Ginger, cinnamon, and cardamom

Autumn grasses and blooms

Cancer has me rather knocked out of orbit, and I’m trying to let go of some old behavior patterns that once offered me some stability. Or I thought they did; now it could well be that they were just holding me back. There is a tenseness across the shoulders that’s easing, and I am less in the thrall of worry when familiar reassurances of health, predictability, and order are no longer handy to lean on.

Still, to keep from awfulizing, I fall back at times on an old mantra: “Everything’s working out beautifully.” The alternative is to be constantly anticipating the worst, which robs the present of the strength it gives to live each day for what it’s worth.

B. M. Bower, Jean of the Lazy A (1915)

Jean and Lite

This was B. M. Bower’s 15th novel, and like her The Phantom Herd a year later, it draws on her knowledge of the movie business. Sixteen-year-old Jean Douglas, the title character, is a no-nonsense daughter of a Montana rancher, Aleck Douglas, who in the opening chapters is wrongly found guilty of murder and sent to prison. With the help of a ranch hand, Lite Avery, she spends the rest of the novel finding the real killer.

Help also comes in the form of a movie company from Hollywood, which hires her as the stunt double for the leading lady of an action-packed western. Able to ride, rope, and shoot with ease, Jean also contributes ideas for making the film more realistic. Before long she is dreaming up scenarios for a Perils-of-Pauline style serial, with herself in the starring role.

Portals

Sunrise sky

A portal I passed through this week has surely been another stage of accepting my mortality, which has continued to be largely an abstraction for me until now. I am beginning to let go of an expectation that I can persist in a routine of reading, writing reviews, and blogging, while actively participating in an online community of like-minded virtual friends.

In recent weeks, as the latest round of chemo has slowed me down again, I have become aware of the effort required to do all that. I have been surprised by a falling off of interest in reading and a diminished ability to write coherently and at length about books and films that I can relate to what has been a focus of my blog—frontier fiction as it originated and continues to evolve and flourish.

Kim Zupan, The Ploughmen

One reader has compared this novel to No Country For Old Men because of a murderous central character, John Cload, who brings to mind yet another dark work of fiction The Silence of the Lambs. Cload is more than a little like Hannibal Lecter, as he befriends a deputy sheriff who keeps him company from outside his jail cell through long, sleepless nights and escorts him to and from the county courthouse where he is under trial.

The deputy, Valentine Millimaki, has been encouraged by the sheriff to learn what he can about Cload that might help in the trial. But besides a single killing, for which there was a witness, the deputy remains unaware that Cload has bodies buried all over the rough Montana country along the northern shores of the upper Missouri River.

Not more than marginally interested in Cload anyway, Millimaki has troubles of his own. Cload correctly senses that they are woman troubles. As a schoolboy, Millimaki once discovered the body of his mother, who had hanged herself in a barn on the family farm. Now, his young wife has left him, weary and depressed by life in a backwater Montana town.

Jenny Shank, The Ringer

Review and interview

Frontier fiction did not end with Louis L’Amour. Its themes and issues continue among today’s writers who place their stories west of the 100th meridian. Jenny Shank’s The Ringer is a fine example of how the frontier, despite Frederick Jackson Turner, has never really closed.

Set in modern-day Denver, this novel takes up two topics that date back to the origins of frontier fiction: the use of deadly force in law enforcement and the conflict between whites and the region’s ethnic populations, especially Spanish-speaking inhabitants who have long lived in the lands of the Southwest, taken in conquest by the U.S. government from Mexico.

Kinda blue

Morning sky over the foothills

Another birthday came and went this week. I am now 73. With that development, my driver license expired, and I am reminded of how my first reaction to cancer was the determination to keep my independence. But that was not quite to be. I soon discovered that the brain tumor, surgery, and/or radiation have affected my depth perception to the extent that it is now hazardous for me to drive a car. I’m even dangerous with a shopping cart, as I found on a recent trip to Trader Joe’s when I took a corner too short and brought down part of a display of canned goods. (I thought that only happened in the movies.)

I have had to give up the independence that driving has given me since I was 13 or so, when I first took the wheel of a pickup on the farm. I’m now chauffeured to doctors’ appointments by my wife, which is okay for me but adds an additional responsibility for her as an already overworked caregiver. I sometimes ride shotgun on trips to the post office and for groceries, so she can stay behind in the car while I run inside.

The Spinners’ Book of Fiction (1907)

Living in San Francisco at the time of the 1906 earthquake, Ina Coolbrith (1841–1928) lost her home and a priceless personal library in the fire that consumed the city. With her interest in the arts and her connections in both San Francisco and New York, she had helped found the Overland Monthly with Bret Harte and encouraged the careers of Jack London and Isadora Duncan among many others.

Following the quake and fire, Coolbrith's friends, including California writer Gertrude Atherton, helped out with financial support. A collection of stories, The Spinners’ Book of Fiction was published with all proceeds to go to Coolbrith. Sixteen Bay Area writers contributed to the anthology, as well as several illustrators and artists. 

Here are a few samples: