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 d...

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...