Since this is Bloomsday for some, let me direct your attention to an old post on Scott Huler’s book, No-Man’s Lands: One Man’s Odyssey Through The Odyssey
Today Is–Do You Care?
June 16 is National Fudge Day in America. While quacks in Dublin are raising pints to each other for Bloomsday, we right-minded, freedom-loving Americans are baking fudge, pouring it on our ice cream, browsing the varieties at specialty shops, and chucking last year’s frost-burned fudge bars at errant congressmen.
But speaking of Bloomsday, Frank Delaney’s podcast actually makes Joyce’s Ulysses sound interesting. Maybe the key to enjoying Ulysses is listening to someone who’s read it talk about it.
Wild Bill's Last Trail, by Ned Buntline
According to an anecdote, E. Z. C. Judson, better known as Ned Buntline, traveled west to Fort McPherson, Nebraska, to meet the famous pistoleer, Wild Bill Hickok, about whom he wished to write dime novels. He found him in his natural environment (a saloon), and rushed up to him, crying, “There’s my man! I want you!” Hickok pulled a revolver on him and told him to be out of town in 24 hours.
Perhaps it’s the memory of Wild Bill’s nickel-plated Colt Navy .36 that accounts for the jaundiced view of the man we find in the deservedly forgotten little novel, Wild Bill’s Last Trail.
Ned Buntline
I downloaded it to read on my Kindle because I’m a Wild Bill buff, and although I’ve read much about Buntline over the years (whatever they tell you in the movies, he never gave Wyatt Earp a long-barreled revolver) but had never savored the quality of his actual prose.
Well, it’s quality prose, in the sense that pretentiousness is a quality, and floridity is a quality too.
“…there’s a shadow as cold as ice on my soul! I’ve never felt right since I pulled on that red-haired Texan at Abilene, in Kansas. You remember, for you was there. It was kill or get killed, you know, and when I let him have his ticket for a six-foot lot of ground he gave one shriek—it rings in my years yet. He spoke but one word— ‘Sister!’ Yet that word has never left my ears, sleeping or waking, from that time to this.”
I must admit that, although I expected the purple prose and the improbable action, one aspect of the book surprised me. I had expected “white hats” and “black hats,” one-dimensional good guys and bad guys. But in fact, this is a Wild West where the deer and the ambivalent play. Wild Bill is arguably the real villain, and everybody who wants to kill him (there are many) seems to have a good reason. One sympathetic character—shades of Dances With Wolves—is not only a professional killer, but has made common cause with the Sioux and plans to join Sitting Bull.
The only explanation I can think of for all this is that Ned must have really held a grudge for the Fort McPherson incident. He also finds numerous opportunities to condemn Wild Bill’s drinking (Ned Buntline made a sideline of lecturing on Temperance—utterly hypocritically, as he drank plenty himself),
I might add that the climax manages to be at once melodramatic, historically inaccurate, and confusing. If you can figure it out on the first reading, you’re a better reader than I am.
Not a good book, Wild Bill’s Last Trail is an interesting historical curiosity.
Literature vs. Trash
“Literature is the right use of language irrespective of the subject or reason of the utterance. A political speech may be, and sometimes is, literature; a sonnet to the moon may be, and often is, trash. Style is what distinguishes literature from trash,” writes Evelyn Waugh, and he backs it up too. This link is particularly relevant to our blog because I posted a G.M.Hopkins poem to the moon earlier this week.
Friedman: Is the Book Dead? Who Cares!
Publishing is still innovating, says Jane Friedman, so even if one type of book becomes permanently out of print, other types will live on. Printed books won’t go out of print any time soon, but other types me dominate the future market. Remember the first cell phones? What if today’s Kindles and Nooks looked like that in 10-20 years compared to what they will become?
An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill (Col. W. F. Cody)
Another public domain book I downloaded to my Kindle is An Autobiography of Buffalo Bill. I’d call it a pretty good acquisition for anyone interested in the Wild West. It’s not too long, and it reads pretty well for a Victorian memoir.
