Thanksgiving 2017

So, many of you have been asking … where have you been for the past few months?

Well, The Jade Sphinx was on temporary sabbatical while I finished a (long-overdue) book on books-adapted into films with critic and historian Jim Nemeth. But since that undertaking is drawing to a close, we will be able to post more regularly in the months to come. In fact, in the weeks before Christmas, I hope to share with you multiple book reviews that reflect new and noteworthy releases. More to come!

But before that, let’s think for a moment about Thanksgiving.

Thanksgiving has always been our favorite holiday. It is solely predicated on the notion of giving thanks for the manifest blessings that we find around us, and for being mindful of the still, quiet miracle of our lives. Every day, wonders settle on my shoulders like so many snowflakes, and I feel deeply in touch with some greater mystery that lies beyond me.

Though uniquely American, Thanksgiving has always been our holiday least associated with ideology or creed.  The celebratory meal represents the bounty that is our lives; it is, simply, the holiday that is best shared with people we love.

I am delighted to report that as I coast through my 55^th year, I am still as in love with my Better Half as I was when we first met, 27 years ago. In no time at all, we will have been together for half (and then more than half) of my life, and I wonder how we spent those early years apart.

I’m thankful for all the dear friends and family who have trekked out to Southern California to spend time with us, and to see us build a new life in a new clime.

I’m thankful that Southern California is the paradise that I suspected it to be, and for exceeding all of my expectations.

And last, but certainly not least, I’m thankful for the new addition to our lives, our dog Lucas. He is a four-and-a-half year old rescue that we adopted from nearby Seal Beach. I have long wanted a dog, and Lucas has been everything I could’ve wanted, and more. We spend an obscene amount of time just gazing at him; he makes us laugh simply by doing things as elementary as walking across the room or drinking from his water dish. He is a gift that has enriched us beyond measure.

It is important to point out that for the past few years, Americans have spent so much time over the Thanksgiving table arguing – over politics, over values, over questions of identity – that we have forgotten what this holiday is really about.

It seems as if we are always on the brink of disaster and things are always trending to ruin.  I’ll be jiggered if I’m going to haul that hoo-haw out again this year, because I think pointing out the negatives in our lives doesn’t do us a whole lot of good.  So, yeah, things are terrible, it seems no one is happy with our current condition, and the world as we know it is changing so fast, no one knows what to hold onto.  It was much the same last year and will be much the same next year.  Been there, wrote that.

But I have faith in America and Americans. Good heavens, we created this holiday, the first nation ever to create a secular day of thanks.  Patriotism was never popular among most of my friends; any positive sentiments towards the country are mostly met with ironic dismissal or sneering condescension. But I think we are a great people, or, at least, we try to be.  I don’t know the future of our land any more than you, but I do know that Americans are capable of great things, great kindness, and unity.  That last quality – unity – has been in fairly short supply in recent years, but I think it will make a remarkable resurgence in the months and years to come.  We can but hope, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This Thanksgiving, make it a point to greet your family, friends and neighbors as people, and not as units of some political philosophy.  Love and nurture each other, and remember to be kind and ethical.  And, finally, remember to be thankful.  Thankful for the many blessings in your life, the bounty of the world around you, and for the quiet, ineffable mystery of your own existence.

Thanksgiving at The Jade Sphinx

It seems that I have penned a special Thanksgiving holiday note since the inception of this blog; but, somehow, I missed last year.  My diaries are currently in storage, and my memory is not up to the task of going back a whole 365 days.  What the devil was I doing last year?  So, now the pressure is on to be particularly memorable this year…

In reviewing what I wrote in previous years, I seem to always say that the country is in a perilous state, that things seem particularly dire this year, and that I don’t know how we’ll overcome it all.  But, it’s our responsibility to be happy, to be thankful, and to fully realize the quiet miracle of our lives every day.

Not doing that this year, and here’s why.

News flash:  we are always on the brink and things are always trending to disaster.  I’ll be jiggered if I’m going to haul that hoo-haw out again this year, because I think pointing out the negatives in our lives doesn’t do us a whole lot of good.  So, yeah, things are terrible, it seems no one is happy with the election (even the winner), and the world as we know it is changing so fast, no one knows what to hold onto.  It was much the same last year and will be much the same next year.  Been there, wrote that.

Instead, I’m going to tell you what I’m happy about. 

I’m happy to be an American, and delighted to now be a Californian.  We may not always be satisfied with the way our government and institutions work, but they do work and that is more than can be said of many countries.  The sunny little beach town I now call home after more than four decades in Gotham has reminded me again and again of the simple decency of most people, of forgotten arts of friendliness and neighborliness I had lost in the Big City, and demonstrated that nature has the upper-hand on us, and not the other way around.  I am surrounded by good people, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

I am happy that I continue to be moved by beauty.  The dangerous thing about spending too much time with people who make a career of the arts is that one can stop feeling an emotional response to them.   I am delighted to say that I still gulp before masterful paintings, am still heady after great novels, and can laugh or cry at music.  (My taste tends to run towards the Great American Songbook, which always puts me in mind of Noel Coward’s wonderful putdown: Strange how potent cheap music is.)  I am delighted that this blog has everything from Michelangelo to Charles Schulz, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Finally, I’m glad to have faith in America and Americans.  Patriotism was never popular among most of my friends; any positive sentiments towards the country are mostly met with ironic dismissal or sneering condescension.  (A gift from the 1960s.)  But I think we are a great people, or, at least, we try to be.  I don’t know the future of our land any more than you, but I do know that Americans are capable of great things, great kindness, and unity.  That last quality – unity – has been in fairly short supply in recent years, but I think it will make a remarkable resurgence in the months and years to come.  We can but hope, and I wouldn’t have it any other way.

This Thanksgiving, make it a point to greet your family, friends and neighbors as people, and not as units of some political philosophy.  Love and nurture each other, and remember to be kind and ethical.  And, finally, remember to be thankful.  Thanks for the many blessings in your life, the bounty of the world around you, and for the quiet, ineffable mystery of your own existence.

The Last Command: Custer and the 7th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn, by Kirk Stirnweis (2001)

The dramatic defeat of Gen. George Armstrong Custer at the Little Bighorn in 1876 has been the subject of several paintings by major artists.  But for today, I thought we would take a look at a work by the relatively little-known, working artist Kirk Stirnweis (born 1967), The Last Command: Custer and the 7^th Cavalry at the Little Bighorn.

