Merry Scribbler

IF EVEN THE POPE "GETS IT?"

2009-12-23T09:51:00.000-08:00

The day after Warren Buffett bought BNSF railroad, a little line of grain cars with one locomotive stopped at the Valier rail line spur to load up and left itself parked across the highway for minutes. Bad planning: long train, busy grain-shipping season.

Last week I went to Shelby, a major BNSF rail/truck shipping transfer yard, and was blocked again because I didn’t use the town’s bridge over the tracks. I could have but I like to watch the trains. This one was long and entirely truck trailers stacked two high. There were very few marked Hanjin, which usually dominates the trains, because this train was coming from the East and the Hanjin traffic crosses the Pacific, coming towards the East.

In the news: Buffett and a staff of about 20 people in Omaha oversee a collection of Berkshire operating companies that employ more than 200,000 and sell goods and services including energy, candy, clothing and luxury flights. Burlington Northern brings Berkshire another 40,000 workers, and Mr. Buffett said the takeover won't have an effect on employment.

"We've got 20 people in Omaha, and there isn't one of them that knows how to run a railroad," Mr. Buffett said. "You'll be running the railroad, and you'll run it in an efficient way, and when times are good, you're going to have more people employed than when times are bad."

Brian Kahn, who runs a Yellowstone Public Radio program as well as Artemis Common Ground, this week interviewed Daniel Finn, St. John's Professor of Theology and Economics, discussing Pope Benedict's recent encyclical, which calls for major restructuring of the global economy to "achieve justice." This was new info for Kahn and me, too. You can listen to it at:
http://www.yellowstonepublicradio.org/programs/local/home_ground.html

One of the remarks Finn made was that in Europe it is often assumed that the employees of a major corporation will sit at the table with the board of investors and managers. This is a shocking idea for the democracy of America, which is often stuck in a model some brought from England in the 19th century, which had defied the Pope and invested in prosperity as a marker of God’s approval. See Finn’s credentials at http://www.csbsju.edu/sot/facultystaff/finn.htm He received his Ph.D. at the U of Chicago the year before I arrived in 1978, so I feel confident that Jim Gustafson and David Tracy, both strongly humanistic men working within the Catholic context, were major influences on him. I also want to mark that St. John’s is Benedictine, a place where the arts are loved. The best religious thought has always been humanist: what is good for human beings, acting on this planet for the greater good of all including nature. There is a long tradition of this INSIDE the Catholic history. We’d be fools to reject it.

The advice I keep seeing in essays and hearing in radio talks is that the crying need over the next decade will be in the twofold character of management: first, the motivating and guidance of employees and second, logistics, the getting and scheduling of things and events. The two main models we’ve be following have been athletic and military, with a lot of overlap. They make very little room for humanities patterns for management. What does that mean?

Both the athletic and military models are based on the assumption of adversarial relations outside the group and strict control inside the group. They are also based on force and hierarchy as well as strategy, often secret strategies. But the most crucial strategy is not that on the battlefield: it is logistics. The general that outruns his supply lines has lost his army. No boots, no food, no fight. Warren Buffett knows this and that’s why he bought a railroad as well as empowering the workers. Aside from motivating workers, including them means far better logistics.

What might be humanistic management strategies? I would point to transparency: understanding what is going on and the necessity for ordinary stuff like schedules and inventories and bookkeeping. I would point to the honoring of those who do the small jobs -- as they say in the theatre, there are no small parts, only “small” actors. Yet after a generation that drove their kids to be big and important, white collar, heads of companies, major players, and that had few kids so they could put them all through good colleges and grad schools “so they won’t have to work as hard as I did,” we’ve come to a place where we have to either outsource work or import workers to get things done. That means not just being able to speak a language besides English, but also learning a kind of meta-culture, an ability to look at human basics beyond what is conventional in the local place, the taken-for-granted community.

Nationally Obama is doing this, but it scares the wits out of people who don’t know how to get to that level of thought. They are still way back there, stuck in the belief that anyone not just like them is not even American. Locally, Valier’s town council is young (from my point of view) men whose success has come from the hard and often stubborn work they learned to do in high school, usually on athletic teams. They are about to meet their new mayor, a woman from “outside” who has been in the corporate world and who considers herself a poet. I will be fascinated and take a lot of notes.

The major problem of this area in the coming years will be the management of diminishing water resources. In the past the water has gone the same way as the management of Blackfeet trust funds: with a big white thumb in the pie. The law is there, was there all along. The problem will be managing the transition from thumb-in to thumb-out, which will hurt a lot of people. The more all parties involved can keep their goals clear and reasonable, the more they can mix practicality with idealism, the less damage and desperation there will be. I worry about a town that resented learning Blackfeet history because “it has nothing to do with us.” But I also worry about a tribe run by resentment and entitlement. Both sides are largely Catholic. That might be an unexpected plus, if the priests are on board with their Pope.

BARRY LOPEZ' WRITING ADVICE

2007-08-20T20:20:00.000-07:00

BARRY SAYS:

Once I was asked by a seatmate on a trans-Pacific flight, a man who took the liberty of glancing repeatedly at the correspondence in my lap, what instruction he should give his fifteen-year-old daughter, who wanted to be a writer. I didn’t know how to answer him, but before I could think I heard myself saying, “Tell your daughter three things.” Tell her to read, I said. Tell her to read whatever interests her, and protect her if someone declares what she’s reading to be trash. No one can fathom what happens between a human being and a written language. She may be paying attention to things in the words beyond anyone else’s comprehension, things that feed her curiosity, her singular heart and mind. Tell her to read classics like The Odyssey. They’ve been around a long time because the patterns in them have proved endlessly useful.

Second, I said, tell your daughter that she can learn a great deal about writing by reading and by studying books about grammar and the organization of ideas, but that if she wishes to write well she will have to become someone. She will have to discover her beliefs, and then speak to us from within those beliefs. If her prose doesn’t come out of her belief, whatever that proves to be, she will only be passing along information, of which we are in no great need. So help her discover what she means.

Finally, I said, tell your daughter to get out of town, and help her do that. I don’t necessarily mean to travel to Kazakhstan, but to learn another language, to live with people other than her own, to separate herself from the familiar. Then, when she returns, she will be better able to understand why she loves the familiar, and will give us a fresh sense of how fortunate we are to share these things.

Read. Find out what you truly believe. Get away from the familiar. Every writer, I told him, will offer you thoughts about writing that are different, but these are three that I trust.

Barry Lopez, quoted by Robert Macfarlane, via The Book Depository
Then quoted by Fretmarks.blogspot.com.

WORKING WITH PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES

2007-07-07T08:23:00.001-07:00

WAYS OF WORKING WITH PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES:

1. Mark off prepositional phrases in sentences.

In the morning we go on the bus to the tournament playoffs in Great Falls.

2. Finish prepositional phrases where the preposition is there but the object must be supplied.

After last night’s ______________.

3. Finish prepositional phrases where the object is there but the preposition must be supplied.

____________the last half

4. Identify which question the prepositional phrase answers and thus whether it is an adverb or adjective phrase.

The cattle on the range (WHERE) drifted before the blizzard (also WHERE). 2 phrases, so two questions:

__________________ _________________

5. Supply the question and ask for a prepositional phrase that answers it:

Where?___________________

What color?_________________

6. Make up nonsense words for objects:

between the long green ______________

7. This gets harder: mix a list of prepositional phrases with NOT prepositional phrases and cross out all those that are not.

taking a break
on the grand piano
to be
after we get there

8. I’ve never tried mixing Spanish or French prepositional phrases with English ones, but I expect it is possible and might be useful. But it would be impossible with Blackfeet because the modifier would be added as a particle of the word.

GRAMMAR - MODIFIERS

2007-07-07T08:03:00.000-07:00

Once a person can dependably identify the noun-verb combination in a sentence (noting as an aside that a verb can be a sentence all by itself -- as in a command -- but a noun, not so much) then attention turns to the modifications to that central “hinge” or “engine.” It’s still important to know a wide range of nouns and verbs with specific connotations and associations, in particular the verbs, but much of the essence of style and clarity is in the modifiers.

MEMORIZE THE FOLLOWING:

Modifiers of nouns answer the questions:
What kind?
What size?
Which one?
http://www.esldepot.com/product.php/14/5/How many?
Whose?

Modifiers of verbs answer the questions:
Where?
How much or to what degree?
When?
In what manner?

Almost more importantly, in English one-word (adjective) modifiers of nouns always have to come just in front of the noun they modify. It’s the opposite in romance languages like French or Spanish -- they give you the big concept and then modify it with the adjectives: “house -- big, white, porched, and dirty.” In English one must keep all the adjectives in mind until coming to the noun: “a big, white, dirty, porched dog.”

One-word adverbs can come almost anywhere and it is often by moving the adverb around that one can improve clarity. It helps to think in terms of what the reader needs to know first.
“Lately I’ve felt lazy.”
“I’ve felt lazy lately.”
“I’ve lately felt lazy.”
“I’ve felt lately lazy.”
Some of these arrangements have a kind of arcane feeling, some emphasize the laziness and others seem to say it’s not usual.

The next step is that prepositional phrases can be either adjectives or adverbs. Adjective prepositional phrases always come AFTER the noun they modify, but again the adverb prepositional phrases can go anywhere. They answer the same questions as one-word modifiers.
“In the morning we’ll go.”
“We’ll go in the morning.”
“We will in the morning go.”
Breaking a verb phrase by putting a modifier in the middle of it (the verb here being “will go”) is usually a no-no, but can be right if it’s meant to give emphasis or to track a speaker’s train of thought.

So now one has to stop and learn by heart the prepositions, because a prepostional phrase is a set of words that always begins with a preposition and ends with a noun. There might or might not be modifiers ahead of this noun. My position when teaching high school was always that a preposition without a noun is an adverb, so I suppose one could maintain the reverse: that a preposition is an adverb with an object.

in, into, to, by, for, at, up, upon, of, off, above, beside, beneath, before, around, down, beyond, past, between, behind ... I can’t say these automatically anymore. Maybe part of the reason is that once one grasps the concept of a prepositional phrase, they stick out of the sentence as a whole. In my classroom I used to have a poster of pigs trying to climb in, into, to, by, around, down, beyond . . . You get the idea. Prepositional pigs.

http://www.englishclub.com/grammar/ At this website you can BUY a list of:

# 150 English prepositions including

* 94 one-word prepositions
* 56 complex prepositions

Or look in your grammar text. Maybe someone who took English from Agnes Carter in Portland, Oregon, in the Fifties will read this and send her list. If anyone else has a good list, feel free to put them in the comments.

One of the most helpful exercises for beginning grammarians is to mark off the prepositional phrases by coloring or bracketing or underlining. In fact, with modern fiber tips, I think it’s very useful to use assigned colors to the parts of speech and regularly mark up sentences on printed out worksheets. I’ll post some on merryscribbler.blogspot.com. It’s useful to take sentences out of books or even to write down sentences heard on the radio and mark them up. There’s one NPR news person who drives me crazy because she’s in the habit of asking a question, then adding to the original sentence one prepositional phrase after another -- the listener can’t tell when the question is going to end. “Mr. X, did you enjoy going to this country in this season by yourself in a Land Rover with a contract for a book from a noted New York publisher for the third time?”

As a rule of style, if one values the concise, one should press towards reducing prepositional phrases to one-word modifiers and modifiers to vivid nouns or verbs.
“The horse went along the trail with its inclines.” or

“Along the trail with its inclines the horse went.” (The horse doesn’t have inclines so the prepositional phrase has to go with the trail.)
“The horse went along the steep trail.” or

“Along the steep trail the horse went.” Not so tricky since there is only one prepositional phrase to move.

“The horse scrambled.”
Note that the differences are in feeling tone more than in meaning. One can play with ambiguity this way -- more or less? Which serves the purpose?

This kind of grammar thinking is a lot more fun and a lot more useful than categorizing words according to some Latinate system.

THREE THINGS MORE BEAUTIFUL THAN SAGGING BOOKSHELVES

2007-04-14T11:39:00.000-07:00

Having a cat in the "in" box is a very good idea. She will keep the papers from blowing around and also keep them warm. If a nearby lamp is on, she will appreciate THAT heat and stay there! This is "Killer" who was indeed a formidable hunter. This desk was in the teacherage in Heart Butte, a remote foothills village on the Blackfeet Reservation, 1989-91. The view out the big window over this desk was of the town a couple of miles away, but a lot of bull pines grew along the bluff just outside. One quiet afternoon I went out with a saw and made a hole in the bull pine branches so I could look at the town and on past into the infinity of the prairie. Killer was more interested in the nearby grasses which sheltered a lot of voles (like big mice with very short tails).

This is the opposite wall where I stacked orange crates (remember them?) to shelve my overflow books. These orange crates started being bookshelves in the late Forties when my father used them in our basement in Portland for his accumulating paperbacks. (We had orders NEVER to let the fire department come in the house. In those days they came to inspect for fire hazards.) The little rectangles cut in the top boxes were made by me when I used the still empty boxes for dollhouses. My hands were just large and strong enough to saw the holes with a coping saw. When I finally gave up hauling these orange crates around, I nearly wept. The inheritor welcomed them gleefully!

This is the SW corner of my present front room in Valier, which is about thirty miles from Heart Butte but farther out on the prairie. I've been here since 1999. This cat can't get into the "in box" because there is too much stuff in it. You might recognize the chair she's sleeping in. She is what I call a "confetti calico," but most people would call her a tortoiseshell. The object of beauty here is meant to be my red desk, which is oak and comes apart into sections that are still so heavy that I can barely pick them up. Bob bought it for me so I could do paperwork in what we called the "Indian Room" of the studio he built. I painted it the color of Stroud cloth, a kind of red wool fabric Hudson's Bay Co. used to sell to the Indians for making things like a beaded horse crupper that hung on the wall.

I use it to display objects rather than to house books and the desk part is my bill-organizing center. I don't have a digital camera or I would make a photo of the objects on display. They include a silver chalice my brother made with garnets inset as though drops of blood, an Inuit stone carving of a narwhale, a chunk of geode with amethyst crystals, a teeny seal made of seal fur, a hot pad for the table made of sweetgrass, birchbark and porcupine quills, an old porcelain doorknob I picked up in the debris of a destroyed house in 1957 on the way to Montana with my parents, a baculite I found fifty miles from here, and the front incisors of a beaver that the dog brought home once in Browning. Other times, other faces. I suppose I was different then. But I like to remember. It helps with my work, since I write.

THE MOTHER-IN-LAW HOUSE

2007-04-11T13:10:00.000-07:00

There’s a “meme” going around about desktops and books, so I thought I’d throw this in. In 1991 I was fired on trumped-up charges from Heart Butte School.

Though I wanted to stay on the reservation, I couldn’t think what to do. There are very few jobs other than teaching. I had enough money to stick for the summer if I could find a cheap place to stay. It just happened that Don Schmidt stepped forward to rent me this little “mother-in-law” house. It’s actual dimensions were 20 feet by 20 feet -- not one room, but the whole house: front room, bedroom barely big enough for a double bed, a teeny kitchen and even teenier bathroom. I couldn’t fit my belongings into it unless I stored at least half but there were no storage facilities in town. Then the motel owner across the street volunteered to let me store belongings in an unused motel unit. So I was saved for a little while. This town often reaches out this way, quietly providing solutions, but it is the reason one cultivates good will. If they think you are not deserving, they will stand back and watch you sink.

In an earlier incarnation in a studio apartment in Helena, I had bought a great many cardboard file storage boxes and covered them with contact paper. Stacked, they made pretty good furniture. I always set up a surface in front of a window for a cat to sleep on. This cat is “Killer,” a calico I inherited along with its name. In Helena I’d also bought many rough baskets which kept things more or less gathered up.

I had a folding “cavalry table” 4’X4’ and a big sturdy “loom” chair -- most people would call it wicker, but it was actually wire wound with paper and then painted. I bought it out from under a guy in a service station in Cardston, Alberta. He had a companion chair with rockers but wouldn’t sell it. This has been my reading chair for many years. These shelves were plastic and came apart into ends and shelves. I finally gave them to my brother. I always set up a U-shape: computer table on one side, typing table on the other (in those days -- now it’s my references), and a big folding table in the middle.

A few people will recognize the first computer I ever owned: a LISA, the earliest of the Apple/Macintosh sequence. When I couldn’t find a job and had to move to my mother’s house in Portland, my childhood home, the only 3-prong plug she had was in her laundry corner in the basement. I sat down there and pounded out one document after another on that LISA. It wasn’t until I finally found a job (a terrible one working for the City of Portland) that I moved into another studio apartment and connected to the Internet.

Sixteen years and several computers have passed since I spent three months in that teeny house. It was so small that one had to come out of the bathroom into the kitchen to dry off after a shower -- there wasn’t enough room to manage the towel otherwise. I had only the barest minimum of belongings. Yet I was quite comfortable there and sometimes I still think about the place.

This house in Valier has some of the same qualities, though it is bigger. Here I have five permanent working centers set up with a mug of pencils, scissors, staple pullers, a Flair fibertip, various pens and high-lighters, a small ruler, a comb (for shedding cats), a nail file; plus a coaster for coffee cups; a small clock. I’m working on an eMac now. My bookshelves are to the ceiling and are wooden. My file cabinets are metal: ten of them. There are two cats and more windows, all with surfaces for a cat.

But when I start to work, all that disappears and my very much bigger and more complex mental interior unfolds. This reassures me when I think of very old age when I might have to live in a tiny studio apartment again. When it’s warm enough to go out on folding tables in the garage/studio, I’ll begin to empty those files into the wood stove. I’m still keeping an eye out for a rocking chair.

JIM HARRISON PARAGRAPH

2007-02-12T14:17:00.000-08:00

The New York Times Book Review that reached me today has Jim Harrison on the cover and a review of “Returning to Earth,” a meditation on dying.

In the column about “best sellers,” the columnist recovers a paragraph from a review Harrison did in 1972, which the columnist considers brilliant, “a strange masterpiece, practically a prose poem.” (The review is of Barry Hannah’s first novel, “Geronimo Rex,” which the columnist considers a “wild man on wild man pairing.” Harrison loved the Hannah novel.)

“You might look at the world of the first novel as a gunny-sack race in the gathering twilight at a county fair, a festival that is on the verge of obsolescence anyhow. It is very hot and dusty even in the lengthening shadows of the grandstand (capacity 300). One can smell the lime in the toilets underneath and hear the bawling of the cattle in the stock barns. A mixed group of 50 have entered the race this year. The prize is a warm watermelon that someone has deftly entered with a razor blade and filled with a coral snake wrapped around an eyeball and a tumor. This is all plainly not as healthy as summer camp or the 4-H.”

Surrealism, eh? A poisonous gothic next-to-last image and then the sarcasm about summer camp and the 4-H, as if to say, “I suppose all you middle western fair-goers thought that was the world. Well, what do you think of a garish desert snake? What do you think of staring at everything honestly -- even cancer? (Which was systematically denied for many years when “proper people” didn’t discuss cancer anymore than they discussed sex -- particularly when they themselves had either.) Summer camp and 4-H are part of the same world as the county fair -- innocent sack races, pit toilets carefully limed, cows.

What about that “entered” and then “entered?” Should someone have edited that? Was it a mistake? Two kinds/meanings of entered? (A sexual overtone there, maybe? Snakes as the male euphemism. I suppose even “warm watermelons” -- sometimes violated by snaky males -- full of danger.)

I don’t know the novel, so there’s no way to say whether the review is doing it justice, but it’s interesting to see what the columnist thinks is “a strange masterpiece, practically a prose poem.” These days reviewers seem to put a high value on shock, surprise, the breaking open of kinder-gentler worlds.

You might look at the world of the first novel as a gunny-sack race in the gathering twilight at a county fair, a festival that is on the verge of obsolescence anyhow.

Direct address to the reader: you might do this thing: “look.” Then a string of prepositional phrases:
at the world
of the first novel
as a gunny-sack race
in the gathering twilight
at a county fair

now an appositive with a subordinate phrase full of more prepositional phrases:
on the verge
of obsolescence
and the adverb “anyhow.”

It is very hot and dusty even in the lengthening shadows of the grandstand (capacity 300).
Specifying the capacity instead of saying this is a small event in a small place.

One can smell the lime in the toilets underneath and hear the bawling of the cattle in the stock barns.
Basic sensory information that establishes this is in the past (pit toilets, well-limed which means attended to) and rural.

A mixed group of 50 have entered the race this year.
People? Horses? Lot of entries for a race, which are usually sorted, not mixed. Sounds more like a melee than a proper race.

The prize is a warm watermelon that someone has deftly entered with a razor blade and filled with a coral snake wrapped around an eyeball and a tumor. This is all plainly not as healthy as summer camp or the 4-H.

Shock, surrealism, and sarcasm.

I don’t think a person often writes this kind of paragraph by consciously planning, “Oh, I’ll list a lot of images, then throw in some ambiguity and at the end shock everyone. But that might be a sort of pattern that develops if a person writes a lot. It would be interesting to look for just this sequence in more of Harrison’s writing. And in Hannah’s, too, of course.

But it doesn’t strike me as “wild man.” That columnist must lead a sheltered life.

A DOIG PARAGRAPH ("Bucking the Sun, p.26)

2007-01-31T12:42:00.000-08:00

The Missouri River had maundered through enough of Charlene’s life already. Her father had been the barber in the little riverside town of Toston, a place with none too many male heads to start with, and those there were in the habit of a haircut only about every sixth Saturday night. Her mother passed her days trying to pretend there was eough clientele among Toston’s females, even fewer and more set in their hairdo habits, to justify her beauty parlor in a partitioned-off area of the barber shop. Both of these scissor merchants devoted their spare time, a nearly unlimited amount, to trying to catch every fish in the Missouri River. In short, with these parents who had about as much enterprise as pigeons, Charlene Tebbet spent her Missouri River girlhood sweeping up hair and raising herself and her younger sister, Rosellen.

The Missouri was only twenty miles old at Toston but already five hundred feet wide and so implacably smooth you knew it had to be deep, drownable deep. When the Tebbet sisters played along the riverbank, beneath the flight paths of fish hawks and just above the swim zones of muskrats, Charlene simply assumed that the responsibility for not falling in was hers, for both of them. Not that Rosellen was a careless or reckless child, but she could be mischievous enough that Charlene felt obliged to order her around for her own good. Rosellen took the bossing without open warfare over it, but by the time Charlene packed up for a store job in Bozeman and Rosellen was about to start high school, they both knew that the older-sister superintendence had run its course.

...I haven’t had a line from Rosellen since Christmas, the little rip. Will write her anyway as soon as I finish this.

These three paragraphs are as good as any to illustrate the idea that though Doig is often consciously poetic, he is essentially a journalist imparting information. And since he often tells it “cute,” sometimes the imparting thickens the information to the brink of excess.

The Missouri River had maundered through enough of Charlene’s life already. (Charlene had grown up on the Missouri but wasn’t attached to it. Maunder: To move dreamily or idly.)

Her father had been the barber in the little riverside town of Toston, a place with none too many male heads to start with, and those there were in the habit of a haircut only about every sixth Saturday night. Her mother passed her days trying to pretend there was eough clientele among Toston’s females, even fewer and more set in their hairdo habits, to justify her beauty parlor in a partitioned-off area of the barber shop. (Sounds like the parents are dreamy and idle as well. Parents=river? Why not just say they were? Well, the word is “show, don’t tell,” isn’t it? But this is not a word picture of a barber shop/beauty parlor with a “gone fishing” sign in the window.)

Both of these scissor merchants devoted their spare time, a nearly unlimited amount, to trying to catch every fish in the Missouri River. (“Scissor merchant,” “an unlimited amount” of spare time, and “catching every fish in the Missouri River” are the kind of joking talk of many small town people, at least in Doig’s world.)

In short, with these parents who had about as much enterprise as pigeons, Charlene Tebbet spent her Missouri River girlhood sweeping up hair and raising herself and her younger sister, Rosellen. (But this is not “in short.” In fact, this is crucial information as the plot evolves, but it takes a sharp reader with a good memory to register all this. Or one could take notes. Note that “Missouri River” is a phrase repeated four times in two paragraphs.)

The Missouri was only twenty miles old at Toston but already five hundred feet wide and so implacably smooth you knew it had to be deep, drownable deep. (Again, “Missouri" as the first word of the paragraph. Note the slide from length to time: “twenty miles old” which could trip the unaware reader. Implacable: 2 meanings. 1) Impossible to placate and 2) unalterable, inexorable. Of course, the point of the Fort Peck enterprise is to alter the river. The emphasis of “deep, drownable deep” is foreshadowing of what the Fort Peck dam would create.)

When the Tebbet sisters played along the riverbank, beneath the flight paths of fish hawks and just above the swim zones of muskrats, Charlene simply assumed that the responsibility for not falling in was hers, for both of them. (Here’s where the “poetry” comes in: the parallels of “flight paths” and “swim zones” but there is no real connection to the girls. They don’t admire or catch hawks or muskrats. They are natural history touches. One might say the girls themselves have “life paths.” The fact that Charlene feels so responsible is key to the plot.)

Not that Rosellen was a careless or reckless child, but she could be mischievous enough that Charlene felt obliged to order her around for her own good. Rosellen took the bossing without open warfare over it, but by the time Charlene packed up for a store job in Bozeman and Rosellen was about to start high school, they both knew that the older-sister superintendence had run its course. (The issues of “mischief” and “ordering,” “bossing” and “superintendence” are constant themes of the tale, from the defiance of one brother against another, through Darien’s political defiance and sabotage, on up to the military engineering hierarchy to President Roosevelt himself.)

...I haven’t had a line from Rosellen since Christmas, the little rip. Will write her anyway as soon as I finish this. (Underlining the matter of Charlene feeling like the boss but not being in control. Doig is used to writing from real letters which were important sources for “This House of Sky.” They lend reality, authenticity, even when they are made up letters.)

This thick, allusive writing is hard work for many readers, but satisfying for those, like engineers, who have a head for detail, structure, and forces.

A GUSTAFSON PARAGRAPH

2007-01-26T18:50:00.000-08:00

It took until the end of January for the days to noticeably lengthen. A struggling sun heartened into the world a little earlier each morn, rising a bit higher from points further south as it made its New Year’s journey down the Glacier Park Rockies. By February atmospheric turbulence spun up lenticular clouds that cocooned the ivory mountains -- wind clouds forecasting big wind to come, this particular wind-cloud wind seldom warm. In March the days brightened until one day a Pacific ensconced their world. The system swirled in with colossal snow and rain. Then followed the wind, the world adrift, followed by more wind, and then finally a warm wind that cleared the grasslands of snow, a Chinook. The gravid cows left the feedgrounds and hiked up the ridges to graze the exposed grass. Grass and snow, snow and wind. Longer days, shorter nights. Cold returned, and with it ice. Cattle require fresh water daily to ruminate and survive. They cannot survive on snow alone as a fluid source like horses can. They cannot live on ice. Sometimes the whole country became ice. Frozen water was the reason the buffalo left ths country in the winter in times past.

This is the introduction to Chapter 10, “Wolfman,” in which the cowboys go out to break ice so the cows can drink and a wolf comes down to drink. They don’t hurt the wolf. Bubbles is Blackfeet -- he has nothing against wolves. So the writer’s task here is to set the scene for something mysterious, which he will closely describe: the cows, the chopping, the wolf drinking. Those paragraphs are all short sentences.

Let’s try some analysis.

