Had a very pleasant TV evening last night. One of our PBS stations was doing one of its increasingly frequent telethons, and they broadcast the “Celtic Woman: The New Journey” concert.

I avoided “Celtic Woman” the first few times they broadcast it (I’ve never actually seen the original concert). The simple pairing of adjective and noun in the title somehow communicated an image of aggressive, ugly feminism. Betty Friedan with a harp. Gloria Steinem burning some randomly selected male in a wicker man… er, person.

What was my amazement, then, to discover that the production is actually a marvelously staged concert featuring lovely women in pretty gowns, singing their little hearts out in voices right up there in the Sissel class. And the cutest little blonde you ever saw (who obviously knows how cute she is, and works it) dances and fiddles simultaneously, to the wonderment of all.

That’s entertainment. If you haven’t seen it yet, watch it the next time your PBS station begs for money (any minute now, probably).

Just don’t make a pledge.

After writing about Forrest Carter the other day, and getting my TV picture back, I decided to watch my DVD of The Outlaw Josey Wales.

Brought back memories, it did. No movie has ever invaded and inhabited my life like that one did. I saw it thirteen times, back when you actually had to go to a theater and buy a ticket if you wanted to see a movie.

It resonated with things going on in my own life at the time (including a temporary move to Missouri, which I may tell you about someday if you’re good).

And I was deeply fascinated with the Wild West, particularly the Missouri border war, at the time. I even bought a couple replica cap and ball Colts, which I practiced with a lot (the folks were still on the farm back then, and I could drive down and shoot without paying any range fees).

I much appreciated the pistols in the movie. I was constantly aware, as I watched, of how many bullets Josey had fired. Because with cap and ball, you’ve got to be aware. Those old charcoal burners can’t be speed loaded. It involves a rather painstaking process of measuring in powder, jamming the ball home, and capping the nipple, one round at a time (you also cover the chamber opening with grease, to prevent chain firing). Which is why Josey Wales carries so much iron. It’s not an exaggeration in the movie. For a man in his situation, to carry one pistol would be suicidal, and two would be barely adequate. There’s not only the issue of being unable to re-load under fire. Those caps also have a way of jumping inside the cocked hammer, getting down into the mechanism, and jamming the whole pistol for you.

Thinking about the story, and about Forrest Carter’s life story (which remains in large part a mystery), I came up with a theory about this white supremacist and speechwriter for George Wallace who turned himself into a renowned New Age Cherokee wise man.

I think Gone To Texas (the novel on which The Outlaw Josey Wales is based) is to a large degree autobiographical.

The story of Josey Wales (if you haven’t seen the movie) is of a man who has been on the losing side in a war. He has lost his family, and the entire way of life he has known has been taken away by the government. He flees to Texas, robbing a bank on the way to pay his expenses (this is a difference between the book and the movie. In the movie Josey’s young friend is wounded by nasty Union soldiers who treacherously offered the guerrillas amnesty, then ambushed them when they’d given up their weapons. In the book, he’s shot while they’re robbing a carpetbagger bank). Along the way, Josey joins up with two Indians, and then with other whites, and they all make a new life in Texas thanks to Josey’s shootin’ skills and personal integrity. In the end Josey finds peace, living under a new name.

Asa Carter was on the losing side of the Civil Rights conflict. Politically ruined, he fled to Texas too, assuming the identity of a Cherokee along the way and taking a new name. He also robbed the “carpetbaggers,” not with a pistol, but with a “big con.” A huge, beautiful con that worked like a charm almost to the end.

I could wish he were a more sympathetic character, because he played the American left like a country fiddle.

He knew that in the new, post-segregation world, he could never be a big, important man as a white man obsessed with race.

But he figured out that he could become a big, important man as a Native American obsessed with race.

We hate white racists. But we love Indian racists.

He knew that he’d never get a book published and made into a movie writing as a white man who hates the government.

