From the point of view of the British Empire -- which was a strange melding of international corporation, religion, and monarchy (Queen as CEO) -- “Rupert’s Land” in western Canada was simply a feeder for the Hudson’s Bay Company. The trapper’s trading forts there were profitable until fashions changed away from beaver-fur felt hats. Then the region became troublesome when even the buffalo were about gone and ersatz whiskey became the commodity for profit. Mounties restored order, but law enforcement always costs money.
In the meantime the factors who ran the forts and the adventurers who came to join the indigenous people in their world of nomadism on the prairie had mixed enough to create a new people, the Metis, who saw themselves as a nation. Their culture was a sturdy melding of creaking Red River carts (marginally better than travois), fiddles, hand-woven sashes, buckskin britches and stroud cloth shirts. But Canada/the Empire chose to ignore them mostly and so did the Hudson’s Bay Company. In this vacuum of power, the Red River people formed themselves into a true nation led by Louis Riel, a religious syncretist with burning eyes, and his brother, who was an excellent military tactician. This annoyed the Empire, esp. since the new nation threatened to be a refuge for those ever rebellious Irish and a foothold for those constantly alert French. So they sent military to disperse the new nation and hang the leaders. If this reminds you of Star Wars, it ought to. Pakistan? Yup. Iraq. Over and over.
The hunted Metis people came to Montana -- upstream from Choteau, tucked into St. Marys, fiddling and dancing in Heart Butte -- they became part of the peoples of Montana and particularly the Blackfeet. But they never forgot that they were capable of rebellion nor did they give up their independent consciences.
Larry Salois, descended from Metis more recently than is easy to imagine, was my UPS man. We exchanged information about history because, as he often said with brimming enthusiasm, “Every day as I make my deliveries I can see the history in every coulee, on every ridge, along every streambed.” We talked about “Strange Empire,” the definitive history written by Joseph Kinsey Howard, who was Metis. (Charlie Russell was not, but wore a Metis sash. Peter Bowen writes a vivid mystery series about a Metis fiddler.) I know a LOT of people named Salois. There are many French names on the Blackfeet rez.
The new “beaver felt hat” is wind energy. It is pushed along by international corporations who have been doing this in Europe for years. The problem in Montana has been shipping it out, which has been the same business problem from the beginning, or would have been without steamships on the Missouri and steam locomotives on the government-subsidized railroads which took eminent domain on the necessary land, timber and grass -- often from the Blackfeet. Wind energy, in the form of electricity, must be shipped out of Montana because there are not enough consumers in the state. One of the reasons electricity is relatively cheap in this state is that there’s no place else to sell it.
Clearly, transmission lines must be built to get the profit back into the wind. Three of these lines are underway: the Montana Alberta Tie Line (called MATL) which is being built by a Chinese box sequence of Canadian developers (Tonbridge); the “Green Line” between Great Falls and Townsend (a joint effort of Tonbridge and Gaelectric, which is Irish); and Mountain States Transmission Intertie (a project of Northwestern Energy). These entities are trying to buy right-of-way across the ranches but are running into resistance, sometimes because they’re a pain-in-the-butt to grain farmers, or maybe because people are nervous about the electromagnetic energy released by the lines, or because they are disrupting historical, geological, and natural history patterns. Some people don’t like the way they look, though they are far less conspicuous in the daytime than they are at night when windfarms are lit with red light so strong that they look like a landing pad for a starship.
The companies must file ecological statements that include rules like not disrupting wetlands or disturbing evidence of early life, whether Amerindian or prehistorical. (There’s plenty of both.) When the locations of the towers were marked, land owners went out to look and Larry discovered that on his land both wetlands and tipi rings indicating past tribal campgrounds were in the way. Therefore he asked that the line location be moved over a bit. Until this was done he refused to sell (actually he is acting on behalf of his mother who is in a nursing home). The company’s response was to use public condemnation, a process in which private land is seized for the public good. No one likes it. Ever.
The MATL line is already making mistakes, breaking its own agreement by misplacing towers and destroying archeological and wetland sites. (A truck got stuck in the mud and by the time a bulldozer got it out, the land was rutted and uprooted.) When hauled before the regulators, the latter simply changed the rules to be more convenient. But the real import of this collision of interests was asserted by Larry’s lawyer, Hertha Lund. Condemnation is a process meant for the public good IN THE NATION WHERE THE LAW APPLIES. Tonbridge et al is Canadian. What business does a for-profit corporation based in foreign country, friendly as it may be, have using a “public good” law in the USA? District Judge Laurie McKinnon ruled there was no justification. There will be an appeal, of course. We can cross our fingers for Larry Salois and his mother.
But behind the scenes, where we have no access -- not even Wikileaks -- we can only imagine the negotiations. If Tonbridge and Gaelectric are stalled, that’s all the better for Northwestern Energy, but the latter is a South Dakota Country. Good old dependable Montana Power committed suicide, hanged themselves with delusions of cybergrandeur. Republicans, torn between profits and nationalism, will be confused.
Some people around here read history. They are aware of how nations and corporations are entwined, have been since Anaconda gripped Montana. The whole planet is in a Laocoonian tangle over boundaries, profits, rules and violence. Probably Larry, like myself, sees this present struggle as only an extension of the Euro-intrusion over the centuries. In the meantime, the Blackfeet Business Council sent a formal endorsement of Larry Salois’ desire to protect the land.
Saturday, December 18, 2010
Friday, December 17, 2010
ELEGY: A Review and Reflection
Good thing I didn’t know “Elegy” was based on a Philip Roth novella. I would not have rented the film since I find Roth whiny, self-centered and exploitative. But, filtered through a Spanish female director, Isabel Coixit, it is delicious. Things start right off with an interesting clip of the “culture critic” played by Ben Kingsley being interviewed by the actual Charlie Rose about Merrymount. As it happens, I know about Merrymount. Go look it up. Roth would have loved it. It’s in the pedigree of UUism, esp. in California.
Part of our fascination with an old man having an affair with a young woman is that in our culture it is considered disgusting, or so my students informed me when at twenty-one I fell in love with a man near fifty. Disgust, which is a pale form of horror and a dark form of social control, says that only the prescribed template may be used. Roth loves this disgust thing and has “played with it” all his life, so now he’s down to the idea of the “dirty old man.” And breast cancer addressed with surgery. Disgusting. Who can bear to think of it? And then the laughable trace of a child’s horror, when this old culture critic -- who knows everything -- hears from his elegant young lover about her early boyfriend’s fascination was watching her menstruate. Eeeuuugghhhh. (As the professor asks, “Just how does that work, anyway?”) But horror zombies are always close to laughable, unraveling as they stagger. Enough about Roth.
Reading through the comments on imdb.com, I see that this movie makes a pretty good inkblog [sic -- good typo] test. You already know my bias, which is “been there, done that.” Well, the May/December thing anyway. What I see in the movie is two people who make deep and intimate contact, symbolized but not exhausted by sex. They are impossibly separated, not just by age but also by culture. More than that, this is a man who is solitary. She is social. Their boundaries don’t match. The reviewers all talk about “fear of commitment” but that’s not it. Not ALL of it. Relationship can be a cage.
A person with an intellectual life one can share it, which is wonderful, but that becomes a problem if the other person is not in sync because of culture, age or goals. One of the readers of “Bronze Inside and Out” remarked, “I can see that one of the key difficulties was the liberal/conservative thing.” This man in the story already has a sexual life with a woman who has no interest in his intellectual life. It’s friendly and, though some will consider it morally disgusting, it’s managed gracefully enough until the woman hits her limit, which is competition. She’s a business woman: she wants exclusive and dependable.
It’s the relationship with his colleague that is truly intimate. Much is made of them being “womanizers” and “not growing up.” The secret truth is that to have an intense emotional connection through intellectual life is almost by definition not to grow up, which means (by definition) to put away childish things like playing with ideas in order to pay the bills, mark the events, socialize, and let one’s spouse become a support system, which he or she WILL try to turn into a capture mechanism. Both of the women in this movie do that. Women want guaranteed continuity, which is a way of saying “domesticity.” The Cruz character thinks that the Dennis Hopper character cheating on his wife is “disgusting.” But the Hopper character stays with his wife. He has as deep a connection with her as with his Kingsley friend. He kisses them both.
In fact, the Kingsley character’s own son (VERY grown up and playing the consoling father to HIS father, talk about age mixups) has his problems, too. He wants TWO conventional committed marriages with children and domesticity. That won’t work either. It’s not a question of escaping the damage of being a limited human -- the question is “where would you like your damage?”
Here I am defending Philip Roth who is a man one recently communicating lit prof would call a pathological narcissist liar. Well, we all are to some degree. If we can get away with it. And if we’re self-examining enough to even consider the possibility. Does it make it all right -- or even a little better -- if you admit it’s true? It sells books.
This is a very beautiful movie with sets in the espresso/latte/caramel mode (with ice blue) that has become fashionable. All the acting is superb. In fact, the story line is an old threadbare one. But the artful execution is dark chocolate rum truffle. Delicious. The deeper issue, of course, is universal. If you only have one body and one lifetime and one, well, “mind,” then how do you allocate it? What choices ought you to make? And some of the early choices will “entrain” other choices that you might not have expected. The awareness that makes the Kingsley character love the Cruz character is also the awareness that steps back in order to leave her free of his aging.
Throwing in the cancer is not playing fair, but it sure plays to the audience, and as the Kingsley character says, when you look at it from one point in your life it’s quite different from looking at it much later, because you will have changed. I mean, when I was an undergrad and later, I dearly loved fifty-year-old men because they were just to the point where they were becoming tender and a little more, um, “largo.” Now that I’m seventy-one, a fifty-year-old man is the age my child would be if I’d had children. In short, Ben Kingsley is too young for me because sexual old women are even MORE disgusting than old men.
This whole story is for older professional guys who have reason to interact with glamorous but intelligent young women. I haven’t watched many academic men try to work their way through these dilemmas (maybe Richard Stern, a friend of Roth’s), but I have closely witnessed ministers, which makes it even more potentially disgusting in a moral way. But even harder for them, because they know just how cultural and situational disgust is -- strict and yet a far easier moral measure than justice. Posters about sexual harassment don’t even come close to addressing the problem of betrayed children and estranged wives. And this movie presumes that everyone has lots of money. Hardly typical.
What the movie does defend is the phenomenon of falling in love with someone quite irregardless of age, culture, education, appearance -- there IS something that can make a connection between people that is deep, intense, instant and beyond definition. In the early Sixties there was a tall, slender, young man with glasses who had just sold a turkey farm in order to get a Ph.D. in philosophy. He walked through the door of the museum and I loved him. Right then and right there. I didn’t go with him when he asked. I threw away his phone number. I’ve often wondered whether he would read this blog some day. We are about the same age.
Part of our fascination with an old man having an affair with a young woman is that in our culture it is considered disgusting, or so my students informed me when at twenty-one I fell in love with a man near fifty. Disgust, which is a pale form of horror and a dark form of social control, says that only the prescribed template may be used. Roth loves this disgust thing and has “played with it” all his life, so now he’s down to the idea of the “dirty old man.” And breast cancer addressed with surgery. Disgusting. Who can bear to think of it? And then the laughable trace of a child’s horror, when this old culture critic -- who knows everything -- hears from his elegant young lover about her early boyfriend’s fascination was watching her menstruate. Eeeuuugghhhh. (As the professor asks, “Just how does that work, anyway?”) But horror zombies are always close to laughable, unraveling as they stagger. Enough about Roth.
Reading through the comments on imdb.com, I see that this movie makes a pretty good inkblog [sic -- good typo] test. You already know my bias, which is “been there, done that.” Well, the May/December thing anyway. What I see in the movie is two people who make deep and intimate contact, symbolized but not exhausted by sex. They are impossibly separated, not just by age but also by culture. More than that, this is a man who is solitary. She is social. Their boundaries don’t match. The reviewers all talk about “fear of commitment” but that’s not it. Not ALL of it. Relationship can be a cage.
A person with an intellectual life one can share it, which is wonderful, but that becomes a problem if the other person is not in sync because of culture, age or goals. One of the readers of “Bronze Inside and Out” remarked, “I can see that one of the key difficulties was the liberal/conservative thing.” This man in the story already has a sexual life with a woman who has no interest in his intellectual life. It’s friendly and, though some will consider it morally disgusting, it’s managed gracefully enough until the woman hits her limit, which is competition. She’s a business woman: she wants exclusive and dependable.
It’s the relationship with his colleague that is truly intimate. Much is made of them being “womanizers” and “not growing up.” The secret truth is that to have an intense emotional connection through intellectual life is almost by definition not to grow up, which means (by definition) to put away childish things like playing with ideas in order to pay the bills, mark the events, socialize, and let one’s spouse become a support system, which he or she WILL try to turn into a capture mechanism. Both of the women in this movie do that. Women want guaranteed continuity, which is a way of saying “domesticity.” The Cruz character thinks that the Dennis Hopper character cheating on his wife is “disgusting.” But the Hopper character stays with his wife. He has as deep a connection with her as with his Kingsley friend. He kisses them both.
In fact, the Kingsley character’s own son (VERY grown up and playing the consoling father to HIS father, talk about age mixups) has his problems, too. He wants TWO conventional committed marriages with children and domesticity. That won’t work either. It’s not a question of escaping the damage of being a limited human -- the question is “where would you like your damage?”
Here I am defending Philip Roth who is a man one recently communicating lit prof would call a pathological narcissist liar. Well, we all are to some degree. If we can get away with it. And if we’re self-examining enough to even consider the possibility. Does it make it all right -- or even a little better -- if you admit it’s true? It sells books.
This is a very beautiful movie with sets in the espresso/latte/caramel mode (with ice blue) that has become fashionable. All the acting is superb. In fact, the story line is an old threadbare one. But the artful execution is dark chocolate rum truffle. Delicious. The deeper issue, of course, is universal. If you only have one body and one lifetime and one, well, “mind,” then how do you allocate it? What choices ought you to make? And some of the early choices will “entrain” other choices that you might not have expected. The awareness that makes the Kingsley character love the Cruz character is also the awareness that steps back in order to leave her free of his aging.
Throwing in the cancer is not playing fair, but it sure plays to the audience, and as the Kingsley character says, when you look at it from one point in your life it’s quite different from looking at it much later, because you will have changed. I mean, when I was an undergrad and later, I dearly loved fifty-year-old men because they were just to the point where they were becoming tender and a little more, um, “largo.” Now that I’m seventy-one, a fifty-year-old man is the age my child would be if I’d had children. In short, Ben Kingsley is too young for me because sexual old women are even MORE disgusting than old men.
This whole story is for older professional guys who have reason to interact with glamorous but intelligent young women. I haven’t watched many academic men try to work their way through these dilemmas (maybe Richard Stern, a friend of Roth’s), but I have closely witnessed ministers, which makes it even more potentially disgusting in a moral way. But even harder for them, because they know just how cultural and situational disgust is -- strict and yet a far easier moral measure than justice. Posters about sexual harassment don’t even come close to addressing the problem of betrayed children and estranged wives. And this movie presumes that everyone has lots of money. Hardly typical.
What the movie does defend is the phenomenon of falling in love with someone quite irregardless of age, culture, education, appearance -- there IS something that can make a connection between people that is deep, intense, instant and beyond definition. In the early Sixties there was a tall, slender, young man with glasses who had just sold a turkey farm in order to get a Ph.D. in philosophy. He walked through the door of the museum and I loved him. Right then and right there. I didn’t go with him when he asked. I threw away his phone number. I’ve often wondered whether he would read this blog some day. We are about the same age.
Thursday, December 16, 2010
"THE FOUNTAIN: Review and Reflection"
At the moment Darren Aronovsky is riding high with “Black Swan,” his ballet movie about the dual nature of women, that old virgin/whore split with stereotypes intact and dosed up with a bit of horror. (I haven’t seen it.) But an earlier movie is “The Fountain,” a syncretistic spiritual triptych about death in three aspects: the modern scientific determination to overcome death; the Spanish Inquisition’s understanding of suffering death and damnation; and the Mayan idea of death as a resurrection/rebirth. Somehow the answer comes out Buddhist, yin/yang, two things meshing together -- the main character clasps his hands with “the woman on top.” Maybe always the best stories are the reinventions of very old ones.
