The decade of the Forties was one that deeply wove the fortunes of the Blackfeet in those of the nation. This post is very long.
When WWII began, the number of volunteers from Montana and from the Blackfeet was proportionately higher than almost any other defined population. The generation born in the 1910’s was still in their twenties and, unless they had family, eager to fight. It would change their lives forever, partly because of trauma in combat and partly because of seeing the world. In May, 2005, I began this blog in part so I could post the research I did in the course of writing a biography of Bob Scriver. I made notes from the Glacier Reporter and will include some of them here. [Be warned that at that point I didn’t know how to block comments so they include a link to a penis enlargement product, unless I’ve managed to eliminate them later today.]
At home the people were united in the support effort. White and Indian women threw themselves into activities sponsored by the Blackfeet War Mothers who sent boxes and boxes of socks, cookies, and other supplies, often with a five dollar bill tucked in there someplace. Raffles and dances were held to raise money. Old-Time Indians came to the homes and businesses of white people to pray for the safety of their children.
In the second half of the Forties the work of managing the peace was almost as hard as the war. A wave of new babies had to be absorbed into families that were coming apart because of wartime marriage in haste or because the men had returned traumatized and often alcoholic, but the women had learned how to manage things by themselves. Blackfeet diasphora communities had formed when people went to do war work in the big cities: Seattle or LA or Minneapolis. It was hard for men who had been officers, who had been respected and treated as equals, to come back to an environment where they were stigmatized. At the same time white veterans came onto the rez to start businesses or maybe to marry tribal women and run ranches. These families were the spine of the town when I came.
What follows is a little taste of the notes on my blog in May, 2005. If locals want to read the actual newspapers, there is a set of the them at the library at Blackfeet Community College.
January 5, 1940
Law passed that women can serve on juries.
January 12, 1940
Nellie Gladstone, BHS honor student, is a nurse in Seattle, passed a Civil Service test. [The Gladstone family includes both Jack Gladstone, the musician, and Curly Bear Wagner, cultural spokesperson.]
January 19, 1940
Born to Mr. and Mrs. Douglas Gold Saturday January 13 at the Blackfeet Hospital: a baby girl weighing 7 lbs. 12 oz. Wed and Thurs Mrs. Gold was reported very ill but is much improved today. [This baby is today Mary Lee Wippert, married to Lloyd Wippert and living in Valier.]
.
February 29, 1940
Melinda Wren died February 29, Thursday AM at her Milk River home. [Check the William Farr photo book for her portrait -- she was VERY beautiful.] She was born March 4, 1849, near Fort Benton. Her father was Chas Chouquette, who worked for Pierre Choteau and the American Fur Co. At age 8 her father sent her to Peoria, IL, to stay with her aunt and go to school. At age 17 she returned. She met John Wren and married him the following year. This “daughter of the cordeliers” accompanied her husband trapping and prospecting from the Peace River to the Yellowstone. This is the family that gave Pincer Creek it’s name -- they moved camp and forgot the horseshoeing pincers. But they went back, found them successfully, and always afterwards called that place “Pincer Creek.” She was the interpreter for years at Old Agency. In 1896 she settled on Milk River. When Wren died, Melinda carried on with her eleven children: Mrs. Al Goss, Mrs. William Kipp, Mrs. Matt Lytle, Mrs. Dan Hamilton, Mrs. Dora Cummings, Mrs. Angus Monroe, Mrs. William O’Brien, John, Robert and Willliam Wren. She had twin daughters: Mrs. Louise Aubrey and Mrs. Josephine Grant. Funeral at Church of Little Flower with Father Halligan. [Recently I officiated at the funeral of Ramona Goss, her granddaughter, who was one of those women who married a white rancher and taught school in the classroom next to mine.]
March 22, 1940
J.L. Sherburne, T.E. Scriver and Bob Starr go to the State Highway Commission to secure the Two Medicine Bridge. [ This bridge is currently being rebuilt.]
St. Patrick’s Dance -- Scriver’s Swing Band.
The commodity meat issue is pigs for a change.
August 23, 1940
Nancy Russell’s will in probate -- left money to trust fund for promoting art. [This trust fund now funds the “C.M. Russell Center for the Study of Western Art” on the University of Oklahoma campus.]
June 20, 1941
Museum of the Plains Indian Museum to open June 29.
Among the distinguished visitors at the Plains Indian Museum this week was Walter McClintock of Pittsburg, PA, who arrived in this section for an annual outing in Glacier National Park and reunion with his old Blackfeet Indian friends who he has known for several decades. McClintock’s intimacies with the Blackfeet tribe are near-sacred, he being among the first of whites to be adopted into the tribe, his Indian friends having included in years past the most outstanding leaders. McClintock, a Yale University scholar, years ago began his trek of the Glacier National Park as a photographer, his work helping to bring about its creation as a national park. His history of the Blackfeet Indians is considered among the authoritative works by students. He is author of a book callee “Old North Trail,” which teems with historic gems.
August 29, 1941
Jack Holterman arrived last Friday evening from San Francisco where he had been attending school and received his Master’s Degree during the summer session. He will teach at Starr School this year. [Holterman became an important historian of the Blackfeet, but he is little known, even locally.]
1943: Makes Cold Weather gives Blood Medicine Pipe to John Ewers. The Council files suit against Superintendent McBride and Forester A.D. Stephenson, defending B. Connolly. A certain amount of double-leasing seems to be going on. Different authorities make different deals with different people. The drought cattle, which were supposed to have been relief, have now somehow become a debt.
1944: National Congress of American Indians formed as Indian lobbying group. Brian Connolly accuses George Pambrun of shady doings. D'arcy McNickle is a member of the government commission that investigates the whole complication. So is Felix Cohen who (as an assistant Secretary of the Interior) had helped to create the Tribal Council and didn't want to hurt it now. He was one of the most celebrated practitioners of Indian law in American and is employed by the tribe.
1946: Warren O'Hara is the superintendent.
1949: Iliff McKay is the Tribal Treasurer. He was bonded, resigned, terminated his bond, and then was reinstated but without the bond. This meant the Council couldn't receive funds from the local accounts on deposit with the Superintendent Rex Kildow and precipitated an audit, which the bonding company insisted upon. The Council had loaned themselves $63,000. There was much other evidence of mismanagement. The Charter was not being enforced. Cohen advised the Council to put their money in a separate account of their own until he can work out difficulties. The superintendent suggests terminating supervision. He asks for the FBI. D'Arcy McNickle, Chief of the Tribal Relations Branch, urges the Indian Bureau to sort things out as the law requires.
Glacier Chief, February 6, 1942
Mountain Chief, 94, and last hereditary chief of the Blackfeet Indians, who died at his house on the reservation Monday, was buried Wednesday in the cemetery here following funeral service at the Church of the Little Flower. Mountain Chief, blind and confined to his home for some years, but otherwise in good health, died suddenly after complaining of having difficulty in breathing. He had been about his yard shortly before and succumbed quietly while lying on his bed. Mountain Chief was born on Old Man River in Canada in 1848 and remembered the Treaty of 1855 of which his father was a signer. he was present at the time it was signed. by this treaty all the land south of the Missouri River claimed by the Blackfeet in Montana was given to the United States. He was known as a great warrior and, according to Dick Sanderville, took part in a great many Indian fights during his lifetime. He met also many of the Presidents, including Theodore Roosevelt, McKinley, Wilson, Taft, and Queen Marie of Rumania. He participated in the sale of land which is now Glacier Park to the government. Mountain Chief was friend of General Hugh L. Scott. In 1930 he had his last visit with the general at the International Peace Conference of the Indian tribes at Browning, when the universal sign language was recorded on movie film under the direction of Scott. He is survived by his son Walter; daughter Rosie Mad Wolf; and four grandsons: Peter Stabs by Mistake, Patrick Marceau and Joe Mountain Chief, all living near Heart Butte, and Aloysious Red Fox. who is in the army in Alaska. There are 14 great grandchildren.
February 20, 1942
A large group of men from here went to Great Falls last week where they took an examination for the army. Among the men who went were Harold Scriver, Les Aubert and Jim Whitecalf.
April 24, 1942
Funeral services for the late John Franklin Bird, 93, venerable Montana pioneer, who passed away at the home of his daughter, Mrs. L. J. Momberg on Thursday, April 16, were held at the Methodist Church Saturday afternoon with Rev. Allen O. Wilcox officiating. Browning Funeral Home had charge of arrangements. Interment was made in the Browning Catholic Cemetery beside the grave of his wife. The following obituary was prepared by Mary B. Salois: The death of Mr. Bird removes from the community one of the real pioneers. He was born in Kansas City, Missouri, Dec. 11, 1848, where he lived until he attained manhood. At the age of 20 he came West and engaged in freighting in the eastern part of Montana Territory, following the route from Bozeman to the Canadian border. His real purpose in coming West was to engage in prospecting. He and Mr. Phemister spent a number of years prospecting for gold in the country that is now Yellowstone Park and adjacent territory. He was among the early freighters out of Ft. Benton, hauling freight to the old government Fort Logan. One one particular trip as he was returning north word reached him that General Custer’s Command had been wiped out by the Sioux on the Little Big Horn. He had been hauling supplies to the old 7th Cavalry. Mr. Bird was a close friend of the late Paris Gibson and well remembered the time when Mr. Gibson, being peeved at the people of Ft. Benton, told them, “I’ll leave this town and start a real town somewhere else.” His statement became true as he started Great Falls. Mr. Bird hauled the first freightload of furniture and supplies to the original Park Hotel in Great Falls. In the year of 1880 he was married to Mattie Mad Wolf Woman, a member of the Blackfeet Tribe. They made their home in Choteau for a number of years and later moving to the reservation. Their first home here was at Old Agency, where he was in charge of the government herd of cattle. The family moved to a ranch on Willow Creek which later became the Methodist Mission. Their next house was about a mile down the creek which within a sort time became the Blackfeet Agency of today. Later the family moved to a ranch on Cut Bank Creek where they lived for many years. During his more than 93 years, Mr. Bird saw many changes in the ways of life. He watched and took part in the development of the community. He often remarked he never thought he would see the day when he would watch airplanes in the sky, automobiles on splendid highways which took the place of the old treacherous trails, electric lights that took the place of candles and all the wonders that always thrilled him. He said it was a long way from driving a bull team on a freight wagon to these days of everything modern. His later years were spent in ranching and he and Mrs. Bird lived for many years on what is still known at the old Bird ranch on Cut Bank River. On a trip about seventeen years ago to Yellowstone Park, he was shown many of the well-known sites. when the party came to Old Faithful geyser, he stood looking at it for some time and then remarked, “It looks just like it did 45 years ago. It spouts out just the same.” Survivors include 4 daughters and 6 sons, who are: Mrs. Dave Higgins, Mrs. L.J. Momberg, Mrs. Andrew Keller of Browning; Mrs. Martha Hans of Niobrara, Nebraska; Sampson, Charles, Johnson, Harry, George and Oscar of Browning; 40 living grandchildren and 14 great grandchildren; a sistser Mrs. Mary Odneal of Sprague, MO, and nephew, Charles Moreland of Lewiston, ID.
May 1, 1942
The Sherburne Mercantile burned.
Mary Salois begins to have a War Mother’s Column in the paper.
Bill Show donates a yearling steer to the War Mother’s auction. [This steer became famous because each person who won it donated it back to be auctioned again!]
June 5, 1942
War mothers: We hear from Harold Scriver PFC that he’s undergone basic training and finds army life is alright but no monkey business. He is glad the Browning War Mothers are doing their bit for the boys and says that the boys having no mothers of their own are indeed lucky to find they can call on several mothers to make life in the service happier for them.
June 26, 1942
Footprints of sign-talkers dedicated. Dedication of the footprints on the lawn of the Museum of the Plains Indian which commemorates the historic Conference of Northwest Indians at Browning in September, 1930, called for the intertribal demonstration of the sign languages, is scheduled for 2 o’clock on the afternoon of June 30 on the Museum lawn. A prominent part of the program will be taken by some of those who took part in the original conference. Most of the participants in that council are now dead. However, James Whitecalf, Richard Sanderville (Chief Bull) and Mr. F. C. Campbell of the original group, whose footprints appear in the circle of bronze tablets will participate. Plans are being made for the Indians from the encampment north of the museum to attend in a body.
July 17, 1942
Private Eddie Big Beaver, Jr. was in Australia.
October 9, 1942
Fred Campbell obituary. [He was the dynamic agent who pushed agriculture.]
Browning Chief, 1944
September 15, 1944
Pvt. John McKay seriously wounded in action in France with heavy artillery. Has been in European war zone for a year.
November 3, 1944
“The lambs of Tom Kipp of Blackfoot weighed approximately 87 lbs. each and were a close second [to Frank Conway’s]. Contrary to the usual situation, the prairie lambs outweighed the lambs that were grazed in the mountains.”
December 1, 1944
Pvt. Eddie J. Big Beaver, son of Mr. and Mrs. E. Big Beaver, Sr. of Browning, is due to arrive soon in the US on furlough from the Atlantic-Pacific war zone. Pvt. Big Beaver has served 36 months in the Army Field Artillery Corps.
June 15, 1945
Maj. Gen. Wm. H. Gill, commander of the 324 (Red Arrow) Division, announces that the Commonwealth Government of the Philippines has awarded the Philippines Liberation Medal to Private Calvin C. Augare of Browning, MT. Pvt. Augare entered the army in April, 1943, and came overseas in October of the same year, assigned to the 32nd Division, veterans of Buna, he saw his first combat action at Saidor, New Guinea. He participated in four succeeding operations and is fighting at present among the mile-high ridges of the Caraldallo Mountins in Northern Luzon. Pvt Augare is the son of Mr. and Mrs. Francis Augare and the husband of Mrs. Theda LaBuff Augare of Browning, Mt.
Pfc. Jack Heavyrunner Escorts Correspondent
Pft. Jack HR, who is with the 32nd Infantry Division in the Pacific, was a member of a patrol that escorted two distinguished war correspondents over the bloody battlegrounds along the Villa Verde Trail in northern Luzon’s Caraballo Mountains. The correspondents, “Doig” Disbrow, nationally known feature writer, and Keo Amelian, owner and reporter for radio station KLEU, Erie, Penn., wanted first hand information on the 120 day battle fought by the 32nd (Red Arrow) Divison to secure the 22 miles of mountain trail through the heart of Japanese resistance to Santa Fe. The visitors also wanted to see action. The patrol spent the day in combing the brush and timber covered canyons and gullies tryiing to make isolated pockets of Japs stand and fight. Towards evening when the party was descending the dizzy curves of the Villa Verde road, a Jap sniper fired on the car carrying the correspondents. Bullets whipped through the air and over the vehicle but no one was injured.
August 10
Big headline: Japs Give Up!
August 31, 1945
When July 4th comes around in the future, Edward Big Beaver, Jr. will go through them with mixed emotions since his war wound was suffered last July 4 when he was shot through the hip by a “die hard” Jap in the Philippines. “Hell!” shouted Big Beaver the other day, “Getting shot on July 4th in a battle is more sensible than having it happen in peacetime!” Big Beaver put in approximately four years in the service of his country, most of which was in the hot spots of the Pacific. He received a medical discharge.
September 24
Harold Douglas, expert electric welder, worked at Hanford and welded the atomic bomb -- blindfolded! [Don’t ask me how he did it. The article didn’t explain -- just that it was the bomb dropped on Hiroshima.]
October 3, 1945
“It was good. It was the biggest thing to hit this valley since the Japs,” said Pfc. Jackie Heavyrunner Jr. of Browning, MT. in an attempt to describe the Carabao Rodeo staged by the 126th Infantry Regiment’s 3rd Battalion near Arctao in the Cagayan Valley, northern Luzon. Heavyrunner, who ended the war on his 538th day of conflict with the 3rd (Red Arrow) Division was one of more than a thousand Red Arrowmen, guerrillas and girls who cheered Carabao #9, “Demobilization,” as he sped across the finish line leading a field of 8, to establish an all-time 500 yards record of 5:25:3. Horse-races, relay races, and other events were climaxed by a battle between the lovely ladies of Deupex and Aritao for the Cayagan Valley Softball Crown while a guerilla band furnished music and ice-cold Coke flowed like water. “The rodeos back in Montana were tame compared to this riot,” said Heavyrunner. “It was the first one I’ve seen since I shipped over here in September, 1943.” He saw action at Sardor and Aitape, New Guinea; Morotai, in the Dutch Indies; and Leyte, Philippine Islands, before going to Luzon. There the Red Arrowmen hammered General Yamashita’s forces for six months, killing 12,000 Japs before the Tiger of Malaya surrendered to the 32nd at Baguio.
October 19, 1945
“The Daughters of the American Indian” [Parallel to the Daughters of the American Revolution]
Pres. Mae Williamson
VP: Mary B. Salois
2nd VP Pansy Cavanagh
Sec. Rita DuBray
Treas. Viola Upham
Kate W. Smith, Nellie Buffalo Chief, Lillie Monroe, Elizabeth A. Welch, Irene Salois, Nora Spanish, Jeanette Night, Lucy Sharp, Julia Wades in the Water, Emma Last Star, Maggie Croff, Mary Huntsberger, Sadie Kennerly, and Hildegarde Jessepe.
Jan. 24, 1947
John McKay, because he is a veteran amputee, is given his choice of any new car with the price limit of $1600 value with the government picking up the tab.
June 20, 1947
Schultz, Noted Writer, Passes; Local Pioneer
James Willard Schultz, 87, now Montana pioneer and nationally known author of stories dealing with the early Blackfeet Indians, died at his home in Ft. Washougie, Wyoming, on Wednesday of last week, the body being forwarded to Browning, funeral services being held Monday afternoon by members of the Blackfeet Tribe. Lying in state at the Beck Funeral Home Sunday and Monday mornings, it was viewed by sorrowing Blackfeet as well as the deceased’s many white friends of older generations. The life of Schultz was perhaps as colorful as any American in pioneer history. Born at Booneville, NY, August 26, 1859, he was educated at Peekskill Military Academy in preparation for West Point. However, he forsook opportunity for a military career to come west and be one of the actors in the drama of Montana pioneering. His trip was by boat from Missouri to Fort Benton. In 1877 he was inducted into the Blackfeet tribe and named Ap-i-kuni, in the Indian tongue meaning “Far Off White Robe.” From then on for many years he was virtually a full-fledged member of the tribe, sharing their joys and sorrows and maintaining his fealty to them to the very day of his death. Learning the Blackfeet language, he launched upon a literary career in the middle 1900’s, among books produced being “My Life As an Indian;” “Bird Woman,” the life of Sacajawea; “Blackfoot Tales of Glacier National Park;” “Signposts of Adventure; “ “Rising Wolf;” and “The White Beaver.” Schultz named many of the peaks in Glacier National Park, including Red Eagle, Going to the Sun, Grinnell Glacier, and Grinnell Mountain. His first wife was Multsi Ahwatan Ahki, a Blackfeet, who died in 1903. A member of the Catholic faith, she was buried in the Holy Family Mission cemetery. To them was born a son, Hart, of Greer, Arizona. In 1931 he married his present wife, Jessie Louise Donaldson, former member of the faculty of the Montana State College amd now engaged as a social worker in the Indian Service at Ft. Washougie. [There are other related articles.]
