POST-WESTERN COMMENTARY ON THE WEST

A while ago I posted about the intellectual center in the Basque region of Spain.  This announcement is for a book by three faculty members there.

   

BEYOND THE MYTH: NEW PERSPECTIVES ON WESTERN TEXTS (London: Portal Editions), ed. by David Rio, Amaia Ibarraran, and Martin Simonson.

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Preface. Elegy and the Defiance of Elegy: Longing and Writing in the American West, by Gregory Martin

Introduction: Reconsidering Western Writing Beyond the Regional Imaginary and its Mythic Borders, by David Rio

Part I: Continuity and Renewal

The Rural West as Frontier: A Myth for Modern America, by J. Dwight Hines

David Guterson’s The Other, the Doppelganger Tradition Visits the American North West, by Aitor Ibarrola

That Boy Ain’t Right: Jimmy Blevins, John Grady Cole, and Mythic Masculinity in All the Pretty Horses, by Maria O’Connell

Western Images in Paul Auster’s Work: From Moon Palace to Later Fiction, by Jesús Ángel González

Part II: Beyond Stereotypes

Affective Critical Regionalism in D.J. Waldie’s Suburban West, by Neil Campbell

Shoshone Mike and the Basques, by Monika Madinabeitia

Revision of American Indian Stereotypes and Post-Indian Identity in Sherman Alexie’s Flight, by Elisa Mateos

The Pros and Cons of Writing Confessional Memoir in the Mormon Milieu, by Phyllis Barber

Part III: Cultural Transfers

Film and Chicano I/dentity in Tino Villanueva’s Scene from the Movie GIANT, by Juan Ignacio Guijarro

“Wagon Train to the Stars:” Star Trekkin’ the U.S. Western Frontier, by Stefan Rabitsch

From California to Jarama Valley: Woody Guthrie’s Folk Banditry, by David Fenimore

How Some of the West Was Lost in Translation: The Influence of Franco’s Censorship on Spanish Westerns, by Carmen Camus

The quote below is from the introduction to the above book about the American West, published in London, proposing that the way to get beyond the mythology is to stay in Europe!  They at least have the moral advantage of not having invaded North America.  

“. . .  despite the resilience of the myth, it may be argued that an increasing number of artistic portraits of the American West debunk traditional mythology, rejecting at the same time extreme reductionism to simplistic binary oppositions, such as the one between myth and reality. Instead, the main emphasis is on the West as a complex, interrelated, unfinished, and plural space, consisting of multiple meanings and often intercultural experiences and identities. In this globalized age of trans-oceanic studies the international and hybrid properties of western American culture have become more visible than ever. . . . Adopting transnational perspectives does not mean neglecting the importance of regional and local studies that testify to the multiple and overlapping cultures and literatures existing in the American West. The book embraces a diverse literary western landscape, aiming to mediate between the regional and the global in order to understand a literature that, after all, claims to be both exceptional and universal. This volume also extends the analysis of western iconography to other artistic manifestations than writing, adopting primarily a postwestern approach.”

Here are the bios of the authors:

David Rio is Professor of American Literature at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria-Gasteiz (Spain). He is the author of El proceso de la violencia en la narrativa de Robert Penn Warren (1995) and Robert Laxalt: The Voice of the Basques in American Literature (2007). He has co-edited Aztlán: Ensayos sobre literatura chicana (2001), American Mirrors: (Self) Reflections and (Self) Distortions (2005), Exploring the American Literary West: International Perspectives (2006) and the special issue of the European Journal of American Studies on “Postfrontier Writing” (2011). He has also published articles on contemporary western American literature, southern literature, and Basque American authors in journals such as Western American Literature, Studies in the Literary Imagination, American Studies International and The International Fiction Review. He is also the general editor of Portal Education series on the American Literary West.
Amaia Ibarraran is a lecturer at the UPV/EHU since 1999, where she has been teaching contemporary North American Literature and Literature and Minorities. Her research has always been focused on the study of Chicano Literature, and she has published several articles and attended national and international conferences on this field. Her current research deals with the literary production of the new generation of Chicano writers as well as with the study of other forms of artistic and cultural expression produced by the Chicano community.
Martin Simonson studied English philology and translation at the University of the Basque Country in Vitoria, Spain, and holds a Ph.D. from the same university with a dissertation on the narrative dynamics of The Lord of the Rings. He has contributed with essays on fantastic literature in many journals and anthologies, and he has published a full-length study on the interaction of narrative genre in Tolkien’s literature titled The Lord of the Rings and the Western Narrative Tradition (Walking Tree Publishers 2008). He has translated several Swedish novels into Spanish, including the works of Jens Lapidus and Jonas Hassen Khemiri, as well as essays on North American history, such as Nelson Johnson’s Boardwalk Empire. Martin’s current research is focused on American and English nature writing and literature of place. He is currently teaching English and Cultural Studies at the MA programme for comparative literature at the University of the Basque Country.

