Words on a Page

Discussion of Woody Guthrie's 'New Year Rulin's for 1942' have been all over the internet this week with some inferring that Woody's inclusion of hygiene matters (3, 4, 5, 9, 11) as an indication that the Huntington's disease which killed him twenty-five years later, at the age of 55, was already at work.  Maybe that's so.  Maybe not.  Maybe he was just so busy spilling words onto paper (the Woody Guthrie Archives contain the lyrics to nearly 3000 songs) that some of life's more mundane tasks occasionally got forgotten.   You can tell he's concerned about the way he's treated his family.  You can tell that, at the age of 30, he's thinking about his health - eat good , drink very scant if any - and about his spirit - don't get lonesome , stay glad , dream good , love , love , love - and about the need to take action and not waste time.  I see Woody's rulin's as a  to do  list, a way of taking small but meaningful steps to s

This is the third annual review I’ve written since setting off on this journey.  One more should see me through to the end, at least as far as submitting my dissertation and preparing for the final viva.  The viva, the ultimate test of whether or not my work stands up to scrutiny, will come in just over a year’s time.  Not too much over, I hope, for I fear that my husband’s patience has its limits.  And so does mine.  After three years, we are both anxious to get our lives back.  Anxious to load up our bikes and find a nice quiet road to pedal down for a few months.  Route 66 sounds good, passing through abandoned Oklahoma towns on the way to the west coast.  So does the northern tier trans-America route as plotted out by the good people at the Adventure Cycling Association – from Bar Harbor , Maine all the way to Anacortes in Washington state.  Or better yet, their Lewis and Clark route which passes right through my hometown.  No detour required.  That would be appropriate, consi

Here's an article from True West Magazine , published in February 2007. It lists some of the events of the frontier era of American history which the author points to as helping to shape not only the country but also the identity of the American people.  It's disappointing, but not surprising, that the list focusses almost exclusively on events that reinforce the heroic myth of Manifest Destiny and western expansion.  The one exception is The Battle of Little Bighorn - but even here the author manages to give a sympathetic account of Custer's defeat:  ‘…the weapons the soldiers were issued were single-shot Springfield trapdoors with copper casings that jammed, while many of the warriors had armed themselves with lever-action Winchesters.’   In effect what he’s saying is that the Indians, by being better armed, weren’t playing fair.   It makes a change, but I’m still not going to shed any tears over the 7 th Cavalry, I’m afraid. Gen. George Armstrong Custer This

Rationale  During the last few years I have taught Literacy to a variety of learners in circumstances ranging from discrete courses for those with learning difficulties to long-term unemployed adults and those engaged in training as part of the last government’s Train to Gain scheme. Regardless of the situation, I have often found motivation particularly lacking when it comes to writing tasks. Learners can easily see the value of reading as it’s a skill we use every day in tasks as unrelated as shopping, driving and cooking. The printed word is everywhere. What’s more, it has authority. When something is written down it is perceived to carry a certain amount of importance, therefore motivation to read is generally quite high. Writing, however, is easier to avoid. What’s more, because the written word is viewed as having authority, many people – even those with sound ‘literacy skills’ – feel insecure about their ability to express themselves on paper. This reluctance to write, I belie

This section carries on from Perception, Character and Mood photo by Brian Lary During the 1970s and 1980s, the United States military took part in a series of engagements which many Americans found morally questionable [1] , shaking the previously firm belief that America was a force for good in the world.  The rise of the Red Power movement and its close associate, the American Indian Movement, and publication of books such as Vine Deloria’s Custer Died for Your Sins (1969) also encouraged the dominant American culture to question the treatment of the nation’s first inhabitants.  Growing environmental concerns, and Cold War anxieties added to the uncertainty which many Americans felt.  At the same time, American writers began to challenge received notions of Western American history, and the revised literary mythologies they created reflected the nation’s mood by offering new perceptions (Lewis, 2003) of a West without heroes.  Most notable of these anti-westerns is Cormac M