September 26, 1947
Loving Tribute Paid Venerable Indian, Wades
Services for the late Wades-in-the-Water, venerable Blackfeet who died at the local hospital last Saturday, were held at the Little Flower Church Tuesday at 2PM with Rev. Fr. Gerner officiating. Arrangements were in charge of the Beck Funeral Home. Active pallbearers were J.L. Sherburne, Harold Hanneman, Joe Ironpipe, Theodore Last Star and Reuben Black Boy of Browning and Wilbur Werner. Honorary pallbearers, token of the departed’s wealth of devoted friendships, included citizens in various walks of life in this and neighboring communities as well as in various cities in Montana and the country at large. Wades-in-the-Water, a full-blood Blackfeet, attained the age of 76. He was the son of the late Running Crane, one of the last official chiefs of the Blackfeet Tribe. A man of courage, with character as firm as was the environs that molded him as a child of Nature, he was regarded higihly by all who knew him. At the grave service in the Browning Catholic Cemetery, a beautiful tribute was paid the departed by an admiring friend, Warren L. O’Hara, superintendent of the Blackfeet Agency.
Oct. 31, 1947
Dr. Schaffer arrives to take over the Museum of the Plains Indian. BA in anthro from the U of Washington, then post-grad at Yale, PhD at U of Pennsylvania.
Nov 7, 1947
Robbery of DeVoe’s and then Starbucks drugstore. Got $2500 at the latter. Marshall Boyd shot to death by “Rowe” who was an escaped con from Minnesota.
Dec. 26, 1947
John McKay wins a second car at the Altar Society Bazaar!
April 16, 1948
FFA delegates: Jack Wood, Steve Barcus, Bill McCurdy, Dennis Harris, Kenneth Juneau, Ed Conway, Eugene Kipp, Jerry Show, Lee Wilson, Fred Pambrun.
Jan. 14, 1949
William Marceau froze to death. 29 below.
Jan 27, 1950
No relief money for Crees -- Joe Hameline is chopping up his floor and burning it to keep from freezing.
Percy Bullchild dies. [Author of “The Sun Comes Down,” which was also his Indian name.]
Feb 3, 1950
30 inches of snow -- 20-30 foot drifts.
July 7, 1950
Mayor and entire council QUIT!! Frank Sherburne is the mayor. Jack Moyer, Henry Parsons, Wm. Wright, and Gus Hunsberger.
1674 people in town. More than half are Indians. There are 4,000 Indians on the reservation which is self-supporting with its income from resources. One quarter of a million dollars was spent on various levels of welfare. There is one policeman. When, over 4th of July, he arrested 20 drunks, they broke out of all sides of the flimsy jail -- pushed out or dug under the walls, broke out the ceiling, etc. Drunkenness and violence rampant.
August 25, 1950
Agent F.C. Campbell’s daughter married LeRoy DeRosier. [The DeRosier family has been remarkable in achievement and contribution to the reservation.]
Sept. 8, 1950
Eloise, 4, daughter of Mr. and Mrs. Polite Pepion, suffered a fracture of the right forearm Tuesday when she fell from a riding pony. With other playmates, she was enjoying a ride at the Pepion ranch. The accident occurred when she fell from her position behind the saddle. She was taken to the local hospital for treatment. [Eloise married Turk Cobell. She is now a MAJOR part of history as the complainant in the just-now settled lawsuit against the US government for mismanaging the trust funds of Indians.]
Monday, November 22, 2010
Sunday, November 21, 2010
THE ABYSS, THE EMBRACE
When I was circuit-riding in my van (1982-85) below zero snowy nights like this week in Valier meant that I stayed in someone’s guest bedroom. That was always an adventure. But if the temp were above ten degrees, I slept in the van. A different kind of adventure, and despite the cold -- I have never been so cold, not even snow-camping while hunting -- I preferred it. I had a space blanket for a mattress pad which was pretty effective. Or I had a little heater and would park behind a mini-office-strip and run an extension cord out the window to the outlet where they plugged in the headbolt heaters on their cars. I would lie very still with legs out straight and arms at my sides, like an Egyptian mummy in a sarcophagus. It didn’t take long to warm up my body space and then I slept surprisingly well. Without moving. Sometimes now I dream I’m sleeping there again.
“Kenosis” is a religious concept based on the idea of emptying out. It recurs in many cultures and religious systems. Maybe because the ministry and probably in all of the Abramic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) but -- most intensely -- Protestant denominations that closely associate prosperity with salvation, I was supposed to be in a growth and expansion mode. More people, more money, more influence, more status, more political power -- you get the idea. The contrast might be Quakers or Catholic religious orders like the Poor Clares. (They have a new retreat in Great Falls now, so what does that mean?) Anyway, “acquisition” to me doesn’t mean what it means to mainstream Americans. I acquire ideas and only pack around too many books because until the Internet, that’s how you got at ideas unless you were on a campus.
The concept of kenosis had a lot of popularity in the 16th century when capitalism and the very beginnings of the middle class were forming so that “stuff” began to mean more than just enough to eat and a shelter. I am not surprised that in these overloaded days of “stuff,” kenosis has come back in our modern way: through music. Three examples: "The French black metal band Deathspell Omega have a 2005 EP named Kénôse, whose lyrics reference theological themes of emptiness and more. The American post-rock band Hammock released an album in 2005 named Kenotic. The American post-hardcore band Designer released an album in October 2010 entitled Kenosis, which addresses spiritual themes such as this, amongst other things." I haven’t heard any of them. Yet. (I got the references off Wikipedia -- forgive me.)
In practical terms, my ministerial van life was simply transportation and bedroom, but in spiritual terms it was my Kenosis, especially in winter. The high prairie is “high” because it is north so it's high on the map page; because it is where the continent subtly folds and slants down from the Rockies to the Mississippi; and because it is a place with such extremes that one’s mind can be “high” in the sense of intoxicated. Driving a hundred miles (roughly the distances between my four fellowships: Bozeman, Great Falls, Helena and Missoula) was my “high church” experience as I shuttled from ragged mountains to sheltered valleys and flat land. My mantra has been “geology is almost theology” and this is where I learned it.
The role of minister is dualistic, not in terms of good/evil, but in terms of being the “primate” (the authority) versus being very aware of one’s limitations, ignorance, and weakness. I think of a Wallace Stegner quote (he grew up on the prairie not far away) about how even a person standing upright has the humility of being on one’s knees, and yet the very fact of being vertical in so much horizon means standing out. The nights in the van were my times of Kenosis, emptying out, becoming one with a huge night sky and taut endless land. They were the heart of my idea of being a minister, never addressed in seminary.
I did not know how to explain that to my parishioners. To them the congregation was an occasion of gathering. Only Missoula had a building where I stayed in the basement bedroom I have now learned was where Dirck Van Sickle wrote “Montana Gothic,” which could usefully be analyzed in terms of horror as Kenosis. Or maybe Kenosis as horror. Certainly, Missoula folks were the most into acquisition and status of any of the groups. They wanted me there, on-call, and significant in the community, which is a college town. Great Falls probably came the closest to being Kenotic since they were mostly scattered grain ranchers, accustomed to long long hours alone on the land. Bozeman was a mountain-climbing town as well as a university. In spite of being the state capital, Helena didn’t have many politicians. They were and are (I think) mostly professionals: shrinks, teachers, fish and game, ag regulators. But they saw themselves as a “get together.”
A bit of my thinking from those years is in my book of prairie sermons:“Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke,” published by the Edmonton Unitarian Church and now only available as remaindered copies through Driftwillow Press. http://www.driftwillowpress.com/
Kenosis is bottomless. How deeply you go depends on your courage -- or maybe it’s recklessness. It requires the faith that however much you abandon, however much you let go, however much you fall, in the end there are forces that will gather you up and restore you, renewed. What you call those forces depends upon your culture, your experience.
Now this flimsy little old house, built in the BIG Depression, and plumbed, electrified and insulated haphazardly as afterthoughts, is the same as my van, is my anchorite refuge. Now the sky brings the humility down on me from the north or from the mountains. Now the wind pounds it into me. Now the sun and the blooming prairie lift me back, rising in grandeur like summer thunderheads. It’s not an intellectual sort of experience, though I insist on pursuing it that way. These concepts -- abyss, embrace -- are FELT concepts, whole body. And yes, probably best expressed in music and dance. Tim understands, way off on the blue ridges with the black bears and the red wolves. Seafarers have always understood. The Blackfeet know.
“Kenosis” is a religious concept based on the idea of emptying out. It recurs in many cultures and religious systems. Maybe because the ministry and probably in all of the Abramic religions (Judaism, Christianity, Islam) but -- most intensely -- Protestant denominations that closely associate prosperity with salvation, I was supposed to be in a growth and expansion mode. More people, more money, more influence, more status, more political power -- you get the idea. The contrast might be Quakers or Catholic religious orders like the Poor Clares. (They have a new retreat in Great Falls now, so what does that mean?) Anyway, “acquisition” to me doesn’t mean what it means to mainstream Americans. I acquire ideas and only pack around too many books because until the Internet, that’s how you got at ideas unless you were on a campus.
The concept of kenosis had a lot of popularity in the 16th century when capitalism and the very beginnings of the middle class were forming so that “stuff” began to mean more than just enough to eat and a shelter. I am not surprised that in these overloaded days of “stuff,” kenosis has come back in our modern way: through music. Three examples: "The French black metal band Deathspell Omega have a 2005 EP named Kénôse, whose lyrics reference theological themes of emptiness and more. The American post-rock band Hammock released an album in 2005 named Kenotic. The American post-hardcore band Designer released an album in October 2010 entitled Kenosis, which addresses spiritual themes such as this, amongst other things." I haven’t heard any of them. Yet. (I got the references off Wikipedia -- forgive me.)
In practical terms, my ministerial van life was simply transportation and bedroom, but in spiritual terms it was my Kenosis, especially in winter. The high prairie is “high” because it is north so it's high on the map page; because it is where the continent subtly folds and slants down from the Rockies to the Mississippi; and because it is a place with such extremes that one’s mind can be “high” in the sense of intoxicated. Driving a hundred miles (roughly the distances between my four fellowships: Bozeman, Great Falls, Helena and Missoula) was my “high church” experience as I shuttled from ragged mountains to sheltered valleys and flat land. My mantra has been “geology is almost theology” and this is where I learned it.
The role of minister is dualistic, not in terms of good/evil, but in terms of being the “primate” (the authority) versus being very aware of one’s limitations, ignorance, and weakness. I think of a Wallace Stegner quote (he grew up on the prairie not far away) about how even a person standing upright has the humility of being on one’s knees, and yet the very fact of being vertical in so much horizon means standing out. The nights in the van were my times of Kenosis, emptying out, becoming one with a huge night sky and taut endless land. They were the heart of my idea of being a minister, never addressed in seminary.
I did not know how to explain that to my parishioners. To them the congregation was an occasion of gathering. Only Missoula had a building where I stayed in the basement bedroom I have now learned was where Dirck Van Sickle wrote “Montana Gothic,” which could usefully be analyzed in terms of horror as Kenosis. Or maybe Kenosis as horror. Certainly, Missoula folks were the most into acquisition and status of any of the groups. They wanted me there, on-call, and significant in the community, which is a college town. Great Falls probably came the closest to being Kenotic since they were mostly scattered grain ranchers, accustomed to long long hours alone on the land. Bozeman was a mountain-climbing town as well as a university. In spite of being the state capital, Helena didn’t have many politicians. They were and are (I think) mostly professionals: shrinks, teachers, fish and game, ag regulators. But they saw themselves as a “get together.”
A bit of my thinking from those years is in my book of prairie sermons:“Sweetgrass and Cottonwood Smoke,” published by the Edmonton Unitarian Church and now only available as remaindered copies through Driftwillow Press. http://www.driftwillowpress.com/
Kenosis is bottomless. How deeply you go depends on your courage -- or maybe it’s recklessness. It requires the faith that however much you abandon, however much you let go, however much you fall, in the end there are forces that will gather you up and restore you, renewed. What you call those forces depends upon your culture, your experience.
Now this flimsy little old house, built in the BIG Depression, and plumbed, electrified and insulated haphazardly as afterthoughts, is the same as my van, is my anchorite refuge. Now the sky brings the humility down on me from the north or from the mountains. Now the wind pounds it into me. Now the sun and the blooming prairie lift me back, rising in grandeur like summer thunderheads. It’s not an intellectual sort of experience, though I insist on pursuing it that way. These concepts -- abyss, embrace -- are FELT concepts, whole body. And yes, probably best expressed in music and dance. Tim understands, way off on the blue ridges with the black bears and the red wolves. Seafarers have always understood. The Blackfeet know.
Saturday, November 20, 2010
SALES PLATFORMS FOR ARTISTS & WRITERS
Mentioning Thomas Kinkade is an excellent intro to the next step for success in art or writing: PLATFORM. That is, knowing who your audience is and providing a sense of identity that they can comprehend as relevant. Some people, a little too clever maybe, can design a platform for a specific demographic group where they think there is money. Kinkade seems to be this type. He creates sweet, pastel, greeting-card images of “home,” as envisioned in a dream world where such a home is absolutely safe, warm, and honorable. That this is not his natural mode is tipped off by his recent troubles with the law. There are plenty more examples, some of them very famous Western artists. Some people don’t think Norman Rockwell was anything like the folks in his paintings. Whether it’s valid as a criticism to say an artist or writer is or is not “like” his work is an old issue that will never be resolved.
Platform as a selling gimmick is something else and has become very intense in recent times. The public is sometimes only interested in the art or writing as a way of connecting to what they fancy to be the artist or writer. Why else would they get so outraged over the idea of a hoax? Identity politics are intense and hard-bitten. Thus, when a modern journalist, John Taliaferro, wrote “Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist,” he found out in a hurry that the fans and especially the promoters of the “brand” called Charlie Russell didn’t want to know the “real truth.” They didn’t CARE that both Charlie and Nancy had been sterilized by syphillis or that Charlie had a goiter bad enough to interfere with his heart and a hernia that meant his Metis sash had to do double duty as a support, but he would not go to a doctor. They were more willing to understand that Nancy, after Charlie’s death and after she had moved to Pasadena, had a very close male friend. (I’ll get kickback for this.) Taliaferro was not thanked and his name is not mentioned at the Great Falls Auction or Museum. All his books disappeared from the shelves. (So did mine.) Neither was Thomas H. Pauly rewarded for unveiling the romantic life of Zane Grey. Revelations about beloved figures, however deceiving their platform personas, fall on deaf ears. Anyway, they’re bad for sales. Commerce can vanquish even scandal.
Thus, when my book about Bob Scriver, “Bronze Inside and Out,” was submitted to the University of Oklahoma Press, the acquiring editor, Chuck Rankin, did NOT like what I said and, in fact, B. Byron Price -- one of the supposed objective secret evaluators -- recommended that it be severely shortened and all the women be taken out. (Something like the editor who refused Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It” because it had too many trees in it.) A different author might have agreed. I pulled my manuscript. Chuck Rankin had done an earlier hatchet job on Bob when he was editing “Montana: the Magazine of Western History,” so I had hated to send the manuscript there anyway. Earlier it had been rejected by the University of Minnesota Press, I suspect in part because of Native American politics over the sale of the Scriver artifact collection.
The general bourgeois public looks for platforms that are reassuring or adventurous in a non-threatening way -- crocodiles in Australia but not dog packs in their neighborhood. Tales of rescue, endless tales of rescue, and no photos of the piles of dead dogs at the end of the day in shelters everywhere. “That’s morbid,” they say. “I can’t face it. Why make me?”
Well, because that’s the way change and reform come about. If you can shut things out of awareness, the profiteers and the death-mongers can go right on with their horrid business. Luckily there ARE tough-minded people who stare straight into the black sun no matter what it costs them. Those who address the nineteenth century prairie clearances of the native Americans stick to paintings of beautiful maidens and the horse-and-feather moments of raids and battles. (HOORAY for today’s decision finally to pay back the embezzled funds of American Indians!) Customers like some romantic but totally unreal lodges in sunsets against idyllic scenery, painted by someone who once worked for Walt Disney. That’s what the rich bourgeois buy. (The truly rich don’t buy anything at all in Montana. Maybe ranches.)
But why should art be all the same? Saying that Kinkade is NOT a legitimate art platform because one is too sophisticated to like it, doesn’t mean that the housing inspector I knew in Portland who covered his cubicle with Kinkade images from calendars wasn’t sincere. He had learned that what his people liked was candy-sweet and safety-based. That’s what he liked, too. The black Imam a few cubicles down whose mosque had recently been burned out and whose son turned out to be a leopard, had NO images in his cubicle. That the men could get along, at least at work, is remarkable. Great art is always in a context. Some people are always going to prefer the Vargas girl to the Mona Lisa, no matter what the “experts” tell them. (Whoever makes the arrangements in the warehouse of Scriver bronzes has hidden his little nudes. He had enormous fondness for Vargas, though there wasn’t a Playboy or Penthouse in the studio. At least not a copy his mother might find. She DID come up and look.)
There ARE legitimate curators of Charlie Russell’s work, definers of genre who try to understand why this platform “formed.” It’s always an interaction of the culture with the individual. These people are generally academic and unknown to the general public, so they make a kind of meta-platform. At the roll-out of the comprehensive list of all Charlie Russell’s work, generally referred to in French as a “catalogue raisonee” to give it a little class, the real experts were brought in for a legitimating seminar and they were wonderful to hear, but it’s tough to get a publisher to commit money to the creation of their books, especially since they will require expensive photo plates. People don’t want to have to work so hard to be able to explain to their neighbors how important their possessions are.