There are problems with scholarship about the West, especially when it is written by foreigners at a European university.   First, there are entirely too many Wests.  Second, there’s no relationship among them.  Too many of them have nothing at all to do with the broad complex of geography we call the American West.  City/country; rain/desert; SW/NW; pre-Columbian/AIM; sheepherders/cowboys; and on and on and on.  They’re fantasies,  post-modern deconstructions (meaning with a major moral component, meaning critical of whatever the existing order is, meaning that the fantasy has footnotes but made no footprints in the American West.  They’ve “attended several conferences,” translated Swedish novels into Spanish, published articles, and focus on American and English nature writing.  Therefore they are qualified to edit an anthology of esoteric chapters about the American West. 

Only academics under the age of thirty would be impressed.  Since I am neither, you can guess my attitude.   Until someone certifies that David Rio, for instance, is a fourth generation Basque sheepherder whose grandfather may have founded a famous tea company in San Francisco and was thus able to send his grandson to an unnamed but prestigious American university, I intend to wiggle my eyebrows.   A google mashup is not a CV.

However, if some of them would get down to work with primary sources and translate the huge body of primary source materials written in European languages by early invaders of America, whether military, ecclesiastical or mercantile, it would be a great contribution.

MONDAY MUSING

So whutcha gonna write about today?

Danged if I know.  I sat all day yesterday reading “Homicide” instead of doing anything useful like working on the yard.

I’m not surprised.  And I suppose you watched a movie all evening.

Yeah, “Mad Men.”  The first three episodes, this time with the oral commentary, which was even more wretched than the story itself.  These people are so wrapped up in their little narcissistic worlds that everything is “amazing,” “terrific,” “fabulous,” to the point that their self-parody inside the parody inside the lack of reality drew much praise from the critics.  Very “meta.”  But none of these people was born earlier than 1980 -- they are making fun of a fantasy that never existed.

Well, the Fifties and Sixties in New York City were not like the same time period in Portland.

One of the characteristics of the time was that places were actually different from each other.  And we did not all incessantly puff on unfiltered cigarettes.  The only person so far who seems to have any brains is the director who acknowledges how cheesy most of the jokes are.

Why are you watching this thing?

Netflix sends them, I watch them.  I was curious and now the next three discs are already in the mail.

You don’t have to watch them just because they’re there.

Whatddya mean?  Let something go through this house without watching it?

Why read “Homicide?”  You saw the whole series plus “The Wire.” 

Baltimore in 1988 was a real place and David Simon was really there, a journalist, capable of moral reflection,  This book is the foundation of some pretty solid work.  It may not be written as well as Norval Morris’ imitations of George Orwell, but the attitude of it is not that different from the story in which “Orwell” is riding in a rickshaw -- or whatever they called the Burma version -- and the emaciated old man who was pulling the thing fell over dead.  In the story “Orwell” puts the man in the rickshaw and pulls it to the nearest hospital himself.  He is roundly mocked for this.  The thing to do was to leave the man’s body between the shafts of his rickshaw and step into another one.  

Sounds modern.

Some social mores never die.  But Simon shows the real costs, not just to the victims of crime, but also the men (they were just about all men) who struggle to solve homicides and often fail.  This was all happening just before the technological era arrived with computers and street communication.  There’s none of the storyline that’s in “The Wire,”  nothing about organized crime, nothing about the docks, the newspapers, and so on.  The drug traffic is still in a primitive state.  

What else you got?

I’ve been thinking about the scandal over the race horses.

Whuzzat?

So many of them breaking legs or otherwise dying on the track.  They’re being run too hard, too often, too young, too stupidly.  But that’s Sid Gustafson’s territory.  He’s a racetrack veterinarian.  I don’t want to trespass.  Anyway, it’s a grim subject and I know at least one of my faithful readers who will skip that day’s post.

Hmmm.  Sounds like you just don’t want to write today.

I’ve broken my rhythm.  I usually research and ponder, then write the next day, but I used up all of yesterday just reading.

And the weather is too nice today.  You ought to post a “gone fishing” sign and go cut the grass.  Valier citisens would be grateful.

I figure I can afford to fiddle around like this for a thousand words, go for the mail and then work on the yard.  There is one thing I’d kind of like to research.

Whuzzat? 

Football players.  There are a couple of convergences.  One is a senior player who tried to warn new drafts about their impending incredible wealth and how everyone will descend on them to “help” them with the problem.  The youngsters, often from ghetto backgrounds, will be urged to buy a big expensive house in a neighborhood where no one is under sixty and no one likes young people (except flashy young women) much less blacks.  They can expect to be victimized, patronized, and treated badly while all the time being expected to perform like, well, like race horses.  This guy named Nate Johnson --

Jackson.  His name is Jackson.

Well, I don’t know one of these guys from another.  Okay, NATE!  On NPR he said,  “I love the game of football, but not the game around football.”  That is, the circle of carrion-eaters who gather whereever there is money to invade privacy, speculate on personal matters, press their wishes upon this man who has -- as Nate put it -- “shaken hands with Darth Vader.”  Notice how Darth Vader has displaced the Devil.

High time.  I’m in favor.  Anyway, how is a big black football player gonna shake hands with a little red devil left over from the Indian Wars?

Hey, none of your racism!  For you, the devil is gonna look like the Pillsbury Dough Boy.

The devil always looks like management.  

