Criminal Elistism
How many times has this happened? You want to deepen your understanding of something. You get a book. You start reading. The writing is so dense, or needlessly complex, you can’t get through it, much less enjoy it. This is criminal elitism. Shit’s gotta stop.
Buoyed
Tuesday afternoon I went over to Pat’s place and dug through boxes-and-boxes-and-boxes of books with her husband, John. To give a sense of the rarity and quality there, a good deal of her collection will be donated to UNM’s library archives, and probably another university’s.
Native Perspectives
I’ve finally been reading Custer Died for Your Sins. Also, I started reading Native Appropriations last weekend, a sharp and insightful read on indigenous presence in American pop culture. Either one alone is humbling. Taken together, it’s razing.
What We Have Here is a Failure to Communicate
Toward the end of Pat’s book, Weetamoo has some hard concerns about writing, itself. Young Metacom has learned to write the figure A. He pronounces it for her, and explains the white men’s utility in writing – and the Indian need, therefore, to be conversant in it. I had to stop reading a while after I saw her response: …What if, whenever we wanted a story, we could just reach out and read it from a paper, instead of waiting for the right time and place and…
Next Levels of Dramatic Irony
Your experience as a standard reader: Toward the end of Pat’s rendition of Weetamoo’s diary, the sachem-to-be is finally called for her adulthood rite. The year is 1654. She’s been anticipating it most of the book; she’ll spend several days and nights in a sweatlodge, tending a fire and waiting for contact from the nonmaterial world. In her two visions, a deer she’d unceremoniously killed leads her through the winter night to an important fishing area to the Pocasset, downstream from a waterfall. The second night, the deer…
Oh, Yeah… Slavery
Sometimes I jumpstart new areas of interest in this book by googling general history. Links daisychain, and soon, BAM. A cornerstone of the story. Today’s lesson is no less dramatic than other discoveries (Metacom’s War; the project’s origins): let’s start talking about Northern slavery. This article on Boston.com (from September of last year) makes a good starting place. I’m far from an expert the article caught me by surprise, both for its content and my ignorance. So I don’t expect this post to serve for…
Redemption
Just now, reading Sex at Dawn in the Captain’s Chair in the living room, I had one of those Important Moments. A few years back a friend asked if and how my writing redeems its dark premises. While I stared through the wall, he suggested “beauty.” That answer always sounded like a copout. The words can dress the subject tenderly, but the subject remains dark, bitter, disturbing. Untransformed. But all this talk of humans fighting and caging our sexuality by institutionalized “pair bonding” – on top of making…
Flintstonization
I’ve been reading Sex at Dawn: The Prehistoric Origins of Modern Sexuality. Along the path to claiming that humans are really bad at monogamy, authors Ryan and Jethá make a very important point about framing and perspective: we can’t productively cast old worlds in the mold of the present. It’s like temporal hegemony. In the same way we can’t productively look to other cultures exclusively through the moral frame of our own, we can’t theorize about earlier ones with current behavior patterns as a guide.…
I miss you, Pat
I’m reading my late editor’s Weetamoo (pronounced Weh-táh-moh) book, Heart of the Pocassets. It’s a heavily-researched, 95% imagined diary of the Pocasset sachem at 14. Pat wrote it for Scholastic, for those lucky eighth-graders with an Indian History unit. It’s simple and refreshing, if light-weight for my needs. An easy little recap after the over-saturated and disturbing Mayflower. Weetamoo’s parents mandate that she find time each day to learn patience. Because the historical Weetamoo didn’t read or write (her culture didn’t use those technologies) it’s a…
Three Shouts of "Huzzah!"
A stomach bug this week afforded me time to finish Mayflower. The epilogue, where Philbrick draws most of his conclusions, is a fat hammer to the chest. And while there are many ideas worth dwelling on in there, one question has me absolutely enthralled: How did Metacom (aka Philip) go from the most hunted man in New England in the late 17th century to a mythological proto-American freedom-fighter in the early-19th? Philbrick, understandably, rushes through the intervening 150 years, and left me pondering. As I said to…
Keep On Dredging