categories as a way of seeing more of whatever they liked last time.
But my preferences are eclectic, mostly based on quality and challenging ideas. which are far harder to judge. How do you put them in an algorithm when they are different all the time, depending on the context? I give Netflix credit for trying to research what I like, but my preferences simply won’t go into categories and I’ve long ago given up the little star trick. Much of what makes a movie wonderful for me is the element of unexpectedness -- which is part of the reason I like foreign films so much. I’ve been hooked on movies since the first ones I saw, probably before I could walk. But I’ve been hooked on foreign films since “The River,” that marvelous evocation of Rumer Godden’s book with the same name. So I bless Netflix for giving me access to the strange, the offbeat, the provocative.
That still doesn’t point out how to ask Netflix for such movies, how to find out what exists. This last time I took recommends from Vanity Fair and, wow! What good movies these three are: “In the Bedroom,” “Under the Sand,” and “Lantana.” (Should I look for movies that have prepositional phrases for titles?)
It’s “Under the Sand” that entirely seduced me. (I’ll come back to the others.) Charlotte Rampling is always intriguing, and has become more so as she has aged. Even so fabulous a person as Catharine Deneuve has thickened and fallen into the habit of grimacing, but Rampling spells out “class” in her posture, her slenderness, her expressive but contained face with its drooped eyelids and lost lower lip, and the intelligence that shows constantly in timing, emphasis, shifts in tone. “Class” to Anglophones mostly means restraint, which requires that in such a person one must watch very closely for small signs.
The situation is simple: the director/writer had always puzzled over a real life incident in his childhood when a married couple went to the beach, the woman napped while the man swam, and the man simply disappeared into the sea. He was never found. But instead of focusing on the man, Francois Ozon, the writer/director, turns his attention to the woman. Though she reports his disappearance, she simply goes to denial. To her, he is there in fantasy, as real as when he was alive -- perhaps more devoted to her than before. The movie develops along two lines: when will she allow herself to know the truth? And what DID happen anyway? Will he come back?
But the real fascination comes from the double way I watch movies and read books: not just the actual creation but how it was made. At first Ozon just wrote a script about the actual disappearance, which is now the first part of the movie. Then he found Rampling, she was interested, and because she was such a strong presence -- mysterious in herself -- he wrote the rest of the movie around her. Also, since he was now writing about a woman, he asked a female co-writer, Emmanuèle Bernheim, to join him. In their voice-over commentary on the DVD it was soon clear why their interaction was so important.
They questioned everything from motives to metaphors, often grossly over-stating something, then pulling it back, sometimes dropping it and occasionally reinstating it in rather a different way. As an example of how subtle this is, at one point the man who drowns was gathering wood and stopped to run his hand down a tree trunk. The camera picks up another close-up tree trunk and lets the man go fuzzy. Later there is a dummy in a men’s clothing store -- just the trunk in the same bark colors.
The couple in Ozon’s memory were nudists and the beach was a nudist beach. Ozon could not ask his prominent actors to be nude, though exposing breasts is accepted, so he slipped in a nude couple on the beach as bystanders. One uses memory in various ways. The nude fact was relevant in that corpses are often identified by what they were wearing, since the flesh is profoundly changed by decomposition. But there is also the idea that this couple was exposed and alone. Images were impelling the script in Ozon’s mind, needing to be honored.
There was a great temptation to make this movie about the man, who was massive and attractive and magnetic. There might have been a succession of clues revealing he had a secret life or a fatal disease, facts that would have torn apart the woman -- made her truly crazy from betrayal, forced to face her own blindness.
There was also talk about having the second man, her first lover after the loss, be a handsome young man -- presumably an irresistible bit of candy so that she would be understandable. This was rejected. Instead there was a man more like her than her husband had been, an intellectual like her. (She is a professor with a special interest in Virginia Wolfe, who was a suicide. Should she kill herself? Had her husband killed herself?) He is gentle, generous, truly interested in her, sexy in a mature way. But he is a “lightweight” both literally when lying on top of her and more socially -- not a real “player.” Still, her husband or his appearance, not only approves but subtly participates. This helps her.
When she visits her mother-in-law, the rubber hits the road with a shock. The old woman knows that the husband was unhappy, specifically with his wife. She ransacks the previously locked office of her husband, confronts the doctor, and finds that at least the unhappiness part is true. The body is found and scientifically identified. She still resists. Then goes to the edge of the ocean, where humans often confront their inner truths, and finally admits the death. There is a man on the beach. She runs in his direction. Is she going to him? We don’t know. Is it Vincent, the pleasant lover? We don’t know.
This is a grown-up mystery, about the kind of questions we all confront throughout our lives and can rarely answer or maybe ought not, because denial can save sanity to say nothing of other nastiness. We do the best we can with what we know. If we can manage the grace and dignity of Charlotte Rampling’s character, we will have done very well indeed.
But my preferences are eclectic, mostly based on quality and challenging ideas. which are far harder to judge. How do you put them in an algorithm when they are different all the time, depending on the context? I give Netflix credit for trying to research what I like, but my preferences simply won’t go into categories and I’ve long ago given up the little star trick. Much of what makes a movie wonderful for me is the element of unexpectedness -- which is part of the reason I like foreign films so much. I’ve been hooked on movies since the first ones I saw, probably before I could walk. But I’ve been hooked on foreign films since “The River,” that marvelous evocation of Rumer Godden’s book with the same name. So I bless Netflix for giving me access to the strange, the offbeat, the provocative.
That still doesn’t point out how to ask Netflix for such movies, how to find out what exists. This last time I took recommends from Vanity Fair and, wow! What good movies these three are: “In the Bedroom,” “Under the Sand,” and “Lantana.” (Should I look for movies that have prepositional phrases for titles?)
It’s “Under the Sand” that entirely seduced me. (I’ll come back to the others.) Charlotte Rampling is always intriguing, and has become more so as she has aged. Even so fabulous a person as Catharine Deneuve has thickened and fallen into the habit of grimacing, but Rampling spells out “class” in her posture, her slenderness, her expressive but contained face with its drooped eyelids and lost lower lip, and the intelligence that shows constantly in timing, emphasis, shifts in tone. “Class” to Anglophones mostly means restraint, which requires that in such a person one must watch very closely for small signs.
The situation is simple: the director/writer had always puzzled over a real life incident in his childhood when a married couple went to the beach, the woman napped while the man swam, and the man simply disappeared into the sea. He was never found. But instead of focusing on the man, Francois Ozon, the writer/director, turns his attention to the woman. Though she reports his disappearance, she simply goes to denial. To her, he is there in fantasy, as real as when he was alive -- perhaps more devoted to her than before. The movie develops along two lines: when will she allow herself to know the truth? And what DID happen anyway? Will he come back?
But the real fascination comes from the double way I watch movies and read books: not just the actual creation but how it was made. At first Ozon just wrote a script about the actual disappearance, which is now the first part of the movie. Then he found Rampling, she was interested, and because she was such a strong presence -- mysterious in herself -- he wrote the rest of the movie around her. Also, since he was now writing about a woman, he asked a female co-writer, Emmanuèle Bernheim, to join him. In their voice-over commentary on the DVD it was soon clear why their interaction was so important.