Most confusing of all to many people are the artists or writers who occupy several platforms, for instance, the Connecticut illustrators like John Clymer who later became an easel painter of Western art. Of course, besides his beloved Saturday Evening Post covers (as well-loved as those of Norman Rockwell), he had always done illustrations of the West like his series about the Northwest Indian Tribes for National Geographic and portraits of Western animals. He was lucky to be seen as “double” partly because he was a Westerner by birth. Howard Terpning, on the other hand, has not exactly pointed out his early career painting pretty Jon Whitcomb girls for short stories in Colliers.
When one sweeps back the Oz curtain that obscures art, the scene is confusing and multiple. It pays to hold still and ponder for a while. Unless you’re trying to close a sale.
Platform as a selling gimmick is something else and has become very intense in recent times. The public is sometimes only interested in the art or writing as a way of connecting to what they fancy to be the artist or writer. Why else would they get so outraged over the idea of a hoax? Identity politics are intense and hard-bitten. Thus, when a modern journalist, John Taliaferro, wrote “Charles M. Russell: The Life and Legend of America’s Cowboy Artist,” he found out in a hurry that the fans and especially the promoters of the “brand” called Charlie Russell didn’t want to know the “real truth.” They didn’t CARE that both Charlie and Nancy had been sterilized by syphillis or that Charlie had a goiter bad enough to interfere with his heart and a hernia that meant his Metis sash had to do double duty as a support, but he would not go to a doctor. They were more willing to understand that Nancy, after Charlie’s death and after she had moved to Pasadena, had a very close male friend. (I’ll get kickback for this.) Taliaferro was not thanked and his name is not mentioned at the Great Falls Auction or Museum. All his books disappeared from the shelves. (So did mine.) Neither was Thomas H. Pauly rewarded for unveiling the romantic life of Zane Grey. Revelations about beloved figures, however deceiving their platform personas, fall on deaf ears. Anyway, they’re bad for sales. Commerce can vanquish even scandal.
Thus, when my book about Bob Scriver, “Bronze Inside and Out,” was submitted to the University of Oklahoma Press, the acquiring editor, Chuck Rankin, did NOT like what I said and, in fact, B. Byron Price -- one of the supposed objective secret evaluators -- recommended that it be severely shortened and all the women be taken out. (Something like the editor who refused Norman Maclean’s “A River Runs through It” because it had too many trees in it.) A different author might have agreed. I pulled my manuscript. Chuck Rankin had done an earlier hatchet job on Bob when he was editing “Montana: the Magazine of Western History,” so I had hated to send the manuscript there anyway. Earlier it had been rejected by the University of Minnesota Press, I suspect in part because of Native American politics over the sale of the Scriver artifact collection.
The general bourgeois public looks for platforms that are reassuring or adventurous in a non-threatening way -- crocodiles in Australia but not dog packs in their neighborhood. Tales of rescue, endless tales of rescue, and no photos of the piles of dead dogs at the end of the day in shelters everywhere. “That’s morbid,” they say. “I can’t face it. Why make me?”
Well, because that’s the way change and reform come about. If you can shut things out of awareness, the profiteers and the death-mongers can go right on with their horrid business. Luckily there ARE tough-minded people who stare straight into the black sun no matter what it costs them. Those who address the nineteenth century prairie clearances of the native Americans stick to paintings of beautiful maidens and the horse-and-feather moments of raids and battles. (HOORAY for today’s decision finally to pay back the embezzled funds of American Indians!) Customers like some romantic but totally unreal lodges in sunsets against idyllic scenery, painted by someone who once worked for Walt Disney. That’s what the rich bourgeois buy. (The truly rich don’t buy anything at all in Montana. Maybe ranches.)
But why should art be all the same? Saying that Kinkade is NOT a legitimate art platform because one is too sophisticated to like it, doesn’t mean that the housing inspector I knew in Portland who covered his cubicle with Kinkade images from calendars wasn’t sincere. He had learned that what his people liked was candy-sweet and safety-based. That’s what he liked, too. The black Imam a few cubicles down whose mosque had recently been burned out and whose son turned out to be a leopard, had NO images in his cubicle. That the men could get along, at least at work, is remarkable. Great art is always in a context. Some people are always going to prefer the Vargas girl to the Mona Lisa, no matter what the “experts” tell them. (Whoever makes the arrangements in the warehouse of Scriver bronzes has hidden his little nudes. He had enormous fondness for Vargas, though there wasn’t a Playboy or Penthouse in the studio. At least not a copy his mother might find. She DID come up and look.)
There ARE legitimate curators of Charlie Russell’s work, definers of genre who try to understand why this platform “formed.” It’s always an interaction of the culture with the individual. These people are generally academic and unknown to the general public, so they make a kind of meta-platform. At the roll-out of the comprehensive list of all Charlie Russell’s work, generally referred to in French as a “catalogue raisonee” to give it a little class, the real experts were brought in for a legitimating seminar and they were wonderful to hear, but it’s tough to get a publisher to commit money to the creation of their books, especially since they will require expensive photo plates. People don’t want to have to work so hard to be able to explain to their neighbors how important their possessions are.
Most confusing of all to many people are the artists or writers who occupy several platforms, for instance, the Connecticut illustrators like John Clymer who later became an easel painter of Western art. Of course, besides his beloved Saturday Evening Post covers (as well-loved as those of Norman Rockwell), he had always done illustrations of the West like his series about the Northwest Indian Tribes for National Geographic and portraits of Western animals. He was lucky to be seen as “double” partly because he was a Westerner by birth. Howard Terpning, on the other hand, has not exactly pointed out his early career painting pretty Jon Whitcomb girls for short stories in Colliers.
When one sweeps back the Oz curtain that obscures art, the scene is confusing and multiple. It pays to hold still and ponder for a while. Unless you’re trying to close a sale.
Friday, November 19, 2010
HOW TO GET RICH WITH ART
The way to make a profit is very simple: “buy low, sell high.” Therefore, persons who are looking for profit look for gradients of time, place or reputation. Something that was worth $5 yesterday -- let’s say shares in an automobile company -- may increase in value to $10 tomorrow. (Interest on a loan is a sort of forced gradient: you get your $5 back plus interest or else you get your $5 back or else you get whatever you put up for collateral. That’s the theory.)
Gradients of place are quite obvious when dealing with ethnic (local, regional) crafts (pots, bead work, quilts) or with natural resources like ores or certain plants (coffee, olives). The entrepreneur buys a supply, invests the cost of transportation, and sells it where it isn’t found.
The gradient of reputation is the most variable and the one most vulnerable to outside interference. Coffee became all the rage -- Starbucks now, coffee houses very early -- until doctors advise against it or the New Age people bolt to tea. Think of the fortunes of beef, profits much reduced by Oprah’s opinion. In fact, scares about health are one of the most effective gradient-factors in our world today. Not just big pharma either. I’ve never forgotten the social commenter who noted that predicting the craze for jogging let a few prescient people clean up on sports bras and big bouncy shoes. Of course, now that barefoot runners from Africa have been seen to win marathons, the trendy are buying thin-soled shoes with separated toes and have found experts to say these are healthier. Earth shoes, negative-heel shoes, went by in there someplace. Sex trumps health, so four-inch-heel platform-sole ankle-strap fuck-me sandals also sell.
A popular gallery exercise in the Cowboy Art world is comparing the gradient of stock market investments against the gradient involved in the value of Remington’s art. (This began as a back East pursuit, which is why they used Remington instead of Russell. The great thing about Russell was that he was so prolific and spontaneous that fifty years ago Dick Flood could still find Russell originals gathering dust in someone’s old chicken coop. Nice low.) Whether the stock market and Remingtons compare well depends on whose thumb is on the scale. Remington knock-offs, encouraged by the public conviction that Remingtons increase in value (and prestige) and their inability to tell a high-value Remington from a cheesy knock-off, are not usually included.
Art has always been a good way to store wealth IF one knows art values and is good at predicting what the future will think about it. What one is really investing in is not the actual object, but the reputation of the art and its maker. Norman Rockwell was famous in a popular way, then knocked off his pedestal by critics who thought the work was sentimental and slick, then replaced on a new pedestal by new critics who feel that Rockwell had his fingers on the pulse of America and that his skills were praiseworthy. There are many other examples.
This is what makes possible the present trend of museums, dedicated to aggregation, to use curation -- changing opinion -- to discard parts of their collection through auction or just slip them out the back loading platform in the middle of the night. If you watch the “stock market” indicator of www.askart.com or other similar websites, you’ll see the fortunes of artists and whole genres go up and down at the indicator auctions.
When the Cowboy Artists of America first banded together, their fortunes were not so rosy, but their association with the then Cowboy Hall of Fame and the promotions of Dean Krakel gradually made membership into markers of quality, so that they all sold much better. This, of course, prompted others to make that sort of art and apply for membership. Soon some streets of Scottsdale and other cowboy art towns were awash with galleries trying to cash in on this value gradient and touting the Remington principle. In the rush of popularity there was so much cowboy art that the value went down. Suddenly galleries began to say, “Buy only what you dearly love!”
Another element in the value of art is its connection to status, education and class. Partly because of the leverage of Life magazine pursuing the wild and romantic lives of Pollock and Picasso, the ordinary person was amazed that something that didn’t look like anything ("my kid could paint like that!") could sell for huge amounts of money. They also got the idea that being an artist, daringly romantic and probably drunk, was a prerequisite. This factor, a kind of frontier style, merged with the “free-range” wildcat aspect of unregulated profit-making, and an association between the political right wing and cowboy art grew up. (“At least I can tell what it is! In fact, I rode a horse like that once!”) Some of the biggest institutions that focused on cowboy art were originally endowed by natural resource millionaires. There is a reason that the Oval Office of the White House is decorated with cowboy art.
But times change. The major curators of cowboy art, let’s say Harold McCracken and Fred Renner, have ridden away over the horizon. Anyway, they were authenticators and enumerators, list aggregators. Rarely did they weigh in about composition or use of color or quality of casting. One of this type, B. Byron Price, has been shepherding a compilation of all known Russell art, with the backing of the CMRussell Museum. This will improve the value of the art work that is listed and devalue those who don’t make the list. Price is also the director of the University of Oklahoma Press and the CM Russell Center for the Study of Western Art. His friends and close associates are well-placed in institutions around the country. He has the ability to suppress all dissenters or to raise up those who will enhance his reputation. Not that McCracken and Renner didn’t do that earlier. Or even Krakel.
This is why I refer to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. I would love to catch someone from the Great Falls Ad Club in an unguarded moment to pick up the real causes of the breakup of the Auction. Some are probably nearly unconscious: the aging of the people who took the brunt of the work, the proliferation of other auctions with access to far more significant work. ("More significant" is not the same as “better.” It just means more aggregated and curated.) The decline in the reputation of natural resources industries, which are now often seen as plunderers and exploiters. In short, the gradient is changing, much of it depending on the popularity of the subject matter. Fascinating to watch. Full of anguish if you have a horse in the race.
Gradients of place are quite obvious when dealing with ethnic (local, regional) crafts (pots, bead work, quilts) or with natural resources like ores or certain plants (coffee, olives). The entrepreneur buys a supply, invests the cost of transportation, and sells it where it isn’t found.
The gradient of reputation is the most variable and the one most vulnerable to outside interference. Coffee became all the rage -- Starbucks now, coffee houses very early -- until doctors advise against it or the New Age people bolt to tea. Think of the fortunes of beef, profits much reduced by Oprah’s opinion. In fact, scares about health are one of the most effective gradient-factors in our world today. Not just big pharma either. I’ve never forgotten the social commenter who noted that predicting the craze for jogging let a few prescient people clean up on sports bras and big bouncy shoes. Of course, now that barefoot runners from Africa have been seen to win marathons, the trendy are buying thin-soled shoes with separated toes and have found experts to say these are healthier. Earth shoes, negative-heel shoes, went by in there someplace. Sex trumps health, so four-inch-heel platform-sole ankle-strap fuck-me sandals also sell.
A popular gallery exercise in the Cowboy Art world is comparing the gradient of stock market investments against the gradient involved in the value of Remington’s art. (This began as a back East pursuit, which is why they used Remington instead of Russell. The great thing about Russell was that he was so prolific and spontaneous that fifty years ago Dick Flood could still find Russell originals gathering dust in someone’s old chicken coop. Nice low.) Whether the stock market and Remingtons compare well depends on whose thumb is on the scale. Remington knock-offs, encouraged by the public conviction that Remingtons increase in value (and prestige) and their inability to tell a high-value Remington from a cheesy knock-off, are not usually included.
Art has always been a good way to store wealth IF one knows art values and is good at predicting what the future will think about it. What one is really investing in is not the actual object, but the reputation of the art and its maker. Norman Rockwell was famous in a popular way, then knocked off his pedestal by critics who thought the work was sentimental and slick, then replaced on a new pedestal by new critics who feel that Rockwell had his fingers on the pulse of America and that his skills were praiseworthy. There are many other examples.
This is what makes possible the present trend of museums, dedicated to aggregation, to use curation -- changing opinion -- to discard parts of their collection through auction or just slip them out the back loading platform in the middle of the night. If you watch the “stock market” indicator of www.askart.com or other similar websites, you’ll see the fortunes of artists and whole genres go up and down at the indicator auctions.
When the Cowboy Artists of America first banded together, their fortunes were not so rosy, but their association with the then Cowboy Hall of Fame and the promotions of Dean Krakel gradually made membership into markers of quality, so that they all sold much better. This, of course, prompted others to make that sort of art and apply for membership. Soon some streets of Scottsdale and other cowboy art towns were awash with galleries trying to cash in on this value gradient and touting the Remington principle. In the rush of popularity there was so much cowboy art that the value went down. Suddenly galleries began to say, “Buy only what you dearly love!”
Another element in the value of art is its connection to status, education and class. Partly because of the leverage of Life magazine pursuing the wild and romantic lives of Pollock and Picasso, the ordinary person was amazed that something that didn’t look like anything ("my kid could paint like that!") could sell for huge amounts of money. They also got the idea that being an artist, daringly romantic and probably drunk, was a prerequisite. This factor, a kind of frontier style, merged with the “free-range” wildcat aspect of unregulated profit-making, and an association between the political right wing and cowboy art grew up. (“At least I can tell what it is! In fact, I rode a horse like that once!”) Some of the biggest institutions that focused on cowboy art were originally endowed by natural resource millionaires. There is a reason that the Oval Office of the White House is decorated with cowboy art.
But times change. The major curators of cowboy art, let’s say Harold McCracken and Fred Renner, have ridden away over the horizon. Anyway, they were authenticators and enumerators, list aggregators. Rarely did they weigh in about composition or use of color or quality of casting. One of this type, B. Byron Price, has been shepherding a compilation of all known Russell art, with the backing of the CMRussell Museum. This will improve the value of the art work that is listed and devalue those who don’t make the list. Price is also the director of the University of Oklahoma Press and the CM Russell Center for the Study of Western Art. His friends and close associates are well-placed in institutions around the country. He has the ability to suppress all dissenters or to raise up those who will enhance his reputation. Not that McCracken and Renner didn’t do that earlier. Or even Krakel.
This is why I refer to the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. I would love to catch someone from the Great Falls Ad Club in an unguarded moment to pick up the real causes of the breakup of the Auction. Some are probably nearly unconscious: the aging of the people who took the brunt of the work, the proliferation of other auctions with access to far more significant work. ("More significant" is not the same as “better.” It just means more aggregated and curated.) The decline in the reputation of natural resources industries, which are now often seen as plunderers and exploiters. In short, the gradient is changing, much of it depending on the popularity of the subject matter. Fascinating to watch. Full of anguish if you have a horse in the race.
Thursday, November 18, 2010
CMR: NOT JUST A MAN
There are two important functions of a museum: aggregation (the collection of things together) and curation (their interpretation). That’s pretty clear. The problem comes when greed and status are involved. Suddenly the monetary value of the aggregation and the status of the curator begin to put political spin on what most people would suppose to be a rather objective function. In fact, we are used to thinking of museums and historical societies as either governmental (tax-supported, which is more common in Canada or Europe than the US) or non-profit (even when they were originally started with endowments from very rich people). The idea was either that they were part of a cultural heritage that makes the nation stronger or that their purpose was so significant in the eyes of the original founders that they would underwrite them the way they might underwrite a cancer hospital. (We aren’t very used to hospitals being profit-makers on today’s scale either. But in Great Falls and Billings, Montana, health care is a major part of the economy.)
Let’s go back to aggregation. Small towns have often been the locus of personal collections of oddities, like arrowheads or albino animals or pioneer implements. Sometimes the things are there just because they are odd (we never lose our fascination with two-headed calves) and sometimes because they are nostalgic and occasionally because the owner simply had a lot of money, and used it to create an aggregation. They aren’t always in accessible places so after the original collectors, who housed them in a basement or garage or -- in the case of one small town in Saskatchewan -- an abandoned movie house, everything is simply dispersed or maybe there’s an effort to raise money through charging admission.
One of my favorite remnants of history now supported as a museum is in North Dakota. Medora was founded in 1883 by French nobleman Marquis de Mores who named the city after his wife Medora von Hoffman. Originally simply the graceful and elegantly appointed ranch house of the Marquis and his wife, who were driven out by meat-packing competitors, it’s something like the Conrad mansion in Kalispell which was emptied by changing times but left intact with furniture. The rather remote ranch home of Alberta Bair is in the category. Such places are heavily curated: the point is preservation rather than aggregation. The Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center is based on the curation of a place, how Lewis & Clark made the change from boats on the Missouri to horses as they continued their journey across the continent. A certain amount of aggregation of authentic equipment or art works are included as well as a point of scholarship, which is a form of curation, explanatory exhibits and talks by guides as well as small events that help people with hands-on experience of one thing or another, like faux parfleches made from brown wrapping paper.
The CM Russell Museum in the same town also organizes such events, especially for kids, who need more than tours to hold their interest. The point of the CMR Museum is aggregation of all things Charlie Russell. By association other artists have been included, though none as the primary focus. The original “seed” for the museum was Charlie’s good librarian friend, Josephine Trigg, who saved small things like letters or the clever little place markers from parties. Charlie’s original house and log cabin studio were there. Someone saw the potential for development and in the last fifty years the place has mushroomed into a major installation. Such a place offers a range of jobs from janitors and security guards to receptionists (originally volunteers), aficionado groups, and a small gift shop.