All through this movie I kept thinking of H. Rider Haggard’s African novel, “She,” in which a glorious woman, when aged, can step into a shaft of fire that returns her to youth. The hero has no such magic, so he must meet her again and again through history as a sort of reincarnation. I read it in high school and can almost tell you where it was on the shelf in the stacks, not on the open shelves. Even then it was a bit of a moldy oldy, but for days and weeks I was hypnotized.
Some of our best thinkers believed that once we saw the photo of the planet taken from outer space, our religions would ALL have to make room for it and certainly I saw it tacked up behind the altar in the old Heart Butte Catholic church. It is the motif for the Whole Earth Catalog that was and is a sort of Bible for some of us. But now we’ve become ever more photographically overwhelmed by the gorgeousness of outer space in the star nurseries where we see a dance that happened millions of years ago and then again we are ravished by the echoing beauty of the inner webbing of our own bones or of sea coral or the deep filamental structure of cells. We can see the atoms in molecules which look like the stars in the galaxies. A symmetry. A map to awe.
The dark promise of wealth that was Africa has now given way to the vegetal promise of Meso-American jungles, tropical trees with magical bark -- maybe truly that second tree from the Garden of Eden, the one everyone forgets except in this movie. Give up good and evil and apples. What about the bark of the tree of eternal life?
In the “transcendent” spaceship part of the story, the man and the remnants of a tree journey together in a bubble. Any Blackfeet could recognize this as a burial tree, but it is subtly alive. When the man puts his hand near, the hairs on it, like the hairs on his lover’s nape, stir and reach. "Everything is all right," he whispers.
Netflix gave this movie 2 stars. IMDB gives it more than 7. There are a LOT of reviews. Here’s an “intellectual” quote from “warren-10 in SF”
“I would like to read Paul Schrader's review of this film. Not because he wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver, but because he wrote a book about "Transcendental Style in Film" and "The Fountain" is certainly in this category of film-making.
“Because of Schrader's book, I've been viewing as many films by Dreyer, Ozu, and Bresson, that I can lay my hands on – especially those by Robert Bresson. There are many parallels between Aronofsky's film and Bresson, and yet their style is completely different – it's like comparing a Tintype photograph with a Van Gogh: Bresson is understated while Aronofsky is over the top.” O starry night!
Another reviewer says more simply: “It is an art film, a discussion piece, a beautiful poem about the fragility of life and the idea of forever.”
I say this is syncretistic religion, gathering up symbols we’ve all learned, giving them vivid embodiment, and coming to what might be called (WAS called) “the perennial philosophy,” -- http://www.amazon.com/Perennial-Philosophy-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0060901918 -- that everything is connected, everything is moving, nothing is ever lost -- only transformed.
One of the virtues of this movie is that it doesn’t preach all that much -- its principle is “show -- don’t tell.” So we see this male goal-oriented handsome conquerer (one of Hugh Jackman's other roles was “Wolverine.”) is so focused on saving his wife that he has no time for her. He’s a brain surgeon!! Rachel Weisz as the wife has a patient strength. (She had a child with Aronovsky, who clearly thinks a movie director is as good as a brain surgeon.) She writes, which is one way the action story is folded in. When we get to the Mayan warrior with the flaming sword who guards the tree (the Green Knight) he is more amazing than armor, but more of a Blakean event than Vesuvial. A true Green Man. So now we’re in Celtic territory.
I’m trying to give you some reference handholds. In case you’ve mislaid your Joe Campbell and someone borrowed your Mircea Eliade books, you might try this website. http://www.religionandnature.com/
The amber-streaked sepia frames are like old master paintings. I always appreciate the crew discussions of what they were doing. This movie is remarkable for the handling of light by cinematographer Matthew Libatique (from Queens, NYC) and the sets by James Chinlund, who looks like a kid with a blonde ponytail but is clearly far beyond that. These are people who work together repeatedly.
The idea here is that everything is a sort of passage, that legendary experience of dying in which one moves down a dark tunnel towards a bright light which some believe is also what it feels like to be born. Every set is a hallway, a canyon, a tunnel, a long entryway -- all bordered by lights like an airport runway. A car rushes along a road upside down, there’s a camera somersault and it goes on rightsideup. The same thing happens with a galloping horse. The light is golden, muted, speckled with candle flames or small fires, or -- in the lab hallway -- lit by successive pools of overhead light. When there is an epiphany, the screen floods with white light, usually justified realistically: the hero throws the doctor against the closed blinds which fall, letting in direct sunlight.
This is trivia from imdb.com. “Tom's last name is Creo which is Latin for "I create." Creo also means "I believe" in Spanish. Izzi Creo (the version of her name on her grave) is a close phonetic translation for "Y sí, creo," Spanish for "And yes, I do believe". What this means to me is that at last maybe we’re getting past the obsession with whether there is “god the father” and getting to “world.” With strong hints of “woman as tree.” The old UU hymnal had on its cover Yddrasill, the world tree, which leans over the spring of eternal life (okay, fountain if you must) and drops acorns into the water which are eaten by salmon who therefore become wise. (The only nut-eating fish I know of are in the South American tropics where they swim under flooded jungle.)
The circles recur and recur. In the end the man makes ink over a little fire and draws circles up his arm, echoing the circles of trees that record the years. I have a near-irresistible impulse to get a Sharpie and draw rings up my arm. Maybe I will.
All through this movie I kept thinking of H. Rider Haggard’s African novel, “She,” in which a glorious woman, when aged, can step into a shaft of fire that returns her to youth. The hero has no such magic, so he must meet her again and again through history as a sort of reincarnation. I read it in high school and can almost tell you where it was on the shelf in the stacks, not on the open shelves. Even then it was a bit of a moldy oldy, but for days and weeks I was hypnotized.
Some of our best thinkers believed that once we saw the photo of the planet taken from outer space, our religions would ALL have to make room for it and certainly I saw it tacked up behind the altar in the old Heart Butte Catholic church. It is the motif for the Whole Earth Catalog that was and is a sort of Bible for some of us. But now we’ve become ever more photographically overwhelmed by the gorgeousness of outer space in the star nurseries where we see a dance that happened millions of years ago and then again we are ravished by the echoing beauty of the inner webbing of our own bones or of sea coral or the deep filamental structure of cells. We can see the atoms in molecules which look like the stars in the galaxies. A symmetry. A map to awe.
The dark promise of wealth that was Africa has now given way to the vegetal promise of Meso-American jungles, tropical trees with magical bark -- maybe truly that second tree from the Garden of Eden, the one everyone forgets except in this movie. Give up good and evil and apples. What about the bark of the tree of eternal life?
In the “transcendent” spaceship part of the story, the man and the remnants of a tree journey together in a bubble. Any Blackfeet could recognize this as a burial tree, but it is subtly alive. When the man puts his hand near, the hairs on it, like the hairs on his lover’s nape, stir and reach. "Everything is all right," he whispers.
Netflix gave this movie 2 stars. IMDB gives it more than 7. There are a LOT of reviews. Here’s an “intellectual” quote from “warren-10 in SF”
“I would like to read Paul Schrader's review of this film. Not because he wrote the screenplay for Taxi Driver, but because he wrote a book about "Transcendental Style in Film" and "The Fountain" is certainly in this category of film-making.
“Because of Schrader's book, I've been viewing as many films by Dreyer, Ozu, and Bresson, that I can lay my hands on – especially those by Robert Bresson. There are many parallels between Aronofsky's film and Bresson, and yet their style is completely different – it's like comparing a Tintype photograph with a Van Gogh: Bresson is understated while Aronofsky is over the top.” O starry night!
Another reviewer says more simply: “It is an art film, a discussion piece, a beautiful poem about the fragility of life and the idea of forever.”
I say this is syncretistic religion, gathering up symbols we’ve all learned, giving them vivid embodiment, and coming to what might be called (WAS called) “the perennial philosophy,” -- http://www.amazon.com/Perennial-Philosophy-Aldous-Huxley/dp/0060901918 -- that everything is connected, everything is moving, nothing is ever lost -- only transformed.
One of the virtues of this movie is that it doesn’t preach all that much -- its principle is “show -- don’t tell.” So we see this male goal-oriented handsome conquerer (one of Hugh Jackman's other roles was “Wolverine.”) is so focused on saving his wife that he has no time for her. He’s a brain surgeon!! Rachel Weisz as the wife has a patient strength. (She had a child with Aronovsky, who clearly thinks a movie director is as good as a brain surgeon.) She writes, which is one way the action story is folded in. When we get to the Mayan warrior with the flaming sword who guards the tree (the Green Knight) he is more amazing than armor, but more of a Blakean event than Vesuvial. A true Green Man. So now we’re in Celtic territory.
I’m trying to give you some reference handholds. In case you’ve mislaid your Joe Campbell and someone borrowed your Mircea Eliade books, you might try this website. http://www.religionandnature.com/
The amber-streaked sepia frames are like old master paintings. I always appreciate the crew discussions of what they were doing. This movie is remarkable for the handling of light by cinematographer Matthew Libatique (from Queens, NYC) and the sets by James Chinlund, who looks like a kid with a blonde ponytail but is clearly far beyond that. These are people who work together repeatedly.
The idea here is that everything is a sort of passage, that legendary experience of dying in which one moves down a dark tunnel towards a bright light which some believe is also what it feels like to be born. Every set is a hallway, a canyon, a tunnel, a long entryway -- all bordered by lights like an airport runway. A car rushes along a road upside down, there’s a camera somersault and it goes on rightsideup. The same thing happens with a galloping horse. The light is golden, muted, speckled with candle flames or small fires, or -- in the lab hallway -- lit by successive pools of overhead light. When there is an epiphany, the screen floods with white light, usually justified realistically: the hero throws the doctor against the closed blinds which fall, letting in direct sunlight.
This is trivia from imdb.com. “Tom's last name is Creo which is Latin for "I create." Creo also means "I believe" in Spanish. Izzi Creo (the version of her name on her grave) is a close phonetic translation for "Y sí, creo," Spanish for "And yes, I do believe". What this means to me is that at last maybe we’re getting past the obsession with whether there is “god the father” and getting to “world.” With strong hints of “woman as tree.” The old UU hymnal had on its cover Yddrasill, the world tree, which leans over the spring of eternal life (okay, fountain if you must) and drops acorns into the water which are eaten by salmon who therefore become wise. (The only nut-eating fish I know of are in the South American tropics where they swim under flooded jungle.)
The circles recur and recur. In the end the man makes ink over a little fire and draws circles up his arm, echoing the circles of trees that record the years. I have a near-irresistible impulse to get a Sharpie and draw rings up my arm. Maybe I will.
Wednesday, December 15, 2010
PERFUME REDUX
The first post I wrote about perfume was sort of off-hand, a simple list of the perfumes I’ve worn over the years, where they came from (sometimes gifts, esp. in the beginning) and what they have meant. I’ve always been very interested in smells for some reason.
Then I read “The Emperor of Scent” by Chandler Burr about Luca Turin and was impressed at his analysis of scent theory and the scramble of science, perfume politics, industrial scent management (deodorants and soaps mostly -- I’m the only person I know who buys dish soap and bar soap according to smell), and simple opportunism. In fact, I sent Turin a fan letter and got back a come-on that assumed I was shopping for some kind of commercial use of his knowledge.
Lately perfume has seemed to be linked with celebrity, a kind of accompaniment to fame that started with the couturiers, most famously with Chanel, and is now lamentably connected to movie stars, transient vixens promoting forgettable flower scents. (One would expect more “musk” in such linked smells -- at least I have strong memories of the tomcat reek of our pet fox in heat.) The idea seems to be to pretend to be very sexy and available but at the same signal that one is innocent, even child-like, which I suspect is an American desiderata. We don’t like snakes in our Edens and are always upset when we find them.
On the European front, there was that remarkable book, evidently about a true case, about a man who murdered young women for reasons of scent. It became a movie, a horror movie, which brings up that issue of “disgust” (smells are more easily disgusting than any other sense), and now begins to make me ask why we mix horror and elegance or at least glamour. Is it an attempt to be extreme? Is it somehow an excuse for horror or a warning to stay away from fascination with glamour? Or is it raw sex, hoping for arousal? Darren Aronovsky appears to be playing with this in his new “Black Swan” movie. Is it a way of trying to reach for transcendence? Perfume as the ultimate emotion? Proust’s metaphor?
So I look at Amazon’s list of books about perfume and find: “Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan” (New Cultural Studies)” by Richard Halpern. One reviewer suggests this book confirms that Lacan is nearly impossible to understand, which is a relief since I share that opinion, but the cover is Mona Lisa -- will we find out what perfume she wears? And much of the content is about Shakespeare’s fascination with both the beautiful boy and the dark lady -- are we supposed to guess what they smell like? Halpern is at Johns Hopkins University, so you are not likely to find this book erotic. The cultural level is bound to be in the ozone. I’ve downloaded a chapter. I’ll let you know.
But I want to come back to one of my fav blogs,called “1000 fragrances” at coifanoctavian@gmail.com It is a door to many other perfume blogs, some of which are more interested in the bottle than the contents, and lots of books. Even sources for famous perfumes, if you have the money. Evidently there are people who look for elegant but elderly ladies who would like to sell the remnants of their collected perfumes. Or perhaps they have departed and you’re looking for an estate sale. Some of the perfumes will have changed over the decades and some of the bottles will be nearly impossible to open without shattering since the perfume has become lacquer and sealed the stopper against eternity.
This man provides reviews of new perfumes as well as some old ones. Though I knew that perfume is layered and meshed in complicated ways, I did not appreciate that they are a time art, unfolding on the skin over the minutes. They also have a lot of history and they are recognizable as the work of specific scent artists in the same way as paintings. Here’s his review of Faberge’s “Tigress,” a scent I wore in high school:
“Tigress is a floral woody aldehydic perfume descending from several less known perfume created in the 1920's based on the accord rose - Sophora + Mellitis - balsamic sweet note - aldehydes. It has 2 distant cousins: one is ToscaBois des Iles (Chanel) for the sweet woody facet. Its origin could be traced back to the many interpretations of Le Parfum Ideal, but unlike the rich Houbigant creation where many expensive naturals where underlined by few synthetics, Tigress redefines the balance with modern, less precious materials and with a strong accent on the woody dry facet. It gives you the feeling of a classic abstract perfume where the powdery balsamic musky drydown notes are contrasted by the aldehydic fresh top note. The citrus top has an unusual light fruity raspberry note that surrounds the sweet rose bouquet. Tigress, launched almost 40 years after Le Parfum Idéal (and without an obvious connection), shows a very important difference in the floral vision. Amour Amour (Jean Patou) has been there showing a very different interpretation of the rose-jasmine-lilac-lily of the valley idea. Tigress is not sweet and opulent but has a certain dryness characteristic of the vetiver-sandalwood notes. The drydown of the perfume is wrapped in several balsamic notes (benzoin, tolu), a very light ambery-opopanax, vanilla, a lot of salycilates with a cinnamon carnation, and musks giving a certain powdery facet to the perfume. The rose-cyclamen- honey accord is very alluring with its lightness floating over an orris-vetiver-sweet tonka notes.”
That’s not all he says, but it’s enough to give you an idea. This is a smell (indeed that particular “family” of Faberge smells) that is popular enough that “The Vermont Country Store” -- which specializes in old-fashioned stuff like original Vicks and historic candies -- sometimes carries it along with “Joy” and “Evening in Paris,” that famous bourgeois bit of glamor in a blue bottle. I have no mental note of either smell, but I can smell “Tigress” in my memory as surely as madeleines in tea.
Then I read “The Emperor of Scent” by Chandler Burr about Luca Turin and was impressed at his analysis of scent theory and the scramble of science, perfume politics, industrial scent management (deodorants and soaps mostly -- I’m the only person I know who buys dish soap and bar soap according to smell), and simple opportunism. In fact, I sent Turin a fan letter and got back a come-on that assumed I was shopping for some kind of commercial use of his knowledge.
Lately perfume has seemed to be linked with celebrity, a kind of accompaniment to fame that started with the couturiers, most famously with Chanel, and is now lamentably connected to movie stars, transient vixens promoting forgettable flower scents. (One would expect more “musk” in such linked smells -- at least I have strong memories of the tomcat reek of our pet fox in heat.) The idea seems to be to pretend to be very sexy and available but at the same signal that one is innocent, even child-like, which I suspect is an American desiderata. We don’t like snakes in our Edens and are always upset when we find them.
