N. Scott Momaday, The Bear -- A Review of Beauty

N. Scott Momaday: Words from a Bear

Sometimes something absolutely beautiful comes on TV when you most need to see it. Last night PBS's American Masters series was N. Scott Momaday: Words From a Bear. You can stream it online at https://www.pbs.org/video/n-scott-momaday-word-from-a-bear-odljy7/. If you do, please watch it on the largest screen you have available. The views of Scott's world are the American West and his imagination. 

Momaday is Kiowa. He was born in Oklahoma's red earth country and raised in the red rock canyons of Arizona and the Jemez Pueblo in mesa country of New Mexico.  Momaday grew up immersed in his father’s Kiowa traditions and those of the Navajo, Apache, and Pueblo. His was a world of vast spaces and timelessness.

PBS describes Scott as a "Pulitzer Prize-winning author and poet, best known for House Made of Dawn and a formative voice of the Native American Renaissance in art and literature." (You can read my review of the book at https://bit.ly/37kI3UM.)

House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for fiction fifty years ago and I had the great good fortune of meeting him almost that long ago.

I was a single mom working full time and taking night classes at Central State University in Edmond, Oklahoma. I took two and, some semesters, three classes to meet a degree requirement. But always one night a week I spent a bit of time outside my daily pressure cooker life -- in Dr. Norman Russell's poetry class. He very kindly arranged for me to continue taking his class after I took it that first semester, changing its title and number to side-step academia's practical order.

In his class we talked poetry. We read poetry. We shared the poetry we had written during the week. We discussed and argued, though always civilly, what made poetry speak to us. Rhymed, free verse, traditional, experimental. How to say what we meant to say. Which words were strong enough to touch our reader, strong enough to touch the universe. The universe both inside and outside of ourselves.

Dr. Russell was an eminent scientist in the world of botany. His day job was teaching science classes to college students. Don't get me wrong. He enjoyed teaching. He loved botany. And he loved our night class of would-be poets. We were not all working toward a degree. We were a mix of generations and professions and life experiences and goals.

He was a Native American, a Cherokee. And, most-importantly to me, Dr. Russell was a poet. A kind and generous poet. Red Shuttleworth (a much awarded Western Poet in his own right) said of Dr. Russell in a 2011 tribute, "Norman H. Russell bushwhacked a trail for many Native American poets.  He was the first Indian to publish poetry widely."

Sometimes Dr. Russell had a poet friend come and read to us. One of those poet friends was N. Scott Momaday. I doubt Momaday remembers me at all, but I remember him. I remember him as a big guy with a wonderful reading voice. I don't think I realized that he was famous. That wasn't important anyway. I just liked that he talked poetry to us as one of us.

Now I'm really glad he was famous, because that got us this beautiful film, N. Scott Momaday: Words From a Bear. This film gives us Momaday's world in his own voice. 

Again, here's the link https://www.pbs.org/video/n-scott-momaday-word-from-a-bear-odljy7/ 

Enjoy.

The Sympathizer -- a review

image from atlantaima.org

The Jaipur Literature Festival is coming to Boulder in September. I will be there -- you betcha!

I decided to read some of the presenters who will be at the JLF in Boulder. Viet Thanh Nguyen, whose debut novel The Sympathizer won the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Best Fiction will be one of the presenters. During Terry Gross' interview with him on NPR, he was thoughtful, articulate, and thought provoking. He discussed his experiences in the Vietnamese community in California.

He told of his parents warning him and his brother not to open their door to unknown Vietnamese because they were afraid of home invasions by Vietnamese gangs. Ms. Gross asked why people who had fled war torn Vietnam would engage in violence here against their fellow countrymen. His eye-opening explanation was that they did come from that same war torn Vietnam. A country that taught them to stash their money and valuables in their homes. A country that taught them not to trust the police who, in Vietnam, were too often as likely to harm them as the 'criminals.' A country caught in a generation-long civil war that taught Vietnamese to attack Vietnamese.