I personally have always viewed Buffalo Bill as a sort of supporting character to his more dangerous friend, Wild Bill Hickok. This is unfair, as Cody’s lasting achievement, both in terms of his influence on the opening of the West, and on American culture in general, far outstrips Hickok’s. One wouldn’t be far off in calling Cody America’s first great media celebrity. (Why he states in this book, without explanation, that Wild Bill ended up an “outlaw” is a mystery. But I understand they parted on bad terms.)
There’s some dispute as to how much one may trust Cody’s own account of his life. Some historians dispute, for instance, whether he ever rode for the Pony Express as he claims here (the documentary evidence is incomplete). But even adjusting for a showman’s self-promotion, it’s quite a life story. Left fatherless at an early age (his father was murdered by pro-slavery ruffians in Kansas), he provided for his mother and siblings by hunting and taking odd jobs as a wagon driver. Eventually his specialized skills and knowledge of the country made him a famous scout and buffalo hunter. This introduced him to influential men and to the press, opening doors to his ultimate career as a showman.
It’s an exciting tale, full of adventures, chases, escapes, and battles. Much is left unsaid (such as his drinking problem and his marital problems), but nobody wrote tell-alls in those days.
He ends the book with a tribute to the American Indians, expressing his respect for them as friends and enemies. He recognizes their legitimate complaints, but sees it as self-evident that the white man could make better use of the land, and so was right to take it.
Young readers should be cautioned about racial depictions common at the time, but unacceptable today. Still, they ought to read it simply as a multicultural exercise.
Everyone Has a Big One
Off topic: The Big But
Moonrise
I awoke in the Midsummer not to call night, in the white and the walk of the morning:
The moon, dwindled and thinned to the fringe of a finger-nail held to the candle,
Or paring of paradisaical fruit, lovely in waning but lustreless,
Stepped from the stool, drew back from the barrow, of dark Maenefa the mountain;
A cusp still clasped him, a fluke yet fanged him, entangled him, not quite utterly.
This was the prized, the desirable sight, unsought, presented so easily,
Parted me leaf and leaf, divided me, eyelid and eyelid of slumber.
“Moonrise” by Gerard Manley Hopkins
Stages in my decline
Those stitches in my head, installed last weekend in Story City, Iowa, came out today at my usual health provider. I wish it had been my splint coming off, but the splint is God’s way of saying, “Have I got your attention yet?” And of course the answer is no, so two more weeks with that.
My regular PA wasn’t available, so I saw another one, a very nice looking young woman. It was obvious she found me intensely attractive, but as is my wont I did not take advantage of her innocence.
I was down in Iowa for the weekend, not playing Viking but visiting family. They served steak for Sunday lunch, and my sister-in-law had to cut my meat up for me. Meanwhile, her daughter was cutting up her infant grandson’s food as well.
Thus life turns on its slow lazy susan, and what you gain on the swings you lose on the roundabouts.
On the way home I got a call from my realtor. He had been called by a lady in the gift shop at a rest stop in northern Iowa. Someone had found my wallet there (I still haven’t figured out how I dropped it), and she found his number on a card in it. He’d called the dean of the Bible school, who’d called my former boss, who gave him my cell phone number. It added better than an hour to my trip, but I got the wallet back, all money intact.
This is the upper midwest. The rules are different here.
An Unusual or Sophisticated Way of Looking at the World
Joseph Epstein reviews a writing book and spends most of his time describing the points raised in another book.
After thirty years of teaching a university course in something called advanced prose style, my accumulated wisdom on the subject, inspissated into a single thought, is that writing cannot be taught, though it can be learned—and that, friends, is the sound of one hand clapping. A. J. Liebling offers a complementary view, more concise and stripped of paradox, which runs: “The only way to write is well, and how you do it is your own damn business.”
…
In its subtlest sense style is a way of looking at the world, and an unusual or sophisticated way of doing so is not generally acquired early in life. This why good writers rarely arrive with the precocity of visual artists or musical composers or performers. Time is required to attain a point of view of sufficient depth to result in true style.
(via Books, Inq)