It’s the birthday of the humorist Robert Benchley, born in Worcester, Massachusetts (1889). He started writing humor as a kid in school. Assigned to write an essay about how to do something practical, he wrote one called “How to Embalm a Corpse.” When he was assigned to write about the dispute over Newfoundland fishing rights from the point of view of the United States and Canada, he instead chose to write from the point of view of the fish.
Grandfather of Peter Benchley, author of Jaws.
So what happens in a liberal democracy when Australian Aborigines demand that museum curators forbid all female staff members from handling the indigenous sacred objects that are on display in Sydney, out of respect for the sexual division of the world in Aborigine society? Or when Native American Lakotas object to the desecration of a sacred site by mountain climbers and by New Age religious worshipers, and the sacred site just happens to be Devils Tower National Monument (made famous by the movie ”Close Encounters of the Third Kind”), which is located in a public park in Wyoming?
What code of cultural privacy makes sense when representatives of the Pueblo community complain that the sun symbol on the New Mexico state flag was stolen without permission from a design on a 19th-century ceramic pot made by an anonymous and unidentifiable American Indian potter? What about the disempowered forest-dwelling pygmies of Central Africa? Is there a meaningful modern sense in which they can be said to own their traditional flute music and distinctive form of yodeling, traces of which have diffused throughout the globe and can be detected in Herbie Hancock’s album ”Headhunters” and Madonna’s ”Bedtime Stories”? Should the pygmies be compensated? Why and how? What are our legal responsibilities under such circumstances? What are our moral responsibilities?
From a New York Times review in 2003 of Who Owns Native Culture? by Michael F. Brown (first mentioned by NewMexiKen two-years-ago today). Read a discussion of the Hopi-Voth controversy from the first chapter here.
… of Milton S. Hershey, born on this date in 1857. Hershey, who only completed the fourth grade, developed a formula for milk chocolate that made what had been a luxury product into the first nationally marketed candy.
… of Bill Monroe, born on this date in 1911. The Father of Bluegrass Music was inducted into the Country Music Hall of Fame in 1970. In 1993, Monroe was a recipient of the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Academy of Recording Arts and Sciences, an honor that placed him in the company of Louis Armstrong, Ray Charles and Paul McCartney,
… of Mel Torme, born on this date in 1925. The “Velvet Fog” was a wonderful jazz singer, but his greatest legacy is “The Christmas Song” — “Chestnuts roasting on an open fire…”.
… of Sherwood Anderson, born on this date in 1876 in Camden, Ohio.
[Anderson] is best known for his short stories, “brooding Midwest tales” which reveal “their author’s sympathetic insight into the thwarted lives of ordinary people.” Between World War I and World War II, Anderson helped to break down formulaic approaches to writing, influencing a subsequent generation of writers, most notably Ernest Hemingway and William Faulkner. Anderson, who lived in New Orleans for a brief time, befriended Faulkner there in 1924 and encouraged him to write about his home county in Mississippi.
— From the Library of Congress, which has more on Anderson.
… essayist and editor, was born on this date in 1880. Some Mencken quotes:
was born on this date in 1852. We know him as O. Henry.
NewMexiKen posted O. Henry’s most famous story, The Gift of the Magi, in its entirety Christmas before last.
Another particular favorite is The Ransom of Red Chief.
… took place on this date in 1857. Here’s what Mark Twain wrote about it in Roughing It 15 years later:
The persecutions which the Mormons suffered so long—and which they consider they still suffer in not being allowed to govern themselves—they have endeavored and are still endeavoring to repay. The now almost forgotten “Mountain Meadows massacre” was their work. It was very famous in its day. The whole United States rang with its horrors. A few items will refresh the reader’s memory. A great emigrant train from Missouri and Arkansas passed through Salt Lake City and a few disaffected Mormons joined it for the sake of the strong protection it afforded for their escape. In that matter lay sufficient cause for hot retaliation by the Mormon chiefs. Besides, these one hundred and forty-five or one hundred and fifty unsuspecting emigrants being in part from Arkansas, where a noted Mormon missionary had lately been killed, and in part from Missouri, a State remembered with execrations as a bitter persecutor of the saints when they were few and poor and friendless, here were substantial additional grounds for lack of love for these wayfarers. And finally, this train was rich, very rich in cattle, horses, mules and other property—and how could the Mormons consistently keep up their coveted resemblance to the Israelitish tribes and not seize the “spoil” of an enemy when the Lord had so manifestly “delivered it into their hand?”