They questioned everything from motives to metaphors, often grossly over-stating something, then pulling it back, sometimes dropping it and occasionally reinstating it in rather a different way. As an example of how subtle this is, at one point the man who drowns was gathering wood and stopped to run his hand down a tree trunk. The camera picks up another close-up tree trunk and lets the man go fuzzy. Later there is a dummy in a men’s clothing store -- just the trunk in the same bark colors.
The couple in Ozon’s memory were nudists and the beach was a nudist beach. Ozon could not ask his prominent actors to be nude, though exposing breasts is accepted, so he slipped in a nude couple on the beach as bystanders. One uses memory in various ways. The nude fact was relevant in that corpses are often identified by what they were wearing, since the flesh is profoundly changed by decomposition. But there is also the idea that this couple was exposed and alone. Images were impelling the script in Ozon’s mind, needing to be honored.
There was a great temptation to make this movie about the man, who was massive and attractive and magnetic. There might have been a succession of clues revealing he had a secret life or a fatal disease, facts that would have torn apart the woman -- made her truly crazy from betrayal, forced to face her own blindness.
There was also talk about having the second man, her first lover after the loss, be a handsome young man -- presumably an irresistible bit of candy so that she would be understandable. This was rejected. Instead there was a man more like her than her husband had been, an intellectual like her. (She is a professor with a special interest in Virginia Wolfe, who was a suicide. Should she kill herself? Had her husband killed herself?) He is gentle, generous, truly interested in her, sexy in a mature way. But he is a “lightweight” both literally when lying on top of her and more socially -- not a real “player.” Still, her husband or his appearance, not only approves but subtly participates. This helps her.
When she visits her mother-in-law, the rubber hits the road with a shock. The old woman knows that the husband was unhappy, specifically with his wife. She ransacks the previously locked office of her husband, confronts the doctor, and finds that at least the unhappiness part is true. The body is found and scientifically identified. She still resists. Then goes to the edge of the ocean, where humans often confront their inner truths, and finally admits the death. There is a man on the beach. She runs in his direction. Is she going to him? We don’t know. Is it Vincent, the pleasant lover? We don’t know.
This is a grown-up mystery, about the kind of questions we all confront throughout our lives and can rarely answer or maybe ought not, because denial can save sanity to say nothing of other nastiness. We do the best we can with what we know. If we can manage the grace and dignity of Charlotte Rampling’s character, we will have done very well indeed.
A LITTLE INTERIM NOTE ABOUT REPLACEMENT KEYBOARDS
PRODUCT REPORT: MAC KEYBOARD REPLACEMENT
The keyboard came! At this point I’m crazy with joy and relieved frustration, but it is quite different from what I expected. I bought from Partstore.com because it was the cheapest by a few dollars. It’s clearly the cheapest because the keyboard is missing some of the keys (the ones that were way up at the top for volume and the disc shelf) and there was no mouse. These were included in the replacement I bought from Macally. I can return this one, but I will not. Instead, I’ll buy another from Macally -- keyboards aren’t expensive -- and keep this one for the next time a keyboard goes bad.
In the meantime, I’m very curious about why the old keyboard went bad, only the letter “e” and nothing else. I think I will take a screwdriver to the back and do an autopsy. But not right now! Now I’ve got plenty to post!
The keyboard came! At this point I’m crazy with joy and relieved frustration, but it is quite different from what I expected. I bought from Partstore.com because it was the cheapest by a few dollars. It’s clearly the cheapest because the keyboard is missing some of the keys (the ones that were way up at the top for volume and the disc shelf) and there was no mouse. These were included in the replacement I bought from Macally. I can return this one, but I will not. Instead, I’ll buy another from Macally -- keyboards aren’t expensive -- and keep this one for the next time a keyboard goes bad.
In the meantime, I’m very curious about why the old keyboard went bad, only the letter “e” and nothing else. I think I will take a screwdriver to the back and do an autopsy. But not right now! Now I’ve got plenty to post!
Sunday, September 13, 2009
A TIME PIE
Now and then, even when not stymied by the faulty keyboard (new one supposed to arrive in the morning), I actually DO draw myself a little pie chart to make my intentions explicit. The division into thirds is easy: I do one third (the blogging) all morning; one third (Cinematheque) all afternoon; and the rest after supper.
The exceptions are laundry days, shopping days, and company. I don't get sick for the same reason that the Eskimoes (when they were innocently called that) never got sick. No one to catch anything from.
These pie charts become most useful when you save them over the years and compare.
Saturday, September 12, 2009
DO ALL BABIES LOOK THE SAME?
Lucy Pinkerton.
1909
Lucy Pinkerton Strachan with her youngest child:
Paul Thomas Strachan
1944
Lucy Strachan with Paul Strachan’s daughter,
Adrienne McCracken
b. 1980
Adrienne McCracken Cautley Lulay’s son, Tristan Charles Lulay
b. August, 2009
Friday, September 11, 2009
ARCHIVING
(Back at the library with a small toddler in camo and his very preggers mother. This is like driving an unfamiliar car -- or maybe I should say "bus," since I'm not used to company. This kid doesn't keyboard. He just likes the twirly chairs.)
Sorting through papers I've saved over many decades is an exercise in history, both in terms of what I thought was important-- and what that said about my identity -- and in terms of what I'm discarding and what that means about change. Being seventy means discarding a LOT. Previously, when in doubt, I saved. Now, with maybe ten good working years left, I'm in edit mode.
What's persisting? Some childhood things: the (nearly) complete works of Gene Stratton Porter, which is a matter of bookshelves, though in the past few years as there has begun to be more scholarship about her in terms of the environment, there are articles to save now. As in most of what I've saved, both tear-outs and print-outs are in the boxes. (I figure I have about ten storage boxes to go. I also keep thinking that if I'd spent 1/2 hour every night filing, I wouldn't have to do this now. But then I flip over and remind myself that I have eight file cabinets of things that ARE filed, even color-coded, so I must have done some things.
What strikes me hard is how much the thought-world is changing. Stratton-Porter was my grandmother's favorite author, then she was "out," then she was just a colorful and obsolete character and -- briefly -- a bird savior. Now she's seen as a rather nasty example of Jingoism and prejudice. In general, it seems as though so many things that were once believed valuable and aspirational have been discredited and demonized, first as old-fashioned and then as oppressive.
Environmentalism, which attracted me first through natural history and what I came to understand as the displacement of the sacred from church to wilderness, has now devolved in some quarters into a kind of philosophical and indiscriminate tyranny: city=bad,wilderness=good, human=bad, animal=good, human=good, machine=bad. In particular the young seem to have labeled everything, according to what their friends and the media says, and to deal in those categories without inquiring into what the definions or context are.
The older and presumably more sophisticated people have become fixated on laws and forcing good ends through regulation. The question of what a wolf "is" if it's managed with a radio-collar, removed with a rifleshot from a helicopter, numbered and listed in a computer, doesn't seem to come up. At the same time as we over-control some things, others are totally out of control: NO ONE knows what to do about the hundred-mile-across plastic garbage gyre in the Pacific. The causes can't be controlled, the mitigation can't be imagined.
