skip to main |
skip to sidebar
Continuing from yesterday's post, drawing from Mae West's novel, Babe Gordon (1930), reprinted as The Constant Sinner. Let's poke around some more, shall we?
Take the two individual words I've circled: "bombarded" and "barrage." These are military terms, specificially concepts in the use of massed artillery, here used as metaphors, Babe and Cokey Jenny being the targets, men in the boxing audience firing verbal shells at them. Source of inspiration? The Great War of 1914-1918, specifically trench warfare on the Western Front.
As for the phrase "former business acquaintances," it's an almost comical mobster-themed eupemism, still widely used in the early 21st century, along with an alternate version: "former business associates."
Other themes of interest: "gave them all the glad-eye," "good-natured guying."
"The girls were suddenly the centre of curious attention and the target of wise-cracks."
Note here that "centre" is spelled in the British manner; "wise-cracks" is a term (now usually spelled without a dash) that came into use in the 1920s, though its compound elements had been in circulation for centuries. Compare wisenheimer, wiseacre, smarty-pants, smart aleck, wise guy and wiseass -- all of which I've heard in my lifeftime at one point or another. Even the use of the word "girls" for women continues, albeit with, maybe, more awareness of its deliberate sauciness, right into the present century. "Molls" and "dames" are more time-specific to Prohibition, but they continued "in the parlance of the day" for quite a bit longer. Now they are used as markers to showcase a gangster milieu set in the past.
What's the overall point here? One can learn important things from a careful perusing of even a single page of text dating from any time and any place. One can decode meaning that applies to now, to then, and to changes in between. Just about any text will do. You can go at it from the perspectives of technology, of attitude, of gender, of culture, of economics, and just about any other angle you may care to consider in life. What's important to people? What's important to you?
Today's Rune: Partnership.
This is a fun exercise from just about any perspective. Digging around this page, you can unearth a ton of stuff: some old, some new, some borrowed and some blue. The text is from Mae West's novel, Babe Gordon (1930), reprinted as The Constant Sinner. Let's poke around a little, shall we?
X-ray lamps. What the hell are those? These are probably not medical X-ray lamps at a boxing match, so must be a slang term from the 1920s. The term "X-ray" was coined in the late 1800s.
"The restless spectators were howling and stamping for the bouts to begin." Could apply to anything from a Roman gladiator fight to a Duke-UNC basketball game. Timeless human nature.
Aisle seats. These go back at least to the ancient Greeks, eh?
"Old-timers of the fight club." Old-timers = veterans, experienced people. The term goes back to just before the American Civil War (1861-1865), if not earlier.
Fight club. I have no idea when or where this idea began, but clearly Mae West's text -- written during the 1920s -- spells it out a long time prior to Chuck Palahniuk's hugely influential 1996 novel, Fight Club, which was adapted into a 1999 film starring Brad Pitt.
Folks, that's just the first four sentences of one page . . . see what I mean?
Today's Rune: The Mystery Rune.
Three books recently acquired by library "X" weave together alternative takes on reality. First up is John McMillan's Smoking Typewriters: The Sixties Underground Press and the Rise of Alternative Media in America (Oxford University Press, 2011). As per usual these days with nonfiction books, the full title pretty much sums up the contents. In between the covers (unless you're reading a phantom electronic version -- in which case forget the covers), you get more details.
Mimeograph machines and typewriters. Who reading this has had firsthand experience with these artifacts? I remember teachers and various nonprofits relying on mimeographs to spread the word about just about anything. Mimeographs had their own scent when freshly printed, so you knew when they were coming. And clacking typewriters did what keyboards do now, in a more mechanical way. I still love the sound of "smoking typewriters" (Allen Ginsberg's words, 1981). The idea of smoking typewriters retains currency: think of the Twitter and Facebook revolutions, how contemporary social media work, and you get the idea. The difference is, underground publications were then more likely to be distributed by hand, and were physical artifacts rather than virtual ones.
When I worked at Duke University's Perkins Library in the 1980s, I used to skim through microfilmed collections of these over in the periodicals department, including Thomas Merton's rag-zine, Monk's Pond; at the same time, I was helping put out Dog Food, another underground project; in Philadelphia in the 1990s, I also worked on Quo Modo, a slightly more polished "sporadical." Fun work, and engaging. This blog takes pretty much the same kind of aim at things.
Today's Rune: Gateway.
While watching The Company Men (2010) directed by John Wells, I kept wondering, will this show us anything we don't already know? Corporations have callous tendencies, and there's an almost random nature to decision-making. Corporations put profit above all else. Short-term planning above long-term. Mergers and acquisitions. Layoffs. Obscene stock option profits for top investors and CEOs. Organizations grow so large they can't help but be hijacked and comandeered by new brean-counters and "soulless ghouls" (in the words of Tony Gallaher) who replace the original entrepreneurial spark with grim accounting methods. Megacorporations are more interested in pushing money around than making real things. Involuntarily losing one's job sucks and it's hard -- and for some, damned near impossible -- to find a new one.
Bottom line: The Company Men doesn't go deep enough and offers nothing new, but might still make you cringe. Easier alternative: look around and pay attention, create your own storylines.
