The Perils of Modernity

03. February 2013 · 1 comment · Categories: Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: , , , ,

So, sometime last Friday afternoon, my author email address was hacked and used to send out several different kinds of spam to simply everybody on my contacts list, for which I apologize abjectly. It’s some small comfort that a good many of the addresses in it were no longer valid. And at least the spammers weren’t pushing anything acutely embarrassing, as when my other personal email account was hacked last year and used to send a pitch for Viagra to a great many people on my email list, one of whom was a friend of the male persuasion, who immediately sent a reply message to me, “Oh, Celia – I didn’t know you cared!”

It’s the second time in a year that this has happened, and Yahoo client services are getting so impossible to work with that I am throwing in the towel and establishing a new email address at gmail. I don’t suppose that gmail will be any more hack-proof than any other server, but at least this affords the opportunity to revise my contacts listing – and hey, now I know how many of them are now invalid. But it is still a bit of a pain to go through and revise my contacts list and transfer it over from yahoo to gmail – and I will have to revise my business cards and printed marketing materiel as well.
I was trying to explain this to my dear sainted mother, who is 83 – and let it be made plain, is one of those who has only heard tell of this internet thing, and most of that being no good at all. “Mom, it’s like someone has stolen your address book, and is using your current address to send torrents of stupid junk mail to every single person in it.” Whereupon Mom replied that she was glad that she didn’t have anything to do with the internet … overlooking, of course, that I make much of my current living through exploiting certain aspects of the internet, and that my daughter and I replaced just about every one of her much-loved and re-read volumes of Helen MacInnes novels, the originals of which were burned in the 2003 brushfire that took the retirement house that she and Dad had built.

So, I would no sooner go to the most dangerous segments of the internet than Mom would visit some of the shadier neighborhoods in the real world – but hey, it’s easier to just avoid that aspect of modernity altogether, if one is able. Which is a round-about way of explaining that my contact email is a little different as of today, but just put in ‘gmail’ where ‘yahoo’ used to be, and amend your contacts list. And if you get a weird email from me in future, offering a link to a diet supplements website, or god forbid, a cheap source for Viagra – I can assure you that it was not really from me.

Let Us Sit on the Ground…

29. January 2013 · Comments Off on Let Us Sit on the Ground… · Categories: Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: , , , ,

…and tell sad stories of the deaths of kings — and commoners too, for that matter. The great William Shakespeare wrote many such sad stories, some of them more protracted and dramatic than others, some of them mercifully taking place offstage, as it were. The other night we watched the current episode of Downton Abbey, and even though we knew it was coming, we did sniffle a little at the shocking death of Lady Sybil – in childbirth, too. Whereas this was a tragically common cause of death in women of high and low social stature alike up until the end of the 19th century, it probably took real effort on the part of the writers to have it happen convincingly in the 20th – even the first quarter thereof. I’ll give the writers all props for creative research and as extra round of appreciation for avoiding the old soap-opera standby of a long fall down a staircase (although in fairness, they have hit upon a good few classic soap opera memes).

This also brought me to think on how many times I had to go into books, or perform a routine googlectomy in looking for just that very means of afflicting or removing one of my own characters. Which did turn out to be a fairly substantial list of conditions, ailments and cause-of-death, although some of them happened off-stage, so to speak or were referred to only briefly, while others had more detailed treatment. Let’s see: To Truckee’s Trail – threatened and actual near-starvation, malaria (called the ague) and cholera, both offstage before and after the time of the story. The Gathering – gunshot to the head, typhus (called ship-fever), malaria again, aftereffects of frontline meatball surgery in wartime, cholera again, and hints of manic-depression. The Sowing – more manic-depression, post-traumatic stress, pre-eclampsia, diphtheria, chronic alcohol abuse, gunshot to the back, multiple gunshots to the torso, and multiple sclerosis. The Harvesting; full-blown manic-depression, agoraphobia, more post-traumatic stress, incipient senility, stroke, peritonitis following abdominal wound with a bladed weapon, gunshot to the abdomen, drowning, and sudden massive heart attack/heart failure. Daughter of Texas: immediately fatal arrow-wounds, unspecified chronic illness, extreme dysentery coupled with heart failure, meatball surgery, and tuberculosis … plus, a war going on. Deep in the Heart: multiple sclerosis, post-traumatic shock, uncomplicated pregnancy and delivery, massive stroke, again aftereffects of frontline meatball surgery, and malaria. Plus another war going on. So far in the latest book, Quivera Trail, I have only gotten up to a massive heart attack, but there is an operation for a depressed skull fracture in my plot outline, so I really should get back to work on that.

