Number of comments: 1 Would you buy a book written by this woman? Mary Strachan circa 1962
It’s Sunday morning, it’s fifteen below zero, there are inches of new snow (undoing all the kind work of Dale, who shoveled out my driveway last time -- at least I [...]
Number of comments: 0 “The Education of Little Tree” (1976) is one of the most notorious of the faux Indian identity books but I had not read the book (still haven’t) and just saw the movie last night. The movie the night before was “Gran Torino” about a cranky old white man who hates [...]
Number of comments: 1 “Ginny Good” by Gerard Jones, Monkfish, 2004 “Bad Behavior” by Mary Gaitskill, Poseiden (Simon & Schuster), 1988 “A Complicated Kindness” by Miriam Toews, Counterpoint (Perseus), 2004 This little stack of books about young women came to me various ways.
Gerard Jones lives in Ashland, Oregon, and is [...]
Number of comments: 2 The most horrible thing is not death -- it’s being stuck between life and death, not being able to die and not being able to get better. People in this situation are called zombies. The American culture likes zombies because they make money. Just in the movies alone they are [...]
Number of comments: 0 Today's tribal chief: Willie Sharp's senior portrait.
It was 1973 and in Browning one of the worst winters I ever lived through (barely). The snow was so deep and the wind was so strong that you could not walk outdoors. I mean, you could get [...]
Number of comments: 2 The new primer is Twitter. I say this because the “infant” primers, as investigated in the Sexson’s “My Book and Heart Shall Never Part,” are presented as being for children, which some people feel is true of Twitter posts. But in truth they are also “five-finger-exercises” for type-setting, a low [...]
Number of comments: 0 So what if you don’t WANT to write a best-selling novel published in Manhattan by a big-name publisher now owned by a soup conglomerate and reviewed in the major mags by smart aleck young people who ALSO want to write a best-selling novel, etc. ? THEN what advice should you [...]
Number of comments: 0 “Rachel Getting Married” and “Until Night Falls” could not be more different in content, but there are some curious echoes in the way they were made that create an interesting comparison. In a sense they are both high-grade (studio-quality) movies made by people with money enough to indulge their own [...]
Number of comments: 0 The blizzard started, as forecasted, just about suppertime last night and is roaring today. It roared all night. Now the world is submarine and somehow subconscious, altered and blurred as in a dream. When I woke up the second time, I spent a long time slipping back and forth into [...]
Number of comments: 2 Instead of using fancy philosophers to peg my two forces, described in my fav Flaubert quote which I keep above the computer (“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”), since I’ve never made a serious study of philosophers (don’t [...]
Number of comments: 1 Always attracted to philosophies advocating simplicity, rootedness, and attachment -- like maybe Tao -- I am often and equally attracted to concepts of glamour, mystery, and risk. My choice is to live the first category and mostly think the second one. It seems to work pretty well, except that it [...]
Number of comments: 0 The reasons that Canadian films don’t “catch fire” in the US are various and may include the idea that their films are too good for us to appreciate! But to be a little kinder, there are other factors. One of the more subtle and interesting is the “Wacousta Syndrome,” which [...]
Number of comments: 1 The snow that always follows Thanksgiving came last night. One moment I looked out the window to see the moon floating among a few clouds in the east. A little later I looked out again and snow was flying.
The first sign that it’s on the way is often [...]
Number of comments: 0 Suppose we dreamt we were Tiger Woods and we crashed our white SUV in the middle of the night while pulling out of the “driveway” of our fancy house in a gated community. Suppose we hit a tree and a fire hydrant and our lovely blonde wife had to save [...]
Number of comments: 2 When Lynda and Michael Sexson organized “Logon ‘83” I was circuit-riding through Montana and didn’t own a computer but had worked on one at the U of Chicago Law School, transcribing. The name of the conference was a pun, of course, since one “logged on” to a computer and the [...]
Number of comments: 1 Being ordained is a little like getting married. I like to joke that I was ordained on the set of “Death of a Saleman,” which is [...]
Number of comments: 0 Some years ago I was looking for a hanging plant for my big east kitchen window. I thought it ought to be pretty heat-tolerant as that spot gets pretty warm in summer. In a commercial nursery I spotted a nice fleshy plant with interesting pods along the stems. The stems [...]