On the European front, there was that remarkable book, evidently about a true case, about a man who murdered young women for reasons of scent. It became a movie, a horror movie, which brings up that issue of “disgust” (smells are more easily disgusting than any other sense), and now begins to make me ask why we mix horror and elegance or at least glamour. Is it an attempt to be extreme? Is it somehow an excuse for horror or a warning to stay away from fascination with glamour? Or is it raw sex, hoping for arousal? Darren Aronovsky appears to be playing with this in his new “Black Swan” movie. Is it a way of trying to reach for transcendence? Perfume as the ultimate emotion? Proust’s metaphor?
So I look at Amazon’s list of books about perfume and find: “Shakespeare's Perfume: Sodomy and Sublimity in the Sonnets, Wilde, Freud, and Lacan” (New Cultural Studies)” by Richard Halpern. One reviewer suggests this book confirms that Lacan is nearly impossible to understand, which is a relief since I share that opinion, but the cover is Mona Lisa -- will we find out what perfume she wears? And much of the content is about Shakespeare’s fascination with both the beautiful boy and the dark lady -- are we supposed to guess what they smell like? Halpern is at Johns Hopkins University, so you are not likely to find this book erotic. The cultural level is bound to be in the ozone. I’ve downloaded a chapter. I’ll let you know.
But I want to come back to one of my fav blogs,called “1000 fragrances” at coifanoctavian@gmail.com It is a door to many other perfume blogs, some of which are more interested in the bottle than the contents, and lots of books. Even sources for famous perfumes, if you have the money. Evidently there are people who look for elegant but elderly ladies who would like to sell the remnants of their collected perfumes. Or perhaps they have departed and you’re looking for an estate sale. Some of the perfumes will have changed over the decades and some of the bottles will be nearly impossible to open without shattering since the perfume has become lacquer and sealed the stopper against eternity.
This man provides reviews of new perfumes as well as some old ones. Though I knew that perfume is layered and meshed in complicated ways, I did not appreciate that they are a time art, unfolding on the skin over the minutes. They also have a lot of history and they are recognizable as the work of specific scent artists in the same way as paintings. Here’s his review of Faberge’s “Tigress,” a scent I wore in high school:
“Tigress is a floral woody aldehydic perfume descending from several less known perfume created in the 1920's based on the accord rose - Sophora + Mellitis - balsamic sweet note - aldehydes. It has 2 distant cousins: one is ToscaBois des Iles (Chanel) for the sweet woody facet. Its origin could be traced back to the many interpretations of Le Parfum Ideal, but unlike the rich Houbigant creation where many expensive naturals where underlined by few synthetics, Tigress redefines the balance with modern, less precious materials and with a strong accent on the woody dry facet. It gives you the feeling of a classic abstract perfume where the powdery balsamic musky drydown notes are contrasted by the aldehydic fresh top note. The citrus top has an unusual light fruity raspberry note that surrounds the sweet rose bouquet. Tigress, launched almost 40 years after Le Parfum Idéal (and without an obvious connection), shows a very important difference in the floral vision. Amour Amour (Jean Patou) has been there showing a very different interpretation of the rose-jasmine-lilac-lily of the valley idea. Tigress is not sweet and opulent but has a certain dryness characteristic of the vetiver-sandalwood notes. The drydown of the perfume is wrapped in several balsamic notes (benzoin, tolu), a very light ambery-opopanax, vanilla, a lot of salycilates with a cinnamon carnation, and musks giving a certain powdery facet to the perfume. The rose-cyclamen- honey accord is very alluring with its lightness floating over an orris-vetiver-sweet tonka notes.”
That’s not all he says, but it’s enough to give you an idea. This is a smell (indeed that particular “family” of Faberge smells) that is popular enough that “The Vermont Country Store” -- which specializes in old-fashioned stuff like original Vicks and historic candies -- sometimes carries it along with “Joy” and “Evening in Paris,” that famous bourgeois bit of glamor in a blue bottle. I have no mental note of either smell, but I can smell “Tigress” in my memory as surely as madeleines in tea.
Tuesday, December 14, 2010
IT WAS THE DYNAMIC HOST CONFIGURATION PROTOCOL
I’m back. It was a fraught 24 hours.
First resource was my 3rivers techies, several shifts of them. Then it was the MAC techies in California. And then the “legacy” MAC techies and finally the eMAC techies. One woman exclaimed (heartfelt), “Oh, I just LOVE eMacs!” I write their names down as I go. (They have a ticket number identifying my prob and me.) Monica, Kyle, Beaufort, Thomas, Jacob, Kimberly, Shane, Lyndell, Andrew, Shayna, Noland, et al.
First suggestion: unplug everything (not just turn it off), leave it for an hour and come back. That worked the first time but never again.
Second suggestion: You must replace your phone connection line.
Third suggestion: You must replace your splitter.
Fourth: You must replace your ethernet connector.
Fifth: You will have to pay the $50 fee for real help from MAC.
Sixth: (a techie who spent time in Heart Butte) “We’d better smudge.” Actually that was my idea, but it made him laugh because he knew what I meant.
The symptom was that I’d gone offline from my provider (3rivers) and could not get back on. I waited until Monday morning to get the new phone line, but had to drive to Conrad (thirty miles away) to get the new splitter and ethernet connector. None of this made a difference. $25 gone up in smoke.
The computer has some self-contained diagnostics and guides which I read and stepped through over and over. Gradually I began to understand that 3rivers uses a form of connection called Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). I think this means that instead of having an assigned server, you are moved back and forth as traffic demands. I accused my provider of bumping me off entirely in order to make more room for other people, since I typically couldn’t get on between 3PM and 11PM, but could at other times. They heatedly denied this as it is against the law. Some techies (not 3rivers) agreed they could and did.
One problem was so deep into the process that no one but the eMAC legacy guy knew what to do. It was about locking and unlocking changes. He was able to address it only because of the constant exchange of such information among dedicated techies which continues on line, at beer blasts, in libraries, and so on in the constant buzzy process of interacting with the Internet in the most specific tiny ways. Most people endorse free sharing and even the techies recommended the online support communities: apple.com/support and apple.com/discussions. I’m sure there are forums specifically for eMAC. But one techie (local) stubbornly insisted that he could not and would not help me unless I spent the $50 bucks for MAC to explain what was wrong with my DHCP.
In the end it turned out to be code corrosion -- that is, my DHCP operating software had lost potency. A reinstall did the job. Andrew, who is the lead techie at 3rivers, suggested it. I had already reinstalled the applications, which didn’t work. So about midnight last night I was back on line.
Then there were two probs left. The first was the pile-up of unread emails -- I get a LOT of them, mostly automated, and I’m careful to at least glance at them unless I really KNOW I don’t want to read them. I wish I’d known to delete one in the avalanche: it was a personal attack from an academic so unreasonable that I wondered a) if this were really from the purported source and 2) whether he had developed a brain tumor. (It contained atypical grammatical errors.)
The other prob or issue or whatever is wondering how my DHCP had gotten so corrupted. Did a hacker simply delete it? Did I use it so often I wore it out? Should I do something to prevent future probs? (If it WERE a hacker, I could name some suspects.) Should I change my security settings? Already Target says I’m too secure for them to deal with -- I block their cookies.) But I know from experience that codes DO get corrupted. The first remedy for everything is to reboot, and the second is to reinstall.
In the spirit of sharing, I pass all this on. But it is not digested yet.
I keep remembering a January long ago when my father-in-law was hospitalized miles away and our phone was shut off for nonpayment, because Bob stubbornly insisted on paying his bills once a month, regardless of when they came in. This did not mesh very well with the new phone company manager. We really needed that phone ON, so I set out to get ‘er done. I called the local office. She could do nothing. I asked for the boss’s name. He answered in his office but he said he could do nothing. I asked for HIS boss’s name, some place back east, but he would not answer his phone. I went to the company receptionist and asked HIS boss’s name. He couldn’t be reached because he was vacationing in Hawaii. I invented a ruse for calling him at his resort in Hawaii. He answered. I explained. Ten minutes later the phone was turned back on.
They CAN reach into your computer, particularly an eMAC, which is designed for that.
I remembered another incident back there in the past when Joe Davis, an old cowboy friend of ours, got so incensed with his phone that he ripped it out of the wall, took it down to the phone office (it was closed), smashed it up enough to feed it through the letter slot and never had another phone again.
But I really LOVE my eMAC!
First resource was my 3rivers techies, several shifts of them. Then it was the MAC techies in California. And then the “legacy” MAC techies and finally the eMAC techies. One woman exclaimed (heartfelt), “Oh, I just LOVE eMacs!” I write their names down as I go. (They have a ticket number identifying my prob and me.) Monica, Kyle, Beaufort, Thomas, Jacob, Kimberly, Shane, Lyndell, Andrew, Shayna, Noland, et al.
First suggestion: unplug everything (not just turn it off), leave it for an hour and come back. That worked the first time but never again.
Second suggestion: You must replace your phone connection line.
Third suggestion: You must replace your splitter.
Fourth: You must replace your ethernet connector.
Fifth: You will have to pay the $50 fee for real help from MAC.
Sixth: (a techie who spent time in Heart Butte) “We’d better smudge.” Actually that was my idea, but it made him laugh because he knew what I meant.
The symptom was that I’d gone offline from my provider (3rivers) and could not get back on. I waited until Monday morning to get the new phone line, but had to drive to Conrad (thirty miles away) to get the new splitter and ethernet connector. None of this made a difference. $25 gone up in smoke.
The computer has some self-contained diagnostics and guides which I read and stepped through over and over. Gradually I began to understand that 3rivers uses a form of connection called Dynamic Host Configuration Protocol (DHCP). I think this means that instead of having an assigned server, you are moved back and forth as traffic demands. I accused my provider of bumping me off entirely in order to make more room for other people, since I typically couldn’t get on between 3PM and 11PM, but could at other times. They heatedly denied this as it is against the law. Some techies (not 3rivers) agreed they could and did.
One problem was so deep into the process that no one but the eMAC legacy guy knew what to do. It was about locking and unlocking changes. He was able to address it only because of the constant exchange of such information among dedicated techies which continues on line, at beer blasts, in libraries, and so on in the constant buzzy process of interacting with the Internet in the most specific tiny ways. Most people endorse free sharing and even the techies recommended the online support communities: apple.com/support and apple.com/discussions. I’m sure there are forums specifically for eMAC. But one techie (local) stubbornly insisted that he could not and would not help me unless I spent the $50 bucks for MAC to explain what was wrong with my DHCP.
In the end it turned out to be code corrosion -- that is, my DHCP operating software had lost potency. A reinstall did the job. Andrew, who is the lead techie at 3rivers, suggested it. I had already reinstalled the applications, which didn’t work. So about midnight last night I was back on line.
Then there were two probs left. The first was the pile-up of unread emails -- I get a LOT of them, mostly automated, and I’m careful to at least glance at them unless I really KNOW I don’t want to read them. I wish I’d known to delete one in the avalanche: it was a personal attack from an academic so unreasonable that I wondered a) if this were really from the purported source and 2) whether he had developed a brain tumor. (It contained atypical grammatical errors.)
The other prob or issue or whatever is wondering how my DHCP had gotten so corrupted. Did a hacker simply delete it? Did I use it so often I wore it out? Should I do something to prevent future probs? (If it WERE a hacker, I could name some suspects.) Should I change my security settings? Already Target says I’m too secure for them to deal with -- I block their cookies.) But I know from experience that codes DO get corrupted. The first remedy for everything is to reboot, and the second is to reinstall.
In the spirit of sharing, I pass all this on. But it is not digested yet.
I keep remembering a January long ago when my father-in-law was hospitalized miles away and our phone was shut off for nonpayment, because Bob stubbornly insisted on paying his bills once a month, regardless of when they came in. This did not mesh very well with the new phone company manager. We really needed that phone ON, so I set out to get ‘er done. I called the local office. She could do nothing. I asked for the boss’s name. He answered in his office but he said he could do nothing. I asked for HIS boss’s name, some place back east, but he would not answer his phone. I went to the company receptionist and asked HIS boss’s name. He couldn’t be reached because he was vacationing in Hawaii. I invented a ruse for calling him at his resort in Hawaii. He answered. I explained. Ten minutes later the phone was turned back on.
They CAN reach into your computer, particularly an eMAC, which is designed for that.
I remembered another incident back there in the past when Joe Davis, an old cowboy friend of ours, got so incensed with his phone that he ripped it out of the wall, took it down to the phone office (it was closed), smashed it up enough to feed it through the letter slot and never had another phone again.
But I really LOVE my eMAC!
Monday, December 13, 2010
eMAC probls
Sometime last night my eMac stopped interfacing with the Internet. I'm typing this at the library.
I've talked to three shifts of techies at 3 Rivers, my provider, where they told me I had to replace my splitter, my phone cord, and my Ethernet cord. Did that.
Talked to the helpful machine at MAC, then a much more helpful MAN at MAC, then the "legacy" division, then the special eMAC person at the legacy division. All stumped.
I won't be back until I figure this out, but my computer works and I'm fine. The temp today is fifty and the town is aswim. Squibbie has found a patch of relatively dry grass and is sitting on it so it won't get away.
Prairie Mary
I've talked to three shifts of techies at 3 Rivers, my provider, where they told me I had to replace my splitter, my phone cord, and my Ethernet cord. Did that.
Talked to the helpful machine at MAC, then a much more helpful MAN at MAC, then the "legacy" division, then the special eMAC person at the legacy division. All stumped.
I won't be back until I figure this out, but my computer works and I'm fine. The temp today is fifty and the town is aswim. Squibbie has found a patch of relatively dry grass and is sitting on it so it won't get away.
Prairie Mary
Sunday, December 12, 2010
"GENOCIDE": HOW DISGUSTING!
Those who have good memories or who have been taking notes will recall the last on the list of five universal and innate value dimensions recently proposed by research is “disgust.” There has been quite a bit of discussion about “the morality of disgust.” I’ve been rereading the third of Tim Barrus’ Eighties novels about AIDS, the one called “Genocide” that is a favorite of adolescent boys out on the edge. Do not read this book if you’re easily disgusted. If you believe “cleanliness is next to Godliness,” just go away. If you are one who argues for compost-as-renewal and dirt-as-fertility, you might be okay. Maybe.
This essay is a first attempt to understand the relationships among: prejudice against those who are different, disgust with disease, the escalation from disgust to moral blame to criminal law that justifies extreme punishment, and our faulty management of the messy processes of birth, death, sex and excretion -- the four necessities of life. This is my way “in” to the book and to the real-life phenomenon of genocide.
Minorities slated for genocide are generally portrayed as “disgusting”: dirty, degenerate and contagious. Diseases are “disgusting”: vomit, diarrhea, pus. Excretion is considered disgusting: stinking, germ-laden. Some people are disgusted by the whole idea of sex and everything connected with it, like nakedness of sexual organs (including breasts). In general the value of disgust (note the root of “gust” shared with “gustatory,” meaning appetite and eating) evolved to protect against eating spoiled food, avoiding practices that are unsanitary or likely to attract insect vectors of disease, animals that eat filth and corpses (rats, pigs, dogs), places where rot and excrement collect, or signs of disease like open sores or leprosy. The weapon that has been most effective against meth use in Montana has been disgust: graphic photographs of rotted mouths and supporating skin.
I would suggest that this disgust may be a way of distinguishing between pornography and eroticism. Maybe not. But it seems a good guide to perversion and fetishes, where the conventional prohibitions or precautions become so strong and enmeshed with their opposites that they become obsessions. Like Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing.
In this book, “Genocide,” the power of Barrus’ transgressive writing violates our sense of what is disgusting more than any of the other moral values. He mixes oral with anal, the repellant with the delicious, disgust with delight. The same photograph of a hopeless bathroom shows up repeatedly in his vids, ironically, since those with the HIV virus must be scrupulously clean (their immune systems don't work). Wherever the boys are, the washing machine will run constantly. The polarities between filth and the great (and historically recent) luxury of cleanliness entwine in a strange way. Barrus celebrates the funky smells of armpits and butt cracks in a time when men are urged to use body sprays to eliminate their own pheromones. He ignores our culture’s identification of strong smells (garlic, sweat, smoke, grease, tobacco) with low class minorities. But he strongly endorses loyalty, honor, strength, love and bathtubs.