This listing actually makes it look as if it it is wall to wall General Hospital-type soap opera medical emergencies in the books, but actually it isn’t. It’s just that illness and death is a part of life – and in the 19th century, it happened with really dismaying frequency. Considering that Daughter of Texas/Deep in the Heart and the Trilogy cover more than fifty years of the lives of four different families, during three wars, and at a time when the best of doctors couldn’t do all that much … this list could have been much, much longer.

On Having Thrown In the Towel on Larry McMurtry

20. January 2013 · 4 comments · Categories: Old West, Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: , , ,

I hung on to reading McMurtry’s Woodrow Call/Gus McCrae cycle for for several reasons – sheer stubbornness and the fact that I had purchased all four of them for pennies on the dollar at various library book sales being chief among them – but eventually I just gave up on Dead Man’s Walk, Comanche Moon, Lonesome Dove and Streets of Laredo when it turned into a long and frustrating slog through the deserts of the metaphorical southwest. I gave up hope of reaching the end, rejoicing and acclaiming the author as one of the epochal bards of the Texas frontier after having completed Dead Man’s Walk, a third of Comanche Moon, and half a dozen chapters of Lonesome Dove. I decided instead to pack it in for the moment and explore the options of anaesthetized root canal work, or the whole season run of Bridezillas. Hey, at least there, I can root for some of the more sane family members and friends of the bridal party and hope that a much-harassed and totally-out-of-patience MOH will haul off and serve up the ‘Zilla-of-the-moment with a richly-deserved knuckle sandwich. The hope of some kind of drama strung me along for … well, it seemed like days.

I had hoped that something would happend, mostly because everyone else says such wonderful things about the Lonesome Dove cycle, including some of my very own dear fans who have, most flatteringly compared my books to his – on the basis, I think, that I wrote about frontier Texas, and had a hero who was an early Texas Ranger, and included lashings of war, local and historic color, tragic romance and the fading of the Old West. Of course, the lucky Mr. McMurtry got a whole couple of TV miniseries made from his books, (with surging royalties and residuals and all, and reissued paperbacks with stills of the stars on the covers, all of which would make his agent worth every penny of the 15% of which Mr. McMurtry earns out of his labors as a creative scribbler and raconteur of the Old West) and so it isn’t all just sour-grapes from an aspiring author, hardly blessed or even barely noticed by the literary-industrial complex … ohhh, do I get any recognition for having written a totally complicated and sort-of-run-on-sentence in the Grand Victorian Tradition? (Oh, guess not, not this time around – better move on, then.)

The first hurdle in my path of acceptance was that it was all build-up and character, but no actual delivery. I was sorta-intrigued, but not-really grabbed by interest, in the characters so delineated. I keep wondering why the deadpan flat, detached affect? Why should I care about various characters if the author doesn’t seem to give a damn about them, or even display much interest, other than in the strictly clinical? As a reader I was also a little exhausted by following the constant leaping one character’s POV to another, and another within the same chapter, and just when I had recovered from the last of them and remember who it was that I was supposed to be interested in – then I would trip and fall flat over a large chunk of expository back-story, which never seemed to lead to anything much happening. A friend of mine, also a fan of both McMurtry and I explained to me that this is very much a Texas thing, to meander and meander, and wander … eventually to come around in a circle again, without anything very much having happened. Apparently, the process of the story is supposed to be the main bit of enjoyment. So how was a couple of hours of heavy petting, leading nowhere other than a chaste kiss of the hand at the doorway supposed to be rewarding – when you have been led in happy anticipation to look for something a bit more energetic? When this happens, romantically, one tends to be a bit disappointed, think of the other party as a dreadful tease, write off the evening as a waste of time and make-up, and resolve to let the answering machine pick-up next time. With a best-selling, and to all appearances, very popular author, who started off Lonesome Dove with one of the very best opening sentences evah … well, maybe one should be a little more indulgent.

Alas – I had a bit of trouble with another aspect of the cycle, especially the earlier books, in being a bit of an amateur specialist in history. That is, amateur in the antique sense of a person who zestfully acquires knowledge for the sheer love of the field. I have no academic training, other than that required of English majors three decades ago, not even a minor in history, or any fancy qualifying initials after my name – only a burning passion to learn as much as I can about any particular aspect, and to get it right, and to weave that knowledge into my stories. Which is all very well, but has absolutely ruined me for watching westerns on television; don’t even get me started on the fantasy west, of pulp novels and TV series and movies. I’m too apt to notice that there is a zipper down the back of the heroine’s dress, that the traveling cowboy is camping with a lot more gear than he could have packed into a teensy bedroll on the back of his horse, and to wonder where in the heck in the old West that a a deep-rock gold mine could be located right next to a cattle ranch?

Plowing gamely through the first two books – Dead Man’s Walk and Comanche Moon turned out to be a bit of a disconcerting experience, as I keep running across names, historic characters and incidents of Texas history but as if someone had jumbled them all together in a small box, and then emptied them out in random order, omitted some pivotal incidents and people, exaggerated others for effect, and now and again threw in something completely bizarre, just rang off-key for me. The real Buffalo Hump wasn’t a hunchback, if the description of him at Meusebach’s peace conference is anything to go by. The real Bigfoot Wallace lived to die of ripe old age; he drew life from a jar of dried beans in Mexican captivity … which incident happened to the survivors of the Meir expedition, not the Texan attempt to take Santa Fe a few years later. Austin was never raided, looted and burned over by a Comanche raiding party – that happened to Linnville, in 1840 – and the aftermath of that involved a massed force of Rangers, local militia and volunteers giving as good as they got in the Plum Creek fight. And there really was a formidible whore nick-named “The Great Western”, so it all makes me wonder why McMurtry needed to make anything up, when what really happened historically would have made at least as much of a good story. And it is a bit of puzzlement, wondering how the early Rangers in the first two books are pretty consistently pictured as being neophytes, hopeless little golden carp in a sea of hungry sharks – a tasty mouthful for every passing predator … which reminds me of the character who was neatly scalped of all of his hair by Buffalo Hump going past at a gallop. I’m almost sure scalping someone took a little bit more than a single swipe with a knife from horseback, although if anyone had perfected the art of a ride-by scalping, it would have been the Comanche.

It sounded a bit improbable to me, anyway – and the hapless recipient of it appearing to be as disposable as any of the red-shirted crewmen on Star Trek, beaming down to an alien planet and being killed in the first act. And that sort of disposing of a character, and other characters, and having characters appear and disappear, and such strange and improbable turns of the plot, such as having a naked English noblewoman with leprosy and a pet snake sing a Verdi aria to bluff a party of hostile Indian warriors into letting a our heroes pass by … well, that was just too television for words, and I came to that realization with a certain shock of recognition. I know they’ve made the books into movies, or into miniseries, and that’s more right than readers and watchers could possibly have known – because it is more like one of the old television westerns than has been along in years! A jumble of historical events and happenstances, check – interminable, episodic adventures – check. Handful of basic, easily identifiable characters – check – some vicious and inscrutable villains (some of them with baroque torture chambers and suitable evil henchmen) – check. Rotating stable of supporting characters, and endless supply of disposable extras – check and check again. And a disconcerting tendency for certain startling shifts in the cast to occur between seasons …or between books . . . or even chapters within books. And there you go – it’s a TV western writ large; no wonder the Lonesome Dove cycle has so many fans. Having come to this conclusion, I may try again, sometime soon … but then again – when is Bridezillas on?

A Lynching in Wyoming

09. January 2013 · 2 comments · Categories: Old West, Random Book and Media Musings

Wyoming Lynching of Cattle KateI’ve said it over and over again, that what really happened in history is very often even more bizarre and dramatic than any fictional account of events, either written or cinematic. A book or a movie has to make sense, after all – and have some kind of logic and believability about it, whereas in reality chance and coincidence do not have to make logical sense. To put it in short; reality frequently trumps imagination. Going back to contemporary accounts, records and memoirs often turn up all kinds of interesting nuggets, which very often contradict conventional wisdom.

This is what amateur historian George W. Hufsmith has done with a very readable account of a lynching in the Sweetwater River Valley of Wyoming over a hundred and twenty years ago. But what Hufsmith found in various dusty public records was sufficient to overturn what had been put out as the conventional wisdom. The 1889 lynching of a man and a woman – Ellen Watson and James Averell – by a party of wealthy cattlemen was advertised immediately as a wholly justifiable reaction; that Watson was a prostitute paid for her favors with stolen cattle, and James Averell was her pimp – among other unsavory things. That was the song that the wealthy stockmen of Wyoming sang to local and national newspapers, and because money talks, the friends and family of Watson and Averell were as powerless in setting the story straight as they were in getting justice done for the murders of the young couple. Ellen Watson’s reputation continued to take a beating through the decades – including in the movie Heaven’s Gate, the mega-flopperoo retelling of the Johnson County War.

