Robert R. Mitchell's Blog, page 8

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When everything grinds to a halt in 19 minutes, grab a beer, put up your feet and fire up a good book.

Here, this one even talks about pumpkins!

"That was one thing he liked about Southern California: the daddy longlegs.  The only time he remembered seeing daddy longlegs back in Washington was when he lowered his head to the ground and peered into the musty twilight beneath the pumpkin vines in his family’s vegetable garden.  A different world existed beneath the monstrous green leaves, a lush miniature jungle-like world in which weeds died from lack of sunlight and daddy longlegs moved about like the alien machines in H.G. Wells’ War of the Worlds radio presentation his parents had on cassette tape."

Page 53 - Only Shot At A Good Tombstone
Copyright 2010 by Robert R. Mitchell

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Huck and/or Scooter?

The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


I reread Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn after reading Albert Murray’s Train Whistle Guitar and heretically wondering if Murray’s work wasn’t actually a superior work overall and one that could potentially replace Huck Finn in curricula across the country or at least act as yang to Twain’s yin. In terms of writers working on many different levels simultaneously, Shakespeare perhaps being the ultimate example, Murray surpasses Twain. Twain was the quintessential American: journalist, riverboat pilot, essayist, entertainer, publisher and entrepreneur. To the best of my limited knowledge, however, he was never accused of being an intellectual, even after writing more philosophical works later in life. When we read Huck Finn we’re usually working with very few subtexts: Twain’s prose isn’t juggling five or six balls, it’s juggling two or three at the most. It’s not surprising that Ernest Hemingway, another iconic American writer whose prose was lean, linear and literal, wrote in his Green Hills of Africa that “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called Huckleberry Finn….All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.” Murray celebrated Hemingway in at least one of his now-famous interviews. I haven’t yet found a similar quote about Mark Twain to prove it, but I’d argue that Murray would have also celebrated Mark Twain’s writing. In the end, while most folks would agree that layers of meaning and the ability to juggle five balls simultaneously are good things, we can’t really deem works by Twain and Hemingway inferior to Murray’s elaborate orchestrations any more than we can discount Bob Dylan’s music because he’s “just” playing the guitar and harmonica.

Twain called Tom Sawyer his “hymn to boyhood” and Huckleberry Finn arguably provides the next three verses and a stirring chorus to boot. These two works not only blazed the trail, they forever enshrined the coarsely sincere, rough and tumble American boyhood as the Eden to which we can never return. These days we follow our sons with webcams, texts and GPS. Huck Finn, barely into his teens, was just fine hunting, fishing and camping on his own for as long as he needed to. We could speculate all day about whether Albert Murray would have written Train Whistle Guitar the same way in a world without Huckleberry Finn, but the fact that Twain endured the criticism and bans from prissy contemporaries eager to distance themselves and their vision of a respectable and civilized America from the muddy miscreants of the Mississippi cannot be ignored.

Twain’s Eden isn’t a garden, it’s a river. T.S. Eliot wrote: “Thus the River makes the book a great book. As with Conrad, we are continually reminded of the power and terror, of Nature, and the isolation and feebleness of Man. Conrad remains always the European observer of the tropics, the white man’s eye contemplating the Congo and its black gods. But Mark Twain is a native, and the River God is his God.” The Mississippi River is truly the omnipresent force in The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Huck is never far from it and the most powerful passages are those when he is on it. It is a presence mirrored to a certain extent by Nature as a whole in and around Murray’s Gasoline Point, but not to the same primeval degree.

Race, of course, is the focal point for most of the modern controversy surrounding Huckleberry Finn and it’s admittedly one of the reasons I wondered if Train Whistle Guitar might be a good alternative, at least in the schools. Huckleberry Finn provides one of the most damning accounts of slavery and racism that you will find in literature. Twain doesn’t preach: the characters speak for themselves honestly and candidly and the result often leaves the reader literally gasping. If modern readers have both the maturity and grasp of American history and literature required to effectively engage themselves with this work and deal with the ubiquitous n-word, they will finish the journey viscerally moved by the horror of slavery and the strength of spirit of those who endured and resisted it. That is the rub. If I were a high school English teacher today with a class of 30 students, only three of whom were African American (typical for many Western Washington suburban classrooms), I (being white myself) would not know how to successfully teach Huck Finn. I’m not saying it’s impossible, I’m saying I wouldn’t know how to do it without the n-word potentially turning the whole effort on its head.