Number of comments: 4 Last Thanksgiving I was a guest for dinner across the alley at the Andersons. Eli brought a turkey, Rose cooked it, and Wayne and I were appreciative. Rose died of cancer last spring. Eli and Wayne were killed in a car crash this fall. Eli took a plate to Lee, [...]
Number of comments: 0 This evening I was watching “Wire in the Blood” and thinking about how extremely stylish it is and how sophisticated all the references to ritual and psych theory and the Bible, etc. etc. and how formidably stark and ingenious the architecture is. Of course, it’s ten years since I’ve been [...]
Number of comments: 1 Betty MacDonald, author of “The Egg and I,” was also the creator of Ma and Pa Kettle. Incredibly shiftless and cheerful, they were living proof that survival can be achieved by pure persistence. Fitness and energy need have nothing to do with it. In fact, the Kettles must have been [...]
Number of comments: 1 These days education is in roughly the same shape as the economy: that is, those at the top are doing fine, in fact, probably quite a bit better than in the past, but those at the bottom aren’t even included. They are out there somewhere mysterious, existing in some kind [...]
Number of comments: 0 Meadville/Lombard Theological School is selling its building. This is my alma mater seminary, though much -- if not most -- of my classwork was done at the University of Chicago where I also earned an MA in Religious Studies. Most of these academic labyrinthine arrangements are pretty mysterious to those [...]
Number of comments: 0 From the review of Yagoda’s “Memoir: A History” by Judith Shulevitz: “Ben Yagoda asks the question we’ve been waiting for: How do we know when we’re being duped? The answer is almost worth the delay, even though it’s a quotation from nearly a half-century ago: Think of the memoirist ‘as [...]
Number of comments: 0 Indie films and Native Americans -- okay, “Indians” -- seem like a match so natural as to be inevitable. The newest one I’ve seen is “Frozen River,” just now being mentioned on the new West Lit blog. (The cowboys have discovered the Indians! And they’re female!) This film is also [...]
Number of comments: 2 Camille Paglia has always been at the periphery of my vision as one of the femme terrible writers who stalks the edges of polite scholarship -- sort of the Patricia Limerick of sexuality. It MUST be about sexuality, right? After all, she’s lesbian. Her life must be all about that. [...]
Number of comments: 0 Out beyond the fancy tourist Native American artifacts, the authentic, the historical, and the humble ritual objects, is something else that is beyond the intangible: the core of the Native American process and the materials from the land, just as Native Americans would create according to precedent, but without any [...]
Number of comments: 0 Earlier in this series I talked about Uhlenbeck and his collection of linguistic material, which he took (without removing) in the form of stories and later analyzed for grammar and structure. He did not publish books of stories for popular consumption like the many versions of Napi stories. (See Monday, [...]
Number of comments: 1 Many people in the West have collections in their basements or garages of things that they’ve simply found or bought from someone else who found it. In Portland, Oregon, my mother had a whole row of stones that had clearly been used for something: mortar and pestle, grinder, pounder. (She [...]
Number of comments: 0 Paul Dyck’s collection of Indian artifacts is the star in the crown of the Buffalo Bill Historical Center. Paul Dyck himself was extraordinary and his wife, Star, even more so. She was the sort of glamorous tomboy whom we associate with old-time major film stars, competent, protective and very beautiful. [...]
Number of comments: 1 Imagine a gold candlestick: nothing fancy, just a single candle. One person figures it’s only brass. A professional evaluator sees that it’s gold and of very high quality workmanship. To another person it’s the candlestick his grandmother always had on the mantel. Maybe this turns out to be the candlestick [...]
Number of comments: 1 Here comes a story at the opposite extreme from the Uhlenbeck’s, one I can only tell now because a confirming article showed up through Google. I had to pay $4 to get a copy from the New York Times, but I already knew the information. I was just afraid to [...]
Number of comments: 2 Let’s try some local case studies before we go to the SW law cases which have not come to trial yet. I have a hunch that by tracing out some very different artifact collectors, we can uncover issues. Too many people reach a point of view by excluding any evidence [...]
Number of comments: 1 Today is still -- no wind -- with rain threatening, so I’ve been up on the garage tarping the roof. Don’t worry. I’m very careful, it’s a flat roof, there’s a little parapet around it, and my ladder is good to 300#. I also read the directions pasted on it [...]