At the top is the director, who is presumably both an administrator and a curator -- that is, can manage organizational issues like building maintenance and the dynamics of a board of directors, but also is enough of an art expert to mount exhibits worth scholarly attention and to interact with other experts. Nowadays fund-raising is even more important than in the past. Beyond that, the CM Russell Museum has influence clear into Oklahoma where the residue of Nancy Russell’s estate now endows the CMR Center for the Study of Western Art at the University of Oklahoma. The University of Oklahoma Press (along with the University of Nebraska Press) is a major vendor of books about Western subjects.
The Great Falls CMR Museum had the good fortune to attract the attention of the GF Advertising Club, a dynamic group who sponsored an annual art auction on Russell’s birthday. This money-maker, soon imitated by the sincere flattery of other entities, not only attracted a cluster of side-kick auctions all over town, but attracted the interest of people working in the American Southwest on the crosshairs of cowboys and Indians. One example there, the Cowboy Hall of Fame, now called the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, was a major player in the development of Western art because of an alliance with the Cowboy Artists of America, a confederation of buddies who marketed together and gradually became an imprimatur of quality that meant a major uptick in artists' income. This interaction is occasionally challenged -- the motivation for, let's say, "accommodation" becomes a little too strong.
The granddaddy museum of them all, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, sometimes called “the Smithsonian of the West,” is in Cody, Wyoming, where it originally formed out of Buffalo Bill memorabilia, mostly guns, and the patronage of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, from the same family that created the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I hope I am making the point that the aggregation and curation of Western art, artifacts and memorabilia is an international network. (Alberta alone has some remarkable museums, including the Glenbow in Calgary, the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton, Head-Smashed-In in Fort Macleod, and the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller.)
Truly qualified directors and curators are hard to find. Individuals shuttle around among institutions, sometimes museums, sometimes publishers, and sometimes academia. Even artists and gallery owners become players. This is not different from other categories of art or natural history museums.
Recently, as the interest of humanitarian millionaires (I mean Billionaires, since millions are small change now) has shifted to international issues (AIDS, starvation, disaster relief) and the big spectacular art museums have been built overseas in Europe or oil country, Western art has changed. Things are leaner. The most nimble of the curator/aggregators have had to mix and match. Take the example of B. Byron Price who is the director of the University of Oklahoma Press (where the editor-in-chief is Charles Rankin who was once the editor of Montana, the Magazine of Western History with its heavy CMR emphasis), also writes books published by the press and/or sponsored by the CM Russell Museum, and is the director of the CMR Center for the Study of Western Art, where staff from the CMR Museum in Great Falls occasionally lecture. Price’s good friend, who previously ran a commercial art gallery, now is the director of the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls.
The Ad Club, which sees itself as local, has decided to change its focus to something else, letting go of the regional network of Western artists who supplied infrastructure for the auction by renting motel rooms and converting them into mini-galleries. The artists are organizing among themselves to maintain this part of the event, but the lucrative auction has moved to the C.M. Russell Museum itself where the director will take on the challenge.
More about this in the future, since my past and, in particular, the career of Bob Scriver is deeply woven into all these institutions even as his estate sits uncurated at the Montana Historical Society.
Let’s go back to aggregation. Small towns have often been the locus of personal collections of oddities, like arrowheads or albino animals or pioneer implements. Sometimes the things are there just because they are odd (we never lose our fascination with two-headed calves) and sometimes because they are nostalgic and occasionally because the owner simply had a lot of money, and used it to create an aggregation. They aren’t always in accessible places so after the original collectors, who housed them in a basement or garage or -- in the case of one small town in Saskatchewan -- an abandoned movie house, everything is simply dispersed or maybe there’s an effort to raise money through charging admission.
One of my favorite remnants of history now supported as a museum is in North Dakota. Medora was founded in 1883 by French nobleman Marquis de Mores who named the city after his wife Medora von Hoffman. Originally simply the graceful and elegantly appointed ranch house of the Marquis and his wife, who were driven out by meat-packing competitors, it’s something like the Conrad mansion in Kalispell which was emptied by changing times but left intact with furniture. The rather remote ranch home of Alberta Bair is in the category. Such places are heavily curated: the point is preservation rather than aggregation. The Lewis & Clark Interpretive Center is based on the curation of a place, how Lewis & Clark made the change from boats on the Missouri to horses as they continued their journey across the continent. A certain amount of aggregation of authentic equipment or art works are included as well as a point of scholarship, which is a form of curation, explanatory exhibits and talks by guides as well as small events that help people with hands-on experience of one thing or another, like faux parfleches made from brown wrapping paper.
The CM Russell Museum in the same town also organizes such events, especially for kids, who need more than tours to hold their interest. The point of the CMR Museum is aggregation of all things Charlie Russell. By association other artists have been included, though none as the primary focus. The original “seed” for the museum was Charlie’s good librarian friend, Josephine Trigg, who saved small things like letters or the clever little place markers from parties. Charlie’s original house and log cabin studio were there. Someone saw the potential for development and in the last fifty years the place has mushroomed into a major installation. Such a place offers a range of jobs from janitors and security guards to receptionists (originally volunteers), aficionado groups, and a small gift shop.
At the top is the director, who is presumably both an administrator and a curator -- that is, can manage organizational issues like building maintenance and the dynamics of a board of directors, but also is enough of an art expert to mount exhibits worth scholarly attention and to interact with other experts. Nowadays fund-raising is even more important than in the past. Beyond that, the CM Russell Museum has influence clear into Oklahoma where the residue of Nancy Russell’s estate now endows the CMR Center for the Study of Western Art at the University of Oklahoma. The University of Oklahoma Press (along with the University of Nebraska Press) is a major vendor of books about Western subjects.
The Great Falls CMR Museum had the good fortune to attract the attention of the GF Advertising Club, a dynamic group who sponsored an annual art auction on Russell’s birthday. This money-maker, soon imitated by the sincere flattery of other entities, not only attracted a cluster of side-kick auctions all over town, but attracted the interest of people working in the American Southwest on the crosshairs of cowboys and Indians. One example there, the Cowboy Hall of Fame, now called the National Cowboy & Western Heritage Museum, was a major player in the development of Western art because of an alliance with the Cowboy Artists of America, a confederation of buddies who marketed together and gradually became an imprimatur of quality that meant a major uptick in artists' income. This interaction is occasionally challenged -- the motivation for, let's say, "accommodation" becomes a little too strong.
The granddaddy museum of them all, the Buffalo Bill Historical Center, sometimes called “the Smithsonian of the West,” is in Cody, Wyoming, where it originally formed out of Buffalo Bill memorabilia, mostly guns, and the patronage of Cornelius Vanderbilt Whitney, from the same family that created the Whitney Museum of Modern Art in New York City. I hope I am making the point that the aggregation and curation of Western art, artifacts and memorabilia is an international network. (Alberta alone has some remarkable museums, including the Glenbow in Calgary, the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton, Head-Smashed-In in Fort Macleod, and the Tyrrell Museum in Drumheller.)
Truly qualified directors and curators are hard to find. Individuals shuttle around among institutions, sometimes museums, sometimes publishers, and sometimes academia. Even artists and gallery owners become players. This is not different from other categories of art or natural history museums.
Recently, as the interest of humanitarian millionaires (I mean Billionaires, since millions are small change now) has shifted to international issues (AIDS, starvation, disaster relief) and the big spectacular art museums have been built overseas in Europe or oil country, Western art has changed. Things are leaner. The most nimble of the curator/aggregators have had to mix and match. Take the example of B. Byron Price who is the director of the University of Oklahoma Press (where the editor-in-chief is Charles Rankin who was once the editor of Montana, the Magazine of Western History with its heavy CMR emphasis), also writes books published by the press and/or sponsored by the CM Russell Museum, and is the director of the CMR Center for the Study of Western Art, where staff from the CMR Museum in Great Falls occasionally lecture. Price’s good friend, who previously ran a commercial art gallery, now is the director of the CM Russell Museum in Great Falls.
The Ad Club, which sees itself as local, has decided to change its focus to something else, letting go of the regional network of Western artists who supplied infrastructure for the auction by renting motel rooms and converting them into mini-galleries. The artists are organizing among themselves to maintain this part of the event, but the lucrative auction has moved to the C.M. Russell Museum itself where the director will take on the challenge.
More about this in the future, since my past and, in particular, the career of Bob Scriver is deeply woven into all these institutions even as his estate sits uncurated at the Montana Historical Society.
Wednesday, November 17, 2010
THE BLOOMSBURY REVIEW
“The Bloomsbury Review”, a newsprint book review publication that I first picked up at the better bookstores in Portland in the Nineties, still survives and deserves to be celebrated as such, since so many of this category have died, groaning. Quarterly, its headquarters are in Denver, truly Western, unlike the faux-Western Lost Angeles that is only flipped Coastal. But it is not merely Regional. Rather it seems to gravitate to what some self-identify as “brown:” neither African-American nor European. Asian (including India), Arabic, Hispanic/Latino (you choose -- I get confused), American Indian, and many creoles (mixed). Bloomsbury was reviewing more American Indian writers earlier than anyone else. There is also a tilt towards academic, though not so much of the French political theory.
I suppose you could just say “ethnic” writing and yet there is another component, like the group of reviews in this issue about the Great American Experiment: “Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations About Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Milbrook and the Sixties” over against “Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstacy.” Gary Bravo edits the first book and Mark Christensen takes on the West Coast. A third book, “Beat Memories: the Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” is edited by Sarah Greenough. Together they describe a kind of visionary nation within the nation that has persisted for fifty years. A surprising number of the participants do indeed remember what happened and were changed by it.
The list of advertisers’ websites reveals the eclectic nature of this publication which, naturally, arises in part from a long-standing friendship networks and partly from their interests and value systems. In fact, some time a little later I’m going to google each of these entities. One is “Windbreak House,” Linda Hasselstrom’s re-purposing of her ranch as a writer’s retreat for women. Feminism is another part of the complex. Another advertiser is “The Tattered Cover,” a major physical book store. Across the page is an ad for “The Gathering of the Forces of Light” from a proprietary website: it’s about space visitors. (Denver is not QUITE as spacey as the rest of Colorado.) Another (full page back) is for “Stones into Schools” by Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea,” about founding girls’ schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan even as we bomb hell out of their families. Education and art are usually represented among the categories. Peace is on the agenda.
In religious terms, there are two kinds of congregations: those that are based on the “parish” wherein the congregation is just “everyone around here,” and is most possible when there is a consensus culture. In terms of publishing, one could call it regional. But the other kind is “gathered,” that is, based on affinity, a commonality of ideas. Ironically, some Unitarian congregations are based on their aversion to traditional consensus-based religion. What draws them together is their experience of not fitting in the usual ways. In the past, an affinity-based group could only happen in a place like a city where there were enough of them to gather together.
But there have always been affinity-based groups with roots in publications, whether those were newspapers from the countries left behind, or specialty magazines, or books. Part of the intense love of loners for print books has not come out of immersive fantasies, but rather a passionate need to pursue dialogue with others who have the same interests. Might be science; might be poetry.
My old friend renewed has not so recently been part of the immediate living dialogue of academic listservs such as those listed on H-Humanities. It is a great treat to pull back the curtains and reveal, tah-dah! -- the immediacy of Internet affinity groups. We’re not quite to the point of posting essays that are then morphed by feedback right before your very eyes, but we’re way past journals that only come out periodically.
Clay Shirky always has a little story to tell. Recently he’s been telling about a math problem that famously resisted solving -- the kind of thing depicted in movies by rows and rows of equations marching across a blackboard. A man thinks he has come close to solving this problem. (Shirky names him -- I’m sure you can find the YouTube vid.) He posts his solution online. Immediately other mathematicians began to critique it (which is welcome in that world) and soon have isolated a half-dozen problematic points in the work. More math-heads are attracted and some of them are able to resolve these or to look at things a new way. Finally even people less specialized are trying to grasp and improve this formula. In about two weeks there is a solid, nearly irrefutable version of it available to anyone interested. It would have taken years without the Internet.
What strikes Shirky is that about halfway through all this, the mathematicians and more peripheral people begin to ask each other, “Wait! Are we ALLOWED to do this?” They were used to journals whose experts policed ideas. “Peer review” they call it and it takes months and months, besides being riddled with political problems. But when the math folks looked around as they emailed back and forth, there was no editor or university president with the power to shut down this free exchange of ideas, to be gate-keepers. They had arrived at the Sixties and Seventies simply by affinity. The clunky mechanisms are falling away. Too bad for the people who made their livings from journals.
“The Bloomsbury Review” was started by a cohort of friends who shared values and loved books. It has survived because it has held true to its values even despite the loss by death of dear leaders and founders. Like congregations and opera subscribers, affinity groups are vulnerable to aging and unless they find new people to join them, they will simply dwindle and disappear. Because this particular cohort has been open to “edge” groups, they have an advantage, and because they have some academic roots, they are smart enough to brainstorm their way forward. So far they’re a little Luddite -- still printed on paper -- but at least they’re still printed in the USA.
Subscriptions: $20 a year. Send the check to “The Bloomsbury Review” or Owaissa Communications Company, Inc, 1553 Platte St., Suite 206, Denver, CO 80202. You could call them up at (303) 455-3123. I suppose you could hand-carry your check over there. They exist.
I suppose you could just say “ethnic” writing and yet there is another component, like the group of reviews in this issue about the Great American Experiment: “Birth of a Psychedelic Culture: Conversations About Leary, the Harvard Experiments, Milbrook and the Sixties” over against “Acid Christ: Ken Kesey, LSD, and the Politics of Ecstacy.” Gary Bravo edits the first book and Mark Christensen takes on the West Coast. A third book, “Beat Memories: the Photographs of Allen Ginsberg” is edited by Sarah Greenough. Together they describe a kind of visionary nation within the nation that has persisted for fifty years. A surprising number of the participants do indeed remember what happened and were changed by it.
The list of advertisers’ websites reveals the eclectic nature of this publication which, naturally, arises in part from a long-standing friendship networks and partly from their interests and value systems. In fact, some time a little later I’m going to google each of these entities. One is “Windbreak House,” Linda Hasselstrom’s re-purposing of her ranch as a writer’s retreat for women. Feminism is another part of the complex. Another advertiser is “The Tattered Cover,” a major physical book store. Across the page is an ad for “The Gathering of the Forces of Light” from a proprietary website: it’s about space visitors. (Denver is not QUITE as spacey as the rest of Colorado.) Another (full page back) is for “Stones into Schools” by Greg Mortenson, author of “Three Cups of Tea,” about founding girls’ schools in Afghanistan and Pakistan even as we bomb hell out of their families. Education and art are usually represented among the categories. Peace is on the agenda.
In religious terms, there are two kinds of congregations: those that are based on the “parish” wherein the congregation is just “everyone around here,” and is most possible when there is a consensus culture. In terms of publishing, one could call it regional. But the other kind is “gathered,” that is, based on affinity, a commonality of ideas. Ironically, some Unitarian congregations are based on their aversion to traditional consensus-based religion. What draws them together is their experience of not fitting in the usual ways. In the past, an affinity-based group could only happen in a place like a city where there were enough of them to gather together.
But there have always been affinity-based groups with roots in publications, whether those were newspapers from the countries left behind, or specialty magazines, or books. Part of the intense love of loners for print books has not come out of immersive fantasies, but rather a passionate need to pursue dialogue with others who have the same interests. Might be science; might be poetry.
My old friend renewed has not so recently been part of the immediate living dialogue of academic listservs such as those listed on H-Humanities. It is a great treat to pull back the curtains and reveal, tah-dah! -- the immediacy of Internet affinity groups. We’re not quite to the point of posting essays that are then morphed by feedback right before your very eyes, but we’re way past journals that only come out periodically.
Clay Shirky always has a little story to tell. Recently he’s been telling about a math problem that famously resisted solving -- the kind of thing depicted in movies by rows and rows of equations marching across a blackboard. A man thinks he has come close to solving this problem. (Shirky names him -- I’m sure you can find the YouTube vid.) He posts his solution online. Immediately other mathematicians began to critique it (which is welcome in that world) and soon have isolated a half-dozen problematic points in the work. More math-heads are attracted and some of them are able to resolve these or to look at things a new way. Finally even people less specialized are trying to grasp and improve this formula. In about two weeks there is a solid, nearly irrefutable version of it available to anyone interested. It would have taken years without the Internet.
What strikes Shirky is that about halfway through all this, the mathematicians and more peripheral people begin to ask each other, “Wait! Are we ALLOWED to do this?” They were used to journals whose experts policed ideas. “Peer review” they call it and it takes months and months, besides being riddled with political problems. But when the math folks looked around as they emailed back and forth, there was no editor or university president with the power to shut down this free exchange of ideas, to be gate-keepers. They had arrived at the Sixties and Seventies simply by affinity. The clunky mechanisms are falling away. Too bad for the people who made their livings from journals.
“The Bloomsbury Review” was started by a cohort of friends who shared values and loved books. It has survived because it has held true to its values even despite the loss by death of dear leaders and founders. Like congregations and opera subscribers, affinity groups are vulnerable to aging and unless they find new people to join them, they will simply dwindle and disappear. Because this particular cohort has been open to “edge” groups, they have an advantage, and because they have some academic roots, they are smart enough to brainstorm their way forward. So far they’re a little Luddite -- still printed on paper -- but at least they’re still printed in the USA.
Subscriptions: $20 a year. Send the check to “The Bloomsbury Review” or Owaissa Communications Company, Inc, 1553 Platte St., Suite 206, Denver, CO 80202. You could call them up at (303) 455-3123. I suppose you could hand-carry your check over there. They exist.
Tuesday, November 16, 2010
SWEET ACHING: Internet Friendships in Old Age
There are not a lot of years left, but quite enough to share what we’ve learned looking back at our long winding roads. Plus a lot of funny stories about our blunders, some of them near-fatal long ago, so we feel as though we've got "free" years ever since. I’ve never met some of these correspondents and probably never will. Like Jake Allsop in East Anglia, fen country, (http://oldscroteshome.blogspot.com/) or Steve Bodio and his wife Libby, falconers and gazehound fanciers (http://stephenbodio.blogspot.com/) in the American Southwest. Dave Lull, the cross-pollinating librarian, sent me Jake’s name when I complained that too many bloggers were barely old enough to vote and never thought about anything grownup. Steve showed up when I posted something about condors. Dave himself has been a major help in many ways. He’s a powerhouse of info and networking and can get me through the walls that sequester online information I need. He was especially helpful in subduing Diabetes II by sending me blogs written by people who KNEW. Jim Stebbings was an environmental email friend who came to visit, bringing chives and sassafras and buying me dinner out. I talk about Tim Barrus, my co-writer, quite a lot. He has made me the kick-ass writer I’m still not through becoming. But he’s only sixty.