Train Whistle Guitar, a magnificent work arguably more complex and sophisticated than Huck Finn, depicts a Southern black community in the 1920s. It is also full of the n-word. While still controversial, it is (for better or worse) less shocking for modern American audiences to hear African Americans using the n-word than it is to hear white folks using it. Ideally, Twain’s and Murray’s works should be taught together as literary bookends of the Civil War, yin and yang. With that said, there’s no easy or universal answer. There are classrooms in America today that look out at homes still flying the Confederate flag on front yard flagpoles. Bullying has entered the digital age with disastrous results. Public discourse is now defined by three-letter acronyms and 140-character tweets. The fact that The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn continues to move and inspire us, however, means we shouldn’t give up trying to teach it. We should also reread it every few years ourselves. It is truly that good. While we’re at it, add Albert Murray to the mix. I bet Samuel Clemens would be happy to share the stage.




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A Cautionary Tale

Pumpkin Seed Point: Being Within The Hopi by Frank Waters

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


If Pumpkin Seed Point had been written today, it might have been subtitled “The Making of the Book of the Hopi.” I wonder if back in the late sixties and early seventies, this was a rather original idea, to write a book about the writing of a book. Regardless, we are truly fortunate Frank Waters did, because so many of us Second Peoples, Third Peoples and Fourth Peoples today in the 21st century still find ourselves looking to our continent’s First Peoples for the spirituality our psyche tells us is missing from our own souls whether we espouse religious beliefs or not. All too often, we read a few books about Native Americans and consider ourselves blood brothers and scholars, confident enough in our standing to speak with authority on Native American issues and beliefs at cocktail parties and book club gatherings. Frank Waters, on the other hand, studied Native American history and beliefs all his life and lived with the Hopi for three years. He came away from the experience at Pumpkin Seed Point with the material for his book; several haunting, prophesied dreams and the brutal truth that a white guy spending three years within a First People community neither guarantees total enlightenment nor secures absolution and communion. In that sense, Pumpkin Seed Point is both a catalyst for additional study and a cautionary tale that there are limits to what we can expect.

Previous reviewers have already rightly pointed out that while Waters has more than enough progressive credentials, he is neither entirely objective nor immune from the latent racism that still infects even the most “open-minded” of us today. Waters clearly outlines what he experienced and hoped to achieve in his succinct Foreword and makes no bones about the Jungian framework in which he interprets all that occurs around him. While compelling, this approach eliminates other potential lenses through which the Hopi beliefs and traditions could be viewed with equal efficacy. Additionally, although he explicitly distances himself from Joseph Conrad, his association of Native Americans with Jung’s collective unconscious leads us down a path that veers uncomfortably close to a “Heart of Darkness” paradigm. We late comers envy First Peoples’ spiritually and geographically uninterrupted link with the primordial. For Americans raised in a Judeo-Christian tradition, the Hopi’s stories of ancient migrations on the American continent in many ways resonate more profoundly than those of a Mesopotamian Eden or Middle Eastern Moses. It is for this reason, largely, that I plan to do more reading on the ancient Americans. With that said, I will work to keep Waters’ cautionary tale front of mind lest I objectify those I still stubbornly turn to for a glimpse of the transcendent.




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A potentially superior counterpart to Twain's Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

Train Whistle Guitar by Albert Murray

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


The fact that I am just now reading Albert Murray, 97 years after his birth and a month after his death, is troubling. I should have learned about him in high school, should have taken a class focused solely on his works in college and should have been talking about him with our two sons in the same conversations in which I mentioned Hemingway, Faulkner, Steinbeck, Salinger, Kerouac and Twain. It isn’t the fault of the preceding giants of literature that they were white men, but it is my fault, and perhaps that of our society, that intellectuals like Murray who wrote with the same degree of artistry but offered the additional benefit of a cohesive theoretical/critical framework underpinning his work were intentionally or unintentionally relegated to the outskirts of our collective, literary consciousness like the inhabitants of Scooter’s “briarpatch,” Gasoline Point. I’m so shocked, in fact, at the apparent disparity between Train Whistle Guitar and Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, justifiably accepted by most scholars as a keystone of American literature, that I’ll be re-reading Huck Finn before completing Murray’s semi-autobiographical trilogy.