That concept can be applied to why anyone victimizes someone like themselves. Not  because they necessarily share a background of civil war, but because they do share a common background and know their victim's habits and fears. That familiarity gives the criminal an advantage they would not have with someone whose circumstances they knew less well.

Past debut novels that won Pulitzers include Gone with the Wind and To Kill a Mockingbird, two of my all-time favorites.

I was ready for a good read.

It's in first person. I don't particularly like first person. But Barbara Kingsolver's The Poisonwood Bible is in first person. (Read my April 13, 2015 review)  Not just first person, but first person from five points of view. An unusual structure for a novel. An amazingly difficult bit of literary art to successfully pull off. Which the author did. Admirably. It is a great read.

So I willing overlooked The Sympathizer's first person narrative. It could be good.

Nguyen doesn't use standard punctuation. Anathema to an old English Major. But Cormac McCarthy doesn't use standard punctuation. When I started his Border Trilogy (All the Pretty Horses, The Crossing, and Cities of the Plain. See my December 3, 2014 review.) I was particularly distressed about McCarthy's failure to use quote marks and attributions in the dialogue. I was afraid I wouldn't be able to follow who was saying what. But he wrote his characters' speech patterns so skillfully that I had no problem.

Failure to use standard punctuation need not be a deal breaker.

Stories whose plots unfold slowly featuring main characters who lack charisma don't necessarily put me off. (See my recent review of the movie The Lady in the Van.)

So I believed that if I read assiduously for as long as it might take, the book would get better.

After reading off and on for a week I'd only gotten to page 180 -- more off than on. But I felt I should give it a chance. I take the stand that stopping a book you've started is immoral. It is judgmental, ungracious, and downright disdainful of a fellow writer who has worked long and hard and done the best they could.

Then a writer friend Sabrina Fish shared a question from The Writer's Circle -- "You wake up stranded on an island with the main character of the last book you read. How does that work out for you?"

And you know what? I stopped reading The Sympathizer. I could not face the prospect of being stranded in a plodding plot with Nguyen's main character in first person. Never knowing if it was dialogue or the main character's thoughts or the author's thoughts.

Quick! Quick! Choose another JLF presenter. Done.

I chose William Dalrymple's White Mughals: Love and Betrayal in 18th-century India. Mr. Dalrymple is a Scottish historian. Even his footnotes are interesting.

Flash: Manuscript Sent to Beta Readers

Miss Shields from A Christmas Story

 

     For those of you who have not seen A Christmas Story based on writings by Jean Shepherd, your assignment for today is find it and watch it. You will laugh and laugh out loud. It is one of the movies we traditionally watch at Christmas time.

 

     Today I know just how the main character Ralphie felt. I finally got my manuscript for Murder on Ceres to the point that I feel comfortable forwarding it to people who have graciously volunteered to be beta readers.

    

     The whole point of the movie is that our hero, a nine-year-old boy, wants a Red Ryder B-B gun for Christmas. All the grown-ups in his life tell him he can't have one because he'll shoot his eye out. Then his teacher gives his class a writing assignment -- "What I Want for Christmas." He works diligently on his paper explaining his fondest hope and desire. All he wants is that B-B gun.

 

     He turns in his paper imagining how Miss Shields, his teacher will appreciate his theme above all others in the class. She will write A++++ all around the room.

 

     And I'm imagining the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, a good word in the New York Times Sunday Book Review, a recommendation from the Oprah Book Club -- something wildly enthusiastic and impressive.

 

     Poor Ralphie. He gets his paper back and his illusions of grandeur crumple around him. Siding with his mother Miss Shields says, "You'll shoot your eye out."

 

Ralphie's Mom and Miss Shields

 

     I am a grown woman and I know I'm not likely to shoot my eye out. Certainly not with a manuscript. But . . .  shoot myself in the foot. Now that's a possibility.