Decades ago there was a notorious murder mystery in Cosmopolitan magazine about women found dead on operating tables with their spinal columns laid open and electrical torture machines nearby. The concept was that someone had invented a drug that converted pain into pleasure. The greater the pain, the more pleasure was felt, so the women urged their torturers to go on and on until they died. Of course, it was “really” about heroin. And it was also about masochistic women hooked on abuse. And perhaps it was about the value struggle over whether women are entitled to freedom from pain in childbirth when it was fancied to be a punishment for Eve’s sin visited on her descendants.
It was so easy to assume that AIDS was a disease specific to homosexual men because sodomy mixes oral/anal/penile. The disgust of that became entwined with the disgust of the symptoms of the disease itself. It was not until it was shown that the fluids of childbirth or transfusion or injection could also carry the retrovirus that the disgust withdrew a little, but some people consider all those things disgusting. Barrus is not going to talk them out of it -- he’s going to throw it in their faces.
Several sources have led him to this. One is his own history, for instance, his attempted suicide by shotgun blast to his abdomen. He was fourteen. In addition to the necessary colostomy, which was eventually reversed, healing involved the formation of many fistulas that leaked so much nastiness that he improvised a disposable diaper taped across his belly in order to go to school where he isolated himself in the library lest someone smell him. An influence that has affected a generation of gay men is nursing innumerable cherished friends as they died of AIDS.
Hospitals are places that mix the nastiness of disease with constant dedication to the cleaning of bodies, equipment and surfaces. Babies fill their diapers with stuff that would drive a skunk out of the room, but once cleaned they are considered sweet and desirable. This interface of cleaning/healing/comforting against the ordure of illness is where Tim stands his ground in real life when he personally nurses (okay, double meaning) the at-risk boys, pulling them back from death. In fiction he presents disgust mixed with delight. He demands that we look at the mess, but then alongside it admits the sweet desirability that keeps us from simply eliminating the source.
For the reader the effect of two strong emotional forces colliding is intense, even addictive. One wants to know but dreads to know, like the consequences of a terrible accident. Some yearn to “fix” everything; others want to stamp out the irresolvable complex. These forces are strong in our culture, partly because of the compassion charities that try to help people like Haitians in the midst of mud and cholera, a fecal disease. We see them on the news. Movie warehouses are full of carefully authentic rotted zombies and crispy black victims of immolation, convincing severed heads and prosthetic wounds. We love CSI autopsies. Horror has us in thrall.
And we feel the connection with glamour, stimulation, risk, gambling, exhibition. Tim’s chapter, “Chinatown Chinatown” is about the brothers “Star” and “Adonais” (both echo Jesus) who are bodyscrapers “slushing” body parts out of the sump under the joy rides that tear people apart in the death camp that is neon candyapple Vegas in the clean dry desert. This is very much like the sequence in the movie “A.I.” where androids are destroyed for the pleasure of the flesh people. Supposedly obscenity is removed by the lack of humanness, which is distinguished from machines by the human capacity to suffer or love. Does that work in reverse? The first story in “Genocide” is about two male lovers -- shot into space to escape “the virus” -- who eventually allow their version of “Hal” the spaceship computer (who is named Tsan) to share their lovemaking. Is this an obscenity? A perversion?
When I remembered this book, I thought it was one long road story augmented with short poignant inter-chapter poems, but it is not. Rather it is a series of reflections on the forcible quarantine of illness, the obscenity of suffering, the disgust of death, the necessity of survival, the uses of flight, persecution by culture, and -- most of all -- salvation by intense relationship with another like yourself. Not long ago I watched “The Road”, Cormac McCarthy’s take on the disgust of filth and cannibalism. I have not forgotten that his roots are in southern gothic horror -- necrophilia, captivity. (See “The Orchard Keeper,” written five years later than “Genocide.”) Whether society will accept reflection on these issues depends upon the context: McCarthy discovered that they fit well with the Mexican border country. In fact, better every day that more heads are found in empty lots.
For Barrus to choose the story-core of two brothers/lovers is transgressive. This suits him, though he backed off the horror a little in the Nasdijj trilogy. As the world considers the consequences of sterility, emptiness, oppression of the many in order to support the luxury of the few, the political dimension of disease (controlling the meds), and whether ants crawling on a crucifix is more shocking than crucifying a man for teaching tolerance, surely we ought to pay attention to this testimony from a man who knows the territory, even as he tries to flee across it to escape death.
I'm not through with this topic, but this is the last in a series of three reconsiderations of Barrus’ Eighties books.
This essay is a first attempt to understand the relationships among: prejudice against those who are different, disgust with disease, the escalation from disgust to moral blame to criminal law that justifies extreme punishment, and our faulty management of the messy processes of birth, death, sex and excretion -- the four necessities of life. This is my way “in” to the book and to the real-life phenomenon of genocide.
Minorities slated for genocide are generally portrayed as “disgusting”: dirty, degenerate and contagious. Diseases are “disgusting”: vomit, diarrhea, pus. Excretion is considered disgusting: stinking, germ-laden. Some people are disgusted by the whole idea of sex and everything connected with it, like nakedness of sexual organs (including breasts). In general the value of disgust (note the root of “gust” shared with “gustatory,” meaning appetite and eating) evolved to protect against eating spoiled food, avoiding practices that are unsanitary or likely to attract insect vectors of disease, animals that eat filth and corpses (rats, pigs, dogs), places where rot and excrement collect, or signs of disease like open sores or leprosy. The weapon that has been most effective against meth use in Montana has been disgust: graphic photographs of rotted mouths and supporating skin.
I would suggest that this disgust may be a way of distinguishing between pornography and eroticism. Maybe not. But it seems a good guide to perversion and fetishes, where the conventional prohibitions or precautions become so strong and enmeshed with their opposites that they become obsessions. Like Lady Macbeth’s hand-washing.
In this book, “Genocide,” the power of Barrus’ transgressive writing violates our sense of what is disgusting more than any of the other moral values. He mixes oral with anal, the repellant with the delicious, disgust with delight. The same photograph of a hopeless bathroom shows up repeatedly in his vids, ironically, since those with the HIV virus must be scrupulously clean (their immune systems don't work). Wherever the boys are, the washing machine will run constantly. The polarities between filth and the great (and historically recent) luxury of cleanliness entwine in a strange way. Barrus celebrates the funky smells of armpits and butt cracks in a time when men are urged to use body sprays to eliminate their own pheromones. He ignores our culture’s identification of strong smells (garlic, sweat, smoke, grease, tobacco) with low class minorities. But he strongly endorses loyalty, honor, strength, love and bathtubs.
Decades ago there was a notorious murder mystery in Cosmopolitan magazine about women found dead on operating tables with their spinal columns laid open and electrical torture machines nearby. The concept was that someone had invented a drug that converted pain into pleasure. The greater the pain, the more pleasure was felt, so the women urged their torturers to go on and on until they died. Of course, it was “really” about heroin. And it was also about masochistic women hooked on abuse. And perhaps it was about the value struggle over whether women are entitled to freedom from pain in childbirth when it was fancied to be a punishment for Eve’s sin visited on her descendants.
It was so easy to assume that AIDS was a disease specific to homosexual men because sodomy mixes oral/anal/penile. The disgust of that became entwined with the disgust of the symptoms of the disease itself. It was not until it was shown that the fluids of childbirth or transfusion or injection could also carry the retrovirus that the disgust withdrew a little, but some people consider all those things disgusting. Barrus is not going to talk them out of it -- he’s going to throw it in their faces.
Several sources have led him to this. One is his own history, for instance, his attempted suicide by shotgun blast to his abdomen. He was fourteen. In addition to the necessary colostomy, which was eventually reversed, healing involved the formation of many fistulas that leaked so much nastiness that he improvised a disposable diaper taped across his belly in order to go to school where he isolated himself in the library lest someone smell him. An influence that has affected a generation of gay men is nursing innumerable cherished friends as they died of AIDS.
Hospitals are places that mix the nastiness of disease with constant dedication to the cleaning of bodies, equipment and surfaces. Babies fill their diapers with stuff that would drive a skunk out of the room, but once cleaned they are considered sweet and desirable. This interface of cleaning/healing/comforting against the ordure of illness is where Tim stands his ground in real life when he personally nurses (okay, double meaning) the at-risk boys, pulling them back from death. In fiction he presents disgust mixed with delight. He demands that we look at the mess, but then alongside it admits the sweet desirability that keeps us from simply eliminating the source.
For the reader the effect of two strong emotional forces colliding is intense, even addictive. One wants to know but dreads to know, like the consequences of a terrible accident. Some yearn to “fix” everything; others want to stamp out the irresolvable complex. These forces are strong in our culture, partly because of the compassion charities that try to help people like Haitians in the midst of mud and cholera, a fecal disease. We see them on the news. Movie warehouses are full of carefully authentic rotted zombies and crispy black victims of immolation, convincing severed heads and prosthetic wounds. We love CSI autopsies. Horror has us in thrall.
And we feel the connection with glamour, stimulation, risk, gambling, exhibition. Tim’s chapter, “Chinatown Chinatown” is about the brothers “Star” and “Adonais” (both echo Jesus) who are bodyscrapers “slushing” body parts out of the sump under the joy rides that tear people apart in the death camp that is neon candyapple Vegas in the clean dry desert. This is very much like the sequence in the movie “A.I.” where androids are destroyed for the pleasure of the flesh people. Supposedly obscenity is removed by the lack of humanness, which is distinguished from machines by the human capacity to suffer or love. Does that work in reverse? The first story in “Genocide” is about two male lovers -- shot into space to escape “the virus” -- who eventually allow their version of “Hal” the spaceship computer (who is named Tsan) to share their lovemaking. Is this an obscenity? A perversion?
When I remembered this book, I thought it was one long road story augmented with short poignant inter-chapter poems, but it is not. Rather it is a series of reflections on the forcible quarantine of illness, the obscenity of suffering, the disgust of death, the necessity of survival, the uses of flight, persecution by culture, and -- most of all -- salvation by intense relationship with another like yourself. Not long ago I watched “The Road”, Cormac McCarthy’s take on the disgust of filth and cannibalism. I have not forgotten that his roots are in southern gothic horror -- necrophilia, captivity. (See “The Orchard Keeper,” written five years later than “Genocide.”) Whether society will accept reflection on these issues depends upon the context: McCarthy discovered that they fit well with the Mexican border country. In fact, better every day that more heads are found in empty lots.
For Barrus to choose the story-core of two brothers/lovers is transgressive. This suits him, though he backed off the horror a little in the Nasdijj trilogy. As the world considers the consequences of sterility, emptiness, oppression of the many in order to support the luxury of the few, the political dimension of disease (controlling the meds), and whether ants crawling on a crucifix is more shocking than crucifying a man for teaching tolerance, surely we ought to pay attention to this testimony from a man who knows the territory, even as he tries to flee across it to escape death.
I'm not through with this topic, but this is the last in a series of three reconsiderations of Barrus’ Eighties books.
Saturday, December 11, 2010
"THE APPALOOSA": Brando's Spaghetti Western?
A man is riding across the scenery on a beautiful horse. He enters a small Mexican town. A black-and-white shepherd dog takes a dislike to the horse and nips at his heels but the horse and the man pay no attention until finally the man pulls up at a watering trough, dismounts, and stares at the dog. The dog quails and then bolts. This is the dream, that old dream about the powerful wandering man, so dangerous. And the horse he rides in on as well. This time an appaloosa stallion, legendary mount from Nez Perce country. (This particular horse is really and truly outstanding, a famous race horse with bold spots on his glossy rump.)
It’s the dream: the desert, the mountains, the arching blue sky, the small Mexican town, even the watering trough and all the lean, sombrero-wearing, grinning men lounging here and there. The reviewers spoke of this being Brando’s spaghetti Western, but it’s also Chinese -- oh, yes! And there must be a version on the Argentine Pampas. A Bedouin version where the man rides in on a camel? It must exist somewhere. (“Lawrence of Arabia?” “The Sheltering Sky?”) It’s the dream of the horseman in the land of the peasant where to own a horse is to be above the rest, a knight. The dream clings to us all, but nowhere more than in the arid borderlands abutting Mexico.
Here is the frontier where the man who can dream anything, endure anything, can prevail against the arrogant oppressor. (But this exceptional man is mangy as a coyote: the worst wig and fake beard I’ve ever seen. It’s a relief when the script asks him to remove them.) He walks into the church, a Southwest cathedral, where his spurs jingle as he crosses the tile floor to the confessional. A beautiful woman emerges from the penitent’s side. This is the dream. Always a princess because next to the horse and the ordeal, the idea is always that a family line must be started, parallel to the horses.
The priest is pretty resourceful. Confronted by this rather urgent man who seizes the bars of the confessional and says he has killed men and troubled women (though he claims they asked for it and who is he to resist?), the priest tells Brando to go to the altar and ask God what penance He will impose to get forgiveness. It isn’t in the movie, but I feel sure the priest quickly made a wise exit as the local wicked prince enters to kill the penitent. The storyline of defiance, punishment, suffering of the innocent, and the worthiness of sacrifice has begun. The ordeal illustrated over and over by the Hero with a Thousand Faces.
I love a Western, even so simple and stylized one as this, going through the moves in its 1966 way, rich with closeups and panoramas, filled with Mexican Indians rather than feathered kind, but nevermind -- there are horses and I like adobe as well as lodges. Goat meat and beans instead of pemmican and buffalo hump.
They say that Brando only accepted this job because he was behind on his alimony and he ostentatiously refused to participate beyond the demands of the contract. A stony face. No particular dexterity or charming expressions. But it works. The director treats him like just another animal and that’s fine. This is the Western chess game. We know the moves. Even the costumes: the tight pants with concho-closures on the boot-flares at the bottom, the tight waists and full bodices on the women, the white pajamas of the paisanos, the dragging spikes of spurs like fangs. The blunt heavy face of Brando, like an effigy from Aku-Aku, stands against the greasepaint and mustachios of the almost-pretty John Saxon as a marker for honesty and dependability.
Only the script enforced by the director can press Brando’s arm down on the arm-wrestling scorpion. His is the strength of resistance, focus on the goal, denial of everything else. Yet several times in this story he despairs. The consequences of gunfire are not seen, nor is the hero hung by the neck. We are given opportunities to identify the iconic rifles involved, same as the iconic horse, the iconic woman, the iconic family. Alas, the iconic withered cornfield.
Ironically (what fun would this be without irony?) the shining goal amounts to just the standard bourgeois preoccupation: prosperity, owning land, a big house on a hill, a family. The hero is neither a poet nor an adventurer, so maybe that’s why his strategy of dogged resistance works. Certainly the “citizen” reviewers say this movie is an all-time great, a “perfect” Western. Sidney J. Furie, the director, also directed the television series made from McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.” He is Canadian-born, BBC-trained, experienced in many genres, always on time and under budget. He’s a good workman. Bourgeois qualities.
The leisure and predictability of this movie allow Furie to indulge in his trick camera shots from strange angles -- one through the loop of a stirrup with a boot in it; another identified by a reviewer as a “scorpion’s eye view” of the arm wrestling, which may be what caused one irreverent viewer to ask whether any scorpions were harmed in the making of the film. Furie is famous for and often criticized for his love affair with the “arty” odd closeup. My favorite in this movie is the shot of a Mexican face along his temple and impossibly high Indio cheekbone to Brando across the room, pretending to drain his jar of pulque.
So this is a fantasy, but a reassuring and patriotic one, if you remember that 1966 was before immigration from south of the border became politically demonized, drug and violence based. This is orderly and gives high respect to formal church-based religion. The woman is not a prostitute; the old Mexican man protects even gringos; in fact, at one point -- briefly -- a United States Marshall steps out onto his porch with a rifle to restore order, though he doesn’t shoot. This is before the complexification and realism fetish took over Westerns, the obsession with violence and alienation. It’s just a simple story about a simple man. Not that today’s fancy Frenchified theorists couldn’t get something out of the terrifying gaze that sent that dog running or even the horse caparisoned in silver saddle and bridle, shining transcendence. Still, this is John Wayne country -- not Eastwood spaghetti.
It’s the dream: the desert, the mountains, the arching blue sky, the small Mexican town, even the watering trough and all the lean, sombrero-wearing, grinning men lounging here and there. The reviewers spoke of this being Brando’s spaghetti Western, but it’s also Chinese -- oh, yes! And there must be a version on the Argentine Pampas. A Bedouin version where the man rides in on a camel? It must exist somewhere. (“Lawrence of Arabia?” “The Sheltering Sky?”) It’s the dream of the horseman in the land of the peasant where to own a horse is to be above the rest, a knight. The dream clings to us all, but nowhere more than in the arid borderlands abutting Mexico.