Almost ALL my environmental stuff went out. Even the pretty pictures. Once they seemed unique, worthy of repeat contemplation. Now I feel surrounded and showered with them -- new and more amazing photos all the time, even in the newspaper.
Likewise the science stuff went out: it's all old-fashioned now. The cutting edge is no longer the genome but it's practical uses. The theoretical stuff, which is always what intriques me, has now backed off to some kind of sub-genome that controls the expression of each genome in subtle ways we hardly understand. Most of the media is hypnotized by genes as the magic answer to commercial problems. We aren't surprised. Physics is sort of in the same place. It's all sci-fi now -- not that I object to that.
Arts and humanities have also changed for me. For decades I cherished the idea that the Sixties with Bob Scriver was a watershed that would mean acceptance in the company of writers in Montana and among the artists. The community of writers in Montana proves to be an illusion based on marketing. These folks finally had little in common in terms style or message or common interests. In fact, many of them have no use for each other. The commodifiers, who see books as middle-class markers of prosperity and education just as they were taught by high school teachers and the Book-of-the-Month Club, are busy having festivals where they play pictionary and rewrite Shakespearean tragedies so they have happy endings. Loads of fun. Not much to do with "real" writing I've understood it.
The art community has also commodified, which is not very new, but Bob Scriver is no longer a viable commodity, partly because there's no profit left in him (they think), partly because the arc of his career has overemphasized the trivial work he did later in life, and partly because he became angry and frustrated, so some people stopped liking him. People who knew him well liked "Bronze Inside and Out," but those who were rather revealed, didn't like it at all and have been successful in pretending it doesn't exist. Nor me either. Anyway, the point is that lots of what I saved is redundant and unnecessary now, so out. The rest doesn't change much, though now and then I get an inquiry or even an insight I wish I'd had earlier.
Another factor in not saving things is similar to the fabulous image excess: many artists are so good now, some better than Bob Scriver, that if I saved every worthy bit of evidence, I'd be crowded out of the house. The CMRussell auction is no longer a local community of people who know each other but rather, like the book festivals, a marketing enterprise that reaches across the continent.
I've done a pretty good job of collecting, labeling and bundling things like old bills, diplomas, titles. But I've saved some of those bundles far too long, so they can go out en masse. In active use are the family photo albums and their re-organization into binders. They don't go out but they constantly need re-filing.
"Indians" have gone through about as many philosophical approaches as what you're supposed to call them. My strategy has been to stick to Blackfeet only, but I've had lapses when book reviews or more global essays really struck my fancy. I'm much less likely to save anthropological material, more likely to include the really early stuff like paleoarcheology or theories of the migration patterns around the world. The native language movement has just about completed a twenty year arc, from a time when there were still native speakers at hand to a time when one has to learn in a context where there is little opportunity to speak and nothing much to read in Blackfeet. But it had the major virtue of legitimizing Blackfeet language.
The arc I'm most glad to see completed and discarded is the post-colonial deconstruction movement that played into social militancy to create an arrogance and self-righteousness that has underlain a lot of destructive dynamics. There was a period of time when indigenous people hadn't found the handholds and terms of doing their own scholarship and writing, but they wouldn't let any outsiders do it either. The result has been a gap and a lot of bad feeling. It's ending now as well-equipped tribal people have gotten to work with far more open minds and less suspicion and paranoia about off-rez people.
My feminist stuff dwindles all the time. Starhawk, Barbara Ehrenreich, and others who probably aren't strictly feminists are still on the shelf but I don't read the mags, so no new tear-outs. Likewise, it seems to me that the psych stuff has all gotten pretty boring and off-the-point. Not very useful. But some of the really old stuff still has teeth. I see that I have three or four clips of Dear Abby's list of the traits of abusers.
The recipes are all useless now. Most of the examples of how I would like to look still work, since they were fairly classic to begin with: pants and jackets. My interior decoration tear-outs are in plastic sleeves and binders -- a LOT of binders. I sit down to see if I can condense them and cannot. White bathrooms, blue and white bedrooms, Ralph Lauren cabins, strict modern kitchens, and mostly cottage, cottage, cottage. Okay, even cottage cheese, but that's mostly what goes out.
I found a handful of letters from my deceased brother and at last can send them to his daughter. An envelope of photos of a beautiful woman I finally realize is Mabel Heitschmidt, who was a fine still-life artist (specialty: flowers) and my great-aunt. She married an architect and lived the good life in Pasadena.
And so it goes: clutter becoming insight, philosophy becoming quack opinions, a good thing becoming overwhelming, a less good thing turning out to be crucial. The discards, three garbage cans full so far, are so heavy that I had to go from leaf and trash bags to extra-thick construction debris bags, fit for pieces of lumber and slabs of plasterboard. I'm doing a form of remodeling, mental though it may be.
Sorting through papers I've saved over many decades is an exercise in history, both in terms of what I thought was important-- and what that said about my identity -- and in terms of what I'm discarding and what that means about change. Being seventy means discarding a LOT. Previously, when in doubt, I saved. Now, with maybe ten good working years left, I'm in edit mode.
What's persisting? Some childhood things: the (nearly) complete works of Gene Stratton Porter, which is a matter of bookshelves, though in the past few years as there has begun to be more scholarship about her in terms of the environment, there are articles to save now. As in most of what I've saved, both tear-outs and print-outs are in the boxes. (I figure I have about ten storage boxes to go. I also keep thinking that if I'd spent 1/2 hour every night filing, I wouldn't have to do this now. But then I flip over and remind myself that I have eight file cabinets of things that ARE filed, even color-coded, so I must have done some things.
What strikes me hard is how much the thought-world is changing. Stratton-Porter was my grandmother's favorite author, then she was "out," then she was just a colorful and obsolete character and -- briefly -- a bird savior. Now she's seen as a rather nasty example of Jingoism and prejudice. In general, it seems as though so many things that were once believed valuable and aspirational have been discredited and demonized, first as old-fashioned and then as oppressive.
Environmentalism, which attracted me first through natural history and what I came to understand as the displacement of the sacred from church to wilderness, has now devolved in some quarters into a kind of philosophical and indiscriminate tyranny: city=bad,wilderness=good, human=bad, animal=good, human=good, machine=bad. In particular the young seem to have labeled everything, according to what their friends and the media says, and to deal in those categories without inquiring into what the definions or context are.
The older and presumably more sophisticated people have become fixated on laws and forcing good ends through regulation. The question of what a wolf "is" if it's managed with a radio-collar, removed with a rifleshot from a helicopter, numbered and listed in a computer, doesn't seem to come up. At the same time as we over-control some things, others are totally out of control: NO ONE knows what to do about the hundred-mile-across plastic garbage gyre in the Pacific. The causes can't be controlled, the mitigation can't be imagined.
Almost ALL my environmental stuff went out. Even the pretty pictures. Once they seemed unique, worthy of repeat contemplation. Now I feel surrounded and showered with them -- new and more amazing photos all the time, even in the newspaper.
Likewise the science stuff went out: it's all old-fashioned now. The cutting edge is no longer the genome but it's practical uses. The theoretical stuff, which is always what intriques me, has now backed off to some kind of sub-genome that controls the expression of each genome in subtle ways we hardly understand. Most of the media is hypnotized by genes as the magic answer to commercial problems. We aren't surprised. Physics is sort of in the same place. It's all sci-fi now -- not that I object to that.