The other story about football players is a heart-breaker.  Here’s the news lead:  “Former NFL linebacker Junior Seau was found dead of a gunshot wound to the chest, in what authorities believe is an apparent suicide. His body was discovered at his home in Oceanside, Calif., Wednesday. Seau was 43.”

Don’t suicides shoot themselves in the head?  

Two other football players have shot themselves to death in the chest: Ray Easterling last month and Dave Duerson last year.  You know why?

Huh, uh.

So their brains could be studied by scientists. You know why?

Huh uh.

More than a thousand NFL retired players are suing the NFL over their head injuries because their brains are masses of scar tissue.  They’re only part of a huge but ignored scandal that reaches into the lives of mid-Western high school kids as much as Seau, who started out poverty-stricken in Samoa.  Why do we send anyone out to destroy their brains for our entertainment and why is that the main goal of small town superintendents everywhere who want to keep their jobs.  Why do Mad Men everywhere cluster in front of TV sets to celebrate all this?

Beats me.  Ask Darth Vader.  Now go work on the yard before every muscle you’ve got atrophies.

"LIGHTNING MEDICINE CLOUD": A WHITE BUFFALO

The human brain, which is meant to constantly scan the environment through all senses and then decide on what action is necessary, is predisposed to notice in particular every anomaly.  What is done about it is a matter of individual temperament and the advice of the culture, which could say it’s good or bad, mostly depending on whether it’s a culture where there is enough ease to spare energy and time for differences or whether it’s a culture that’s so severe as to teach people to assume the worst.  

Put that together with the technical genetic fact that every mammal has genes that determine color and therefore every mammal species, given a mutation or developmental glitch, has an albino phase -- an anomaly -- and you have the makings of an icon of either good or evil.  Most animals in groups (birds also have albino phases) will try to eliminate any individual that is very different, so a white crow is going to be attacked.  Albino humans, especially those who are normally black, are also going to be viewed with suspicion.  In stories they may be killers, like the half-brother in “The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo”. 

Off hand I can’t think of any albino humans in stories who are the heroes or definitively “good,” but when it comes to albino buffalo they are seen as a crack in the universe that lets the magic from another world come through -- symbols of salvation meaning that the world will be more merciful now.  Plains Indians had stories about White Buffalo Woman, who was a benign figure, rather like the Chinese Quan Yin or the European Dark Madonna. (Dark was the anomaly there.)  Maybe Yellow Pollen woman in the Native American corn cultures.  

A white buffalo calf gets everyone excited because it is considered a sort of promise of a better future. The media goes crazy, thousands show up to endow the little critter with some amazing symbolic name, like “Lightning Medicine Cloud.”  The owner, Arby Little Soldier, of this particular anomalous bison calf, born May 12, 2011, on a North Texas ranch called “Lakota Ranch” (though Sioux territory is more usually in the states of Dakota) tragically found the calf dead last Monday before they could celebrate his first birthday.  The mother died the next day.  No autopsy reports yet.

A number of bison ranchers have been inbreeding their buffs in an attempt to create exciting white calves in the same way Siegfried and Roy have inbred tigers to get albino cubs for their glamorous Las Vegas act.  David Quammen blew the whistle on this inbreeding for white in an essay some years ago, but people didn’t want to know.  Color genes are also active in other ways in the body so inbreeding for color will affect the rest of the animal -- one of the basic biological rules is that everything is connected.  White animals are vulnerable beyond being obvious to predators.  For instance, certain kinds of white blue-eyed kittens will be stone deaf.  Strangely, the same romantic folks who are so lathered up about “purebred bison” meaning no domestic cow genes -- so much so that they will butcher any unfortunate gene carrier of cow genes -- don’t seem to register inbreeding bison to get albinos.  Human inbreeding, of course, is pretty universally condemned and mocked.  By now even the British royal family has come around.

So here we have some things to think about:  anomalies that are such unexpected reversals that they seem supernatural; the quandary about whether it is better to eliminate such anomalies or consider them preciously unique; the failure to realize that everything is connected and therefore has consequences that might be not predictable; the exploitation of emotion that is seeking signs; the technological science of genetics that is not grasped by ordinary people; opportunism -- all recognizably overlapping with religion.  Here’s more:  the idea that Native American people are more pure and directly connected to the land, particularly the tribes that have been glorified by the media; the slipping over of that enchanted aura onto the bison that were the foundation of their world; the guilt and dissocation of contemporary white people because of realizing that “we” systematically killed the buffalo in order to eliminate the Native Americans on the prairie.

No one preaches about these things.  The major environmental media will not touch them.  Bison and wolves are sacrosanct.  In quietly erudite circles people will discuss such esoteric phenomena as albinism and assume in a mild way that they are better because they dare to do so.

Oh, sigh.  Referring back to the lead sentence, what should we do about what our brains take in?  We can’t even decide what to do about the overabundance of ordinary dark bison in Yellowstone Park.  Ranchers declare that moving them to the reservations will cause the collapse of their operations, which were founded by their ancestors.  (All of maybe 150 years ago -- on land taken from Indians.)  But people have been successfully ranching bison for decades, which is part of the reason their genes got mixed up with those of cows.  Then there’s the disease factor -- brucellosis, which varies in the public mind from a raging plague dropping animals in their tracks to what one cute little bison-hugger informed me was a nonexistent disease invented for political purposes.  (Is that what killed Lightning Medicine Cloud, and his -- we aren’t told the gender of the calf -- mother, almost on Mother’s Day?)  Actually, politics can be lethal. 