Here is the frontier where the man who can dream anything, endure anything, can prevail against the arrogant oppressor. (But this exceptional man is mangy as a coyote: the worst wig and fake beard I’ve ever seen. It’s a relief when the script asks him to remove them.) He walks into the church, a Southwest cathedral, where his spurs jingle as he crosses the tile floor to the confessional. A beautiful woman emerges from the penitent’s side. This is the dream. Always a princess because next to the horse and the ordeal, the idea is always that a family line must be started, parallel to the horses.
The priest is pretty resourceful. Confronted by this rather urgent man who seizes the bars of the confessional and says he has killed men and troubled women (though he claims they asked for it and who is he to resist?), the priest tells Brando to go to the altar and ask God what penance He will impose to get forgiveness. It isn’t in the movie, but I feel sure the priest quickly made a wise exit as the local wicked prince enters to kill the penitent. The storyline of defiance, punishment, suffering of the innocent, and the worthiness of sacrifice has begun. The ordeal illustrated over and over by the Hero with a Thousand Faces.
I love a Western, even so simple and stylized one as this, going through the moves in its 1966 way, rich with closeups and panoramas, filled with Mexican Indians rather than feathered kind, but nevermind -- there are horses and I like adobe as well as lodges. Goat meat and beans instead of pemmican and buffalo hump.
They say that Brando only accepted this job because he was behind on his alimony and he ostentatiously refused to participate beyond the demands of the contract. A stony face. No particular dexterity or charming expressions. But it works. The director treats him like just another animal and that’s fine. This is the Western chess game. We know the moves. Even the costumes: the tight pants with concho-closures on the boot-flares at the bottom, the tight waists and full bodices on the women, the white pajamas of the paisanos, the dragging spikes of spurs like fangs. The blunt heavy face of Brando, like an effigy from Aku-Aku, stands against the greasepaint and mustachios of the almost-pretty John Saxon as a marker for honesty and dependability.
Only the script enforced by the director can press Brando’s arm down on the arm-wrestling scorpion. His is the strength of resistance, focus on the goal, denial of everything else. Yet several times in this story he despairs. The consequences of gunfire are not seen, nor is the hero hung by the neck. We are given opportunities to identify the iconic rifles involved, same as the iconic horse, the iconic woman, the iconic family. Alas, the iconic withered cornfield.
Ironically (what fun would this be without irony?) the shining goal amounts to just the standard bourgeois preoccupation: prosperity, owning land, a big house on a hill, a family. The hero is neither a poet nor an adventurer, so maybe that’s why his strategy of dogged resistance works. Certainly the “citizen” reviewers say this movie is an all-time great, a “perfect” Western. Sidney J. Furie, the director, also directed the television series made from McMurtry’s “Lonesome Dove.” He is Canadian-born, BBC-trained, experienced in many genres, always on time and under budget. He’s a good workman. Bourgeois qualities.
The leisure and predictability of this movie allow Furie to indulge in his trick camera shots from strange angles -- one through the loop of a stirrup with a boot in it; another identified by a reviewer as a “scorpion’s eye view” of the arm wrestling, which may be what caused one irreverent viewer to ask whether any scorpions were harmed in the making of the film. Furie is famous for and often criticized for his love affair with the “arty” odd closeup. My favorite in this movie is the shot of a Mexican face along his temple and impossibly high Indio cheekbone to Brando across the room, pretending to drain his jar of pulque.
So this is a fantasy, but a reassuring and patriotic one, if you remember that 1966 was before immigration from south of the border became politically demonized, drug and violence based. This is orderly and gives high respect to formal church-based religion. The woman is not a prostitute; the old Mexican man protects even gringos; in fact, at one point -- briefly -- a United States Marshall steps out onto his porch with a rifle to restore order, though he doesn’t shoot. This is before the complexification and realism fetish took over Westerns, the obsession with violence and alienation. It’s just a simple story about a simple man. Not that today’s fancy Frenchified theorists couldn’t get something out of the terrifying gaze that sent that dog running or even the horse caparisoned in silver saddle and bridle, shining transcendence. Still, this is John Wayne country -- not Eastwood spaghetti.
Friday, December 10, 2010
"BUNDLE, BUNDLE, WHO'S GOT THE BUNDLE?"
This post is not about Wikileaks. But I want to use two of the most interesting comments about Wikileaks to explore something else. The first comment was about what a jolt this information is giving historians of the international scene who have built whole careers on the limited information that was previously known. Like the collapse of the USSR releasing the truth about who was or was not a spy, some researchers are finding out they were on the wrong track and all their reasoning means nothing.
The second comment was actually a double comment from the startling but distinguished team of Nassim Taleb and Clay Shirky on the BBC. It is that Wikileaks is a vivid demonstration that we are in a “tectonic” paradigm shift. Power no longer is controlled by authorities at the top who presumably know what they are doing, but rather comes up from the bottom in a surge -- many many people reacting to their own lives and demanding change.
Bob and Mary Scriver at the opening of the addition to the Whitney Gallery of Western Art in Cody, Wyoming in 1969. The sculpture is "Parade Indian." I contributed the beading on the horse accouterments.
You can come back to check on these two ideas, but this post is about an essay by an historian, Bill Farr, who is on the faculty at the University of Montana in Missoula. He is a friend of mine. This is not meant to be malicious and we have discussed this issue I’m taking up now, but (a) his information was limited and (b) there has been an unrecognized tectonic paradigm shift.
The essay he wrote was about Bob Scriver and Blackfeet artifacts. Bob sold his artifact collection (actually a family collection plus two purchased collections, one of old Mountie uniforms and the other a collection of guns) to the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton, where he had been stationed in WWII. Prompted by Chuck Rankin, then editor of Montana, the Magazine of Western History, as well as by Blackfeet activists in Missoula, Farr tried to interpret what was “really” going on. He was handicapped by Bob Scriver’s refusal to talk to him. He described Bob as “crusty” and “aggressive,” even before Bob, outraged by the article, did his best to get Farr and Rankin fired.
Rankin and Farr were operating in a Hollywood depiction of the 19th century prairie clearances, thinking they were Richard Widmark befriending Jeff Chandler. They did not register that there had been a fire in the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife or that the Browning Mercantile had burned to the ground, both events blamed on AIM by the obsessed FBI. Nor could they know that Phil Stepney, the curator who had tried to acquire the Scriver collection for years and who was formally cursed by the activists, would die of an exotic cancer. They did not know that these activists had threatened to rope Bob off his horse at the Indian Days parade and to drag him to death. (Famously, it had been done to a policeman a few decades earlier.) No older, wiser, more assimilated tribal members were consulted for the article.
Let me address part of the issue first: Bill Farr did not know that women are a crucial part of Blackfeet ceremonies. All these guys, profs and AIM activists alike, imagine warriors in “ceremonies” as ordeals involving thongs piercing their well-developed chest muscles. In fact, the Blackfeet ceremonies depend upon a holy woman, a very old, virtuous, devoted mother who fasts and prays. Bob knew this. He believed in the power of women, particularly mothers. (Particularly his.) This is an example of the part about the unknown facts. One cannot own a Sacred Bundle unless there is a wife to take care of it. The Bundle is transferred to the couple and both own it. Richard Little Dog transferred (not SOLD -- the money was one part of many gifts, including a horse) to Bob Scriver and I in part because Richard didn’t have a wife and Bob did. (Me.)
A consequence of Farr and Rankin writing out of the romance of it all instead of the actual facts, was that neither had any awareness that I WAS THERE. I really hate being erased. It makes me itch.
In fact, by the time Farr was writing, I had earned an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School in part because I wanted to understand the deep functioning of this ceremony IN WHICH I WAS ALSO A RECEIVER AND KEEPER OF THE BUNDLE. The fact that I was no longer a resident in Scriver’s lodge is irrelevant. I acted as a Bundle Keeper at its opening and as a co-religionist at the creation of the Badger Tipi AFTER the legal Montana law divorce, which Molly Kicking Woman gleefully told me was now erased. Ha! (This was not good news to the fourth wife, though it didn’t bother Bob who knew about polygamy on the plains.) When Rankin, now editor at the University of Oklahoma Press, was considering my manuscript of "Bronze Inside and Out," he tried to make me take myself and my opinions out as a condition of acquisition. So I took the book to the University of Calgary Press. This is exactly the sort of nonsense Wikileaks is trying to reveal.
The Bundle Keeper’s circle that Bob and I joined was open to us because of Bob’s dreams. I was sleeping beside him as he dreamt and he told them to me on first waking, still on our pillows. I documented everything. (Alice Kehoe documented the tipi painting. Harold McCracken and Paul Dyck documented the Sacred Pipe Bundle transfer. McCracken (also hypnotized by that strange dream of the horse warrior in which guilt over destroying a way of life is replaced by identification with the victim) was inaccurate and self-celebrating. Paul Dyck, whose collections of artifacts and knowledge about them far exceeded Scriver’s, was accurate. (His materials went to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody.) Bob documented the people in the circle by depicting them in a sculpture, making portraits of each, replacing me with Mary Blackman and himself with Charlie Reevis. This is not mentioned in the essay nor are the participants named.
There were no white people in the circle. The Keepers were ancient: the youngest (aside from myself) was Bob’s age. He was born in 1914, the same as George Kicking Woman. These people were mostly born in the 1880’s and their suffering had been great but their natural culture was the last of the Blackfeet way of life. Today there are Sacred Bundle Keeper circles, organized around repatriated Bundles given back to them by institutions. They’re a little wobbly on the songs and so on, but they do their best and include several devoted white men, dreamers.
One of my favorite moments was when the female halves of the Bundle Keeper pairs organized a panel discussion to advise the community how to improve. One look and it was clear that arguing would be a mistake. Farr didn’t have the facts because he depended on books, newspapers, and unreliable informants. Rankin didn’t want facts: he wanted to improve his own status. Neither of them could see the female participants in the story. Today, Rosalyn LaPier, a Blackfeet woman, is a Ph.D. candidate in Missoula and produces far deeper and more meaningful work than we’ve had before.
The “problem” (if that’s what it is) with the contemporary Bundle Keepers’ interpretation of the Bundle Ceremony is based on “doing what our ancestors did because we are their children.” But the old-time Circle, as they danced with the contents of the Bundle -- which are skins of animals meant to prompt thoughts of those lives on the shared prairies -- were relating to the actual animals, each well-known to them with its penumbra of characteristics. The modern Bundle Keepers are worried about maintaining their relationship with their culture. The ancient Bundle Keepers were worried about maintaining their relationship to the land which both preserved and destroyed them: it was their essential source of life itself, the foundation of their culture. This is what I learned by earning a degree in religious studies.
“Bundle Keeping” is not just something exotic about Blackfeet to put in a museum of cultural artifacts and brag about owning. It is a celebration of the essential truth of life everywhere on this planet which far too few of us have learned. Instead of pursuing the Bundles of other people, we should be looking to our own.
The second comment was actually a double comment from the startling but distinguished team of Nassim Taleb and Clay Shirky on the BBC. It is that Wikileaks is a vivid demonstration that we are in a “tectonic” paradigm shift. Power no longer is controlled by authorities at the top who presumably know what they are doing, but rather comes up from the bottom in a surge -- many many people reacting to their own lives and demanding change.
You can come back to check on these two ideas, but this post is about an essay by an historian, Bill Farr, who is on the faculty at the University of Montana in Missoula. He is a friend of mine. This is not meant to be malicious and we have discussed this issue I’m taking up now, but (a) his information was limited and (b) there has been an unrecognized tectonic paradigm shift.
The essay he wrote was about Bob Scriver and Blackfeet artifacts. Bob sold his artifact collection (actually a family collection plus two purchased collections, one of old Mountie uniforms and the other a collection of guns) to the Royal Alberta Provincial Museum in Edmonton, where he had been stationed in WWII. Prompted by Chuck Rankin, then editor of Montana, the Magazine of Western History, as well as by Blackfeet activists in Missoula, Farr tried to interpret what was “really” going on. He was handicapped by Bob Scriver’s refusal to talk to him. He described Bob as “crusty” and “aggressive,” even before Bob, outraged by the article, did his best to get Farr and Rankin fired.
Rankin and Farr were operating in a Hollywood depiction of the 19th century prairie clearances, thinking they were Richard Widmark befriending Jeff Chandler. They did not register that there had been a fire in the Scriver Museum of Montana Wildlife or that the Browning Mercantile had burned to the ground, both events blamed on AIM by the obsessed FBI. Nor could they know that Phil Stepney, the curator who had tried to acquire the Scriver collection for years and who was formally cursed by the activists, would die of an exotic cancer. They did not know that these activists had threatened to rope Bob off his horse at the Indian Days parade and to drag him to death. (Famously, it had been done to a policeman a few decades earlier.) No older, wiser, more assimilated tribal members were consulted for the article.
Let me address part of the issue first: Bill Farr did not know that women are a crucial part of Blackfeet ceremonies. All these guys, profs and AIM activists alike, imagine warriors in “ceremonies” as ordeals involving thongs piercing their well-developed chest muscles. In fact, the Blackfeet ceremonies depend upon a holy woman, a very old, virtuous, devoted mother who fasts and prays. Bob knew this. He believed in the power of women, particularly mothers. (Particularly his.) This is an example of the part about the unknown facts. One cannot own a Sacred Bundle unless there is a wife to take care of it. The Bundle is transferred to the couple and both own it. Richard Little Dog transferred (not SOLD -- the money was one part of many gifts, including a horse) to Bob Scriver and I in part because Richard didn’t have a wife and Bob did. (Me.)
A consequence of Farr and Rankin writing out of the romance of it all instead of the actual facts, was that neither had any awareness that I WAS THERE. I really hate being erased. It makes me itch.
In fact, by the time Farr was writing, I had earned an MA in Religious Studies from the University of Chicago Divinity School in part because I wanted to understand the deep functioning of this ceremony IN WHICH I WAS ALSO A RECEIVER AND KEEPER OF THE BUNDLE. The fact that I was no longer a resident in Scriver’s lodge is irrelevant. I acted as a Bundle Keeper at its opening and as a co-religionist at the creation of the Badger Tipi AFTER the legal Montana law divorce, which Molly Kicking Woman gleefully told me was now erased. Ha! (This was not good news to the fourth wife, though it didn’t bother Bob who knew about polygamy on the plains.) When Rankin, now editor at the University of Oklahoma Press, was considering my manuscript of "Bronze Inside and Out," he tried to make me take myself and my opinions out as a condition of acquisition. So I took the book to the University of Calgary Press. This is exactly the sort of nonsense Wikileaks is trying to reveal.
The Bundle Keeper’s circle that Bob and I joined was open to us because of Bob’s dreams. I was sleeping beside him as he dreamt and he told them to me on first waking, still on our pillows. I documented everything. (Alice Kehoe documented the tipi painting. Harold McCracken and Paul Dyck documented the Sacred Pipe Bundle transfer. McCracken (also hypnotized by that strange dream of the horse warrior in which guilt over destroying a way of life is replaced by identification with the victim) was inaccurate and self-celebrating. Paul Dyck, whose collections of artifacts and knowledge about them far exceeded Scriver’s, was accurate. (His materials went to the Buffalo Bill Historical Center in Cody.) Bob documented the people in the circle by depicting them in a sculpture, making portraits of each, replacing me with Mary Blackman and himself with Charlie Reevis. This is not mentioned in the essay nor are the participants named.
There were no white people in the circle. The Keepers were ancient: the youngest (aside from myself) was Bob’s age. He was born in 1914, the same as George Kicking Woman. These people were mostly born in the 1880’s and their suffering had been great but their natural culture was the last of the Blackfeet way of life. Today there are Sacred Bundle Keeper circles, organized around repatriated Bundles given back to them by institutions. They’re a little wobbly on the songs and so on, but they do their best and include several devoted white men, dreamers.
One of my favorite moments was when the female halves of the Bundle Keeper pairs organized a panel discussion to advise the community how to improve. One look and it was clear that arguing would be a mistake. Farr didn’t have the facts because he depended on books, newspapers, and unreliable informants. Rankin didn’t want facts: he wanted to improve his own status. Neither of them could see the female participants in the story. Today, Rosalyn LaPier, a Blackfeet woman, is a Ph.D. candidate in Missoula and produces far deeper and more meaningful work than we’ve had before.