It took until the end of January for the days to noticeably lengthen.
This is a passive construction. Pronoun - verb - four prepositional phrases.

A struggling sun heartened into the world a little earlier each morn, rising a bit higher from points further south as it made its New Year’s journey down the Glacier Park Rockies.
Adj, adj, noun, verb, prep phrase, adverb phrase, adverb phrase (when) -- then participle , adv phrase (where) adv. phrase --and subordinate clouse. Sub. conj (as), pronoun , verb, object with adjectives and prepositional phrase.

The sun is personified (but neuter) and active (struggling) but “heartened”. which means “to give courage to something” -- in other words , it usually takes an object but this sun is just “heartening” all by itself: generating more courage to be earlier -- needing courage because it is still cold and harsh? “Morn” is a kind of poetic constraction of “morning.” But this IS poetic. The sun is NOT named “Natoosi” which would be the Blackfeet word and imply the sacred source of life. The sun is IT -- that thing up there -- which contradicts the personification.

By February atmospheric turbulence spun up lenticular clouds that cocooned the ivory mountains -- wind clouds forecasting big wind to come, this particular wind-cloud wind seldom warm.
Now we go to scientific talk, but still metaphorical, since the turbulence is spinning cocoons. Lenticular clouds are the ones that look like flying saucers but they could also look like cocoons. It’s a good year when the mountains are ivory these days. Right now the front ranges are looking dark. He introduces “wind clouds” than makes the two words into a hyphenated adjective for wind, which is a bit redundant, is creates a category and separates ths individual example.

In March the days brightened until one day a Pacific ensconced their world.
Ensconced means to be fixed securely, to be sheltered and hidden. But a “Pacific” is evidently one of those wind-cloud winds.

The system swirled in with colossal snow and rain.
Okay, it’s a system. It’s always hard to come up with enough synonyms for really big when describing Montana, but colossal also echoes ensconced in it’s sound.

Then followed the wind, the world adrift, followed by more wind, and then finally a warm wind that cleared the grasslands of snow, a Chinook.
Now we get to the legendary wind which makes a “wind-arch” or “chinook arch” in the sky. He leaves the science of “catabatic wind” alone. He does not tell us Chinook means snow-eater. He just givs the sequence, and the image of “adrift.”

The gravid cows left the feedgrounds and hiked up the ridges to graze the exposed grass.
You can handle “gravid”? Pregnant? I have to admit I had a quick flash of backpacks on those cows, but the dogged, weighted pace of human hikers is about right for cows -- internal calf-packs, I reckon.

Grass and snow, snow and wind. Longer days, shorter nights. Cold returned, and with it ice.
Short sentences, comma splices. Catches the rhythm. Gives you a bit of a surprise with the third sentence, which even has a verb.

Cattle require fresh water daily to ruminate and survive. They cannot survive on snow alone as a fluid source like horses can. They cannot live on ice. Sometimes the whole country became ice. Frozen water was the reason the buffalo left this country in the winter in times past.
Now the pay-off explanation of why the ice must be broken. Not even the tough old buffalo could survive without water. Simple sentences, steady progression of logic.

Paragraphs of description like this are hard to write because they are sometimes just filling up a space in the story or making a transition or because it’s hard to make the same description new. We all know that in the spring the sun comes up earlier and farther south. The words themselves need to pick up some of the swing and mystery and especially the SPECIFICNESS of just how it is. That means that the writer must have been really paying attention in the past and have a good memory. He’s passing you information that justifies your attention.

In addition this writer throws in a few strange words: “heartening” or “ensconced” that aren’t usually used this way, though they’re technically meaningful.

Suppose someone else wrote this paragraph:

By the end of January the days were definitely longer. The sun rose a little earlier in the morning, rising from further south as it moved along the mountains. By February atmospheric turbulence caused lenticular clouds over the mountains -- cold wind clouds forecasting big wind to come. In March the days had more sun until a Pacific weather system moved in with much snow and rain. Then there was wind blowing snow, followed by more wind, and then finally a warm wind that melted the snow off the grass, a wind called the Chinook. The pregnant cows left the feedgrounds and walked up the ridges to eat the exposed grass. Grass and snow and wind interacted. Days grew longer. But cold and ice returned. Cattle require fresh water daily to ruminate and survive. They cannot live on ice, but sometimes everything froze. In the winter in times past the buffalo left this country to find water.

The changes might suit some people, but to me they destroy the authentic sound of the paragraph. It’s okay, but the flavor is gone. I don't know how much of Gustafson's writing style is conscious and how much is just a product of the personality and lingo of Gustafson. Maybe it's both -- first spontaneous writing and then a little revision to sharpen it up. Some writers really don't know -- they just do it. Others are QUITE conscious of their choices and might fiddle with them for a long time.

JOURNALING PROMPTS

2006-12-14T14:39:00.000-08:00

When I was in the ministry, I often ran “journal workshops,” sometimes using Progoff structure and suggestions and other times just winging it. The idea was to supply prompters and structure for people who wanted to think about their lives on paper. No grading. Sharing only if they wanted to -- sometimes it was a good idea to FORBID sharing in the class at least. A few people have more need to share than anyone has a need to listen. And it’s good reverse psychology for kids, who might refuse to share otherwise.

In fact, I had a student who refused to participate in the regular class. She was angry, didn’t want to be there, and had good reason. I gave her a spiral notebook and asked her to write me a letter. Then I wrote her a letter back. She did no assignments, but every day in class she wrote me a letter and I wrote one back. In the end she probably made more progress than the other kids. Certainly I got so I understood her pretty well.

For a while in Portland there were nearly a half-dozen of us running journal workshops and we thought of a doing a marathon day where everyone would come with a thermos and sandwich early in the morning and just write all day with the leaders changing hourly.

So here’s a list of ideas, something like the memes that bloggers exchange.

1. Make lists. Shopping lists, lists of your favorite whatevers, lists of your clothes, lists of all the pets you’ve ever had, etc.

2. Make a time-line. Might be historical, geological, personal, tribal. Stick paper together to make the time-line really long. Maybe run a string around the room and hang events off them in order. Write a year on each card and then write what happened on that card then file the cards in order.

3. Draw a map. Needn’t be a map of anything real. Could be a map of the inside of your brain. Could be a map of your family. I save maps, maps of dogs, maps of parts of the country that drink Pepsi, Coca-Cola, or RC. Etc.

4. Diagram. Might be like a map or might be like a Venn diagram: a circle with one quality overlapping a circle with another quality and inside the overlap all items have to have both qualities. Or a Johari diagram: four sections of a rectangle: one quadrant shows what you know about yourself and everyone else knows as well, one shows what you know but no one else knows, one shows what everyone else knows but you don’t, and one shows what no one, not even you, knows about you. Could make it like a sentence diagram: you, the noun -- what you do, the verb. Modifiers hanging from both.

5. Draw portraits. If you can’t draw and have access to old magazines, cut out “portraits” of people in your life and tell about them. You might want to draw hats or mustaches or earrings onto them. Or you might draw or cut out portraits of “yourself” in various aspects.

6. Write a letter. Could be real. Could be phony or imaginary. Write a letter to Abraham Lincoln or the moon or your cat or the bush in the yard. Or the Bush in office. Might be to yourself in ten years and you might give it to someone trustworthy who will mail it to you in ten years.

7. Write down sensory information: use as many senses as you can. Decide on a location and time from the past and list the sensations. Pretend you are a dolphin or an owl or a seaweed and write down what you think they can sense.

8. Let your left hand talk to your right hand. Actually use those hands to write, even if it looks awful when it’s not your usual hand. Theoretically different sides of your brain will be engaged by different hands. If you were really in a mood for extremes, you might try writing with your toes, maybe a dialogue from feet to hands.

9. Indulge in time travel. Imagine yourself in a different time and place. Maybe list a lot of possibilities first and then pick the most unlikely one -- that’s often the most fruitful.

10. Balancing the ledger. Assign values to good or bad things, and add up the two columns. Or you could do it with aspects of a job or prospects of some enterprise. You could do this as a graph, either a pie chart or with lines. You could even do the kind of graph where you have four quadrants to work with and assign four dimensions: smart/dumb, attractive/repellant. Write your qualities onto the chart.

11. Re-framing. Take a situation or assumption and try to look at it from an entirely new point of view. Take a bad thing and make it into a good thing or go the other way. Pretend you’re someone else and look at it from their point of view.

12. Guided fantasy. You can buy these in workbooks or someone might help you by making up an adventure: you’re walking on a path, something is in the way -- what is it? Like that.

13. Diary/journal/daybook. At the same time every day over a long period of time write down what happened, or the weather, or what letters you mailed, or what book you’re reading, quotes you like, and so on. Once a month or a week, look back over the material and write some kind of summary, response, or comment.

14. Old photos. Don’t have to be from your family. Write what you think the person is thinking, what they will do next, why they are wearing those clothes, what their favorite food might be, etc.

15. Stepping stones/nodes/turning points. Make a list of the intense times in your life since you were born. Times you moved, when you started or changed schools, jobs, marriages, births, losses, when you moved, and so on. Just note them. Then go back and write what happened in between.

These are just starters. Very often a person will start with one idea, catch fire and take off with something irrelevant. That’s okay. Make new rules. Break rules. It’s just for yourself. Don’t throw anything away. Reread the stuff next year at this time and sift for great ideas.

DIAGRAMMING SENTENCES -- IT'S COMING BACK!

2006-12-09T10:49:00.000-08:00

from Grumpyoldbookman.blogspot.com Dec 8

Kitty Burns Florey: Sister Bernadette's Barking Dog

The subject of this non-fiction book (published in the US by Melville House) is the English language; in particular, English grammar.

It's partly in the form of a memoir (the author was taught English by Sister Bernadette), and partly a speculation upon such abstruse topics as whether Mark Twain was a better grammarian than James Fenimore Cooper, and what the hell Gertrude Stein was talking about half the time.

More specifically still, the book deals with a method of diagramming sentences which was once, apparently, quite widely taught, and even popular, in American schools.

...This was invented about a hundred years ago by a couple of teachers named Brainerd Kellogg and Alonzo Reed. ... The system is a bit like parsing, only you do it on a blackboard, or on paper, splitting up the subject, object, definite article and so forth, and setting them out on a sort of tree, with branches at all angles.

... Publishers Lunch has just announced that Becky Kraemer, acting on behalf of Melville House, has sold the (presumably paperback) rights to Sister Bernadette to Tina Pohlman at Harcourt, for six figures, for publication in fall 2007.

***********

If I were writing this book about diagramming, I would peg it on Agnes Carter, the old-maid red-headed Irish-Catholic battler who knocked it into our eighth-grade heads in Portland, OR. But the truth is that we began learning the little game from Mr. Jones, the seventh grade teacher. (Who sometimes had to dash next door to ask Miss Carter for help.) Art Schmidt, who sat in front of me in those screwed-down wrought-iron and oak desks, and I were the top contenders for sentence diagramming skills. I don’t know whether it’s turned out to be much use for him (He’s a minister and pastoral counselling administrator in a hospital.) but for me it’s been a key to clear sentences. I tried to pass it on when I taught the first time, in the Sixties, but it's had an emetic effect on classes where I’ve tried it since.

The thing is, English sentences are dependent on the way the noun-modifying words/phrases/clauses are hinged to the subject and the verb-modifying elements are hinged to the verb. There must be something and the something either is or takes action, and all the rest is modifiers.

Once I had an unruly sentence in an essay that was the subject of an environmental writing workshop in the Bitterroot Valley. It was taught by no less than Peter Matthiessen, who loves straightening out sentences. I could NOT make this tangle of elements behave, but Peter took up his blue pencil, converted a prepositional phrase into an adverb, moved another to the subordinate clause, and replaced a noun-with-adjectives with a specialized noun. Well, not exactly, but along those lines. Suddenly the whole sequences of ideas lay down on the page and purred with clarity. Probably you would have a difficult time understanding what I just said here if you didn’t have a firm grasp of diagramming, which pulls everything apart enough to see what’s what.

Diagramming sentences, which we learned from the old Warriner’s Handbook, always reminds me a bit of “mapping” or “webbing” which elementary teachers now do to get students to think before they write. The notion is to zero in on the subject, put it into a circle in the middle, then brainstorm its elements or related notions as fast and furiously as possible. Consider them, connect them to the central circle subject, maybe push some into attachments to subordinate circles, group the ones that are related, erase the ones that are too nutty, and so on. This technique takes the same topological approach to ideas as diagramming and it appears that this is the natural way for many people to analyze, to dissassemble the parts, lay them out on a surface in terms of their logical relationship, then alter, replace or whatever.

Both techniques push back against the tendency of many beginners to think of an essay as something like an egg: arriving with mysterious contents inside an inscrutable shell. Especially when they are trying to be “creative,” they cannot believe that their creation can be analyzed or augmented without killing it. Thus they become the victims of their disorderly and disobedient subconsciousnesses, which will sometimes produce a story and sometimes not.

True enough, sometimes a poem or story or even essay WILL arrive all developed in secret, ready to tumble out of the egg and walk. But you can’t count on it.

When I look at a sentence, I “see” the prepositional phrases easily (because Agnes Carter made us memorize all the prepositions and not with any cute posters about pigs and fences either), can spot verbs with no trouble (because she made us memorize all the linking verbs), and can understand which prepositional phrases and dependent clauses are adjectives and which are adverbs (because she made us memorize all the adverb and adjective questions). Therefore, when I realize that yet again I’ve written a sentence that is “wrong-side out” as Richard Stern used to point out, if I concentrate I realize that I’ve written down the modifiers as they occurred to me and not as a reader needs to receive them in order to make sense. (Um, sentence. Same root?)

So, is one to begin with “where” or “when” or “why?” “Here on the high prairie” or “only this morning” or “because I write.” They say there is another grammar book coming that is called “If You See an Adjective, Kill It!” I love it. You know, of course, that it’s a take-off on the counseling book called, “If You See the Buddha on the Road, Kill Him!” which was meant to be an antidote to the idea that you should go find some expert to tell you how to live. Presumably, this book will be a pitch for finding the right noun instead of sticking ever more frills on some old utilitarian subject/object, in hopes that more means clearer.

If one were able to master diagramming (and in the end it’s an unmasterable discipline since people say undiagrammable things and rigid grammar is imposed on the snakes and worms of words), if one had a huge fund of vivid nouns and verbs (presumably if one has learned ALL of one’s own language, one could begin on the next), if one thought out the webbing under the essay, there would be a lot more readable stuff in the world. To me, it’s more fun than chess and not that different.

And why didn’t Art Schmidt or I write this book and get rich? Well, that’s just unanswerable. Why wasn’t Agnes Carter a nun?

PATTERNING AT THE HEART

2006-12-07T12:46:00.000-08:00

Thanks to SBpoet.com for starting my motor with her post on writing poetry, which to me is highly patterned sound/meaning/image.

This is a notion that's been bumping around in my head for quite a while. Writing (like speaking and hearing and looking et al) is a matter of patterning. There are the story-patterns of narrative, the patterns of metaphor and image, the patterns of a sentence and the intensely layered patterning of poetry. People respond to the patterns they can perceive and the theory is that an education of whatever kind will help you to see and even name different patterns of sound (rhythm and rhyme) and meaning. Sometimes the best way to become sensitive to such patterns is to memorize.

But culture also is behind both formal education and the learning of patterns -- even determining which ones are there, which ones "count," and so on.

And now, after the amazing research into how brains work, I think quite a bit about earliest childhood and the training of the senses -- indeed the building of the synapses that support pattern. (It is a given that what happens to you in the womb and in the first three years after birth actually “build” the instrument that is your brain.)

Print depends upon the ease with which one "knows" or associates sounds with the alphabet. Just as some people displace sounds to colors or "see" numbers as colors or tastes, there are a few people who look at print and don't "hear" the sounds. Some can't associate the two things at all (“s” with the sound of hissing, for instance), so never really learn to pronounce, much less read. Some experts suggest that as many as ten per cent of the population as a whole is simply missing whatever it takes to look at "cat" and hear “k-aaa-tt” or associate that with the animal, much less have rich associations with the creatures themselves including earlier writing about cats. Since things go in continuums more than they do in dichotomies, I presume that people are "differently abled" when it comes to this skill, but also that there are many people who COULD learn if they were helped a bit.

Right now our youth culture is bonkers for sound patterns of a fractal and nearly chaotic nature. They like loud -- I can't tell you a whole lot more about some of it. But then, they turned on a dime and came up with rapping, HIGHLY patterned rhythm and rhyme with transgressive, defiant lyrics. I had several Blackfeet students who could improvise raps on the spot -- not badly either. The rhythm and rhyme are meant to be mnemonic prompts, as well as pleasures in themselves, so that presumably the original troubadors and balladeers could remember the words to their songs. I remember studying the internal slant rhyme and conventional metaphors of “The Iliad,” which it would have taken me a long time to notice if someone hadn’t said, “Look at this, look here, and here.”

These thoughts are prompted in part by reading Bruno Nettl's ideas about ethnomusicology, a discipline he helped invent and develop, and his thoughts about people who listen for Beethoven when they are presented with "Carnatic" music (what they play in Iran or India) and therefore hear nothing. It's like watching for eagles when the environment is full of robins, or vice versa, to escape the value judgment in every image. Kittens experimentally raised in an environment of horizontals will not be able to interpret verticals.

So what are we not noticing? How do we escape our culture? Can we teach ourselves to taste numbers?

That’s a nice set of questions for we (ahem) educated readers and writers. But who asks what is preventing whole segments of our society from being readers and writers? Are they raised in homes where no one reads and there are no books? (Check.) Can they get by in school without knowing how to read or write? (Check.) Does no one really know how to teach them what they need to know? (Check.) Have alcohol, drugs, violence, chaos, and loud noise blasted their brains into insensitivity? (Check.)

I’ve got a former student here, now close to my age and sharing many of my experiences, who has become a buddy. He had a brain aneurysm close to the center floor of his brain. My father died of an aneurysm there, but this buddy didn’t because of heroic medical intervention and a vigorous constitution. He was always a reader and he has not stopped, but his eyes don’t track right. Okay, he just went to ears: tapes. He’s hooked on the narrative line going along in words -- he’s not picky about the story, doesn’t rave about how one writer is better than another, doesn’t always remember, but just keeps the words coming. He says I once put him on detention for reading when he was supposed to be doing something else -- shockingly unjust in his opinion. It clearly didn’t change his behavior, though he hasn’t hidden behind reading, and before the aneurysm made his living largely through construction and maintenance. He sees how things fit together and is actually very bright -- once wanted to be a math teacher, since math was one of his best subjects. He’s a pattern-man: he sees them, he appreciates them, he understands what they do.

I don’t hear patterns in music very well. Blackfeet singing is not something about which I can say what the pattern is -- but I recognize it, I like it, I have many associations with it. I feel the beat. Once I was asked to participate in a story-festival at Vina Chattin School, grades 3-4-5. I took along Browning’s “Pied Piper of Hamelin” and read it with as much brio as I could muster, hitting the rhymes and the feet and letting the images go where they would. The kids paid absolute attention. A few days later a little girl came up to me in the grocery store. “Did you read us a poem?” she asked. “Yup.” She didn’t say any more, but she tucked something into my pocket. When I looked, it was a little brown rat folded out of construction paper with yarn for a tail. Someone had picked up on the story. Someday somewhere maybe she’ll hear a speech about drugs stealing away the children of the Blackfeet and she’ll think of that poem. So one doesn’t have to stay in one’s own culture to have meaning. I’m hardly a participant in Browning’s culture, either the poet or the town.

So that seems to be one of the keys to patterns: that they illuminate something universal: a pattern of societies or human behavior or maybe something in the larger world, like seasons -- though one can tire of the same cliches so that it takes someone who has a subtle, maybe slantwise, sense of things to find new patterns or make the old ones deeper.

A week or so ago I went on my monthly provisioning expedition to Great Falls and had a coffee at the Starbucks in Barnes and Noble. A little girl with a new book was sitting across the table from two grown women, maybe friends or sisters. The little girl was reading out loud, stopping to sound out words she didn't know. The two women sat there patiently sipping coffee and listening. No comments, no applause, no corrections. The feminists used to call that "listening the answers out of each other." Very powerful.

TWELVE BLACKFEET STORIES by Mary Scriver

2006-12-03T10:36:00.000-08:00

NOT YOUR USUAL MYTHS AND LEGENDS!!

Dogwoman (1742 - 1766)
An old woman protests that dogs were good enough for the ancestors -- who needs horses?

Eats Alone (1767 - 1791)
A chief has everything but confidence in the Sacred.

Two Medicine (1792 - 1821)
A young two-spirited man falls in love with a little blonde priest, thinking he is also a man in a dress.

Horse Healer (1821 - 1841)
A woman warrior is captured and taken over the Continental Divide.

Horizon (1843 - 1859)
An exploring Indian goes back East and is mistaken for an insane person.

Eclipse (1860 - 1882)
A priest and a doctor puzzle over what to do with an old dead woman.

Whiteout (1883 - 1900)
An abusive wolfer is killed by his woman and her niece.

Cutnose Woman (1901 - 1924)
A woman unjustly punished for being unfaithful finds happiness unexpectedly.

Gay Paree (1924 - 1953)
Three Blackfeet soldiers, very different from each other, accidentally meet in Paris at the end of WWII.

Basketball Warrior (1953 - 1969)
A young athlete goes off to fight at Wounded Knee but never makes it.

Sweetgrass Hills (1969 - 1991)
A young man takes his Vision Quest in the Sweetgrass Hills, not knowing a rancher’s daughter is nearby.

The Sun Comes Up (1992 - now)
A female Blackfeet Fish & Game warden picks up a Blackfeet man (who has never seen the reservation) plus the bones of the ancestors so that both can come home.

ORDER ONLINE FROM:

http://www.lulu.com/content/393261
POWELLS, AMAZON, AND SO ON.

OR NOW in bookstores:
ISBN 978-1-84728-453-2

“Mary Scriver is an unruly fireball of writing talent -- full of horsepower, information, soul, brains, and juice.” MICHAEL B.

PARODYING GERALD DURRELL

2006-12-02T13:55:00.000-08:00

Parodying Gerald Durrell, as opposed to Lawrence, his brother, is difficult for two reasons. One is that he is already writing farce, often involving things painful and politically incorrect, so that inflating them only a little bit more makes them almost offensive. (In fact, these days it’s a little hard to read the pidgin English and brutal threats, even knowing they are exaggerated.) The other is that I read so much Gerald Durrell early in life that my own style takes after him and I lose the line between the two of us.

I’ve thought about what it would be like to write a combination of Gerald and Lawrence, but the results are rather bizaare. For instance, I might create a scene between a lustful maiden and her equally lustful but rather inept swain in which the maiden develops the hiccups. All those inopportune and ill-timed clenchings -- one physiology pitched against another -- very funny but not just anyone would print it.

Then, taking into account Gerald’s love of creatures, one might write a bit about a frog princess who meets one of those “itchy buggery” persons that Lawrence speaks of and asks him to consider her wide mouth and dexterous tongue, to say nothing of her love of “flies.” You see what I mean.

It’s remarkable that these two men came out of the same family except that they share so much. Both have huge vocabularies and exotic circumstances to draw on. But the third brother, so fascinated by guns, and the sister, seemingly conventional, don’t write at all. We don’t hear about the mother even reading, much less writing. One wonders what the father was like.

Both men are quite out of fashion now: one must not make fun of Africans, one must not make heroes of alcoholics, one must make sex steamy but not romantic, and a host of other "musts" pertain. But what I've noticed (though it's not always true) is that when something is thoroughly out of fashion, it is liable to come slipping back in the near future. For one thing, we're all tired of being hit over the head with political correctness. For another, have you noticed the returning interest in the antiquities that Lawrence so loved? And Gerald, with his stubborn collecting of animals, seems much less a fool these days.

The sure sign: the BBC movie about the family.

Prairie Mary

"TUNC" TO "REZ"

2006-11-29T10:22:00.000-08:00

Below is an excerpt from "Tunc" by Lawrence Durrell, an example of his preoccupation with sex (of all kinds -- he smuggles in the word "buggery" as much as modern writers use the "f" word, whether any of it is happening or not.) and with exotic scenery. It's hard to make fun of Lawrence more effectively than his brother Gerald did. L. is a know-it-all, a been-there-done-that-find-it-boring guy. His books have little plot but stagger from one torrent of words to another. Nevertheless, if the reader is willing to "go with it," the effect of the images (esp. if you have enough mythology to know what the references are) can be hypnotic.

On the one hand, the day for this once-daring, sensuous, self-important stuff is over. On the other hand, one still meets it, often in the context of "spiritual" writing about the West. I was a little surprised myself at the success of my change-of-scene parody. It almost seems saleable!

From Tunc by Lawrence Durrell. (New York: Pocketbooks, 1968)

“A true Athenian, free from all this antiquarian twaddle, she knows and cares nothing for her city; but yes, some of the stories alert a fugitive delight as she sits, sugaring her kisses with her apple. It is pleasant to babble thus, floundering among the telescopic verb schemes of demotic; telling her how Styx water was so holy as to be poisonous, only to be safely drunk from a horse’s hoof...

“...The quiet wind blew dustily uphill amng the moonkeepers. To make love in this warm curdled air seemed an act of unpremeditated simplicity that placed them back once more in the picture-book world sacred to the animal kingdom where the biological curve of the affect is free from the buggerish itch of mentation. Warm torpid mouth, strong arms, keen body -- this seems all the spiritual instruction the human creature needs. It is only afterward that one will be thrown back sprawling among the introspections and doubts. How many people before Iolanthe? Throats parched in the dry air we drink thirstily from the sacred spring. She washes the sugar from her lips, washes her privates in the icy water, drying them on my old silk scarf. No, Athens was not like other places; and the complicated language, with its archaic thought forms, shielded in its strangeness from foreign eyes. Afterward to sit at a tin table in a tavern, utterly replete and silent, staring at each other, fingers touching, before two glasses of colorless raki and a plate of olives. Everything should have ended there, among the tombs, by the light of a paraffin lamp. Perhaps it did?”

PARODY:

“A true Montanan, free from all this academic theorization, she knows and cares nothing for the last best place; but yes, some of the ideas prompt a temporary pride as she sprawls, salting her grin with a bag of Cheetos. The college boy prattles on, all mind and no common sense, blundering through the myths of the Blackfeet; telling her how Scarface went to the top of Chief Mountain where he was overcome by fumes from an extinct volcano...

...The constant whirlwind ripped dustily uphill among the tipi circles. To make love in this hot rushing air seemed an act of defiant daring that whipped them back against the weedy grass on the long horizon celebrated in paintings, spiritually linked to the buffalo where adrenaline is uninhibited by any caution for contagion. Hot loose mouth, sinewy arms, athletic body -- this seems all the carnal equipment the cowgirl needs. It is only afterward that the young grad student is knocked sideways wondering what he has done, what the unseen consequences might be. How many people had her rancher husband punched out before him? Their faces burn in the wind and sun, but the woman has put Coca-Cola in the canteens, stinging their throats. She rubs the salt from her lips, taking his red bandana to wipe the salty smear between her legs. No, the rez was not like other places; and the coded language, with its laconic thought forms, didn’t enlighten him much about the rules. Afterward to sit at a sticky table in a cafe, utterly stunned and silent, staring at each other, fingers touching, before two mugs of coffee and a basket of fries. Everything should have ended there, among the formica booths, by the light of flickering flourescents. Perhaps it did?”