My initial gut reaction, however, is that Murray’s work offers both the casual reader and the serious student everything that Huck Finn offers and much more. There is the same earthy, history-rich colloquialisms of the American South, but Murray manages to seamlessly augment them with the music-born poetry/prose we so often attribute almost exclusively to Kerouac. Twain is justifiably credited for illustrating the disparate lives of blacks and whites in the Antebellum South but inescapably does so from the perspective of those in power. Because Murray both grew up in a community like Gasoline Point and approached the story with the eye of a forensic poet, we are presented not only with the words of disenfranchised African Americans but their thoughts and the first-hand symbol-rich detail that even the most empathetic outsider would have missed. Even the flora of the first few pages speak volumes to the socioeconomic status and Nature-centric lifestyle of Gasoline Point’s residents. For an introduction to the power of plants in Murray’s work read Bert Hitchcock’s fascinating essay on the “chinaberry tree” in “Albert Murray and the Aesthetic Imagination of a Nation” edited by Barbara A. Baker. And then there is the music: the Blues which evolved and gave birth to Jazz which in turn informed Murray’s art and his theories about race in America, literature and literary criticism. Murray once said “We invented the blues. Europeans invented psychoanalysis. You invent what you need.” While my review has focused mainly on the historical and critical importance of Train Whistle Guitar, without the blues-infused emotions of the work, it wouldn't move us enough to be worth analyzing.




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Sunset and rye

"So they drank to Job. Rye whiskey and beer. And the sun sank behind distant foothills, leaving its deep red stain on the western sky.  The oscillating fan hummed, left and then right, left and then right, like a soldier on guard duty after Taps.  The clanging sounds of rush hour subsided, leaving the apartment building immersed in its own easy buzz of air conditioners, televisions and dinner conversations.  The ancient olive green refrigerator periodically clicked and whirred with metallic hunger pains. Wilson and the young man drank quietly for half an hour before either spoke."

From page 41 of Only Shot at a Good Tombstone Copyright 2010 Robert R. Mitchell

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Reading and Reviewing

If all goes according to plan, I'll be reading and reviewing Albert Murray's Scooter trilogy: Train Whistle Guitar, The Spyglass Tree and The Seven League Boots starting this Friday. Albert Murray is one of those writers whom I really should have read long before now. Time to make up for my failing! A bonus would be to finish the trilogy AND continue learning about the Hopi with Pumpkin Seed Point: Being Within The Hopi and the Woman of Otowi Crossing with The House at Otowi Bridge: The Story of Edith Warner and Los Alamos. Looking forward to it.

Peaches

We weren't surprised when the inevitable happened. The young man’s father retired with a decent pension after 30 years with the same company and their house sold for twice what they’d paid for it.  He and his wife bought an RV and headed out to discover America before it became an infinitely repeating landscape of Applebee’s, Wal-Marts and SuperMalls. The young man, on the other hand, had his own ideas. He was tired of the perpetual grey, the gloom, and the brooding pissing sky. He dreamt of sunshine and heat. He was tired of bundled-up, burnt umber granola chicks; of parkas and long coats and scarves and hats. He wanted to watch girls in bikinis roller-blading past sunny beaches.  He was tired of his neighborhood in particular and the suburbs in general. He wanted to leave before some kid got run over by one of the maniacal mini-van driving moms who careened through the streets in desperate attempts to get home before Oprah started.  The way he talked about moving south reminded us of the Joads in Grapes of Wrath. He was a smart kid, but all he was thinking about was peaches.

Only Shot At A Good Tombstone (p. 24) Copyright 2010 by Robert R. Mitchell


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Who the hell is Frank Waters?

Woman At Otowi Crossing by Frank Waters

My rating: 5 of 5 stars


One of the benefits of reading The Woman At Otowi Crossing was that I was forced to admit that not only am I woefully ignorant about the American Southwest, but there is a ton of history, religion, philosophy, science and mysticism tied to an area I had written off as “that hot stretch between California and Texas.” Another confession: ignoring all evidence to the contrary, as a Washingtonian, I have always claimed Colorado as one of “our” states (i.e. northwestern), mentally fudging its location to approximately that of southern Montana and northern Wyoming, two states I am at times guilty of disregarding entirely. Thanks to Frank Waters’ tremendous novel, my geographic prejudices have been corrected and a vast territory has been opened for me to belatedly explore.