A little older than me is a re-found friend, Karen Scott. Actually a re-re-found friend. She grew up in my neighborhood, a little older than me, and may have been a student librarian at my local Vernon branch where I hung out all the time. We both had red hair, I think. I didn’t really know her then, but we had all the same teachers and the same neighborhood doctor. We both had a bit of a crush on the doctor’s nurse’s son, Leonard McCracken. Red-headed. Decades later Karen turned up in Saskatoon when I was the minister for the Unitarians there twenty years ago. Then I left. Not long ago, in a psychic surge, I thought of her and called her to get her email. Widowed last July, she’s not in the best of health. She’s been putting her former husband’s death away with all the paperwork that means and also sorting things out in case of her own death, because it’s best to do that before you are distracted by dying. (What a distraction!)
So, partly to keep her company, I’ve been doing that, too. My three-ring binder mania means that I’ve set one up with a hot pink spine: “In Case of My Death.” I’m putting in my computer passwords, and where my bank accounts are, and who should get what and what things are worth. Not that there’s much of great value, but I remember how when my mother died we thought the bisque hen that came on the Oregon Trail in a barrel of cornmeal was terrifically valuable -- but it wasn’t. And the complete set of Rosebud Chintz china didn’t seem valuable -- but was. The people who dispersed Bob Scriver’s estate had very little understanding of what was important and what was not -- even in terms of dollars. Bob’s mom had a friend she always referred to as “Lorraine -- bless her heart!” so that’s what we called her: “Lorraineblessherheart.” Long before she was at death’s door, she put stickers on everything to indicate who should inherit it. For years she entertained herself by ripping off the stickers of the people she was angry with and awarding things to people who pleased her. No one ever knew, of course, and in the end her sister came with a U-Haul and took everything. The sister she hated.
All these preps and prompts of mine might be scaring people when I ask them their preferences. But it seems congruent with the weather -- the first real snow predicted. A single-digit high. Extreme wind. The new-old, new-new, and old-new friends now in their silver years are kind of wild bunch, because when you get to a certain age you can afford to risk. You can ask anything, speak the truth and pretend you’re an oracle. No longer might you get pregnant. I can’t be fired anymore, I own the house, and so far the government has not removed my social safety net. My only real worry is the recklessness of the Valier town council.
What makes me gloating and gleeful is the time -- oh, the lovely time -- I have now! Clear around the clock! No deadline, no rendezvous, no schedule except the relentless cats. They are restless tonight -- the mice may be moving indoors, though I doubt there are many mice left in this cat-crowded town. 450 people (I looked it up), 232 males, 220 females, median age 42.7. No official cat census. My senior friends send me occasional photos of their cats. There seems to be a major preference for tuxedo cats. They don’t do extraordinary things like playing the piano. They're not Clay Shirky lol cats.
Clyde and Suzanne McConnell are in Calgary and were also online enviro friends until they stopped through on the way south. Clyde was invaluable with “Bronze Inside and Out,” able to upgrade my grainy old snapshots so they could be included. He is a professor of art and photography at the University of Calgary, but it is Sue who sends photos and sometimes sketches. Pamela Banting is also a good enviro friend on the faculty there, but she’s just a young ‘un. Long ago our grandmothers pioneered in adjacent valleys far to the north in Manitoba, but didn’t know each other. A poet has gone silent now that her invalid husband has died. Martin Murie and his wife moved from their mountain cabin to be closer to health care and now don’t answer. When the social fabric is torn or worn, the threads of conversation unravel.
Most of the legends about Internet friendships emphasize the danger and how mustache-twirling ax-murderers are looking back at you through the computer screen while you undress, psyching out your passwords so they can raid your bank accounts. But I’m finding laughter, tips about beloved books or how to do things, consolation and remembrances. People slip away with no final notice, no place to send a card. When I miss them, my question to myself is always “would you rather not have loved?” (An old counseling question. Human question.) This sweet ache is at the heart of being human. Better a bruise than only ice or, worst of all, nothingness. I imagine holding their hands for a moment. Then I trot down to the post office for used books and Netflix.
A little older than me is a re-found friend, Karen Scott. Actually a re-re-found friend. She grew up in my neighborhood, a little older than me, and may have been a student librarian at my local Vernon branch where I hung out all the time. We both had red hair, I think. I didn’t really know her then, but we had all the same teachers and the same neighborhood doctor. We both had a bit of a crush on the doctor’s nurse’s son, Leonard McCracken. Red-headed. Decades later Karen turned up in Saskatoon when I was the minister for the Unitarians there twenty years ago. Then I left. Not long ago, in a psychic surge, I thought of her and called her to get her email. Widowed last July, she’s not in the best of health. She’s been putting her former husband’s death away with all the paperwork that means and also sorting things out in case of her own death, because it’s best to do that before you are distracted by dying. (What a distraction!)
So, partly to keep her company, I’ve been doing that, too. My three-ring binder mania means that I’ve set one up with a hot pink spine: “In Case of My Death.” I’m putting in my computer passwords, and where my bank accounts are, and who should get what and what things are worth. Not that there’s much of great value, but I remember how when my mother died we thought the bisque hen that came on the Oregon Trail in a barrel of cornmeal was terrifically valuable -- but it wasn’t. And the complete set of Rosebud Chintz china didn’t seem valuable -- but was. The people who dispersed Bob Scriver’s estate had very little understanding of what was important and what was not -- even in terms of dollars. Bob’s mom had a friend she always referred to as “Lorraine -- bless her heart!” so that’s what we called her: “Lorraineblessherheart.” Long before she was at death’s door, she put stickers on everything to indicate who should inherit it. For years she entertained herself by ripping off the stickers of the people she was angry with and awarding things to people who pleased her. No one ever knew, of course, and in the end her sister came with a U-Haul and took everything. The sister she hated.
All these preps and prompts of mine might be scaring people when I ask them their preferences. But it seems congruent with the weather -- the first real snow predicted. A single-digit high. Extreme wind. The new-old, new-new, and old-new friends now in their silver years are kind of wild bunch, because when you get to a certain age you can afford to risk. You can ask anything, speak the truth and pretend you’re an oracle. No longer might you get pregnant. I can’t be fired anymore, I own the house, and so far the government has not removed my social safety net. My only real worry is the recklessness of the Valier town council.
What makes me gloating and gleeful is the time -- oh, the lovely time -- I have now! Clear around the clock! No deadline, no rendezvous, no schedule except the relentless cats. They are restless tonight -- the mice may be moving indoors, though I doubt there are many mice left in this cat-crowded town. 450 people (I looked it up), 232 males, 220 females, median age 42.7. No official cat census. My senior friends send me occasional photos of their cats. There seems to be a major preference for tuxedo cats. They don’t do extraordinary things like playing the piano. They're not Clay Shirky lol cats.
Clyde and Suzanne McConnell are in Calgary and were also online enviro friends until they stopped through on the way south. Clyde was invaluable with “Bronze Inside and Out,” able to upgrade my grainy old snapshots so they could be included. He is a professor of art and photography at the University of Calgary, but it is Sue who sends photos and sometimes sketches. Pamela Banting is also a good enviro friend on the faculty there, but she’s just a young ‘un. Long ago our grandmothers pioneered in adjacent valleys far to the north in Manitoba, but didn’t know each other. A poet has gone silent now that her invalid husband has died. Martin Murie and his wife moved from their mountain cabin to be closer to health care and now don’t answer. When the social fabric is torn or worn, the threads of conversation unravel.
Most of the legends about Internet friendships emphasize the danger and how mustache-twirling ax-murderers are looking back at you through the computer screen while you undress, psyching out your passwords so they can raid your bank accounts. But I’m finding laughter, tips about beloved books or how to do things, consolation and remembrances. People slip away with no final notice, no place to send a card. When I miss them, my question to myself is always “would you rather not have loved?” (An old counseling question. Human question.) This sweet ache is at the heart of being human. Better a bruise than only ice or, worst of all, nothingness. I imagine holding their hands for a moment. Then I trot down to the post office for used books and Netflix.
Monday, November 15, 2010
EDUCATION AS SEDUCTION
When I was in high school (Jeff ‘57) it was just assumed that I would be a high school English teacher. It’s what girls did. (No one thought I would ever marry.) I managed to put some kinks in the plan: my teaching focus was dramatics and I taught on the Blackfeet Reservation in Montana in short bursts. 1961-66, 1970-73, 1988-91. This excludes my student teaching in Evanston, IL and three months in Cut Bank, a white town at the edge of the reservation. When I reflect on whether I was a “good” teacher or not, the answer always depends upon where and when I was. That is, in the right circumstances I was pretty good but in the wrong circumstances, I was dreadful.
The key difference seemed to be the students. I’m sure that my present bond with Tim Barrus comes in part because he is the age of my first batch of students, who were equally remarkable, “Boomers” born into a unique time. Some of those early Sixties students committed suicide, some became drunks. some died of misadventure -- car accidents, violence, prison. Some became teachers and school superintendents against all odds. (They’re retiring now.) The school was rough, keeping order mostly by excluding students who were trouble -- if they didn’t get a clue and leave. Cops got shot in the gut or dragged to death. A few of the kids, both in school and on the street, were natural poets.
In the Seventies it was the teachers who were in trouble. The students were trying to take charge, to force the adults to behave. The smart adults were reading Kozol and A.S. Neill and the Third Force psychologists. They formed Free Schools.
In 1988-91 I was in Heart Butte, a new high school in a remote place where drop-outs could get a new start. Ten years later Cut Bank, a white town, was a total mismatch for me except for one class of boys who were determined to evade any kind of control except on the athletic field. We got along fine because I didn’t try to control them. The problem was the other classes whose idea of school was from the Fifties, an idea they got from Spielburg/Lucas movies and sit coms. All surface, no content.
Someone asked me once what teaching was like and was startled when I said it was like sex. What I was trying to express was the intimacy of shared ideas. When a classroom achieves that state, it’s flying, it’s a “high,” it’s transformative. No way it can ever be achieved by tabs-and-slots prescriptive curriculums or lesson plans. It won’t show up on national exams. Brain-to-brain contact is far more powerful than genital entanglement. Tim understands this. The American public does not. The American Public seems to be afraid of all kinds of intimacy. They do not trust any high that isn’t either adrenaline or a drug. (They don’t understand sex either. They think it’s about satin sheets and champagne.)
Robert Sapolsky (who is not afraid of anything except maybe barbers) has a fascinating article in today’s NY Times. It’s about how our brains confuse the metaphorical with the actual. “What are we to make of the brain processing literal and metaphorical versions of a concept in the same brain region? Or that our neural circuitry doesn’t cleanly differentiate between the real and the symbolic? What are the consequences of the fact that evolution is a tinkerer and not an inventor, and has duct-taped metaphors and symbols to whichever pre-existing brain areas provided the closest fit?”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/this-is-your-brain-on-metaphors/?emc=eta1
The schools seem to think there has to be a choice made between the metaphorical and the actual. One consequence has been the ignorant discrediting and belittling of abstract concepts, even as -- at the other extreme -- grad school whiz kids leave reality altogether and try to live in abstract theories. Few do what Sapolsky is talking about: find the concepts that will make our real world a better place. Even thinking about what “better” means or what education “is” has become a victim of the same confusion. “Better” means more money; “education” means a piece of paper that will get you a better job. The motivation is not the sheer pleasure of learning but rather lifelong fear of poverty. Sapolsky suggests, “We study hard to get admitted to a top college to get a good job to get into the nursing home of our choice. Gophers don’t do that.” Gophers don’t go to school. At least not on purpose.
The principal at Heart Butte (not this one -- one twenty years ago) said, “You’ve got to MAKE them learn. FORCE them to learn.” I said, “You think education is rape. I think it’s seduction.” He said, “That’s right. RAPE them!” He was a deeply ignorant man. I didn’t quit -- I was fired. If he reads this, he’ll believe he was right. If I think that “thinking” is like sex, I must be a dirty old woman. I might do something that would get the school sued. Deep down he did not believe Indians should go to college anyway -- they had to be taught obedience so they would make good janitors and cooks. They were people who were destined to get their hands dirty, unlike himself.
The ranchers and farmers around here dirtied their hands and broke their backs so they could send their children to good colleges, in hopes their children would eventually put them into good nursing homes with no gophers. They hate gophers.
“High” and privileged thought has been a phenomenon of the cities where the population is dense enough to support the specialization necessary for learning some things. Good universities gather together people interacting passionately. Now the Internet -- which came onto the dining tables of the ranchers so they could follow the futures market and know when to sell -- has become a way for rural youngsters to participate in university-level thought. On the reservation at least a few of the community college students who are now learning spreadsheets and databases will be seduced by ideas.
Education and sex are best learned in a mix of the actual hands-on reality and the curiosity, dexterity, and experimentalism of ideas. I was tickled that Sapolsky had to look up “haptic,” one of my favorite words -- it means related to hands. In this place one needs to know the land by picking it up in handfuls, smelling it, tasting it. But also it’s crucial to think about DNA, satellite-imagery, and how to use the GPS on the combine as well as how to repair the combine. It’s not about just drilling the earth with seed. It’s about fitting oneself to the planet, awareness, and -- maybe most of all -- love. Not Hallmark love -- dirty, self-sacrificing, often painful, love. The way Tim teaches.
The key difference seemed to be the students. I’m sure that my present bond with Tim Barrus comes in part because he is the age of my first batch of students, who were equally remarkable, “Boomers” born into a unique time. Some of those early Sixties students committed suicide, some became drunks. some died of misadventure -- car accidents, violence, prison. Some became teachers and school superintendents against all odds. (They’re retiring now.) The school was rough, keeping order mostly by excluding students who were trouble -- if they didn’t get a clue and leave. Cops got shot in the gut or dragged to death. A few of the kids, both in school and on the street, were natural poets.
In the Seventies it was the teachers who were in trouble. The students were trying to take charge, to force the adults to behave. The smart adults were reading Kozol and A.S. Neill and the Third Force psychologists. They formed Free Schools.
In 1988-91 I was in Heart Butte, a new high school in a remote place where drop-outs could get a new start. Ten years later Cut Bank, a white town, was a total mismatch for me except for one class of boys who were determined to evade any kind of control except on the athletic field. We got along fine because I didn’t try to control them. The problem was the other classes whose idea of school was from the Fifties, an idea they got from Spielburg/Lucas movies and sit coms. All surface, no content.
Someone asked me once what teaching was like and was startled when I said it was like sex. What I was trying to express was the intimacy of shared ideas. When a classroom achieves that state, it’s flying, it’s a “high,” it’s transformative. No way it can ever be achieved by tabs-and-slots prescriptive curriculums or lesson plans. It won’t show up on national exams. Brain-to-brain contact is far more powerful than genital entanglement. Tim understands this. The American public does not. The American Public seems to be afraid of all kinds of intimacy. They do not trust any high that isn’t either adrenaline or a drug. (They don’t understand sex either. They think it’s about satin sheets and champagne.)
Robert Sapolsky (who is not afraid of anything except maybe barbers) has a fascinating article in today’s NY Times. It’s about how our brains confuse the metaphorical with the actual. “What are we to make of the brain processing literal and metaphorical versions of a concept in the same brain region? Or that our neural circuitry doesn’t cleanly differentiate between the real and the symbolic? What are the consequences of the fact that evolution is a tinkerer and not an inventor, and has duct-taped metaphors and symbols to whichever pre-existing brain areas provided the closest fit?”
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/14/this-is-your-brain-on-metaphors/?emc=eta1
The schools seem to think there has to be a choice made between the metaphorical and the actual. One consequence has been the ignorant discrediting and belittling of abstract concepts, even as -- at the other extreme -- grad school whiz kids leave reality altogether and try to live in abstract theories. Few do what Sapolsky is talking about: find the concepts that will make our real world a better place. Even thinking about what “better” means or what education “is” has become a victim of the same confusion. “Better” means more money; “education” means a piece of paper that will get you a better job. The motivation is not the sheer pleasure of learning but rather lifelong fear of poverty. Sapolsky suggests, “We study hard to get admitted to a top college to get a good job to get into the nursing home of our choice. Gophers don’t do that.” Gophers don’t go to school. At least not on purpose.
The principal at Heart Butte (not this one -- one twenty years ago) said, “You’ve got to MAKE them learn. FORCE them to learn.” I said, “You think education is rape. I think it’s seduction.” He said, “That’s right. RAPE them!” He was a deeply ignorant man. I didn’t quit -- I was fired. If he reads this, he’ll believe he was right. If I think that “thinking” is like sex, I must be a dirty old woman. I might do something that would get the school sued. Deep down he did not believe Indians should go to college anyway -- they had to be taught obedience so they would make good janitors and cooks. They were people who were destined to get their hands dirty, unlike himself.
The ranchers and farmers around here dirtied their hands and broke their backs so they could send their children to good colleges, in hopes their children would eventually put them into good nursing homes with no gophers. They hate gophers.
“High” and privileged thought has been a phenomenon of the cities where the population is dense enough to support the specialization necessary for learning some things. Good universities gather together people interacting passionately. Now the Internet -- which came onto the dining tables of the ranchers so they could follow the futures market and know when to sell -- has become a way for rural youngsters to participate in university-level thought. On the reservation at least a few of the community college students who are now learning spreadsheets and databases will be seduced by ideas.
Education and sex are best learned in a mix of the actual hands-on reality and the curiosity, dexterity, and experimentalism of ideas. I was tickled that Sapolsky had to look up “haptic,” one of my favorite words -- it means related to hands. In this place one needs to know the land by picking it up in handfuls, smelling it, tasting it. But also it’s crucial to think about DNA, satellite-imagery, and how to use the GPS on the combine as well as how to repair the combine. It’s not about just drilling the earth with seed. It’s about fitting oneself to the planet, awareness, and -- maybe most of all -- love. Not Hallmark love -- dirty, self-sacrificing, often painful, love. The way Tim teaches.
Sunday, November 14, 2010
WHO IS THIS JESUS?