A PETER MATTHIESSEN SENTENCE DISSECTED

2006-11-17T11:09:00.000-08:00

Peter Matthiessen is a master of the sentence. He is of the school that likes to begin with a long complex sentence, saving the short blunt ones for emphasis. Here is a first sentence dissected.

Wild northern Alaska is one of the last places on earth where a human being can kneel down and drink from a wild stream without being measurably more poisoned or polluted than before; its heart and essence is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the remote northeast corner of the state, the earth’s last sanctuary of the great Ice Age fauna that includes all three North American bears, gray wolves and wolverines, musk ox, moose, and, in the summer, the Porcupine River herd of caribou, 120,000 strong.

Main clause: “wild northern Alaska is one”
Two prepositional phrases: of the last places/on earth
Subordinate clause: “where a human being can kneel down and drink” (adjectival describing “one”
prepositional phrase: “from a wild stream” (adverbial describing drink)
prepositional phrase with a participle noun object: “without... being measurably more poisoned or polluted”
preposition phrase, adjectival describing “being poisoned or polluted”: “than before.”

linked by a semi-colon to an appositive:
“Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the remote northeast corner of the state, the earth’s last sanctuary of the great Ice Age fauna that includes all three North American bears, gray wolves and wolverines, musk ox, moose, and, in the summer, the Porcupine River herd of caribou, 120,000 strong.”

“Arctic National Wildlife Refuge ANWR” is the noun anchor.
two prepositional phrases adjectival describing Refuge: “in the remote northeast corner”/of the state”

Another appositive: “The earth’s last sanctuary” is the noun anchor.
one adjectival prepositional phrase: “of the great Ice Age fauna”
subordinate clause linked by “that” which is also the subject to “that includes”
plural objects: "all three North American bears/gray wolves/wolverines/musk ox/moose/the Porcupine River herd"
two prepositional phrases: “in the summer” (adverbial tied to “includes”) and adjectival “of caribou” describing herd.
An appositive describing the herd: “120,000 strong.”

LET’S TRY WITH NO PREPOSITIONAL PHRASES:
Wild northern Alaska is one where a human being can kneel down and drink; its heart and essence is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR), the earth’s last sanctuary of the great Ice Age fauna that includes all three North American bears, gray wolves and wolverines, musk ox, moose, and, the Porcupine River herd 120,000 strong.

NO APPOSITIVES OR SUBORDINATE CLAUSES

Wild northern Alaska is one of the last places on earth where a human being can kneel down and drink from a wild stream; its heart and essence is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) in the remote northeast corner of the state.

STRIPPED TO BASICS
Alaska is one of the last places on earth where a human being can kneel down and drink; its heart and essence is the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR).

REMARKS:

Some echoes have accumulated in this genre of writing. One is the “last best place.” Arguably, another is “poisoned and polluted.”

Matthiessen subtly introduces sacredness by talking about “kneel down and drink,” both important ritual actions in more than one religion. This reinforces the idea of sanctuary. Yet he keeps hold of science with “Ice Age fauna.” Notice that he brackets together gray wolves and wolverines, marking a break before the browsers: musk ox, moose and caribou.

The whole article is at http://nybooks.com/articles/19430

Vol. 53, Number 16 October 19, 2006

LIGHTNING by Fred Stenson

2006-11-16T11:21:00.000-08:00

There are many accounts of the great cattle herds moving over the open range from Texas north, but not many written by Canadians as Fred Stenson has done in “Lightning.” In what many might think of as “typically” Canadian style, his version is understated, wry, and truthful. He includes surprises: bowling alleys in the little tent cities that grew up along the trails. We knew about the cards and pool tables -- but have we ever heard of a cowboy who started as a pin setter and became a “bowling shark?”

The women, both those respectably married and otherwise occupied, are uncommonly independent and liable to be scarred, freckled and muscled. Fred can’t resist that old story about the round and cuddly whore who -- when her cranky customer forced her to disrobe -- turned out to be built like a slat. She was largely bought from a catalogue. It’s always cold, so another warm body in the bed is as welcome as... well, food if not sex.

Fred’s version of the West is neither the “Lonesome Dove” saga of aging pards trading philosophy nor the horripilating bloodbath of Cormac McCarthy. Doc, the hero, is neither Gary Cooper or John Wayne. Rather he is like a lot of old cowboys still around here in 1961 or so -- small, wizened and wistful, surviving through friendship, good luck, and faithful horses.

There are two themes that hold the plot together: one is the mentoring relationship between older and young men living in hardship. (Early on, Doc is the receiver -- later he becomes the mentor.) The other is the man/woman instant and physical attachment that is something more than just sex -- as much about talking as fucking. Underlying it all is the electric prairie, liable to suddenly wipe out cow, horse, man or house. If you haven’t been on the prairie when an electric storm is building and haven’t felt the hair stirring on your head, you won’t know what an excellent metaphor for Fate it can be. Unless you read this.

Fred researched the historical context thoroughly -- much of it happens in Montana as the cowboys go from Texas to Calgary. The tone is rather like Teddy Blue’s authentic account of being there. Alongside the animal persistence that bonds man to horse is the great glory of occasionally finding a safe spot where one is loved, fed and sheltered. No guarantees. Always serendipity.

Always the pressure to think of safety measures, preventatives, strategy. Pearly, the pool shark, guards her bed with strings of broken glass that tinkle like a Malibu mobile if anyone comes close enough to bump them or make a breeze. The origin of the vigilantes in the Masonic Lodge is a strand in the story.

This tale follows a book called “The Trade” about the fur trappers and I wouldn’t be surprised if it were followed by one about running a cattle ranch as the open range is fenced.

Get it on the Internet: Amazon.ca if you have to. (Douglas & McIntyre: 2003. ISBN 1-55365-030-1 pb)

Fred is the spouse of Pamela Banting, who is active in environmental issues. Does she show up in this novel? Arguably. Both are faculty members at the University of Calgary.

THE ALEXANDRIA QUARTER VIA JAMES JOYCE

2006-10-04T13:20:00.000-07:00

Re the Lawrence Durrell quartet, I recall my own theory was at the time I read it is that he configured it like James Joyce's theory in A Portrait Of The Artist As A Young Man (also a novel about young writer's development). Though written in the third person, Joyce's novel was set up as an exercise in the hero's increasingly sophisticated awareness, as he grows from toddler to the emergence of the artist who realises he must become an exile (as Joyce did) to be a novelist. (Each chapter concludes with a transcendent moment of vivid awareness, a concept Joyce based on the Catholic Epiphany.)

Finally, he has his hero Stephen Dedalus express the idea that literature overall developed in stages akin to the first, second, and third person pronouns - I, you, and he/she/they. The first person was the early lyrical, subjective viewpoint of primitive poetry; the 2nd person matches the epic born of the funerary address or ode to fallen heroes etc; the modern novel arrived with the use of the impersonal 3rd-person narrator, with the real author omniscient but invisible, manipulating characters from behind the scenes.

So in LD's first novel, Justine, the budding young author Darley writes up his experiences of Alexandria from a first-person viewpoint. If you read it as I did as a standalone work, it's a vivid, poetic novel of the genre the French call the novel of sentimental education, where a young man recalls his first adult affair, and how he learned a lesson about life and love, ending up sadder but wiser.

In the 2nd novel, Balthazar, Darley sends the 'Justine' manuscript to his old friend Dr Balthazar, who tells him he had in fact been oblivious to the wider situation (Justine using him in a political plot), the novel being based on a duologue of letters and other exchanges which expand Darley's awareness of the world around him.

In the third novel, Mountolive, the view of David Mountolive, the British official who had to deal with the political plot (as well as his own private troubles), is given from a third-person viewpoint.

The fourth novel, Clea, is both a sequel and a synthesis of viewpoints where the now-older-and wiser Darley author recaps and follows through events with a more mature first-person account incorporating an awareness of events around him, as he has first 'grown-up' relationship with an artist.

I don't think it all works, but fascinating nonetheless!

David

info@south-central-media.co.uk

___________________

David maintains a web presence in England where he posts many fine ideas. I've misplaced the exact URL of his address, but will find it and put it up later.

What interests me, particularly since I've just started a novel, and since I've just read Elizabeth Owen's evidently famous essay called "Notes on Writing a Novel" in NarrativeMagazine.com, is how much structural machinery there is -- even for a writer who seems to be writing wild dream-ridden stuff from his subconscious. I think most beginning writers don't realize this structure exists or might be helpful, or how one would go about developing it anyway. Of course, Durrell belonged to a community of writers who debated all this sort of thing interminably -- which suggests why good work often comes from groups of people.

Prairie Mary

THE DURRELLS

2006-09-10T14:51:00.000-07:00

It’s certainly no secret that I’m not an organized person -- never pretended to be (except in a job interview), and have no particular need to change now. But once in a while I get aggravated by the books surging around here and want to get some order out of them.

Last spring I bought a nice plastic box and filled it with the books I wanted (needed, really) to read this summer. At that point I was ready to plunge back into my manuscript about Blackfeet Bundle-Opening and the poetics of ritual/worship and how it evolves from life and is related to nature, yada yada yada.

But then I switched over to writing the dog book that’s been floating around in my head so long, so I refilled the box with the books I’d been saving for that.

Then the Durrells popped up. Probably because of the BBC movie version of “My Family and Other Animals.” First a bio of Gerald showed up in the remainder catalogue and then Ruth sent me the video of Gerald’s book. The Durrells struck the same rich chord as they did many years ago when I first read their work. Long before I knew about deep ecology or the “other,” I was nearly drunk on “The Bafut Beagles” and “The Whispering Land.” I didn’t even own the books -- I must have gotten them from the library -- but I carried them ever after in my heart.

For a long time I didn’t connect Lawrence with Gerald. Much later in life my mother rented a cottage on the Oregon Coast in the middle of summer -- a splurge -- and there were two paper volumes of the Alexandrian Quartet on the shelf. I read them straight through with not much idea what they meant -- just that I was pulled into a scented dream exactly right for hot sand and surf. After that, if I came across a cheap paperback Lawrence Durrell, I grabbed it. Little by little I began to realize that he belonged to a group so sophisticated, erotic and worldwise that they would make the Bloomsbury group retire in confusion. After all, Anais Nin, Henry Miller, Paul Bowles??

They would never have intimidated Gerald, who consorted with wild tribes and wilder animals, achieving impossible feats with enormous cursing and prodigious exertion, followed by liberal alcohol intake to medicate his wounds and state of mind and -- next morning -- reparative tea. But then Gerald was dependent on women. (He reminded me thoroughly of Bob Scriver.) And he was always rather in danger of patronizing the natives with renderings of pidgin English and goofy interpretations of what they were thinking. But he did so love the animals even as he caused the deaths of many of them.

Lawrence, as Gerald is willing to concede, was far more subtle and elevated. In fact, until now I wasn’t able to follow very well, but one of the few pluses of the Iraq invasion is that suddenly he seems relevant and precisely on target, even when describing the fustiest and most ambiguous aspects of Copt Christianity in Egypt.

Egged on by Alibris, I ordered a clutch of Gerald’s novels in used paperback at $1 each. What I didn’t realize until too late was that they were in England and the postage was rawtha steep. Just the same, I ended up with 8 books for fifty bucks total. Then I went around my shelves and gathered up all of Lawrence’s novels. Free, or at least paid for. The trouble is their randomness: “Mountolive” and “Clea” from the Alexandrian Quartet; “Tunc” and “Monsieur” evidently orphans; “Livia” and “Constance” from the Avignon Quintet. I suppose an orderly person would immediately order the missing novels.

Too late. I’ve already been sucked into “Mountolive” by an extraordinary opening scene of a young Englishman being initiated into night fishing in Egypt:

“The punt which now carried him, thrust by slow thrust across the turbid water, was turning slowly eastward to take up its position in the great semicircle of boats which was being gradually closed in upon a target area marked out by the black reed spines of fish pans. And as they closed in, stroke by stroke, the Egyptian night fell -- the sudden reduction of all objects to bas-reliefs upon a screen of gold and violet. The land had become dense as tapestry in the lilac afterglow, quivering here and there with water mirages from the rising damps, expanding and contracting horizons, until one thought of the world being mirrored in a soap bubble trembling on the edge of disappearance. Voices, too, across the water sounded now loud, now soft and clear.”

The description goes on, hypnotic, as the boats form a semicircle, strong torches capable of penetrating to the bottom of the shallow water are lit, and then the fish can be seen darting and surging into the nets previously set. When the fish are drawn into the boats, kingfishers and other birds are attracted and dive on the cargo, sometimes spearing and slashing the men by mistake. The whole thing is realistic and yet the metaphorical load is momentuous. The mood is both celebratory and ominous as the young Englishman returns on horseback to the ornate balconied household where he is sleeping with the woman of the house, at her aged husband’s suggestion. All is hint and implication -- soft shadows and then light like knife blades. This exotic culture is both respected and feared as the British try to maintain their empire and the Arabs -- even the Christian Arabs who must protect themselves again Muslim Arabs -- set out to claim their own empire back.

Contrast this with Gerald’s headlong plunge after establishing his scene. Lawrence, who was older, did coach him a bit about “how to write.” But I think mainly they write this witty way because the whole family talked like this all the time and they had that English Wordworthian love of nature.

This is the beginning of “My Family and Other Animals.”

“July had been blown out like a candle by a biting wind that ushered in a leaden August sky. A sharp, stinging drizzle fell, billowing into opaque grey sheets when the wind caught it. Along the Bournemouth sea-front the beach-huts turned blank wooden faces towards a greeny-grey, froth-chained sea that leap eagerly at the cement bulwark of the shore. The gulls had been tumbled inland over the town, and they now drifted above the house-tops on taut wings, whining peevishly. It was the sort of weather calculated to try anyone’s endurance.

“Considered as a group my famly was not a very prepossessing sight that afternoon, for the weather had brought with it the usual selection of ills to which we were prone. For me, lying on the floor, labelling my collection of shells, it had brought catarrh, pouring it into my skull like cement, so that I was forced to breath stertorously through open mouth. For my brother Leslie, hunched dark and glowering by the fire, it had inflamed the convolutions of his ears so that they bled delicately but persistently. To my sister Margo it had delivered a fresh dappling of acne spots to a face that was already blotched like a red veil. For my mother there was a rich, bubbling cold, and a twinge of rheumatism to season it. Only my eldest brother, Larry, was untouched, but it was sufficient that he was irritated by our failings.”

A few lines later he says, “Larry was designed by Providence to go through life like a small, blond firework, exploding ideas in other people’s minds, and then curling up with cat-like unctuousness and refusing to take any blame for the consequences.” There you have it: a synopsis of all Lawrence Durrell’s books. He often seems a bit inhuman, despite all the sensuousness.

One wonders about the genetic underpinnings of this family -- WHAT must the father have been like? But more than that they were fortified by the iron of the British Empire and its culture of both noblesse oblige and domination. And they had an extraordinary sensitivity -- more sensuous than cinematic -- to scene and landscape. To say nothing of readers’ vocabulary.

It’s going to take me all fall to get through this box of books, since I’m weaving them in among that other box of dog books. But I’ll keep you posted.

GERALD DURRELL by Douglas Botting

2006-03-23T19:55:00.000-08:00

Years and years ago in a summer rental at the Oregon Coast where the days were Mediterranean, I found three volumes of “The Alexandrian Quartet” and read them in the sand with waves of sensuous emotions washing over me. I never did figure out what was happening or quite who the people were, but that didn’t seem to matter. It was mostly a Javanese shadow play inside the head of Laurence Durrell anyway.

When I came across the books of Gerald Durrell, his brother, I was never in doubt about what was happening, I loved it all as equally sensuous and far funnier than the Alexandrians -- inevitable since most of the beings having sex in Gerald’s book were animals. “Bafut Beagles,” “The Drunken Forest” -- I was reading them as fast as they appeared without really thinking about where they were coming from. I’m sure that when I lit in Browning, Montana, with Bob Scriver and the constant cohabiting animals, I thought I’d found Gerald Durrell. And I certainly had found a variation on the theme. (Chuck Jonkel, the Montana bear expert, is out of that barrel, too. Probably others and I hope I find them.)

One of my luckier remaindered book orders was “Gerald Durrell: The Authorized Biography” by Douglas Botting, a big fat book full of funny stories and major insight into a man totally without formal education, running wild on the island of Corfu as a child, handsome as Kenneth Branaugh in youth, and an alcoholic wreck when he died at seventy. (That’s what happened to his brother, too.) But all the way through he had such an appetite for life, such an irreverent grasp of what life really does, so much capacity to pull people (from Princess Anne to natives in Africa) into his projects and visions, and altogether so much love -- it’s impossible to blame or criticize. His final monument is a zoo on the Isle of Jersey that rescues species from extinction and breeds them until there are enough to repopulate their place of origin.

I put this review on this blog, which purportedly is the one of my three which is about writing and teaching writing, because much of Botting’s material is meant to explain why the books were so riotously funny, even as one learned all about the strangest of beings with big round eyes and fingers like witches (aye-ayes), or maybe baboons with faces and bottoms colored like crayons. (The sponsor of the Jersey Zoo was Princess Anne and early in her relationship to the place, when Durrell was conducting her around in a crowd of courtiers, they passed this baboon which was in season and more violently bright than usual. He presented his rear end to Princess Anne. Gerald asked, enthusiastically, “How would you like to have a bottom like that?” She took the question seriously, studied the example carefully, and said firmly, “I would not.”)

So part of the formula was an insouciant attitude towards pomp and authority, which occasionally got him in trouble with people who didn’t have the aplomb of the royals. Much of the rest of his success was a gift for similie and metaphor. One interviewer, who lunched with him on boiled green beans that squeaked when bitten, remarked on the sound. “Yes,” said Gerald. “Just like gum boots in dry snow.” And that was it exactly.

My aunt who is a poet once sent me a short video program of Peter Matthiessen in Florida doing Gerald Durrell sorts of things. He’s with a woman naturalist who has conducted him to the sand nest of an alligator. She’s about to put her hands down in the warm sand to lift out a few eggs so they can look at them. “Oh, please, let me!” begged Peter and she did. Maternally, so gently, he brought out those eggs. Later when they had caught some baby alligators and put rubber bands on their jaws to make them safe, Peter held the little creatures on his knees and stroked them so softly, so soothingly. Very Durrellian.

This is what I’ve been missing from so much natural history writing. Maybe I’m traveling in the wrong circles, but all I see is high theory and politics. High dudgeon about cruelty, demands that we treat animals like people, blame, blame, blame... All of it as abstract and cool as geometry of the moon with no love poems, no jokes about green cheese, no rhyme with a jumping cow. Empty, flat stuff. I don’t get the feeling that these writers even have a cat or dog in the house.

This Botting book about Durrell is 600 pages long and not in the least padded. But I hit Abebooks.com and found a host of Durrell paperbacks for a dollar each in England. I forgot to think about the postage until it was too late, rushing into debt just like GD. But I feel quite defiant about it. Not like a silly bugger at all.

Carroll & Graf, 1999 ISBN 0-7867-0655-4

SERIOUSLY, MINNIE

2006-03-21T10:53:00.000-08:00

A Critical Review of "Shoot, Minnie, Shoot!" the story of 1904 Fort Shaw Indian Girls – Basketball’s First World Champions by Happy Jack Feder

By Mike Jetty (Spirit Lake Dakota/Turtle Mountain),
Dorothea M. Susag, educator and author Roots and Branches: A Resource of Native American Literature Themes, Lessons, and Bibliographies;
Kathryn Shanley (Assiniboine), Native American Studies Chair at the University of Montana, author of numerous articles on Native American literature and cultural studies, and editor of Native American Literature: Boundaries and Sovereignties.
In collaboration with Barbara Winters, Drusilla Gould, and Mary Lukin, Granddaughter,Great-granddaughter, and Grandniece of Fort Shaw 1904 basketball team players
None of us wanted to go and our parents didn’t want to let us go. Oh, we cried, for this was the first time we were to be separated from our parents. Nobody waved as the wagons, escorted by the soldiers, took us toward the school at Fort Shaw. Once there, our belongings were taken from us, even the little medicine bags our mothers had given to us to protect us from harm. Everything was placed in a heap and set afire. (Lone Wolf, son of Fine Shield Woman, a Piegan
Blackfeet, and James Willard Schultz in Native American Testimony. Peter
Nabokov, editor. (1991, 220))

Like Lone Wolf, Indian children were taken from their families and communities to
boarding schools, sometimes for as long as ten years and sometimes as far away as 1,000 miles in often abusive and physically unhealthy environments. This was part of a grand federal plan to “civilize” the Indian. Boarding schools, officials hoped, would offer a way both to assuage the guilt of whites for massacres and small pox infestations and the like, and to open vast and currently “useless” domains for settlement.

Like Lone Wolf, many Indian people remember the loneliness and loss, and they tell
their children boarding school stories that others have forgotten. All the while, the media and popular fiction and even serious histories have romanticized or demonized their stories, eclipsing their voices and reinforcing stereotypes. “Shoot, Minnie, Shoot!” the story of the 1904 Fort Shaw Indian Girls Basketball’s First World Champions is this kind of fiction. In this review, we offer our readings of the novel in the interest of “Indian Education for All” teaching imperatives; our hope is to make clear where history and fiction differ regarding the Ft. Shaw Indian girls basketball team and to emphasize the importance of accurate representations of American Indian life, past and present.

"Shoot, Minnie, Shoot!" is a novel, written and self-published by Happy Jack Feder, a fiction writer and publisher who has made his home in Sun River Canyon, Montana, about thirty miles west of present-day Fort Shaw. To its credit, the novel recognizes the girls’ achievement, as well as the racial struggles of the time. Clearly, Mr. Feder appreciates basketball, threading his story of these remarkable teenagers with the conflicts he imagines they may have experienced, with easy dialog and realistic game scenes, with their responses to triumph, with a few romances, and with some semi-historical stories related to boarding-school and Indian/white issues and events.

On the copyright page, Happy Jack Feder offers a disclaimer: "This is a work of fiction and any resemblance or similarity to any persons or events is entirely coincidental and unintended." However, the title and reviewers’ notes, the Library of Congress designated category of "Historical Fiction," the accurate names of the Fort Shaw ball players and superintendent, photographs of the team members, direct quotes from newspapers, and facts about the 1904 Fair all contradict Feder’s claim of its purely fictional basis. The persons or events are not at all coincidental. Therefore, the novel must be regarded and evaluated as "Historical Fiction."

So what makes this small-distribution book so worthy of critical attention? Like so much fiction about Indians, "Shoot, Minnie, Shoot" suffers from misinformation, contradictions, false assumptions, and all-too-common stereotypes (noble, uncivilized, wild or animal-like, and savage, for a few). Such stereotypes and distorted generalizations hide the seriously complex truths that lie beneath, while the voices of children such as Lone Wolf are clearly disregarded. It seduces the unwary reader, primarily non-Indian, while it betrays the very people it purports to praise.

One particularly egregious distortion involves the mis-impression the cover photo
gives—it’s not Minnie! Furthermore, in his “Author’s Notes,” Feder regrets “that Belle Johnson holds the ball on the front cover, not Minnie, who is pictured on page 161.” But that’s not Minnie, either. It’s Emma Sansaver, as recognized by Barbara Winters, Emma’s granddaughter. Forgetting for a moment the insult Belle Johnson's descendants might feel in reading that the writer regrets that their grandmother is holding the ball, consider how readers would respond to a novel about Jackie Robinson with an unlabeled photo of Hank Aaron on the cover? Identifying photographs accurately is a fundamental responsibility of a publisher. Clearly, this is false advertising.

Feder also claims that "no facts have been turned upside down or perversely interpreted”. Well, "Shoot, Minnie, Shoot," may not be in the league of Custer mythology, but in the interest of “Indian Education for All” and the importance of accurate representations of American Indian life, past and present, we’d like to get the facts straight.

SUMMARY: The novel begins on the Shoshone Indian Reservation in central Idaho, "a
day’s horse ride from the Montana border," where images of five blue swallows, flying
"to a distant and unknown destination," appear to Minnie. Putting "the dream away for a moment," she thinks again about "her one consuming passion: . . . to accomplish a
wondrous and great deed." She also thinks of the stories of Shoshone women warriors,
and how her Shoshone people “needed to be reminded that they were as great a people
now as when their grandmothers were babies”. Although she does not know what she
will accomplish with her life, a spark of potential “greatness” burns within her as
something to counter “the suffocating stillness of sedentary reservation life”.

The "kindly [Fort Lapwai] Indian agent and schoolteacher," Mr. Burton, recognizes
Minnie’s intelligence and throwing skills. He suggests she leave her family to attend the Federal Indian Boarding School in Fort Shaw, Montana, hundreds of miles north and
east. Her father agrees, because he believes she will "bring honor and joy" to her family. Throughout the novel, images of the five swallows recur, and Minnie grows to
understand their significance for her and for the team.

At the Fort Shaw boarding school, Minnie interacts and sometimes conflicts with other
students. She also learns to play basketball and to perform Delsartean dances and
pantomimes. The tallest player on the team, Minnie soon wins the attention of crowds
who cheer "Shoot, Minnie, Shoot," as the unbeatable team achieves widespread
recognition. The team is the pride of the school. Mr. Campbell, the superintendent and coach, teaches his students about Lewis and Clark and the upcoming centennial
celebration to be held in St. Louis, Missouri in 1904. Over several months, the girls
practice, raise funds and travel from Fort Shaw to Missouri for the World’s Fair and the competition for "World Basketball Champions."

In the end, the Fort Shaw team defeats the Missouri Women’s All Stars "24-2" to receive the trophy for the "First World Championship of Women’s Basketball." Minnie’s
"vision" of the soaring swallows comes true, and she is reunited with her father when he surprises her in St. Louis.

REVIEW: The true story of the Fort Shaw team is inspiring and certainly engaging, but
these women deserve an honest and respectful rendition that is historically accurate and culturally authentic. This novel is neither.

Despite its being loosely based on the history of the Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School, on published newspaper articles about Fort Shaw games and students’ musical
presentations, on information regarding the 1904 World’s Fair, and on the girls’ tribal backgrounds, "Shoot, Minnie, Shoot" does not reflect the historical facts as it could.

Moreover, it lacks literary integrity. The characters and many imagined scenes are not only unbelievable but literally outrageous, and the most basic respect for
acknowledgment of sources is absent. Had the author interviewed and then requested
feedback from descendants, or had he read the article entitled “World Champions: The
1904 Girls’ Basketball Team from Fort Shaw Indian Boarding School,” by researchers
Linda Peavy and Ursula Smith, first printed in the Montana Magazine of Western History (Winter 2001), he could have avoided some glaring contradictions, misrepresentations of historical facts, false assumptions, and all-too-common stereotypes. Peavy and Smith have several times given a talk about the Ft. Shaw Indian Girls basketball team entitled, “Shoot, Minnie Shoot!”

First: consider the issues of family, and tribal or cultural affiliation. The novel introduces Minnie as a young girl with a father, Sees-Far-Away, and with a living mother, "the youngest of her father’s four wives." They live in a tipi on the Shoshone Indian Reservation, near the Fort Lapwai Agency. In the novel, Minnie takes the last name of the Indian Agent, Mr. Burton; and then at Fort Shaw, she explains to her classmates that her Shoshone people are "part of the Sioux nation . . . "Minnehaha is a name often given to a girl who is what you might call a Sioux princess".