Wherefore, according to Mrs. C. V. Waite’s entertaining book, “The Mormon Prophet,” it transpired that—
A “revelation” from Brigham Young, as Great Grand Archee or God, was dispatched to President J. C. Haight, Bishop Higbee and J. D. Lee (adopted son of Brigham), commanding them to raise all the forces they could muster and trust, follow those cursed Gentiles (soread the revelation), attack them disguised as Indians, and with the arrows of the Almighty make a clean sweep of them, and leave none to tell the tale; and if they needed any assistance they were commanded to hire the Indians as their allies, promising them a share of the booty. They were to be neither slothful nor negligent in their duty, and to be punctual in sending the teams back to him before winter set in, for this was the mandate of Almighty God.The command of the “revelation” was faithfully obeyed. A large party of Mormons, painted and tricked out as Indians, overtook the train of emigrant wagons some three hundred miles south of Salt Lake City, and made an attack. But the emigrants threw up earthworks, made fortresses of their wagons and defended themselves gallantly and successfully for five days! Your Missouri or Arkansas gentleman is not much afraid of the sort of scurvy apologies for “Indians” which the southern part of Utah affords. He would stand up and fight five hundred of them.
At the end of the five days the Mormons tried military strategy. They retired to the upper end of the “Meadows,” resumed civilized apparel, washed off their paint, and then, heavily armed, drove down in wagons to the beleaguered emigrants, bearing a flag of truce! When the emigrants saw white men coming they threw down their guns and welcomed them with cheer after cheer! And, all unconscious of the poetry of it, no doubt, they lifted a little child aloft, dressed in white, in answer to the flag of truce!
The leaders of the timely white “deliverers” were President Haight and Bishop John D. Lee, of the Mormon Church. Mr. Cradlebaugh, who served a term as a Federal Judge in Utah and afterward was sent to Congress from Nevada, tells in a speech delivered in Congress how these leaders next proceeded:
They professed to be on good terms with the Indians, and represented them as being very mad. They also proposed to intercede and settle the matter with the Indians. After several hours parley they, having (apparently) visited the Indians, gave the ultimatum of the savages; which was, that the emigrants should march out of their camp, leaving everything behind them, even their guns. It was promised by the Mormon bishops that they would bring a force and guard the emigrants back to the settlements. The terms were agreed to, the emigrants being desirous of saving the lives of their families. The Mormons retired, and subsequently appeared with thirty or forty armed men. The emigrants were marched out, the women and children in front and the men behind, the Mormon guard being in the rear. When they had marched in this way about a mile, at a given signal the slaughter commenced. The men were almost all shot down at the first fire from the guard. Two only escaped, who fled to the desert, and were followed one hundred and fifty miles before they were overtaken and slaughtered. The women and children ran on, two or three hundred yards further, when they were overtaken and with the aid of the Indians they were slaughtered. Seventeen individuals only, of all the emigrant party, were spared, and they were little children, the eldest of them being only seven years old. Thus, on the 10th day of September, 1857, was consummated one of the most cruel, cowardly and bloody murders known in our history.The number of persons butchered by the Mormons on this occasion was one hundred and twenty.
Harry Potter books all available as audiobooks exclusively (but not cheap) from iTunes (the store).
Also, a new version of iTunes (the software) is available (5.0).
The author of The Outsiders, That Was Then, This Is Now and Rumble Fish is profiled in The New York Times. S.E. — it stands for Susan Eloise — published The Outsiders when she was 17. She’s lived all her 55± years in Tulsa.
“Scholars have known for decades that Native American societies were in many ways more technologically sophisticated than their European counterparts. So why do we still find this fact so surprising?”
An article by Charles Mann at The Boston Globe explains.
Mann is the author of the well-received new book 1491: New Revelations of the Americas Before Columbus.
… was born on this date in 1847.
From the review at Amazon.com of T.J. Stiles’s Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War:
James is often grouped with famous frontier criminals like Billy the Kid and Butch Cassidy, but he’s best understood as a Southerner who forged partisan alliances in postwar Missouri and promoted himself as a latter-day Robin Hood. Stiles describes James as “a foul-mouthed killer who hated as fiercely as anyone on the planet” and places his life in the context of “the struggle for–or rather, against–black freedom.” Stiles’s fundamental point about James is as startling as it is convincing: “In his political consciousness and close alliance with a propagandist and power broker, in his efforts to win media attention with his crimes … Jesse James was a forerunner of the modern terrorist.”
Powerful, powerful tribute to her native city from Anne Rice.
But to my country I want to say this: During this crisis you failed us. You looked down on us; you dismissed our victims; you dismissed us. You want our Jazz Fest, you want our Mardi Gras, you want our cooking and our music. Then when you saw us in real trouble, when you saw a tiny minority preying on the weak among us, you called us “Sin City,” and turned your backs.