Biblical Archeology Review is a popular magazine (on newsstands) that so impressed my seminary classmate Annie that she wanted to buy subscriptions for everyone. I never did subscribe to Biblical Archeology Review, though I enjoy reading it. But I subscribe to a daily aggregator of articles called “Art Daily” which defines art rather broadly, often listing rather peripheral materials. They supply a photo, a first paragraph or so, and then a link to the actual online article. Today they linked to an article about the academic study of Jesus. Here’s the link:
http://www.bib-arch.org/bar/article.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=36&Issue=6&ArticleID=4
Someone was so threatened by it that they hacked the link so it sends the inquirer to a website about wine. Since liberals (however much they are fond of wine) would support the scientific study of Jesus, I presume that the hacker was from the religious right wing and is committed to the idea that one must not question any theological assumptions. That’s fine, but they’re in the wrong pew. This article is at a kind of meta-level, talking about how the various disciplines that research the period of Jesus differ, and what entering the same subject in different ways can reveal.
The various disciplines include history (the record of events in writing), literary (the style and use of the writing), archeology (the study of the places and buildings by looking at their traces), and theology (the doctrines that have been handed down in institutions as matters of faith). The study of Biblical materials (perhaps including writing from the same period that didn’t get included in the canon we read today) is focused on the content rather than which discipline, but has in the last decades become increasingly literary, for instance, analyzing the four gospels as different genres of writing. This is partly a shift in the analysis of subtext, partly a growing understanding of ancient languages (maybe with the help of computers), and partly the expansion of scientific capacities like analysis of the actual paper and ink of the original documents.
This hacked-link article, entitled “Jesus of History vs. Jesus of Tradition” is an interview with Sean Freyne, “director of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies, as well as emeritus professor of theology, at Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on the integration of literary and archaeological sources for understanding the social and religious world of Galilee in Hellenistic and Roman times.” Basically, he thinks that the figure of Jesus arises from the paradigm shift caused when the more ancient context of Jewish culture is challenged by an increasing influence from Hellenistic Rome. There are plenty of people who would go farther and say that a mythic Jesus draws on a host of messianic savior figures whose names begin with J, including John the Baptist and Joshua, and that elements are well-mixed with what we call “Greek mythology.” An editor of the magazine, Herschel Shanks, is asking the questions.
You are an expert in historical Jesus studies. I have always wondered about that name. Are there nonhistorical Jesus studies, or unhistorical Jesus studies?
[Laughing] That’s a good question. Some people confuse the notion of the historical Jesus with the notion of the actual or the real Jesus. I think the historical Jesus is a construct, a theological construct, really. It’s the figure of Jesus as he is represented in the documents of Christian faith as a historical person.
I thought it was just the opposite, that the historical Jesus was opposed to the theological Jesus.
What we’re trying to do, I think, in this quest for the historical Jesus is to find the figure who stands behind the gospel narratives as a historical figure. If we look at the Gospels, all we have, in the case of the Synoptics [Matthew, Mark and Luke], is one year of his public ministry. If we include John, we make it three years. It’s a bird’s-eye view of this figure who walked the roads of Galilee. We have no record whatever of Jesus’ early life. We have the infancy gospel stories, which of course are highly theological and highly literary, made up later. So we really can’t build anything historical on those narratives.
So this scholar is trying to find the actual historical Jesus who may very well exist, but can’t be proven by theological materials. The Christian theologians who interpret these materials are afraid and opposed to this search for a real person, because they think it will take away the “magic.” They believe that familiarity breeds contempt.
By now those who read what I write know that I often sneak around to a radical shift. Here it is: modern journalists (and many voters) have developed a kind of Satanic assumption, that all politicians are corrupt and should be revealed. It’s the opposite of the theological assumption that Jesus was a divine or near-divine man and should be left unknown in any other way, because disillusionment will mean broken faith. These guys think they SHOULD break all faiths. This new “take” is that the journalist should be a Judas, who reveals to all the mere humanity of people who sleep around, take bribes, hire illegal immigrants and neglect their children. And there is a particular animus towards fathers, old guys with power, as well as a kind of pride in aspiring to iconoclasm and disillusionment. They are "wised up," in a sophomoric way.
There are two other ideas that Sean Freyne proposes. One is that in the time of Jesus the group was more important than the individual. Jesus did embody (incarnate) something, but he did it on behalf of the whole group, the inclusive society. The other is that Freyne resists the idea that there was a clash between Jewish culture and Hellenistic culture, resulting in crucifixion. He proposes that the Jewish culture was elastic enough to accommodate the ideas of Hellenism, even to integrate them and benefit from them. Both of these ideas are presently very much submerged in contemporary American culture. We want crucifixions.
These ideas Freyne suggests are sources of peace: to include and integrate in a time of surging populations and changing relationships between nations. These ideas move from “last man standing” attempts to prevail by killing/discrediting all competitors to Jesus’ (theological) assertion that “whosoever cares for the least of us also cares for me.” Freyne says, “The Jesus movement is thus a renewal group built around the figure of the servant of God, as depicted in Isaiah, who is not militantly opposed to foreigners.”
How about that, religious control-freak monoculture hackers?
http://www.bib-arch.org/bar/article.asp?PubID=BSBA&Volume=36&Issue=6&ArticleID=4
Someone was so threatened by it that they hacked the link so it sends the inquirer to a website about wine. Since liberals (however much they are fond of wine) would support the scientific study of Jesus, I presume that the hacker was from the religious right wing and is committed to the idea that one must not question any theological assumptions. That’s fine, but they’re in the wrong pew. This article is at a kind of meta-level, talking about how the various disciplines that research the period of Jesus differ, and what entering the same subject in different ways can reveal.
The various disciplines include history (the record of events in writing), literary (the style and use of the writing), archeology (the study of the places and buildings by looking at their traces), and theology (the doctrines that have been handed down in institutions as matters of faith). The study of Biblical materials (perhaps including writing from the same period that didn’t get included in the canon we read today) is focused on the content rather than which discipline, but has in the last decades become increasingly literary, for instance, analyzing the four gospels as different genres of writing. This is partly a shift in the analysis of subtext, partly a growing understanding of ancient languages (maybe with the help of computers), and partly the expansion of scientific capacities like analysis of the actual paper and ink of the original documents.
This hacked-link article, entitled “Jesus of History vs. Jesus of Tradition” is an interview with Sean Freyne, “director of Mediterranean and Near Eastern Studies, as well as emeritus professor of theology, at Trinity College Dublin. His research focuses on the integration of literary and archaeological sources for understanding the social and religious world of Galilee in Hellenistic and Roman times.” Basically, he thinks that the figure of Jesus arises from the paradigm shift caused when the more ancient context of Jewish culture is challenged by an increasing influence from Hellenistic Rome. There are plenty of people who would go farther and say that a mythic Jesus draws on a host of messianic savior figures whose names begin with J, including John the Baptist and Joshua, and that elements are well-mixed with what we call “Greek mythology.” An editor of the magazine, Herschel Shanks, is asking the questions.
You are an expert in historical Jesus studies. I have always wondered about that name. Are there nonhistorical Jesus studies, or unhistorical Jesus studies?
[Laughing] That’s a good question. Some people confuse the notion of the historical Jesus with the notion of the actual or the real Jesus. I think the historical Jesus is a construct, a theological construct, really. It’s the figure of Jesus as he is represented in the documents of Christian faith as a historical person.
I thought it was just the opposite, that the historical Jesus was opposed to the theological Jesus.
What we’re trying to do, I think, in this quest for the historical Jesus is to find the figure who stands behind the gospel narratives as a historical figure. If we look at the Gospels, all we have, in the case of the Synoptics [Matthew, Mark and Luke], is one year of his public ministry. If we include John, we make it three years. It’s a bird’s-eye view of this figure who walked the roads of Galilee. We have no record whatever of Jesus’ early life. We have the infancy gospel stories, which of course are highly theological and highly literary, made up later. So we really can’t build anything historical on those narratives.
So this scholar is trying to find the actual historical Jesus who may very well exist, but can’t be proven by theological materials. The Christian theologians who interpret these materials are afraid and opposed to this search for a real person, because they think it will take away the “magic.” They believe that familiarity breeds contempt.
By now those who read what I write know that I often sneak around to a radical shift. Here it is: modern journalists (and many voters) have developed a kind of Satanic assumption, that all politicians are corrupt and should be revealed. It’s the opposite of the theological assumption that Jesus was a divine or near-divine man and should be left unknown in any other way, because disillusionment will mean broken faith. These guys think they SHOULD break all faiths. This new “take” is that the journalist should be a Judas, who reveals to all the mere humanity of people who sleep around, take bribes, hire illegal immigrants and neglect their children. And there is a particular animus towards fathers, old guys with power, as well as a kind of pride in aspiring to iconoclasm and disillusionment. They are "wised up," in a sophomoric way.
There are two other ideas that Sean Freyne proposes. One is that in the time of Jesus the group was more important than the individual. Jesus did embody (incarnate) something, but he did it on behalf of the whole group, the inclusive society. The other is that Freyne resists the idea that there was a clash between Jewish culture and Hellenistic culture, resulting in crucifixion. He proposes that the Jewish culture was elastic enough to accommodate the ideas of Hellenism, even to integrate them and benefit from them. Both of these ideas are presently very much submerged in contemporary American culture. We want crucifixions.
These ideas Freyne suggests are sources of peace: to include and integrate in a time of surging populations and changing relationships between nations. These ideas move from “last man standing” attempts to prevail by killing/discrediting all competitors to Jesus’ (theological) assertion that “whosoever cares for the least of us also cares for me.” Freyne says, “The Jesus movement is thus a renewal group built around the figure of the servant of God, as depicted in Isaiah, who is not militantly opposed to foreigners.”
How about that, religious control-freak monoculture hackers?
Saturday, November 13, 2010
PIEGAN BLACKFEET HISTORY: 1930 - 1940
Remember that these are only notes for a book not yet written. Feel free to comment.
The story of the bronze footprints of the sign talkers neatly fits this decade. The conference that they commemorate was in 1930 and the building that was built in part to locate and protect that circle was the Museum of the Plains Indian. This filmed convention was meant to record the basic gestures of the last sign talkers from several tribes. Bits of it are on YouTube and Piegan Institute has put the whole thing on DVD but, as far as I know, it’s not commercially available. Ironically, it was organized by a general who had lost parts of his hands! When he made the sign for elk, making one’s hands into antlers, it was not a trophy head. In addition to the film, each man was asked to make an impression of his feet in plaster, which was then cast in bronze, now arranged in a circle in front of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Montana. The men were wearing their regalia, not the “citizens’ dress” of their daily lives, and so their toes show plainly through their moccasins. At first very formal, by the end of the film the men are having an hilarious time telling jokes and clowning.
This incident and the eventually ensuing edifice record some of the ambivalence about the Blackfeet at this time. On the one hand, “salvage anthropology” (the idea that anthros should gather up as much of vanishing cultures as they could) was important. Voisin, the sculptor, was in Browning about then, making portraits of outstanding people, though the real salvage was filming the sign talkers. Then the museum was built through the efforts of John Ewers, the first curator and author of the classic "The Blackfeet: Raiders of the Plains," The museum was meant to be a double institution: partly a repository of objects and partly a workshop where people would create modern versions of them to sell to tourists. They were not defined as “art” but as “crafts” but crafts were an elevated category.
This movement had started years earlier in the valuing of folk skills in Britain and across America, handwork like baskets, blankets, quilts, pots and the like. (At this same time, high art revolved around Paris and Manhattan, leaving representation behind, but Charlie Russell and others were engaged in what was essentially a pictorial version of salvage anthropology, painting the West that was gone by the Thirties.) The Museum was funded in part by the US Crafts Board, which was working desperately to help people make enough money that way to stay alive, and partly by the Lions Club.
Ironically, in 1930 just as the Depression gripped the nation by the throat, “Tip” O’Neill and Louis Hill hit the first big oil gusher on the Michael’s ranch near Cut Bank. Agent Stone asked for a geological survey of the reservation but was denied. This was a poker game and no one wanted to show their cards. In 1933 the Santa Rita well came in and there was much drilling in the Cut Bank area. There were many bids for leases, but they were hit-and-miss with no systematic criteria or process developed to keep track of them.
In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act, which was part of the New Deal, created the present form of tribal government. Out of roughly a thousand Indian families, 747 were receiving federal welfare assistance and 138 were making it on their own. By 1935, with Warren O’Hara as superintendent, the Blackfeet Tribal Constitution had been prepared and the Tribal Charter was approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1936 the superintendent is C.L. Graves. An inventory shows that the tribal goods and equipment have been quietly looted -- the value of the missing things is estimated at $100,000. In 1939 an attempt to balance the Council’s cashbook couldn’t succeed because entries between January first and September first had not been recorded, nor had Nancy Goss, the treasurer, been making receipts. Hazlett was the chair, a controversial figure as always. Brian Connolly, Wright Hagerty and Levi Burd are on the council.
Paul Rosier’s “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912 - 1954” is a careful, detailed, evidence-based account of what was happening through this period. It may seem dry to those who don’t know the people involved, but for we who do recognize individuals -- might be related to them -- or for the individuals themselves who are still living, this book deserves careful reading and discussion. This is the time period when the idea of a reservation for a dying and essentially different people has to be replaced by the idea of people with a special heritage who are entitled citizens like everyone else. Denial dominates strategy. The larger world has never admitted this shift. They want ghost Indians, not real players.
Outsiders have very little understanding of the many factions or the depth of the schism between full-bloods and double-bloods. Blood quantum (really provenance rather than blood DNA) for enrollment is reduced and reduced again until it stands at roughly a quarter-inheritance from an enrolled ancestor, male or female, but it is always challenged. One parent’s family might have both enrolled and un-enrollable children, with consequences being fairly crucial for entitlement or subsidy. All of this, combined with the riches of oil, make the job of the Tribal Council overwhelming, to say nothing of the constant accusations of corruption.
The continuing intervention and supervision by the Agency Superintendent and the Bureau of Indian Affairs meant that three-handed games were inevitable. One entity plays the victim, the second plays the oppressor, and the third plays the rescuer. Everyone swaps roles as is convenient. Some of the organizational problems seem irresolvable. The reservation is separate, but wants to be sovereign, meaning decide its own affairs. But the people are not quite ready to negotiate the perils of Washington, D.C., nor do they have any way of supporting themselves except through oil and government dependence. This is when the land lease payments began to be diverted out of the hands of the owners assigned by the Dawes Act. In addition, the people are dependent on the US government for major law enforcement (murder, arson, etc.) but have no Supreme Court that can resolve locally rigged outcomes of lawsuits. To imagine what these times were like, think of Afghanistan without the explosions.
Education in this time period was functional on the reservation where Doug Gold, son of the Presbyterian minister, had organized and built the first public school in Browning. Many students were educated at the higher levels at regional Indian high schools and vocational schools. Then came international war and a new kind of education by experience. It was suddenly very important to be American.
ADDITIONAL IDEAS FROM RAY DJUFF BY EMAIL:
Some things you might want to add:
By 1931 the railway was feeling the pinch of the Depression, and cut
back almost entirely the road trips on which it used to send Blackfeet
delegations east to promote Glacier. Those trips were financially
important to those who were entertainers for the railway. Rather than
just three months of work, June 15 to September 15, at Glacier Park
Hotel, the trips east could add one to three months of additional wages.
Also, the group of Blackfeet who remained on hire to work at the hotel
was smaller, and starting in 1934 did so without front-man Two Guns, who
had died earlier in the year. His death along with the subsequent death
of Bird Rattle marked a further evolution in the lineup of entertainers,
with people like Mike Short Man and the Wades-in-the-Waters, among
others, becoming more prominent.
The promotional work the railway did, however, laid the groundwork
(raising the profile of the tribe) for the hiring of a group of
Blackfeet to appear with Shirley Temple in the Hollywood production of
Susannah of the Mounties.
You also don't mention the "Big Claim," the land claim compensation
issue left over from 1855, launched as a lawsuit about 1925. So many
people in the 1930s thought it would be the big payout, which it later
proved not to be. I think each person got about $85.
The story of the bronze footprints of the sign talkers neatly fits this decade. The conference that they commemorate was in 1930 and the building that was built in part to locate and protect that circle was the Museum of the Plains Indian. This filmed convention was meant to record the basic gestures of the last sign talkers from several tribes. Bits of it are on YouTube and Piegan Institute has put the whole thing on DVD but, as far as I know, it’s not commercially available. Ironically, it was organized by a general who had lost parts of his hands! When he made the sign for elk, making one’s hands into antlers, it was not a trophy head. In addition to the film, each man was asked to make an impression of his feet in plaster, which was then cast in bronze, now arranged in a circle in front of the Museum of the Plains Indian in Browning, Montana. The men were wearing their regalia, not the “citizens’ dress” of their daily lives, and so their toes show plainly through their moccasins. At first very formal, by the end of the film the men are having an hilarious time telling jokes and clowning.
This incident and the eventually ensuing edifice record some of the ambivalence about the Blackfeet at this time. On the one hand, “salvage anthropology” (the idea that anthros should gather up as much of vanishing cultures as they could) was important. Voisin, the sculptor, was in Browning about then, making portraits of outstanding people, though the real salvage was filming the sign talkers. Then the museum was built through the efforts of John Ewers, the first curator and author of the classic "The Blackfeet: Raiders of the Plains," The museum was meant to be a double institution: partly a repository of objects and partly a workshop where people would create modern versions of them to sell to tourists. They were not defined as “art” but as “crafts” but crafts were an elevated category.
This movement had started years earlier in the valuing of folk skills in Britain and across America, handwork like baskets, blankets, quilts, pots and the like. (At this same time, high art revolved around Paris and Manhattan, leaving representation behind, but Charlie Russell and others were engaged in what was essentially a pictorial version of salvage anthropology, painting the West that was gone by the Thirties.) The Museum was funded in part by the US Crafts Board, which was working desperately to help people make enough money that way to stay alive, and partly by the Lions Club.
Ironically, in 1930 just as the Depression gripped the nation by the throat, “Tip” O’Neill and Louis Hill hit the first big oil gusher on the Michael’s ranch near Cut Bank. Agent Stone asked for a geological survey of the reservation but was denied. This was a poker game and no one wanted to show their cards. In 1933 the Santa Rita well came in and there was much drilling in the Cut Bank area. There were many bids for leases, but they were hit-and-miss with no systematic criteria or process developed to keep track of them.