Stirnweis was born in Suffern, New York, and grew up in Connecticut. He would eventually move with his own family to Montana, Arizona, and then back east to New Hampshire; while keeping a foothold in Loveland, Colorado.  His father was a professional illustrator, and his mother had a background in graphics.  He drew constantly as a child, and his family would often discuss art around the home.

During his high school summers, Stirnweis would draw and paint at the nearby Silvermine Artist Guild. During the same period he studied anatomy with a retired surgeon, taking one of the doctor’s first classes working with professional artists. Stirnweis was taught to master composition by copying the works of the Great Masters, and was encouraged to go into illustration to hone his skills to a professional level.

Kirk was educated at several different schools studying marine biology and medicine, holding degrees in radiologic sciences and Medical imaging. But his scientific studies did not keep him from art: immediately after high school he did illustration for Field& Stream, Harlequin Romance Novels and Leisure Books, and the Danbury Mint. 

Stirnweis says, For the past 20 years I have been painting and sculpting western/historical subjects, mostly Native Americans, mountain men, prairie women, land and seascapes nautical subjects and wildlife of all kinds. Out of the blue I was commissioned to paint Custer’s Last Stand at the Little Big Horn; a daunting task. To complicate matters I had virtually no knowledge of U.S. cavalry at the time and only scant knowledge of the battle. After months of intensive research, hours spent with experts on the subject and several visits to the battlefield; I started painting. Three months later I completed The Last Command. The homework was exhaustive but well worth it, the painting had reaped the distinction of being written up by a West Point graduate and historian as: “The most accurate depiction of the Custer Battle EVER!” An enlarged Copy of the painting now hangs in the renovated Museum of Military History in KS. Subsequently, I was invited to the 125th anniversary of the Little Big Horn Battle, where I met with Native American Veterans of Foreign Wars and Chiefs of the Crow Nation. They expressed their appreciation for the noble way that I depict their culture in my paintings and sculpture.

This is quite a dramatic painting, despite some rather telling flaws.  While Stirnweis has a great gift for painting dramatic faces, the figures all seem to inhabit different pictures, rather than act as an integrated group.  Indeed, in some figures, it seems as if they have no lower body whatsoever.  (Where is the rest of the bugler and his horse?)  Also under-realized are the two fallen horses, one on the left and the other, right.  Neither seem to fully inhabit the picture, and it looks like Stirnweis relied too heavily on tall grass to address issues of foreshortening.

But Stirnweis’ failings are solely those of technique: in terms of drama and composition, he performs admirably.  The gentle rise of the mountain allows the eye to read the frame from the fighters on the left, through the main action on the rise, and then scan back left (to the beginning) by following the trajectory of the arrows.  Stirnweis also uses the empty bask spaces of the West to heightened effect:  aside from another regiment battling in the distance, these men are alone and vulnerable.

Stirnweis also amps the drama by depicting many of the men already wounded or injured, but continuing to fight on.  The look of steely determination on the faces of the small knot of five men dead center of the picture tells the entire story. 

This is an admirable addition to the iconography of Little Bighorn.

Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America, by T. J. Stiles (2015)

A fabulous book.

Many of us think we know George Armstrong Custer (1839-1876) because we know how he died: at the battle of Little Bighorn, he and his men slaughtered by Lakota and Northern Cheyenne warriors.  Most people see Custer’s end as a cautionary tale: one of hubris, or racism, or simple tragic miscalculation.  But Pulitzer Prize-winning author T.J. Stiles believes that this end-is-the-beginning approach is overly reductive.  In fact, the only way to make sense of Custer, he thinks, is to embrace the totality of his experience, and to understand how he was both a player and observer in a changing America.

Custer’s Trials: A Life on the Frontier of a New America argues that Americans saw their world radically remade during Custer’s lifetime.  Custer’s life is the story of the American Civil War, the Westward expansion, and the Indian Wars.  Through it all, Custer was a study in contradictions as he struggled to find foothold in an earth that was ever-changing beneath him.  He was a brave Union solider who sympathized with the South.  He freed countless slaves, but was openly hostile towards people of color.  He was a dutiful and obedient soldier, but he also suffered from a crippling vanity and need for acclaim.  He behaved with reckless abandon and considerable courage on the battlefield, but it is unlikely that he ever fully internalized war’s catastrophic human cost.

Because of these contradictions, historians (and armchair philosophers) have had their way with Custer for decades.  Stiles argues that Custer has been left to be misremembered by each succeeding generation.  Because he is so contradictory a figure, he very much symbolizes to people what they like or dislike about American history.  Is he a hero who died to spread Western civilization, or a murdering racist who targeted Native Americans?  Is he representative of the heroism and valor that is part of the American character, or is he a bully and braggart?

Stiles believes that asking these questions is a losing game:  Custer does not need to bear the full weight of American history, and that his life has significant meaning outside of the narratives told by defenders or debunkers. 

In reading this long and well-argued book, I’ve come away somewhat surprised by how much I liked Custer.   There were many, many things detestable about the man by 21^st Century lights, but to condemn (or praise) figures of the past by the dictums of today is ridiculous.  Historical figures need to be seen in historical context, and to do otherwise would make as much sense as a Venusian judging a rural American through his interstellar worldview.  The differing points of reference are so vast as to render the exercise meaningless.

Custer was profoundly needy, troubled by self-doubt, and always hoping to improve himself.  Last in his class at West Point (a position routinely called ‘the goat’), Custer wanted to live up to his romantic ideals of military life.  His romantic ideals are not to be sneered at: they often translated into bravery in battle, magnanimity to captured enemies, and selfless protection of others.  One of the most telling stories in the book is Custer demanding a litter to take a wounded comrade away during a retreat – while his brother soldiers opted to leave the man behind.

Custer was not a bogeyman or devil nor an angel or a demigod; he was simply a man, with all of the qualities and flaws attendant to that designation.  And in reading this excellent book, Stiles allows us to know that man a little better.

