• It’s been a challenging time here in Sisters Country. We essentially burned up the month of August and have been living for weeks under a pall of smoke. The impact on local businesses has been painful. The week-long classic bicycle trek Cycle Oregon has been cancelled; so has the annual Shakespeare Festival; and we’re now being forced to plan some radical contingency measures for next weekend’s Sisters Folk Festival.
Oregon and Montana are both burning up — hundreds of thousands of acres; hundreds of millions of dollars spent. Something’s got to give in the way we manage our forests. More on that later. The most recent fire, which is threatening Cascade Locks in the Columbia River Gorge and raining ash on Portland, was allegedly caused by teenagers throwing firecrackers off a cliff and filming it on a cell phone. Brilliant.
• Watching Emmylou Harris at the Ryman on OPB. She’s reprising her acoustic show with The Nash Ramblers. Saw that show twice in 1992, at Universal Amphitheater in L.A. and from about six feet away at the Crazy Horse Saloon in Orange County. Met Emmy once, when I was 16. She gave me a cookie.
I’ve loved that woman for about forever. Right at this moment, she’s covering Bruce Springsteen’s Mansion on the Hill and it’s so beautiful it makes me cry.
• Finally reading No Friend But The Mountains. It is worthy. Some excellent reporting from highland conflict zones across the globe. There are remarkable similarities in mountain cultures that otherwise should have little in common. It’s a slim volume, easily read in chunks.
FARC in the Colombian highlands.
• Hosted a bookstore talk on Warriors of the Wildlands last Friday. By design, it was more of a group discussion on race and history, built around the story of Texas Ranger scout and Confederate general Ben McCulloch.
We need to talk about this stuff — not shouting across barricades or shooting off Facebook memes, but sitting down with our neighbors and hashing through the persistent and profoundly difficult matter that is fundamental to American history and culture. Watching the body language in the crowd, it was easy to see that this was acutely uncomfortable for a lot of people — and hats off to them for coming out and putting themselves through it. A woman bought a book and told me as I signed it, “I’m getting more comfortable being uncomfortable. This helped me with that.” I consider that a win.
The study of history — the HONEST study of history — demands a certain level of comfort with discomfort. And if you let it, it can train you to thrive in it.
• Deuce Richardson scouted up a forthcoming Netflix project titled Outlaw King, telling the story of Scotland’s Robert the Bruce. Several of the key figures involved were on the masterpiece Hell Or High Water, which bodes very well indeed.
• I am highly seasonally affective. When the season tips toward autumn, I feel acutely the pull of my ancient Celtic/Germanic bloodlines. Listening to Wardruna and the roar of the pipes and drums.
I have been waiting to delve into Season 2 of the Netflix production of Bernard Cornwall’s Saxon saga, The Last Kingdom. Perhaps it’s time…
It is a fine frontier tale, from the era when the Danes were campaigning hard in southern England and Alfred was the last, flimsy christian bulwark of the titular last kingdom. Uthred is a classic frontier “man of the middle ground,” caught between the cultures of his native Christian Saxons and the pagan Danes who raised him.
• Saw Wind River last week. Must say, a film thematically centered around lost daughters is not necessarily the ideal movie for a dad about to send his daughter off to college. It was kinda tough on me, I’ll admit. Taylor Sheridan is a man of brutal sensibilities. See it. It’s Frontier Partisan to the core. Also, as Craig Rullman said, the FBI agent Jane makes some pretty damn good mag changes. And I miss my .45-70.
• Fixing to head back down Colombia way for another season of Narcos, which dropped on Netflix on Friday, September 1. The first two seasons focused on the rise and spectacular fall of Pablo Escobar, and they were magnificent. It’s hard to imagine another tale clearing the bar set in the Escobar story, which is some of the best TV I’ve ever seen. Yet, as they say, the blow must go on. And by all accounts, Narcos S3 is every bit as good as the original — focused now on the Cali Cartel. The Orejuela brothers were smarter and less flamboyant than Escobar, and less likely to lash out in self-destructive acts of rage-filled violence. That, of course, made them all the deadlier.