It happens that Bob Scriver had an intimate relationship with “Big Medicine,” the white buffalo bull that lived on the Moiese Bison Range over in the Flathead Valley.  Bob was commissioned to mount the beast, who now stands in the second-floor hallway of the Montana Historical Society with a nice mural behind him.  Big Medicine lived a long peaceful and prosperous life.  By the time he died, like so many of us, he’d gotten nearly bald and so peaceful that he hardly moved at all.  But the director of the Society who was managing the project insisted that he be mounted as though he were a young bull on the rut, tail up and ready for action.   Facts don’t make history -- myths make history.  If a historical society wants to be funded, they will go for story, the more provocative the better.  If Bob wanted his check, he would be obedient.

It’s an old story.  There’s Big Medicine in a phony pose, revered by many as an authentic manifestation of nineteenth-century Native American legends (though he lived out his life on a federal reservation -- oh, well, um . . .).   And down under that is a story of opportunism and merchandizing.  How religious.  We know what to do with anomalies: commercialize them.  Exploit them.

TAKING BARRY LOPEZ AT HIS WORD

http://thewritequestion.blogspot.com/

Okay, so now here’s the writing scene from an entirely different corner.  Barry Lopez is from the Asian-influenced environmental/mystical/poetic scene on the West Coast that takes writing VERY seriously.  At the website above you can hear him explain concepts that are pretty foreign to best seller lists.  He sells well, many books and for a long time, but he’s not one of those notorious mega writers and does not WANT to be.  In fact, loathes the whole concept of the celebrity writer as well as “best-seller” books.

His approach to writing is near-religious, certainly moral/ethical, leaning to poetry, striving for the universal in the particular, not afraid of fancy language.  It is analytical, sometimes political, and not always easy to find in libraries.  I don’t know whether I can come up with a list of twelve writers in this mode, but I’ll give it a try.  Many would be classified as “nature writers.”   Barry Lopez, Gary Snyder, Wendell Berry, Annie Dillard, Mary Oliver, Ken Wilbur, sometimes Peter Matthiessen, Leslie Marmon Silko, Gaston Bachelard,  Mary Austin, Stan Rowe, Don Gayton.   Major academic streak because most of these people make their living by teaching.  Also some overlap with travel writing.  Maybe with philosophy, though I would exclude the post- and deconstruction people on grounds that they are a separate category.

As far as “features” go, I started making a list and then realized they were all about the author in spite of Lopez’ protestations against celebrities.  These writers often have devotional practices, political influence, eschew modern technology, and try to remain private -- but accumulate devotees.  They are mostly positive, even transcendent, or at least aim to be.  The “type” is more 19th century English naturalist except for the dark “other”-but-equivalent writers, who tend towards French poet maudits, full of defiant evil and deviant sex.  Americans lean towards adrenaline and find their “gods” at the extremes of exertion.  

Each of these “types” have their constituencies but there’s not a lot of crossover, though I have to wonder about genre writing lately -- all that stuff about S/M in historical romances that my cousins claim they skip when they read, because they are reading only for “history.”  Or maybe medical writing where the wonders of technological medicine blur over into miracles, conveniently skipping Big Pharma which belongs with genre.  Or politics.  “So ugly.”

There is a lot of talk about culture and story (rather than narrative).  Lopez says story is necessary in the midst of crisis in order to pull things together, driven by the storyteller’s earnest response to the reader’s need.  (Like preaching?)  Yet they try to be multi-cultural, meta-cultural.  

Lopez locates the value of the writing in the content, not in the author -- how is that really different from the list of “features”?  I think the answer is that both this kind of writing I’m trying to describe now AND the major mega best-sellers in “Hit Lit” pre-date the corporate ownership of publishers.  They were not “marketed” as though writers were movie stars in the old studio system.  The corporate shilling of writing is what has made epublishing inevitable.  I’ll come back to that some other time, but I think it is a subject for someone with more thought muscle than I have. 

Lopez says (and I agree) that there can be a book that smacks you amidships and changes your life -- but no else has ever heard of it.  It wasn’t famous, it didn’t make a lot of money, but it is transformative for the reader in the most immediate way.  Gospel.  Not pandering.  It’s confusing that it might easily be a genre best-seller.  Books don’t stay in their categories.  Anyway, categories change over the years. 

Lopez rules out anything negative, cruel, hateful, oppressive, excluding, etc.  I part company with him.  It think ruling out that dimension makes us shallow, accommodating, sentimental and ineffective.  It conflates this stream of writing with “liberal” politics that want to make everything candy and pretty.  It is certainly not consistent with any indigenous culture I know, all of which have no such luxury as denying starvation, trauma, plague, genocide, and general evil.