Best of all, Stiles tells his tale with a novelist’s dash.  Here is a representative passage: She emerged into a clearing and encountered mayhem.  Custer’s brigade fought amid a sea of enemy soldiers – bullets cracking overhead, artillery shells exploding, mounted Confederates charging here and there with sabers swinging.  The wagon master approached Custer and asked if he could lead the wagon train to the rear.  Custer looked around and said, “Where in hell is the rear?”

This book is highly recommended to students of Custer, the Civil War, or simply American history.

Education of a Wandering Man, A Memoir by Louis L’Amour (1989)

We recently reviewed a graphic novel based on the work of Louis L’Amour (1908-1988), and we have certainly read many of his novels in the past.  But … we knew precious little about the man himself.  So, it was a delight to come across his memoir, Education of a Wandering Man, revised and published in 1989.  It is a remarkable book.

It puts us in mind of the old Chinese legend about tests: the student sits down and simply writes down everything he knows.  L’Amour doesn’t quite do that, but he does create a fascinating account of his own intellectual development, and his deep and passionate engagement with reading.  If you are at all interested in the effect that reading has, and what a tool it can be to enlightenment, then certainly read this fascinating book.

L’Amour’s engagement with reading in his early life is not surprising when one looks at his major characters.  The typical L'Amour hero was a strapping young man in his late teens or early 20's, a romantic, nomadic figure dedicated to self-improvement. His character Tell Sackett carried law books in his saddlebags; Bendigo Shafter read Montaigne, Plutarch and Thoreau; and Drake Morrel, a one-time riverboat gambler, read Juvenal in the original Latin. 

Much like L’Amour, himself.

L’Amour looked like one of his own literary creations – big, ruggedly handsome and self-contained.  He was born Louis Dearborn L'Amour on March 22, 1908, in Jamestown, ND. He was a son of a veterinarian who doubled as a farm-machinery salesman, grandson of a Civil War veteran and great-grandson of a settler who had been scalped by Sioux warriors.

He quit school at 15, roaming the West working as a miner, rancher and lumberjack before taking off for the Far East as a seaman. By the time he was 20, he had skinned cattle in Texas, lived with bandits in Tibet and worked on an East African schooner.  He managed to survive a walk through Death Valley on his own with little water, and rode the rails as a hobo.  He worked as a longshoreman, a lumberjack, an elephant handler, a fruit picker and an officer on a tank destroyer in World War II. He had also circled the world on a freighter, sailed a dhow on the Red Sea, been shipwrecked in the West Indies and been stranded in the Mojave Desert, and won 51 of 59 fights as a professional boxer.  And all the time he was on the road, he was reading: Shakespeare, Byron, Wilde, Ibsen, Turgenev, Dostoevsky, Sheridan, Bacon, Tolstoy … and many, many others too numerous to mention.  L’Amour provides his reading list during the period at the end of the book and, frankly, it made me deeply ashamed of my own profound failings as a reader.

I read Balzac, Victor Hugo and Dumas before I ever read Zane Grey, he said in an interview.  His first book was not a Western, but a collection of poems, published in 1939.  But despite his immense erudition, L’Amour could not reconcile the disdain the literary elite had (and has) for novels about the Western experience.  If you write a book about a bygone period that lies east of the Mississippi River, then it's a historical novel.  If it's west of the Mississippi, it's a western, a different category. There's no sense to it.

Here is L’Amour writing about talking to people of the Old West during his wanderings in the 1930s:  Yet there was no better time to learn about what the West had actually been.  Many of those who lived it were still alive, and as the years of their future grew fewer, they were more willing to talk of what had been.  Old feuds were largely forgotten, and time had given the past an aura.

The old cowboy might appear to be as dry as dust, he might scoff at some of the stories, but he was a figure of romance in his own mind (although he would never have admitted it) or he would not have become a cowboy in the first place.  As the years slipped away, he began to want to tell his stories, and I was often there, a willing listener, knowing enough to sift the truth from the romance.

In every town there was at least one former outlaw or gunfighter, an old Indian scout or a wagon master, and each with many stories ready to tell.

One story engendered another, and sitting on a bench in front of a store I’d tell of something I knew or had heard and would often get a story in return, sometimes a correction.  The men and woman who lived the pioneer life did not suddenly disappear; they drifted down the years, a rugged, proud people who had met adversity and survived.  Once, many years later, I was asked in a television interview what was the one quality that distinguished them, and I did not come up with the answer I wanted.  Later, when I in the hotel alone, it came to me.

Dignity.

This is great stuff, one step removed from prose poetry.  We here at the Jade Sphinx (having recently moved our own library from the East to West Coast), sympathize with L’Amour’s acute bibliomania:  A wanderer I had been through most of my early years, and now that I had my own home, my wandering continued, but among books.  No longer could I find most of the books I wanted in libraries.  I had to seek them out in foreign or secondhand bookstores, which was a pleasure in itself.  When seeking books, one always comes upon unexpected treasures or books on subjects that one has never heard of, or heard mentioned only in passing.

Now I know what I wished to learn and could direct my education with more intelligence.

Slowly I began to place on my shelves the books I wanted.  When the shelves were first installed, one workman doubted they would ever be filled, yet a few years later they were crammed with books, filling every available niche.

What I find most refreshing here is L’Amour’s own determination to educate himself, his active engagement with his own intellectual development, and for the breadth of his knowledge.  Here is a wonderfully prescient passage: If we had only Greenwich Village as an example, it would tell us nothing of the rest of America, yet often one discovers a writer, or several of them, giving just such a narrow picture.  One should tread warily when using the life-style of any group as an example of the thinking or practice of a people.

This is a warm, wise and essential book.  Highly recommended.

Law of the Desert Born, A Graphic Novel, by Louis L’Amour

Here’s a first for The Jade Sphinx, a review of a graphic novel, and it’s a humdinger, Law of the Desert Born, adapted from a Louis L’Amour (1908-1988) short story of the same name by Charles Santino (working off a script by Beau L’Amour and Katherine Nolan), and illustrated by Thomas Yeates.  Even if you have never been the ‘type’ to try a graphic novel (i.e., novel in comic book form), you should try this one.  Not only is it a model of the craft, it is a spectacular Western, as well.