Fortunately, there are millions of folks out there who have lived and breathed the Southwest all their lives and many of them have opinions about Water’s depiction of Edith Warner, the “Woman” of the title. This isn’t surprising since Ms. Warner perfectly personifies the unique intersection of past, present and future (concepts she ironically didn’t believe in); of Spanish, Native American and Anglo; and of science, religion and mysticism; that existed where two bridges, railroad and automobile, crossed the Rio Grande down the hill from the top secret Los Alamos Laboratory. In deference to the debate, I plan to check out The House at Otowi Bridge: The Story of Edith Warner and Los Alamos written by one of her close friends, a distinguished American Poet, Peggy Pond Church; as well as Patrick Burns’ In the Shadow of Los Alamos: Selected Writings of Edith Warner. With that said, Waters’ perspective appears to be unique because he worked at Los Alamos and spent years studying Hopi, Pueblo and Navaho culture and history.

At first I was surprised there haven’t been more retellings (that I could find) of what is truly a remarkable American story, but after reading Waters’ book, I realized that the gripping subject matter is both a blessing and a curse. While intrinsically fascinating, it would be awfully easy to muck up the story with anything more dramatic than an encyclopedia entry. Waters pulls it off with an almost journalistic objectivity (he was also a newsman), in which human beings with normal human failings and passions collide like the atoms on top of the hill. There are no saints, only sinners and if you thought that the Pancho’s Bar scene in The Right Stuff was anachronistic, wait until you read about Manhattan Project scientists helping patch the roof of a tearoom without running water. You’ll find those kinds of juxtapositions throughout this captivating novel. Underlying it all, of course, is the question of perception and reality. The people, the landscape and the events transfix us, but we’re constantly challenged to decide whether any of it truly matters (pun intended).



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Review of Elaine Pagels' Adam, Eve, and The Serpent

Adam, Eve and the Serpent by Elaine Pagels

My rating: 4 of 5 stars


In spite of Pagels’ thorough Introduction and well-known areas of expertise, I was for some reason still looking for a comparative religions-type approach to the Eden account when I began Adam, Eve, and The Serpent. I stubbornly held out hope until I reached the Epilogue and read that the book was born from her quest for “a ‘golden age’ of purer and simpler Christianity” and became an analysis of “how Christians have interpreted the creation accounts of Genesis.” I won’t tell you whether Pagels found her “golden age” but I will tell you that my comical degree of stubbornness pales in comparison to that exhibited by many of the early Christians’ leaders. Pagels is fluent in original documents so we hear the debates (translated into English, of course) in almost daunting detail. While the debate about celibacy, for example, seemed to drone on forever, the thing that really struck me while reading this book is how quickly human beings f*** things up. Seriously. It only took about 300 years to go from Jesus delivering the Beatitudes to the birth of Augustine who argued (successfully) that physical violence is an entirely appropriate response to heresy. And the kicker? The kicker is that we weren't even arguing about stuff Jesus said. We were arguing about Original Sin, Free Will, Sex and a bunch of other Capitalized Concepts that were defined by……you guessed it: the account of Adam, Eve and The Serpent.



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Washington State is divided in half

An ode to Eastern Washington:

That’s where his father’d done his first “real” duck hunting: the ancient, sparsely-populated, wild land of coulees, potholes, wasteways, dunes, seeps, canals, aqueducts, siphons and petrified wood; a land where constant, day-long, dry, buffeting, chapping winds that make you yell to be heard and fill your ears like cotton, threaten to wear the skin from your face; the land of exploding cock pheasants and sagebrush that dies and detaches itself from the earth to roll across the hard dry ground, dropping seeds as it goes like a spawning desert salmon; the land of nuclear reactors and Cold War million-gallon tanks of radioactive sludge, the poisonous cost of freedom; the dusty, arid land ironically defined by the occasional appearances of water; the land of cattail-rimmed, creek-fed ponds, and supersonic, whistling teal that rocket overhead in green and blue streaks, dodging shotgun blasts like Catch-22 pilots avoiding flak; Woody Guthrie’s land of massive concrete dams and reservoirs and manmade lakes and hydroelectric power that illuminates the steel and glass skyscrapers way out West across the mountains where the cities are; the land of skinny, sun-crazed coyotes that circle and howl and yip in the night’s silver sunlight; circling around the poor greenhorn who must clean the hunting party’s ducks on the muddy banks of the pond while the other guys, back at the pickup trucks 300 yards away, pull out their predator calls and laughingly call the hungry dogs in closer.

Only Shot At A Good Tombstone copyright 2010 by Robert R. Mitchell

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