“Story is the enemy of forgetting,” says Lopez.  Okay.  What about maybe story is the enemy of suppression and denial?  Is he going to push away stories of war and crime?  He also says, “How can we go deeper without being terrified.”   Now he’s coming close to the truth.  Stories that terrify and go untold because of that terror.  

So does he tell us how not to be terrified?  Not for me.  He leaps to the “spiritual interior of words” which is all very pretty but doesn’t help me.  "The story takes care of us," he says.  The story of crucifixion?  He eschews advertising and politics.  How virtuous.  That could make a person famous.

My book along these lines is currently called “The Molten Chalice” and I was startled that googling the title gets me pieces that I’ve posted to my blog.  It’s still not quite the same as the end-point document, but some of the tentative thinking.  This post, too, is tentative.

Lopez says if you can’t feel that the author knows you are there, you should not read what they write.  WHAT???  Then he says that if people feel the author didn’t know you’re there -- who you are -- stick your head up and point yourself out.  (Write him a letter -- he doesn’t do email.)  Well, I’d have to spend the rest of the day on that one.  There are so many people who deny that I exist.  And I’m not alone in Invisiblestan.

There’s a famous sci-fi story (lately much of our good moral writing seems to be in the sci-fi genre) about a planet where all the misery, evil, and torture has been eliminated.  It is all borne by one person, who is locked away -- screaming in darkness where no one knows she exists.  Is this moral?  (It IS Christian.  Except that all the bad stuff is still here, so Jesus’ suffering appears to have been ineffective.)  Maybe you know people who live this out -- what? you say -- but there ARE people suffering, unknown by us, to spare the rest of us.  What is unexpected is that some of the people who are suffering the worst find that they can paradoxically convert that pain to their own pleasure, to become ecstatic, to feed on it.  Barry Lopez will deny that.  Makes me curious why he would.

ARE YOU WRITING A BEST SELLER?

James W. Hall, who wrote “HIT LIT: Cracking the Code of the Twentieth Century’s Biggest Bestsellers,” is a college professor who had written a number of contemporary, trendy, experimental, praiseworthy novels that didn’t sell worth a damn.  Then he had an epiphany something like that of Abraham Maslow, who was finding the study of mental derangement to be a downer.  “Why not study successful happy people?” asked Maslow.  It was a psychological revolution.

So James Hall’s revolution was to ask “Why not study those trashy genre novels that sell like hotcakes even though I and my colleagues sneer at them?”  Generously, he included his students in the discussion and called it a class.  This book offers discussions of twelve books according to fourteen or so “features” that correlated among all the samples, the aspects that seemed to make them so successful.  

To show what a nerd I am, I’ve only read three of them -- all long ago -- as it happens, the first three.  I’ve only seen five of the movies made from them.  Hall assures us that they were best sellers before they were movies and that the sales figures for these specific books were waaaaaaay higher than the usual books on best seller lists.  Also, he is surprised by just how good they really are after all, except that he did NOT like “The Bridges of Madison County.”

1.  Gone with the Wind

2.  Peyton Place

3.  To Kill a Mockingbird

4.  Valley of the Dolls

5.  The Godfather

6.  The Exorcist

7.  Jaws

8.  The Dead Zone

9.  The Hunt for Red October

10.  The Firm

11.  The Bridges of Madison County

12.  The Da Vinci Code

Here are the “features.”

1.  Simple, straightforward “earthy” writing with “high concept” plots.  (High concept means simple enough to state in a sentence.)

2.  Hard driving, understandable, passionate motives.

3.  Some kind of grave danger that increases and is pressed by limited time.

4.  Controversial background in some larger culture clash crucial to Americans.

5.  The scope is large though the central story may be personal.

6.  At some point an Edenic image with idealized sense of innocence and purity, maybe sexual.

7.  Lots of stuff to learn about how the world works.

8.  A secret society, not up to any good.

9.  Tension between city and country.

10.  High-falutin’ religion is discredited.

11.  Severe criticism of the American promise.

12.  Rebels, loners and mavericks struggle at the center.

13.  Broken families abound.

14.  A pivotal extreme sexual act at some point is crucial to the plot.

He adds that none of the things on this list will work unless the writer has some sort of emotional investment, some obsessive issue that drives him or her through the long days and weeks and months of shovel work it takes to get it on paper.  He is aware that agents, editors, and publicists will try to remake the work in their own image, but that should be resisted.  They do NOT know what will sell.  

The discussion of each of these features is fun to read but also startling sometimes when these well-known characters are compared with each other, The dilemmas turn out to be quite similar, even such unlikely pairs as Scout and Scarlett O’Hara.  Hall’s quick summaries of plot reveal that they are similar in many ways, but a small difference in emphasis or point of view could have taken the reader in quite a different direction.  I don’t want to spoil the pleasure of the book by telling you too much or quoting a lot of his quips.

What I was after was the mechanics of writing, not reading.  How can I use these features in the two novels I have fermenting on the back burner?  One, “Both Sides Now,” is about the widow of a much older anthropologist who has died.  While she sorts through the dead man’s personal papers, she’s living up by Heart Butte in a house she rents from a Blackfeet father and son.  She’s also a painter of scenery.  The father is ancient and the son is a gifted classical composer.  It’s easy to see how to develop the Eden of the place, and it’s clear that the invading dilemma will be either oil drilling or a high-tension transmission line, both of them threatening the peace and beauty of the East Slope.