In NewMexiKen’s view no visit to left-coast Portland is complete without getting lost in Powell’s City of Books, America’s greatest bookstore. Today we made the pilgrimage — paying at a parking meter with a credit card, a NewMexiKen first.
A (cell phone) photo of the U.S. states’ history section. Really, western states on the left, others on the right — all the way down. A row away there was nearly 30 linear feet just for books about Abraham Lincoln. Powell’s best feature is the intermingling of new and used books on the same shelf, a practice that greatly increases the variety.
When I’m older and turn into a street person, just let me get lost in Powell’s 24-by-7.
Good background from Christopher Hitchens in the beginning of his New York Times review of three new non-ficition works on America’s Pirate Wars:
Viewed from our hyperpower perspective, the decades between the Revolutionary War and the War of 1812 were so precarious they seem to belong almost to the history of another country. And in many ways they do. The ”United States” at that time was to the east coast of North America what Chile now is to the west coast of the southern cone: a long and ribbonlike territory with indistinct or disputed frontiers, caught between mountains and the ocean. Three large European empires — British, French and Spanish — exerted immense influence on the rest of the continent, and on the Atlantic and Caribbean approaches to it. The new Republic had a tenuous and fluctuating relationship with France, a hostile one with Britain and a competitive one with Spain. It had no army or navy to speak of, and a Constitution that was skeptical about, if not antagonistic to, the maintenance of permanent armed forces. The two human symbols of this vulnerability were the American sailor seized from his ship and ”impressed” into the British or French Navy, and the sailor or passenger taken at sea by marauding Muslim pirates and delivered into slavery.
Each of three new books treats a different aspect of that vertiginous period. The word ”corsair,” which can mean either pirate ship or pirate, became inextricably and incorrectly linked with the Romantic as a result of Byron’s 1814 poem of that name. But corsairs ruthlessly kidnapped and plundered, whether in Africa (the Barbary Coast) or the Gulf of Mexico. We may still harbor a slight sympathy for the smuggler and the bootlegger, but there was little romance in living at a time when such people had state power.
is 72 today. The Writer’s Almanac has an excellent little bio.
And there’s this from the Cormac McCarthy web site —
Critics have compared Cormac McCarthy’s nightmarish yet beautifully written adventure masterpiece, Blood Meridian, or the Evening Redness in the West, with the best works of Dante, Poe, De Sade, Melville, Faulkner, Flannery O’Connor and William Styron. The critic Harold Bloom, among others, has declared it one of the greatest novels of the Twentieth Century, and perhaps the greatest by a living American writer. Critics cite its magnificent language, its uncompromising representation of a crucial period of American history, and its unapologetic, bleak vision of the inevitability of suffering and violence.
Critics haven’t been so lavish in their praise of McCarthy’s new novel, No Country for Old Men. See, for example, this review, which appeared in The New York Times.
The oldest Sweetie does Harry — 1:04 AM July 16.
On this date in 1904, Leopold Bloom took his epic journey through Dublin in James Joyce’s Ulysses.
“Bloomsday”, as it is now known, has become a tradition for Joyce enthusiasts all over the world. From Tokyo to Sydney, San Francisco to Buffalo, Trieste to Paris, dozens of cities around the globe hold their own Bloomsday festivities. The celebrations usually include readings as well as staged re-enactments and street-side improvisations of scenes from the story. Nowhere is Bloomsday more rollicking and exuberant than Dublin, home of Molly and Leopold Bloom, Stephen Dedalus, Buck Mulligan, Gerty McDowell and James Joyce himself. Here, the art of Ulysses becomes the daily life of hundreds of Dubliners and the city’s visitors as they retrace the odyssey each year.
Even Google gets in on Bloomsday.
Jesus’ General provides a book report:
People who bought Silent Witness: The Untold Story of Terri Schiavo’s Death by Mark Fuhrman also bought:
- The Truth About Hillary : What She Knew, When She Knew It, and How Far She’ll Go to Become President by Edward Klein
- Men In Black: How the Supreme Court Is Destroying America by Mark R. Levin
- Unfit for Command: Swift Boat Veterans Speak Out Against John Kerry by John E. O’Neill
- Blood Brother: 33 Reasons My Brother Scott Peterson Is Guilty by Anne Bird
- A Deadly Game: The Untold Story of the Scott Peterson Investigation by Catherine Crier
- Because He Could by Dick Morris
is 69 today. The Writer’s Almanac has a fine essay about this talented writer of both fiction and non-fiction, in NewMexiKen’s opinion the best to write in both forms about the American west since his mentor Wallace Stegner.