Number of comments: 1 When I was about six and the movies still meant going to a theatre to see a double feature, one major and one minor, plus a newsreel, a cartoon and maybe a couple of shorts, there was a funny short about Fibber Magee and Molly, who were normally on the [...]
Number of comments: 2 When I was an undergrad at Northwestern University in what was then the School of Speech, I kept worrying my advisor, a kind but conventional man who wanted to make sure I’d be able to earn a living, by signing up for courses in religion. It was bad enough that [...]
Number of comments: 0 Tim and I and the Cinematheque boys have been talking about writing techniques and genres. This phrase that starts with “Madly Anointed, etc.” collided with Donald Pittenger’s thoughts on 2blowhards.com talking about how 19th century Western art is essentially Orientalist, and I created the following satire which is also mock-porn. [...]
Number of comments: 0 Purple prose is a term of literary criticism used to describe passages, or sometimes entire literary works, written in prose so overly extravagant, ornate, or flowery as to break the flow and draw attention to itself. Purple prose is sensually evocative beyond the requirements of its context. It also refers [...]
Number of comments: 1 “Blood” is the preoccupation of Indians and yet the identity of an Indian is not determined by actual genetics after all. The criterion is “pedigree” or “provenance” (which are approximately the same thing) created by People self-announcing identities about two hundred years ago when the army began making lists of [...]
Number of comments: 1 There are two assumptions here: first, that a thing like an idea, a story, a poem, a song, can be owned; the second that the creator should have control of it, any profit that comes from it. Most of us would accept these ideas: they are the basis of our [...]
Number of comments: 0 The crux of the matter is that for the American autochthonous people, everything was sacred: land, people, animals, plants. But some hundreds of years ago, in order to keep the peace when science began to depart from religion, the Europeans invented the idea of the “secular” and divided life into [...]
Number of comments: 2 Recently there was an uproar over a YouTube post that put “synchronized pow wow dancing” (which is already controversial) to Chubby Checkers’ twist music. Four guys wore ribbons and feathers that furiously thrashed around them as they exactly matched their steps to the drum and each other -- and the [...]
Number of comments: 1 We tend to think of trade goods as being the result of European contact, but in fact there has always been vigorous trade along routes that networked both North and South America, as well as very early detectable trade around the Pacific Rim many thousands of years ago.
Only a few miles north of Valier along Birch Creek which is the southern boundary of the Blackfeet Reservation, is a place called “Willow Rounds.” Via Google you can find some wonderful photos of the place because the ranch called that is currently for sale. You’ll see [...]
“Lith” means stone. Sometimes American indigenous people are called “stone age people,” though we used to kid each other in the foundry that the Blackfeet present were now up to the “bronze age.” The truth is that much of the early material culture must have been organic: [...]
We are constantly digging up things, including skeletons. Some on purpose, like paleontologists searching in Africa and finding the remains of eohumans that are six million years old, and others accidentally (possibly homicide victims) when making highway cuts or excavating for basements. When rationalizing their [...]
Number of comments: 1 The ever on-going discussion and actual events around Native American artifacts have gotten tragically heated, resulting in arrests, jail terms, suicides and rented trucks carrying away literal tons of materials. Most people either have nearly violent opinions or can’t figure out what the heck to think.
Number of comments: 10 BORN IN 1939. So today I’m 70. Looking at the decades in reverse:
In 1999, at 60, I was just moving to Valier, a huge jump. It was freedom. It was going home. At last I could read and write all day and have two cats. I DID [...]
Number of comments: 1 “Small Beneath the Sky” by Lorna Crozier was one of the books offered to be reviewed by one of the environmental groups I belong to, one based in Canada. I’m only an hour’s drive south of the border and have many family roots in Canada as well as having served [...]
Number of comments: 0 http://www.ourmedia.org/ia/details/null
In theory at least, you should be able to hear my first “published” sound blog by clicking on the above link. You might have to copy and paste to your browser.
There must be another step, namely installing a gizmo to play ON the blog. Nope. That's' [...]
Number of comments: 1 Years and years and years ago “Bend in the River” was filmed on the shoulder of Mt. Hood. It was about the Oregon Trail pioneers struggling through the last part of the trek, which was probably also the hardest part, getting over the Cascades, slashing through timber and lowering the [...]