The late Gary Cooper (1901-1961) used to opine that he loved Westerns because, when they were good, “there was an honesty about them.”  Though they sometimes devolved into simple stories about white hats vs black hats, more usually there were shadings of complexity and subtlety.  Great (and even really good) Westerns are only ‘plot driven’ in the same manner as great literature: we are the sum of our motives and the consequences they drive us to.

Law of the Desert Born takes place in New Mexico, 1887, during the worst drought that anyone can remember.  Rancher Tom Forrester has his access to the Pecos River cut off by the son of his old partner, and he convinces his foreman, Shad Marone, to rustle cattle on his land.

Shad squeezes his poor employee, Jesus Lopez, a half-Mexican, half-Apache on the run from the Fort Marion prison in Florida, to do his dirty work.  Lopez, a scout and tracker for the army, helped relocate the Chihenne and Chiricahua Apaches for the government, and was repaid for his loyalty with a one-way trip to the same gulag.

When the rustling is discovered, Lopez takes the fall.  Tensions escalate, and Forrester is fatally injured by his enemy; Shad kills the rival rancher in revenge and goes on the run.

Now, the sheriff must release Lopez from jail and allow him to use his skills as a tracker to lead the posse to Shad.  Lopez guides them through miles of trackless badlands, into a crucible to test their courage and skill.  But, as the story continues, the question becomes: what are Lopez’s real motives?

This is great stuff.  Both Shad and Lopez are equal parts hero and villain, and the sheriff is both compassionate man of justice and unthinking hardcase.  The townsfolk that make up the posse are like most humanity – neither hero nor rogue, just simply people trying to get along.

L’Amour also dispenses with many of the tropes that would degrade the core integrity of the tale: there are no deadeye gunslingers, or rancher’s daughters to provide love interest – nor even any clear indication of whether either side was right or wrong in the issue of water rights.  What it all is … is very complicated.  Much like life.

The book comes with a wonderful coda from Beau L’Amour on the differences between this adaptation and his father’s original pulp story, and details his efforts to get the story made into a film.  It also has some valuable biographical data on his father, and notes to put the whole story in historical perspective.

Now, a graphic novel lives or dies on its illustrations, and I’m delighted to report that Yeates’ pages are wonderful.  Rendered in stark black and white, Yeates has created a pen-and-ink wash world of stark landscapes, wide vistas and intense close-ups.  He creates his pages with a cinematic flair; if anyone ever did make a movie of this, they could simply tear the pages out and stuff them into the camera.

Yeates’ anatomy does sometimes seem to be slightly off, but any slight failures of draughtsmanship are more than made up by his genius for composition.  His pages are not a static series of regiment panels, but, rather, a dynamic expression of motion and story on the page.  It’s a textbook lesson on how the form is done.

This oversize hardcover is a great addition to the library of any Western or comic fan, or, indeed, anyone who likes a good story.

Waiting and Mad, by Charles Marion Russell (1899)

We finish our brief look into the internal workings of the mind of Charlie Russell, Cowboy Artist Extraordinaire, with this witty and wonderful picture, Waiting and Mad (1899).

People who have known Your Correspondent for some time have surely heard me say, “I’ve been married for 26 years and I’ve spent 23 of them waiting.”  As someone who regularly waits by the door, waits by the shower and waits in the car while my Much Better Half does whatever it is that he’s doing, the feeling in this picture is very familiar.  And I’m sure the look on my face is much the same.

Just to be upfront about it – I love this picture.   Though Charlie was merely a capable draughtsman of the human form, every detail of this picture speaks volumes.

The story is clear from the surroundings and the look of … sultry disgust on the Indian woman’s face.  Here is a beautiful and sexualized woman – notice the nearly exposed breast and the provocative curve of hip.  Her pallet is ready for company, but the fire in the foreground has grown cold (a witty joke), the dinner bowl is now empty, and the long pipe is cast aside and unused (ditto).  Like the wispy smoke from the dead fire, there is only a dissipating trace of something that was once hot.

Most delicious of all is the look on her face: a mixture of disappointment, fury, resignation and bored familiarity.  One has the distinct impression that this has happened before, and will probably happen again in the future.  And she knows it.

So … why do I like this painting so much?  Mainly because Charlie’s views on humanity were much smarter and commonsensical than the ways we are taught to think today.  Charlie knew many Native Americans in his time in the West, and genuinely liked them.  He was one of nature’s democrats – he judged people as individuals, and knew that, as groups, people are more alike than they are different.

Today, we are taught that our differences matter more than our similarities, and that our cultural peculiarities are some sacred carapace that protect us from being more like one another.  Charlie would’ve thought we were crazy (and I’m with Charlie).  This picture works so well because Charlie was able to capture the look of everyone who has ever waited for their wife or husband to show up.  It would be the same picture if the woman was in an Asian setting, or a Middle-European one, or in a contemporary American home: and that is Charlie’s point.  We’re all people, and we’re all more alike than we are different.

Charlies notions don’t have much currency in today’s world, but how much of commonsense does, nowadays?

Next week: New and Noteworthy Books  

Laugh Kills Lonesome, by Charles Marion Russell (1925)

It’s no secret that we here at The Jade Sphinx love the work of Charles Marion Russell (1864-1926), the cowboy artist.  The boyish Russell went West in his early youth, and worked as a cowboy, watching the waning days of the American West with an artist’s eye.  He didn't seem to be very effective in the saddle, but it was all he wanted and he was happy.

Charlie not only loved life, he loved his life.  He wanted to be a cowboy in his earliest boyhood, and went West as soon a he had the chance. 

Charlie’s vision of the West was a boyish one, full of endless prairies and freedom.  His was an eternal boyhood – both promise and nostalgia at the same time.  The West (and his boyhood) became to him a Lost Eden which he missed and to which he could never return.

The sense of loss, though, was not a bitter nor astringent one.  In fact, it grew into some of a sweet wistfulness.  Charlie was too happy a man – too content with life and his place in it – to allow loss to play to great a part.  It’s a lesson we can all take from this maddeningly simple yet complex man.  The more I read about Charlie, the more I think I know him, the more I feel some vital core essence of the man is slipping through my fingers.

This week, we will look at three of Charlie’s pictures.  (I only think of him as “Charlie,” it’s almost impossible to think of him under his full moniker.)  They are not necessarily his best (nor most representative pictures), but they illustrate something of his philosophy, I think.