The “problem” (if that’s what it is) with the contemporary Bundle Keepers’ interpretation of the Bundle Ceremony is based on “doing what our ancestors did because we are their children.” But the old-time Circle, as they danced with the contents of the Bundle -- which are skins of animals meant to prompt thoughts of those lives on the shared prairies -- were relating to the actual animals, each well-known to them with its penumbra of characteristics. The modern Bundle Keepers are worried about maintaining their relationship with their culture. The ancient Bundle Keepers were worried about maintaining their relationship to the land which both preserved and destroyed them: it was their essential source of life itself, the foundation of their culture. This is what I learned by earning a degree in religious studies.
“Bundle Keeping” is not just something exotic about Blackfeet to put in a museum of cultural artifacts and brag about owning. It is a celebration of the essential truth of life everywhere on this planet which far too few of us have learned. Instead of pursuing the Bundles of other people, we should be looking to our own.
Thursday, December 09, 2010
"ULTERIORITY" IN "ANYWHERE,ANYWHERE"
“There are many other things I have found myself saying about poetry, but the chiefest of these is that it is metaphor, saying one thing and meaning another, saying one thing in terms of another, the pleasure of ulteriority.” This is Robert Frost in 1946, in an essay for The Atlantic Monthly. As quoted in the blog called “The Rawness” on Oct 6, 2010.
The blogger continues:
“Today’s Raw Concept is Ulteriority. Ulteriority occurs whenever there is a gap between a purported surface motive and the deeper and an underlying (and usually more powerful) motive that subtly occurs beneath surface, the latter also being known as the ulterior motive.
“Whenever we say something has ulteriority, what we’re saying is that there’s some kind of gap between what is going on the surface compared to what’s going on below the surface. If there’s a high level of ulteriority, then the gap between what’s being communicated on the surface and what’s being communicated below the surface is not only very wide, but in addition the communication below the surface is especially complex, nuanced and subtle.”
This is one of the major secrets of powerful writing: that the writer is not just creating a smooth surface narrative that slides easily across the page but also is thinking about issues of rhetoric, of social reference, of his own wish to express or explore something molten at his own core, and maybe even thinking about becoming famous. In “Anywhere, Anywhere” this depth dimension is suddenly present in a way it was not in Tim Barrus’ first book.
This is Barrus managing stigma within stigma. First, there is the stigma of being a soldier in the Vietnam War, a betraying, politically correct ambush for men coming home from risking their lives as they were made to do. Second, there is the stigma of being gay. Within this -- which is simply the sexual desire for someone of one’s own sex -- is the stigma WITHIN the gay community of not being a conforming middle-class wage earner nor an Oscar Wilde witty aesthetician, but frankly, aggressively, macho. (Which in itself can be politically incorrect in an era of feminists.) On top of that is the stigma of being in a wheelchair. (And having PTSD before it was understood.)
Barrus’ saving counterforce is tender intimacy. Even between big strong men who share a bed and a bathtub. Someone to hold you while you die. This is the “spine” of all Barrus writing. In this book he finds his voice: profane, jazzy, familiar, chanting and poetic. The themes of boys and subterranean are already here in the teenaged tunnel rat soldiers who must clear VC out of underground diggins. Also present are the themes of raw determination and not dying alone. This is not California anymore. This is Manhattan/Mineshaft. Gritty and dark. Part of the ulterior dynamics is that Vietnam is a screen for AIDS. Jungle war and Agent Orange stand in for the virus, just as deadly, just as hidden. A fast, violent apocalypse is more understandable and sympathetic than a slow eating away of friends and lovers, who still need to be held while they die.
The irony is that the intimacy of the story attracts women, at least those young and unconventional enough to not be offended. But then, it is also probably partly what attracts stalkers, hating themselves and looking for something to either save them or destroy them. Publishers do not generally consider either of these categories a promising platform for sales, but perhaps they should reconsider. Most recently on Facebook females were strongly attracted, along with Asian boys. As the culture evolves -- everyone becoming less shockable -- this book begins to look mainstream. Intimate relationship appears to be a more durable focus than sex. Even in war.
The section on Vietnam must have been derived from tales told by veterans and it’s plenty convincing, which it has to be to justify the section that deals with the idiocy of mental health wards of shuffling men drugged into mental glitter balls and dressed in pajamas that let their dicks hang out. Another section deals with the families trying to understand and help -- or not. These are situations the author knows but do not assume he is writing autobiography. His “ulterior motive” is to indict society as it exists. In the end his solution is old-fashioned and, considering that these men are mostly supposed to be gay, a surprise. They decide to help and protect children, not just any children but “brown” children (Native American, Hispanic, Asian). Anywhere, anywhere.
Using song lyrics is a little risky because the songs can go out of the public mind and lose the effect of a sound track playing in the head of the reader, but the songs Barrus uses (“Barbara Ann”, “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Hound Dog”, “Teddy Bear”, “Love me Tender” and “House of the Rising Sun”) are so iconic and deeply embedded in the public mind that even I know them.
Except one. I did have to look up the "House of the Rising Sun". It’s such an old ballad that many of the original meanings are lost, but the main euphemism seems to be that the “house” is either a brothel or a prison. In case you’ve forgotten, here’s the refrain:
Oh mother tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun
My level of ignorance meant that the image I got was simply the natural “rising sun” which I associate with Asia and also with the American Southwest. I happen to know that Barrus is one who, like a Native American, often watches the sun come up, even if it’s because he’s been out all night.
This book is a lament, energized by indignation, full of despair, and rich with slang and poetry. I can’t tell you how it compares with other Vietnam literature because I don’t know the genre and I suspect it suffers in some minds from not having been written by an actual veteran. The strength of it is the portrayal of bonding among a few men determined never to let each other give up, even after their heads have literally been blown off. Insanely, they go on.
Here’s part of the last paragraph when the men are driving towards the American Southwest: “The sun set in front of us with the same kind of brilliant, glorious orange that she used to show us at sunset in Vietnam. Uncompromising and intransigent. Bloodred and indigo. Candy, soda, dirty pictures, boom boom dope. Elvis in my head. YOU AIN’T NOTHING BUT A HOUNDDOG . . . “ I reckon the sun probably rises and sets about like that in Afghanistan, too, where at the school they drink three cups of tea. What do you think the ulterior motive for that is? It could be anywhere, anywhere.
The blogger continues:
“Today’s Raw Concept is Ulteriority. Ulteriority occurs whenever there is a gap between a purported surface motive and the deeper and an underlying (and usually more powerful) motive that subtly occurs beneath surface, the latter also being known as the ulterior motive.
“Whenever we say something has ulteriority, what we’re saying is that there’s some kind of gap between what is going on the surface compared to what’s going on below the surface. If there’s a high level of ulteriority, then the gap between what’s being communicated on the surface and what’s being communicated below the surface is not only very wide, but in addition the communication below the surface is especially complex, nuanced and subtle.”
This is one of the major secrets of powerful writing: that the writer is not just creating a smooth surface narrative that slides easily across the page but also is thinking about issues of rhetoric, of social reference, of his own wish to express or explore something molten at his own core, and maybe even thinking about becoming famous. In “Anywhere, Anywhere” this depth dimension is suddenly present in a way it was not in Tim Barrus’ first book.
This is Barrus managing stigma within stigma. First, there is the stigma of being a soldier in the Vietnam War, a betraying, politically correct ambush for men coming home from risking their lives as they were made to do. Second, there is the stigma of being gay. Within this -- which is simply the sexual desire for someone of one’s own sex -- is the stigma WITHIN the gay community of not being a conforming middle-class wage earner nor an Oscar Wilde witty aesthetician, but frankly, aggressively, macho. (Which in itself can be politically incorrect in an era of feminists.) On top of that is the stigma of being in a wheelchair. (And having PTSD before it was understood.)
Barrus’ saving counterforce is tender intimacy. Even between big strong men who share a bed and a bathtub. Someone to hold you while you die. This is the “spine” of all Barrus writing. In this book he finds his voice: profane, jazzy, familiar, chanting and poetic. The themes of boys and subterranean are already here in the teenaged tunnel rat soldiers who must clear VC out of underground diggins. Also present are the themes of raw determination and not dying alone. This is not California anymore. This is Manhattan/Mineshaft. Gritty and dark. Part of the ulterior dynamics is that Vietnam is a screen for AIDS. Jungle war and Agent Orange stand in for the virus, just as deadly, just as hidden. A fast, violent apocalypse is more understandable and sympathetic than a slow eating away of friends and lovers, who still need to be held while they die.
The irony is that the intimacy of the story attracts women, at least those young and unconventional enough to not be offended. But then, it is also probably partly what attracts stalkers, hating themselves and looking for something to either save them or destroy them. Publishers do not generally consider either of these categories a promising platform for sales, but perhaps they should reconsider. Most recently on Facebook females were strongly attracted, along with Asian boys. As the culture evolves -- everyone becoming less shockable -- this book begins to look mainstream. Intimate relationship appears to be a more durable focus than sex. Even in war.
The section on Vietnam must have been derived from tales told by veterans and it’s plenty convincing, which it has to be to justify the section that deals with the idiocy of mental health wards of shuffling men drugged into mental glitter balls and dressed in pajamas that let their dicks hang out. Another section deals with the families trying to understand and help -- or not. These are situations the author knows but do not assume he is writing autobiography. His “ulterior motive” is to indict society as it exists. In the end his solution is old-fashioned and, considering that these men are mostly supposed to be gay, a surprise. They decide to help and protect children, not just any children but “brown” children (Native American, Hispanic, Asian). Anywhere, anywhere.
Using song lyrics is a little risky because the songs can go out of the public mind and lose the effect of a sound track playing in the head of the reader, but the songs Barrus uses (“Barbara Ann”, “Blue Suede Shoes”, “Hound Dog”, “Teddy Bear”, “Love me Tender” and “House of the Rising Sun”) are so iconic and deeply embedded in the public mind that even I know them.
Except one. I did have to look up the "House of the Rising Sun". It’s such an old ballad that many of the original meanings are lost, but the main euphemism seems to be that the “house” is either a brothel or a prison. In case you’ve forgotten, here’s the refrain:
Oh mother tell your children
Not to do what I have done
Spend your lives in sin and misery
In the House of the Rising Sun
My level of ignorance meant that the image I got was simply the natural “rising sun” which I associate with Asia and also with the American Southwest. I happen to know that Barrus is one who, like a Native American, often watches the sun come up, even if it’s because he’s been out all night.
This book is a lament, energized by indignation, full of despair, and rich with slang and poetry. I can’t tell you how it compares with other Vietnam literature because I don’t know the genre and I suspect it suffers in some minds from not having been written by an actual veteran. The strength of it is the portrayal of bonding among a few men determined never to let each other give up, even after their heads have literally been blown off. Insanely, they go on.
Here’s part of the last paragraph when the men are driving towards the American Southwest: “The sun set in front of us with the same kind of brilliant, glorious orange that she used to show us at sunset in Vietnam. Uncompromising and intransigent. Bloodred and indigo. Candy, soda, dirty pictures, boom boom dope. Elvis in my head. YOU AIN’T NOTHING BUT A HOUNDDOG . . . “ I reckon the sun probably rises and sets about like that in Afghanistan, too, where at the school they drink three cups of tea. What do you think the ulterior motive for that is? It could be anywhere, anywhere.
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
LES PETERS 1917 - 2010
As soon as I got back to Montana in 1999, I began to ask people where Les Peters was. I always thought of Les as a prince of painters, the kind of generous, gentle man that people presumed Charlie Russell was. Today I opened the newspaper to his obituary, quietly dead at 93. I remember him warmly as a man in his forties who wore his hat to paint, maybe because -- like Charlie -- it helped to keep his hair from falling in a boyish lank across his eyes. I remember how he pushed his hat back by using the tip of his thumb under the brim to keep from touching it with his stained fingers. His paintings were like himself: muted, accurate, full of love of the land and the animals.When I first met Bob Scriver in 1961, he was just beginning to create his room of miniature wildlife dioramas, window portraits of inch-to-a-foot animals in their natural settings. But he wasn’t happy with his ability to paint backgrounds. One day he had an inspiration and called Les Peters to see if he would swap some sculpture for painting a couple of backgrounds. He would and Bob figured he would watch closely to pick up pointers about how to do the rest. Les was generous and patient, so Bob got the best of the swap. (The dioramas are in storage at the Montana Historical Society.)
In 1969 Dale Burk, prize-winning journalist, did a roundup of the Montana artists and put them in a book called “New Interpretations” which is still available from the Stoneydale Press in Stevensville. (777-2729) Those were the days when artists were local and accessible. Dale’s opening vignette in his essay about Les Peters captures the man well. Les is about to put a brush full of color on his work in progress, but hesitates and finally puts the brush down. “A lot of times I feel that I need more color in a painting and I try to put it in but I can’t. It just doesn’t look right to me.”
Charlie Beil, Charlie Russell’s student and possibly Nancy Russell’s favorite, gave lessons to Les up in Banff, but Burk suggests that Les may have been more impressed by Carl Rungius whose studio was next door. Les didn’t pick up Rungius’ brilliant color, but he did learn the dynamic X as the basis for composition. Both painters were far more interested in big game than frontier violence, which was Beil’s taste. For Les the point of the painting was a kind of meditation, a merging with the animals and the land. He didn’t need the money and didn’t paint for sales and prizes.
In fact, in those days we were all a lot more idealistic. A few of Dale’s subjects in this book are still around: Fred Fellows (though he returned to Oklahoma), Bob Morgan, Gary Schildt, Stan Lynde, Rex Rieke. Maybe it’s because there are so many new people in Montana and so many of the museum curators have also been from “outside,” but we don’t hear much about about the pioneer artists of the Sixties and earlier. Good thing Dale thought to record them. I still see these survivors around now and then, but I would have liked to have spent much more time with Les Peters, shy and graceful as a whitetail buck. In the old days his death would have been front page news in Great Falls, but it wouldn’t have mattered to him. He didn’t want fame and he already had fortune.
This photo of Les in his studio is by Dale Burk and appears in “New Interpretations.”
_________
From the Great Falls Tribune, December 7, 2010
Boise, ID: Leslie Hamilton “Les” Peters, 93, an Army veteran and long-time Great Falls artist, died of natural causes Thursday at his daughter’s home in Boise, Idaho.
A celebration of his life will be held at a later date in Great Falls. Cremation has taken place under the direction of Cremation Society of Idaho in Boise.
The family of Leslie Hamilton Peters announces his passing at home with his daughter LInsey and her husband Rich Linford, in Boise, ID, on the evening of Dec. 2, 2010.
Les lived a long and wonderful life, leaving an amazing legacy through his artwork and his work in helping to establish the C.M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, MT.
Les was born July 18, 1917, in Great Falls. As a child he loved the time he spent with his family at their cabin in the Little Belt Mountains east of Great Falls. He attended the University of Montana for a year and studied for one year at the University of Oregon before serving in the Army with the 11th Cavalry on the Mexican border. In 1942 the Cavalry was disbanded and Les was transferred to an infantry division, later serving in France and Germany with the 13th Armored Division in World War II.
During his time in the Army, he met the love of his life, Barbara Lyons, of New York. Les and Barby were married in August of 1945. They moved to New York where Les studied for a year at the Art Students League and the Central Park School of Art. He and Barby returned to Great Falls where they raised five daughters. Les immersed himself in the life he loved, seeing and painting wildlife and the Western lifestyle.
Les continued to paint and sculpt through his life, giving generously of his time and talents, becoming a mentor and friend to many. On most days, Les could be found painting at his brick study in Great Falls. Even though he may have been in the process of finishing up a painting to get it sent off to a gallery or art patron, he always pushed back his easel to welcome visits from his friends and those interested in seeing his artwork and extensive collection of Native American artifacts. Les’s beautiful artwork can be found throughout Montana and in private collections throughout the United States. Some of Les’s greater accomplishments were a 90-foot mural for the Florence Hotel in Missoula, which now hangs at the Missoula airport, dioramas in the State Historical Society in Helena and a small painting that was presented to President Eisenhower.
He is survived by his five daughters: Suzy Peters (Bob Ruch) of Bainbridge Island, WA; Deb Cole (Bob) of Missoula, MT; Cindy Hilderbrand (Martell) of Billings, MT; and Lindsey Linford (Rich) and Margot Nye (Tracy) of Boise, ID; grandchildren, Troy, Libby and Ford Clary; Travis and Michael Cole; Ryan and Abby Linford; and Landon, Emily, Logan, and Connor Nye; great-grandchildren, Parker and Whitney Clary; his sister Mildred Duncan; and several nieces and nephews.