Kevin Costner is particularly good. The rest are professional, though maybe just a little contrived in feel: Ben Affleck, Tommy Lee Jones, Chris Cooper, Maria Bello, Rosemarie DeWitt, Eamonn Walker, Craig T. Nelson. Set in and around Boston, with a side trip to Chicago, starting in 2008.
Today's Rune: Gateway.
Recently, I experienced an eerie feeling around Sesakwa, Seminole Nation / Seminole County, Oklahoma. This led me to investigate afterwards, and to come across the "Green Corn Rebellion" of 1917. In a nuthsell, several hundred people had gathered in the area in opposition to the Draft (military conscription) under the banner of the Working Class Union (WCU), an ad hoc group of poor tenant farmers. The US government had formally entered the Great War (World War I) in April 1917, and the wartime Draft kicked in over the summer. Many Draft opponents were armed and actively resisted; some committed acts of sabotage in the area, and small-scale raids.
Meanwhile, the Mexican Revolution (1910-1920) had spilled over the US border, and more than 110,000 National Guard troops were massed along the Texas and Southwestern US/Mexican frontier in 1916 and 1917. Anything could happen.
Oklahoma was also undergoing an oil rush at the time. "Until overtaken by California in 1923, Oklahoma remained the leading [petroleum] producing state in the U.S."*
The Green Corn Rebellion was quickly put down by "posse justice." Whoever organized and led these posses (it's unclear to me who they were at this point) managed to haul in four or five hundred "rebels," and a third of them were then convicted and jailed. A handful were not released from federal prison until the 1920s. Three people were reported killed during the "uprising." Under wartime powers, "radical subversives" were vigorously suppressed throughout the area, and throughout the entire country, followed by Red Scare hysteria and the Palmer Raids of 1919-1920.
Hence, I suppose, the eerie feeling while passing through Sesakwa.
As for the National Guard units on the Mexican border, most were sent to the trenches on the Western Front by 1918. The Draft was suspended after the war, and resumed from 1940 until 1973, never since to return.
Dan T. Boyd, "Oklahoma Oil: Past, Present, and Future," Oklahoma Geology Notes, v. 62, no. 3 (Fall 2002), p 98.
Today's Rune: Defense.
A recent journey took me through the Chickasaw Nation, the Seminole Nation of Oklahoma and Citizen Potawatomi Nation.
Above: Chickasaw cuisine served at the Aaimpa’ Café, Chickasaw Cultural Center. In the basket are corn cribs (kernels wrapped in fried dough balls). There's also an "Indian taco" on fry bread, possum grape dumplings (sort of like candied cherries) and pishofa (hominy and pork). Plus sauces.
Learned that Tishomingo is the Chickasaw capital, and Wewoka, the Seminole capital. Will return to check out the Citizen Potawatami Nation's cultural center in its capital, Shawnee.
Came across Lightning Ridge, and near Sesakwa, menacing parts of the Seminole Nation, a back road with a sign that read: "Hitchikers May Be Escaped Inmates."
Chickasaw Nation Community Radio (89.5 FM) played an excellent swampy blues mix with tracks like "Going Back to My County Home" and a gritty soing about bounced checks and ending up paying $127 for a cheese sandwich and a bag of Fritos.
"Indian Removal" in the 1830s. At the time, Indian Territory (Oklahoma) was at the edge of the USA, a buffer on the Mexican border. Texas was still Mexican territory, where slavery was officially banned -- until forcefully taken over by Americans, who brought slavery back to Texas. The Chickasaw Nation (as well as other tribal groups) brought slavery with them during the relocation to their new lands. Legal entanglements are still being sorted out and challenged even now, in 2011. Formal slavery was abolished in tribal areas only in 1866 -- after the American Civil War.
Image above: within the Chickasaw Nation, at the cultural center.
Today's Rune: Separation (Reversed).
Before The Rolling Stones completed the song we know as "Street Fighting Man" (1968), it was a work-in-progress referred to as "Did Everybody Pay Their Dues?," or some close variation of that. Listening to the audio track now, part of the lyrics go more or less like this, a sort of gnarly hybrid of "Who's Been Sleeping Here?" (which came before it) and "Brown Sugar (which came after):
Now did everybody pay their dues?
Now did everyone with tribal blues
All the braves and the squaws and the maids and the whores
Did everybody pay their dues?
He's a tribal chief his name is called disorder
He's flesh and blood he tears it up when acting right is normal
Now did everybody pay their dues?
Now did any of them try to refuse?
With this track, the music remained more or less intact, but the lyrics were radically changed. Why? The Tet Offensive, US-Vietnam War. Really? Yes, really. Mick Jagger participated in an anti-war rally in London (outside the American embassy) in March '68, and was on top of the situation in France (mai '68 and its lead-up). Cataclysm was in the air. In the US on March 31st, President Lyndon Baines Johnson announced: "I shall not seek, and I will not accept, the nomination of my party for another term as your President." Given all the excitement, Jagger revamped almost everything, changing
He's a tribal chief his name is called disorder . . .
to
Hey, said my name is called Disturbance . . .