Exhibit A: Laugh Kills Lonesome, painted in 1925 and now in the Mackay Collection in Helena, Montana.  It was painted just a year before Charlie went to the Last Roundup, and if ever an artist painted an end-of-life farewell, it is this.

Charlie paints the figures in a markedly sketchy manner: it’s not verisimilitude he is after, but mood.  The sky and surrounding landscape are simply laid out in muted, cool colors.  The moon shines brilliantly in the distance, and the stars seem almost heavenly, but they do no wash the picture with cool light – they are distant and fairly unobtainable.

The realm warmth of the picture comes from the campfire, which brings a warm glow to the chuck wagon, a few simple tools, and the cowboys themselves.  There is nothing of particularly high mark in their attitudes or actions; it is simply a group of men content after a hard life of labor, loving the outdoors, their lives, and one another.  One of them smokes a contemplative cigarette, another pours the last of the coffee, and two of them share a game of cards.

But the arresting figure is the man standing on the right, hat back, coat open, body receptive to capture the campfire’s warmth.  Who is it but our old friend, Charlie Russell, the Cowboy Artist.  We have seen in the past that Charlie was not averse to putting himself into his own work, and there he is, holding his lariat, smoking a cigarette, and perhaps looking at the fire die down as his own life draws to a close.

Charlie was in ill health for the final years of his life, and he is evidently looking at his own past in this painting.  But it is not a look of regret or of loss; if anything, it’s a look of satisfaction.

Perhaps the truest nugget of the real Charlie Russell can be found in the picture’s title:  Laugh Kills Lonesome.

There, in a nutshell, is the essence of Charlie Russell.

Dandelion Wine, by Ray Bradbury

For many years, it was standard practice every summer at the home of Your Correspondent to read Dandelion Wine (1957) by Ray Bradbury (1920-2012).  Somehow, we had fallen out of the habit for the last decade or so, and it was with some trepidation that we recently revisited the book.  Will it hold up?

Dandelion Wine is the story of two brothers growing up in Green Town, Illinois.  The older boy, Douglas Spaulding, is 12, his brother Tom, 10.  The year is 1928, and the narrative is not a single story so much as a series of vignettes that illustrate the summer. 

In the course of the book, Doug and Tom solve no crimes, have no adventures, see little action in the traditional sense.  But it is a formative summer, nonetheless.  First, Doug realizes that he’s alive.  This is a stupendous realization, bringing color and a sense of wonder to all things.  But, he also realizes that some day he will die, which lead to revelations of another sort.

The boys also befriend Col. Freeleigh, a near centenarian who remembers the Civil War, Pawnee Bill and the buffalo, and the mysterious death of magician Chung Ling Soo.  (Look it up.)  They meet an old lady who may never have been young, a neighbor who vows to build a “happiness machine,” and Doug’s best friend moves across the country, out of his life forever.  Grandparents die, new tennis shoes are bought, and feuding neighbors resort to mail-order magic to settle differences.

One reads through Dandelion Wine, thinking that none of it flows in any coherent sense, and then, boom, summer is over and we see that the events of the book fit together in a panoramic mosaic.  It is a startling literary achievement.

So, visiting it again after so many years, I have to confess that I come away more impressed by Bradbury’s work than ever before.  This is a beautiful, lyrical novel, and Bradbury may have been the 20^th Century’s finest prose poet.  It is a book to be read aloud, each word savored and tasted.

Bradbury, of course, built his reputation on his stories of science fiction and fantasy.  He was already a household name when Dandelion Wine debuted, but it was a radical change for the author in that it is not a work of the fantastic.  There are no spaceships, illustrated men, monsters, dinosaurs, Martians or ghosts in Dandelion Wine.  Despite the lack of such flummery, the book is suffused with magic; parts of it read like an outright incantation, as if every word brings the reader closer to the experience of being young.  If you want to know what Bradbury the man was like, read Dandelion Wine.

The book met with glowing reviews from the mainstream press, but the harshest critics of the tale came from the science fiction community, who perhaps felt that Bradbury, in writing a “straight” novel, was abandoning the genre.  This is ridiculous, of course, as Bradbury only wrote science fiction and fantasy in the broadest sense of the terms.  In reality Bradbury was a magical realist – he sees magic everywhere, and thinks the simple act of living a miraculous thing.  If science fiction and fantasy were the tools to best help him achieve his type of lyric prose poetry, fine, but he never really cared about the general conventions of genre fiction.  (Bradbury also had a profound – and wise – dislike of machines and technology, thinking that human connections and interactions are more important.  This is heresy to the science fiction community.)  It is this genius for being himself that enabled Bradbury to escape the ghetto of genre fiction, and assume the deserved mantle of serious writer.

One more observation.  I remembered a book that was beautiful and touched with sadness.  Now, after rereading it again a decade later, I see a book that is sad and touched with beauty.  It is not the sadness of personal tragedy or the particular hardships in life.  Rather, it is the sadness that only comes with the realization of loss.  The great theme of Dandelion Wine is change: it seems we start out in Arcadia, and every summer, every change of our lives, takes us further away from this golden ideal.  To Bradbury’s mind, it’s all downhill from 12 on, and, who knows, he may be right. 

Below is a brief excerpt from Dandelion Wine, one of my favorite passages.  Here, Doug, Tom and some of the neighborhood kids are corralled by Mr. Tridden, the trolley man, who tells them that the trolley is closing down…

At noon the motorman stopped his car in the middle of the block and leaned out.  “Hey!”

And Douglas and Charlie and Tom and all the boys and girls on the block saw the gray glove waving, and dropped: from trees and left skip ropes in white snakes on lawns, to run and sit in the green plush seats, and there was no charge. Mr. Tridden, the conductor, kept his glove over the mouth of the money box as he moved the trolley on down the shady block, calling.

“Hey!” said Charlie. “Where are we going?”

“Last ride,” said Mr. Tridden, eyes on the high electric wire ahead. “No more trolley.  Bus starts to run tomorrow. Going to retire me with a pension, they are. So-a free ride for everyone! Watch out!”

He ricocheted the brass handle, the trolley groaned and swung round an endless green curve, and all the time in the world held still, as if only the children and Mr. Tridden and his miraculous machine were riding an endless river, away.