The truth? According to researchers Peavy and Smith, the historical Minnie Burton’s
mother, "a Western Shoshone from Nevada, had died when Minnie was nine, and Minnie
and her younger brother were thereafter raised by their Lemhi Shoshone father, William Burton, and their stepmother, a Bannock woman"(Peavy and Smith 9-10)."
Minnie’s tribal heritage, as the novel attributes her saying, is also inaccurate. Shoshone is not a "part of the Sioux nation". The term “Sioux” is the term the Anishnabe used for their traditional enemy, and comes from the word “niddowasioux,” meaning “little snakes,” “adders.” The designation Sioux represents the congregate of Lakota/Dakota people, who lived and hunted in the Montana, Dakota, and Minnesota territories. Their language systems differ significantly from Shoshone, and their locations on opposite sides of the Rocky Mountains would have made such a relatedness impossible. The idea of an Indian princess is completely made up. Minnehaha does not mean Indian princess in Lakota, and the concept of royalty did not (and does not) exist in traditional Lakota thought. Moreover, "Minnehaha" is Algonquin, not Lakota or "Sioux." We wonder how Abigail Adams’ descendants might feel about a fiction writer suggesting Abigail’s name originated in Spain and that her ancestral home, England, was a part of the French Nation.

The implied heritage of Belle Johnson is also problematic. In Feder’s compilation of
contemporary newspapers, with the exception of what Feder calls "obvious" fictional
narratives, the fictional writer, Jonathon C. Foggs, says, "It would not surprise me
the very least if Belle [actually Piegan/ Blackfeet] is the granddaughter of Crazy Horse [actually Oglala Sioux] himself, so valiantly did she push the ball up field”. We might suspect Belle’s descendants would find the association insulting. However, giving the reporter some room for error, a reader could possibly assume that the reporter may not have known that Piegan/Blackfeet and Oglala Sioux are different tribes. But with the compilation including no quotation marks or citations, it is difficult to distinguish whose voice we are actually reading, Feder’s or the fictional journalist. Who is the writer committing the error? Feder or an eastern reporter at the turn of the century?

Even more disturbing is Feder’s admitted "masquerade" of Louis Youpee as Metís
(mixed-blood or French/Cree in this case). In his "Author’s Notes," Feder says he made the change because the Metis "deserved mention," since "huge numbers" had lived in the area "before returning en masse to Canada in 1905". Feder identifies Youpee as
"Sioux and not Metis," but in fact Louis Youpee was Chippewa (Peavy and Smith 7).
Again, like the mislabeling of the photograph on page 161, Feder doesn’t get it right. But that’s not the only inaccuracy. All Metís descendants did not return "en masse" to Canada. In fact, they remained hidden in the Choteau and Sun River Valley area, as wellas other places throughout Montana to avoid persecution from the military who had executed their leader, Louis Reil. Today, keeping their Metis history alive, many still live in the Sun River Valley and Choteau area. But what of Louis Youpee’s actual heritage? Is it not worth including? What is his story?

Another serious problem occurs with the identification of the spiritual figure who
influences Minnie throughout the novel, as well as the dangerous assumptions and
treatment of spiritual beliefs of other students and team members. Again, Feder
acknowledges that there is a debate as to whether "Old Man and Great Father are two
separate entities or merely parallel manifestations of The One God”. Feder
oversimplifies and trivializes the issue. In the first place, not all tribes and not all Native people ascribe to a belief in "Old Man,"and not the Shoshone in particular. While Minnie’s Shoshone father attributes her dream to "Old Man," this spiritual figure is actually the trickster/transformer Napi of the Blackfeet, not the Shoshone. Then, Minnie later "knows" that each girl on the team “had found a way to believe in both Great Father of the church and Old Man at the same time." At the end, we read that "Old Man and his good friend, Great Father [of the white people] . . . enjoy a good laugh," as they appear joyful in Minnie’s dream, having shown her the way to the championship game in St. Louis (160). The ecumenical spirit of such depictions of tolerance fits with the spunky persona of western fiction, a conflation
born of common sense ala Mark Twain and Will Rogers, yet one has to question its
trivializing effects. While it is entirely possible that individuals in the Blackfeet or in the Judeo-Christian traditions might have a dream such as Minnie’s, few Christians or Muslims would trust a fictional narrative that confuses Mohammad with Jesus.

Most disturbing is the implication that Native American ethnic or cultural authenticity is a mute issue, since non-Indian readers won’t know about the great diversity of tribal nations and cultures. In truth, more than 550 federally recognized tribal nations exist today. If a writer gets them mixed up, it won’t matter. Perhaps no one will notice.

Second: consider the author’s application of “poetic license.” Feder’s narrative about the appearance of Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill Cody at the 1904 Fair is inaccurate and disrespectful, despite Feder’s admission that he has "a fondness for Sitting Bull and [thinks he deserves] a ticket to see his descendants echo his famous battle and mete out a second ‘Last Stand’ to yet another cocky leader” (164). Cheering for the “underdog,” a typical Hollywood motif in depicting dominant/minority relations, tends to obscure all sorts of real-life domination, suggesting that any individual can succeed in realizing the American dream, no matter how oppressed his or her group or people may be. Although Sitting Bull (Hunkpapa Sioux) was tragically shot and killed in 1890 over Ghost Dance fears and internal tribal conflicts, Feder has imagined him present at the 1904 Fair. In company with Buffalo Bill, Sitting Bull makes Minnie’s "heart ache to see her own people." He speaks "in a Sioux dialect” that Minnie has difficulty understanding, and Buffalo Bill calls him a "crusty feller." By contrast, Buffalo Bill’s appearance makes Minnie "feel proud”. He looks to Minnie like "the epitome of American majesty”. The situation is as absurd as a cranky John F. Kennedy showing up at Nixon’s inauguration. The contrasting descriptions of Sitting Bull and Buffalo Bill are most disturbing, with "majesty" being ascribed to an entertainer, and a political and spiritual leader of thousands called "feller." Now it’s possible Buffalo Bill might have said as
6
much about Sitting Bull – they were, in fact, friends until one was sent to arrest the other
in 1890, with Sitting Bull’s assassination following shortly thereafter. We might accept
this exchange in the novel as satire, but it’s not. It is included as an imagined extension of
a true story.
Third: consider the way Hollywood rather than history pervades the novel through the
non-Native bias evident in the stereotypes. Although the existence of the novel itself
represents Feder’s attempt to show respect and sensitivity for the Native people, his
fictional narrative betrays his lack of understanding for the very complex truths that lie
beneath his assumptions.
Take the situation of Emma Sansaver. According to Emma’s granddaughter, Barbara
Winters, Emma’s father Edward died when Emma was seven years old. But in the novel,
her father suddenly shows up at the school and chastises her for wearing a feather in her
hair. "What’s this garbage? I said no injun clothes or foofaraw and I meant it."(30) Emma
challenges him in a "brave and true voice" with "‘Yet you married my mother. A full
blood.’" And then he slaps her.
Now it’s entirely possible a white father may have behaved this way, but it’s unlikely that
such a man would so dramatically change. In Chicago, Minnie persuades her teachers to
let audience members participate in a dance. Although Emma’s fictional "father" has
followed the team, still exhibiting disapproval, Minnie draws him in and he dances with
Emma. Moved by the crowd’s applause, he now understands "his daughter was now her
own woman. She was who she was and that was that. She excelled at being herself. . . .
Emma was the best Emma possible. His job was done(122)." Fictional depiction aside,
the reader is supposed to believe that this white father—a clear racist—was really a good
man. The chapter in which Minnie’s father slaps her ends with “some men from town”
gathered to find Oliver, who they speculate has run away to look for his father. In a subtle
way, all these depictions call for benevolent administrators and teachers to fill the
fatherhood gap with a benign paternalism.
The historical F. C. Campbell is generally reputed to have been a kind and highly
motivated administrator, educator and coach. But Feder finds it necessary to incorporate
guilt as a motive for Campbell’s "generous and enthusiastic efforts to better the Indian
condition” (163), inaccurately incorporating the Massacre on the Marias into his novel.
Campbell says, “You and I were only boys. Eighteen and soldiers . . . . On that awful
morning we were the boots of twisted and amoral generals whose criminal egos ran
amok.”
The truth? Most of the soldiers who participated in the Massacre on the Marias River of
173 Blackfeet old men, women, and children on January 23, 1870 were young and
inexperienced. Campbell would have been just six years old on that date. Moreover,
Campbell himself was an accomplished athlete, and an educator, who "recognized the
self-esteem sports could impart to young athletes” (Peavy and Smith 7). Feder had
enough motivation for Campbell. He didn’t need guilt.
7
In language, image and situation, the novel is rife with both positive and negative
stereotypes along with the oversimplification of culture, language, religion, and dress that
creates outright incongruities and contradictory historical and cultural truths. These are
some examples that hopefully will require little explanation.
! "Before succumbing to the conquering combination of white people’s diseases,
soldiers and endless streams of settlers, young Shoshone men had entered
adulthood by performing a great deed.” This reinforces the notion that Indians
were a conquered people, along with the disappearance of previous ways (10).
! "[Minnie] was happy to attend school and learn about the world beyond the
reservation, whereas her mothers and grandmothers might have slowly tortured to
death a captive or fought off a murderous grizzly bear while out picking
huckleberries."(11). Where did the author get this idea?
! And later in St. Louis during one of the preliminary games, a similar image
describes the Fort Shaw Indian girls: "Minnie and her mates wouldn’t have heard
the roar of a grizzly bear if their head were inside its open jaws. They were the
grizzly bear" roaring "up and down the field.” (113).
! "The brand new cotton dress the Fort Lapwai Agency had distributed, along with
other clothes, to her family. . . . made her feel clean and pretty"(11)--as if she
were not somehow clean when she was at home with her Shoshone people.
! "Trapped again, thought Minnie. Trapped in a hopeless reservation." (12)
! "I want to become a Shoshone by the old ways. But here on the reservation there
is nothing great to do. There is nothing little to do, either. Our opportunities have
been taken from us. We count days and moons and winters. That is all" (13).
! We wonder about the reference to not touching tears (14), and the reference to
"devil Blackfeet” and cutting out “their beating hearts" (15). The reviewers know
of no such tradition related to drying one’s own tears. Although cutting out the
beating heart of an enemy was a practice in some tribes, its use in this text seems
sensational.
! The race to the boarding school is less believable than their running away from it
might have been. In general, the boarding school experience represents a cultural
genocide, in the words of Richard Henry Pratt, “Kill the Indian, save the man.”
! Belle Johnson tells Minnie, "[Fort Shaw] is a huge boarding school . . . everyone
is good friends" (18).
! In her Indian dress at Fort Shaw and after her three-day trip to the school, Minnie
feels "awful . . . like a sack of squishy, rotting potatoes" (19).
! Looking at Mr. Campbell, Minnie thinks, "exchange the clothes for Indian garb,
and he would still command respect" (22). His surrogate father role (Great White
Father) and the patriarchy of mainstream American society are reinforced yet
again.
! "Most Metís lived in Canada, but a few bands had drifted down to Montana . . . .
the Metis, who spoke an indecipherable mixture of French and Indian"(28). In
truth, many Metis people lived in Montana – and still do. Metís or Michief was a
very common language on the western plains and in Montana. Metís dictionaries
have been written. A more accurate statement would have been a mixture of
French and Cree. Michef is still spoken in at least four states and five Canadian
8
provinces. Reference to other peoples’ languages as “indecipherable” comes from
ethnocentrism and ignorance at best.
! "Both the red and white parts of my heart" (31) represents a serious
oversimplification of identity issues and echoes the romanticism and tragedy of
“halfbreed” pulp fiction.
! "The dark thought crossed her mind that, like her grandmothers, she might also
have enjoyed torturing captured enemy braves had she been born fifty years
earlier"(45). Where does this idea come from? It perpetuates the stereotype about
Indians as savages at the same time it instills the idea that the girls come from
cultures where women were strong and brave—a mixed message at best.
! "Minnie had forgotten that some Indian boys did not let a girl order them about"
(57), as though white men do? This is an interesting passage considering how
many women in "white" America during this time period were treated as secondclass
citizens – could not vote, for example.
! "Maybe I shouldn’t be so impatient that I haven’t had my vision yet"(58).
Typically, don’t talk publicly about their visions or dreams. These are personal,
and the way Minnie talks about her vision contradicts the way a traditional
Shoshone individual might talk.
! The passage about "delicious and hearty" meals (59) doesn’t discuss why many
Indian children on the reservations suffered from malnutrition. The passage
suggests Indians didn’t know how to eat properly; in fact, malnutrition was a
serious problem in boarding schools.
! The passage regarding Minnie having a "mean vision" is disturbing (69-70).
Moreover, the mention of Indians "getting visions all the time" takes a deep
spiritual, sacred ceremony and belittles it. Indian people and others still do receive
personal visions that should be respected.
! What is the Blackfeet perspective (74) on the Baker Massacre? Why not include
Belle Johnson’s perspective?
! When two boys disappear, having been seen "heading toward the horse barn two
hours earlier," Emma Sansaver cries, ‘Ho! What if they’re stealing horses to
escape!’”(83). Would she say stealing? Is this not a Euro-American gloss? Some
of the students might have seen this as "counting coups," but as it stands, the
passage mirrors the “sneaky” Indians of Hollywood westerns.
! "Nettie always carries a braid of [sweetgrass] in a little bag as a perfume” (85).
Sweetgrass is used for purification not as a perfume.
! Although 300 students came from diverse Native and mixed-blood backgrounds,
one (very thick) dialect is represented in the fictional voice of Genie Butch, her
mother "Assiniboine and her father a ‘Scottish’” immigrant. Minnie admires her
voice as "an exotic songbird." However, while Genie suffers only a hint at
criticism for not speaking clear English, Miss Howard, the literature teacher, tells
Belle, "with a bit of effort I’m certain you will eliminate those few remaining
traces of that clipped Blackfeet accent. It simply ruins Paradise and the Pearl.
The words must flow gently, please" (42).
! While we might admire Feder for his ability to write the Scottish dialect so well,
we wonder, why not incorporate all the others, various native and western-
9
European, as well? Why not use Genie’s actual dialect, since her father was
British not Scottish? (Peavy and Smith 11)
! "Mr. Campbell stood comfortably in silence, a practice he’d deliberately styled
from Indians . . . He found many Indian mannerisms and rituals more than
admirable” (84).
And then there’s the noble savage stereotype that can take the form of the “doomed one
who is destined to be extinguished” or the “Indian always with us in the drop of
American Indian blood” that many Americans claim. The fictional Mr. Campbell
chastises Mr. Sansaver for condemning Emma when he sees her wearing a feather in her
hair. He says, "I admire your efforts to have her educated formally, but you do her a
terrible injustice by punishing her for the few noble Indian habits she dares to practice"
(102). We wonder, is she practicing other less-noble habits? Are all Indian habits noble,
with Minnie practicing just a few?
Minnie herself is extraordinarily noble, singularly courageous and brave. Following the
image and symbolism of the five swallows "still winging through her life," she succeeds
in helping to solve five problems: One, to help "Emma find peace with both her father
and Louis Youpee"; two, to help "Oliver find a college that would accept him"; three, to
help "Miss Howard and Mr. Duffield broach the subject of marriage"; four, to help "Mr.
Campbell find a worthwhile opponent for their championship game"; and, five, "before
leaving the World’s Fair and returning to Montana, she would discover in what direction
to aim the remainder of her life” (95-96).
Minnie has so much confidence in her "vision," that she can boldly tell Mr. Campbell that
they are "going to the Louisiana Purchase Exposition," and "our team is going to win ten
gold medals. Winning the medals is the great deed I will accomplish” (71). Just before
the final game in St. Louis, Mr. Campbell speaks with the team and tells them he must
"let go of his child," and not be with them on the floor as a coach. The fictional narrative
puts him in the stands, but in fact, he had left St. Louis in August to return to Fort Shaw
where he was still administrator and teacher. Speaking to the girls, he says: "It was the
thousands of white people who saw something noble in you and rose above their
prejudices to cheer you on” (137). In a similar vein, Minnie notices the character of their
opponents, the Missouri All-Stars. "They all shared [their coach], Stremmel’s heartless
calculating face, [carrying] and aggressive confidence." And with typical nobility, Minnie
thinks, "Now here are players worthy of a championship game and my vision” (142).
Such passages bring to mind the concept Renato Rosaldo develops in his book, Culture
and Memory, “imperialist nostalgia.” It is the longing on the part of the oppressor for the
return of the people one has destroyed.
After Referee Kelly’s toss of the medallion, "gold spinning in summer sunlight" at the
start of the game, he hands it to Minnie. But Minnie doesn’t keep it. Instead, as the gun
sounds the end of the game, she races to Referee Kelly and presses it "into his hand" so
he will remember this "magic day” (154). As with the passages quoted above, Feder
often pushes the idea that Indians were pervasively grateful to their non-Indian teachers
and coaches for mentoring them.
10
Fourth: Consider the distorted portrayal of the Federal Indian Boarding School system as
pervasively positive and helpful, with children better off away from the reservations and
their Indian communities. Feder includes the situation of a runaway, Oliver Old Coyote,
whose father is alcoholic and a "murderer." In a peculiar valorization of white education,
Oliver says this to Minnie: "I promise you, Minnehaha Burton, daughter of the great
Shoshone Chief Sees Far Away and his wife, Looks In Water, that Oliver Shakespeare
will never again run away from this fine school” (60). Minnie smiles in approval.
To be sure, this situation with Oliver does illustrate the way local bounty hunters would
catch the runaways, be paid by the school, and then would give part of the money back to
the runaways. "Oliver laughed. ‘But [the pouch] was empty when I gave it to hem. He put
the money inside the pouch. It’s the bounty money Mr. Campbell had to give to Mr.
Cobb.’ Oliver rubbed his stomach. ‘Also, his wife Mrs. Cobb feeds me very well. She is a
fine cook.’” (66-67)
The images of laughing when they are caught running away and girls mostly happy and
excited to be living together at Ft. Shaw (25) make some big assumptions regarding
children living away from relatives in a militaristic atmosphere. The impacts of boarding
school policies were more devastating to Native people than single massacres, as
deplorable as massacres may have been. Consequently, Native peoples today continue to
suffer intergenerational historical trauma from their parents, grandparents, and greatgrandparents
having been raised away from tribal communities and in abusive and often
physically unhealthy environments.
Although "these magnificent red children will be capable citizens" (23) is probably a true
sentiment of folks working at the boarding school, many people probably aren’t even
aware of the true nature of the underlying philosophy of boarding schools. Thomas
Morgan, Commissioner of Indian Affairs 1889-1893, stated “a wild Indian requires a
thousand acres to roam over, while an intelligent man will find comfortable support for
his family on a very small tract. When the rising generation of Indians have become
civilized and learned to use the land they live on, a vast domain now useless can be
thrown open to settlement and become the seat of great farms, happy homes.”
The novel takes up the topic of white ways versus Indian frequently, but deceptively casts
them as polar opposite ways of life between which one can sometimes choose and other
times not. Overall, the idea of progress suggests that the “Indian” in the children will
“disappear” as they learn white ways. At the Christmas Ball, Emma speaks to her friends
about missing her old life.
At school we try so hard to be good white people that we forget we are
also good Indians. We try hard to learn the white people’s ways, and that
is good. That is how it must be if we are to survive and prosper. When
kidnapped by warriors from another Indian nation, did not our ancestors
also learn the language and ways of their new home? This is why we have
come to Fort Shaw. Here we have learned to play basketball better than
white men and soon we are going to a World’s Fair to become the
11
champions of the world. This is a good thing. But we must not forget the
part of us that is Indian. We cannot forget this. . . . Our little sadness at the
Ball was the Indian in us calling out to be remembered and celebrated. It
won’t go away just because we pretend it is, but gone” (86).
We wonder, what is the "Indian inside?” An emotion? A culture? A value? An image? A
dance? A romantic memory and vanished past? Being “better than white men” can
hardly be seen as the goal of boarding schools, where the students provided free labor for
farm work and other low-skilled jobs required by white businesses and families local to
the schools. On another note, we wonder, why did huge audiences of non-Indian people
admire the girls and their achievements? Because they exceeded the general public’s
athletic expectations for Indians? Because they fulfilled America’s obsession for athletic
competitions, whether it was baseball or boxing or basketball? We wonder, why not the
truth? Why change the final score which was 17-6 and make it 24-2?
Finally, what does all of the misinformation, distortion and stereotype in this novel add
up to? It is literary malpractice. Consider more of the testimony from Lone Wolf of his
boarding school experience. Although the episode took place more than ten years
previous to the championship days, Lone Wolf’s experience certainly contradicts the
romance of flying blue swallows and smiling gods.
It was very cold that day when we were loaded into the wagons . . . I
remember looking back at Na-tah-ki and she was crying too. . . .
Next was the long hair, the pride of all the Indians. The boys, one by one,
would break down and cry when they saw their braids thrown on the floor.
All of the buckskin clothes had to go and we had to put on the clothes of
the White Man.
If we thought that the days were bad, the nights were much worse. This
was the time when real loneliness set in, for it was when we knew that we
were all alone. Many boys ran away from the school because the treatment
was so bad, but most of them were caught and brought back by the police.
We were told never to talk Indian, and if we were caught, we got a
strapping with a leather belt.
Native American Testimony. Peter Nabokov, editor. (1991, 220)
Like other popular fictions and ethnocentric histories, Feder told Minnie’s boarding
school story as an outsider to the cultures, to the histories, and to her personal experience.
He told the story as he imagined it, apart from the available truths of the ball players in
particular, and apart from the narratives of children like Lone Wolf. On January 23,
2006 the Great Falls Tribune featured an editorial by Ellen Goodman, columnist for the
Boston Globe. She says, “The morphing of truth and fiction promotes a world in which
facts are ‘subjective’ and reality ‘flexible.’ It feeds on indifference to honesty and a
belief that every truth is up for grabs.” This is the danger of fiction such as “Shoot,
Minnie, Shoot!”
In Sherman Alexie’s poem, “Introduction to Native American literature” the
speaker reminds us of our limitations with respect to others:
Because you have seen the color of my bare skin
12
does not mean you have memorized the shape of my rib cage.
Because you have seen the spine of the mountain
does not mean you made the climb. . . .
Because you sleep/does not mean you see into my dreams.
(Old Shirts and New Skins. Los Angeles: American Indian Studies Center-University of
California, 1993. pp. 3-4)
At the very least, the descendants who have recorded and freely shared their
families’ stories deserve an honest and respectful rendition that is historically accurate
and culturally authentic. It’s a matter of simple respect.

Clear Simple Truth: Classic Writing

2006-03-13T10:29:00.000-08:00

Clear and Simple as the Truth: Writing Classsic Prose
by Francis-Noel Thomas & Mark Turner

There is a website: classicprose.com. Princeton Paperbacks. ISBN 0-691-02917-2

When I was in seminary and struggling to understand what was required, not just at Meadville/Lombard (my little seminary) but also the U of Chicago Divinity School (the great ship on which M/L was a barnacle), I once asked a professor of poetics what rhetoric was. She had an excellent reputation but found me incredibly ignorant and was confounded by the problem of where to begin with me. “Rhetoric?” she said, incredulously, “Why it’s just self-evident! It’s how you talk.” I was unenlightened.

If only I’d had this book at the time. The key is that “writing proceeds from thinking” and it ought to match the thoughts in order, relationship and clarity -- but not SHOW the thinking. Forget style, which is a result. “A style is defined by its conceptual stand on truth, presentation, writer, reader, thought, language, and their relationships.” The authors also offer the equivalent of this sentence in French, which ought to convince anyone that they know what they’re saying. The classic style is not confined to one language.

The “Classic” style is simply (got that? SIMPLY!) a matter of conveying thought clearly between two equals. Transparency is the point: we don’t want people looking at the finger but rather at the matter to which it is pointing.

The rest of the book consists of examples of success and “failure” -- although some of the “failed writing” simply fails at being “classic,” not at being writing. It’s of a different style with a different purpose than simply conveying information between equals. (Maybe impressing people. Or obscuring the bald truth: some fascinating examples from Alan Greenspan about how to say something that means little or nothing!) And I finally see that “rhetoric” is something like “style” as used in this book. It’s a philosophical stance about what the language is trying to achieve, and it can be quite unconscious -- probably is, in many cases.

The first half of the book is basic dimensions of being “classic,” as opposed to (their categories) reflexive, practical, plain, contemplative, romantic, prophetic, oratorical. The second half of this slender book is examples of classic and nonclassic, often juxtaposed so that one can see the difference.

I was startled to see that Strunk & White, who I thought were as classic as possible, are in fact “practical,” though “drastically incomplete.” “The Elements of Style” is praised for: 1) “implicit, cheery and optimistic promise that... you will not embarrass yourself,” 2) “exhortatory cheerleading” and 3) “common sense.” In other words, it gives you a toehold which could lead to better things. But that’s all.

Buried in the examples are a few quotes from sanctified minority writers, like Black women. (There are no quotes from American Indians that I spotted.) Bravely but gently, Thomas and Turner show that they are almost unintelligible -- though very poetic -- because the concepts behind them are either too foreign to the reader -- or, possibly, too unresolved to the writer. Fine phrases, euphoniously assembled, leaving the impression that something has been said, are all too familiar when dealing with subjects like spirituality or courage in the face of oppression. Sometimes I think this is the chief contribution of the French/Algerian theories of Minority Virtue through Suffering -- many marvelous but rather indefinable concepts. A little like psychoanalytical ideas, with which they often associate.

I’m reminded of an evening I spent in Heart Butte trying to put Emerson’s “Self-Reliance” essay into plain English that the American lit class could understand. It came down to “use your own judgment,” without mentioning that a person would then have to suffer their own consequences or distinguishing judgment from just doing whatever you want. In my eyes -- and I am, after all, a fellow Unitarian minister with considerable sympathy for Emerson -- he just sounded like an adolescent. (The class loved my version.)

But I have a feeling that Transcendalists and those trying to transcend their circumstances are often writing in order to think things out -- to reduce or expand the inchoate to something intelligible. Thomas and Turner insist that this is NOT classic writing, in which the thinking is done beforehand until it is resolved and exact -- THEN the words and sentences are chosen in response to and as an accurate representation of those facts.

There is a time and place for word-wrestling, for fireworks and flourishes, for the ringing declaration of loyalty or the exquisite account of surfaces, but that’s a different “style,” “rhetoric.”

I think the main reason I had a lot of trouble with “rhetoric” is that my professors had never resolved their own rhetoric for themselves. They were not “classic” writers because they were incomplete thinkers -- with a few exceptions. But then, the task of the preacher is not always seen as clear and honest thinking. As Emerson discovered, that sort of preaching will get you thrown out of your pulpit.

HEARTBREAK BUTTE That Ain't English Part 2

2006-02-03T14:49:00.000-08:00

THE POLITICS OF ENGLISH
Language has many political and moral attachments, both in the larger aspect of a complete language system and in the smaller aspect of vernacular uses within one language. Some sub-pronunciations, local grammars, and unique vocabularies are labelled "low-class," to be extinguished. When students say "ain't," the effect is almost like swearing. "You shouldn't say ain't," scold the virtuous who KNOW. From then on the word has an aura, like forbidden sexual words or cursing. Playing with the words is playing with emotions -- getting the grownups mad, showing independence, making a statement about class and status. Kids know a lot about rhetoric -- they just don't have a name for it.