The broken family is the Blackfeet one -- all women gone, all children gone -- and the secret society is the corporation executives who have sneakily managed to control the legal mineral rights.  I think I’ll throw in a same sex love affair for the pianist and AIDS, plus a lot of ceremonies, vision fasts, and rare artifacts.  The gimmick is that anthropologist’s papers supply a steady stream of clues about everything. I’d like to include a grizzly bear somehow.

The other one is “Prairie Gladiators” inspired by my brief months of teaching in Cut Bank about ten years ago.  “Cut Bank” is also a movie that’s supposed to be shooting in Cut Bank this fall.  Since it includes in the cast John Malkovich and Ben Kingsley.  I don’t think it will be about football or cowboys.  (It’s making the town a little nervous.)  I’m folding my story, which IS about football and cowboys -- as well as extreme fighting and the ten thousand year old advent of grain raising, which totally changed human life -- into that thing about city/country.  An English teacher in late middle-age returns to her childhood town expecting Eden and finding something quite different, including an alcoholic rancher.  The danger is people turning against each other, tolerating violence like football head injuries for the prestige of the town, not standing together in a climate that will kill loners.  In short, destroying their seed grain.

This second tale has a plot outline but so far only a chapter written, which is a short story by itself.  The first one has several short story/chapters.  I post bits on this blog as I go along, which is the modern way to create a novel, almost participatory.  The idea of a work of genius scribbled in a solitary attic was a poetic construct from the beginning.  This stuff is coming out of the lives of the people right here and now.  In fact, I know quite a bit about these things, some of them to the level of passion.

At the end of his book, Hall notes the members of his classes who have used these ideas to go on to writing careers.  I don’t recognize any of them, but I don’t read genre anyway.  The best sellers on this list were so famous, even notorious, that they have become part of our cultural vocabulary.  That is not in the power of any author to control, but it can be made more likely with a checklist like this one.

THE PUBLISHING ALBATROSS

http://youtu.be/rzYzJ0jb4jE

My polymath friend and frequent commenter, Art Durkee, is beginning to make and post on YouTube what you might call “movies,” but are in fact videos he made of landscapes in black and white accompanied by music he composed.  Art is a mystic poet as well as a techie.  He made this video on an iPad last night using “Garageband” for composing.   You could do it.  Well, probably not quite at the level Art can reach, just starting out.  Talking about such things is severely pinched by lack of vocabulary.  This is a cross-media poem but it has no words.  It is an “object.”  The tone and subject of it make it suitable for meditation but it contains no religious dogma.  It is universally available on the Internet through YouTube, which constitutes “publishing,” or does it?  

“Publishing” has become an albatross -- not the soaring white bird that follows ships at sea but the stinking carcass hung around the neck of the ancient mariner.  It stinks of money.  When it was in the sky, mysterious and iconic, it was an automatic sign of quality.  Important People somewhere in the sky (demi-gods) anointed published books with awards and praise, so that you knew to be impressed by it.  Your high school English teacher taught you to believe this.  (I hope he or she also taught you Coleridge.)   If you say you are a writer, the next question is always “are you published?”  

They think they are asking whether they could find a copy to read, but what they really mean is “are you anointed?”  If you ask them, what do you mean, “published,” they will describe a book.  But consider this: friends of mine were eating out with someone who knew nothing about me.  The friends told this person about my blog, so he put his smartphone on the table and punched up http://www.prairiemary.blogspot.com and there I was, published, if you mean available for anyone to read.  But if it doesn’t cost anything, can it be worth anything?

Change birds.  Waterfowl in all their genres seem to glide effortlessly on the pond, but we all know that their ugly little webbed and scaly feet are paddling like crazy where you can’t see them.  Self-publishing without marketing is a decoy:  seems to be a gliding bird but has no feet, can’t go anywhere.  The feet are marketing.  Self-publishing is not publishing unless it’s also self-marketing.  That’s where the anointing happens.  Advertising.  They call it your “platform.”  One can contract with an advertising company (install batteries) or tow your decoy around the pond on a string.  (Self-promotion.)  If a book isn’t promoted, can it be worth anything?

There are so many people aching to be anointed (and rich) that if a person wants to make money, the best bet is to exploit all the pilgrims.  Sell sandwiches on the road to Lourdes, as it were.  Offer cheap and easy access to e-publishing, for instance.  Or actually print-on-demand the books, the way I do at Lulu.com.  You and I can order any of my books via Lulu.com or even Amazon and have them here in a week, but few of my readers will do that.  There’s money in educating writers, but not readers.  Better to keep consumers where they were.  I’ve offered to do workshops for readers but no one comes. People don’t read -- they watch vids. 

 The people who in the past would buy local self-published books, partly as a favor and partly to see what the writer was up to, are accustomed to the authors having a stash at home under the bed, because in the past one had to print a LOT of books at a time.  So they call you on the phone or stop you in the post office to get your book.  In order to sell my books, I must front the money to print up a few dozen to show around or to the locals they will not seem “real.”  Some of my books are suitable for locals (though whites for the most part will not read about Blackfeet).  They do not care about liturgical theories.  Anyway, they’re a little afraid of Google.  (If they used it and understood, they would be even more afraid.)  They imagine eyes staring out of the screen at them, and they are. Real ones.