From CNN:
Throughout, ‘Narcos’ remains tense — almost unbearably so at times — bleak and disturbing, the prevailing theme and main connective tissue being that authorities are ultimately playing an elaborate game of Whac-a-Mole, meaning that decapitating one drug honcho will, in this case, simply sprout four more.
And that’s the story of the Kingpin Strategy in a nutshell.
https://www.youtube.com/watch?time_continue=138&v=Ory6b2EJ3Bk
And… in October comes Damnation, which looks like a Western set in the Midwest during the Great Depression.
An epic saga about the secret history of the 1930s American heartland, Damnation centers on the mythic conflict and bloody struggle between big money and the downtrodden, God and greed, charlatans, and prophets. The pilot introduces Seth Davenport, a man masquerading as a small town Iowa preacher in the hopes of starting a full-blown insurrection against the status quo. Focused on his mission, he is unaware that an industrialist tycoon has hired a professional strikebreaker named Creeley Turner to stop the uprising by any means necessary. But unbeknownst to those around them, these two men already share a secret bloody past.
Paul McNamee says
My contributions;
Well, I know this crowd tends more toward non-fiction reading when it comes to history but I have to mention D. J. (Dave) Butler’s WITCHY EYE, which is not only alternate history of North America (and the world) but also fantasy. Pennsylvania is an empire, pushing into Ohio and Native American lands. Andrew Jackson tried to make himself king and his corpse hangs in a gallows cage in New Orleans. In this new, early 1800s world, Sarah Calhoun is a young Appalachian woman whose world gets turned upside down when she learns she is destined to rule her own kingdom.
It’s hard to sum it all up, it’s an experience to read. Butler has created a rich fantasy world ripe with Americana flintlock & tomahawk ambience.
http://paulmcnamee.blogspot.com/2017/08/recent-read-witchy-eye.html
Also, you found this article about a Mainer trying to recreate Benedict Arnold’s foray into Quebec.
http://m.penbaypilot.com/article/camden-man-recreate-benedict-arnold-expedition-seize-quebec/91078
That led me to poke around Amazon and discover that NORTHWEST PASSAGE, the novel, has *finally* been made available in ebook (Kindle, anyway.)
http://www.amazon.com/Northwest-Passage-Kenneth-Roberts-ebook/dp/B01N4EEDY9
JimC says
Yes! Sounds like a perfect fall read.
lane batot says
ANY BOOK that has Andrew Jackson’s corpse in a gallows cage sounds like worthwhile reading to me!
Dave says
You met Emmylou Harris?!
And she gave you a cookie?!
Now I am REALLY envious.
JimC says
Truth. Greek Theater, Los Angeles, 1982.
Greg Marshall says
We’re up on the coast of BC, and getting the smoke from the Washington state fires today. Overnight low here was 24C (75F) which is unheard of on the coast. The smoke is trapping yesterday’s daytime heat. You can smell it in the air, and there was no real sunrise this morning. We’d normally be paddling outrigger with our crew today but it is not a day for aerobic activity if it can be avoided. The air is thick and hard to breathe.
We can’t shoot in the woods here, or at our range. There’s too much danger of random ignition of forest litter by projectiles or vehicle exhaust, I’m told. Can’t think my little .22 pills would cause harm, but better safe in this case. I just read a news item about an idiot who was complaining about his $1200 for fine for tossing a cigarette butt out his vehicle window. My sympathy is modest.
You have many distractions to look forward to. Be careful with that Narcos S.03 thing. You could lose a day, easily. Worse than potato chips.
Thanks for the book suggestions. Cruising Amazon is my next duty, after making another pot of coffee.