Arts and humanities have also changed for me. For decades I cherished the idea that the Sixties with Bob Scriver was a watershed that would mean acceptance in the company of writers in Montana and among the artists. The community of writers in Montana proves to be an illusion based on marketing. These folks finally had little in common in terms style or message or common interests. In fact, many of them have no use for each other. The commodifiers, who see books as middle-class markers of prosperity and education just as they were taught by high school teachers and the Book-of-the-Month Club, are busy having festivals where they play pictionary and rewrite Shakespearean tragedies so they have happy endings. Loads of fun. Not much to do with "real" writing I've understood it.
The art community has also commodified, which is not very new, but Bob Scriver is no longer a viable commodity, partly because there's no profit left in him (they think), partly because the arc of his career has overemphasized the trivial work he did later in life, and partly because he became angry and frustrated, so some people stopped liking him. People who knew him well liked "Bronze Inside and Out," but those who were rather revealed, didn't like it at all and have been successful in pretending it doesn't exist. Nor me either. Anyway, the point is that lots of what I saved is redundant and unnecessary now, so out. The rest doesn't change much, though now and then I get an inquiry or even an insight I wish I'd had earlier.
Another factor in not saving things is similar to the fabulous image excess: many artists are so good now, some better than Bob Scriver, that if I saved every worthy bit of evidence, I'd be crowded out of the house. The CMRussell auction is no longer a local community of people who know each other but rather, like the book festivals, a marketing enterprise that reaches across the continent.
I've done a pretty good job of collecting, labeling and bundling things like old bills, diplomas, titles. But I've saved some of those bundles far too long, so they can go out en masse. In active use are the family photo albums and their re-organization into binders. They don't go out but they constantly need re-filing.
"Indians" have gone through about as many philosophical approaches as what you're supposed to call them. My strategy has been to stick to Blackfeet only, but I've had lapses when book reviews or more global essays really struck my fancy. I'm much less likely to save anthropological material, more likely to include the really early stuff like paleoarcheology or theories of the migration patterns around the world. The native language movement has just about completed a twenty year arc, from a time when there were still native speakers at hand to a time when one has to learn in a context where there is little opportunity to speak and nothing much to read in Blackfeet. But it had the major virtue of legitimizing Blackfeet language.
The arc I'm most glad to see completed and discarded is the post-colonial deconstruction movement that played into social militancy to create an arrogance and self-righteousness that has underlain a lot of destructive dynamics. There was a period of time when indigenous people hadn't found the handholds and terms of doing their own scholarship and writing, but they wouldn't let any outsiders do it either. The result has been a gap and a lot of bad feeling. It's ending now as well-equipped tribal people have gotten to work with far more open minds and less suspicion and paranoia about off-rez people.
My feminist stuff dwindles all the time. Starhawk, Barbara Ehrenreich, and others who probably aren't strictly feminists are still on the shelf but I don't read the mags, so no new tear-outs. Likewise, it seems to me that the psych stuff has all gotten pretty boring and off-the-point. Not very useful. But some of the really old stuff still has teeth. I see that I have three or four clips of Dear Abby's list of the traits of abusers.
The recipes are all useless now. Most of the examples of how I would like to look still work, since they were fairly classic to begin with: pants and jackets. My interior decoration tear-outs are in plastic sleeves and binders -- a LOT of binders. I sit down to see if I can condense them and cannot. White bathrooms, blue and white bedrooms, Ralph Lauren cabins, strict modern kitchens, and mostly cottage, cottage, cottage. Okay, even cottage cheese, but that's mostly what goes out.
I found a handful of letters from my deceased brother and at last can send them to his daughter. An envelope of photos of a beautiful woman I finally realize is Mabel Heitschmidt, who was a fine still-life artist (specialty: flowers) and my great-aunt. She married an architect and lived the good life in Pasadena.
And so it goes: clutter becoming insight, philosophy becoming quack opinions, a good thing becoming overwhelming, a less good thing turning out to be crucial. The discards, three garbage cans full so far, are so heavy that I had to go from leaf and trash bags to extra-thick construction debris bags, fit for pieces of lumber and slabs of plasterboard. I'm doing a form of remodeling, mental though it may be.
Thursday, September 10, 2009
RULES FOR BEING HUMAN
If you can read this, it means I can blog from the Valier library, a very good thing.
I found the ten rules below when I was filing.
1. You will receive a body.
You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.
2. You will learn lessons.
You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lossons re think them irrelevant and stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons.
Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ulitmately "works."
4. A lesson is repeated until learned.
A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end.
There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you alive, there are lessons to be learned.
6. "There" is no better than "here."
When your "there" has become a "here" you will simply obtain another "there" that will, again, look better than "here."
7. Others are mirrors of you.
You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you.
You have all the tools and resources you need. What you with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie inside you.
The answers to life's questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen and trust.
10. You will forget all this.
I found the ten rules below when I was filing.
1. You will receive a body.
You may like it or hate it, but it will be yours for the entire period this time around.
2. You will learn lessons.
You are enrolled in a full-time informal school called life. Each day in this school you will have the opportunity to learn lessons. You may like the lossons re think them irrelevant and stupid.
3. There are no mistakes, only lessons.
Growth is a process of trial and error, experimentation. The "failed" experiments are as much a part of the process as the experiment that ulitmately "works."
4. A lesson is repeated until learned.
A lesson will be presented to you in various forms until you have learned it. When you have learned it, you can then go on to the next lesson.
5. Learning lessons does not end.
There is no part of life that does not contain its lessons. If you alive, there are lessons to be learned.
6. "There" is no better than "here."
When your "there" has become a "here" you will simply obtain another "there" that will, again, look better than "here."
7. Others are mirrors of you.
You cannot love or hate something about another person unless it reflects to you something you love or hate about yourself.
8. What you make of your life is up to you.
You have all the tools and resources you need. What you with them is up to you. The choice is yours.
9. Your answers lie inside you.
The answers to life's questions lie inside you. All you need to do is look, listen and trust.
10. You will forget all this.
PROGRSS OF SMALL DONKY ACROSS TH PRAIRI
DU TO TH WONDRS OF MODRN TRACKING DVICS (MAYB THR'S A GPS COLLAR ON THIS SMALL DONKY, I NOW KNOW MY KYBOARD LFT ILLINOIS ARLY TUSDAY AND IS DU HR ON 9/14.
I SHALL HAV TO COP SOMHOW.
PRAIRI MARY
I SHALL HAV TO COP SOMHOW.
PRAIRI MARY
Wednesday, September 09, 2009
grrrrrrrr
Kyboard should hav bn hr ystrday. Book I ordrd shuld hav bn hr today. Ntflix should hav snt m two movis today. What is happning? Tim says du to cut-backs, UPS is snding all shipmnts via China on small donkys. H may b right.
In th mantim, I'm filing. I hav th fantasy that I won't di so long as my filing is not don so th stack is rally humonguous.
Now and thn I com to a spidr, so I just fil thm, too.
Dos this qualify as a graphic blog?
Prairi Mary
In th mantim, I'm filing. I hav th fantasy that I won't di so long as my filing is not don so th stack is rally humonguous.