But he figured out he could write an anti-government book, and get a movie deal, if he moved the story back to the Civil War, when the government was Republican (Hollywood hates Republicans even a century ago, when the Republicans were the liberals. Check it out. Find me a recent movie set in the 19th Century that has a single good thing to say about Republicans, even though they were the party of abolition and rights for black people).

(As a parenthetical note, the scaly senator in the ambush scene in the movie is an actual historical character, Sen. Jim Lane (R) of Kansas, one of the slimier specimens to ever slither through American politics, which is saying a lot. He went to Kansas as a pro-slavery man, but quickly realized that prospects were better on the abolitionist side, and so “flip-flopped.” He used to make it a point to attend revival meetings on his campaign trips, and would go weeping to the altar rail, over and over again, after which he would allow himself to be baptized by the preacher. One farmer is said to have told his son, “Don’t water the cows downstream from where they baptized Jim Lane.”

Remember Mary Surratt, the woman convicted of participating in the Lincoln assassination, the first woman legally hanged in the United States? Nobody expected her to be hanged. Everyone figured President Johnson would pardon her. President Johnson expected to pardon her. But the pardon didn’t get to him, because Jim Lane and a friend physically barred the way, keeping Mrs. Surratt’s daughter, weeping, outside the door.

Jim Lane eventually committed suicide when a financial scandal caught up with him.)

Racism is a stupid philosophy, but that doesn’t mean all racists are stupid people. Asa/Forrest Carter found a way to siphon off liberal money and get his victims to thank him for taking it from them.

It must have felt sweet. When he was sober.

It was a rainy weekend, and today was rainy too. Almost constant, soaking rain. This is good (except for the folks in the southeastern part of the state who suffered flooding). Up to this weekend, we had below average rainfall. Now suddenly we’re above it. I hope it’s not too late to help with the crops.

It did put a damper on our Viking Age Society’s annual Viking Youth Day event, held at the Danebo Hall in Minneapolis, under the sponsorship of the Sons of Norway. We had both indoor and outdoor activities planned, but it ended up being only indoor. Some kids came (with their parents, of course), but they all went home after lunch, and we left ourselves shortly thereafter.

Discovered something fairly disturbing today. James Lileks at buzz.mn mentioned that great impersonator, “Iron Eyes Cody,” (the “crying Indian” in the famous environmental ad), who turned out, on closer examination, to have been a second-generation Italian-American. The Snopes article he linked to contained a further link to this piece about “Forrest Carter,” author of Gone To Texas, the novel that was the basis for one of my favorite movies, The Outlaw Josie Wales. Turns out that Forrest Carter was in fact Amos Carter, an active white supremacist well known to the FBI.

I never read The Education of Little Tree (Carter’s putative autobiography), but I read Gone To Texas, and I’m not sure I perceived all the subliminal racism the author of that article seems to find in it. I did note one wrong note in the book, though. Lone Watie, the character played so well by Chief Dan George in the movie, describes himself as a “Cherokee. Full-blooded, I reckon,” in the book.

I knew this was misleading, because historically the full-blooded Cherokees sided with the Union (Lone Watie fights with the Confederacy). It was the mixed bloods who, by and large, owned slaves and supported the South. I’m not sure what point was served by that misdirection, but it struck me as odd at the time. Perhaps Carter had a message of racial separation in mind.

Carter was far from the only author to obscure his real identity. A famous example was B. Traven, author of The Treasure of the Sierra Madre. To this day, nobody’s sure who the heck he was.

Maybe that’s what I ought to do. I’ve pretty much sputtered to a halt as Lars Walker. Maybe I should re-invent myself as Luisa Wahlid, a Mexican-Pakistani lesbian living in this country illegally, forced to live in hiding (in a carbon-neutral compound in Oregon) because the CIA is trying to assassinate her for knowing too much about Bush’s lies in Iraq.

Nah, I expect it’s already been done.