Phil Ward used to look forward to the day television reached the community, because he felt that it would be a way for the kids to hear and develop standard pronunciation. Bless his heart, he couldn't have predicted Rock n' Roll culture, shock-jocks and the ghetto-based lingo that dominates much of the media. Not too many Rez kids watchin' Hallmark Hall of Fame! (They all watched Larry McMurtry's Lonesome Dove with the result that I was never able to use the word "poke" in class again.) But just the same, I do think the kids now have better spoken and heard vocabularies. They just don't read as much as they used to. They carry videos instead of books. Movies are texts as surely as novels.

I grew up with a reading vocabulary that overreached my verbal vocabulary and ran into embarrassment when I had my own peculiar pronunciations. (I used to speak knowingly of "man-yer" as a fertilizing agent.) Today's kids are likely to have many words they speak but never see in print and therefore can't spell except phonetically. We are in a time when vocabulary is being created daily, both because of new technologies and scientific terms (i.e. "floppies," "plate tectonics"), and because of world culture-meshing or even the popularization of under-class vernaculars by the media. ("Don' be dissin' me, girl!")

Because of renewed waves of immigration from South America and Asia, speaking English has become a political hot-button again. "Speak English or get out," say the conservative patriots. Not speaking English is equivalent to being un-American -- resisting assimilation. It never occurs to most people that English is an imported language -- even a latecomer, since the earliest visitors from Europe were Spanish and Italian. (Columbus brought a rabbi along in case the natives spoke Hebrew, which he thought of as a sort of ur-language.) Blackfeet is a literally native language. But Blackfeet is also portrayed by some as a "foreign" language. A few still hang on to the idea that it is a pagan and therefore satanic language.

It seems to me impossible to teach English on the Blackfeet reservation without coming to terms with the teaching of Blackfeet language, because at one time English was the forcible replacement for Blackfeet and still has that political stigma. Speaking English was the criterion for assimilation. People still living were once whipped for not speaking English instead of Blackfeet. They can hardly be blamed for resenting English or even for trying to escape the whole issue of language. They are self-conscious about the near-dialect that many habitually use and afraid of being criticized for it.

The Doc constantly urged me to drive the kids "the way the Japanese push their kids." (They have the highest child-suicide rate of any country.) But he was dubious about any kind of stuff that might be unAmerican. Every morning the administration made sure the student body president read the Pledge of Allegiance over the intercom, even though he got the giggles so bad he could hardly finish. It was the forms that were insisted upon, even when the spirit was exactly opposite to what it ought to have been.

Every morning my more sophisticated students refused to stand up or put their hands over their hearts. I didn't insist. I did stand with my own hand over my own heart. When I gently inquired with one dignified and rather well assimilated girl, she said flatly, "They killed us and took our land. I won't pledge to them." I never would have suspected she felt that way. It was a little harder for me to stand and pledge, since I am “them.”

THE NEED TO BE UNDERSTOOD
Being truly understood in spite of blunders and limits is the great magnet that calls out talent. Every time I've ever asked one of my former students, or even one of the high-achieving older Blackfeet, just what it was that made them outstanding, they've said, "My teacher believed in me." Or maybe it was their grandpa or their mother, but someone believed they were an achiever. They could do it. Feminists sometimes speak of being "listened into understanding."

Suzanne Langer proposes that language arises from feeling rather than logic. It is the need to share that drives speech and writing into being. Her philosophy has great integrity and persuasiveness, but I also believe it intuitively. What kept the students from growing in the language arts was their own inner reluctance to feel, because it was so painful and risky. There was no safe environment in which to share. And yet their only chance of finding out how to survive was to plunge into words and feelings. The forces of secrecy that come from alcoholism, traumatic pasts, festering hatreds, and political competition were all in the way of good writing, which depends upon honest disclosure. This, I felt, was the real reason the community was hypocritical when it said it wanted the children to be "good in English." If they began to write truly out of their own experience, people could no longer pretend to be what they were not.

How do people think before they know any words? This question fascinates me. I find that when I think there is often talk in my brain, but sometimes it's more like drawing diagrams, or a camera panning, or like a dream in which I'm dancing. Sense memories are underneath the words; they are the raw material the words only symbolize. The smell of parents, the sounds of doors and cupboard catches, the taste of rubber or wood, long shadows, warm water, wind in the trees, dogs barking far away, car upholstery-- all the clues that float through dreams.

Solid connections with the actual world, strong sensations deeply and accurately felt, are sources of both sanity and good language. My acting training centered on sense memories, the language in which emotions are coded in our brains and transmitted through our poetry and stories. Alvina Krause, famous professor of acting at Northwestern University, taught us how to find the body and surroundings of a character. "Think what it is to be alive for this person! What is around you? How do your clothes feel on your body? What kind of chair are you sitting in? What music do you hear? What do you smell? What was the last thing you ate?" She insisted that we hold an imaginary rose in our hand and make it so real to ourselves that she could tell what color it was from looking at our faces! ( A little show biz hype!)

The textbooks I taught from in the early Sixties listed Wallace Stegner as one of the editors. (He was a small boy on the Montana/Canada border and in adulthood developed one of the nation's finest college writing programs at Stanford.) The sections on writing were very much anchored in the five senses plus kinesthesia and movement. Exercises were based on vivid description, ordered in space (back to front, left to right, top to bottom) in time (earlier, now, later), and in psychology ("the first thing I noticed was..."). They did not begin with actual writing, but with preparation for writing, the summoning up of material. It was a way of learning how to write out of abundance. To lack this step is to lack confidence that one can write or that writing is "about" anything.

Over and over I chose a topic and -- forbidding the kids to seize their pencils and embark on clichés -- made the students sit still, remembering some specific time and place until it seemed almost real. Then I made them write a list of ten sensations, each one in a complete sentence, two for each sense. At that point they were to compose a topic sentence, then choose the best three sensations, and pull together a paragraph from all the raw material they had summoned up. Recently I described this method to someone at a writing seminar who accused me of “hypnotizing” the kids. If focus is the goal, I guess it is a little like hypnotism.

In those days, the good kids tried to write "pretty" and "nice," in a sort of greeting card way. I penalized vagueness and icky sentiments by taking points off, but they clung to their blue skies and fresh air. Finally I had to resort to giving every paper with the words "pretty" or "nice" in it an automatic F. Even then, once in a while I would have to dramatically tear up a paper while gnashing my teeth and standing on my desk like Robin Williams to get the point across. I also kept a six-foot poster of vivid synonyms. I tried to pass on what my high school writing teachers had required: "All right, Mary. You say this is lavendar. Point to something in this room that is lavendar. You say a robin was singing. Imitate that robin for me to prove you know it." Precision. Accuracy. Location.

One of my all-time best paragraphs was from Kelly Grissom, son of the BIA superintendent. The assignment was memories of summer. Of course he meant to be shocking. He wrote about watermelon juice trickling down his shirtless belly, chicken manure squishing between his bare toes, and sand in the bottom of the bathtub. I loved it. A little kid in shorts on an Oklahoma farm.

In Heart Butte I went to a more abstract and newer process called "webbing" or "mapping." The idea is to draw a small circle on a big piece of paper, write the topic in the middle of the circle, and then let ideas occur to you by free association-- "brain-storming." As the ideas come, instead of trying to maintain a hierarchy, scribble them into balloons and attach them to the main idea with lines. If sub-ideas come along, put them in balloons and draw lines to the closest related ideas. When it is all done-- and sometimes I did this on the board with the whole class collaborating-- there is a lot of material ready to be used. Often the whole thing falls into order by itself. Usually one needs to do editing or even some research.

What this revealed was that some kids had few ordering skills. They couldn't think in categories or see relationships. Everything had about the same importance. Most stuff was so mysterious and amorphous to them that it simply was indescribable. As far as some of the kids were concerned, we were talking about an invisible world -- one their senses couldn't reach. Often there was no world they really cared to think about. I didn't know how to deal with this. It was existential despair. The remedy is religious, not educational.

In fact, at Heart Butte when I used sensory exercises, just lists of smells and sounds, they didn't work very well. For some kids the world was a blur they tried not to experience. Brain damage might have been involved -- real difficulties in sorting out sensory information about color, shape, size, and movement -- but it seemed more like attitude: they didn't want to feel anything. They didn't want to know anything. The world was a painful place and the idea was to either be so disengaged that it would all be a gray blur or to be so over-stimulated by speed, danger, drugs or sex that it would pass in a glittering flash. They had no interest in controlling themselves, because they felt so paralyzed by things they couldn't control. What they liked best was to be caught up in something intense but external, like a movie, so that the time passed with them hardly knowing it and without any risk on their part. Before these kids could be convinced to read or write-- indeed, even to talk to a teacher-- they had to be brought alive. They were zombies, on-lookers at their own lives.

Trying to teach such kids how to diagram a sentence or even to punctuate was pretty much an exercise in futility-- almost like taunting them. The underlying grammar in a sentence cannot be seen by people who can't grasp abstract relationships like predicate words or subordinate clauses. When I asked the class what a noun was, they all parroted, "a person, place or thing."

"It is NOT!" I exploded.

They were astounded. "But every teacher we've had has said so!"

"A noun is a NAME of a person, place or thing!" I bellowed in an explanatory manner.

"Same thing," they shrugged.

"It's NOT! A person, place or thing is real, a sensory object you can hold onto -- and maybe something you are pretending is a sensory object. A name is just a sound-sequence that stands for the person, place or thing. Or maybe it's a set of particular little squiggles on paper that stand for the sound-sequence that stands for the person, place or thing."

They sighed.

It took me a long time to convince them that NOUN=NAME. It was the concept "name" they couldn't get. They had a Pavlovian understanding, not an insightful one. And they didn't think it mattered, but it matters a lot when you do grammar and must reflect on what a word is standing for.

They couldn't get MODIFY either. "That's math," they said. Well, math is just another language. But if you can't understand "modify," then you can't identify adverbs and adjectives, or phrases and clauses used like them, so you can't diagram and you don't get the idea behind where the words can go when the sentence is reassembled. (Adjectives have to go right ahead of the nouns they modify -- adverbs can move around.) All of this is as logical as chess, if only one has the first insight into the underlying assumptions.

RESOURCES
All teachers recycle their own student days. I have always used the teaching methods of Agnes Carter, my red-headed, bow-legged 8th grade English teacher. She was Irish, a pillar of St. Andrews Catholic Church whose tolling bell I could hear from my backyard, and she took no nonsense off anyone. Her solution to teaching grammar was simply to make us learn sets of the small recurring words by heart in batches. We learned all the linking verbs, then all the prepositions. (To this day, in our fifties, my brothers and I can recite them aloud.) It was a wonderful help and if I succeeded in teaching the kids to spot prepositions, then they could usually find the whole prepositional phrase. Once the prepositional phrases are excluded from a sentence, the bare bones left would more easily yield subject and verb, especially if you know "have-has-had-do-does-did-shall-will-must-might-should-would-could-be-am-is-are-was-were-been" are always verbs.

For the Heart Butte kids I tried to teach it with rhythm, like rap. "Have, has, had! Do, does, did!" I even made them stamp their feet and clap their hands. Stamp, stamp, CLAP! Stamp, stamp, DID! It worked just fine. Except that it was getting towards spring and there were never again more than a third of the kids in any class, no class with the same combination of people from one day to the next. My bookkeeping about who-had-mastered-what broke down and was never completed.

Teachers & Writers Collaborative proved to be a rich source of materials. One of the best was a two-part set of books called Origins. It was about word roots in English (e.g. BHEL, to swell) which became whole families of vocabulary (billow, belly, balloon, bowl, bold, bulky, ball, boulder, bulge). The books include exercises and stories, which I used, but I was especially careful to use the "Total Physical Response" method that the Blackfeet teachers found effective. That is, we said, "BILLOW, BELLY, BALLOON...." while pretending to swell up and roll around. It was a great release for the class clowns. Besides having another way to get at word meaning beyond the Latin and Greek clues, I hoped they would see that languages are almost physical -- that they come out of life itself. I wanted them to see Lear some day and recognize "Blow, wind, and crack your cheeks!" I wanted them to look at a bloated horse or a hay bale and think: "swell up: BHEL!"

For the very first spelling lesson, because our books hadn't come yet, I used some simple naturalist lists that Glacier National Park had made for tourist kids. No Heart Butte kid could spell "ptarmigan" or even knew what one looked like. Same for "marmot". After some discussion a few kids realized they had seen ptarmigan, or at least grouse, walking around right in the school yard. They had been calling the marmots "ground hogs" -- just didn't know proper names. I was determined that the kids should know what they saw around them, be able to name them and to spell the names.

For the remainder of the year I tried to draw the spelling words from their lives, so the list was likely to include things like the parts of saddles and horses-- "pommel" and "haunch." The project was complicated because of local pronunciations. Among these kids the cowboy leapt into his "sattle." "B," "d," and "t" slipped back and forth in unexpected ways. If one spelled as they pronounced, it became clear that here in Heart Butte words had drifted in common usage. I said to a dog, "sic 'im," but they said, "sig 'im." I said "pot-bellied" and they said "pop-bellied." Sometimes I liked their version better. How can anyone teach phonetic spelling to kids who don't use the same consonants as the rest of the country?

Some kids were dyslexic When reading and writing they reversed individual letters left to right (b for d) or even top to bottom (p for b). But I didn't know what to do about it and could find no helpful references. Not until the end of the two years I taught did I uncover a priceless book, Language Arts: Detecting and Correcting Special Needs. Every time I got close to a college, I raided their bookstore, but invaluble as the resources were, it was hard to digest them alone. [There were no online bookstores then.] I longed to talk to someone about them, but there were few opportunities to meet with other local "English" teachers. [There were no list servs or chat rooms yet.] Those I did talk to were just as stumped as I was. High school teachers are not taught how to deal with such problems because it is taken for granted that they will be addressed at the elementary level.

In Blackfeet nouns are not singular or plural, signaled by suffixes, which is why no one can ever explain definitively whether to say "Blackfeet" or "Blackfoot." Their pronouns don't carry gender clues either, so old-time Blackfeet speakers would confuse male and female references in English. Stories with gender references mistaken in a funny way are still told by white people, many of them with uncertain English skills of their own-- which is why they like to tell the stories. It's always nice to feel you're smarter than someone else.

In Blackfeet a vowel is drawn out to make a different, new vowel, and the sounds are shaded slightly. People speak of Blackfeet speakers as drawling. Blackfeet also includes consonants that were long ago dropped out of English in its passage from Anglo-Saxon: back-of-the-mouth fricatives and plosives, glottal stops like Scots talking. I called it guttural once and made a former student very angry, because he thought it had something to do with the gutter. One almost needs an x-ray in motion to see what is happening in order to learn to do it. And until one learns to make the sound, it is hard to hear. Of course, the English alphabet has no symbols for some of those sounds. There are specialized alphabets with proper symbols, but I don't know them.

Now and then I heard a French locution -- a word order not used in English or an unusual inflection -- not surprising considering that French Canadians and Metiz had been in the area for a hundred years. One of the little localisms often mocked even while it was consistently used was “init.” I wondered if it weren’t a conflation of the French-style phrase, “Is it not?” That would be logical, init?

I ached to know more, to find better resources for describing and guiding. I used what conventional spellers I could find, but continued to take spelling words from their own papers. Using Sylvia Ashton-Warner's ideas in her book about teaching the Maori, I gave them pieces of paper with "their" words on them. I kept a file of the words each kid consistently mis-spelled and based quizzes on the ones no one got right. They were always willing to write words twenty times or even fifty times, and sometimes that helped.

Occasionally I thought the real problem was the kids not hearing words accurately, and requested hearing tests. Many had recurring ear infections or had received blows to the side of the head, as well as wearing too-loud headphones for their beloved rock music. Icy winds in winter and blowing dust in summer didn't help. No one was surprised to find many hearing deficits. Speech therapists came from the Browning school system to work with the kids. They were the gentlest and most inspired of teachers, doing as much counselling as pronouncing. They sat in quiet relationship, listening, demonstrating, playing little win-win games they had invented. They were kind of a model for my ideal: quiet collaborative learning. I never met their standard.

CARD GAMES
Still hanging on to the idea that these kids were "double-breeds," I ordered a set of books on Greek mythology to complement the material in their literature books. They would sometimes choose the mythology books for free reading. To teach them the gods, I made a little set of cards with each god sketched and named. Then I developed a technique of fortune telling using the cards. "Oh, yes. I see! Here is Venus, which means you will soon fall in love, and this is Mars, which means you will have a fight with someone." Since I knew about these kids private lives, I could easily do a little counselling in the course of predicting. "Oh, my. Jupiter and he's upside down -- that means you're quarrelling with your father. But here's Athena, the goddess of wisdom, so what would be the wise way to handle this?" A few girls came every morning to get a reading, until their parents began to mutter about the work of the devil in cards.

The idea of the cards came from being suddenly pressed into service to babysit the Blackfeet language class when their teacher, Molly Bullshoe, was ill. Desperate for something that would hold the attention of the junior high boys, I grabbed my set of Medicine Cards -- animals with Jungian/New Age/Native American interpretations. Each kid drew a card from the pack to establish his true nature -- "Ah, you are a badger! That means you are fun-loving and work hard!" I improvised, having once had a pet badger. We went on from there. The Jungian philosophy that accompanies the cards is so mysterious and magical sounding that they loved it. "What does that mean?" they demanded and really tried to figure it out. I used the approach I learned from Thomas Moore, when he did a class on dream interpretation in Bozeman, long before his books on spirituality became best-sellers: "What does it mean to you ? Use your imagination. Everything means something. Turn it around. Take a chance. Look at the small details. Let the objects speak."

MONTANA LITERATI
Montana Writers and the Choteau School District organized a literary conference in Choteau in honor of A.B. Guthrie, Jr. who was still alive but very frail. It was the kind of event that initiated literati would fly thousands of miles to attend. Significant Western writers by the handful would be speakers. One day was set aside specifically for high school students. I asked the administration for transportation and the day off to take four of my best writers.

I was especially anxious to get them there because James Welch, Jr. would be one of the speakers and I wanted to plant firmly in the kids' heads that they could follow his path. Also Ripley Schemm would be there. A fine poet herself, the widow of Richard Hugo had spent a year as "poet in residence" in Heart Butte where she was much beloved and got good work from the younger kids. I had read out loud The Blind Corral so we also looked forward to Ralph Beer in his big black mustache.

The kids were scared before we even started out in the Jimmy with the truant officer driving. The bold author of an impassioned story about Vlad the Impaler, the Ur-Vampire, was late waking up as usual, and we had to go pound on his door. All the way down Highway 89 the student writers had panic attacks about what the Choteau kids might do to them.

When we arrived, I buzzed around saying hello and asking questions. I found Welch and towed him over to my foursome so I could brag about each of them. He was gracious and truly interested, as he always is, but the kids were mortified. As soon as he left they scolded me, sotto voce. "You're calling attention to us! Everyone is staring!" They tried to stand with their backs together like buffalo facing wolves.

At lunch time, after incredulously inspecting the Tater Tot casserole on their plastic trays, they rose in a body, scornfully dumped the offending food into the garbage, and stalked off to find a fast food vendor. The truant officer went with them. I suspect they also picked up some cigarettes. Partly because I was provoked with them, I ended up picking an argument with a Choteau teacher who claimed she understood all about Blackfeet kids.

The day was divided into sessions, of which we were to choose one from several alternatives. The kids, moving as an eight-legged animal, mostly stuck close to me. The last reading in the afternoon was by Mike Riley, a colorful young man who had once taught in Augusta but -- for reasons not unlike those that put me out of Heart Butte -- was now on the faculty in Cody, Wyoming, where he was rewriting a novel about Indian basketball players. A reformed druggie with a fast-and-fancy take on language, a wild sense of plot, and an obvious love for kids, he read a scene wherein one dark night a wooden Indian from a cigar store is stolen and incinerated at a small town intersection. All four Blackfeet fell madly in love with him. They still ask me when his book will be published. That fall I called him in Cody and offered to swap teaching jobs for a week, but since he had a wife and kids, it was too complicated

The next summer Nature Conservancy near Choteau sponsored a poetry workshop taught by Ripley Schemm and Mike Riley. Schemm had grown up there. This time Mike Riley gave me a stiff lecture about not living up to my potential. The teacher I had quarrelled with in Choteau was at the poetry workshop and we made peace. After I was thrown out of Heart Butte and living for a summer in a tiny yellow house behind a photography shop in Browning, Riley brought me a gleaming fat trout he had caught, which I grilled to my cat's enormous appreciation. (She got the skin and head.)

So many writers were working in the area, from Rick Bass in Yaak to Linda Sexson in Bozeman, that I thought we had a unique opportunity and a real obligation to involve Native Peoples in their lives and the writers in our Heart Butte lives. If Victor Frankel believed in a "talking cure" as a means of trauma survival, then I believed in a writing cure. If there ever was a dream for Heart Butte, I saw it as the creation of a voice.

First, there would be student writing that was honest and powerful. Then, networking through computer modem hookups on Internet, they would be able to search the libraries of the world and to stock their own collection of books. Someday -- a publishing house. They could send their work direct to Japan and Germany, where people hunger for stories about Plains Indians.

I envisioned books written by The People, printed by The People both in cheap editions and in fine quality letterpress editions, both for the use of the Nitzitahpi (hopefully using myths and poetry written by themselves) and to preserve historical works -- all bound by the Nitzitahpi in leather tanned right there. Imagine a specially hand-set version of Napi stories -- restored to their original vigor and uncensored by white men (In some stories Napi has a penis so long it has to be rolled up like a firehose!) -- with marginal decorations and illustrations, bound in smoked buckskin with a grouse feather for a bookmark. (No eagle feathers -- too sacred.) Maybe the shaft of the feather could be beaded or quilled.

On this deeply aesthetic level one might begin to create a kind of jobs that people would enjoy and stick with. I sketched out a plan for how a building could provide a place to work, with lockers for individuals to keep their projects safely, and someone to sell materials as they were needed or buy them as they were brought in. Marketing could be done on the Internet, through bookstores, or through the conventional tourist trade. They could tap the world market that exists for old-style artifacts done with care and inspiration. (Now some say the best ones are made by German aficionados.) A Native American former drug addict told me the most successful therapy for fighting drug addiction he knew of was beading-- a kind of replacement repetition-compulsion obsession addiction.

People said it wouldn't work.

GRIZZLIES, LOVERS, TRICKSTERS AND HEROES
In the second year I decided that I would organize each grade level's work around a specific theme. This was partly to keep my own head straight about who was doing what, and partly to relieve the boredom of students repeating the same class. The counselor assigned them to whatever English fit the rest of their schedules. Some of them were making up three years of failed English classes.

The freshmen were assigned grizzly bears. I bought as many picture books as I could afford -- with my own money so I wouldn’t have to argue with the administration. The kids pretended they were bears, they told real life bear stories, they told bear tall-tales, they read photocopied newspaper stories, and I read out loud Doug Peacock's Grizzly Years and Ernest Thompson Seton's Biography of a Grizzly. We saved Far Side grizzly jokes. For several years I had attended the annual grizzly/wolf technicians' conference that formed around Chuck Jonkel, a professor in Missoula and a much-loved and powerful visionary. (It's not easy to attend these conferences since they go out of their way to pick an inaccessible campground and don't let the public know where it is.)

Jonkel, a strong believer in wildlife videos and student video work, loaned me lots of videos about bears. Once, for some reason, he included one about meerkats which knocked us all out. None of us had known anything about meerkats before. They are a sort of cross between a weasel and a gopher that live in colonies in the African desert. Some kids were a lot more interested in meerkats than grizzlies. The strange is always attractive.

We watched the Scandinavian movie, The Bear (The kids loved it, especially when the cub got high.), and an awful grade B movie starring Clint Walker about a demon grizzly that turned out to be very close in plot to one of the stories in The Old North Trail. An early warrior is heroically brave but is killed. He becomes a grizzly and guards the old Cut Bank Pass trail, but then he is killed again and becomes a tree that still stands there, looking vaguely bear-like. People on the Rez can point out the very tree. (Bob Scriver says that over the years there have been three or four of them.)

I described the Bear Knife Bundle, one of the most impressive objects in the Scriver Artifact Collection that went to Edmonton. I read part of the Craighead's book out loud and we watched a pretty inept film of Faulkner's story, The Bear, which was only a black bear anyway. I got so into grizzlies myself that I rose up at 4 AM and went out to watch a road-killed bull from the safety of my pickup, in hopes a bear would show up. None did. It was cold and rainy, so there wasn't much smell to get the message to the bears. Sitting out there in steely darkness, gripping my thermos of coffee, I felt at last I was becoming a nature writer.

Towards spring the kids were able to sit down and write a paragraph about why bears are of scientific interest. "Bears are studied by scientists for three reasons. Bear ovum do not implant in the womb until the bear hibernates. Bears get fat but do not have a problem with cholesterol. Bears can sleep all winter without urinating. The things we learn from bears can help people." It wasn't much, but it was clear and orderly. It was not stupid.

For some of them it worked pretty well. But one kid heaved a sigh and said, "You sure do have a thing about bears, Mrs. Scriver. I wish I knew where it comes from." They reported all their own bear-sightings, which were rather numerous, but took a bored attitude about bears. They were just common. All I cared really was that they stop thinking that writing a report was the same as copying something out of the encyclopedia. I saw them in the library, copying and copying-- mostly inaccurately-- for their other classes.

By now I had discovered the wonderful Boynton/Heinemann books about how to teach writing in the classroom and was using the little "paragraph creature" to remind them how to organize: a head for the introduction, three points on its back with underneath lots of feet (details to make it "walk") and then a conclusion for a tail. I kept a drawing of the creature on the bulletin board and insisted that they look it over and think about it before writing.

LOVERS
All over Montana high school teachers were teaching Shakespeare by using West Side Story and the Zefferelli Romeo and Juliet. For the sophomores I followed suit. The theme was to be thwarted lovers. When West Side Story first came on the screen, the class was electrified and incredulous. All heads swung around to me. "What are those people doing?" they demanded. "Are those gang guys dancing and singing?" They had never see a true musical before --just MTV.

I added Dirty Dancing. We made a list scene-by-scene of how the plot went and then began to write a new story called Dirty Horseback Riding about a Blackfeet boy who is a guide for dudes in Glacier Park and falls in love with a tourist girl from Minneapolis. (Other things intruded and we never finished it, but it was a pretty good tale. I still have the notes.) "See, just pick out two people who are in love but from two different worlds and then play those two forces against each other." It was a chance to talk about cultural differences and the consequences of prejudice, as well as how plot unfolds from conflict. I rented Elvira Madigan. The girls were entranced -- the boys could care less.

They wrote about Indian/white romances and Blackfeet/Crow romances. I pulled out of The Old North Trail and other books some of the old legends about women who fall in love with a bear or a star or a dog. One luckless maiden fell in love with a turd, which was melted by spring rains, much to her despair! Again, in the Scriver Artifact Collection is a Beaver Bundle, which was said to be created when a Blackfeet woman fell in love with a Beaver. McClintock describes the story and the Bundle in detail and shows photographs. Bob had done a sculpture of the Beaver Bundle being opened, as well as a sculpture of the woman and the beaver embracing, echoing in their curved form the beaver's lodge. I explained and demonstrated the Beaver Women dancing with sticks in their mouths. I suppose some would consider that sacrilegious.