Now and thn I com to a spidr, so I just fil thm, too.
Dos this qualify as a graphic blog?
Prairi Mary
Friday, September 04, 2009
Thursday, September 03, 2009
THE COST OF DOING PUBLISHING BUSINESS
Harking back to yesterday’s post about two kinds of readers and two kinds of writers, now I want to go to publicity as handled by publishers who see books as a way of creating a saleable commodity, an object of value. Since it costs MUCH less proportionally to produce the actual object and there is no longer a need to store them in a warehouse or pay taxes on an inventory of books (not that this sort of publisher wouldn’t quickly grind up or remainder any books that didn’t turn over fast enough), more of the investment goes into the publicity.
The pattern is NOT figuring out how to market a book everyone loves and that the publishing house thinks will change Western thought. Far from it.
The publicity starts way back with market research to see what sells. If you look at agents and publishing house access, they tell you what they want by describing categories. Not even genres, but more micro-types like “teen vampires” or “Christians with diseases.” Someone looks through the slush pile or phones some agents to see if there is anything pre-existing. If not, a manuscript is sort of summoned out of the air: ghosted imitations with long quotes or rewordings from similar books.
THEN an author has to be found. It’s more like old-fashioned movie studios creating a star than it is like Miss Anne Shirley from Avonlea entering the cave of the publisher. This is beyond ghosting a book for a movie star, more like hoaxing, except that it is the publisher who is the hoaxer. More of an imposed identity than an assumed identity.
The next trick is to start anticipation buzz in the biz while designing the look of the book -- enough like the last successful one in that genre to get the conditioned reaction, but different enough that the customer won’t think they already have it. Certain genres have certain styles. Like scholarly books tend to have matte sepia arty photos. Westerns have embossed gilt banners in olde tyme script.
When the book as object is set, the writing is sort of poured into it, then the central casting author is photographed, flaps are written and blurbs for the back are solicited. Authors who want nice blurbs (and good treatment from their publishers, since the blurbers are often from the same “stable”) write really nice blurbs. Some of them are better written than the quoted author’s own books, probably because they spend so much time on a few sentences rather than reading the book. Of course, none are negative. If the book falls flat, no one will look to see who thought it was brilliant.
It used to be that the author was sent around the country on tour, going from one big bookstore to another. There is never any real guarantee that an audience will form. Even at Powell’s I’ve seen readings where there were maybe five people and others where there were a hundred or more crammed among the shelves, usually not reacting to the book so much as the politics or trendiness of the subject. If the author is gay, American Indian, Arab, or some other non-standard type, he or she will be handled extra-well, in order to reassure the kind of liberals who read books.
They tell me that now the idea is to compose a website, hopefully with an interactive feature like questions to the author and maybe a tour schedule. Some authors include prompts to start discussions at book clubs. Or a way you can sign up for a newsletter mailed monthly. But I’m hearing that the thing to do is to produce a DVD or at least a video for YouTube. (Serendipituously, I was interviewed on the radio by George Cole and that is on the Internet. You can find it with Google.) Then mail the DVD to potential radio or TV interviewers or to magazine and newspaper writers. Maybe a podcast.
Except for George, who actually read most of my book (I could tell because he’s the kind of person who reads with a highlighter), few-to-no interviewers read the books of the authors they interview. Someone like Oprah has staff who read for her, but most interviewers simply read the materials the publisher sent. At my publisher, the only person who actually read the book was the line editor. (Who looks for typos, bloopers, grammar.) Even the person who prepared all the handouts and publicity releases did not read the book.
Anyway, she knew nothing about the subject matter, had no contacts in the world of cowboy art, and simply didn’t have time to find out. The press had a protocol checklist: catalogue, Amazon, local universities and historical society magazines -- the end. Same for all books. It was an academic press which means that the author makes NO money. The staff makes their salary; most of the writers are faculty members who make tenure. The rest just creates the illusion of a press in the full sense.
Many publishers now ask the author to prepare for submission with their manuscript the nature of interested groups, estimated sales, marketing suggestions. This is more important than the actual manuscript. One Montana publisher said he would simply not consider any author who didn’t make it his or her mission to sell their book, no matter what it took: effort, expense, health, whatever. He cared more about the promotion than the content, more about the book than the author. He was simply being realistic.
Bookstores do promote and hand-sell via clerks, along with special set-ups like row “cap” racks and tables in the aisle or cardboard displays. Sometimes the publisher pays for this. Amazon et al and even some used bookstores will also keep track of customer preferences (according to their algorithms) and "push" your category online the way Netflix does.
What most of us don’t realize is that behind the bookstores are another set of salesmen who “rep” the publishers, maybe individually or maybe in related groups like academic books. The alternative is booths at fairs or tables at events, like the ones at the Montana Festival of the Book. If THOSE guys can get enthusiastic and push a book, that causes the bookstore to get excited, which might even make the local media curious. Those unknown salespersons spend their lives on the road. I suspect they read at night in motels. We need to know more about them. Is there a professional organization? What turns them on?
I would like to see an accounting of a big time publicity campaign plan with the costs spelled out. That would have to be the minimum a book is likely to make before a money-making publisher is really willing to look at it. But why couldn't an author pay for such a campaign directly? Would it be different from a millionaire running for political office?
The pattern is NOT figuring out how to market a book everyone loves and that the publishing house thinks will change Western thought. Far from it.
The publicity starts way back with market research to see what sells. If you look at agents and publishing house access, they tell you what they want by describing categories. Not even genres, but more micro-types like “teen vampires” or “Christians with diseases.” Someone looks through the slush pile or phones some agents to see if there is anything pre-existing. If not, a manuscript is sort of summoned out of the air: ghosted imitations with long quotes or rewordings from similar books.
THEN an author has to be found. It’s more like old-fashioned movie studios creating a star than it is like Miss Anne Shirley from Avonlea entering the cave of the publisher. This is beyond ghosting a book for a movie star, more like hoaxing, except that it is the publisher who is the hoaxer. More of an imposed identity than an assumed identity.
The next trick is to start anticipation buzz in the biz while designing the look of the book -- enough like the last successful one in that genre to get the conditioned reaction, but different enough that the customer won’t think they already have it. Certain genres have certain styles. Like scholarly books tend to have matte sepia arty photos. Westerns have embossed gilt banners in olde tyme script.
When the book as object is set, the writing is sort of poured into it, then the central casting author is photographed, flaps are written and blurbs for the back are solicited. Authors who want nice blurbs (and good treatment from their publishers, since the blurbers are often from the same “stable”) write really nice blurbs. Some of them are better written than the quoted author’s own books, probably because they spend so much time on a few sentences rather than reading the book. Of course, none are negative. If the book falls flat, no one will look to see who thought it was brilliant.
It used to be that the author was sent around the country on tour, going from one big bookstore to another. There is never any real guarantee that an audience will form. Even at Powell’s I’ve seen readings where there were maybe five people and others where there were a hundred or more crammed among the shelves, usually not reacting to the book so much as the politics or trendiness of the subject. If the author is gay, American Indian, Arab, or some other non-standard type, he or she will be handled extra-well, in order to reassure the kind of liberals who read books.