But there’s the passivity problem.  When I asked a museum exhibiting Bob Scriver’s work why they didn’t carry the book I wrote about him, they said,  “Oh, no salesman has come and asked us to carry it.”  But few publishers even employ salesmen anymore.  A chair for a major local conservation group asked how she could find my books, but when I suggested Amazon, she said she did not care to use a computer.  Some here still think blogging is an activity of the devil, mysteriously likely to precipitate one into a pit of pornographic vipers.  Yet they will sign up for Facebook and Twitter, snake bait if there ever was.  Many of these people are depending upon salesmen to teach them, so naturally what they learn is shallow consumerism.  They don’t go to YouTube to watch edifying lectures but rather to watch cats in mailboxes or chimps abusing frogs.

How does one learn to make a video like Art’s?  How do people even know such things exist, much less that they probably already have the tools to do it.  They’ll say,  “Oh, I have no talent,” but talent comes -- like playing the piano -- from doing it.  NOT a salesman.  What kids know and Art knows is the computer is NOT like a television set.  A television set is a salesman, trying to get you to buy something and to teach you to trust the television.  A computer is a trail that you walk up, with effort, with awareness, with gradually increasing power.  (This post is a metaphor riot.)

Writing is like a computer, but on a computer you can “write” with images and sounds.  I think what keeps a lot of people from even trying it is that a television set gives a person the reassuring sensation of being alone in their living room with just the actors on the screen.  A computer with Internet gives people the fantasy of being in a stadium crowded with an audience ready to go thumbs up and thumbs down as you confront the tiger of “writing a book.”    If you relish that, here’s a website for you:  http://bookcountry.com/   You post your writing there and then put your thumb to work on other people’s writing, who will do the same for you.  Go ahead.  If you’re embarrassed to look bad in front of your computer, here’s your chance to let a lot of actual people criticize you.

Art Durkee’s meditative vid easily includes “fifty shades of gray” but it’s unlikely to go viral.  We’ve been taught that sex is the main marker of value: no sex, no bucks.  Publishing taught us that.  That albatross, too, hangs stinking around our necks, another that used to gleam soaring across a blue sky.

THE MELTING CHALICE

(Continued from yesterday’s post.)

At this point I want to challenge Damasio’s term “the autobiographical self” and rename it “the identified self” in order to make room for a couple more layers of consciousness, including the one with “graphic” in it.  When the Identified Internal Self comes up against an Object, or objects or the generalized external universe, the process of sensory definition and necessary reaction begins. Many images form in the mind, some unconscious and some conscious.  Some of them may be urgent and all of them will be emotionally indexed or charged.  If this input is strong enough to overflow, one form of “excretion” might be to create sensory objects such as paintings, dance, sculpture or music.  (Art is shit, art is exhalation, art is exfoliation.)  Singing is at this level until it has words.  Then it goes to another level.

Involving speech means using memory to manage the symbolism of sound-objects.  When writing evolves, there is yet another level, which is marking down symbolism of sound-objects.  Now there’s a technological advance in memory because one can make notes.  These steps are evolutionary, perhaps a discovered use of pre-existing capacities or perhaps enabled by a mutation.  Remember that EVERY evolutionary stage of emotion and experience must be in operation.  Maybe those who work in “rationality” and mathematics don’t think emotion is there, but it’s only suppressed.  The focus has excluded it, which may or may not be useful.  In the context of liturgy, the exclusion is impossible.  It will make the liturgy dead.

By the time one gets to the level of religious singing, especially what is nearly chanting or merely sounds without words, maybe with percussion, then the liturgy is changed in a different way because this is usually shared in a “holding community.”  It is a participation:  a performance with no onlookers.  A group ritual.  

By contrast if there is oral language performed by one or several people with others as audience, it is likely to be in story-telling, structured as poetry, and as such it will draw on the mythic confabulations.  Now we’re evolved to Greek drama.  Later this material can be frozen by rationality into dogma.

When liturgy gets to the level of printed words (the Book) it is changed again because now some of the energy of spontaneity and individuality is moved to prescriptions, rules, and authorities.  Suppression becomes as important as expression.  When liturgy is written, there are implications about societies, judgments from outside the “holding community”, about what art does when it becomes a source of income, about what religion is when it has become an institution, a building, a hierarchy, a governing authority with the power to torture and kill, an exemption from secular authority.  Now there are letters, treaties, recorded laws, tablets brought down off of mountains.  Religious wars.   This is the chalice that will melt and set the fire free in a holocaust.

The pattern of liturgy I’m suggesting is not centered on print, not as Bible nor as the words to hymns nor as dogma and especially not on theology as a rational, argued, library-spawning enterprise.  I’m not attacking those things: I’m going around them, under them, previous to them.  What the people seek as spirituality, the experience of relationship to the universe, is not on the literary level of brain activity but rather much deeper, at least in the sense of identity, probably clear back to the proto-self, seeking survival through homeostasis, which is the maintenance of those conditions that support life.  Shelter, confidence, joy, the dance of the sea anemone bringing in sustenance, the oceanic feeling in the sea of the universe.  Belonging.