In 1934 the Indian Reorganization Act, which was part of the New Deal, created the present form of tribal government. Out of roughly a thousand Indian families, 747 were receiving federal welfare assistance and 138 were making it on their own. By 1935, with Warren O’Hara as superintendent, the Blackfeet Tribal Constitution had been prepared and the Tribal Charter was approved by the Bureau of Indian Affairs. In 1936 the superintendent is C.L. Graves. An inventory shows that the tribal goods and equipment have been quietly looted -- the value of the missing things is estimated at $100,000. In 1939 an attempt to balance the Council’s cashbook couldn’t succeed because entries between January first and September first had not been recorded, nor had Nancy Goss, the treasurer, been making receipts. Hazlett was the chair, a controversial figure as always. Brian Connolly, Wright Hagerty and Levi Burd are on the council.
Paul Rosier’s “Rebirth of the Blackfeet Nation, 1912 - 1954” is a careful, detailed, evidence-based account of what was happening through this period. It may seem dry to those who don’t know the people involved, but for we who do recognize individuals -- might be related to them -- or for the individuals themselves who are still living, this book deserves careful reading and discussion. This is the time period when the idea of a reservation for a dying and essentially different people has to be replaced by the idea of people with a special heritage who are entitled citizens like everyone else. Denial dominates strategy. The larger world has never admitted this shift. They want ghost Indians, not real players.
Outsiders have very little understanding of the many factions or the depth of the schism between full-bloods and double-bloods. Blood quantum (really provenance rather than blood DNA) for enrollment is reduced and reduced again until it stands at roughly a quarter-inheritance from an enrolled ancestor, male or female, but it is always challenged. One parent’s family might have both enrolled and un-enrollable children, with consequences being fairly crucial for entitlement or subsidy. All of this, combined with the riches of oil, make the job of the Tribal Council overwhelming, to say nothing of the constant accusations of corruption.
The continuing intervention and supervision by the Agency Superintendent and the Bureau of Indian Affairs meant that three-handed games were inevitable. One entity plays the victim, the second plays the oppressor, and the third plays the rescuer. Everyone swaps roles as is convenient. Some of the organizational problems seem irresolvable. The reservation is separate, but wants to be sovereign, meaning decide its own affairs. But the people are not quite ready to negotiate the perils of Washington, D.C., nor do they have any way of supporting themselves except through oil and government dependence. This is when the land lease payments began to be diverted out of the hands of the owners assigned by the Dawes Act. In addition, the people are dependent on the US government for major law enforcement (murder, arson, etc.) but have no Supreme Court that can resolve locally rigged outcomes of lawsuits. To imagine what these times were like, think of Afghanistan without the explosions.
Education in this time period was functional on the reservation where Doug Gold, son of the Presbyterian minister, had organized and built the first public school in Browning. Many students were educated at the higher levels at regional Indian high schools and vocational schools. Then came international war and a new kind of education by experience. It was suddenly very important to be American.
ADDITIONAL IDEAS FROM RAY DJUFF BY EMAIL:
Some things you might want to add:
By 1931 the railway was feeling the pinch of the Depression, and cut
back almost entirely the road trips on which it used to send Blackfeet
delegations east to promote Glacier. Those trips were financially
important to those who were entertainers for the railway. Rather than
just three months of work, June 15 to September 15, at Glacier Park
Hotel, the trips east could add one to three months of additional wages.
Also, the group of Blackfeet who remained on hire to work at the hotel
was smaller, and starting in 1934 did so without front-man Two Guns, who
had died earlier in the year. His death along with the subsequent death
of Bird Rattle marked a further evolution in the lineup of entertainers,
with people like Mike Short Man and the Wades-in-the-Waters, among
others, becoming more prominent.
The promotional work the railway did, however, laid the groundwork
(raising the profile of the tribe) for the hiring of a group of
Blackfeet to appear with Shirley Temple in the Hollywood production of
Susannah of the Mounties.
You also don't mention the "Big Claim," the land claim compensation
issue left over from 1855, launched as a lawsuit about 1925. So many
people in the 1930s thought it would be the big payout, which it later
proved not to be. I think each person got about $85.
Friday, November 12, 2010
WILD WEST PIG TALES
Paul and I have been swapping pig tales (pig tails, hahahaha). I’ll let him lead off. WARNING: NOT for PETA people.
PAUL:
First ones I ever raised, the old neighbor down the road and I both had bad Canadian thistle patches in our garden areas, because we thought we could get rid of them with constant tilling. So, we hit on the idea of hogs to grub them out and eat them. We bought seven I think for the first go and put them in Ed's fenced off garden area first.
We knew we had to neuter them, but my only experience was with sheep and cattle. For one reason or another, mostly because we just didn't want to do it, we waited until they were about 100 lbs apiece. Finally, one afternoon we drank enough homemade wine to take on the project. Went about like what you'd expect, but we got the job done finally. Took about a gallon of wine.
His wife, Dee, teased us for years about Ed and Paul's hog rodeo. Those pigs were terrors and our hippie fencing skills lacking. We were always having to round them up and it was a real chore when it was time to get them into my garden. Trying to herd pigs 3/4 mile is an adventure in humor, patience and sweat.
Guess I didn't have electricity yet, because after we butchered the hogs here, I tried dry curing all the hams, hocks and bacons. Lost a good portion of it to bone sour. Lot of effort and a lot of wasted meat, I was angry with myself, but I guess that's how you learn. We had a great time making all the sausage at Ed's place, since neither of us had any experience at the time. Those turned out great though, even in our homemade smoker.
MARY:
Thanks, Paul. Now I'll tell YOU a hog story! After Bob divorced me, I just went on as though we were still married. In fact, according to the law, if I had gone to a lawyer, that meant the divorce was invalidated. But I just ignored the whole situation, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to think about it. Bob's mother thought it was indecent to stay on in the house in town, so I went out to our little ranch on Two Med.
About this time one of Bob's best friends and hunting buddies, who lived just downstream, decided he was going to get rich raising pigs. But he was doing some heavy drinking, so he just let them go loose to rustle for themselves. They worked their way to our little ranch (mostly thistles since the flood took all the topsoil in '64) and they thought the best rustling was right under the edge of the house, which was very old -- log at the core. They could actually raise the house off its alleged foundations by rooting with their snouts.
Towards spring my mother in Portland decided I should be checked out and sent my brother and his dog to see how I was doing. Actually, at the time I thought it was me doing HIM a big favor by getting him out of Portland for a week. He had a black powder shotgun that he loaded up with no lead -- just powder and paper -- and he and the dog went out into the brush to pig hunt. They crawled around having a wonderful time and I don't think the pigs were very impressed.
Later, after I'd moved out to a decrepit house in East Glacier, Bob and the grandkids were staying at the ranch and Bob lost his temper. He used a real load and killed a massive hog. Then he called me in EG and wanted me to drive down and help him and the kids drag the monster into the pickup so he could haul it up into the mountains for the bears to eat the evidence. His friend had a terrible temper and a massive fist.
I turned him down. First time I did that. Sometimes a divorce happens in pieces. I don't know how he got rid of that pig, but the horses were out there, so he probably used them.
At animal control we had an officer who had handled pigs. He taught us that a sheet of plywood or even a sheet of cardboard would turn a pig. They won't challenge something solid looking -- mostly. I did some reading which recommended stuffing a bucket over the pig's head and picking up its back legs. Then you can run it around like a wheelbarrow. Of course, there are size limits to this method.
PAUL:
So, it was time to finish off the new gestation barn. We sided the interior metal on frame buildings with OSB and commenced with painting so the entire facility could be hosed down for cleaning. First coat went on fine. When I started the second coat, I couldn't keep track of where I was at, because white on white, in that light just made your eyes swim. Decided to mix a different color in with the white to make it stand out. When Ben got back he was a little disgruntled that the interior of his hog barn was bright pink! Don't mix red and white paint. The last coat covered it up nicely though.
The hogs were adept at tearing out their fences, as I've probably mentioned. The electric fence we used was a very powerful one and they'd knocked the wire loose in their deep wallow. Since I was already wearing rubber boots and rubber gloves, I figured I'd be safe to reattach the wire to the posts. Just to be sure, I touched the wire with one hand and was fine. So, I grabbed on and bent over to attach it to the fence post. Zap, Bam, Sploosh! The shock nailed me so hard, I hit my head hard on the metal post hard enough to briefly knock myself out and fell backwards into the mire.
When I got my wits about me, I quickly realized I was stuck. Legs buried in sticky mud up to the knees and I couldn't find bottom with my arms, or roll over. The hogs were taking a real interest in my predicament, and all I could think about were all the horror stories I'd read of farmers getting eaten by their hogs. Fortunately, Ben was close enough to hear my wails for help and wade in to tip me back up so I could work my way out.
The hog business started from a 4H project for their kids. Hogs were one of the few money making farm endeavors around here and there were maybe 10 good sized operations scattered through the county. Ben was trying to find anything that would make his place show a little black on the books, so started building a modern containment hog building. I hired on the first Winter, building outdoor "barns" to contain their growing herd. By winter’s end, we must have had a dozen 8x16 shelters full of hogs, oh, and a VW bus hog shelter. Them hogs was stylin', we joked about trying to find over-sized sun glasses for them and some tunes for their rig. It was a big learning curve for all of us, trying to contain a whole lotta hogs mostly with hog wire and electric fences.
The following Summer, they built the first containment hog building which featured raised manure pits, with the idea of eventually adding wire flooring and hog crates for farrowing. The owners went back to Indiana for six weeks or so during the Winter and I'd make a couple trips a day up there to take care of the hogs, many of which were now living inside the floorless manure pits. They were easy to get in there when they were wiener size, but we didn't think ahead as to how we were going to get them out of there when it was time to send them off to market. Trying to capture and manhandle 250 pound hogs out of waist high pits was more than two brawny men could handle, as we found out when the owner threw his back out. After that I tried building a series of ramps, but we still were greenhorns about moving hogs around and had quite the time getting them out.
There are definite techniques for moving hogs. Hog whispering if you will. Once you have that mastered, hogs are great, but it was a very long process for all of us.
We tried every method there was to move hogs. In the barns it was a little easier because of the aisles. There we could use hog panels with some effect. The first hogs we shipped, I tried most everything to get them loaded in the truck, but having been raised inside, they were reluctant to head for daylight. I tried starving them out and laying trails of food, hoping I'd come back in the morning and find them all comfy and laid out in the inviting straw on the back of the truck. Didn't happen. Finally had to construct a tunnel to the truck.
Left to my own designs, I could load the shippers myself. It just took patience, a Zen like calm and an imposing, but movable force. Linda was always throwing a wrench in things. An impatient and firey red-head (Strawberry, remember?), she tried to help me out one day. I had 15 or so hogs all headed for the truck ramp and when the first one was about to step into the truck, she reached in with an electric prod and hit him on the nose. Chaos ensued and I got run over by the whole herd. That was a common occurrence, she just didn't get the hang of moving hogs and had to be banished from the barns on shipping days.
The bucket method works to a limited degree with single hogs, but size makes a big difference. If you can get the bucket over their head, they'll back up trying to get out of it, but there is a steep learning curve in how to steer them.
PAUL:
First ones I ever raised, the old neighbor down the road and I both had bad Canadian thistle patches in our garden areas, because we thought we could get rid of them with constant tilling. So, we hit on the idea of hogs to grub them out and eat them. We bought seven I think for the first go and put them in Ed's fenced off garden area first.
We knew we had to neuter them, but my only experience was with sheep and cattle. For one reason or another, mostly because we just didn't want to do it, we waited until they were about 100 lbs apiece. Finally, one afternoon we drank enough homemade wine to take on the project. Went about like what you'd expect, but we got the job done finally. Took about a gallon of wine.
His wife, Dee, teased us for years about Ed and Paul's hog rodeo. Those pigs were terrors and our hippie fencing skills lacking. We were always having to round them up and it was a real chore when it was time to get them into my garden. Trying to herd pigs 3/4 mile is an adventure in humor, patience and sweat.
Guess I didn't have electricity yet, because after we butchered the hogs here, I tried dry curing all the hams, hocks and bacons. Lost a good portion of it to bone sour. Lot of effort and a lot of wasted meat, I was angry with myself, but I guess that's how you learn. We had a great time making all the sausage at Ed's place, since neither of us had any experience at the time. Those turned out great though, even in our homemade smoker.
MARY:
Thanks, Paul. Now I'll tell YOU a hog story! After Bob divorced me, I just went on as though we were still married. In fact, according to the law, if I had gone to a lawyer, that meant the divorce was invalidated. But I just ignored the whole situation, mostly because I couldn’t figure out how to think about it. Bob's mother thought it was indecent to stay on in the house in town, so I went out to our little ranch on Two Med.
About this time one of Bob's best friends and hunting buddies, who lived just downstream, decided he was going to get rich raising pigs. But he was doing some heavy drinking, so he just let them go loose to rustle for themselves. They worked their way to our little ranch (mostly thistles since the flood took all the topsoil in '64) and they thought the best rustling was right under the edge of the house, which was very old -- log at the core. They could actually raise the house off its alleged foundations by rooting with their snouts.
Towards spring my mother in Portland decided I should be checked out and sent my brother and his dog to see how I was doing. Actually, at the time I thought it was me doing HIM a big favor by getting him out of Portland for a week. He had a black powder shotgun that he loaded up with no lead -- just powder and paper -- and he and the dog went out into the brush to pig hunt. They crawled around having a wonderful time and I don't think the pigs were very impressed.
Later, after I'd moved out to a decrepit house in East Glacier, Bob and the grandkids were staying at the ranch and Bob lost his temper. He used a real load and killed a massive hog. Then he called me in EG and wanted me to drive down and help him and the kids drag the monster into the pickup so he could haul it up into the mountains for the bears to eat the evidence. His friend had a terrible temper and a massive fist.
I turned him down. First time I did that. Sometimes a divorce happens in pieces. I don't know how he got rid of that pig, but the horses were out there, so he probably used them.
At animal control we had an officer who had handled pigs. He taught us that a sheet of plywood or even a sheet of cardboard would turn a pig. They won't challenge something solid looking -- mostly. I did some reading which recommended stuffing a bucket over the pig's head and picking up its back legs. Then you can run it around like a wheelbarrow. Of course, there are size limits to this method.
PAUL:
So, it was time to finish off the new gestation barn. We sided the interior metal on frame buildings with OSB and commenced with painting so the entire facility could be hosed down for cleaning. First coat went on fine. When I started the second coat, I couldn't keep track of where I was at, because white on white, in that light just made your eyes swim. Decided to mix a different color in with the white to make it stand out. When Ben got back he was a little disgruntled that the interior of his hog barn was bright pink! Don't mix red and white paint. The last coat covered it up nicely though.
The hogs were adept at tearing out their fences, as I've probably mentioned. The electric fence we used was a very powerful one and they'd knocked the wire loose in their deep wallow. Since I was already wearing rubber boots and rubber gloves, I figured I'd be safe to reattach the wire to the posts. Just to be sure, I touched the wire with one hand and was fine. So, I grabbed on and bent over to attach it to the fence post. Zap, Bam, Sploosh! The shock nailed me so hard, I hit my head hard on the metal post hard enough to briefly knock myself out and fell backwards into the mire.
When I got my wits about me, I quickly realized I was stuck. Legs buried in sticky mud up to the knees and I couldn't find bottom with my arms, or roll over. The hogs were taking a real interest in my predicament, and all I could think about were all the horror stories I'd read of farmers getting eaten by their hogs. Fortunately, Ben was close enough to hear my wails for help and wade in to tip me back up so I could work my way out.
The hog business started from a 4H project for their kids. Hogs were one of the few money making farm endeavors around here and there were maybe 10 good sized operations scattered through the county. Ben was trying to find anything that would make his place show a little black on the books, so started building a modern containment hog building. I hired on the first Winter, building outdoor "barns" to contain their growing herd. By winter’s end, we must have had a dozen 8x16 shelters full of hogs, oh, and a VW bus hog shelter. Them hogs was stylin', we joked about trying to find over-sized sun glasses for them and some tunes for their rig. It was a big learning curve for all of us, trying to contain a whole lotta hogs mostly with hog wire and electric fences.
The following Summer, they built the first containment hog building which featured raised manure pits, with the idea of eventually adding wire flooring and hog crates for farrowing. The owners went back to Indiana for six weeks or so during the Winter and I'd make a couple trips a day up there to take care of the hogs, many of which were now living inside the floorless manure pits. They were easy to get in there when they were wiener size, but we didn't think ahead as to how we were going to get them out of there when it was time to send them off to market. Trying to capture and manhandle 250 pound hogs out of waist high pits was more than two brawny men could handle, as we found out when the owner threw his back out. After that I tried building a series of ramps, but we still were greenhorns about moving hogs around and had quite the time getting them out.
There are definite techniques for moving hogs. Hog whispering if you will. Once you have that mastered, hogs are great, but it was a very long process for all of us.
We tried every method there was to move hogs. In the barns it was a little easier because of the aisles. There we could use hog panels with some effect. The first hogs we shipped, I tried most everything to get them loaded in the truck, but having been raised inside, they were reluctant to head for daylight. I tried starving them out and laying trails of food, hoping I'd come back in the morning and find them all comfy and laid out in the inviting straw on the back of the truck. Didn't happen. Finally had to construct a tunnel to the truck.
Left to my own designs, I could load the shippers myself. It just took patience, a Zen like calm and an imposing, but movable force. Linda was always throwing a wrench in things. An impatient and firey red-head (Strawberry, remember?), she tried to help me out one day. I had 15 or so hogs all headed for the truck ramp and when the first one was about to step into the truck, she reached in with an electric prod and hit him on the nose. Chaos ensued and I got run over by the whole herd. That was a common occurrence, she just didn't get the hang of moving hogs and had to be banished from the barns on shipping days.
The bucket method works to a limited degree with single hogs, but size makes a big difference. If you can get the bucket over their head, they'll back up trying to get out of it, but there is a steep learning curve in how to steer them.
Thursday, November 11, 2010
DO YOU LIKE POETRY? ON VETERAN'S DAY?
The sun comes up tarnished brass and sheets a shadowed world, frosted cold. The grass is ochre, leaves are gone. The world is stripped, burned by cold.