They tell me that now the idea is to compose a website, hopefully with an interactive feature like questions to the author and maybe a tour schedule. Some authors include prompts to start discussions at book clubs. Or a way you can sign up for a newsletter mailed monthly. But I’m hearing that the thing to do is to produce a DVD or at least a video for YouTube. (Serendipituously, I was interviewed on the radio by George Cole and that is on the Internet. You can find it with Google.) Then mail the DVD to potential radio or TV interviewers or to magazine and newspaper writers. Maybe a podcast.
Except for George, who actually read most of my book (I could tell because he’s the kind of person who reads with a highlighter), few-to-no interviewers read the books of the authors they interview. Someone like Oprah has staff who read for her, but most interviewers simply read the materials the publisher sent. At my publisher, the only person who actually read the book was the line editor. (Who looks for typos, bloopers, grammar.) Even the person who prepared all the handouts and publicity releases did not read the book.
Anyway, she knew nothing about the subject matter, had no contacts in the world of cowboy art, and simply didn’t have time to find out. The press had a protocol checklist: catalogue, Amazon, local universities and historical society magazines -- the end. Same for all books. It was an academic press which means that the author makes NO money. The staff makes their salary; most of the writers are faculty members who make tenure. The rest just creates the illusion of a press in the full sense.
Many publishers now ask the author to prepare for submission with their manuscript the nature of interested groups, estimated sales, marketing suggestions. This is more important than the actual manuscript. One Montana publisher said he would simply not consider any author who didn’t make it his or her mission to sell their book, no matter what it took: effort, expense, health, whatever. He cared more about the promotion than the content, more about the book than the author. He was simply being realistic.
Bookstores do promote and hand-sell via clerks, along with special set-ups like row “cap” racks and tables in the aisle or cardboard displays. Sometimes the publisher pays for this. Amazon et al and even some used bookstores will also keep track of customer preferences (according to their algorithms) and "push" your category online the way Netflix does.
What most of us don’t realize is that behind the bookstores are another set of salesmen who “rep” the publishers, maybe individually or maybe in related groups like academic books. The alternative is booths at fairs or tables at events, like the ones at the Montana Festival of the Book. If THOSE guys can get enthusiastic and push a book, that causes the bookstore to get excited, which might even make the local media curious. Those unknown salespersons spend their lives on the road. I suspect they read at night in motels. We need to know more about them. Is there a professional organization? What turns them on?
I would like to see an accounting of a big time publicity campaign plan with the costs spelled out. That would have to be the minimum a book is likely to make before a money-making publisher is really willing to look at it. But why couldn't an author pay for such a campaign directly? Would it be different from a millionaire running for political office?
Wednesday, September 02, 2009
BE NICE TO YOUR REFERENCE LIBRARIAN!
More than a few of us continue to think about how what used to be the “publishing of books” has changed in the last decades after millennia of being lines of ink hand-written on paper. We started out, after all, with something like the “street of books” journalists located in Baghdad, where the shops sold handwriting on parchment fragments alongside modern machine printed and bound leaves of paper. The newest did not eliminate the oldest. They are all commodities, objects to be acquired, stored, used and resold.
There are two kinds of readers: those who go looking for the writing they want, whether it is scraps from the Dead Sea Scrolls or the latest novel or a science reference. They are usually specialists of some kind, participate in a network of people interested in roughly the same thing, and value what they find. These folks are often more willing than most to use the internet to search for books or to read digital documents which only exist as code until they are screened or printed. Virtual objects cannot be owned because they have no physical being, but access to them can be controlled, so merchants must move their attention to virtual password gates instead of actual padlocked storerooms. Those who have custody of the access “have” the documents. Be nice to your reference librarian.
The other kind of reader doesn’t read anything unless it’s more or less pushed at him or her. Best seller lists, media, critics, previews, big displays at the book stores, cut rates, and what they call “hand selling” (a clerk approaches you, asks what you like, offers specific books) are what work here. These are all aimed at books as objects, commodities. One leaves popular and impressive books around the house where visitors will notice them. One buys such books and somehow has no time to read them. One loads the shelves. In movie sets the libraries are packed with impressive sets of books that have only spines of leather and gilt, no pages. They are prestige markers, like fake jewels.
Once in a while, like the recent flurry of political books, one had to at least skim a book to participate intelligently in water cooler discussion, but the truth is that many of us just read the reviews or some blog opinion, which saves a lot of time and effort. This explains why so many books are labeled wonderful or hoaxes or important -- but when investigated turn out to be entirely different. At the other extreme is the kid enthralled by a book, reading it over and over.
So now let’s “turn the page” and consider two kinds of writers. One kind produces books to sell, as commodities. Layers of secondary workers exist to serve that end. Publicists, editors, researchers, indexers, graphic artists, designers, agents, acquiring editors, and so on weave a network of what we call publishers. They likely contract out the actual printing, so we won’t mention people who make paper and ink or bind books. These are done commercially, though any object can be bound artistically: fine paper, special ink, custom binding. This takes the book into a different part of the commodity market.
In some circles it’s customary to separate a hundred or so “collectible” versions of the print run of a book by providing special bindings and maybe slip-cases, then sell them for a much higher price. Bob Scriver custom-designed a slipcase for the collectible version of his self-published book, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains,” so that it had a compartment on the front that held a branch of annual prairie sage. A publisher collaborated with him. He did not set up a printing press in the foundry. This kind of market is likely untouched by the internet revolution except that one can buy and sell with ease, so long as the “hand-selling” factor isn’t necessarily needed. These are still books made and sold for profit.
The other kind of writer is simply driven to write, whether or not anyone ever reads it. Emily Dickinson, for instance, scribbling her poetry and stashing it in a trunk. Until she was gone, no one saw it except selected and respected persons she sought out. Because the writing was her. It wasn’t BY her, it was HER. I mean, SHE. People do it all the time and the majority of it is as unremarkable and and misguided as they are. We’re highly aware of this when we read blogs. Mostly blogs are not beautiful writing.
But some of the people who write only for themselves have very high standards, much training, and a willingness to self-edit until the piece becomes worth sharing, possibly in the way that letters used to be literate and reflective thought made accessible to a reader. One has to be a bit of an obsessive ego-maniac to do it that way, but we’ve got lots of them underfoot and online.
There are some people who really want to read that sort of thing, either because of the content or because of the quality of the work. Publishers were once interested in capturing such readers and pairing them with writers, but this dimension devolved to the bookstore and has now migrated to the internet via Google et al. But both readers and writers are out there in such numbers that the search engines use algorithms designed by people who are usually not readers.
Algorithm-based match-making can be pretty hilarious, the very definition of incongruous. I often giggle over the ads on my gmail or even the ones that will pop up between my prairiemary posts. I hope no one thinks that if some ironic word in my blog prompts a recommendation for something it means that I endorse or even know the thing advertised.
The closest I can think of to “hand-selling” is Dave Lull and a few others who assiduously read and forward articles, reviews, remarks, in his role as a librarian. Somehow he keeps track of what people care about and relays the information. He does it for free.
The only other method of finding the right books is to constantly monitor the bibs and footnotes of the books one already is reading, looking to see what that author read, which probably doesn’t include anyone with whom he disagrees or competes. Likewise, one learns to keep track of who publishes what, though publishers are changing shape with incredible speed, eliminating whole imprints and dismissing editors overnight. Many are no longer in Manhattan or even on the East Coast.