“Last day?” asked Douglas, stunned. “They can’t do that! It’s bad enough the Green Machine is gone, locked up in the garage, and no arguments. And bad enough my new tennis shoes are getting old and slowing down! How’ll I get around? But … But They can’t take off the trolley! Why,” said Douglas, “no matter how you look at it, a bus ain’t a trolley. Don’t make the same kind of noise. Don’t have tracks or wires, don’t throw sparks, don’t pour sand on the tracks, don’t have the same colors, don’t have a bell, don’t let down a step like a trolley does!”

“Hey, that’s right,” said Charlie. “I always get a kick watching a trolley let down the step, like an accordion.”

“Sure,” said Douglas.

And then they were at the end of the line, the silver tracks, abandoned for eighteen years, ran on into rolling country. In 1910 people took the trolley out to Chessman’s Park with vast picnic hampers. The track, never ripped up, still lay rusting among the hills.

“Here’s where we turn around,” said Charlie.

“Here’s where you’re wrong!” Mr. Tridden snapped the emergency generator switch.  “Now!”

The trolley, with a bump and a sailing glide, swept past the city limits, turned off the street, and swooped downhill through intervals of odorous sunlight and vast acreages of shadow that smelled of toadstools. Here and there creek waters flushed the tracks and sun filtered through trees like green glass. They slid whispering on meadows washed with wild sunflowers past abandoned way stations empty of all save transfer-punched confetti, to follow a forest stream into a summer country, while Douglas talked.

“Why, just the smell of a trolley, that’s different. I been on Chicago buses; they smell funny.”

“Trolleys are too slow,” said Mr. Tridden. “Going to put busses on. Busses for people and busses for school.”

The trolley whined to a stop. From overhead Mr. Tridden reached down huge picnic hampers. Yelling, the children helped him carry the baskets out by a creek that emptied into a silent lake where an ancient bandstand stood crumbling into termite dust.

They sat eating ham sandwiches and fresh strawberries and waxy oranges and Mr. Tridden told them how it had been twenty years ago, the band playing on that ornate stand at night, the men pumping air into their brass horns, the plump conductor flinging perspiration from his baton, the children and fireflies running in the deep grass, the ladies with long dresses and high pompadours treading the wooden xylophone walks with men in choking collars. There was the walk now, all softened into a fiber mush by the years. The lake was silent and blue and serene, and fish peacefully threaded the bright reeds, and the motorman murmured on and on, and the children felt it was some other year, with Mr. Tridden looking wonderfully young, his eyes lighted like small bulbs, blue and electric. It was a drifting, easy day, nobody rushing and the forest all about, the sun held in one position, as Mr. Tridden’s voice rose and fell, and a darning needle sewed along the air, stitching, restitching designs both golden and invisible. A bee settled into a flower, humming and humming. The trolley stood like an enchanted calliope, simmering where the sun fell on it. The trolley was on their hands, a brass smell, as they ate ripe cherries. The bright odor of the trolley blew from their clothes on the summer wind.

A loon flew over the sky, crying.

Somebody shivered.

Mr. Tridden worked on his gloves. “Well, time to go. Parents’ll think I stole you all for good.”

The trolley was silent and cool dark, like the inside of an ice-cream drugstore. With a soft green rustling of velvet buff, the seats were turned by the quiet children so they sat with their backs to the silent lake, the deserted bandstand and the wooden planks that made a kind of music if you walked down the shore on them into other lands.

Bing! went the soft bell under Mr. Tridden’s foot and they soared back over sun abandoned, withered flower meadows, through woods, toward a town that seemed to crush the sides of the trolley with bricks and asphalt and wood when Mr. Tridden stopped to let the children out in shady streets.

Charlie and Douglas were the last to stand near the opened tongue of the trolley, the folding step, breathing electricity, watching Mr. Tridden’s gloves on the brass controls. 

Douglas ran his fingers on the green creek moss, looked at the silver, the brass, the wine color of the ceiling.

“Well . . . so long again, Mr. Tridden.”

“Good-by, boys.”

“See you around, Mr. Tridden.”

“See you around.”

There was a soft sigh of air; the door collapsed shut, tucking up its corrugated tongue. The trolley sailed slowly down the late afternoon, brighter than the sun, tangerine, all flashing gold and lemon, turned a far corner wheeling, and vanished, gone away. 

Beyond 30 (AKA The Lost Continent), by Edgar Rice Burroughs (1915)

During your correspondent’s misspent youth – back when dinosaurs ruled the earth – he spent most of his summer vacations reading the works of Edgar Rice Burroughs (1875-1950).

Yes … most of you have just lost what little respect for me that you may have had.  However, I believe you judge too harshly.  I say without shame and in complete candor that some of the people I met in my ramblings through ERB’s corpus are among the most important literary friendships that I have made.  Tarzan of the Apes, John Carter of Mars and the explorers of the subterranean world of Pellucidar, where intelligent reptiles live at the Earth’s core, are as real to me to this day as many actual human beings that I have met in later life.  And some of them even make better friends.

No one will argue for a moment that ERB is a prose stylist, or that his insight into human nature was a rare and subtle one.  More damming to his literary reputation are his sensibilities and taste for high adventure; most modern novels are simply slices of life that may better labeled why we are miserable now.  ERB has no patience for that type of thinking or that type of narrative.  ERB wrote adventure stories – set in some of the most exotic places on and off of the planet – and they were unabashedly plot-driven.  If you want know the plight of unhappy men in a midlife crisis, or women struggling for identity in a world redefined by feminism, look elsewhere.  Want to learn how a Civil War soldier miraculously transported to Mars, befriends four-armed green giants and battles rampaging, carnivorous white apes, and you’ve come to the right place.

Minds as brilliant and creative as Carl Sagan (1934-1996), Gore Vidal (1925-2012), Ray Bradbury (1920-2012), William Joyce (born 1957) and Jane Goodall (born 1934) have all credited him as an influence, and his contribution to global popular culture is incalculable.

Whatever the faults or strengths of his particular novels, what is most remarkable about his work is the experience of reading ERB.  The adventure novels of ERB has the remarkable quality of affecting the reader in ways unexpected and serendipitous.  Aside from (not so) simple narrative pleasures as a compelling storyline and absolutely unfettered imagination, it is impossible to read ERB without a sense of delight and of wonder.  In the world of ERB, all bets are off and most anything is possible.  There is a sense of energy, drive and, for want of a better word … pep.  ERB is a tonic; read him and grow young again.

