Colbert and Sherman Alexie

Earlier in the month, Sherman Alexie appeared on The Colbert Report, promoting his new book War Dances, but also making some interersting points about e-text books and readers such as Kindle, all and all, a good and entertaining interview:

Sherman Alexie on The Colbert Report, available at Hulu.com

Happy Holidays

Happy holidays from the Western Literature Association Blog!

I hope you enjoy this odd little video, which despite its northern orientation (referring to a famous inhabitant of the North Pole), is western in a couple of ways:  1) “Here Comes Santa Claus” is performed by singing cowboy Gene Autry; 2) the flashing lights synchronized to the song are located in that most westerly of states, California.

The Road to Nowhere

. . . or nowhere The Road. Although The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel, opened with a big splash a couple of weekends ago, and with a lot of word in the press that the opening was going to be pretty widespread, it turns out that the film is still only playing on a few screens, much to the dismay of filmgoers who have been seeking it out to no avail. I’ve been hoping to post something about the film, but The Road to Maine is yet to be built, and that seems to be the case for most folks outside of major cities.

Click on the link for the full article:

Where is the Post-Apocalyptic Movie The Road Showing?

The Weinstein Company, co-owned by the brothers who were former heads of Miramax, may have miscalculated with their limited release of this picture. First, the movie was already bumped from being released last year, a notorious game of musical chairs played too often with pictures produced by this company. Second, the misinformation of a wide release for “The Road” has served to alienate some of the crowd who wants to see this picture.

There’s even an online petition campaign in favor of a wider release.

Thoughts on The Road

The Road, based on Cormac McCarthy’s novel, opens this weekend. For anyone who has seen it, any thoughts?

 

More On Frozen River

From Mary Scriver (editor’s note: this was posted as a comment, but I thought I would move it forward into its own post for easier reading):

Indie films and Native Americans — okay, “Indians” — seem like a match so natural as to be inevitable. The newest one I’ve seen is “Frozen River,” just now being mentioned on the West Lit blog. (The cowboys have discovered the Indians! And they’re female!) This film is also highly suitable for the discipline called “border studies” which might be described as something like philosophical geography.

The Mohawk Nation preserves its autonomy strongly enough that their reservation/reserve sovereignty persists on both sides of the Canadian/US border, which is a river because many of the early treaties between nations of all sorts defined territory by physical features like rivers or mountains. Through Montana the border is the edge of the drainage of the Missouri/Mississippi rivers, created by a row of small volcanic hills and then defined by surveying the 49th parallel. The Blackfeet Nation is on both sides of the line, but it is not contiguous. The US side is against the line, but the Canadian side is scattered into small areas. Nevertheless, in theory tribal members have free passage between the countries. It’s sometimes hard to convince border agents of that.

Two women, one played by Melissa Leo (my favorite “Homicide” detective) and the other by Misty Upham. Misty is Blackfeet and must be part of the family of “Doc” Upham who used to play in club bands with Bob Scriver. She grew up in Seattle, a part of the Indian community over there. Every Upham that I’ve known has been pretty remarkable for brains and enterprise. Leo, who is coming up fifty, looks her age (she’s a smoker — that’ll do it) and Misty dumped her Pocahontas image by cutting her hair and gaining 65 pounds. (I’m not sure she realized what that would do to her health, but she has taken forty pounds back off.) This is a reality story, not a reassuring little parable. The two women collide more than they meet, and bad fortune throws them together into a scheme to make money by running third-world illegal immigrants across the border from Canada to the US. They don’t need a boat because the ice on the river is multiple feet thick in winter when temps go far below zero, though sun in the daytime produces a layer of slush.

Another border is between the Indian woman and the white woman, sociological but not economic. Thanks to racial profiling a white woman is not likely to be stopped by off-rez police, so she has a smuggling advantage. On-rez it’s the Mohawk who has the sympathy of the officials so long as she doesn’t ruffle the Tribal Council hens. (Mohawk keep the pattern of tribal matriarchy.) The ties between them are about their children: Leo’s husband was an addict and gambler who took off with the family’s hoard of money meant to buy a new trailer. Upham’s husband is dead, gone through the ice while smuggling, which is how she got into the racket, but he left her pregnant. Since she’s living in a tiny camp trailer with no water (she sleeps in her coat), she can’t keep her baby. So the strong bond is children, the most basic human motive for women. This pushes the plot and resolves it in the end.