A problem is an opportunity. I believe that. But the knocking on the door is a little muted. In the meantime, if I may quote myself, be nice to your reference librarian.
There are two kinds of readers: those who go looking for the writing they want, whether it is scraps from the Dead Sea Scrolls or the latest novel or a science reference. They are usually specialists of some kind, participate in a network of people interested in roughly the same thing, and value what they find. These folks are often more willing than most to use the internet to search for books or to read digital documents which only exist as code until they are screened or printed. Virtual objects cannot be owned because they have no physical being, but access to them can be controlled, so merchants must move their attention to virtual password gates instead of actual padlocked storerooms. Those who have custody of the access “have” the documents. Be nice to your reference librarian.
The other kind of reader doesn’t read anything unless it’s more or less pushed at him or her. Best seller lists, media, critics, previews, big displays at the book stores, cut rates, and what they call “hand selling” (a clerk approaches you, asks what you like, offers specific books) are what work here. These are all aimed at books as objects, commodities. One leaves popular and impressive books around the house where visitors will notice them. One buys such books and somehow has no time to read them. One loads the shelves. In movie sets the libraries are packed with impressive sets of books that have only spines of leather and gilt, no pages. They are prestige markers, like fake jewels.
Once in a while, like the recent flurry of political books, one had to at least skim a book to participate intelligently in water cooler discussion, but the truth is that many of us just read the reviews or some blog opinion, which saves a lot of time and effort. This explains why so many books are labeled wonderful or hoaxes or important -- but when investigated turn out to be entirely different. At the other extreme is the kid enthralled by a book, reading it over and over.
So now let’s “turn the page” and consider two kinds of writers. One kind produces books to sell, as commodities. Layers of secondary workers exist to serve that end. Publicists, editors, researchers, indexers, graphic artists, designers, agents, acquiring editors, and so on weave a network of what we call publishers. They likely contract out the actual printing, so we won’t mention people who make paper and ink or bind books. These are done commercially, though any object can be bound artistically: fine paper, special ink, custom binding. This takes the book into a different part of the commodity market.
In some circles it’s customary to separate a hundred or so “collectible” versions of the print run of a book by providing special bindings and maybe slip-cases, then sell them for a much higher price. Bob Scriver custom-designed a slipcase for the collectible version of his self-published book, “The Blackfeet: Artists of the Northern Plains,” so that it had a compartment on the front that held a branch of annual prairie sage. A publisher collaborated with him. He did not set up a printing press in the foundry. This kind of market is likely untouched by the internet revolution except that one can buy and sell with ease, so long as the “hand-selling” factor isn’t necessarily needed. These are still books made and sold for profit.
The other kind of writer is simply driven to write, whether or not anyone ever reads it. Emily Dickinson, for instance, scribbling her poetry and stashing it in a trunk. Until she was gone, no one saw it except selected and respected persons she sought out. Because the writing was her. It wasn’t BY her, it was HER. I mean, SHE. People do it all the time and the majority of it is as unremarkable and and misguided as they are. We’re highly aware of this when we read blogs. Mostly blogs are not beautiful writing.
But some of the people who write only for themselves have very high standards, much training, and a willingness to self-edit until the piece becomes worth sharing, possibly in the way that letters used to be literate and reflective thought made accessible to a reader. One has to be a bit of an obsessive ego-maniac to do it that way, but we’ve got lots of them underfoot and online.
There are some people who really want to read that sort of thing, either because of the content or because of the quality of the work. Publishers were once interested in capturing such readers and pairing them with writers, but this dimension devolved to the bookstore and has now migrated to the internet via Google et al. But both readers and writers are out there in such numbers that the search engines use algorithms designed by people who are usually not readers.
Algorithm-based match-making can be pretty hilarious, the very definition of incongruous. I often giggle over the ads on my gmail or even the ones that will pop up between my prairiemary posts. I hope no one thinks that if some ironic word in my blog prompts a recommendation for something it means that I endorse or even know the thing advertised.
The closest I can think of to “hand-selling” is Dave Lull and a few others who assiduously read and forward articles, reviews, remarks, in his role as a librarian. Somehow he keeps track of what people care about and relays the information. He does it for free.
The only other method of finding the right books is to constantly monitor the bibs and footnotes of the books one already is reading, looking to see what that author read, which probably doesn’t include anyone with whom he disagrees or competes. Likewise, one learns to keep track of who publishes what, though publishers are changing shape with incredible speed, eliminating whole imprints and dismissing editors overnight. Many are no longer in Manhattan or even on the East Coast.
A problem is an opportunity. I believe that. But the knocking on the door is a little muted. In the meantime, if I may quote myself, be nice to your reference librarian.
Tuesday, September 01, 2009
LOOK OUT!! FALL!!
http://www.artsjournal.com/gap/2009/08/ominous-music-heard-nationwide.html
The Valier ominous early morning music, a high whine quite a lot like a giant vacuum cleaner, is a grain siphon moving wheat either into or out of the storage bins as big as houses. In fact, not too long ago, grain bins WERE little reinforced houses and it’s not hard to find ranch dwellings composed of several of them fastened together. But the newer metal bins are corrugated, round, and mostly inhabited by pigeons who live on them as much as in them, appreciating the scatter of grain always around them. The bins are so numerous they form whole neighborhoods of tin.
A grain siphon or auger is a long pipe on wheels, one end resting on the ground when not in use, and with a screw inside that will lift the grain as though it were water. Moving grain is quite a lot like moving water and one can even drown in a bin of loose grain. But just as dangerous is that screw inside the pipe. If it catches your sleeve cuff, you will be missing an arm. Not the arm of the shirt -- YOUR arm. There’s always been a macabre and ominous side to fall harvest, Halloween as opposed to the midsummer festival when flowering, full of bees, is just shifting into things to eat.
After a cool and breezy summer we’re now into a spate of heat and our light is saturated with smoke, so that the sun comes up red in a red sky and the day continues slightly orange, metallic, the sky whitened and high, the Rockies missing. We see all the things that didn’t get done this summer and MUST be done before winter. The Farmer’s Almanac predicts an unusually cold and snowy winter, as though last winter weren’t. But the leaves aren’t down yet -- just turning now -- so there’s no point in cleaning gutters. The garden is either exhausted or full of root vegetables that can stay in the ground.
My big silverleaf cottonwood, which makes this house so pleasant, has sent fine droplets of sap down all summer so that the pickiup is sticky and so is that side of the house. Washing the windows is pointless. I’ve about eliminated flies this summer, thanks to plastic bag traps with baffles in the top. Even the wasps are trying to get in there, but can’t get through the baffle, so maybe next year I’ll use the kind for wasps, though I don’t mind them. The bait is different. The ants were worse this year and I’ve finally resorted to serious poison from Big R instead of the pet-and-child-safe traps. It appears that the strategy of using peanut husks and coffee grounds to fertilize the flower borders is a bad one. The ants are ecstatic. They ate my Explorer Rose from Canada.