Thanks for the words of wisdom regarding dealing with our histories. I think this is a direction that we should be moving in. We’ve spent several days this summer trying to listen to our First Nations as they describe their most recent (post-colonial) world. Only time travel could fix these problems. Reconciliation is along process and you have to spend a LOT of time listening to others. Not for the faint of heart, or for the weak of spirit.
JimC says
Good stuff Greg. The first rains of autumn can’t come soon enough.
Sounds like somebody already binged….
True words on reconciliation — and that’s the right term, I think. Perhaps I’ll write more on this. Part of the problem is that First Nations peoples and the descendants of slaves and of Mexicans for whom the border crossed them, not the other way around, all want their stories to be acknowledged and understood. And they should be. MUST be. On the other hand, the heirs of the dominant culture don’t want to see their own legacy trashed in order to exalt another, or be made to feel that they should feel perpetual guilt for sins and crimes they themselves did not perpetrate. That’s not an unreasonable or “racist” attitude.
Obviously, there’s no easy way to negotiate this thicket, but LISTENING is a good start.
Matthew says
You mention that you have ancient Germanic/Celtic bloodlines. That’s more or less my descent as well. I also have both deep south and Midwest abolitionists descent. But as Waylon said The Ghost of General Lee can see us fighting the Civil War
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=p-MX0PXDWis
On a geekier note, the picture of the beautiful FARC with a gun reminded of one of my favorite manga characters. A recurring character in Black Lagoon was a FARC assassin turned maid….
http://lagooncompany.wikia.com/wiki/Rosarita_Cisneros
Matthew says
Oh, I recently finished The Curved Sword by Howard Lamb. It’s strange that Lamb was almost forgotten when he was one of the best adventure writers ever.
Still, reading Fighting Men by Jim Morris about his time in Vietnam
JimC says
Lamb is truly great.
Matthew says
Lamb is proof to me that there are undoubtedly great writers who have been forgotten. Manly Wade Wellman and Leigh Brackett being two others. Unfortunately, sometimes a writer survives “the test of time” because Academics love it, not ordinary people. Still, don’t get what’s so great about the Great Gatsby.
JimC says
I despise Fitzgerald and I despise that book.
JosieW says
Word. I knew there was something I liked about you.
Matthew says
It is a bit hard to explain what’s wrong with the Great Gatsby, though. It has some beautiful if heavy handed prose. The characterization is decent, though not great. I think it was basically somewhat immature. All the characters seem to act like they are in high school. Gatsby despite his achievements is still stupidly infatuated with Daisy. Despite the theme of the book being something like “money won’t buy you happiness” Fitzgerald both as a writer and a person is fixated on luxury. Look how many scenes there are of boring parties.
Also, Gatsby dies in the most contrived way in all of literature.
JimC says
The Snows of Kilamanjaro:
“poor Scott Fitzgerald and his romantic awe of [ the rich ] and how he had started a story once that began, ‘The very rich are different from you and me.’ And how someone had said to Scott, yes, they have more money.”
Matthew says
Somewhere I read that Gatsby’s problem was that he was a romantic. Personally, I think both Gatsby and Fitzgerald’s problem was that they were a stupid romantic. Why be in awe of the rich? Gatsby was himself a romanticized version of Fitzgerald. A war hero while F. Scott spent his time in the War drinking and annoying Dwight D. Eisenhower. Gatsby was a mid-westerner who built a fortune (illegally but still) Fitzgerald fancied himself a mid-westerner but grew up in New York state. He spent money he didn’t have.
Two facts about works related to Snows of Kiamanjaro:
One issue of the comic Jon Sable, Freelance has Sable hike pass the froze corpse of a leopard mentioned in the story.
An episode of the anime Cowboy Bebop has the story recanted by one of the characters. Who says he hates the story 🙂
JimC says
Awe of the rich never did anybody any good.
Love it.
Matthew says
Just out of curiosity have you gotten around to reading any of Mike Grell’s John Sable? It’s been mention on this board and you said you needed to read it. (Actually, I’m pretty sure anything by Mike Grell will be up your alley.)