In ‘Dangerous Ground,’ Annie Proulx contends that early writers considered western landscapes to be ‘hostile’ and that ‘[a]lmost never did the protagonist display any sense of belonging to or understanding of the country through which he journeyed, nor did he try to learn much about it’ (Proulx 2008:15).  While this may be true of the adversarial adventure stories featured in the later dime novels, Proulx’s statement is far too generalised and she offers no specific examples to support this claim.  In her own work, Proulx uses landscape to explore the psychology of her characters.  External landscape reflects the internal contours and depth of vision her characters possess and, as a driving force within the plot, landscape controls their movements and influences what they can and cannot do.  Her characters are frequently outsiders, alienated in some way from the society around them, and rootless either by choice or coercion.  It is clear, however, that landscape is more than simply a

This section carries on from ' Environmental Indians '... Alexie’s representations of place have also attracted criticism.  While Reservation Blues (1996) and his earliest short stories are primarily located on the Spokane Indian Reservation and are littered with authentic place names (Wellpenit, Spokane Falls, Riverfront Park, Reardon), Alexie provides few visual references to landscape which would anchor these stories to a specific geographical location.  Owens describes the reservation portrayed by Alexie as being ‘a vaguely defined place where people live in cheap federal housing while drinking, playing basketball, feuding with one another, and dying self-destructive and often violent deaths’ (1998:71-2).  Bernardin takes up this point and suggests that Alexie deliberately uses what she refers to as ‘generic signifiers of “Indianness”’ (2004:167) to build a physical world recognisable by his target audience – young Native Americans [i] .  The reservation Alexie describe

Since the increased public awareness of environmental issues in the 1960s, Native Americans have been closely associated with numerous ecological campaigns under the implied authority of having a uniquely harmonious and non-invasive relationship with the natural world.  In one now notorious television commercial, an ‘Indian’ in traditional dress is shown paddling a birch bark canoe through a polluted waterway of an industrial city.  Upon landing his canoe on the litter-strewn shore, the man walks to the edge of a highway where a bag of rubbish, tossed from a passing car, lands at his feet.  The voiceover delivers the campaign’s message: ‘Some people have a deep abiding respect for the natural beauty that was once this country.  And some people don’t.’  As the man turns to face the camera, a tear runs down his cheek and the narrator makes the emphatic statement: ‘People start pollution; people can stop it’ (Keep America Beautiful, 1971).         The commercial is today considered contr

Louis Owens’ widely-discussed novel Wolfsong (1991) illustrates both the homecoming nature of Native fiction, and an eco-conscious world view which exists in opposition to the view of the white community and westernised Indians.  At the opening of the novel, a road crew is carving a new route through the temperate rainforests in the Cascade mountains of western Washington state.  The land has been designated a wilderness area [i] , but government authorities have recently granted permission for the construction of an open-pit copper mine.  From the cover of the trees above the road crew, Jim Joseph makes a one-man protest, shooting at the bulldozers to disrupt their progress. 

The Broad Expanse: charting the landscape Western literature is tied to place more than any other regional form.  As we read the pages of a Cormac McCarthy novel or an Annie Proulx short story, we traverse a world of staggering imagery: jagged peaks of distant blue mountains, arid expanses of red desert and sagebrush, and hip-high seas of winter wheat rippling and cresting in a prairie breeze.  It is a world of wide-open spaces and unpopulated places, where characters come and go, but the land is constant and forever.  In her essay ‘Dangerous Ground’, Annie Proulx argues that landscape is much more than what the landscape historian John Brinckerhoff Jackson describes as being ‘a portion of the earth’s surface that can be comprehended at a single glance’ (2008, p. 12).  Rather, she offers her own broader definition: Landscape is geography, archaeology, astrophysics, agronomy, agriculture, the violent character of the atmosphere, climate, black squirrels and wild oats, folded rock, bu

Numerous works of western fiction have drawn inspiration from the Lewis and Clark journals since their official publication in 1814.  Most, such as Vardis Fisher's Tale of Valor (1960) and Brian Hall's I   Should Be Extremely Happy In Your Company (2003) have attempted to fictionalise what is known about the expedition, relying on the journals to structure the narrative and provide the bones of character development while relating the story of the expedition from the perspective of one or more real life members of the party.  James Alexander Thom's Sign Talker (2000) tells the story from the viewpoint of George Drouillard, the Corps’ half-blood Shawnee interpreter, while Anna Lee Waldo's Sacajawea (1978) and Diane Glancy's Stone Heart (2003) present the story from the point of view of the expedition's only female member.  Others, such as Will Henry's The Gates of the Mountains (1963), present the story from the point of view of a fictional character plac