And … ERB believed in adventure.  Much of the literary establishment has written off ERB not only for his prose, but also for his abundant output and for his choice of genre.  ERB was no hack, churning out novels at a penny a word.  Rather, ERB lived in an imaginative landscape that was a real to him as the workday world is real to us.  His Martian society, the (mostly invented) African jungle of Tarzan, and the land at the Earth’s Core all share a sense of … conviction.  In his way, ERB was a serious novelist--as his worlds mattered to him; there was a compelling urgency to his vision that is evident in his fiction.

Finally, ERB had a very definite sense of what life should be.  Unlike many contemporary writers, ERB let it be known that life was for living.  Or, as the hero in Beyond Thirty says when finding land:

"It is the nearest land," I replied. "I have always wanted to explore the forgotten lands of the Eastern Hemisphere. Here's our chance. To remain at sea is to perish. None of us ever will see home again. Let us make the best of it, and enjoy while we do live that which is forbidden the balance of our race—the adventure and the mystery which lie beyond thirty."

I was thinking about Burroughs recently when I luckily came across his book Beyond Thirty while rummaging through the invaluable www.manybooks.net.  This is a resource of public domain books available for free download – and if you want to learn more about ERB, there is no better place to start.

At any rate, I cannot think of the summers of my past without thinking, too, of ERB.  I make it a point to at least revisit one of his novels every summer, or, if possible, read one I have not come across before.  Beyond Thirty (sometimes also called The Lost Continent), was first published in All Around Magazine, and did not appear in book form in ERB’s lifetime.  It was collected in book form first in 1955, and later in 1963 with a delightful cover by artist Frank Frazetta (1928-2010). 

The story takes place in 2137, when Pan-American’s Navy Lieutenant Jefferson Turck, commander of aero-submarine Coldwater, patrols the 30^th meridian from Iceland to the Azores.  The ship’s anti-gravitation screens fail, and it drifts beyond the forbidden territory into Europe.

Europe had been off limits to Pan-America since the start of the Great War in the early 20^th Century, and Turck and a handful of loyal men find themselves in a now savage landscape that was once the civilized world.  Ladies and gentlemen, Beyond Thirty is a corker.

Most science fiction is never really about the future – but, rather, serves as a distorted mirror to the present.  Written in 1915, the world was then plunging into the conflict of the Great War.  The vast majority of the American population (and their politicians) favored an isolationist approach.  What would the world be like, ERB seems to ask, if the New World withdrew from the world stage?  It would appear as if ERB anticipated the American Century before most of the world did – for his tale tells of a unified North, Central and South America that has achieved many marvels of super-science, while war-ravaged Europe perishes when left to its own devices.

Also interesting is what ERB posits happens to a Europe ravaged by global conflict without American intervention.  In short, England descends into barbarism, the countryside now ravaged by wild animals that were once kept in zoos.  Continental Europe is now largely enslaved by Moslems from Abyssinia – who are using slave labor and whatever military expertise they have to prepare for a definitive conflict with the sleeping giant that is China.  With a little tweaking, it would seem as if the foreign policy concerns of a century ago were as pressing today as they were then.

Beyond Thirty is a remarkable and satisfying romp by one of the masters of the form.  It is an extremely short novel, and as a free download, would serve as a terrific introduction to the imagination of Edgar Rice Burroughs.

Sketches of Marvin Franklin

Some artists are indefatigable sketchers.  Once such example was the late, great Marvin Franklin, a working artist in every sense of the term.

Franklin worked two jobs.  At night, he worked on the New York City subway system, fixing the tracks.  By day, he would work on his art – drawing, painting, and attending classes at the Arts Students League.  And for good measure, he volunteered two days a week at a homeless shelter, volunteered one day a week at his church helping young kids, and taught art classes to teens in the Bronx.  Franklin was clearly a man of remarkable energy and significant artistic curiosity.

Franklin lived with a sketchbook in his hand.  He always carried an 11x14 sketchbook, and usually used a simple ballpoint pen.  Franklin thought the pen was the ideal tool to hasten his artistic development; he thought it made the artist look more closely and draw more carefully since erasure was impossible.  He also thought ballpoint pens were resilient, compact, handy and ubiquitous. 

I don’t know how the many impromptu models felt when Franklin sketched them, but I’m sure it helped that he was over six feet tall and weighed some 230 pounds.  Franklin would fill an entire spiral sketchbook every week or two; his pen seldom left the surface of the paper. 

On April 29, 2007, Franklin, then 55, was carrying a piece of equipment across the tracks at the Hoyt-Schermerhorn station in Downtown Brooklyn when he was struck and killed by a G train. He left behind a wife, three grown children, and hundreds of sketch pads, watercolors and etchings. Many of his works depicted subway riders and, often, homeless people.

Franklin came to his empathy for the homeless through direct experience:  he was homeless once himself for about a year, and said that the discipline of art helped him put his life into order.  Upon his passing, the New York Transit Museum curated a show of his most significant work.

Even the most cursory look would reveal the Franklin was an acute observer of humanity, and that he sketched with a remarkable fluidity and sense of detail.  Though his sketchbooks were not home to finished drawings, the images he created had a vitality often missing from more academic work. 

What would have happened to Franklin had he lived longer?  That will be forever unknown to us; he seemed to live for his art, but did not dream of artistic fame.  His ambitions (and passions) were more down-to-earth; to Franklin making great art was not more important than being a good man. 

I had not the pleasure of meeting Franklin, though his legend at the Arts Students League looms large.  I would’ve been delighted, I’m sure, to call him a friend.

The Artist’s Sketchbook: Civil War Sketches In the Becker Collection

Sketch From the Becker Collection, copyright The Becker Collection

Few places and conditions on the earth are less involved in art or creation than the battlefield.  In the field of fire, destruction, not creation, is the name of the game.  But in the pre-photography days, sketches were often the most efficient way of documenting man’s inhumanity to man.