Towards spring, the class -- now down to three or four students -- insisted they wanted to watch Pretty Woman, in spite of having seen it half a dozen times at home. I consented, but only if they would let me talk during the show. I did a running commentary to get them to see how the costumes, the lighting, the scene cuts, and the underlying assumptions were coaxing them to believe that something as hard, demeaning and destructive as prostitution could be the path to a happy life. "Is this real or is this Cinderella?" They knew women who had been prostitutes, but none of them knew men who paid for sex -- in their experience, men just took it. To them, someone who actually paid must be a real gentleman. "But a man who has to pay for sex? Do you think he is likely to be so handsome, so considerate?" They looked at me and I saw the bubble had burst. "It's just a fantasy, isn't it?" they sighed. Why are the public schools not teaching students how to resist such brain-washing?

TRICKSTER
The juniors' theme was the Trickster. They knew their own Napi, who gets everyone--including himself--into so much trouble all the time. But I wanted to include Loki, Coyote, Road Runner, Hare, Mercury, Odysseus. The theme works remarkably well as a way into American literature. Huck Finn, Walt Whitman, Pecos Bill, Paul Bunyan. Perhaps these American tricksters are indebted to the underlying Native American culture.

COLLEGE PREP
Seniors were to consider heroes and anti-heroes: Beowolf, King Arthur, Macbeth, World War II soldiers. For the freshmen and sophomores, I had ordered the easier reading books, but for the juniors and seniors I ordered college prep. My rationale was that the five or ten students who made it that far deserved to know what everyone across the country was reading-- even though I knew I would mostly just explain parts or show movies.

I was surprised when Beowolf was a big hit with the seniors. My approach was to show Aliens and to explain that the story was very much parallel to Beowolf. (In fact, Star Trek recently did a take-off on Beowolf.) Defining video movies as literature was a little close to the conventional edge and The Doc hated them, associating them with the kind of teacher who gets tired at the end of the week and shows any old film that happens to be lying around. "I know you do it," he claimed. "I used to do it myself."

My approach was much more esoteric. I sketched out Joe Campbell's hero cycle over and over. I thought it was not unlike the pattern I had seen lived out by actual Blackfeet who had left the reservation, had careers, and then returned when they neared retirement, bringing new ideas and energy back with them. The strategy worked well and I continued it on into Idylls of the King. I figured Celts, Angles, Saxons were the Natives of their time and place -- horse-culture warriors. I was just a little bit ahead of Rob Roy and Braveheart.

One afternoon a single student showed up for senior English. The assignment was King Arthur. The young man was having a rough time in his life. His best friend, the friend's wife and their new baby had been burned to death in a trailer fire. My student and his girl had had one stillborn infant. Now they had had a second baby, but their relationship was rocky. The girl had gone back to stay with her parents who warned the young man to stay away. I had bought a video of Excaliber, knowing it had gotten good reviews and that the casting was English Shakespearean actors, but I hadn't previewed it yet. It was rated "R."

When I mentioned this to the young man, I was startled by his reaction. "What?" he cried. "I've been looking everywhere for that movie! I've got to see it!" For the next fifty minutes we watched it together without interruptions -- or rather he watched the movie and I split my attention between my student and the movie. The R rating was for nudity and violence. The film is very long. When the bell rang at the end of the class, we were just past Lancelot and Guinevere betraying Arthur. They were asleep on mossy boulders, startlingly nude and vulnerable. Arthur came as they slept to plant Excaliber between them while great chords of Wagner swelled on the soundtrack.

Fairly true to the Malory version of Morte d'Arthur that was in the textbook, the movie is also a great heaving, steaming entanglement of echoes from Star Wars, Ursula LeGuin, a bit of Monty Python thrown in here and there, and an occasional shadow of Ingmar Bergman. When I watch the video now I recognize Patrick Stewart, Helen Mirren and Liam Neeson. The plot follows on out through Fraser's The Golden Bough and the Fisher King motif beloved of T.S. Eliot -- the health of the king is the health of the land -- until the body of Arthur sails off into the setting sun. There was easily enough material to occupy a college seminar. Well -- a broad-minded one. Maybe one led by Thomas Moore.

The textbook printed version of the Arthur myth was not acessible to many among my students. This spoken, acted out version would at least make the plot clear. Sadly, from experience I discovered that the old black-and-white Orson Welles-type versions of Shakespeare were repellant to these kids. Too dark, too arty, not enough special effects. But now I realized -- unprepared -- that Excalibur had an almost religious meaning to this young man, in the sense that deep concepts were moved at the level we call the "heart" as compared to the "mind." It was pre-verbal, even psycho-therapeutic. To him the screen had a mythopoetic reality, an authority, like foretelling dreams or Jungian analysis. It was an understanding underneath the words, carried by images and music, a meaningful archetype -- and why not? Knights have been role models for generations.

If someone could reach students on that level, I thought, their lives could be interpreted , even transformed. But I was neither Merlin nor Yoda. At that moment I was not capable of saying, "Look, this is a story about pre-Christian or at least paleo-Christian time -- about the end of one civilization and the beginning of a new nation. It's about druids being replaced by priests and the Roman Catholic church -- not so different from the old Blackfeet shamans being replaced by Father Mallman, the Merlin of Heart Butte. And it's about tribes who war among one another uselessly, which takes the land into destruction and the people into poverty. The secret is that the king -- the chief -- and the land are one, which once meant that the king and the nation are one -- but maybe now it means that the actual land and a strong leader could redeem this Blackfeet landscape and nation. And maybe you are that leader. Or maybe it will take a whole Round Table of knights."

I believe that in an incoherent way, the young man was feeling -- not thinking -- these things. He longed to have power, to be a leader. But he lived in a violent time where the deadly magics of alcohol, methamphetamine and cocaine make illusions and cravings more vicious than Grendel's mother. How is he even to identify the villains? The rage is there, but it has no focus, no plan of action, and so it turns inward on the very People the heroes ought to be protecting.

Anyway, the next day class was cancelled or the student didn't come or the other two students in the class came back-- something happened to break the magic and we never did have a chance to really talk about what the movie meant. But I was convinced again that videos can be as effective as the original experience of sitting in a great stone hall listening to a wandering poet chant/sing the great heart-deep legends of Beowolf or Morte d'Arthur, which was how the whole thing got into the English textbook in the first place. [I wish I’d had Seamus Heaney’s translation and himself on a CD reading it.]

Temporary Blogger Standdown

2006-02-01T17:57:00.000-08:00

The blogger has had to regroup and take a few days of “stand-down” to retool. In simple terms I’ve just been diagnosed with Type II diabetes, which means a major change in habits and a huge jump in the attention that has to be paid to eating and exercising. I’m making big charts -- then revising them. I’m supposed to take daily blood pressures, twice-daily blood sugar readings, and a half-hour of walking or the equivalent. (What IS the equivalent to a half-hour of walking?) But it’s working. My blood sugar sank from 200 (very high) to 100 (tolerable) in 24 hours. It’s like cotton candy melting out of my brain. I feel better and I didn’t even realize I didn’t feel good.

Being my father’s daughter (my father believed the world could be saved by Popular Mechanics and self-help books), I had at hand some books to guide me. I’ll list them in case you need something similar. I got them from Hamilton remainders online, whose inventory changes all the time. Maybe there’s something new and better by now.

RESOURCES:
“THE GOOD NEWS EATING PLAN for Type II Diabetes” by Elaine Magee. John Wiley & Sons, 1998.
“THE GOOD CARB COOKBOOK: Secrets of Eating Low on the Glycemic Index” by Sandra Woodruff. Penguin Putnam, 2001.
“THE DIABETIC’S BRAND NAME FOOD EXCHANGE HANDBOOK” BY CLARA G. Schneider. Running Press, 1991.

Some time ago I read an article that claimed if a person who had gone slightly to seed in late middle-age or early old-age really got with the program, ten years could be restored to their health. All the years of not drinking/not smoking should count for something.

But there is nothing to be done about my posture from hunching over a keyboard all these years -- well, unless I got hip to podcasts!

ZANE GREY: His Life, His Adventures, His Women

2006-01-27T19:58:00.000-08:00

Though the sub-title of the new bio of Zane Grey is "His Life, His
Adventures, His Women," it ought to be entitled "His Finances and His Big Fish," since that's really what most of the book is about. There is not a lot about his writing. And the "women" deal is mostly a tease, though Thomas H. Pauly, the author, neither hides nor embellishes who they were and what they did. In fact, they did a great deal of the work necessary to keep Grey "afloat." On the other hand, since Grey kept an encrypted diary of his sex life, complete with photos, there’s no doubt that it was there -- Pauly just doesn’t dish any details.

To remind ourselves of what Zane Grey writing was like, let’s quote from page 65 of the biography where there is quoted the first paragraph from “Byme-by-Tarpon,” an early big fish book:

“Under the rosy dawn the river quivered like a restless opal. The air, sweet with the song of blackbird and meadow lark, was full of cheer; the sun, rising, shone in splendor on the water, and on the long line of graceful palms lining the opposite bank, and the tropical forest beyond, with its luxuriant foliage festooned by gray moss. Here was a day to warm the heart of any fisherman; here was the beautiful river.”

Gaspingly lyrical, but he did manage a bit more control in later writing. It was meant to be nearly beatific.

But here’s another quote:

“ ‘Lassiter!...Will you do anything for me?’

“In the moonlight she saw his dark, worn face change, and by that change seemed to feel him immovable as a wall of stone.

“Jane slipped her hands down to the swinging gun-sheaths, and when she had locked her fingers around the huge, cold handles of the guns, she trembled as with a chilling ripple over all her body.

“ ‘May I take your guns?’

“ ‘Why?” he asked, and for the first time to her his voice carried a harsh note, Jane felt hs hard strong hands close round her wrists. It was not wholly with intent that she leaned toward him, for the look of his eyes and the feel of his hands that made her weak.

“ ‘It’s no trifle -- no woman’s whim -- it’s deep -- as my heart. Let me take them?’

“ ‘Why?’

“ ‘I want to keep from from killing more men -- Mormons. You must let me save you from more wickedness -- more wanton bloodshed--.’”
(p. 109 in the biography)

The first time I read that (it’s from “Riders of the Purple Sage”) I nearly fainted. I was a sub-teen and didn’t quite understand about phallic symbols, mostly because I didn’t know anything about phalluses. But I got the point anyway. It’s a masterpiece of sublimation and displacement.

Zane Grey was a nice enough and fairly normal guy with a big Romance Complex that played out in both an idealistic and a superficial love of women and nature. One might say he was "experience based" rather than philosophical, though he seemed to be the latter since he cashed in on a good deal of literary "natural supernaturalism," to quote Abrams. He was lucky -- or unconsciously wise -- in choosing a wife who would be his "mother" and manager, his bedrock and home port. The women were not sultry slinkers in the night, but cheerful, hard-working, young women related to his wife (at least in the beginning) who shared Grey among them with few cat fights. Most people accepted the idea that they were surrogate daughters and sometimes his actual daughter, as an adult, came along. They loved the horseback riding, the hiking, the sea voyages, and the excitement of being an intimate of a famous man. They loved the sex -- he was evidently a skillful lover. (This was the Van de Velde era: pink light and sweet music.)

Only one threatened to blackmail him and that was an unrelated woman closer to the end of his career when the money began to run out. There were probably a half-dozen of these young women -- not as many as a dozen -- and most of them went on to happy marriages and even careers. No one seems to have gotten pregnant but his wife. He finally died at home in bed with that same wife. The model is more like a Mormon polygamous marriage than anything else, though anti-Mormonism came boiling out of him when he wrote. (There are psychological opinions about that.)

For many years Grey was a money-making machine. He was formulaic and predictable in his cowboy stories, but the publishers liked that and didn't want him to stray far away from what worked. They set themselves up as the judges of what would sell and in the process took out all the easy sex that Grey put in as well as some of the innovations. Critics grumbled, but the magazines and publishers went on buying even when the public slowed a bit.

Besides writing about cowboys in the southwest, he had a second series of writing about the huge fish that he pursued, building and buying and converting boats right up to schooners, and supporting a peripheral staff of dozens as captain, crew, cook, refitter, etc. This is Pauly's real interest. It's also where Grey's ego was centered and helped fight off the depressions that plagued him, esp. in the early years. Then the Big Depression, the worldwide financial one, really did him in. No matter. By then his health was failing. He'd offended all the people who kept the lists of "biggest fishes," so they found reasons to de-list him. He retreated to the Rogue River in Oregon.

His wife, ever practical, learned how to type and to drive, so that she no longer had to pay someone else to do those things for her. She became the president of a bank, a person of significant financial expertise.

So here we have another version of Woody Allen's chicken joke in which he informs the shrink that his brother thinks he's a chicken. "Bring him in and I'll see what I can do," offers the shrink. "Oh, no! We need the eggs." That is, all the delusions of the writer were encouraged because everyone needed the money from the writing.

The photos are a big part of this book and I loved them. Taken together, in some ways they tell better stories than the words do. I hope that we are all able to see Zane Grey more clearly than before, but without condemning him or belittling him.

Here’s another quote:

“Suffice it to add that Long Key is a place to thrill and to invite one’s soul. At night, if no breeze blows, there is not a quieter place on earth. The sun burns white all day and the stars burn white all night. The spell of the south is upon this white strip of coral. The mystery of the place is the same as that of the little hermit-crab, which trails across the coral-sand in a stolen shell, and holds to his lonely course, and loves his life so well. And that secret no man knows.”

Mary Scriver
Valier, Montana
January, 2006

NANOFICTION EXAMPLES

2006-01-23T20:27:00.000-08:00

I've been thinking up a daily nanofiction to post on prairiemary.blogspot.com, but thought it might be a good idea to repost them as a cluster over here. They might make good classroom examples, either for people to experiment with rewriting, or for folks to imitate, or maybe even as "starters" for longer pieces. (Pick one and expand it into a longer story.) I've tried to stay pretty much in Montana for context.

Sometimes these bits just jump out at you and other times, it's digging. I'm intrigued with how different the styles of different people are; whether they include dialogue, action, description; whether they use an ironic undercut or simply a shift of mood or point of view. Much to discuss.

1-06-06
The night of the district playoffs, there was a freezing rain. The Browning bus went off the highway and rolled twice, shattering windows and strewing both baggage and players. Five young men and the coach survived but wished they had not.

Over the years their grieving regret killed them one by one, even the coach.

1-07-06
The first time she met him was at Indian Days but he paid no attention to her. The second time they met she wore the jingle dress her grandmother helped her make, and he couldn’t ignore her. He was a hoop-dancer and won his event.

Years later, she helped their daughter make a jingle dress.

1-08-06
The old fisherman loved being out in his little house hunched over a hole when the ice was really thick. But he left his pickup parked on land and walked all the way out. “Why not drive,” people asked.

“I like to walk on the water -- like Jesus,” he said smiling. They shook their heads.

1-9-06
Two women, longtime friends, gossiped in a summer yard, shrieking with laughter, moaning with pain, and swearing with anger. They rocked in their wicker chairs, twitched at their flowered sundresses, and refreshed their lemonade.

The striped cat sat quietly overhead on the garage roof, paying as close attention as an opera lover. Finally it yawned.

1-10-06
The widowed farm wife’s old cat slept with her. One morning she woke to find he had died. The ground was frozen too hard to dig a grave under her favorite tree, so she wrapped the small body decently and sent it with the trash.

In spring that tree blew down and she was inconsolable.

1-11-06
Saturday night and the whole small town was at a dance. A dignified old rancher looked around for a likely woman and spotted a retired schoolteacher.

“I don’t dance”

“Sure you do.” He pulled her out on the floor.

In a bit he returned her. “You don’t dance and you’re too drunk if you did!”

1-12-06
The tough old rancher was told he had incurable macular
degeneration. He was seemingly not emotional, but told his wife that he was thinking about what to read for the last time before he went blind.

Later she came into the room and, seeing a book in his hands, asked what it was.

“’Goodbye, Moon.’”

1-13-06
Three queen-sized housewives procrastinated over coffee and cigarettes in the local cafe. The sleek town banker passed their table. “Gooood morning, little ladies!” he purred.

“Up yours, buddy,” muttered one rebel, blowing smoke. The others snickered.

At a nearby table the librarian, gracious and disciplined, overheard, but held her book higher to hide her smile.

1-14-06
The fact that her daughter was a military pilot in Iraq seemed unnatural.

When she went out to the compost, she saw in the swirly sky a bright line, unnaturally straight. It was like a line drawn by an angel’s finger.

She knew it was just a jet contrail, but was it also a sign?

1-15-06
The mall opened early so senior citizens could walk for exercise in bad weather. Women walked -- men reverted to “standing on the corner watching all the girls go by.”

One woman sat down for a breather. A man sat next to her.

“Bother someone else!” she snapped. “I’m no pickup.”

He wept. “I’m so lonely.”

1- 16-06
First try: too boring. Second try: too sexy. Someone might take it personally. Third try: snarky. Fourth try: giving too much away. Fifth try: nice irony. Sixth try: now we’re cookin’.

Nanofiction: old dance, more dangerous when cyberized. Anyone might read it. So who is the audience? Will they think this is the real me?

1 -17- 06

The about-to-retire teacher took no nonsense off anyone. She went to confront the coach about his team’s bad grades.

The coach called the boys out from the lockerroom and they emerged half-dressed with bare chests and Spandex pants, crotches and thighs padded. They reeked of sexuality and health.

Unable to speak, she turned and left.

1 - 18-06

“Gram? Gram, want some tea?”

Gram is watching iceskating competition on television. She remembers: her muscles sing, her spine flexes, her lungs breathe evenly, she flies on a silver edge. No one alive today has seen her skate. She gave away her trophies.

“Gram, come away from the television. You need to get more exercise.”

1-19 - 06
While she washed dishes she sang Broadway musical songs. “I Love You, Porgy!” and “Poor Jud Is Dead.” Her husband heard and came to pick up the dish towel. It wasn’t the singing -- it was the happiness that attracted him. Had from the very beginning. She looked at him, winked, and began “Old Man River.”

1-20 - 06
Working late, the young lab tech peered closely at his Petri dish and asked, “What’s this fruitfly doing in my agar-agar?”

His co-worker looked. “The backstroke!” They cracked up laughing.

The tech turned back to his work, caught a sleeve on the microscope and dropped the Petri dish. Smash. “There goes the hope of humanity!”

1-21 - 06
Cat was sleeping on top of the television set where it was warm. Natural history program came on. “Garumph!” from a frog. Cat opened one eye.

Lot of sonorous narration. Elephant trumpeted. Cat raised her head. Put it down.

Owl hooted. Cat went under the sofa. She recognized that one. Owl almost got her once.

1-22-06

“Curse you, Herman.” The rancher’s first-time heifer had been bred by a neighbor’s extra large bull that got over the fence. Now the calf could not be born without help -- and the heifer might not survive the ordeal. Rancher and cow strained and struggled.

“Damn you, Herman!” Herman was not the bull but the neighbor.

The Grammar Gene

2006-01-22T15:49:00.000-08:00

No sooner do I begin to understand that genes are merely manufacturing guides for proteins (including on-and-off instructions, responses to contingencies, and back-up systems) than I find out that the reason the genome was so easy to figure out is because it’s a snap compared to the “proteome” (all the possible proteins that genes can make and what those proteins do), than something even more amazing shows up.

Genes control grammar. Evolution is not about noses and thumbs, it’s about the constant tiny mutations of the protein molecule flow and how they are used in the body. How they really ARE the body, the way that atoms are substances. It looks as though human speech has nothing to do with the shape of the uvula or larynx and everything to do with a change in a protein. We can even suggest which one.

This is from “Nature Via Nurture” by Matt Ridley. It’s a crucially important book.

“ ‘Severe language impairment’ has long been known to run in families, to have little to do with general intelligence, and to affect not just the ability to speak, but the ability to generalize grammatical rules in written language and perhaps even to hear and interpret speech as well. When the heritability of this trait was first discovered, it was dubbed the “grammar gene,” much to the fury of those who saw such a description as deterministic. But it now turns out that there is indeed a gene on chromosome 7, responsible for this disorder in one large pedigree and in another, smaller one. The gene is necessary for the development of normal grammatical and speaking ability in human beings, including the motor control of the larynx. Known as forkhead box P2, or FOXP2, it is a gene whose job is to switch on other genes -- a transcription factor. When it is broken, the person never develops full language.”

... “in all the thousands of generations of mice, monkeys, orangutans, gorillas, and chimpanzees...which all had a common ancestor, there have been only two changes in the FOXP2 gene that alter its protein product -- one in the ancestors of mice and one in the ancestors of orangutans. But perhaps having the peculiar human form of the gene is a prerequisite of speech. In human beings, since the split with chimpanzees (merely yesterday) there have already been two other changes that alter the protein. And ingenious evidence from the paucity of silent mutations suggests that these changes happened very recently and were the subject of a ‘selective sweep.’ This is the technical term for elbowing all other versions of the gene aside in short order.”

So, paraphrasing, about 200,000 years ago a small change in the production of a vital molecule suddenly made humans more effective somehow, most likely by being able to speak.

“At least one of the two changes, which substitutes a serine molecule for an arginine at the 325th position (out of 715) in the construction of the protein, almost certainly alters the switching on and off of the gene.” Maybe it’s “on” longer and maybe it comes “on” in a different place. That would change whole structures and their capacities.

Ridley goes on about what parts of the brain are involved, what previous skills of apes helped lay out the plan, and so on. His contention is that sign language preceded spoken or written language. The “total physical response” method of learning language that the Piegan Institute uses successfully would endorse this and also the fact that the universal language of the prairie Indian tribes was sign language. Deaf mutes who suffer strokes in the places that normally destroy language lose their sign talk.

Then comes this: "William Stokoe, a pioneer of the study of sign language, suggested that hand gestures came to represent two distinct categories of word: things by their shape [nouns] and actions by their motions [verbs], thus inventing the distinction between noun and verb that runs so deeply through all the languages. To this day, nouns are found in the temporal lobe, verbs in the frontal lobe across the Sylvian fissure. It was their coming together that transformed a protolanguage of symbols and signs into a true grammatical language.”

Right away I begin to think of ways to get kids to use hand signals for nouns (a shape) and verbs (a gesture) when they analyze sentences. Discussion in this book goes on about expanding vocabulary, the ability to speak of things not present (abstract) plus the growing ability to transmit culture “memes” -- these are distinct survival values enabling people to speculate, plan and learn.

But for tens of thousands of years after this mutation, nothing much happened. Other small genetic changes or something else must have triggered the leap to creating actual cultures. The shrewdest guesses are on trade. As Ridley suggests, cultural exchange does for society what sex does for the gestation of new children -- mixes and creates, strengthens and morphs. I wouldn’t stress this in a junior high school class, but the word intercourse means language as well as sexual congress.

I’m thinking about the strength of the maritime cultures like Greece, England and Japan, the islands that sent out ships around the world, and about the convulsive mingling of cultures on the prairies where survival set the parameters. The Indians knew how to survive as things already were -- the immigrants had a lot of ideas that underwent a huge weeding out of unimportant memes. It’s painful. Japan slammed its borders shut for a while.

But I’m also thinking about the introduction of so many new physical substances into the world we all touch. They say that all of us now carry in our bodies one of the crucial substances in Teflon. We don’t know how that will change our genes or interact with our proteins. What if it switches OFF or substitutes some other molecule for “the serine molecule that replaced an arginine at the 325th position (out of 715) in the construction of the protein”? Will humans then die out because they are no longer able to speak? We don’t know. But there is no rule that all mutations represent progress or will preserve humans. Consider that Alzheimer’s and Mad Cow are prion diseases, which means they are not adding or subtracting molecules -- just making them fold up wrong. That’s the equivalent of bad grammar -- all there but in the wrong configuration.

What it suggests to me is that we’d best talk while we can -- in person, on paper, on tape and through podcasts, and holding hands. And we’d better make sure our kids can talk as well -- and talk WELL about ideas worthy of becoming memes.

"NARRATIVE DESIGN" BY Madison Smartt Bell

2006-01-07T13:45:00.000-08:00

The Unconscious Black Box

Operating on hints from Michael Blowhard, I’ve been finding a new set of books that deal with creativity -- expecially writing -- in a slightly different way that is deeply satisfying because it is an approach I’ve been feeling my way towards all along. The example today is Madison Smartt Bell’s “Narrative Design.” (W.W. Norton, 1997) I even love the cover, which might be Bell himself, sitting at a desk writing with a fountain pen fed by an IV apparatus. Unclear whether it is ink or blood or, given the philosophy explored, both mingled.

The technical part of writing came easily to me. My family was well-spoken, I read a lot, I had competent grammar teachers and all sorts of support. My paternal cousins and brothers are also technically skilled writers. Where I parted company with them was at college, not because it was college, but because I found there how to open my black box. The others keep theirs sealed.

I learned how in acting classes from Alvina Krause. She taught ‘the Method” based on sense memory, which has been much mocked. Bell treats this more vividly and accurately than I’ve ever seen done elsewhere, comparing it to hypnosis in service to therapy. When he went to a hypnotist for relief from personal tendencies and habits he didn’t like, the hypnotist took him through a guided meditation much like the ones we used to use in a religious context to prepare for meditation or prayer. “You are walking in a field...” Lots of sensory detail about flowers, the sound of wind in the grass, cool water and warm sun -- all meant to create a mood: a little invented context full of reassurance and what he says George Garrett calls “A sensuously affective texture.” (Gotta look that up next!)

The effect, says Bell, is to feel “a slow, gradual, willing process, like the division of a cell.” Then he was able to watch himself from a separate consciousness, unendangered because uninvolved, as a writer sees the mysteriously imagined world about which he is writing. He quotes Andrew Lytle, a novelist, as describing it as “you put yourself apart from yourself, and you enter the imaginary world.” Not being able to do that is simply writer’s block. The worst possible scenario is a little onlooker inside that won’t shut down and is hypercritical -- like Woody Allen.

Okay, now back up, because this is interesting. This technique is the way to get into your unconscious “black box.” Bell calls this “right brain” stuff. (Scientific literature shows that this is shorthand since there are many exceptions.) He finds it missing from the famous writing workshops that now flourish in academia around the country, often criticized for producing boring, flat, technically slick and “soul-less” writing. Bell had assumed -- until he went to teach at the Iowa Writers’ Workshop -- that this was due to some policy or hierachical oppression. In fact, it turned out to be provided by the students themselves, because the workshop focused on errors and criticism. They crushed each other into the same mold, not because they were evil but because the process as designed is totally left-brain, “craft-driven.” (Parallel to the development of the computer, but that’s a different blog.) One is sealed into defensiveness.

Yet he points out the danger from the very small percentage of teachers who wants “to pry or coax open the black box and come up with hands dripping with that mysterious ectoplasmic creativity stuff.” This is what scares my relatives: we’re all strung a little tight already. And in fact, the one second generation relative who “tripped” into his own black box to the point of nearly shattering, has shown us vividly that it’s possible to go too far. (And also that it’s possible to come back out, at terrific cost and effort.)

Bell agrees. He says the gentle version of the “black box” teacher might use “meditation, soporific music, or various mental and writing exercises.” The Progoff journal-writing exercises come to mind. One is always writing about one’s own life, working between therapy and art (not that it’s much of a distance). One does not always write alone, but sitting in a group with a guide present. People break down crying. People laugh. People get angry and sweat. The instruction is to keep writing, but there IS a safety net.

