"Whose Names are Unknown", Sanora Babb

Sanora Babb came of age before the Depression, and when the Dust Bowl came and swept the folks of the great plains west, she was among them hearing their story and recording it. She published a few books much later as non-fiction histories of the times. If the subject matter sounds familiar, then chances are good you've heard of The Grapes of Wrath.

Steinbeck and Babb didn't work together, and maybe Steinbeck's people can show he did his own research and didn't crib hers, but The Grapes of Wrath and Whose Names are Unknown were set to be published nearly simultaneously, but Grapes... got to the market first, and then exploded. Babb's publisher decided the country couldn't handle two novels covering the same subject. Can you imagine that today? Once one thing is successful, there are hundreds of impostors almost immediately.

In any case, an act of literary injustice was committed when they shelved Sanora's work for 70-80 years. This book was just published in the last few years, and I wouldn't have heard about it if it hadn't been requested as a Decemberween present.

The title comes from bank eviction notices on foreclosed upon farms: "The Residents, whose names are unknown, are hereby evicted."

Reclaiming some American history...who says the ladies can't join the Okie exodus and take notes and write a novel about it...

"The Length of an Afternoon", Jim Cushing

This copy of poems is published by Cahuenga Press, a publishing house founded and financed by the member poets. Cushing's poems are both conversational and dense, but I'm not a poetry critic. I enjoy looking through the pages when I come across the book in its long life outside the bookshelf.

I mention it because while it may be a rarity, Jim Cushing was a professor of mine at Cal Poly in SLO. I had him for two separate classes. The first was during the beginning of my senior year, and my friend Dennis and I were able to hang out for a last hurrah as it were. I mention that class specifically in my post about Madame Bovary and how Dennis and I had to calculate what page we were on in his different edition.

The second class I had with Jim Cushing was a poetry composition class; a creative writing class. I took it with the creative writing short fiction class the same quarter, my last before graduation. I had the two writing classes (taking both CR/NCR), my senior project class, and a C++ class, and I had already taken C++ at some other school a few years before. That last quarter was a blur of of alcohol, bike riding, poetry, Denis Johnson coming to campus, and meetings with my adviser about the last touches of my senior project.

In any case, Doc Cushing had us purchase his own book as well as another Cahuenga Press poet who'll appear here in a hot minute. I have both books because Cushing was a fun, white pony-tailed stoner-type who was passionate about literature, and Harry Northrup, the other poet, on whom my group did our project, had his own interesting back story, and I'll be getting to that at that time.

Poetry, while highly respected by myself, does not make up a large portion of my library.

"El Indio"; Greogorio Lopez y Fuentes

I believe I found this copy of El Indio at a book sale recently. The cover art, as well as the drawings on the interior were done by famous muralist Diego Rivera. This copy is a second printing, from 1961, translated from the Spanish by Anita Brenner. First published in 1937, it was the first winner of the Mexican National Award in Literature. The sketches and the synopsis were enough for me to snatch it up when I found it.

Here's one of the many full page drawings by Diego, Mr. Frieda Kahlo:

The story for this historical novel follows the struggles of the descendants of the Aztecs, the mountain Indians as they work for the white Spanish and mestizo bosses. It's as powerful as it is important for an idea of how the remnants of one civilization deal with a new foreign and hostile one.

The conquerors become another jungle peril...

"Ethel and the Terrorist", Claude Jasmin

Next in the line for the enlightening effect of being spotlit here is a brief history in the form of a novel.

Written by Quebecois writer and intellectual Claude Jasmin, the story is about a relationship between lovers, a couple who are at the center of a Quebec separatist bombing.

The background for the book is a historical event: the 1963 bombing of a Canadian military recruitment center in Montreal, killing one Wilfred O'Neil, an overnight guard. The killing was a surprising accident, as the Quebecois nationalists and separatists had been known to bomb symbols of the established relationship between the English and French segments of Canadian society, but they'd do it, like Basque separatists, late at night when the places are usually empty.