Until the end of the nineteenth century, the West was not situated in a static geographical location.  In its earliest guise, it encompassed all but the thinnest margin along the eastern edge of the continent.  Kentucky, Tennessee and Ohio – all states now firmly entrenched in the geographical East – at one time lay beyond the frontier within an unknown and unexplored western territory.  Until the latter part of the nineteenth century, the frontier retreated physically as each new wave of white settlement pushed it ever closer to the Pacific coast.  Since then, the frontier has retreated from us in time.  Consequently, the meaning of ‘the West’ has changed, and continues to change on a regular basis. 

Western American Literature: an expansive canon   Western American Literature: an expansive canon   The canon of western American literature encompasses many forms: popular and literary fiction; nature writing; personal essays and memoirs; and historical studies.  It is an area of literature which is nearly as vast as the land from which it emanates.  A brief survey of the novels which fall beneath its banner confirms the diverse range of work it includes: Zane Grey’s classic of the western genre Riders of the Purple Sage (1912); Willa Cather’s depiction of the female agrarian struggle in O Pioneers! ; A.B. Guthrie’s mountain man adventure Big Sky (1947); Steinbeck’s Grapes of Wrath (1939) and East of Eden (1952); and Wallace Stegner’s Angle of Repose (1972) are all novels which are widely studied in connection with the American West.  Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985); Annie Proulx’s Wyoming stories; Barbara Kingsolver’s BeanTrees (1988); Larry McMurtry’s antiheroic, anti-we

The origins of western American literature can be found in the written accounts of the explorers and adventurers who delved into the wilderness beyond the Mississippi River at the turn of the 19 th century.  Commissioned with exploring the newly acquired Louisiana Purchase, which had doubled the size of United States territory, and finding a trade route to the Pacific, Lewis and Clark ’s Corps of Discovery set forth in the spring of 1804 into a vast unknown. Over the course of nearly two and one-half years, the six men tasked with documenting the expedition produced enough material to fill the nearly five thousand pages of Moulton’s definitive edition of the journals.  In their close observation of both the landscape through which they travelled and of the Native people they encountered, the men not only recorded the events of their explorations but ‘gave reality to the Louisiana Purchase ’ (Lyon, 1999:5) itself. In the introduction to ‘The Written Donnée of Western Literatur

My copies of Award Winning Tales have just arrived in the post this morning, and I'm very pleased to see that my story 'The Difference Between Cowboys and Clowns' has made it into print.  The story was a finalist in the  NYCMidnight Short Story Challenge  a couple of years ago, a competition I can't recommend highly enough.  In the challenge, participants are divided into groups, and each group is given a writing genre and a topic which must feature in the story. In the initial round of the competition, participants are given one week in which to complete a story of 2500 words. That year, my genre was 'Romantic Comedy' and my subject 'Rainbow'. Goodness, I thought, as I received my instructions (by email at midnight, NYC time). Having a severe disinclination towards 'romance' (it's a long story - don't ask), I was less than thrilled with the genre I'd been given. And as for rainbows (deep sigh), although I really do appreciate the

Although I consider myself politically left of centre, I've always enjoyed John Wayne's westerns. When I was growing up in 1970s America, Wayne stood for something people longed for - a simpler time when the good guys were easy to spot and the bad guys always got what they deserved. Wayne's own rightwing leanings didn't come into it.  It was a film, afterall.  Fiction.  People used to be able to leave their politics in the cinema lobby and enjoy the myth. Times change: we're all postmodernists now. I looked forward to seeing the remake of True Grit because a) I like westerns, and b) I like the Coen brothers (at least Fargo, O Brother, and No Country). I'm afraid their True Grit, however, just didn't live up to my expectations.  The performance of Hailee Steinfeld as fourteen-year-old Mattie was quite exceptional - her earnestness was unflinching, and of all the characters it is she who has true grit. Jeff Bridges was less convincing, though he worked ha