JimC says
Not yet.
J.F. Bell says
Here there be tangents.
Ever since I was big enough to read I’ve always had reading material around. Books, magazines, newspapers, magazines, old army field manuals…you name it. About the only thing I missed was comic books. Never really got the superhero bug. To each their own. But I always read, and come middle school it perplexed and frustrated my teachers to no end that I frequently did so poorly where comprehension was concerned. Had I not read the material? Did I take careful notes? Why could I not figure out what the author was saying?
I could figure out what the author was saying easy enough. Thing was…I didn’t care. This was decidedly not helped by the reading list. English teachers tend to like the sort of thick, layered narrative that slowly reveals some kind of human truth, or stands up a great allegory, or enriches the human experience…whatever that’s supposed to mean. I (and my reading friends at the time) wanted primarily to be entertained. If we picked up some kind of useful skill that’d be okay, too.
This lightning bolt hit somewhere around seventh or eighth grade. In class we were slogging through Ethan Frome, which is a fine sort of book if you’re into dreary New England winters, low-grade discord in the home, and altogether unsatisfying action sequences which fail entirely to kill the kind of insipid drones who pass for characters in these things. I believe that’s known in the common parlance as Great Literature ™.
So there I was, turning in C- and D-grade papers and dreading quiz days. Meantime, I was burning through a thousand pages every two weeks on my own time. The key difference was that my own selections weren’t Great Literature ™. Puzzling (to them) that I could finish off Thirty Second Over Tokyo or Away All Boats or any of that schlock by Stephen Hunter or Bernard Cornwell or Larry McMurtry (I didn’t find out about Cormac McCarthy until college) but just COULD NOT get my head around majority of our reading list.
None of which, you know, involved people going out and doing things. There were a few exceptions, naturally. The morbid qualities of Edgar Allen Poe were always a hit. Some of Faulkner’s work was alright, and nine times in ten Hemingway was reliably interesting. I probably read Alas, Babylon four times while it was lent to me. But those were the exceptions.
I can’t speak for teenage girls, but for a boy that age there’s not much worse than being forced to sit through a couple of hundred pages of dreck built on ‘emotions’ or ‘society’ or ‘convention’ or God forbid, ‘relationships’. As man’s interest in reading goes, that shit at that age is poison. Most would far sooner be airdropped onto a deserted island with a machete and box of matches than forced to sit through that brand of soul-crushing monotony. The former might kill them, of course, but at least they’d get to jump out of an airplane.
For its considerable horrors, Lord of the Flies is vastly preferable rich people in New York (Fitzgerald), the social habits of English aristocrats (Austin), or Cajun feminism (Chopin). The story of a man turning into a giant cockroach (Kafka) proved a bitter disappointment, and I’m still not sure what we were supposed to learn from killing strangers on the beach (Camus).
But of course these are Great Literature™ and us mortal peasants may not look askance at their majesty and significance.
JimC says
You are speaking to and for boys and men the world over. Why do men “not read”? Because they associate it with torture, inflicted to “improve their minds.” Bah! Give em stories with people going out and doing things and they’ll read. Ain’t that hard to figure out.
J.F. Bell says
Semi-related…as I’ve thought on it in the years since, I can’t for the life of me understand the scorn with which so many of our enlightened types regard the kid reading comic books.
Like I said, comics weren’t my thing. But they still require reading, and if you got a kid who’ll do it of their volition, you’re halfway to Howard, Lovecraft, L’Amour…whoever. And believe it or not, if you can get somebody into pulp adventure Hemingway becomes an easy sell. Get Hemingway and you get his contemporaries, and even if they don’t come away from Gatsby with the Great American Novel-tinted glasses, they might find something worthwhile meeting the book on its own terms.
…nah. Scratch that. Better to keep those unwashed, unenlightened, un-pedigreed commoners out. For all we know they might bring new ideas to table, and God forbid our culture countenance such a horror.