He was preceded in death by Barby; his parents, Julius and Julia Peters; his brother Julius Jr. (June) and sister, Elizabeth “Betty” Holbrook.
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
IS YOUR TATTOO AN ADVANTAGE OR A DISADVANTAGE?
Stigma is first of all, at the level of animal wiring, a matter of appearance, something that sets the person apart because it looks “different.” Not repellent necessarily, but unusual. It’s the white crow phenomenon: a white crow will be excluded and even attacked by the black crows. Is there a book called “the white crow” to go with “the black swan?” But a black swan is quite normal in Australia. It is not the blackness itself, which aesthetically is fine, but the unexpectedness of it. Something in biology wants a group to be homogenous. Outliers are eliminated. Yet they are the source of evolution because if circumstances change radically, they may be the only ones equipped to survive. THAT’s what fitness means -- not biggest and most vicious.
As a card-carrying liberal (albeit with an awkwardly eclectic bent) I’ve always felt that stigmas were unjustified, that oddballs were valuable (maybe geniuses!!), and that those in minority groups must be protected in order to preserve democracy. When I ran across this old (1963) almost unknown study by Erving Goffman called “Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity,” which is really somewhere between an expanded essay or thesis and a conventional book, I realized that I was naive. It’s the “management” element that I hadn’t considered: that stigma is a way of managing social groups and individuals. Persons who make trouble are stigmatized and thus “spoiled identities.” rendered powerless. Excluded. Fair game to punish or ignore or deprive.
I know this firsthand. Really powerful people pay no attention to me -- tubby old ladies in small towns are easy to ignore. But those in some contexts who are uncertain about their hold on money or status are quick to label me “bitter, greedy, hysterical” or as one woman put it, “too outspoken.” But it has backfired: instead of bringing me under control, being stigmatized has freed me from having to play the game by majority rules. I do not have to stay “in favor,” since I’m already “out” with no perceptible damage except the opinions of people I don’t care about anyway. (Context? Try Unitarian Universalists. Try the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Try the Montana Humanities scene.)
I may be moving too fast for you. Okay, back up. Being a member of a stigmatized group can be an advantage or a disadvantage. Any boundary presents an opportunity for strategy. Simply excluding people does not render them “safe” or nonexistent. Both the people in the in-group and the people in the out-group need to consider management of these “spoiled” identities.
Stigma turns out to be several different things.
Originally, says Goffman, the Greeks used stigma as an imposed mark or brand to signify status, maybe as a class (slave) or maybe associated with moral failure (thief). But then the mark might be converted into a mark of pride and voluntary association, even holiness as in bodily signs of Christian grace that echo the Crucifixion, like bleeding palms. Today piercing and tattooing that might once have marked people to avoid, have become, through defiant modeling by culture heroes, marks of belonging and identification -- pride. Of course, something permanent signs a more serious commitment to the category than does a sign on clothing: the yellow star marking Jews vs. the concentration camp tattooed number on the forearm.
Congenital characteristics like skin color or eyes with epicanthal folds or noses with too bold a curve are the kinds of stigma I was taught to oppose because they sign the stigma of groups that are simply “other” with no fault -- though the primitive idea of racial tribes, now swept aside by DNA analysis, still persists, and we are still afraid of those who are different. They might be enemies, or at least competitors, or your sister might want to marry one, which would introduce the possibility of her loyalty going to a group not the family. (Not YOU.)
Being born with no nose or a cleft palate (Have you seen those horrific photos of babies with holes in their faces?) can be addressed by surgery, but often even after repair there is some subtle difference that draws stares. I once rode the bus with a young woman who had Marfan Syndrome (unusually tall and thin) and couldn’t keep from staring at her. Our brains want more information. I thought she was beautiful, but I hurt her by making her self-conscious. Freaks trigger a terrible contradiction: how can people be so different and still be human? But one of the forces for good has been science fiction movies that humanize “persons” made weird by latex and silicone, excellent practice for looking past, say, the scars and melted-off ears of a burn victim to the mind inside.
There are plenty more stigmatized categories that are not immediately obvious. What is a stigma in one time/place (“What, you have no children?”) is a virtue in another (“How fine that you’ve refrained from having children in this over-populated world!”). And things have a tendency to flip: there have been many stories about the damage done by bullies, especially in grade school, but yesterday on the radio there was a story about how bullies have been damaged and should be helped, forgiven. Even so strong a category as murder flips: murder is so stigmatized that murderers are murdered by society, which triggers mercy in certain nuns. When there is a strong stigma countered by strong compassion, we become obsessed with it, can’t let it go.
Consider illiteracy or sexual orientation. They can be hidden. But everyone shares them to a degree: everyone is illiterate in some dimension or to some extent and everyone is unique in their sexuality to some extent. The boundary is blurry, so we don’t really know whether we’re on this side or that side, and yet there’s little space to manage being right on the line. It could give you a mid-life crisis, wondering whether you are old or not and whether it’s “in” or “out” to be old. Should you dye your hair? Get plastic surgery? Roll the bottoms of your trousers?
What makes Goffman’s book so interesting is that he’s working to help the stigmatized person figure out what to do about the stigma. Should a Native American among whites make a big deal out of it, taking the attitude that it’s a noble identity carrying special faculties? Or should he or she, aware that some people will expect them to be violent and drunk, simply let the unknowing assume they are Italian? Or abandon pride and get drunk: smash anyone who is critical. And how do you handle your inner life: be proud, be wary, shut the whole thing out of consciousness?
I’ve been watching the “spin” on Assange, who is either a principled whistleblower or a traitorous squealer, depending on how you manage your stigmas. The issue was moved to a sexual offense, rape, which is almost universally stigmatized. Now it appears that the event in question was consensual “sex by surprise,” which is defined as not using a condom. But our feelings about that are even more problematic because it addresses disease, one of the original reasons for stigmatizing and excluding people in order to protect the larger “herd” from contagion. But we have intense social commands to heal and protect everyone. (The health industry depends upon it.)
It’s a counseling truism that every problem is an opportunity. It appears that we’ve got a great opportunity to sort our stigmas and that it is a task that badly needs doing.
As a card-carrying liberal (albeit with an awkwardly eclectic bent) I’ve always felt that stigmas were unjustified, that oddballs were valuable (maybe geniuses!!), and that those in minority groups must be protected in order to preserve democracy. When I ran across this old (1963) almost unknown study by Erving Goffman called “Stigma: Notes on the Management of Spoiled Identity,” which is really somewhere between an expanded essay or thesis and a conventional book, I realized that I was naive. It’s the “management” element that I hadn’t considered: that stigma is a way of managing social groups and individuals. Persons who make trouble are stigmatized and thus “spoiled identities.” rendered powerless. Excluded. Fair game to punish or ignore or deprive.
I know this firsthand. Really powerful people pay no attention to me -- tubby old ladies in small towns are easy to ignore. But those in some contexts who are uncertain about their hold on money or status are quick to label me “bitter, greedy, hysterical” or as one woman put it, “too outspoken.” But it has backfired: instead of bringing me under control, being stigmatized has freed me from having to play the game by majority rules. I do not have to stay “in favor,” since I’m already “out” with no perceptible damage except the opinions of people I don’t care about anyway. (Context? Try Unitarian Universalists. Try the Industrial Cowboy Art Cartel. Try the Montana Humanities scene.)
I may be moving too fast for you. Okay, back up. Being a member of a stigmatized group can be an advantage or a disadvantage. Any boundary presents an opportunity for strategy. Simply excluding people does not render them “safe” or nonexistent. Both the people in the in-group and the people in the out-group need to consider management of these “spoiled” identities.
Stigma turns out to be several different things.
Originally, says Goffman, the Greeks used stigma as an imposed mark or brand to signify status, maybe as a class (slave) or maybe associated with moral failure (thief). But then the mark might be converted into a mark of pride and voluntary association, even holiness as in bodily signs of Christian grace that echo the Crucifixion, like bleeding palms. Today piercing and tattooing that might once have marked people to avoid, have become, through defiant modeling by culture heroes, marks of belonging and identification -- pride. Of course, something permanent signs a more serious commitment to the category than does a sign on clothing: the yellow star marking Jews vs. the concentration camp tattooed number on the forearm.
Congenital characteristics like skin color or eyes with epicanthal folds or noses with too bold a curve are the kinds of stigma I was taught to oppose because they sign the stigma of groups that are simply “other” with no fault -- though the primitive idea of racial tribes, now swept aside by DNA analysis, still persists, and we are still afraid of those who are different. They might be enemies, or at least competitors, or your sister might want to marry one, which would introduce the possibility of her loyalty going to a group not the family. (Not YOU.)
Being born with no nose or a cleft palate (Have you seen those horrific photos of babies with holes in their faces?) can be addressed by surgery, but often even after repair there is some subtle difference that draws stares. I once rode the bus with a young woman who had Marfan Syndrome (unusually tall and thin) and couldn’t keep from staring at her. Our brains want more information. I thought she was beautiful, but I hurt her by making her self-conscious. Freaks trigger a terrible contradiction: how can people be so different and still be human? But one of the forces for good has been science fiction movies that humanize “persons” made weird by latex and silicone, excellent practice for looking past, say, the scars and melted-off ears of a burn victim to the mind inside.
There are plenty more stigmatized categories that are not immediately obvious. What is a stigma in one time/place (“What, you have no children?”) is a virtue in another (“How fine that you’ve refrained from having children in this over-populated world!”). And things have a tendency to flip: there have been many stories about the damage done by bullies, especially in grade school, but yesterday on the radio there was a story about how bullies have been damaged and should be helped, forgiven. Even so strong a category as murder flips: murder is so stigmatized that murderers are murdered by society, which triggers mercy in certain nuns. When there is a strong stigma countered by strong compassion, we become obsessed with it, can’t let it go.
Consider illiteracy or sexual orientation. They can be hidden. But everyone shares them to a degree: everyone is illiterate in some dimension or to some extent and everyone is unique in their sexuality to some extent. The boundary is blurry, so we don’t really know whether we’re on this side or that side, and yet there’s little space to manage being right on the line. It could give you a mid-life crisis, wondering whether you are old or not and whether it’s “in” or “out” to be old. Should you dye your hair? Get plastic surgery? Roll the bottoms of your trousers?
What makes Goffman’s book so interesting is that he’s working to help the stigmatized person figure out what to do about the stigma. Should a Native American among whites make a big deal out of it, taking the attitude that it’s a noble identity carrying special faculties? Or should he or she, aware that some people will expect them to be violent and drunk, simply let the unknowing assume they are Italian? Or abandon pride and get drunk: smash anyone who is critical. And how do you handle your inner life: be proud, be wary, shut the whole thing out of consciousness?
I’ve been watching the “spin” on Assange, who is either a principled whistleblower or a traitorous squealer, depending on how you manage your stigmas. The issue was moved to a sexual offense, rape, which is almost universally stigmatized. Now it appears that the event in question was consensual “sex by surprise,” which is defined as not using a condom. But our feelings about that are even more problematic because it addresses disease, one of the original reasons for stigmatizing and excluding people in order to protect the larger “herd” from contagion. But we have intense social commands to heal and protect everyone. (The health industry depends upon it.)
It’s a counseling truism that every problem is an opportunity. It appears that we’ve got a great opportunity to sort our stigmas and that it is a task that badly needs doing.
Monday, December 06, 2010
"MY BROTHER, MY LOVER" First Draft Novel
Tim Barrus was always a writer and mostly -- from high school where he won a city contest for poetry, a book called “Footprints in the Sand” -- without guidance except his own reading and sheer emotional force. I have not read the “Footprints” book nor have I read any of the successors during the years when Tim stood at the ferry slip in San Francisco with homemade stapled chapbooks for sale, asking the tourists, “Do you like poetry?” They often did. Those were the late Sixties and then Seventies. Tim was hanging out with the best and most verbal in that fermenting stew of creativity and possibility.
The first published book was “My Brother, My Lover.” Since it is first person, immediately presents the reader with the problem of what is “true” and what is “fiction.” What is possible? What is likely? What is shocking or even horrifying? My position would be that a book should be taken as it is on the surface of the page and not as an access to a private life. I have enough knowledge of Tim’s life to say -- I hope without violating boundaries -- that what he is doing and has always done is to try to heal abuse with love. The original abusive relationship was not brothers or cousins or peers -- it was not any equal relationship at all. He was a beautiful child and certain persons could not leave him alone.
First paragraphs are always helpful. This book starts off, “I don’t think that there was ever really a time that I wasn’t totally enigmatically connected to my brother. Thomas is only nine-square-months older than I am, but it seems as if I have always in one way or another found myself looking “up” to him.” So here’s the kernel of Tim’s stories: two males, deeply connected, not quite equal. In this first version, the narrator is the younger, the more vulnerable. The little joke about “nine-square-months” is typical and especially in this early novel Tim uses vernacular in a corny Ma-and-Pa Kettle way to establish that these are country people. Women say, “Land’s sake!”
Soon the other major fiction figure appears: the powerful, dominating, king-like figure that the “princes” dare not offend but cannot help admiring. “We had a daddy the likes of which we adored with an earnest fascination. Our daddy was a rancher-carpenter who not only ran our working ranch but rented himself out . . .” This is very much a Western and frontier figure. “Our daddy could do anything.” “Our daddy was built like a bear. He looked like a bear, talked like a bear, and our mamma always said he thought like one.” But this daddy has a granddaddy loving disposition.
Mamma is “the one who introduced me to the world of books. It was her world. She read. Constantly.” In this story it is the Mamma who gets the boys put into the same class at school and says, “They’re too close to be separate.” But the daddy teaches them to work until “it was just ingrained inside of us.” At bedtime the Mamma comes to read to them about Mowgli from “The Jungle Book” and calls them her coyote pups, so they rub noses, but this is not all sweet and soft. Mamma tells them that the coyote will teach them to endure. She tells them about the coyote who gnaws off his own foot to escape from a trap.
These two boys have enormous intimacy but no sexual relationship until adolescence. The advent of initiation is more ignorant than innocent. Sex is synonymous with “the city” which is San Francisco which accepts gay sex. How forbidden they might consider sex between brothers, I don’t know, but Tim’s stories are always about what is transgressive and always asks whether the suffering that ensues is necessary retribution. In this case the family home burns with the parents inside.
The narrator wants to rebuild the house. The barely older brother leaves. At the end of that chapter, after a night of hard drinking, comes this sentence: “Soon enough I could see the sun rising like a whore’s red lips in the east over the mountains subtly ending the night with light.” The poet has mugged the story teller. “Whore’s red lips” are not subtle. Nor do they shed light.
The story goes on, pulling in another favorite constant: the nurturing transvestite who resolves the problem about whether to marry Mamma or Daddy by being both. She’s also a source of wit and a mouthpiece for Tim’s rules for life: growth and risk are identical. The best drug is adrenaline. Bodies are not the locus of love, which is in intimacy, emotion. Porn is boring. By the last paragraph of the book, Barrus has control of his metaphors. As the lovers reunite at last, “the sky was drunk with thunder.” Also by this time the last essential element has been introduced: the dog, in this case an Irish setter puppy. In fact, if you need a good metaphor for this book, the pup is it -- lovable but a little clumsy.
The sharp remarks about the sex biz are earned knowledge. Copyright 1985 means that Tim’s career as a whore has been ended by HIV and his second marriage. He is thirty-five with an adolescent daughter. The AIDS plague is devastating San Francisco. “Time to get out of Dodge” is a Barrus principle.
The next book, “Anywhere, Anywhere” is mixed genre: poetry as a heading for each chapter, pop music lyrics larded through the story as they were through the Vietnam War that is the basic trigger for the story, and eventually this book became a play in Manhattan. The language is no longer innocent.
The jump in sophistication between the first novel and the second is big. And yet Tim says the impetus for “Anywhere” came from simply watching a pair of men take care of each other. It is the nurturing and protecting element that distinguishes Tim’s same-sex lovers but now the incest drops out and never reappears. He’s never this corny again, but keeps the preoccupation with money and social class. The earmarks that will persist are energy, earnestness, and the authenticity of Tim’s writing. A few phrases (“Stars in my arms”), the Dorothy in the Land of Oz trope, and the subject of same-sex love out on the edge of the world will be constant.