Such a setting provides plenty of suspense and the same kind of bleak but sublime long horizons against the sky as on the prairie. The cast was mostly local with white bits most likely to be doubling crew members. There is a growing pool of experienced tribal actors, especially on the Canadian side where the government supports arts. Budget was under one million dollars. It was Courtney Hunt’s first writing and directing undertaking.

When one looks at amateur painting, the most usual deficit is in “values,” which means the dark/light dimension, white-gray-black. Colors, composition, drawing and so on may be pretty good, but the sameness or skewing of values will give away inexperience. Likewise, the element most often missing in Indie movies is what Marshall W. Mason calls “beats” in his book, “Creating Life on Stage: A Director’s Approach to Working with Actors,” which is drawn from his career with the Circle Repertory Company in NYC. When one listens to the voice-over comments for an Indie, the chatter is most likely to be excitement over how “felt” the story is, how realistic, how from the heart, plus a lot of memories of good times and scary times. When one listens to an old pro Hollywood or London director, the talk is far more technical and analytical, much more about art-form concerns. “Beats” are a way of divvying up the timing and emphasis into a coherent and controlled whole, rather than taking a sort of general scenario approach.

On the other hand, as Hunt points out, this story has children and dogs in it, found at the last minute and barely guided in what they did. Equipment was limited so camera angles were confined, there was no studio, and even local merchants controlled what could or couldn’t be done. (The local trailer sales emporium was leery of the low-class image of trailers.) This movie was made simply with heart and faith. It was “found” as much as composed.

One of my all-time favorite movies about Indians, “Loyalties,” is a big budget version of a similar theme that would be interesting to watch alongside “Frozen River.” One of Tantoo Cardinal’s early films (I would not hesitate to suggest that Misty is the next Tantoo.), it happens much farther north in Cree country. Anne Wheeler, who started out very much like Hunt, is the director but she had professional English actors and a budget. That story is about an English doctor who mysteriously arrives with his family to work in the Boonies. His wife is confused and paralyzed by the environment so the doctor hires a local woman to help her — that’s Tantoo. When I looked at the imdb.com remarks, I was gratified to see that people said that though they’d seen the film twenty years ago or more, it remained vivid in their minds. Same here. The two women become friends and then more than friends when she and the English woman must protect the children at a high cost.

Today, a time when immigrants are treated with such suspicion and when the long tradition of citizens being able to cross the border peacefully without a passport has ended, we all need reminding that it is the fate of our children that should be our ultimate loyalty.

True Blood and the West?

Speaking of the Undead in the West, the CFP below for HBO’s True Blood series reminded me that there were western elements in the most recent season of the series. Although, with its primary Louisiana setting, True Blood seems mostly to draw on southern regionalism, vampire Bill and human (or mostly human) Sookie made a side trip to Texas as part of season two’s story arc, where they had an encounter with anti-vampire religious militants, and there were quite a few vampires here and there displaying a distinct cowboy aesthetic in their dress sense.  That foray into western space might be interesting to examine in terms of western genre as well.

The Call For Papers:

True Blood ( PCA/ACA, 3/31 – 4/3, Submission Deadline: 12/15)

The Vampire in Literature, Culture and Film area of the Popular Culture Association is seeking papers for the Joint National Popular Culture Association/American Culture Association Conference to be held Wednesday, March 31st to Saturday, April 3rd, 2010 in St. Louis.

Papers which cover any aspect of the HBO True Blood series or the Charlaine Harris Sookie Stackhouse books are sought for presentation. Papers should be limited to a reading time of 15-20 minutes (3 person panels allow for 20 minute papers while 4 person panels allow for 15 minute papers; panels will be formed no later than January 2010 in order to provide panelists ample time to adjust their presentation time).

If you want to form your own panel of 3 or 4 presenters unified around a particular theme or work, please send panel proposals along with brief abstracts of each paper, each paper’s title, and contact information for each presenter in addition to designating one presenter as the Panel Chair. Discussion panels of 4-6 participants each are also encouraged.

All presenters must be (or become) members of the PCA or ACA and must register for the conference. Membership and registration information will be sent upon presentation acceptance. Please note that paper acceptance obligates participants to present the paper at the conference. Additionally, as per PCA/ACA guidelines, multiple submissions to different areas are not allowed (although you can present a paper and participate as a round-table speaker), and you must be present at the conference to read your own paper.