Because it rained fairly often all summer, my sprinkler discipline went to pieces and some things just didn’t get watered enough. On the other hand, the grass has never been so vigorous, except for the sweetgrass, which I would want to encourage.
Because of so many years in school, in academic jobs and in the church, fall feels to me more like a new beginning than spring does. I’ve gotten over the impulse to go buy a new plaid dress (I don’t know why they were always plaid.) but I never recover from the need to buy new pens and paper. So I did. Normally my windows in front have cafe curtains on them, but I took them down to wash, and see eight-year-olds with big backpacks striding heroically off to classes. It’s very confused this year. School started last week, not after Labor Day in the old harvest tradition. Anyway harvest is very late because of rain storms, and Labor Day -- which feels as though it should have been last weekend -- is not until next weekend, the 7th, which is as late as it can get. (First Monday in September.)
I’ve spent every day furiously typing away in my little back bedroom office without even having to run a fan, which meant that energy was high, ideas were flying, and I produced a LOT of print. But now I’ve got to sort and match and fit in all the pieces that Tim wrote. The economy may be re-assembling, though publishing is changing so much and so quickly that no one knows what that will mean about books. The Blowhard called Donald at 2blowhards has a book about popular traditional-style artists who have been very successful but got rolled underfoot by the Manhattan Modernists. He says he’s just about to begin sending his query packet around. This Donald is a very conservative (even old-fashioned) fellow my age who has spent his life as a quant in a corporate environment, so his opinion counts.
But the politics are back to hand-to-hand combat, even with the martyred body of Ted Kennedy in their midst. (Did you see the photo of all the presidents in a row in a pew, looking adult and sober except for George W. making a little boy’s petulant face?) An NPR guest talked about “revanchist politics” -- a term from the French word for revenge. All the insane preoccupation with imagined horror stories is destroying any kind of dialogue -- with the justification being that they are equivalent to the real and proven horror stories of the Cheney years. Payback. (Forget Bush. He’s Pinocchio except he never escaped the strings into reality.)
In this village people anchored in the realities of the seasons, the work, the family, are still easily worried by talk about climate change, water entitlement, global markets, and the possible removal of farm subsidies that represent the only profit some people make. There’s even talk of closing down CRP, the payment for NOT farming that underwrites many retirements. The two old guys across the alley, one alcoholic and the other with an amputated arm, say they’re going to winter together in the trailer. I called the cops Sunday because of the shouting and pounding -- not the old guys, but the young men who try to take sanctuary with them because they can’t find jobs or places to stay. Their families don’t want them. They aren’t imagining it. They are the seeds of trouble.
The Valier ominous early morning music, a high whine quite a lot like a giant vacuum cleaner, is a grain siphon moving wheat either into or out of the storage bins as big as houses. In fact, not too long ago, grain bins WERE little reinforced houses and it’s not hard to find ranch dwellings composed of several of them fastened together. But the newer metal bins are corrugated, round, and mostly inhabited by pigeons who live on them as much as in them, appreciating the scatter of grain always around them. The bins are so numerous they form whole neighborhoods of tin.
A grain siphon or auger is a long pipe on wheels, one end resting on the ground when not in use, and with a screw inside that will lift the grain as though it were water. Moving grain is quite a lot like moving water and one can even drown in a bin of loose grain. But just as dangerous is that screw inside the pipe. If it catches your sleeve cuff, you will be missing an arm. Not the arm of the shirt -- YOUR arm. There’s always been a macabre and ominous side to fall harvest, Halloween as opposed to the midsummer festival when flowering, full of bees, is just shifting into things to eat.
After a cool and breezy summer we’re now into a spate of heat and our light is saturated with smoke, so that the sun comes up red in a red sky and the day continues slightly orange, metallic, the sky whitened and high, the Rockies missing. We see all the things that didn’t get done this summer and MUST be done before winter. The Farmer’s Almanac predicts an unusually cold and snowy winter, as though last winter weren’t. But the leaves aren’t down yet -- just turning now -- so there’s no point in cleaning gutters. The garden is either exhausted or full of root vegetables that can stay in the ground.
My big silverleaf cottonwood, which makes this house so pleasant, has sent fine droplets of sap down all summer so that the pickiup is sticky and so is that side of the house. Washing the windows is pointless. I’ve about eliminated flies this summer, thanks to plastic bag traps with baffles in the top. Even the wasps are trying to get in there, but can’t get through the baffle, so maybe next year I’ll use the kind for wasps, though I don’t mind them. The bait is different. The ants were worse this year and I’ve finally resorted to serious poison from Big R instead of the pet-and-child-safe traps. It appears that the strategy of using peanut husks and coffee grounds to fertilize the flower borders is a bad one. The ants are ecstatic. They ate my Explorer Rose from Canada.
Because it rained fairly often all summer, my sprinkler discipline went to pieces and some things just didn’t get watered enough. On the other hand, the grass has never been so vigorous, except for the sweetgrass, which I would want to encourage.
Because of so many years in school, in academic jobs and in the church, fall feels to me more like a new beginning than spring does. I’ve gotten over the impulse to go buy a new plaid dress (I don’t know why they were always plaid.) but I never recover from the need to buy new pens and paper. So I did. Normally my windows in front have cafe curtains on them, but I took them down to wash, and see eight-year-olds with big backpacks striding heroically off to classes. It’s very confused this year. School started last week, not after Labor Day in the old harvest tradition. Anyway harvest is very late because of rain storms, and Labor Day -- which feels as though it should have been last weekend -- is not until next weekend, the 7th, which is as late as it can get. (First Monday in September.)
I’ve spent every day furiously typing away in my little back bedroom office without even having to run a fan, which meant that energy was high, ideas were flying, and I produced a LOT of print. But now I’ve got to sort and match and fit in all the pieces that Tim wrote. The economy may be re-assembling, though publishing is changing so much and so quickly that no one knows what that will mean about books. The Blowhard called Donald at 2blowhards has a book about popular traditional-style artists who have been very successful but got rolled underfoot by the Manhattan Modernists. He says he’s just about to begin sending his query packet around. This Donald is a very conservative (even old-fashioned) fellow my age who has spent his life as a quant in a corporate environment, so his opinion counts.
But the politics are back to hand-to-hand combat, even with the martyred body of Ted Kennedy in their midst. (Did you see the photo of all the presidents in a row in a pew, looking adult and sober except for George W. making a little boy’s petulant face?) An NPR guest talked about “revanchist politics” -- a term from the French word for revenge. All the insane preoccupation with imagined horror stories is destroying any kind of dialogue -- with the justification being that they are equivalent to the real and proven horror stories of the Cheney years. Payback. (Forget Bush. He’s Pinocchio except he never escaped the strings into reality.)
In this village people anchored in the realities of the seasons, the work, the family, are still easily worried by talk about climate change, water entitlement, global markets, and the possible removal of farm subsidies that represent the only profit some people make. There’s even talk of closing down CRP, the payment for NOT farming that underwrites many retirements. The two old guys across the alley, one alcoholic and the other with an amputated arm, say they’re going to winter together in the trailer. I called the cops Sunday because of the shouting and pounding -- not the old guys, but the young men who try to take sanctuary with them because they can’t find jobs or places to stay. Their families don’t want them. They aren’t imagining it. They are the seeds of trouble.
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