Then Bell speaks of the violent end of the Black Box Opener spectrum. “The strategy is to assume tremendous authority, elicit enormous trust, and then abuse both, deliberately and to the maximum.” We all know tales of how children under assault (esp. sexual abuse) divide into two people, one of whom is safe. (There’s a powerful soliloquy based on this in the Wim Wenders’ movie, “The End of All Violence.”) Says Bell, “Your more bloody-minded writing teacher, meanwhile, wants to get into this place to awaken his disciple to the glory of art. He is in one hell of a hurry and he is willing to use dynamite to open the black box." For the past decade there has been a man who taught “transgressive writing” in Portland, Oregon, urging people to explore the hidden, the forbidden, the suppressed, in writing. People were in awe.

But Bell says, sensibly, “To put it in metaphysical terms, while you may with good reason choose to offer up your soul to God, or to a lover, it probably is not a smart idea to hand it over to a creative writing instructor. The writing teacher probably didn’t want your soul all THAT much in the first place, is unlikely to be equal to the responsibility of caring for it, and will probably be incapable of returning it to you in a useable condition.”

Alvina Krause walked right along that edge. Aspiring to act was a religion: many of us would have sold our souls. She opened the deepest black box only in graduate level classes, hand-picked, and with the group there to support. Even so, some people -- partly because that’s the kind of people who hope to find a home in theatre -- were a little too intense, cracked, or over-motivated/under-defended to survive without damage. I can remember two who eventually required hospitalization. I don’t think anyone at NU is teaching this way now.

Bell feels that once a person becomes competent with words, the sub- or pre-conscious sensorium is compromised, less accessible, and probably never really available again. I disagree with this, but I’ll just leave it there. It’s not the same thing as one’s careful craftsmanship destroying one’s “real” intuitive and spontaneous life. (My cousin asked me about this recently because her son-in-law is sophisticated enough about movies to comment on “nice dolly,” “good segue” and other technical matters, which hinders the “willing suspension of disbelief” in others present. She said, “Aren’t you afraid that if you analyze writing, you can’t appreciate it?” But, no. Somehow, I walk in and out of the spell.)

So, Professor Bell, what’s to teach? If you’ve got the grade school grammar and the high school metaphors down, what craft is there? His explanation is a musical analogy, to play the infinite variables of detail along the majorly laid out “tune” or, he says, “chord progression.” “Writers improvise over narrative patterns.” The form tends to come from craft -- the improvisation comes from the black box. (The black box, of course, is filled and re-filled from one’s own experience and sensorium as one goes along.)

I just discovered a little fiction-haiku form called “nanofiction.” 55 words long, exactly. In the hands of the inventors, who seem to be from SE Asia, the structure is mostly emotional shift, like haiku. I see that the ones I’ve written so far fall into a call/response pattern: something happens, consequences ensue. The one I did today depended not on an internal shift in point-of-view but in a shift from one person to the other. I’m not sure this is what he means. (I’m going to try to write a nanofiction a day and post them on prairiemary.blogspot.com.)

The rest of the book is analysis of one story after another, I presume touching on both craftsmanship and subconscious intuition. I’ll leave reading Bell’s work to the very last, for fear of disliking it. But I might scan the cover and pin it up over my computer.

Prairie Mary

NANOFICTION

2006-01-06T12:19:00.000-08:00

When I was teaching English in the Sixties, one of my routine strategies was to assign a topic and a word limit -- often a very short one, like a few dozen words. I was trying to make the kids confront their choice of words, their ability to play with vocabulary or sentence structure, and how very much COULD be conveyed in a few words. Once in a while someone outwitted me, usually Mike McKay. When he was assigned “a picnic,” he wrote. “We arrived and put down our picnic basket. Then the ants arrived: one ant, two ants,....” etc. until he had enough words.

http://www.sepiamutiny.com features what it calls “nanofiction,” specifically a 55 word novel. The best are “published” on the website on Fridays. The site is for India-Indians and Asians. These examples of nanofiction are therefore in that context. The subject is the new year, which happens to be the year-anniversary of the Tsunami. I apologize abjectly for accidentally losing the author for this first one. It was clumsy cut-and-pasting.

As the days became hours, and the hours became seconds, he began wishing that time would just stop. The celebrations around him only served to emphasize the prolonged breaking of his heart.

All he knew was that a slate – more so, his soul - cannot simply be wiped clean by the turning of a day.

2 · chick pea

The seconds were ticking by…as she awaited the change…anticipating great surprises her way this new year… will it bring hope, travels, love, and laughter? The simple turn of the clock bringing in the joys of a new beginning was enough for her to smile and turn toward the crowd and smile in glee and happiness.

7 · Msichana

Her heart was beating loudly against her chest. She stole a glance and saw his hand, limp against the remote.

The pills had worked.

The clock chimed twelve just as she slipped outside. It was a new start to her life. Her feet were light and her heart was open.

She was alive again.

8 · badmash

On this stretch of beach one year ago, he lay on his face, praying that the waters would return and take him as well. They never came. My, God why have you forsaken me? He was left to go on without wife and children. How and why, he hoped this new year would show him.

Srini

The clock announced the approaching midnight hour. A pumpkin and mice stood in front replacing the stagecoach and horses. She started to run with one slipper on. Then the realization struck her that it was New Year’s day.

She turned around and went back in. Time to drink some champagne and kiss a wonderful prince.

These short “novels” also keep in mind the difference between a statement and a story plot.

This is from http://www.learner.org/exhibits/literature/read/plot1.html

If an author writes, "The king died and then the queen died," there is no plot for a story. But by writing, "The king died and then the queen died of grief," the writer has provided a plot line for a story.

A plot is a causal sequence of events, the "why" for the things that happen in the story. The plot draws the reader into the character's lives and helps the reader understand the choices that the characters make.

A plot's structure is the way in which the story elements are arranged.

Let’s try this in our own small-town Montana context.

The night of the district playoffs, there was a freezing rain. The Browning bus went off the highway and rolled twice, shattering windows and strewing both baggage and players. Five young men and the coach survived but wished they had not.

Over the years their grieving regret killed them one by one, even the coach.

Now a happy one:

The first time she met him was at Indian Days but he paid no attention to her. The second time they met she wore the jingle dress her grandmother helped her make, and he couldn’t ignore her. He was a hoop-dancer and won his event.

Years later, she helped their daughter make a jingle dress.

Counting Up/Counting Down

2005-12-02T11:02:00.000-08:00

A friend loaned me a book that is a long lament about how bad education is these days. (“Lying about the Wolf: Essays in Culture and Education” by David Solway. It’s Canadian: McGill-Queen’s University Press.) I like my friend and I like all the writers this Solway cites as his sources of information, so I was looking forward to reading this. Unfortunately, in vocabulary and concept it’s so rarefied and high-falutin’ that I can only understand it if I read very slowly. Even with a college dictionary beside me, I’m having to get up to consult the Unabridged too often for comfort. (Especially since as soon as I stand up, the cat settles into my reading chair.)

But I’m keeping on with it, partly because my friend is so disappointed when people don’t read this book, and partly because there are little nuggets here and there that are like diamonds -- not very big, but precious.

For instance, a discussion of the difference in implication and feeling between counting “up” -- 1, 2, 3, 4, etc. -- and counting down, which he describes as being a spring compressed until it gets to the explosive zero. The latter always has a end, a cut-off, a consequence. The former might or might not.

We rather associate the count “up” with putting kids to bed -- “I’ll count to five and you’d better be in your pajamas!” It has a comic overtone, the possibility of indulgence. “I’ll give you to 10 before I shoot you, unless you surrender,” said the sheriff in the movie I watched the other night. And since it was a comedy, there was a lot of fooling around in between the numbers. “One. Think of your poor mother and how she will miss you!” And “Two. What do you want on your tombstone?” Closer and closer to ten and we don’t know whether the guy given an ultimatum will cave in, try to run, try some strategy of his own, or whether something else will intervene. It’s most satisfactory when something totally unexpected but logical happens.

Countdowns are now associated in all our minds with NASA rocket launches. Those, in reality, are days long and really consist of a checklist, an engineer’s bullet list. The count down can be stopped in order to make repairs or seek reassurance. For the last numbers, esp. when it was still new, the whole nation was counting along with “Houston,” “three...two...one...zero. Fire rockets.” Then that explosive roar. As though one has depressed the plunger that sets off dynamite.

It’s possible to count “up” endlessly though the numbers are paced by expectations, which gives the opportunity for humor and surprise -- like clowns coming out of a Volkswagen at a circus. Or think of vote counts in a significant election. Often a category is stipulated to have an amount, so one is really trying to remember them all or to tell whether one is missing. And then there’s the counting of rank, where reading from the top gives you the best and the bottom tells you the worst score.

More on this later.

Narcissistic Razor Burn

2005-11-14T14:40:00.000-08:00

Though I’ve written a great deal -- learned a lot about it, acquired a voice, found my subject matter and so on -- lately I’ve moved into a new realm, that of being edited.

Any dummie (I hope) knows enough to get someone to read one’s work for spelling errors, failures of agreement or antecedent, tangled sentence structure and so on. And it’s always helpful to have someone to read for more than that -- coherence or relevance.

Once -- for about two weeks a decade ago -- I was a stringer for the Great Falls Tribune. It soon became clear that I was not allowed to write anything that was outside my editor’s experience or vocabulary. For instance, we went round and round about the word “concho.” He claimed no one would know what it meant and I would have to come up with a synonym. My position was that there IS no synonym for “concho.” As Rumsfeld might say, “It is what it is.” I accused him of being from back East -- horrified, he insisted he’d grown up in Montana. “Must’ve been eastern Montana,” I muttered.

As a former high school English teacher, my position has always been that new and unknown words are a good thing, an opportunity to use your dictionary. So long as the whole piece doesn’t become so interrupted that one loses interest in reading, I welcome unfamiliar words. But for newspapers, evidently, one must not exceed the vocabulary of the newspaper reader -- maybe because then they would read above the level at which newspaper readers are said to read?

An unpaid volunteer, the first editor of my bio of Bob Scriver was a newspaper editor. He made me put in everyone’s whole name and add their age at the time I was speaking of them. I found this very tiresome and over-formal, but then I became rather persuaded of the usefulness of this approach when I began to Google them -- though so many of the artists I discussed were historical rather than extant, I began to parenthetically include both their birth and death dates.

Another inadvertent reader of this manuscript, who turned out to dislike it, was a fund-raiser and arts administrator who was exquisitely sensitive to everyone’s proper title and the names of awards (especially his own), went through and corrected all I had mentioned -- a great favor to me, with my cowboy tendency to be over-casual.

When I write about Indians, I end up in all kinds of trouble. First of all, to say Indians are politically schizmatic (to say nothing of a few schizophrenic-type tendencies) is an understatement and if I said what pleased one, I was bound to displease another. (Unitarian Universalists are quite like this as well.) Far worse is the Scylla and Charybdis of the reputations of Indians among non-Indians: A) that they are uneducated, poverty-stricken and ingrates, or B) that they are noble, naturally wise victims.

When I was preaching -- “writing” for people whose faces I could see and whose pledges would support the church budget, including my salary -- I tried to just lay out the facts or the arguments relevant to the issue and let people draw their own conclusions. Some stories I hoped I were persuasive, some suggested strategies, and some vivid images. Since they were intelligent people, I assumed they would have good ideas.

Now I discover that writing for a newspaper with a “point of view” -- a newspaper with goals I would want to promote -- means that I must be more polarized, more prescriptive. Newspapers sell when the writers are vivid and impassioned, I guess. They don’t want Joe Friday supplying “just the facts,” even when the subject is a little obscure.

But this is self-serving. I should observe the rules or move on. Why should I care if an editor adds sentences or changes them in ways that twist or lose my meaning?

Increasingly, especially after some of the stories told at the Montana Festival of the Book, I get the idea that writers are filtered and forced into stereotypes by editors who are not from the same milieu and don’t understand the “givens” of the situations. It’s not that they think bronco is an unknown word, it’s that they think they know what a bronco is like and would do, when in fact they haven’t the least notion. Many of them know Montana is the Big Sky Country, but when finally they step out of an airplane into the long, long windy line of Montana horizon, they gasp and stagger.

One little missy editor told a big engineer who’s been hunting for many years that if he didn’t change what he wrote to what she prescribed as being more “macho,” she would tear up his contract. “We paid you for this manuscript and now we own it,” she told him.

The most general consequence I see is one I could never prove -- but I might start trying to find evidence in order to make a case. Because so many writers are Western and so many editors are Eastern, much writing about the West is distorted. On the one hand it goes off into arias and on the other hand it goes off into legislative lobbying. Plain talk about the ordinary people -- which used to be the stock in trade of many fine Montana writers -- is simply missing.

But maybe this is all narcissistic razor-burn -- the result of being shaved a little too close in the process of presenting a good appearance.

The Engineer's Bullet List

2005-11-07T19:52:00.000-08:00

Once I was on a committee that included an engineer and an architect. The engineer offered a bullet-list of things we would have to do. The architect offered a sketch of a sailboat, explaining which forces belonged to the sail (impelling us forward) and which to the keelboard (keeping us stable). If Weschler was writing the equivalent of architecture, let’s sharpen the point by looking at the writing of another writer I much admire: William Langewiesche, who sometimes writes like an engineer. Look at the first paragraph of his article in the November, 2005, Atlantic Monthly called “The Wrath of Khan. I’ve separated the sentences into a bullet list, though I don’t know how to make a bullet on a blog, so I’ll just number the sentences:

1. Rawalpindi is a city of two million residents on the northern plains of the Punjab, in Pakistan.

2. It is a teeming place, choked with smoke and overcrowded with people just getting by.

3. A large number of them live hand to mouth on the equivalent of a few hundred dollars a year.

4. Much of their drinking water comes from a lake in the peaceful countryside north of town.

5. The lake is surrounded by tree-lined pastures and patches of sparse forest.

6. The navy of Pakistan has a sailing club there, on a promontory with a cinder-block shack, a dock, and one small sloop in the water -- a Laser 16 with dirty sails, which sees little use.

7. Though fishermen and picnickers sometimes appear in the afternoons or evenings, the lakefront on both sides of the promontory is pristine and undeveloped.

8. The emptiness is by design: though the land around the lake is privately owned, zoning laws strictly forbid construction there, in order to protect Rawalpindi’s citizens from the contamination that would otherwise result.

9. This seems only right.

10. If Pakistan can do nothing else for its people, it can at least prevent the rich from draining their sewage into the water of the poor.

In ten sentences Langewiesche has walked us through some cliches to a moral conundrum. #1: okay, we know where we are on the map. #2,3,4: Just about what you’d expect in a big old Third World country. #5,6,7: Doesn’t sound so bad, a nice lake and a forest. How lucky! #8. Yes, yes! Just what ought to be done!

#9. Uh, oh. When sentences suddenly change length, that means something is coming. #10. Here it is: the most common sense of public health modern science being defied. Who IS it?

A. Q. Khan. We already have an attitude about the guy when we read the next paragraph and discover that he defiantly and proudly built a sewage-producing house right where everyone could see it and it was not immediately bulldozed by the authorities, as has been done to others. The rest of the article is about Khan’s contribution to the Pakistani program to build a nuclear bomb, which has succeeded, and how he has ended up under house arrest -- for the good of his country. And not even in that nice house on the lake.

Throughout the chronological and technical account of just how this happened, which is not always easy to understand, the reader keeps in mind the obvious wrong of privilege that hurts others and the obvious corruption that lets it exist in plain sight. Thus Langewiesche doesn’t have to bring that to bear on Pakistan’s right to be a nuclear power, which is a trickier argument.

I first started marking Langwiesche mentally when he wrote the amazing story of the “unbuilding” of the World Trade Tower pile of rubble. Others noted him then, too, because it was something we really wanted to know about but we needed a careful and moral account in a kind of engineer’s layered chronology and technology -- and we got it.

There are so many difficult subjects in the world today that I’m grateful for whatever will explicate them. I don’t know how much Langwiesche (or Weschler) are simply responding to their own personal and natural way of thinking and how much they are being “artful,” but I certainly am confirmed in the value of learning one’s own mind-style as well as acquiring whatever arts can be learned.

Keyboard or clipbboard, composer or engineer, it’s exciting.

Tonight on Cambridge Forum E.O. Wilson spoke and read, then David Abrams read. Taxonomy -- then poetry. Facts -- then senses. Both stirringly recounted. I love the encounter between the two.

CHEAP EPIPHANY

2005-11-06T16:35:00.000-08:00

I’m not quite through with Weschler yet. This paragraph is him quoting himself talking about Robert Irwin, the artist.

“If you spend any time with Irwin, you’re likely to notice that he has two quintessential gestures. He’ll be rolling along, expounding at length, and then, at a certain moment, he’ll bring his hand up, thumb and fingers bunched together, like a tulip, which he then proceeds to open out, in a blossoming -- his whole face opening, his eyebrows riding up on his broad forehead, a bemused grin spreading across his face. It’s an easy, breezy gesture of openness and release. You’ve got to keep your sense of humor, he may say; at a certain point, you’ve just got to let things go. The tulip opening. All I’m saying -- ppfff, the tulip opening -- is that the wonder is still there. Then, at other times, his entire being will seem to focus, to concentrate: his face will scrunch up, his eyes will narrow, he’ll seem to throw all his body weight behind his arm as it screws an imaginary anchor into an invisible massif before him -- a gesture gritty with determination. In fact, sometimes he’ll even grunt -- mmmff. I mean, either you’re going to do it or you’re not going to do it, and if you’re going to do it you’ve got to get in there and -- mmmff -- do it. You’ve got to take all that and somehow, man -- mmmff -- you’ve got to nail it. You really have to bite the bullet if you’re going to do philosophy; halfway doesn’t count for anything and there are no excuses. There are all sorts of excuses, and good ones, for not beating the shit out of yourself, but if you’re going to pursue certain lines of thought, take on certain tasks, well -- mmmff -- you’ve really got to make the commitment.”

There are two things I want to say. First of all, I agree with these sentiments. Some things are so difficult and require so much energy -- like writing -- that they have to take up all the space there is.

At the Piegan Institute they are used to hearing people come in and say, “Oh, I want to learn Blackfeet! I’ll do anything to learn to speak Blackfeet!” But they don’t. It’s a huge commitment if you are really learning a language so different. Learning to count to ten or say “dog” in Blackfeet is not even the beginning. The beginning is learning to think a whole new way (like philosophy) -- and it is a way not much left in the world. The ones who know it are thinning out. (Gene Ground has died this week.)

The other thing I want to remark is how physical the STRUCTURE of writing can be. When I was back in school in that class of four over-intense women at the U. of Chicago, I found that when it was my turn to critique what they wrote, I often couldn’t think of words. I would say, “Well, it goes along like this,” (my hand like an airplane); “then this other thing starts faintly...” (other hand behind and above); “and overtakes it and then the two things become one and they slowly sink.” And then I’d say, “I couldn’t quite understand what happened in the ‘overtake’ part.” The writer usually knew what I meant.

Since learning that little textbook ski-jump diagram of introduction-rising action-climax-turning point-denouement that they teach as the structure of literature, I’ve thought of plot as schematic, topographical -- but not clearly enough to use that knowledge for my own stories, which just sort of happen. Then if I look back, I can see the schema, the pattern. (Never anything so grand as a Wechsler concerto!)

Brian Kahn is a lawyer who has an interview program on Yellowstone Radio. He presses people hard (mmmff) and makes them define their words. He’ll say, “I’m assuming that’s a ‘term of art’ -- would you explain it please?” There are “terms of art” in any discipline. If they’re standardized, you might call them “jargon,” terms used among people in a special discipline.

But sometimes there are no words, or you don’t know the proper agreed-on words, and so you make up words -- or a gesture, like Irwin, who also uses sound effects. ppfff: let the flower bloom and blow, or mmmff: let the screw go hard and deep. The art is knowing which to use when and to have strategies in between, because you don’t want to be the hammer to which everything looks a nail or stand there like a flower when the hammer is coming at you.

I’ve never heard anyone else speak of the kinesthesia of writing, but if counsellors and psychologists can ask people to make “statues” of their families or dance the dynamics within them, it’s not much of a leap to do the same thing for a story, which is probably about your own family on some level anyway.

Now I’m going to quote Rick Moody, who was the next locutor on transom.org.:

“What's happening in literary fiction, the way I see it, is the hegemony of the formulaic.

“I'm not going to name names -- it doesn't do any good -- but even a casual familiarity with the fiction in The New Yorker over the course of a few months, or a glance at the work of some of the writers who have come out of the eminent Iowa Writer's Workshop in the last ten years will indicate the presence of a rather profound homogenizing force in fiction. While the writers in question know very well how to construct a perfectly calibrated story, the fact that their work often sounds the same would lead one naturally to wonder if there isn't, by reason of homogeny, something missing from the literature of the times.

“And what's missing? Without getting too technical ... the problem arguably lies with an overreliance on the trope of the epiphany. The word "epiphany," as you probably know, comes from the Greek, epiphanios, for "manifest." "Epiphany" names a feast day in the Western Church, the day on which the Magi were supposed to have appeared, the day, that is, when Christ first made himself apparent to humankind. That's the legend. And so epiphany is about revelation, understanding. The light of recognition.

“So far, so good.

“James Joyce was likely the first writer to turn this trope of the epiphany into a kind of a reliable literary device. There were epiphanies in fiction and poetry before, as there were epiphanies in Western culture generally. There was Saul of Tarsus become Paul the Apostle on the road to Damascus. Or: Dante first encountering Beatrice in the afterlife, somewhere near the end of the Purgatorio. But for Joyce it was the flash of insight into self and civilization that was the strategy. (Think about Gabriel Conroy's famous speech about snow being "general in Ireland" at the end of "The Dead.") And while everyone else in Western literature didn't immediately set out to imitate Joyce (who himself went on to think quite differently about narrative and consciousness in Ulysses and Finnegans Wake) you can see how thoroughly the epiphanic moment begins to take hold: Nick Carraway realizing that Gatsby never actually reads his books. Franny Glass keeling over at the lunch table with her collegiate boyfriend. By the end of the twentieth century, it's possible to find the epiphanic structure almost anywhere you look for it, at least in contemporary American fiction.

“Herein lies the problem. The epiphany, as literary gesture, has become predictable. You can even hear when the epiphany comes to pass at readings by literary writers. A sort of moo, a softly murmured lowing of assent, sweeps through the audience. The moo, you see, indicates that esteem for our fellow humans has been approved.

“Humanist approval is well and good, but is it a genuine response, one freely entered into, if it's utterly predictable? If literary fiction too has come to refer to one thing, a kind of a story that delivers a predictable humanist epiphany in a likeable, uncontroversial character, at a predictable point in the story, then, philosophically speaking, it is no different from genre fiction. In fact, at least in terms of its strategy and its trajectory, it's not significantly different from pornography, which of course means to do one thing economically and without fail. The themes are different, but the structure (rising action, epiphany, denouement) is the same.”

If that isn’t mmmff, I don’t know what is. I’m thinking about it. How does all this stuff fit together? Does it have anything to do with preaching, esp. liberal preaching? (I think it does.) I’m beginning to write about “religious” stuff, so I need to figure this out. I don’t want “cheap epiphany.”

I do know that it’s important to remember the tulip.

Dissecting Weschler

2005-11-03T10:33:00.000-08:00

(It might be a good idea to read yesterday’s post before you read this one. I would also be helpful to have the November, 2005 issue of Harpers at hand.)

Okay, nothing like specifics. I’m going to dissect a couple of Weschler sentences, the first paragraph of his Harper’s article called “Valkyries over Iraq,” about the Wagnerian attack in “Apocalypse Now” -- meant to be anti-war and now used to glorify war.

First the sentences:
“Early in 2003, a little more than ten years after the conclusion of the First Gulf War -- which is to say the short, fast, clean, clear, and ever so painlessly triumphalist one -- and on the very brink of what was rapidly seeming the inevitable launch of its far more complicated sequel, Anthony Swofford, a Marine sniper veteran of that first conflict, published a powerfully bleak memoir of his experiences there in the Kuwaiti amphitheater back in the early nineties, a bitterly cautionary screed, utterly pithed of illusion by easy consolation.”

This is the first half of the paragraph. The second half is the second sentence, so these are long, complicated sentences with lots of internal notations, reminders, descriptions, and prompts. Like music, as Weschler says. Architectonic -- a structure driven through time. I would recommend that if you’re really serious about this, you download this blog and mark the parts with color-coded highlighters.

The heart of the sentence: subject-verb is “ANTHONY SWOFFORD PUBLISHED A MEMOIR.”

Subsets:
“Early in 2003”
“a little more than ten years after the conclusion of the First Gulf War”
“on the very brink of what was rapidly seeming the inevitable launch of its far more complicated sequel”

He’s really making sure you’ve got the timing down. And he smuggles in his point of view in a subset of the second subset above: “which is to say the short, fast, clean, clear, and ever so painlessly triumphalist one.” All this is before the subject.

Anthony Swofford’s description is in an appositive right after his name: “a Marine sniper veteran of that first conflict.” Short. No physical description like height or age except as implied.

Now the verb: “published” with no subsets.

Then the object of the sentence: “memoir” with subsets:
“a powerfully bleak” (adjective with a rather contradictory intensifying adverb). At least I don’t usually think of “bleak” as being powerful.
“of his experiences”
Subset: “there in the Kuwaiti ampitheater back in the early nineties”
“a bitterly cautionary screed”: (adjective with an adverb placed as an appositive. This parallels the earlier one about the author.)
“utterly pithed of illusion or easy consolations.” A second phrase describing the memoir. One could take it as either an adverb or an appositive.

Now let’s play with changes:

“Anthony Swofford published a memoir of his experiences, utterly pithed of illusion or easy consolations.”

“A Marine sniper veteran of that first conflict published a bitterly cautionary screed.”

These reductions show that Weschler did a lot of preparing for his writer/sniper. His early subsets all say, “Remember? Remember what happened and when that was? And now we’ve got Iraq II?” Those who do remember and care are going to be primed for what comes next. “A Marine sniper veteran” -- huh? Then the reader is ready for the cascade of “bleak, bitter, cautionary, pithed of illusions.” Okay, so maybe that’s how the reader feels, too, but this guy was there, he was in it, he might have something to say. Without this preparation, we wouldn’t be -- uh -- prepared.

The second sentence is the real premise of the article:

“Of all the revelations in Swofford’s brisk chronicle, one of the most startling occurred near the book’s very outset, as he described how Marines on the verge of being sent into battle goosed themselves into a blissed-out state of readiness by screening videos of movies depicting earlier wars, and in particular battle scenes from several of the bleakest Vietnam movies of all --some of the most thoroughly illusion- and consolation-pithed films ever made -- scenes, for example, like Robert Duvall’s celebrated and notoriously blood-drenched Valkyrie helicopter raid in Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now.’”

Subject/verb: “ONE OCCURRED”
Subset: “Of all the revelations in Swofford’s brisk chronicle..” placed as an oppositive just ahead of the noun. This keeps you coming: the sniper/writer is brisk and he has revelations.
Subset: “of the most startling” He’s going to surprise you.

“Occurred” subsets:
“near the book’s very outset” You won’t have to wait.

Now we’ve got a complex subordinate clause joined by the conjunction “as.”

Subject/verb/object of this clause are “HE DESCRIBED HOW”.
“How” turned into a conjunction that introduces another clause with the subject/verb/object “Marines goosed themselves.”
(Kinda rude.)
Subsets of “Marines”:
“on the verge” (adverb prep phrase telling when)
“of being sent into battle” (adjective double prep phase describing verge)
Subsets of “goosed”:
“into a blissed-out state” (sounds a little ridiculous, esp. with "goosed")
“of readiness” (contradiction, seemingly)
“by screening videos”
“of movies”
“depicting earlier wars”
and “in particular battle scenes”
“from several
“of the bleakest Vietnam movies of all” (I’d leave the two prepositional phrases together)
A DASH stands in here for a word conjunction.
“scenes”
“for example”
“like Robert Duvall’s celebrated and notoriously blood-drenched Valkyrie helicopter raid
“in Francis Ford Coppola’s ‘Apocalypse Now.’”