TO BE CONTINUED
The first published book was “My Brother, My Lover.” Since it is first person, immediately presents the reader with the problem of what is “true” and what is “fiction.” What is possible? What is likely? What is shocking or even horrifying? My position would be that a book should be taken as it is on the surface of the page and not as an access to a private life. I have enough knowledge of Tim’s life to say -- I hope without violating boundaries -- that what he is doing and has always done is to try to heal abuse with love. The original abusive relationship was not brothers or cousins or peers -- it was not any equal relationship at all. He was a beautiful child and certain persons could not leave him alone.
First paragraphs are always helpful. This book starts off, “I don’t think that there was ever really a time that I wasn’t totally enigmatically connected to my brother. Thomas is only nine-square-months older than I am, but it seems as if I have always in one way or another found myself looking “up” to him.” So here’s the kernel of Tim’s stories: two males, deeply connected, not quite equal. In this first version, the narrator is the younger, the more vulnerable. The little joke about “nine-square-months” is typical and especially in this early novel Tim uses vernacular in a corny Ma-and-Pa Kettle way to establish that these are country people. Women say, “Land’s sake!”
Soon the other major fiction figure appears: the powerful, dominating, king-like figure that the “princes” dare not offend but cannot help admiring. “We had a daddy the likes of which we adored with an earnest fascination. Our daddy was a rancher-carpenter who not only ran our working ranch but rented himself out . . .” This is very much a Western and frontier figure. “Our daddy could do anything.” “Our daddy was built like a bear. He looked like a bear, talked like a bear, and our mamma always said he thought like one.” But this daddy has a granddaddy loving disposition.
Mamma is “the one who introduced me to the world of books. It was her world. She read. Constantly.” In this story it is the Mamma who gets the boys put into the same class at school and says, “They’re too close to be separate.” But the daddy teaches them to work until “it was just ingrained inside of us.” At bedtime the Mamma comes to read to them about Mowgli from “The Jungle Book” and calls them her coyote pups, so they rub noses, but this is not all sweet and soft. Mamma tells them that the coyote will teach them to endure. She tells them about the coyote who gnaws off his own foot to escape from a trap.
These two boys have enormous intimacy but no sexual relationship until adolescence. The advent of initiation is more ignorant than innocent. Sex is synonymous with “the city” which is San Francisco which accepts gay sex. How forbidden they might consider sex between brothers, I don’t know, but Tim’s stories are always about what is transgressive and always asks whether the suffering that ensues is necessary retribution. In this case the family home burns with the parents inside.
The narrator wants to rebuild the house. The barely older brother leaves. At the end of that chapter, after a night of hard drinking, comes this sentence: “Soon enough I could see the sun rising like a whore’s red lips in the east over the mountains subtly ending the night with light.” The poet has mugged the story teller. “Whore’s red lips” are not subtle. Nor do they shed light.
The story goes on, pulling in another favorite constant: the nurturing transvestite who resolves the problem about whether to marry Mamma or Daddy by being both. She’s also a source of wit and a mouthpiece for Tim’s rules for life: growth and risk are identical. The best drug is adrenaline. Bodies are not the locus of love, which is in intimacy, emotion. Porn is boring. By the last paragraph of the book, Barrus has control of his metaphors. As the lovers reunite at last, “the sky was drunk with thunder.” Also by this time the last essential element has been introduced: the dog, in this case an Irish setter puppy. In fact, if you need a good metaphor for this book, the pup is it -- lovable but a little clumsy.
The sharp remarks about the sex biz are earned knowledge. Copyright 1985 means that Tim’s career as a whore has been ended by HIV and his second marriage. He is thirty-five with an adolescent daughter. The AIDS plague is devastating San Francisco. “Time to get out of Dodge” is a Barrus principle.
The next book, “Anywhere, Anywhere” is mixed genre: poetry as a heading for each chapter, pop music lyrics larded through the story as they were through the Vietnam War that is the basic trigger for the story, and eventually this book became a play in Manhattan. The language is no longer innocent.
The jump in sophistication between the first novel and the second is big. And yet Tim says the impetus for “Anywhere” came from simply watching a pair of men take care of each other. It is the nurturing and protecting element that distinguishes Tim’s same-sex lovers but now the incest drops out and never reappears. He’s never this corny again, but keeps the preoccupation with money and social class. The earmarks that will persist are energy, earnestness, and the authenticity of Tim’s writing. A few phrases (“Stars in my arms”), the Dorothy in the Land of Oz trope, and the subject of same-sex love out on the edge of the world will be constant.
TO BE CONTINUED
Sunday, December 05, 2010
CURATING TIM BARRUS
There are those who would say I’m not entitled or qualified to “curate” Tim Barrus. First, as his “co-writer,” I have a vested interest in portraying him in a positive light. Okay. Keep that in mind.
Second, some -- probably including Tim, and certainly his boys -- would say that I have no context for the exotic situations about which he writes and in which he has lived. So the first criticism would be that I know too much about Tim and the second would be that I don’t know enough. Let’s just say they cancel each other out.
There is no single context that can do Tim’s work justice. Until now he has mostly been addressed by aggregators of “gay” writing, lists rather than much discussion. “Gay” writing falls into a host of categories, still unsettled. Tim’s definition of “Leather Lit,” which is meant to describe himself, is only part of his work. The S/M world is intense, private, and voluntary. Work with the AIDS epidemic, with human trafficking and the support of adolescent boys at risk are perhaps more major. Some of this work rests on his experience as a special ed teacher.
Ironically, much of the evaluation of his writing was done in the belief that he was half-Navajo, which seems in some minds to have been voided by the revelation that he was not, though there is a large and respected body of writing about Native Americans that is written by white people: the Hillerman mysteries, “Laughing Boy,” “When the Legends Die,” and even one written under false pretenses by a neo-Nazi: “The Education of Little Tree,” which is still published by the University of New Mexico Press. PEN, the writer’s organization, gave Tim their “Beyond Margins” prize (which does not specify an NA writer) and did not rescind it since they are aware of the phenomenon of “noms de plume.” Much of what Tim knows about NA’s is from Chippewas in Michigan. Many of his critics didn’t even realize there were Indians in Michigan, much less what tribe they might be. He has worked with other SW tribes.
In a never fact-checked biography by the “Gale Reference Team” which produces the “Contemporary Authors” series for libraries, several reviewers are quoted:
In Salon, Maria Russo says, “The ‘singular language’. . . blends Native American mythological rhythms and imagery, stirring Whitemanesque catalogs and unadorned observations about life on and around the reservation, Nasdijj’s terse, elemental sentences don’t so much follow one another as nestle on top of the next, like a desert rock formation. His anger as the ‘white people world’ just about reaches off the page and shoves you, and yet there’s a disciplined quality to his fury. For all it’s descriptions of drunken violence and crushing poverty, the book has a gentleness at its core.”
In the Washington Post Book World, Christopher D. Ringwald wrote: “much as a drumming circle or meditative chanting may bring participants to an altered state, Nasdijj’s repetitious, episodic style taps a deeper consciousness.”
In Kliatt Edna M Boardman said: “He may be one of America’s great writers today.”
In the Salt Lake Tribune Online, Martin Naparsteck wrote: “some pages. . . will shred your heart. Some will boil your blood. Seldom has one book contained so much pain and anger and so thoroughly drawn the reader into its emotional sandstorm.”
In the Austin Chronicle Online, Michael Robertson said, “Nasdijj rough-hews the English language until it takes stunning forms. He dismisses narrative linearity because memory is ‘the exploded junk from hand grenades and words become the most elemental stuff, crushed rock and flowers to sift through his fingers with disciplined intensity.’”
In the New York Times Book Review, Ted Conover, a journalist who has made his reputation by walking on the wild side, wrote “This is an outsider’s book; Nasdijj has sympathy for the downtrodden and anger toward the world that marginalizes them. . . . Nasdijj exposes a pain so deep in the Tommy chapters that he breaks your heart . . . this is a fascinating book, unlike anything you are likely to have read . . . his book reminds us that brave and engaging writers lurk in the most forgotten corners of society.” It was Conover’s student, Mathew Fleischner who tried to build a career by labeling Tim Barrus a hoaxer, carefully leaving out any hint that he was a man who wrote under many names for many reasons. One of the reasons for that was to protect Tim’s family, but this protection was shattered in the scandal.
Since then Tim’s blog/vlog short pieces combining word and image -- some of his most arresting and vivid work -- present the problem of being multi-media. They can’t be evaluated without including the whole post, which means viewing images and video on a computer.
A whole body of print, some of it enraged invective, resides in comments meant to expose, embarrass, accuse, punish, and somehow move publishers off their commitment to a stupid and damaging status quo. His assailing of the “wall” around Manhattan publishing did not cause its collapse, but he was identifying the problems as loudly as Joshua marching around Jericho with a brass band and was gratified when it fell.
Poetry on Facebook came as grace, unexpected and lyric if dark. Often just a sentence or two in response to a poem, most often by Carolyn Srygley-Moore, or sometimes something longer, these are mature work. Now many of them appear with his photographs on Rachel Chapple’s webside dedicated to AIDS prevention and the fight to find a cure. http://www.real-stories-gallery.com/
By the time Facebook closed its doors to Tim, he was unable to travel. He posts material from early in his life, sometimes about his life as a whore before carrying AIDS made him a lethal weapon. I know nothing about the literature written by prostitutes but I would be surprised if many of them addressed the practical issues of safety and child care. (Children are also a result of sex, in case you didn’t realize.) Westerners have long been fascinated by female whores on the frontier (“Lonesome Dove”) or the Frenchified bordellos of New Orleans (“Pretty Baby”). Now that they have realized that men have sex with men as well as sheep, they may still be startled by Tim’s matter-of-fact domesticity in Vegas, where he preferred to live with the female sex workers rather than the males. I’ll say this: Tim is a man who makes loyal friends no matter the context.
The gay photographers and writers of San Francisco and Florida, Tangiers and Paris, produced fine work and included famous names, but were snuffed early by AIDS and drugs. Tim (b. 1950) was just a little late, hitting his stride as the virus was isolated and tests were available. But then came the meds that made him a survivor, merely suffering. Avascular necrosis, the result of huge doses of predisone necessary to save his life from fungal pneumonia, requires repeated surgery and uses up all book profits.
There is one context that Tim prefers to leave off-limits: his family. I itch to call on social theory that might destroy the myth of the safe white suburban home where children are protected. Interposing himself as a human barrier, Tim managed to save his descendents, some biological and some psychological. He does not wish that to be undone. Just let me say that he has remarkably stayed close to boyhood friends.
What remains is to look at specific writing.
Second, some -- probably including Tim, and certainly his boys -- would say that I have no context for the exotic situations about which he writes and in which he has lived. So the first criticism would be that I know too much about Tim and the second would be that I don’t know enough. Let’s just say they cancel each other out.
There is no single context that can do Tim’s work justice. Until now he has mostly been addressed by aggregators of “gay” writing, lists rather than much discussion. “Gay” writing falls into a host of categories, still unsettled. Tim’s definition of “Leather Lit,” which is meant to describe himself, is only part of his work. The S/M world is intense, private, and voluntary. Work with the AIDS epidemic, with human trafficking and the support of adolescent boys at risk are perhaps more major. Some of this work rests on his experience as a special ed teacher.
Ironically, much of the evaluation of his writing was done in the belief that he was half-Navajo, which seems in some minds to have been voided by the revelation that he was not, though there is a large and respected body of writing about Native Americans that is written by white people: the Hillerman mysteries, “Laughing Boy,” “When the Legends Die,” and even one written under false pretenses by a neo-Nazi: “The Education of Little Tree,” which is still published by the University of New Mexico Press. PEN, the writer’s organization, gave Tim their “Beyond Margins” prize (which does not specify an NA writer) and did not rescind it since they are aware of the phenomenon of “noms de plume.” Much of what Tim knows about NA’s is from Chippewas in Michigan. Many of his critics didn’t even realize there were Indians in Michigan, much less what tribe they might be. He has worked with other SW tribes.
In a never fact-checked biography by the “Gale Reference Team” which produces the “Contemporary Authors” series for libraries, several reviewers are quoted:
In Salon, Maria Russo says, “The ‘singular language’. . . blends Native American mythological rhythms and imagery, stirring Whitemanesque catalogs and unadorned observations about life on and around the reservation, Nasdijj’s terse, elemental sentences don’t so much follow one another as nestle on top of the next, like a desert rock formation. His anger as the ‘white people world’ just about reaches off the page and shoves you, and yet there’s a disciplined quality to his fury. For all it’s descriptions of drunken violence and crushing poverty, the book has a gentleness at its core.”
In the Washington Post Book World, Christopher D. Ringwald wrote: “much as a drumming circle or meditative chanting may bring participants to an altered state, Nasdijj’s repetitious, episodic style taps a deeper consciousness.”
In Kliatt Edna M Boardman said: “He may be one of America’s great writers today.”
In the Salt Lake Tribune Online, Martin Naparsteck wrote: “some pages. . . will shred your heart. Some will boil your blood. Seldom has one book contained so much pain and anger and so thoroughly drawn the reader into its emotional sandstorm.”
In the Austin Chronicle Online, Michael Robertson said, “Nasdijj rough-hews the English language until it takes stunning forms. He dismisses narrative linearity because memory is ‘the exploded junk from hand grenades and words become the most elemental stuff, crushed rock and flowers to sift through his fingers with disciplined intensity.’”
In the New York Times Book Review, Ted Conover, a journalist who has made his reputation by walking on the wild side, wrote “This is an outsider’s book; Nasdijj has sympathy for the downtrodden and anger toward the world that marginalizes them. . . . Nasdijj exposes a pain so deep in the Tommy chapters that he breaks your heart . . . this is a fascinating book, unlike anything you are likely to have read . . . his book reminds us that brave and engaging writers lurk in the most forgotten corners of society.” It was Conover’s student, Mathew Fleischner who tried to build a career by labeling Tim Barrus a hoaxer, carefully leaving out any hint that he was a man who wrote under many names for many reasons. One of the reasons for that was to protect Tim’s family, but this protection was shattered in the scandal.
Since then Tim’s blog/vlog short pieces combining word and image -- some of his most arresting and vivid work -- present the problem of being multi-media. They can’t be evaluated without including the whole post, which means viewing images and video on a computer.
A whole body of print, some of it enraged invective, resides in comments meant to expose, embarrass, accuse, punish, and somehow move publishers off their commitment to a stupid and damaging status quo. His assailing of the “wall” around Manhattan publishing did not cause its collapse, but he was identifying the problems as loudly as Joshua marching around Jericho with a brass band and was gratified when it fell.
Poetry on Facebook came as grace, unexpected and lyric if dark. Often just a sentence or two in response to a poem, most often by Carolyn Srygley-Moore, or sometimes something longer, these are mature work. Now many of them appear with his photographs on Rachel Chapple’s webside dedicated to AIDS prevention and the fight to find a cure. http://www.real-stories-gallery.com/
By the time Facebook closed its doors to Tim, he was unable to travel. He posts material from early in his life, sometimes about his life as a whore before carrying AIDS made him a lethal weapon. I know nothing about the literature written by prostitutes but I would be surprised if many of them addressed the practical issues of safety and child care. (Children are also a result of sex, in case you didn’t realize.) Westerners have long been fascinated by female whores on the frontier (“Lonesome Dove”) or the Frenchified bordellos of New Orleans (“Pretty Baby”). Now that they have realized that men have sex with men as well as sheep, they may still be startled by Tim’s matter-of-fact domesticity in Vegas, where he preferred to live with the female sex workers rather than the males. I’ll say this: Tim is a man who makes loyal friends no matter the context.
The gay photographers and writers of San Francisco and Florida, Tangiers and Paris, produced fine work and included famous names, but were snuffed early by AIDS and drugs. Tim (b. 1950) was just a little late, hitting his stride as the virus was isolated and tests were available. But then came the meds that made him a survivor, merely suffering. Avascular necrosis, the result of huge doses of predisone necessary to save his life from fungal pneumonia, requires repeated surgery and uses up all book profits.
There is one context that Tim prefers to leave off-limits: his family. I itch to call on social theory that might destroy the myth of the safe white suburban home where children are protected. Interposing himself as a human barrier, Tim managed to save his descendents, some biological and some psychological. He does not wish that to be undone. Just let me say that he has remarkably stayed close to boyhood friends.
What remains is to look at specific writing.
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