"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.

"Willie Boy", Harry Lawton: The Last Great Posse Chase

On a drive away from the Salton Sea and back to the Southland, our trip found us weaving through the Anza -Borrego State Park, and at a bookstore right outside the Martinez-Torres reservation, I found this book. The bewitching drawings on the cover and inside caught my attention. The story of the last great old west posse chase pushed me over the edge, and I eventually bought this edition.

Here's the title page:

Each chapter has a cool silhouette drawing that speaks to content of that particular chapter, and this is one of the coolest drawings, for chapter 10:

So...first the book, then the story.

The copy I have was one of the 1995 printings, the last time any press brought out an edition. Originally published in hardback in 1960, the subsequent paperback editions came out in '76, '79, '84 and '95. This copy has no printed ISBN nor a printed price. The last page is a fold-out map of the chase and surrounding area that if you're lucky enough to find a copy, you'll be using as reference regularly as you read.

The second-to-last page is a note abut the type, and  it's here that they mention, in one sentence, that a man named Don Perceval "designed and decorated the book and jacket". That's how they mention, on the penultimate page, who did the silhouette drawings throughout. Perceval was a Brit, who gre up for a time in LA, and lived in the Navajo Nation for a time, and has a long history of Native American art pieces.

I was determined to buy a book at that particular bookstore, and this was my candidate. This book was first published by Balboa Island Press, and subsequently by the Malki Museum Press. Interestingly enough, the Malki Mueseum, on the Morongo Reservation, was the first museum on a reservation in America.

Willie Boy was a young Paiute man, living at the Twentynine Palms reservation in 1909. He was known as "Billie Boy" to everyone, and as a slight but hard working ranch hand and vaquero, he was well respected and liked by the white ranchers. He wasn't a drunk or gambler, but he did get arrested once for public drunkeness. The Paiute were a minority on the Twentynine Palms rez, but that wasn't the worst thing ever.

Part of those people's governing traditions that white American society today, as well as back then, didn't understand was what caused the so-called "last great posse manhunt of the west."

Marriage traditions are different all over, and things that happened for Paiute once occurred in what became the western marriage tradition---the act of marriage-by-capture.

Billie Boy ended up shooting Old Mike, the father of a young lady he had an eye for, Lolita, and then he and Lolita fled. The classic "Old West" was fairly dead at this point, but one more desert manhunt got organized. Ranch hands who knew Billie Boy were upset about the whole thing. They respected and liked him; he knew the desert, was a crack shot, and was fearless. This would be no easy manhunt.

Quickly they found Lolita dead, shot where she'd fallen, exhausted. An old Indian man shot by another Indian didn't stir up the blood, but a young dead Indian girl, one with designs on going to school, that got the public interested.

Posses formed in San Bernardino and Riverside, meaning to pinch him in the middle. President William Howard Taft paid a visit during the early stages of the manhunt, and since his nickname was "Billy Boy", the newspapers decided to call our fugitive Willie Boy. It was because of this speech tour and the attendant New York newspapermen picking up the manhunt story and spreading the word back east that made the story of a desert Indian's plight a legend.

Without the girl in tow, Willie Boy ran on foot for 500 miles all around the desert, from spring to spring, from food cache to food cache, never being caught by the horseback riding forces chasing him over pitiless terrain that would have killed most people. In the end Willie Boy took himself out with his last bullet and wasn't found for nearly ten days, ten scary days for southern California desert white folks who were sure a full scale Indian revolution was beginning.

His tale turned into a legend, and many stories about how Willie Boy survived and escaped into Mexico, or back to Nevada where he was born, or even all the way to Dinetah in the Navajo Nation abound in the lore of the desert people.

This book is just under a two hundred pages of text and twenty pages of photos, and, being written by one Harry Lawton, an award winning newspaperman (he was born in Long Beach) reads like a newspaper article and can be consumed in a single long afternoon, or over a rainy weekend.

The silhouette pictures by themselves are pretty damn sweet.

Quickly after this, manhunts were done by automobile and coordinated by telephone, and the idea of the horseback posse faded like the ghosts these riders were emulating. Many of the riders were friends with and contemporaries of the Earp family, and if the two sheriffs featured here, Ralphs and Wilson, were quicker to shoot instead of making peace during conflicts, they'd probably have turned into the legends of the dime novel story like their pals, the Earps.

Truly a fascinating point in this country's history, this little book is worth the look.