Putting that last title at the end of the sentence and the paragraph gives it emphasis. In acting, we might say it “lands the line.” It’s the punch, the subject, the real hook. That scene struck so many people hard.

Going on with this is pretty ponderous, so I’ll stop, but note two words get repeated. One is “bleak.” The other is “pithed.” (My eye caught on the “pith” in amPITHeatre, but even for Weschler that’s a little too subtle to mean much. Maybe.

As it happens, “pith” is one of my favorite words, not least because it is emotionally loaded. Of course, I like to make “pithy remarks” and I sometimes think of “pith” in plants or maybe in mammals where the real “pith” is “marrow,” another favorite. But the connotation that strikes me here is “pithing frogs” for biology class. It consists of using a sharp object to remove the frog’s brain to immobilize the creature without killing it, for purposes of experiment. Mindless mayhem from the frog’s point of view. If you do a lousy job, leaving some brain, the frog might manage to jump off your table. It happens.

This is not a bad personal reference for this article, though short of having served as a Marine sniper.

If you wanted to do some experimenting with these two sentences, you might try using the sequence of:
“ANTHONY SWOFFORD PUBLISHED A MEMOIR.”
“ONE OCCURRED”
“HE DESCRIBED HOW”
to create a parallel sentence on your own topic.

“Beautiful and graceful young dancer Isabella published a memoir of her ballet career in New York. One of the most traumatic incidents occurred at a dress rehearsal in which she broke her ankle -- she described how long it took her to recover and her anguish over whether she ever would.”

This is not necessarily the kind of grammar structure that a person would find helpful as conscious use in a first draft, but it is crucial to doing decent revisions.

Architectonics of Writing: Lawrence Weschler

2005-11-02T15:56:00.000-08:00

This blog was intended to be about grammar, but I come back again and again to the notion that grammar is only the means to the larger means of clearly saying what one means. But then what is the end? What is it that powers the writing?

I have a friend who is trying to write as powerfully as he speaks and thinks, but doesn’t. He gives samples to people he respects and they say, “Oh, well, you still haven’t found your voice.” What’s that supposed to mean? How does one find a voice?

I think it takes two things: one is an awareness of the architectonics of writing. Oh, wow. Can a person be more pretentious? I refer you to an online dialogue sponsored by Transom.org: “The Transom Review,” Vol. 4, Issue 3. The guru is Lawrence Wcschler, who was an editor at The New Yorker -- the old New Yorker that so many of us loved to ramble around in. He doesn’t LOOK like that at all. He looks and sounds very back-East and Jewish -- very University of Chicago. No, that’s not right. He’s definitely New York with that trans-Atlantic orientation and holocaust-dominated sense of history. I’m reaching out to trans-prairie, Native-American-holocaust-dominated people. What streets are to Manhattan, geology is to my chosen limits: Edmonton to Yellowstone, Rockies to Dakotas.

Weschler defines architectonics as “a compositional enterprise, involving the sequential deployment of material across time in a forceful manner, which is to say a transparent architectonic structure.” He offers an amazing example of what he means: a comparison of the architectonic structure of his own writing compared with the architectonic structure of his grandfather’s composing. There are embedded links in the back-and-forth so that you can look at the writing (If you’ve downloaded it and printed it) while listening to the music that he claims is structured exactly the same way. The means of structuring is GRAMMAR. At least those are the building blocks of the flow of the sentences and reasoning.

Transom and Weschler are exploring the interplay of sound and print (probably also graphics) to create something new -- a whole expression of voice. NPR has been broadcasting from the sound side of the concept for quite a while, using talk, sound-effects, music, and so on. Too bad my friend considers NPR to be a boring, pretentious, irrelevant source. Clearly, he’s never listened to “This American Life.”

The other necessity for developing a writing “voice” is courage. To be honest, to let the real self come out exposed and engaged, takes courage. People will misinterpret, take advantage, and try to grab your heart while it’s beating. Eventually the writer learns that this isn’t lethal and occasionally it’s transformative in a good way. But most people back off to teaparty chatter and everyone pretends that’s good enough. Even in rough-and-tough Montana, people are wary of the truth. People get invested in a romantic tapestry of assumptions. “Montana is so beautiful.” “There aren’t many people in Montana.” “Montana is the land of the free.”

Recently I spent a couple of days email-wrestling with a guy who was writing a book and wanted to portray an “Indian burial” that would be satisfyingly in sync with freedom, nature, etc. etc. He kept demanding to know things that assumed the Christian framework, order of service details. A prayer. A song. Detail about the arrangement of the body. All things proscribed by his very goal of being free and natural. The WRITER is the one who needed to figure out how to be free and natural! He thinks that wilderness is accessed by a trail cut by someone else.

Weschler says he can’t write fiction because reality is so complex, interwoven, and fascinating that it intrudes and grabs him. Part of the courage of finding one’s voice is not protecting oneself from the truth and what made me Google Weschler in the first place was his remarkable essay in the November, 2005, issue: “Valkyries Over Iraq: the Trouble with War Movies.” It’s about using Wagnerian battle scenes from anti-Vietnam movies like “Apocalypse Now” to get soldiers juiced up for battle.

So many write because they hope to convince the world that they are someone they hope to be. And Bush doesn’t even do that -- he HIRES people who are supposed to give him words to convince the world that he is someone he is not. Why do we even listen? And seriously critique his “rhetoric?”

I have the advantage of being (increasingly) old. Courage is just another name for “nothing left to lose.” Take it or leave it.

MISS CARTER'S GRAMMAR with comments in honor of Miss Colbert

2005-10-19T15:39:00.000-07:00

(This was written some time ago in another context -- I think when I was asked to teach grammar for a day on the reservation.)

Many thinkers and scientists now believe that all human beings learn grammar as infants -- in fact, don’t really “learn” the basics, but have them hard-wired right in. Anyone who speaks intelligibly to other people knows grammar and has only had to learn the specifics of that particular language. Only one family has been found which cannot put two words together into a sentence that actually makes sense -- they are missing their grammar gene, evidently. They cannot detect patterns in the way words are arranged.

Not every language is patterned the same way. Miss Carter, my eighth grade teacher, was Irish. (VERY Irish, with red hair and a red face, and deep devotion to St. Andrews Catholic Church whose bells rang the hours through the days of the neighborhood.) Her ancestors would have spoken Gaelic back in Ireland, a language which was suppressed by the English with as much vigor as they suppressed American Indian languages. I know very little about Gaelic, though my ancestors were Irish as well as Scots, and there has been a revival movement of that language just as there is currently among American Indian languages.

My fourth grade teacher was Mildred Colbert, a Chinook Indian. Chinook was a trade language, so it was a mixture of several Indian languages, sometimes a bit of English or Russian, and signtalk. Miss Colbert wrote an internationially famous book called “Kutkos, Chinook Tyee.” Tyee is the Chinook word for Chief, more or less. (The book is in English.) I bought my copy of the book from an Irish bookstore via the Internet. The Portland, Oregon, library system is down to one copy and to read it you must sit alongside the librarian while she holds your hand! They consider it precious.

Many people think that learning another language is just a matter of learning words, but sometimes one has to learn a new grammar as well -- sometimes one has to learn a new world. Some languages show the relationships between words by adding “particles,” the way one makes a woman’s name by adding “aki” to the end of the word -- like English adds “-ess” to poet to make “poetess,” a female poet. (Feminists will bite you if you do this. “-ist” added to the end of a word in English means that they are preoccupied with the concept just preceding -- that is, in this case, being female. In this case feminists would argue that putting -ess on the end of poet is a kind of diminuative, a little like calling William “Billy.” They feel that they would be more equal if they were not designated by a particle to be female.)

Sometimes the relationships between words in a sentence are indicated by using little separate words. If they are common, one of the excellent strategies of sentence dissection is to simply learn them. It’s more possible than it sounds.

here are the linking or helping verbs, which are often also verbs of being. If they stand alone, they are probably verbs of being. If they are with another verb, they probably add to the meaning of that verb, like indicating tense. If you are serious about grammar, memorize these “little” verbs.

Be, am, is, are, was, were, been.
Have, has, had. Do, does, did.
Shall, will, must, might.
Could, would, should.

When Miss Carter’s former students come together (and my class graduated in 1953) they can and do recite these verbs.

HOW TO MEMORIZE:
1. Keep them in exactly this order and repeat them many times.
2. Learn one line at a time, then add the next one until you have the whole thing.
3. Write these words on a 3x5 card and carry them around with you. When you are waiting or riding in a car or just killing time, say them out loud, only peeking at the card when you get stuck.
4. Get someone else to hold the card while you try to recite them properly. Tell them not to help unless you get really stuck.
5. Write them down. Maybe several times. Maybe a hundred times. Some people need to “see” words.

My advice is to look for the verbs in a sentence first. If you see any of these words, they are almost always going to be verbs. Check to see if they are part of a verb phrase, like “would have gone.”

How I Write

2005-09-26T11:07:00.000-07:00

Long ago in Oregon I attended a conference on Native American writing, organized by Sidner Larson (then a professor at the U of Oregon and now a professor at Iowa State). At the time I was involved with a Native Literature list serve (sort of a predecessor of blogging) that had become a community -- or maybe a family, since fist-fights regularly broke out. [Grammar note: my position is that any preposition wandering around with no object is automatically an adverb -- so forget putting that on my checklist of errors.]

Living in Portland, I drove to the conference in Eugene and back every day. Going home on the freeway, I had time to reflect and develop ideas in my head, and when I got home I was still too “up” [fooled you -- this preposition without an object is an adjective!] to sleep, so I composed a review of the events that day. As it turned out, the written record was as valuable as the mental exercise. Back home in Montana, I continue this discipline.

One of my principles with the Montana Festival of the Book has been to frame the actual proceedings with the drive to get there [double-meaning], since it’s a four hour trip each way, crossing the Rockies. Notice that the above paragraph echoes this method, framing the paragraph with two parallel sentences, one at the beginning and one at the end. I don’t TRY to do this -- it’s the way my mind works after many long years of trying to write clearly, esp sermons. Somehow whatever is just below the surface takes care of it, and then I sharpen or suppress the results afterwards.

So here’s my final paragraph from my report on the Montana Festival of the Book. I try to end on a note that is grand [hallelujah, amen], plays off the scenery and weather, and evokes the satisfaction of returning home, a safe place that I want to be. [Leave off “in” or “at” after “to be” -- it’s clutter.]

“Worrying about the pass, I left straightaway, but it was cleared and graveled. Enough snow along the way to track elk. On the west side the snow became dark rain. Thin pewter rents tore the low indigo clouds into long silvery streams with a star here and there like a fish. The streams formed an estuary, and by the time I was north of Choteau, the Big Dipper was sailing along with me and the sky was a huge net of glittering stars.”

The first problem I see on this clear-headed Monday is that I have the side of the mountains wrong: should be “On the EAST side the snow became dark rain.” Has lost the period, too. This paragraph was rewritten maybe five or six times and needed three more comb-outs.

I questioned “Worrying about the pass, I left straightaway, but it was cleared and graveled.” In actuality, I stopped for fish & chips at the restaurant near the big truck stop on the way out of town. This is a place I’ve always liked, though once in summer there were way too many flies for a place to eat -- still I took it as an indication that they weren’t using nasty insecticide. This time there were gnats wading around in my blue cheese dressing. But all this stuff about stopping to eat is just not interesting in a piece about Big Ideas. [Not this. The piece about the Festival.] It’s a sidebar that could be developed into an essay about environmental tradeoffs. So I left it all out. Maybe later.

I wanted to note that I left right at the end of the last panel, [second time of using “left” in contiguous sentences -- should I change the second one to “departed” or change the first one to “omitted”?] though I made a quick check for people who might want to speak face-to-face at the end. Still, this is an awkwardly split sentence [both the original one and the one in the critique] and I should have done it one more time. Participle at the beginning, right before the pronoun “I” -- then the hinge of the sentence “I left” but then a subordinate clause with a double verb that refers back to “it” -- the pass. But actually the road through the pass. Messy. Maybe break into two sentences. “Worrying about the pass, I left straightaway. The road was cleared and graveled.” Too plain. Maybe “mercifully the road was cleared and graveled.”

Maybe pull over the next image “Enough snow along the way to track elk.” So: “Though there was enough snow to track elk, the road was cleared and graveled.” Or “Enough snow to track elk. But the road was cleared and graveled.” Maybe leave out the “but.” What I wanted was snapshots and a Montana point of view: we all travel passes and track elk, right?

The next problem was when and how to introduce the growing darkness since I’m always returning home at and after sunset. In previous years the east side has been rather glorious, esp. since I drive north along the Rockies. This time it was dark enough that almost everything was unsee-able except the sky, so this had to be a sky story. “On the east side the snow became dark rain. Thin pewter rents tore the low indigo clouds into long silvery streams with a star here and there like a fish. The streams formed an estuary, and by the time I was north of Choteau, the Big Dipper was sailing along with me and the sky was a huge net of glittering stars.”

The first cracks in the clouds showed a kind of faux snowy horizon -- I mean that’s what I thought it was at first. But I decided not to play with the idea of deception. So now I’m looking for adjectives that imply shiny -- I was seeing tin roofs that were shiny, the same color as the breaks in the clouds. Left them out. It occurred to me that the long shiny breaks were like a river. The fish metaphor came then and the rest was unfolded out of that. The “net of glittering stars” is a mythological/theological allusion (Ariane’s net) with a lot of juice to it, but most readers won’t know that. If this were a novel it would be a useful trope to address.

In fact, one of the books that is still fermenting in the back of my mind is “Circuit-Riding” which is about the three years I spent living in a van while serving four Unitarian Universalist congregations in Bozeman, Helena, Missoula, and Great Falls. The shape of the book HAS to be: visit a congregation, see people, preach, counsel, listen, whatever -- drive home thinking about it. Repeat at the next place. (I did one town a week the first year and two towns a week after that.) So I’m doing warm-ups here and I’ll want that dimension of hurtling through a landscape under a cosmos. This is my metaphor of being -- NOT being nailed to a cross.

You’ve just spent a few minutes listening to the keyboard monkeys in my head.

Anfractuosities of the Senses

2005-08-30T18:22:00.000-07:00

Nouns don’t do you any good if you never notice what’s around you. They are about perception, the telling detail, the vivid impression, the insightful relationship. Many people don’t understand that writing begins with living: really seeing, hearing, tasting, touching, smelling. Then there’s something to write about.

The hardest part of teaching writing was to prevent the kids from plunging into the assignment immediately, piling up some quick cliches about “my summer vacation” -- suspiciously similar to the one they wrote the previous fall -- and calling that good. To force them to slow down and remember as intensely as possible, I would make them list sense-memories from the summer, two phrases for each of the “five” senses. (There are really far more senses than that.)

Two smells, two sounds, two temperatures or textures, and so on. Then they were to take the better of each pair and compose those selected five sense phrases into a paragraph. In 1961 Kelly Grissom, the son of the Blackfeet Agency Superintendent, thought he would be silly and funny, but he followed the instructions and the result was memorable. In 2005 I still remember three of his summer images: sand in the bottom of the bathtub, watermelon juice trickling down his bare stomach, and fresh chickenshit squishing up between his toes. (He vacationed on a farm in Oklahoma.)

This is the secret of good acting, too, which is where I originally got the concept: that if one can invoke the sense memories of a time and place where one had the same emotion as the character, one can bring that emotion to life with intensity and truth.

But it’s a hard sell. When I try to describe this little exercise on the college level, people won’t even let me finish. To them, writing is some wildly emotional fugue in which their pen or computer keys race along, inspired and nearly automatic. No wonder they hate revising.

In high school I fell in love with Elizabeth Bishop’s poem called simply “The Fish.” The first line is “I caught a tremendous fish...” The last line is “And I let the fish go.” In between is simply a detailed mental picture of this huge old fish, an accumulation of detail so vivid and accurate that one understands completely when she lets the fish go. But there is no emotional gushing about compassion or even any scientific talk about ecology. If you Google >”The Fish” “Elizabeth Bishop”< you will find what amounts to a course in poetry, all about the seemingly simple description of a fish not caught -- or at least not kept. At one time I had this poem by heart -- I think I should try to recapture it.

Other nouns than those available to the senses are also important. Nouns like “fulcrum” or “penumbra.” You can see where they are -- the fulcrum is the point of balance, as on a teeter-totter, and penumbra is the fainter second shadow often cast outside the deeper shadow. So you could say, “she wavered on the fulcrum of her grief, refused to come to rest until the anguished umbra had faded to sad penumbra.” Kind of fancy. Might want to just say, “she suffered until the loss was in the past.” Depends on the context, of course.

I was so delighted with one word that I kept looking for chances to use it. I found it in a book about making molds of sculptures and it describes all the little caves and overhangs of the shape that must be filled with plaster or mold rubber or whatever. The word is “anfractuosities.” The unabridged dictionary defines it as the quality or state of being “anfractuous.” Not much help. Second meaning is “a winding channel, course or passage., esp. an intricate path or process (as of the mind).” The meaning at “anfractuous” suggests origins with “coil or crook” or “break” as in fracture or “around” as in ambi. Of course, anfractuous is an adjective so you have to change the ending to show that it has become a noun. Isn’t that anfractuous?

Don’t you love to sit with someone over coffee, exploring the anfractuosities of your lives? Heck, this is turning into a short story. The fulcrum of the plot might be sense memories that fade to penumbras until all that remains of a thing is its name, a noun.

SOUNDS LIKE NOUNS

2005-08-25T17:31:00.000-07:00

A word that is the name of a person, place or thing might sound perfectly recognizable, but maybe it isn’t. Here are some tips:

1. The Greeks (actually it was Plato -- remember this fellow) looked for the essence of things, which cannot be seen or perceived except when expressed through another actual entity (noun), like whiteness or roundness or softness or lightness or quietness. You will notice these words all end in “ness.” Therefore, this is a good clue to nouns -- the above referenced are all nouns.

2. Regardless of #1, a good way to test for a noun is to say did you ever see a ....? A noun can be easily recognized even if you haven’t the foggiest notion what it is, if the sentence shows by syntax that the word is a noun by putting a, an, the, this or that in front of it. Is this your grintapul? Look at that kemital! Have you got an ampliudio ? One can steal nouns from other languages that value nouns and put them into English sentences. One can put X in place of all the nouns and still know they are nouns. The X in this town is that X.

3. Another way to test is to try to make a plural out of it by adding s. English-speaking people pay attention to whether nouns are plural or singular. However they don’t always create a plural by adding an “s” (notice that in this case the noun is a single letter) so if you say “sheeps” you are likely to end up looking sheepish.

4. Words with capital letters are usually nouns, in fact, “proper” nouns. (Improper nouns are the ones that make people blush and your mother slap you.) The United States of America. This time the noun (In my opinion) is probably best taken to be the whole phrase, though it plainly is >two adjectives, one plural noun, a preposition and a noun<. If I were working up an analysis, I would circle or hi-lite the whole phrase. But people use as shorthand just “America,” to stand for the country, which is unfair to Canada, Mexico and everyone south of Mexico. Others might say “Yankees” or whatever, but such words have overtones, not quite proper.

One should learn noun synonyms in all their nuance and plenitude because this is where much successful and vivid writing begins.

Here’s a fun way to do this self-improvement that is called The Dictionary Game.

1. Divide into two sides of several people each.

2. Get a dictionary, the closer to unabridged the better -- maybe even a specialty dictionary like a dictionary of geological terms or slang or professional jargon.

3. One side picks out a strange word. Each of the players on this side prepares a definition of this noun. (It COULD be a verb, but don’t change the subject!) One definition is the real one and the others should be as convincing as possible even though misleading. Write down the definitions and read them out in turn.

4. The other side tries to guess which is the right definition by discussing among themselves. If they do, they win. If they don’t, they lose.

5. If they win, they switch sides and present the next set of definitions. And they gain one point.

6. The side with the most points wins, but usually everyone is having so much fun that they don’t care.

On my NPR station, this game comes on the air just before the opera on Saturday morning. A nice upscale liberal pursuit. A good occasion for cleverness, though carefulness is advised.

Speaking of cleverness, I had occasion to hand out worksheets to students whom I then asked to circle all the nouns. In the computer I had colored all the nouns green. To correct their papers the students could turn them over and see if the word was green. But they were too clever for that. They quickly noticed that all the green words, when printed in black ink, were slightly lighter than the real black words. They spent the whole exercise trying to see which words were lighter and never turning the page over. I don’t know what they learned about nouns. I thought the game they assigned themselves was the harder one, but old I am and my eyes are weak.

Nouns as Icebergs

2005-08-22T12:11:00.000-07:00

Nouns are like icebergs. A small part of the meaning pokes up into the sentence while 80% or so is just under the surface. The result may be unexpected if people see something under the surface that the noun chooser didn’t expect.

I’m old enough to have had a family that met for supper, a holdover from the rural backgrounds of my parents, I think, because a farm is a place where everyone does things pretty much together and in sync. My father grew up in homesteader South Dakota and Manitoba. My mother grew up in an orchard near Roseburg, Oregon. (I grew up in Portland, OR.) At one meal in the Fifties one of my brothers casually referred to a “dingus,” using it rather as one might say “thingy.” My father grew red in the face, threw down his napkin (we had napkins in those days), and left the table -- clearly upset. “Don’t SAY that!” he scolded.

It turned out that when he was a young man, a “dingus” is what they called an athletic supporter. In those days one did not speak of athletic supporters. (Today a mother might yell at her son as he leaves the house for football practice, “Did you remember your cup?”) Even in the Seventies at the rather elegant church I attended, the student minister greatly upset one of the women’s committees by getting in the habit of leaving his athletic supporter on the steam radiator in their meeting room so it would dry after he’d been swimming. But now, even in mixed company, I can get away with joking, when asked if I like sports, “Do I look like an athletic supporter?”

So one must choose nouns carefully, considering the audience and the various meanings the word might have.

Nisbett repeatedly makes the point, by telling us of clever experiments, that Westerners are very fond of nouns and when they speak to their children in the earliest years, much of the conversation is about things and their properties: “What’s this? What color is it? Which is bigger?” Naming games.

Asian children are encouraged to interact with things: “Which do you like? Where does it go? Will you share?” In the simplest experiment, a trio of objects were pictured and the subjects were asked to decide which two of three “go together.” For example, a hen, a cow and some grass were grouped by Westerners with the two animals together, but Asians tended to put the cow with the grass because cows eat grass. These show more attention to verbs.

Something that interests me is that this attention to process and verbs tends to have moral content. What should one do? I’ve maintained that American Indian novels have a moral focus. But Westerners, presented with an Indian novel, want to “name” everything. Which tribe is this? To what family does their language belong? I believe the more old-time an American Indian is, the more like an Asian he or she is.

Also, Asians tended to see a whole and Westerners tended to see a prominent part -- presented with a drawing of a fish tank with fish, plants, snails, etc., the Asians said, “a fish tank.” The Westerners said, “A big fish, maybe a trout, in a fish tank.”

One of my favorite jokes is about two old lady teachers who went on a drive to the country. They had lived always in the city and thought they ought to get some idea of what was rural. They drove through the fields, observing, until they felt a pressing question, so they stopped to ask a farmer on a tractor. The farmer was obliging.

“Now, sir, we are passing your fields and we see that there are cows, but some of the cows have no horns. Why is that?”

The farmer answered, as tactfully as possible, “Some cows are ornery, so we saw their horns off. Some cows are what we call polled cows, genetically bred not to have horns. But these cows have no horns because they are horses.”

This is what you call a “category error.” Westerners are very prone to category errors (like racism) because they are so insistent on constantly creating categories made up of discrete objects, instead of looking at a continuous existence of inter-related processes which we might call “an ecology.” Westerners spent centuries making taxonomies of everything before they thought of ecology. They saw trees, but not forests and not the climate patterns that enable trees.

Then along comes DNA and we learn that all living creatures share much of their essential metabolic molecular activity -- the human body INCLUDES most of the DNA of fungus, much of the DNA of chickens, even more of the DNA of cows, and the DNA of chimpanzees plus a little more that is our own. The DNA that is our own appears to be the bits with which we think, processes that can be seen with tomography even as they function, and tiny structures that require instruments to see.

So now we find that we’ve been perpetrating a LOT of category errors and that genetically things are quite different than their appearance or behavior might suggest. This has caused us to take much more seriously disciplines like Asian thought.

In fact, it looks to me as though Asian thought is what “feminist” thought and “green” thought and “outsider” thought, et al. have been all along -- that is, the other side of the noun/verb coin. It is a flattening bifurcation we have not kept in mind, which is a little surprising when one considers that one of the major failings of Westerner thought (particularly when it comes to religion) has been a tendency to render everything into two opposing forces.

Either you’re good or bad, sheep or goat, Christian or pagan, with me or against me, Indian or white --- ignoring the mixed-ness of reality. Asian thought is more likely to see that there is yin in yang, yang in yin. But it’s perfectly possible for a Westerner, once prompted, to remember that bell curves and synergies exist all around us. The point is to approach a subject -- and a sentence -- with awareness of these issues.

In truth, grammar is not just a matter of naming. The Sapir/Whorf insight into the importance of process is sometimes in and sometimes out of fashion, but it is still a MAJOR help when trying to think clearly so as to write well about a complex world.

Where to Begin?

2005-08-21T20:43:00.000-07:00

This blog is meant to be about writing well. It will address grammar, rhetoric, theory, examples, exercises, and whatever else I can think of. Teachers should find it useful, but also autodidacts who are trying to get a grip on what makes writing work.

I can remember taking a workshop from Peter Matthiessen. In my sample piece I had a sentence that refused to lie down on the page and behave meaningfully. It writhed on the paper. Peter, who likes revising, carefully changed a prepositional phrase to an adjective, subordinated one thought to the other by using a participle, switched the order of some phrases and cut out about five words. The sentence lay flat, obedient. Not a bad sentence.

I took a class from Richard Stern. He grew incensed over my persistence in writing sentences that were inside out. It must be in my thinking, because I still write inside-out sentences, but now I know to look for them when I revise and I ALWAYS revise.

Two lessons:
1. Behind good writing is good thinking. Bad writing often means the thinking is not finished.
2. Revise. Most people don't, because they don't know where to begin. There's no one place -- take out, put in, change around.

I am always of two minds when I start thinking about grammar. There is considerable evidence that different cultures develop slightly different ways of organizing sentences, beginning with those who like nouns versus those who like verbs. In English most people like nouns. They learn langauges by learning the names of things.

If you ask most American kids, "What is a noun?" they will say a "person, place or thing." They are wrong. A noun is a name. Persons, places and things are commonly named. The most commonly named will be called by one word.

But you can't have a sentence that is only a noun. You CAN have an English sentence that is only a verb, usually a command. "Stop!" "Jump!" So which is most important, noun or verb?

In many languages it is not the objects but the processes that are important, so just as "climbing" is a verb that acts like a noun, which we call a gerund, in Native American languages there are many gerunds. No wind, but blowing. No sun, but shining.

I'll start with nouns. Tomorrow. (That last is not a sentence.)

Mary Scriver