JimC says
Jack London. Give em Jack London!
Matthew says
My Dad read Jack London to me. Personally, I think they should teach Jack Schaeffer’s Shane instead of Gatsby. I liked the Old Man in the Sea. Never liked A Seperate Peace which takes it’s name from Hemingway novel, but I felt was worse than Gatsby.
J.F. Bell says
I think the qualities of good reading (stepping aside the Great Literature mess for a moment) boils down to one simple aspect. It’s not the time period or the physical location or the page count. It’s not witty turns of phrase or fantastic settings.
It’s an able man in a dangerous circumstance.
Our hero might be trapped inside his collapsing home on the sea floor with a couple of hours’ oxygen left. He may be the brakeman on the detached half of a runaway train screaming down the mountain towards an express loaded with passengers. He may be the last paratrooper in his stick dropped in hostile country miles from the nearest friendly forces. He may be a bomb-disposal technician perched over a thousand pounds of high explosive that may go if he breathes wrong. He might be a private eye working in the slums, or the only man alive on a heretofore uncharted island. He may be a hostage negotiator, or a surgeon, or a skinny nerd in horn-rimmed glasses trying to bring a handful of his astronaut colleagues home.
Whatever he is, he faces a clear (if complex) challenge. Over the course of the story we expect to see him address this, whether by wits or physical prowess. When it’s all said and done we can cheer the protagonist that makes it or admire the one who gave as good as he got went down fighting.
Regardless, we want to see him try. And we want him to win, but not easily.
And this is where Gatsby goes flat. We have a story of people dangerous mostly to themselves in lieu of an actual conflict. Our protagonist is a fool related by a colorless narrator in the company of people whose lives are largely devoid of anything approaching conflict.
Nobody’s competent because nobody has to be. What we get instead is arrogance and carelessness piled atop misfortune and chance. At only one point does any character do anything of consequence – except the consequence falls elsewhere.
Elsewhere, an American partisan fighting in the Spanish Civil War wants to blow up a bridge. Three men in a rickety boat want to kill a Great White. A Ranger captain and his squad have to find the last of four brothers in the bloody days after the Normandy landings. A misfit group of gunfighters band together to save a small Mexican town. A farm kid, a princess, and a smuggler work to blow up a planet-killing superweapon. Scientists at a remote arctic station realize an unseen terror moves among them. A man left for dead by his comrades drags himself through the heart of winter for revenge.
…one marvels at the popularity of these clearly inferior stories.
Now if only there was a blog or a website that talked about this kind of thing….
JimC says
Somebody needs to set that blog up.
Matthew says
“Nobody’s competent because nobody has to be. What we get instead is arrogance and carelessness piled atop misfortune and chance. At only one point does any character do anything of consequence – except the consequence falls elsewhere.”
Arguably, that was Fitzgerald’s point. It still doesn’t explain why I should care. I was never in awe of the rich and I’m not sure why Fitzgerald was. Also, I’m pretty sure he was just angry that Ginerva King dumped him.
JimC says
Simply put, Fitzgerald was a pussy.
Matthew says
I’m pretty sure that’s what frustrated Hemingway about Fitzgerald. People say Hemingway was kind of a bully and he was. But his frustrations about Fitzgerald came from a very real place.
I wonder what Robert E. Howard and Ernest Hemingway would think about each other if they met.
Saddle Tramp says
Jim,
My first weekend out in Amarillo during my 8 years there I went into a restaurant where I saw a Mexican girl wearing a Tee Shirt that said:
The border crossed us we did not cross the border. What’s your problem?
This was 21 years ago.
We have no leadership only divisive rhetoric and policies.
I alluded to our vulnerability in previous correspondence. The world depends on the vast majority to be somewhat sane or at a minimum harmless. A democracy is so fragile and nature even more so…
Heading west on I-84 back to I-5 and south.
I-84 closed at Troutdale just on the other side of where I just delivered.
— ST