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  • WE DREAM WE ARE TIGER WOODS

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 30, 2009, 10:48am EST
    by prairie mary

  • LOGON '83: A SEED THAT GREW

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 29, 2009, 9:33am EST
    by prairie mary

  • ORDAINED IN HELENA, MONTANA

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 28, 2009, 9:30am EST
    by prairie mary

  • THE CACTUS AND RIGHT ALIGNMENT

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    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 27, 2009, 2:22pm EST
    by prairie mary

  • THE STORY CONTINUES

    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, [...]
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    Posted: November 26, 2009, 4:11am EST
    by prairie mary

  • CULTURE SHIFT

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    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 25, 2009, 10:43am EST
    by prairie mary

  • BETTY MACDONALD & THE MEMOIR GENRE

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 24, 2009, 4:41am EST
    by prairie mary

  • THE GATES TO PROGRESS

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 23, 2009, 11:46am EST
    by prairie mary

  • SELLING MEADVILLE/LOMBARD

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 22, 2009, 11:31am EST
    by prairie mary

  • BEN YAGODA & THE EGG & I

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 21, 2009, 10:04am EST
    by prairie mary

  • FROZEN RIVER: A Review

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 20, 2009, 9:55am EST
    by prairie mary

  • CAMILLE PAGLIA: OH, HELLO!

    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. [...]
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    Posted: November 19, 2009, 10:31am EST
    by prairie mary

  • INDIAN ARTIFACTS: THE BADGER TIPI

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 18, 2009, 10:37am EST
    by prairie mary

  • INDIAN ARTIFACTS: INTANGIBLES

    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, [...]
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    Posted: November 17, 2009, 10:48am EST
    by prairie mary

  • INDIAN ARTIFACTS: HOME COLLECTIONS

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 16, 2009, 10:18am EST
    by prairie mary

  • INDIAN ARTIFACTS: PAUL DYCK

    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. [...]
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    Posted: November 15, 2009, 7:48am EST
    by prairie mary

  • BUY LOW, SELL HIGH

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 14, 2009, 4:48am EST
    by prairie mary

  • INDIAN ARTIFACTS: JOHN HELLSON

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 13, 2009, 5:08am EST
    by prairie mary

  • ARTIFACT COLLECTORS: UHLENBECK

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 12, 2009, 9:59am EST
    by prairie mary

  • VETERAN'S DAY OVERCAST

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 11, 2009, 10:52am EST
    by prairie mary

  • HEAD FAKE (ARTISTIC)

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 10, 2009, 9:30am EST
    by prairie mary

  • WHAT IS ART? PAUL SCHILPP & ALVINA KRAUSE

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 09, 2009, 5:22am EST
    by prairie mary

  • WRITING: Orientalism Out West

    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. [...]
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    Posted: November 08, 2009, 8:46am EST
    by prairie mary

  • STUDY IN PURPLE AND RED: writing

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 07, 2009, 7:54am EST
    by prairie mary

  • ARTIFACTS: FLESH & PAPER (Part 9)

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 05, 2009, 9:49am EST
    by prairie mary

  • ARTIFACTS: INTELLECTUAL PROPERTY Part 8

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 04, 2009, 8:56am EST
    by prairie mary

  • ARTIFACTS: CEREMONIAL OBJECTS Number 7

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 03, 2009, 9:42am EST
    by prairie mary

  • ARTIFACTS: PAN-INDIAN POP CULTURE (Part 6)

    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 [...]
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    Posted: November 02, 2009, 7:52am EST
    by prairie mary

  • ARTIFACTS: TRADE GOODS (PART 5)

    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.

    One [...]
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    Posted: November 01, 2009, 10:12am EST
    by prairie mary
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