These thoughts came to mind while paging through some of the sketches in the Becker Collection, which currently reside in Boston.  The Becker Collection consists of more than 650 sketches, and is the largest private collection of Civil War drawings, and is second only to the collection of the Library of Congress.  Artist Joseph Becker (1841-1910) was an artist-reporter in the mid-19^th century for Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper.  Becker and other artist-reporters satisfied the public’s appetite for images of the war as it progressed, sending eyewitness accounts on all facets of military life.

Photography at the time was often staged, or capable of recording quiet and at-peace moments.  These sketches were not the finished works that would appear in print; rather, they were preparatory sketches to keep perspective, scope and incident in mind when Becker and a cadre of other artists would make finished drawings.

Becker was born in Pottsville, PA.  He started at Frank Leslie’s Illustrated Newspaper as an errand boy.  He had no formal training in art, but newspaper staff encouraged his raw talent, and in 1863, Leslie sent Becker to accompany the Union Army and make drawings.  When not sketching the battlefield, Becker recorded scenes of daily life in the army camps.

The Becker Collection travels often, and they have orchestrated many outstanding retrospectives.  If it travels to your city or town, it comes highly recommended.

American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny, by Christopher Miller

We started the year dipping into a delightful surprise – American Cornball: A Laffopedic Guide to the Formerly Funny, by Christopher Miller.  Arranged alphabetically, Miller enumerates the countless tropes so frequent in American comedy circa 1900-1966, and why they were funny and what they tell us about Americans of old.

Miller creates an artificial cutoff of 1966, citing anecdotally that the upheavals of the 1960s resulted in a seismic change in what America meant and, consequently, what it meant to be an American.  One would think that this is an invitation for Miller – a professor at Bennington College in Vermont and the author of Sudden Noises from Inanimate Objects – to take potshots at the Great American Century.  However, such is not the case at all, as Miller rightly sees the downside of our social “progress.”  More often than not, it would seem to Miller that the America of the 1920s, 30s and 40s was a funnier, and perhaps, better place than the country we know today.  (A sentiment with which we here at the Jade Sphinx are in full agreement.)

The book has entries on a wide array of laugh-getters, including falling safes and anvils, pratfalls, milquetoasts, flappers, hash, hobos, outhouses, rolling pins, castor oil, dishwashing husbands, nosey neighbors and noise – and that is just scratching the surface.  Miller also talks about many of the formerly great venues for this humor, including full-page comic strips, radio comedy, silent movies, and of course, joke books. 

Coming in at 544 pages, one would think that American Cornball more than overstays its welcome; however, one wishes the book was longer and some of the entries more detailed.

Miller’s particular genius is not just in enumerating instances of a comedic trope, but wondering why they were (or are) funny in the first place.  Miller has keen insight into the human condition, and finds many of his observations in the arena of the ridiculous.  Though not a philosopher like G. K. Chesterton (quoted, incidentally, in this volume), Miller’s worldview is that of an expansive humanist with a predisposition to the comic rather than the tragic. 

The encyclopedia format keeps the observations loose and light, and this also proves to be one of the few flaws in the book: when Miller really has something to say (which is often), he is hamstrung by his format.  One hopes that he will follow-up American Cornball with a collection of essays of greater depth and fewer topics, as there is much more for him to say.

But what he does say here is terrific and to be savored.  I read through the volume with a goofy smile plastered on my face – and how could anyone resist a book that cites the Three Stooges, W. C. Fields and the Marx Brothers a source material?

Here is an example of Miller at his best, rifting on the subject of pain:  There is, as far as I know, not one scene in all of Henry James where a character of either sex sits on a thumbtack.  I haven’t read everything by Henry James, but I’ve read enough to know what the rest must be like, and nowhere do I see a thumbtack penetrating an unsuspecting buttock.  Stubbed toes are also few and far between, if they occur at all.  And unlike all those hapless dads on America’s Funniest Home Videos, the males in James’s arcadia never get it in the balls.

Good stuff, that, but better still, here he is midway on his discussion of morons:  In our culture, “That’s not funny” really means “It’s wrong to laugh at that,” which is why we sometimes say it even while laughing.  “That’s not funny” is only secondarily a report on the speaker’s true reactions, though it can be an effort to train those reactions.  If you strongly disapprove of something and therefore insist it isn’t funny, that isn’t quite as dishonest as insisting that O.J. Simpson was never a great running back because you hate the psychopathic asshole he later became.  No, it’s more like refusing to find an actress beautiful because you hate her personality.  Given the determination, you really can suppress your sense of humor, like your sense of beauty.  But if you say, “There’s nothing funny about mental retardation, and for the life of me I’ve never understood why anything thinks there is,” you must be either a hypocrite or a saint.  Either way, you’ve clearly forgotten the jokes of your childhood…..

Then there is this, on farting:  Before it became permissible to discuss farts openly, our forebears relied on all kinds of substitutes— from ducks to tubas, from foghorns to balloons. It may be that the fully lifelike simulation of farts became possible only with later improvements in sheet rubber, but in the pre-whoopee epoch it wasn’t necessary or even desirable for a noisemaker to sound exactly like the real thing; it just had to sound like something sometimes used to symbolize the real thing. Novelty makers are always boasting about how “realistic” their products are, but in this case, realism wasn’t wanted.  Instead, aspiring practical jokers were offered a range of metonymies and metaphors.  Even in our unembarrassed age, the whoopee cushion itself still claims to imitate a “Bronx cheer” or raspberry—not a fart but the imitation of one made by buzzing the lips in what linguists call a bilabial trill. (The reason that sound is called a “raspberry” is that it is or was cockney rhyming slang for “fart,” via “raspberry tart.”) The sound is the best simulation of a fart we can produce with our normal speech apparatus.  In the early 1930s, when whoopee cushions took the world by storm, raspberries too were in fashion, at least on the funny pages—both Dagwood and Popeye had recourse to them now and then.  A little later, Al Capp gave us Joe Btfsplk, the world’s biggest jinx, easily recognized by the small black cloud—a personal fart cloud? —hanging over him at all times. When asked how to pronounce Joe’s surname, Capp would respond with a raspberry, adding, “How else would you pronounce it?”

I loved American Cornball, and spent much of the past few weeks reading it aloud to all and sundry.  This is a treasure for anyone interested in humor – and a perfect gift for those without a sense of one.  Highly recommended – and Mr. Miller, more, please.