To have your proposal considered for presentation, please send a 250-350 word abstract by December 15, 2009, complete with your name, affiliation, and contact information to either:

Mary Findley
Vermont Technical College
mfindley@vtc.edu

OR

Patrick McAleer
Indiana University of Pennsylvania
mcaleer_p@yahoo.com

More on the Undead in the West

Reading back through the call for papers for the Undead in the West panel (see previous post), I find that while I’m familiar with a couple of the films mentioned (Bubba Ho-Tep in particular), I don’t really know the other films all that well, nor can I think of any other Undead Westerns.  Is anyone else more familiar with the genre? What are some examples of films that combine the horror and western genres?  Does the new Woody Harrelson film Zombieland count as an Undead Western?

Undead in the West

Seems appropriate for Halloween weekend:

Call for Papers:   Undead in the West

PCA/ACA National Conference

March 31-April 3, 2010

St. Louis, Missouri

Deadline: December 1, 2009

Co-presenters are being sought for a panel on the “Undead in the West,” as part of the Westerns and the West area at the PCAs.

The frontier has long been framed as a landscape of life and death, but few scholarly works have ventured into the realm where the two become one, to explore portrayals of the Undead in the West – the zombies, vampires, mummies, and others that have lumbered, crept, shambled, and swooped into the western from other genres.  This sub-genre, while largely a post-1990 phenomenon, traces it roots to much deeper hybrid traditions of Westerns and horror or science fiction, and yet, shows ties to the recent A-Western renaissance.  What happens when traditional frontier figures, settings, symbols, and ideologies encounter these characters that defy the laws of nature?  How are western archetypes subverted or accentuated when confronted by the undead?  How do zombies, vampires, and the like, affect our understandings and interpretations of the West, and vice-versa?   Might these hybrid westerns function as the new anti-western, or do the undead facilitate a return to tradition?

Other possible issues include, bur are not limited to:

– Do vampires and zombies map on to traditional Western “bad guys,” such as Indians, Mexicans, and outlaws?  Have zombies become a “safe” substitute for Indians as aliens have for foreign soldiers in stories of war and invasion?

– How do the conventions of the Western intersect with the conventions of the Undead movie . . . Do the movies play with either set of conventions for dramatic effect (James Woods’ character Jack Crow as a vampire-hunting version of Clint Eastwood’s amoral Western avengers) or comic relief (the zombie sheriff and prostitute in Deadwalkers)?  .

– Do undead Westerns consciously use the Undead elements of the plot to comment on the nature of traditional Western heroes and villains?

These questions and more may be asked of films of the Old West, or the new, such as Bubba Ho-tep (2002), when a Stetson-wearing mummy menaces a nursing home in the East Texas backwater; From Dusk ‘til Dawn (1996),  when vampires prey on unsuspecting patrons of a Mexican bar; It Came From the West (2007), the puppet zombie western from Denmark; or Purgatory (1999), where the frontier town of Refuge serves as liminal space between heaven and hell;  and numerous other tales of the Undead in the West.

Papers presented in “Undead in the West” at the PCAs may also be considered for a larger post-conference project.

Please send your 250-350- word abstract to both co-organizers, Cindy Miller (cymiller@tiac.net) and Bow Van Riper (bvanriper@bellsouth.net).  Deadline for submissions is December 1, 2009.

CFP: Transnational Native American Studies

Charting Transnational Native American Studies: Aesthetics, Politics, Identity

Yanoula Athanassakis / Journal of Transnational American Studies

contact email: jtas.special.forum@gmail.com

Charting Transnational Native American Studies: Aesthetics, Politics, Identity
Extended Deadline: December 15
http://repositories.cdlib.org/acgcc/jtas/cfp.html

Guest-edited by Philip J. Deloria, Hsinya Huang, John Gamber, and Laura Furlan

In the context of an increasingly transnational globe, the master narratives of time and place have been open to various rethinkings. In hemispheric American indigenous cultures, central coordinates for the construction of individual and collective identity have emerged around spatial notions of homeland, territory, migrancy, diaspora, and removal. Equally critical have been complex understandings of layered, recurrent, multidimensional, and sacred time. These ways of thinking space and time have originated from multiple contexts, including tribal, cross-tribal, hemispheric and global exchange. They demonstrate multiple and longstanding forms of both tribal-national and transnational orientation. At the same time, methodological borderlines between inquiries into cultural impact, identity and politics, on the one hand, and analyses of literary, aesthetic and stylistic qualities, on the other, are also being redrawn, diversifying and complicating a discussion concerning the current place of Native Studies at large. These conversations are themselves explicitly transnational in nature—though perhaps not always visible in that form. This forum seeks to present work in transnational Native American studies and investigate the transnational dimensions of the field itself.