What emerges from Hufsmith’s exacting research and retelling of the story is that Watson and Averell were hard-working, respectable and well-thought of, among the townsfolk and small ranchers in that part of the world. Averell was an honorably discharged Army veteran, a widower whose wife had died in childbirth. He kept a store and saloon, was postmaster as well as a Justice of the Peace. Watson was separated from an abusive husband, and had worked as a cook and housekeeper at a boarding house in Rawlins, Wyoming. There she met Averell; they set up on adjacent homestead claims, and perhaps delayed marrying so that they could each prove up on a claim, instead of the single claim allowed per family. They had taken out a license to marry, but it is unknown if they had gone through with it by the time of their deaths. In any case, they were in business together, and as they began to prosper, Ellen Watson bought a legitimate cattle brand, and began to purchase cattle – all legally … but such small homestead operations as hers were viewed as a threat to the large established cattle ranchers of the district. Worse yet for the couple – both hers and Averell’s claims lay right in the middle of a well-watered tract of pastureland which one of the big ranchers had used for years as his own, although having no legal claim to it. Her having the temerity to compete with the large ranchers of the area was seen as the last straw. Six of them paid a visit to Ellen Watson’s ranch and James Averell’s store on a morning in July, 1889, wholly convinced that Watson and Averell had been illegally branding stolen cattle. They were taken away and hung from the branch of a tree on the edge of a ravine on the south bank of the Sweetwater River, and if that murderous indignity was not sufficient, their personal reputations were lynched again in the popular press for years afterwards.

Several friends and employees of Watson and Averell witnessed them being taken away by the six ranchers, and the hanging. A coroner’s inquest was held almost at once, and the six ranchers were arrested and charged with murder. Alas – it never came to a trial. The key witnesses vanished mysteriously, and Averell’s nephew, who worked as one of Watson’s ranch hands, died suddenly on the very day that the grand jury was supposed to begin hearings into the matter. With no witnesses available or willing to testify, charges against the six were dropped. They did not get off scot-free however; local feeling was very much against them in the Sweetwater Valley. And two years later the conflict between small rancher/homesteaders and the wealthy and well-connected big ranchers would erupt in the Johnson County War.

Becoming at One With Texas

04. December 2012 · 2 comments · Categories: Book Event, Domestic, Random Book and Media Musings · Tags: , ,

Henry With Boots - UnimpressedIt was a gradual process … the place grows on you, even back before it became clear that it was one of the states – out of these occasionally United States – which has a good chance of emerging comparatively unscathed from impending economic disaster. I don’t know why Texas should be so fortunate among states and nations, but perhaps it is because of a part-time Legislature. Yes, this might tend to discourage professional busy-bodies from taking up a full-time career dictating the teensiest minutia of every scrap of our lives, from the number of flushes our toilets need to the wattage of the light-bulb in our porch light and the knotty question of whether a puddle in the back forty qualifies as a seasonal body of water. The Texas Lege can only assemble every two years for a set period of time to consider these and other weighty matters, and so must find other and more remunerative means of earning a living and staying out of their constituents hair. There was an adage to the effect that work expands to fill the time you have available for it – very likely it works the same way for legislative bodies. Perhaps limiting the time available to them forces legislators to prioritize and focus their potential mischief on only the most necessary tasks. Still, what a thought, that Texas might be the last best place to survive the impending economic and political meltdown – who would have thought, eh?

So, Texas took us over, bit by bit – although it wasn’t without a struggle, especially when enduring the ghastly heat of summer, which occasionally felt as if it were lasting all year. Or when there was a highway alert because … er, there were stray cows on the roadway … Or when I could not get just-introduced men in a social setting to not straightaway start addressing me as ‘darlin’’. There were charms, insidious ones – the Hill Country, and sweeps of wildflowers in spring, breakfast tacos (the breakfast food of the gods, I swear), the many splendors of the HEB grocery chain, real Texas BBQ … oh, the list goes on and on. I suppose the first sign that assimilation had begun was when my father began to say that Blondie and I sounded a little more Southern in our speech – there was, he swore, a faint interrogatory lift in tone at the end of certain sentences, which had not been there previously. Blondie began to like country-western music, I began to giggle at Robert Earl Keen’s “Merry Christmas from the Family” … and upon finally retiring from the military I had to get a Texas driver’s license. And then I began to write historical fiction … and well, it was all over, then. Assimilation was complete, or nearly so.

I do like to dress up in a slightly western-fashion when I do a book event now; a long skirt, western-style shirt and vest – and I have let my hair grow long again, so that I can do it up in a roll with a curved Spanish comb in it – and I have been looking around for a pair of Western boots to complete the look. I’ve substituted a pair of high-laced old-fashioned ladies’ boots for now – but a pair of cowboy boots would really complete the look. But not just any boots – being thrifty but with high standards means that I’d like I. Magnin style at a Walmart price, so we’ve been checking out the various thrift and resale stores for a pair of good and broken-in (yet not broken down!) boots. We almost thought we’d found them at a little boutique in Boerne last week, but I couldn’t get one pair on, and the other was too big … for me, but not for Blondie. So, she has herself a pair of Tony Lama’s now, and for me, it is just a matter of time.

Assimilation complete. I got here to Texas as fast as I could.

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