It’s the birthday of the novelist Larry McMurtry, born [in] Wichita Falls, Texas (1936). He grew up in a little town called Archer City. He came from a long line of Texas ranchers, but Larry McMurtry figured out he didn’t like working on a ranch when he was a kid. He said, “I saw right away that my father and all the cowboys were slaves to these stupid animals. Who wants to be a slave to a cow?”
He never thought cowboys were romantic figures. He thought they led mostly drab, repetitive, unexciting lives, and weren’t necessarily strong or free. Many of them were twisted, fascistic, and dumb.
He studied literature at Rice University. He started writing dark novels about his home town, in which he portrayed most of the people there as none too bright, none too good. His third novel, The Last Picture Show came out in 1966. It begins, “Sometimes Sonny felt like he was the only human creature in the town. It was a bad feeling, and it usually came on him in the mornings early, when the streets were completely empty, the way they were on Saturday morning in late November. The night before Sonny had played his last game of football for Thalia High School, but it wasn’t that that made him feel so strange and alone. It was just the look of the town.”
People in Archer, Texas didn’t much care for the way they were portrayed by Larry McMurtry. He moved away to Washington, D.C., became a severe critic of the whole Western genre. But even though he hated the idea of the romanticized Old West, there was a story in his head that he couldn’t get rid of. It was a story about the Old West, which started as a movie treatment for John Wayne, but Wayne had backed out of the project. Once in a while McMurtry would think about the characters again, and then one day he drove past a sign for a church called “Lonesome Dove,” and that inspired him to rewrite the screenplay as a novel.
It was the story of a former Texas Ranger, Augustus McCrae, who persuades two friends to ride with him to Montana to find his one true love Clara Allen, the only woman who could ever beat him in an argument. Lonesome Dove became a huge best-seller. It won the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, and was made into a TV mini-series.
After it came out, McMurtry’s home town embraced him. The local hotel changed its name to the Lonesome Dove Hotel, and Larry McMurtry moved back there and opened one of the largest antiquarian bookstores in the country, and he announced that keeping a bookstore was a form of ranching, and instead of herding cattle, he herded books.
“Human Events asked a panel of 15 conservative scholars and public policy leaders to help us compile a list of the Ten Most Harmful Books of the 19th and 20th Centuries.”
Jesus’ General reviews the children’s book — which an Oklahoma legislator is attempting to ban — King & King. A teaser:
That’s the danger of this book. On the surface it seems like your average buddy story, but it’s actually a diabolical attempt to endanger our children’s salvation by introducing them to the iniquitous world of the tolerant.
David Carr has a wonderful piece about Elmore Leonard in today’s New York Times. I suggest you read it, then go get Leonard’s latest, The Hot Kid.” But here’s a couple excerpts:
He writes seven days a week in the living room of a nice house in the suburbs here with a No. 5 Pilot Pen on unlined yellow paper. He does not use e-mail or a computer. He types the handwritten pages on an I.B.M. Selectric, which occasionally breaks down from daily exertion.
“There’s one name in the phonebook who repairs typewriters,” Mr. Leonard said, adding, “he says he can live on $6,000 a year. He lives in a trailer park.”
…
This great American author, one of the best dialogue writers ever, lets people at charity auctions bid for the right to name his characters; Ed Hagenlocker, a “hard-shell Baptist” and cotton farmer in “The Hot Kid,” got his name that way. “Why not help them out?” he said.
…
“Elmore always says you have to do what you love; otherwise, what’s the point?”
And that explains 40 wonderful books.
MakesMeRalph: New MexiKen Challenge. Some interesting choices. Ralph’s definitely a Dr. Seuss fan.
… and handles the book meme with his usual aplomb and erudition: FunctionalAmbivalent: Taking the NewMexiKen Challenge.
Sorry, though, my yard is reserved for quail and rabbits.
There is a meme going around among bloggers. (According to the totally reliable Wikipedia, a meme is a self-propagating unit of cultural evolution.)
Anyway this particular meme is about books.
And now I am supposed to pass this meme along to three other bloggers. No obligation guys, but here you go Tom at Functional Ambivalent, Garret at dangerousmeta!, and Jon at Albloggerque.
The Freakonomics guys have a blog.
In case it’s new to you, Freakonomics: A Rogue Economist Explores the Hidden Side of Everything, was published this week by Steven D. Levitt and Stephen J. Dubner.
Slate had two excerpts earlier this week: A Roshanda by Any Other Name and Trading Up, both fascinating.