Nationalistic approaches, which have come to the fore in a number of areas of Native American studies, have clear pragmatic importance for American Indian people and nations. Intellectually productive as well, such approaches nonetheless run the risk of oversimplifying complex tribal identities, erasing broad networks of interaction and community, and smoothing indigenous histories that have always included transnational elements. How might we think about the relation between nation and sovereignty, and how do we consider those concepts in relation to “post-sovereignty” arguments that position them within a colonizing Western frame? What are the critical genealogies of indigenous nationhood? More important, what does it mean to put such questions in a transnational frame—not only in terms of the global flow of people, ideas, and capital, but also in relation to the political and aesthetic situations defined by particular tribal nations? In what ways have indigenous conceptions of nationhood—and the movements between nations—challenged and complicated European and other colonial understandings of the nation? What kinds of advantages and disadvantages inhere in comparative global approaches to indigeneity, particularly in relation to tribal and national narratives that have been central to much of American Indian studies? How do indigenous American artistic expressions establish, reshape, challenge, and/or complement the formation of communities and collective cultural and literary entities? How, in these processes, do longstanding notions of homeland and nation interact with new modes of community formation and literary expression, drawn across spatial and temporal borderlines?

This special forum seeks to address some of the issues surrounding place and mobility, aesthetics and politics, identity and community, and the tribal and the global indigenous, all of which have emerged in the larger frameworks of transnational American Studies. We wish to contextualize Native American literatures and histories not only across national boundaries but also across the disciplines of literary and cultural studies. The editors of Journal of Transnational American Studies thus invite contributions that explore the consequences of transnationalism for Native American Studies, American Studies, and for the field of literary and cultural criticism in general.

Submission Guidelines

Please submit manuscripts electronically at http://repositories.cdlib.org/acgcc/jtas and indicate Special Forum when prompted for “Type of Submission.”

Submissions should not exceed 10,000 words, including endnotes, and are accepted on a rolling basis. Please follow the Chicago Manual of Style and include an abstract (not to exceed 250 words) and keywords. Submission guidelines and the style guide for JTAS can be found on our website at http://repositories.cdlib.org/acgcc/jtas.

Authors retain copyright for all content published in The Journal of Transnational American Studies (JTAS). However, authors grant to the journal the right to make available such content, in any format, in perpetuity. Authors may reproduce, in other contexts, content to which they possess the copyright, although in any subsequent publications JTAS should be acknowledged as the original publisher.

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Best of the West Anthology

From Seth Horton:

I just wanted to send out a quick note to let everyone know that the series, Best of the West: New Stories from the Wide Side of the Missouri, has finally returned.  As some of you may remember, this yearly anthology of short fiction began in 1988.  The first two volumes were published by Gibbs Smith Books in Utah.  The series then migrated to New York City where Norton published the next three volumes. Those early anthologies contained stories by such luminaries as Ray Carver, Leslie Marmon Silko, Kent Meyers, William Kittredge, Joy Harjo, Ron Hansen, and Ron Carlson.

Now, after a hiatus of seventeen years, I am pleased to announce that the University of Texas Press has just released the sixth volume in the series; volumes seven and eight will appear over the next two years.  The current volume includes stories by Annie Proulx, Louise Erdrich, Dagoberto Gilb, Joyce Carol Oates, Antonya Nelson, Lee K. Abbott, and a number of emerging writers.  Rick Bass wrote the forward.  James Thomas and I co-edited the book.  You can see the table of contents for yourself at: http://www.utexas.edu/utpress/books/horbep.html.

The editors at the University of Texas Press have expressed an interest in establishing the series on a more permanent basis if these books sell, which would give western writers a steady platform through which to find an audience.  To that end, if any of you decide to use our anthology in your classes, I would be more than happy to engage in an online question and answer session with your students about how the book was edited, potential relationships between the stories, how various writers seem to conceptualizing the region, or anything else that you’d like me to address.  Just shoot me an e-mail and we’ll set something up.

Best,
Seth Horton