Today is Veteran's Day in the States and Remembrance Day in Canada. I think I will take the occasion to talk about the terrible beauty of death and destruction in time of war and the wrenching truths of poetry that speaks of tragedy remembered. Maybe I can make a case for the aesthetics of devastation and why we want to look and look and yet hate to look at the work of war photographers. Beyond that, I want to point to poetry that is confessional, murderous, despairing and -- because of that -- transformative.
Yesterday I got into trouble with a correspondent for saying in an essay, “Now Tim writes poetry, nothing like the wildly purple erotica of his early poetry. Now it is stripped, burned, influenced by several poets on Facebook.” The reader, who is admittedly from a different culture as defined by both nationality and class, but not very aware of what that means, thought that I was condemning Barrus’ poetry and the other poets, whom she knows and likes and features on a website dedicated to raising awareness of AIDS. However, she represents (without knowing it) a culture that has been labeled bourgeois, based on the harmony and security that money can provide, regardless of where on the planet you are. The overwhelming guide is what is pretty, comfortable, happy. The emotional style is a child’s successful birthday party, provided by loving parents. To her credit (maybe), she wants everyone’s life to be like that.
This is hardly the world of Barrus, whose life was broken open like a dropped melon when he was still small, his very body split like a peach in the hands of a strong hungry man. Ease and plenty do not mark the work of the poets he has found on Facebook. They are not organized into something named, but have gravitated together like the formation of comets. Aad de Gids in the Netherlands; Carolyn Srygley-Moore in Albany, New York; Sanctus Paulus somewhere in America; Dom Gabrielli somewhere on the planet. Others. There’s no directory. They post their poems to each other, then respond. Tim writes small poems as comments. Some write child’s naive comments, admiring all the wrong things.
These are people writing out of pain, loss, confession of sins, the world’s injustice and destruction; which can yet be transformed by understanding -- either a calm regard or a raging condemnation -- something that says THIS was real and I alone escaped to tell you. I’m not very good at knowing the proper literary genres, tropes and conventions of confessional poetry, because they don’t let high school English teachers talk about such things. The convention, at least in Montana, is that the high school years are the happiest years of your life, in spite of everyone in the room knowing about the deaths, tortures, starvations, addictions and abortions of the students who have still somehow managed to make it to the classroom. Half the spectrum of human experience is denied.
It didn’t used to be like this. I first learned about war poetry my sophomore year in high school in Portland, Oregon. “The Death of the Ball Gun Turret” -- “they washed him out with a hose.”
Wilfred Owen: “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?/ Only the monstrous anger of the guns, Only the stuttering rifles rapid rattle/ can patter out their hasty orisons.” He was killed in WWI, along with a whole school of poets: anti-romantic, bitter, cynical. No video contact with family. No R&R. No medi-vac. My generation came to awareness in WWII. We felt guilty that we didn’t suffer like those in Europe or Russia where homes were reduced to rubble and children starved. We were reminded daily that our lives were bought with the blood of our fathers -- the real ones who came back mutilated and refusing to talk about it -- and that this obligated us.
By the time of Vietnam the horror of war had gone so far beyond what people could bear, so over the limits of perception, so beyond even the loudest rock-n-roll, that the only possible reaction became a kind of maniacal giggle. For American Indians the prairie clearances were reawakened by heads on stakes in “Indian country.” Since then war means predator drones in lands marked off by stone mountains and ochre sand, shadeless places where people go draped in tragedy and have for millenia. Sterile killing, seen on screens, controlled by button triggers operated by young gamers in Indiana. They will not lose limbs unless they drink too much and drive. We speak of religion in a political world that dares not mention even the sacrifice of lambs in a culture gone vegan.
A trace left from Israel in the American series, “In Treatment,” is spoken by the psychiatrist. He says that the success of Christianity is due to the shift from thinking of the terrible punishing Jehovah of the Old Testament, who rained judgment on an innocent if chosen people, to the Good God of the New Testament trying to redeem wicked Caesar-driven masses. Without much success, I might note. The shrink says, “We’d rather believe that we are evil than think the world is controlled by monstrous gods -- and even worse parents.”
I suppose you think Elizabeth Barrett Browning is one of those sentimental bourgeois poets reclining and sighing about love. Consider this: “I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;/ that only men incredulous of despair,/ Half-taught to anguish, through the midnight air/ Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access/ Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,/ In souls as countries, lieth silent bare/ Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare/ Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express/ Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death -- / Most like a monumental statue set/ In everlasting watch and moveless woe/ Till itself crumble to dust beneath./ Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: / If it could weep, it could arise and go.” The title is simply “Grief.”
Now I’ll shut up and go. I think of the formal beauty of Brady’s Civil War photos of war dead. So still.
Today is Veteran's Day in the States and Remembrance Day in Canada. I think I will take the occasion to talk about the terrible beauty of death and destruction in time of war and the wrenching truths of poetry that speaks of tragedy remembered. Maybe I can make a case for the aesthetics of devastation and why we want to look and look and yet hate to look at the work of war photographers. Beyond that, I want to point to poetry that is confessional, murderous, despairing and -- because of that -- transformative.
Yesterday I got into trouble with a correspondent for saying in an essay, “Now Tim writes poetry, nothing like the wildly purple erotica of his early poetry. Now it is stripped, burned, influenced by several poets on Facebook.” The reader, who is admittedly from a different culture as defined by both nationality and class, but not very aware of what that means, thought that I was condemning Barrus’ poetry and the other poets, whom she knows and likes and features on a website dedicated to raising awareness of AIDS. However, she represents (without knowing it) a culture that has been labeled bourgeois, based on the harmony and security that money can provide, regardless of where on the planet you are. The overwhelming guide is what is pretty, comfortable, happy. The emotional style is a child’s successful birthday party, provided by loving parents. To her credit (maybe), she wants everyone’s life to be like that.
This is hardly the world of Barrus, whose life was broken open like a dropped melon when he was still small, his very body split like a peach in the hands of a strong hungry man. Ease and plenty do not mark the work of the poets he has found on Facebook. They are not organized into something named, but have gravitated together like the formation of comets. Aad de Gids in the Netherlands; Carolyn Srygley-Moore in Albany, New York; Sanctus Paulus somewhere in America; Dom Gabrielli somewhere on the planet. Others. There’s no directory. They post their poems to each other, then respond. Tim writes small poems as comments. Some write child’s naive comments, admiring all the wrong things.
These are people writing out of pain, loss, confession of sins, the world’s injustice and destruction; which can yet be transformed by understanding -- either a calm regard or a raging condemnation -- something that says THIS was real and I alone escaped to tell you. I’m not very good at knowing the proper literary genres, tropes and conventions of confessional poetry, because they don’t let high school English teachers talk about such things. The convention, at least in Montana, is that the high school years are the happiest years of your life, in spite of everyone in the room knowing about the deaths, tortures, starvations, addictions and abortions of the students who have still somehow managed to make it to the classroom. Half the spectrum of human experience is denied.
It didn’t used to be like this. I first learned about war poetry my sophomore year in high school in Portland, Oregon. “The Death of the Ball Gun Turret” -- “they washed him out with a hose.”
Wilfred Owen: “What passing bells for these who die as cattle?/ Only the monstrous anger of the guns, Only the stuttering rifles rapid rattle/ can patter out their hasty orisons.” He was killed in WWI, along with a whole school of poets: anti-romantic, bitter, cynical. No video contact with family. No R&R. No medi-vac. My generation came to awareness in WWII. We felt guilty that we didn’t suffer like those in Europe or Russia where homes were reduced to rubble and children starved. We were reminded daily that our lives were bought with the blood of our fathers -- the real ones who came back mutilated and refusing to talk about it -- and that this obligated us.
By the time of Vietnam the horror of war had gone so far beyond what people could bear, so over the limits of perception, so beyond even the loudest rock-n-roll, that the only possible reaction became a kind of maniacal giggle. For American Indians the prairie clearances were reawakened by heads on stakes in “Indian country.” Since then war means predator drones in lands marked off by stone mountains and ochre sand, shadeless places where people go draped in tragedy and have for millenia. Sterile killing, seen on screens, controlled by button triggers operated by young gamers in Indiana. They will not lose limbs unless they drink too much and drive. We speak of religion in a political world that dares not mention even the sacrifice of lambs in a culture gone vegan.
A trace left from Israel in the American series, “In Treatment,” is spoken by the psychiatrist. He says that the success of Christianity is due to the shift from thinking of the terrible punishing Jehovah of the Old Testament, who rained judgment on an innocent if chosen people, to the Good God of the New Testament trying to redeem wicked Caesar-driven masses. Without much success, I might note. The shrink says, “We’d rather believe that we are evil than think the world is controlled by monstrous gods -- and even worse parents.”
I suppose you think Elizabeth Barrett Browning is one of those sentimental bourgeois poets reclining and sighing about love. Consider this: “I tell you, hopeless grief is passionless;/ that only men incredulous of despair,/ Half-taught to anguish, through the midnight air/ Beat upward to God’s throne in loud access/ Of shrieking and reproach. Full desertness,/ In souls as countries, lieth silent bare/ Under the blanching, vertical eye-glare/ Of the absolute Heavens. Deep-hearted man, express/ Grief for thy Dead in silence like to death -- / Most like a monumental statue set/ In everlasting watch and moveless woe/ Till itself crumble to dust beneath./ Touch it; the marble eyelids are not wet: / If it could weep, it could arise and go.” The title is simply “Grief.”
Now I’ll shut up and go. I think of the formal beauty of Brady’s Civil War photos of war dead. So still.
Wednesday, November 10, 2010
INCANDESCENT: Blair Underwood and Glynn Turman
I finished the first year of “In Treatment” on DVD last night. Things sort of “tied off” at the end with mixed success. People moved away, decided on divorce, finally “got it,” and so on -- except that the therapist (or actually both of them since he’s also “In Treatment” with another therapist) ended up with a lot of debris to sort, both about themselves and about their relationships with clients. They also had questions about this practice of psychotherapy, using formulas and principles to interpret people’s pain. How much of the “cure,” says Paul, is just “being there” with one’s own attention and, truly, love?
There is a curious pentimento in this program that was brought from Israel and, for the first two years, simply translated. That is, the Israeli culture shows through in subtle ways. For one thing, we are never shown sex. In America people watch shows as though they were porn, submerging in second-hand sensuality. (They loved the "Laura" story line.) For another, there are none of the older desperate trapped and often fat or alcoholic women who end up in therapy because no one -- I mean NO one -- will take them seriously and they are not equipped to find something constructive to do. The therapist’s wife sort of points in that direction, but she is a competent, beautiful, very thin woman who is in sync with her children.
Israelis must take generations very seriously because each of their generations has had an intense challenge to overcome and the solutions for one generation -- let’s say fathers -- are often only a handicap for the next generation -- sons. The holocaust, the founding of new communities, the maintenance of high military alert, the opposition to other competing ethnic/national/religious groups, is hard to duplicate for an American audience, but they found a way, and it was a brilliant opportunity for two actors.
The equivalent to the Israeli experience was American blacks. Not so much the slavery generation, but the Jim Crow lynchings and mutilations in the South after ownership of humans turned to racist hatred and blacks became scapegoats for white failure. The story is simple: an African-American grandfather has a breathing disorder that is noisy. A lynch mob comes to the house but the family is in a prepared hiding place. They will be revealed by noise. The father covers the grandfather’s mouth and nose with his hand to keep him quiet. The invasion lasts too long and when it is safe to remove his hand, the old man has suffocated. But the family is saved.
The old man was gentle, intellectual, kind to everyone. The son is broken-hearted but simply walls in his grief and goes on protecting the family. His own son, “Alex” who comes for help, is just like his grandfather -- same mannerisms, same personality. He is victimized easily, so this father sets out to make him tough and succeeds all too well. Alex, played brilliantly by Blair Underwood, becomes a top-gun hot-shot Navy pilot and accurately bombs a school because he was given wrong information. Dozens of children die. He is devastated but denies it consciously -- instead he runs, runs, runs with his friend until he has a heart attack and nearly dies. He is forced into therapy in order to prove he is mentally fit to fly again.
Bluffing his way back to flying, even though the therapist has major doubts, he crashes his plane in a training mission. Now we meet the family members, including the small boy who is the fourth generation and again, like his father and great-grandfather, quiet and brilliant. His grandfather has been trying to bully “Alex” (Prince is the family name, which is not an accident) into toughening up the grandson in the way he thinks he has succeeded with Alex. Now this anguished man comes to the therapist, trying to understand whether he has somehow killed his son while trying to save him, just as he killed his father, trying to save the family. When does protection become oppression?
This story line is so brilliantly acted that I could feel the hair lifting on the back of my neck. I never paid much attention to Blair Underwood before -- another pretty face -- but here he manages to convey a world lost, a world just over the horizon and perhaps represented by his best friend, a gay physician. Maybe he would naturally have been “gay” (not that gay men can’t be macho military men -- we KNOW that) because in their best versions they let people be themselves. In the story Alex has been living with his gay friend and partner, separated from his wife.
But the revelation is Glynn Turman as “Alex’s” father. In a twenty-minute episode he manages to hit a full range of emotion so convincing, complex and intense that afterwards I went scrambling for his name and previous work. He has done Greek tragedy on the stage, I guess. “The House of Atreus?” (The man who ate his children baked into a pie.) That’s the level he is at here in this therapist’s office. Never out of control, profoundly racked by what life has demanded of him. Far braver than a Navy pilot, and far more guilty than for a bombing error, because this is his own family he has killed. The therapist tries to get him off the hook, but it goes far too deeply into his guts and heart.
All the way through I kept wishing for an American Indian plot like this and actors who are up to it. Sherman Alexie’s jokey tales don’t cut it for me, though I know they are commercially successful. The sentimental prairie horse operas don’t get there either. Jim Welch could come close in print. Maybe white American guilt over the prairie clearances and American Indian anguish over what happened to their great-grandparents is still too deep. Maybe it’s because rez life -- partly because of alcoholism -- is often matriarchal and an equivalent story might have to be a mother who tried her best with bad results.
Clearly, what made this small story in a braided series so brilliant and memorable was that the actors had had so many chances to develop their skills and that the script itself went to the human core of the survival dilemma. I am grateful that it exists. And that Gabriel Byrne is so generous a person as to be on the same screen with these incandescent African-American actors. Not that the Irish don’t have the same bitter story.
There is a curious pentimento in this program that was brought from Israel and, for the first two years, simply translated. That is, the Israeli culture shows through in subtle ways. For one thing, we are never shown sex. In America people watch shows as though they were porn, submerging in second-hand sensuality. (They loved the "Laura" story line.) For another, there are none of the older desperate trapped and often fat or alcoholic women who end up in therapy because no one -- I mean NO one -- will take them seriously and they are not equipped to find something constructive to do. The therapist’s wife sort of points in that direction, but she is a competent, beautiful, very thin woman who is in sync with her children.
Israelis must take generations very seriously because each of their generations has had an intense challenge to overcome and the solutions for one generation -- let’s say fathers -- are often only a handicap for the next generation -- sons. The holocaust, the founding of new communities, the maintenance of high military alert, the opposition to other competing ethnic/national/religious groups, is hard to duplicate for an American audience, but they found a way, and it was a brilliant opportunity for two actors.
The equivalent to the Israeli experience was American blacks. Not so much the slavery generation, but the Jim Crow lynchings and mutilations in the South after ownership of humans turned to racist hatred and blacks became scapegoats for white failure. The story is simple: an African-American grandfather has a breathing disorder that is noisy. A lynch mob comes to the house but the family is in a prepared hiding place. They will be revealed by noise. The father covers the grandfather’s mouth and nose with his hand to keep him quiet. The invasion lasts too long and when it is safe to remove his hand, the old man has suffocated. But the family is saved.
The old man was gentle, intellectual, kind to everyone. The son is broken-hearted but simply walls in his grief and goes on protecting the family. His own son, “Alex” who comes for help, is just like his grandfather -- same mannerisms, same personality. He is victimized easily, so this father sets out to make him tough and succeeds all too well. Alex, played brilliantly by Blair Underwood, becomes a top-gun hot-shot Navy pilot and accurately bombs a school because he was given wrong information. Dozens of children die. He is devastated but denies it consciously -- instead he runs, runs, runs with his friend until he has a heart attack and nearly dies. He is forced into therapy in order to prove he is mentally fit to fly again.
Bluffing his way back to flying, even though the therapist has major doubts, he crashes his plane in a training mission. Now we meet the family members, including the small boy who is the fourth generation and again, like his father and great-grandfather, quiet and brilliant. His grandfather has been trying to bully “Alex” (Prince is the family name, which is not an accident) into toughening up the grandson in the way he thinks he has succeeded with Alex. Now this anguished man comes to the therapist, trying to understand whether he has somehow killed his son while trying to save him, just as he killed his father, trying to save the family. When does protection become oppression?
This story line is so brilliantly acted that I could feel the hair lifting on the back of my neck. I never paid much attention to Blair Underwood before -- another pretty face -- but here he manages to convey a world lost, a world just over the horizon and perhaps represented by his best friend, a gay physician. Maybe he would naturally have been “gay” (not that gay men can’t be macho military men -- we KNOW that) because in their best versions they let people be themselves. In the story Alex has been living with his gay friend and partner, separated from his wife.
But the revelation is Glynn Turman as “Alex’s” father. In a twenty-minute episode he manages to hit a full range of emotion so convincing, complex and intense that afterwards I went scrambling for his name and previous work. He has done Greek tragedy on the stage, I guess. “The House of Atreus?” (The man who ate his children baked into a pie.) That’s the level he is at here in this therapist’s office. Never out of control, profoundly racked by what life has demanded of him. Far braver than a Navy pilot, and far more guilty than for a bombing error, because this is his own family he has killed. The therapist tries to get him off the hook, but it goes far too deeply into his guts and heart.
All the way through I kept wishing for an American Indian plot like this and actors who are up to it. Sherman Alexie’s jokey tales don’t cut it for me, though I know they are commercially successful. The sentimental prairie horse operas don’t get there either. Jim Welch could come close in print. Maybe white American guilt over the prairie clearances and American Indian anguish over what happened to their great-grandparents is still too deep. Maybe it’s because rez life -- partly because of alcoholism -- is often matriarchal and an equivalent story might have to be a mother who tried her best with bad results.
Clearly, what made this small story in a braided series so brilliant and memorable was that the actors had had so many chances to develop their skills and that the script itself went to the human core of the survival dilemma. I am grateful that it exists. And that Gabriel Byrne is so generous a person as to be on the same screen with these incandescent African-American actors. Not that the Irish don’t have the same bitter story.
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