Have you heard that for years someone has been putting roses and cognac on the alleged grave of Edgar Allan Poe in Baltimore? A man stepped forward to claim responsibility for the tributes, but he lacks the credibility to put the mystery to rest. Apparently, the man “has a long history of making things up for the sake of publicity, which in this case is rather ironic as it is itself a publicity stunt about claiming to have started something else as a publicity stunt.”

Here’s an author interview with Athol Dickson in Infuze magazine.

We have a new poet laureate. “He’s very hard to describe, and that’s a great tribute to him. His poems have a sequence that you encounter in dreams, and therefore they have a reality that does not correspond to the reality that we perceive with our eyes and ears,” James H. Billington, the Librarian of Congress, said of Charles Simic. Not a native of the States, Simic was born on May 9, 1938, in Belgrade, Yugoslavia. He has lived stateside since 1954, and he is an American poet. Today, he won the 2007 Wallace Stevens Award from the Academy of American Poets for “outstanding and proven mastery in the art of poetry.”

The New York Times reports:

Mr. Simic said his chief poetic preoccupation has been history. “I’m sort of the product of history; Hitler and Stalin were my travel agents,” he said. “If they weren’t around, I probably would have stayed on the same street where I was born. My family, like millions of others, had to pack up and go, so that has always interested me tremendously: human tragedy and human vileness and stupidity.”

Yet he balks at questions about the role of poetry in culture. “That reminds me so much of the way the young Communists in the days of Stalin at big party congresses would ask, ‘What is the role of the writer?’ ” he said.

Mr. Simic said he preferred to think of the point of poetry in the way a student at a school in El Paso put it when he visited in 1972: “to remind people of their own humanity.”

It’s raining this afternoon. This is a good thing, though they tell us we might get some severe weather later tonight. But that’s OK. I don’t mind a little storm damage. As long as it happens to somebody else.

Gaius at Blue Crab Boulevard got a link from Hugh Hewitt at Towhall.com today.

I hate you, Gaius. Curse you, and your little animal uprising too!

Dale sent me this link to a trailer for the upcoming Robert Zemeckis Beowulf movie. Looks like they’re going the 300 route, which isn’t necessarily bad. It can’t be worse than the recent Icelandic effort with Gerard Butler, which I reviewed a while back. But it doesn’t look like much effort has been made to get the costumes authentic (which the Gerard Butler incarnation at least got right, pretty much the only thing it got right).

We Viking reenactors don’t ask for much. We’d like to see a Viking movie (Beowulf isn’t technically a Viking, but close enough to get on our radar) with historical authenticity and a good story.

So far, the best Viking movie ever made is still The Vikings with Kirk Douglas and Tony Curtis. And that movie isn’t really very good (though it’s a lot of fun). The Thirteenth Warrior had its points, but it went so far off the reservation with armor and weapons that it kind of hurts to watch. (Unless you’ve just watched the Gerard Butler Beowulf, in which case it’s like a drink of cold water on a hot day.)

So I’ll see this one. Maybe I’ll be pleasantly surprised. I don’t think anyone has ever imagined Grendel’s mother (the part Angelina Jolie plays) as a siren before. I suppose it could work.

Just as long as I’m not supposed to like her. I like Robin Wright-Penn all right, even though she has lousy taste in husbands.

Hollywood! Don’t you realize the world is screaming for a film version of The Year of the Warrior?

The Thinklings have a good, long interview with the author of The Chess Artist: Genius, Obsession, and the World’s Oldest Game and The Devil Is a Gentleman. In the second book, Hallman says he toured the religions of the world with William James as a type of guide. “It’s kind of a revisitation of the basic thinking of William James in The Varieties of Religious Experience,” he says. Is chess a religion? Find out in this interview.

From the AP–“Norwegian author Per Petterson won the IMPAC Dublin Literary Award on Thursday for his novel, Out Stealing Horses, which charts how a child’s death and a family breakdown end a teenager’s innocence and haunt him into old age.” Out Stealing Horses is favorably reviewed here by The Complete Review.