The French-Canadian intellectuals and writers, the young folks, were almost all sympathetic to the separatist terrorists, that is, right up until the death of Wilfred O'Neil, a French-speaking gent of Irish descent. This event caused them to look inwards.

For one person, Claude Jasmin, the result was this quick novel. Ethel and her lover, the narrator, start out on the run right after the bomb goes off, and they head to New York as the everything unfolds.

The book was originally published in French in 1964, a year after the bombing, and was translated into English by David S. Walker in 1965. The copy here is one of those first English printings from 1965.

Minor Format Change

If you look at the histories of some of my blogs, especially after I started a bunch, is that the ones that get a ton of material go through spasms of lost to say. This one and the Flags and Logos blog are good examples of that. Geysers at the beginning, and then the trail off. I can tell I had a lot to say for a short time, and then it starts to taper.

So here, starting with the last post, the Old Jules post, I've decided to switch up formats.

Originally, this blog is was about my books, my library. That hasn't changed. But this blog originally was about where I got my books, what they meant to me and my writing, and ultimately what I thought at the time of the acquisition or how the book's impact would effect the library itself. (That's not total bullshit, right?)

Now I'd like to highlight some books that aren't well known but yet may be important in some other fashion, like the Mari Sandoz and her biography of her dick dad. Her fight for her Western idiom, her fight against the chauvinist establishment of the '30s, and the look at the old frontier of hardscrabble Western Nebraska is as important to our American identity as other, better known books and authors.

This lady is a hardscrabble American writer.

Some of the other books coming soon will be tiny slivers of importance, like a deliberately covered up novel by a lady that finally, 70 years later, gets its day.

"Old Jules", Mari Sandoz

At the Dollar Bookstore in my neighborhood, I'd walk by a haphazardly labeled "Biography" shelf and see Old Jules looking out at me. The piercing eyes would beckon, and I'd find myself thumbing through the opening pages, trying to catch a semblance of the contents.

Eventually I bought it.

Mari Sandoz is the daughter of a Swiss immigrant, a brutal bastard of a man who, having moved from Switzerland to the hardscrabble existence the panhandle of Nebraska offers, did what he could to belittle the ambitions of his daughter. This was Old Jules Sandoz. On his deathbed, in a remarkable twist, Jules asked his daughter to tell his story.

The manuscript won a non-fiction prize from the Atlantic Press in 1935. It was published soon thereafter, after a fight between Mari and the publishers. They wanted her to abandon the Western Frontier idiom she wrote it in in favor of the more accepted East Coast idiom.

This is a late edition, maybe eleventh, but the story of an immigrant carving a life out of unforgiving land for himself and his family is as fresh as you'd like it to be. Watch Old Jules befriend the local Indians. Watch as he presides over a makeshift court and a man is hanged.

Mari Sandoz got her material from newspapers, letters, and the random interview, and put it togther almost despite her father. She herself had been married to another brutal ass, then divorced him, and had to  legally fight to change her name back to Sandoz. Her fight and perseverance are traits that harbor no mystery as to from where they originate.

Another one of my Diamond in the Rough books...

NY Giants: Super Bowl XXV Champs

In elementary school a trailer would show up at different times during the year. It was the book-sale mobile. I usually would get sports books, but one or twice I got a choose-your-own adventure. This is one of those sports books.

I was a Giants fan, and still am. Phil Simms winning his Super Bowl was one of earliest NFL memories. A few years later, during the Bills painful march through four straight Super Bowls, we got Hoss and Otiss (not a typo, that's two s's) leading Big Blue to another SB victory.

And as a modern fan, I've been able to enjoy Eli winning two rings himself. Two. Eli. Right?

This book is small and flimsy, maybe fifty or sixty pages, and is a collector's item, if that collector is a little kid who thinks the Hostetler name contains an interesting consonant cluster.

This is probably a time where I picked a book by its cover, like another one of my earlier book-mobile purchases, a baseball book from 1987 with Donnie Baseball on the cover.