MALE AND FEMALE CREATED HE THEM

Back in the Eighties when I first entered the Unitarian Universalist ministry, the PNWD ministers had organized a study group for themselves which they called “Humptulips” because it sounds naughty and because it was held in a little town on the Washington coast with that name.  Actually it was a Native American name that meant a cold and rainy place, which it was.  Part of the mild “hazing” that this bunch imposed was assigning new ministers a topic for a scholarly paper that was meant to challenge the person.  So they assigned me the problem of defining the difference between male and female based religions.  It was the time of goddesses and all that, but I didn’t go there, and they knew it.  They were curious about how I would react.

When I looked at both the literature and at personal experience, especially with small experimental groups like the PNWD UU Leadership School group, I decided that the main difference was that the women wanted emotional fusion -- what I called a “hot tub” -- while the men wanted rationality -- what I called a glass phone booth.  (This is not new.)  In practical terms it meant that when it was time to cross the threshold into liminal space, the women went too quickly while the men held back.  (Suddenly they had to make a phone call.) but when it was time to end, the women dawdled in their seats while the men rushed out to pack the car for the drive home.

This matches up somewhat with Simon Baron-Cohen’s studies on the hormone called testosterone, which is often joked about, even unscientifically defined as a poison.  The general scientific indication -- with MANY qualifications about the variations and the impact of culture or personal experience -- is that high testosterone IN THE WOMB for whatever reason generally means high testosterone in the infant, regardless of whether it’s XX/female or XY/male.  (YY babies cannot survive.)  There are at least twenty-five genes that influence the production of testosterone, and it’s estimated that the molecule accounts for maybe forty per cent of the differences between male and female babies as they grow up.  The most salient difference between high and low testosterone babies (regardless of whether they were formally female or male) is that the high testosterone babies better understand systems like math and “hard” science but the low testosterone babies have more empathy and eye contact with humans.  (Given the usual bell-curves, of course.)

The wild card is one of Baron-Cohen’s primary interests:  is there something about testosterone that encourages autism?  More boys than girls have it.  Autism is a spectrum disease, meaning that you can have it a “little bit” or a lot, but it tends to affect boys more than girls.  It is diagnosed by behavior rather than any lab test, and behavior is always much affected by environment and personal experience, so there is nothing very “hard science” about this.  The study I’m drawing on is discussed at:  http://edge.org/conversation/testosterone-on-my-mind    The situation is complex because even if a body is drenched in testosterone, the molecule can’t do anything unless there are testosterone receptors in the body.   (I’ve always understood that high adrenaline in a mother who is carrying a baby will cause a female baby to have higher testosterone than usual but can discourage the development of testosterone in male babies.  I followed the issue when tests years ago showed that I was high androgen.  But I was also high cortisol, which can be a result of trauma, and I got more interested in that.  Especially in the city one often sees low-income, overweight women with male pattern baldness -- the results of stress cortisol.)

This Edge discussion was particularly interesting because it did NOT link testosterone to aggression or violence or sexual potency -- only to high comprehension of systems and lower empathy.   Though there was an interesting observation about the possibility of a “high system” person being able to figure out social patterns well enough to seem empathetic.  This would be an advantage for, say, a lawyer.  Another interesting question was whether a person could have too much empathy -- the expert opinion was that a person could feel what everyone else is feeling to such a great degree that they would neglect themselves.  No one noted that highly empathetic people can seem invasive. 

It’s quite usual for liturgies in many cultures to separate male from female.  No doubt there are many different reasons, depending on the circumstances.  For instance, the women will have the children with them and so be likely to be distracted or even to have to leave.  But also, when religion is defined as systems, reasoning about the gods or ethics, then those “superior” professorial types are likely to run headlong into the more emotional, elastic and case-by-case approach of the women if there is no separation.  Often the reason given for even curtaining off the women is that they are an erotic distraction.  This sounds like men’s self-congratulation to me.  Are they so easily aroused?

During the feminist movement among the UU’s, it became the fashion to perform liturgies restricted to women.  They were often patterned around merging, like pouring water together, and emotional attachment, like bringing the water from some beloved place.  When this ceremony was performed with the whole congregation in Bozeman, one man managed to evade emotion by bringing water from his kitchen tap and -- when it came time to testify about his connection -- explaining the city water system.  But it was a young boy who brought his jar of water with a living creature in it.

The Humptulips study group fell apart when braininess was valued less than it had been earlier and possibly also because there were more and more women ministers.  The earliest ordained females tended to be from the congregations of those ministers, to be older women, divorced (though not as many times as the male ministers), and to have had to work through some major challenges.  The men tended to have come to the ministry young, to have had wives who supported rather than competed, and so on.  But in the days when the ministers were all male, they took the occasion of “study groups” to become emotional, usually with the help of alcohol, and did a lot of ad hoc counseling with each other.  They dropped their testosterone curtain, one might say.  Even got into actual hot tubs.  It’s the thing to do in a cold and rainy place.