Irene Bedard, as Indian Jenny

Who was it that said a movie only needs three good scenes?

Paul Newman experimented with that formula in 1970 by making a film with only one. In Sometimes A Great Notion, Richard Jaeckel played the trusting, loyal Joe Ben who drowns as his cousin Hank tries and fails to keep him alive. Jaeckel was Oscar nominated for a performance which culminates in that one scene, but what happened to the rest of Kesey’s masterful epic?

Where are the other two good scenes?

I am guessing they landed on the cutting room floor when actor-producer-director Paul Newman jettisoned the novel’s main plot. A second try at adapting Kesey’s sprawling masterpiece, using the multi episode format available in the television mini series, could restore the “since you slept with my mother, I am going to sleep with your wife” plot line which is central to the book.

So invested am I in the belief that Sometimes A Great Notion would make an excellent mini series that I have gone to the trouble of assembling a dream cast.

Joaquin Phoenix, as Hank Stamper

It is clear that Hank Stamper would best be played by Joaquin Phoenix.  Joaquin matches Kesey’s description of Hank, down to the curly hair, muscular build and flashing green eyes. Hank has a high intelligence, a volatile temper and a secret which he keeps from everyone, including his wife, and including himself.

Greta Gerwig, as Myra Stamper

Myra, Henry  Stamper’s second wife, seduced her stepson Hank on his sixteenth birthday, and slept with him throughout his high school years. She treats Hank as her lover even after she returns to the East Coast to raise Lee, Hank’s half brother, in privilege. When Myra, isolated by her transgression, commits suicide, Lee drops out of graduate school to take revenge. He goes West to seduce Hank’s wife, and ruin his life. However when he meets Viv Stamper, he falls instantly, genuinely, in love. But he still makes sure Hank witnesses him in bed with Viv just as he, Lee, as a child, had witnessed Hank in bed with Myra. Viv leaves Hank, but Lee remains behind. Alone in the bus station, waiting to get out of town, Viv sees a photo of young Myra, who she closely resembles. Viv understands for the first time that she was always, to Hank, only a substitute.

That’s the plot of Sometimes A Great Notion. There’s logging, the union, bar fights, prostitutes, and death. But the real story is three generations of sexual obsession.

The Stamper family is driven by ghosts. They are possessed by them, in bondage to them. Monstrous in their strength, their hatred and their self definition, they are shadow people in thrall to the past. The community, not incorrectly, perceives them as a threat. Lee, who was raised elsewhere, returns intending to destroy his family but instead joins them. Viv, who married into the family,  and had no idea of leaving, escapes. There is no room for women in the world of the Stamper family. Kesey knew this about Viv, and described her in his notes as  “just an ordinary girl, caught up in a family plot”.

Greta Gerwig, as Viv Stamper

Greta Gerwig has the range to play the dual roles of exotic, neurotic, sex abusing Myra Stamper, and the normal, ‘ordinary girl’ Viv Stamper. She has the power to play both. As Kesey wrote: “Viv is a pawn in a game, a long ago game”.

Then there’s Lee.

In Kesey’s notes for the novel he writes:  “Hank the fighter, the winner. Lee the pacifist, the loser.

When Kesey wrote Sometimes A Great Notion, jocks were winners. Much of the plot concerns the courage the lanky, underdeveloped Lee must summon to continue seducing the wife of his violent, physically powerful half brother. The better Lee knows Hank, the more he realizes how dangerous his plan is.

How to cast this role?

The most important qualities Lee must have are a physical resemblance to Hank Stamper/Joaquin Phoenix, and the ability to transform from child to adult. He must be, as all Stampers are, convincingly, and passionately self deluded.

Nicholas Hoult, as Lee Stamper

When Lee chooses to remain behind with Hank, the brother he both loves and hates, we understand he has chosen death.  He had his chance at life. Viv=vitality=life. As Viv watches the two men struggle to bring the logs down the river from the window of her Greyhound bus out of town, she is Ishmael escaping the unholy vortex of Moby Dick. Kesey’s understanding of Viv as a whole person, not a plot device, is entirely, but entirely, absent from the 1970 film adaptation of Sometimes A Great Notion.

So many other wonderful character parts! Ancient patriarch Henry Stamper should be played by an actor who is old, old, old enough to be a grinning defiant skeleton. Death in a hardhat. Terrifying! That’s the way Kesey wrote him. Then there’s obsequious undertaker Boney Stokes, apoplectic union man Floyd Evenwrite, ice cold bureaucrat Jonathan Draeger, and hard living, mud flat dwelling, fortune telling Indian Jenny, who spends her entire life in love with her memory of the handsome green-eyed logger, Henry Stamper, who alone among all his peers refused to patronize her services. Kesey wrote an entire world.

One appreciative reader: We have here all you could ever want to know about felling trees, bear hunting, the life and language of a small-town bar, juvenile delinquents in small-town America, music of the 50s and 60s, shamans, Indians, evangelists, Captain Marvel, small-town justice, union organizing, revenge, old age, dying, death.

Irene Bedard, as Indian Jenny

Restoring Indian Jenny to the plot would make an honest miniseries out of a Sometimes A Great Notion, and communicate both the novel’s social and psychological complexity, and its epic sweep. I propose Irene Bedard to play the beautiful small town prostitute who falls in love with the young logger Henry Stamper, and whose thwarted union with him provides the narrative engine for the rest of the plot.

It is because of Henry’s unexpressed love for Indian Jenny that he marries socialite Myra, who has Indian Jenny’s long black hair. It is because of Henry’s son Hank’s incompletely expressed, semi-incestuous love for Myra that he marries Viv, who has Myra’s face. I calculate it would take five to six one hour episodes to do justice to this multi generational chain of human frailty masquerading as strength.

I have done the casting.

Who will make Sometimes A Great Notion: The Mini Series?

It has been quite a year for Oregon film history buffs!

Oregon used to confine its film history love to an annual celebration of The Goonies in Astoria.

But in the past year……

Katherine Wilson made Animal House of Blues (2012)

Allison Elwood & Alex Gibney made Magic Trip: Ken Kesey’s Search for a Kool Place (2011)

Alexia Anastasio made Adventures In Plymptoons: A documentary on the art and animation of Bill Plympton (2011)

Umatilla County Historical Society screened Nicholas Ray’s The Lusty Men (1952)

Deschutes County Historical Society screened Jacques Tourneur’s Canyon Passage (1946)

Clinton Street Theater screened Don Zavin’s Fast Break (1977)

Oregon Cartoon Institute screened Lew Cook’s The Little Baker (c. 1925)

Brian McWhorter composed and performed a new score for Ed’s Coed (1929)

John Paul plans to tour, conducting his original chamber orchestra score for F. W. Murnau’s City Girl (1930)

Matt McCormick re-issued the Peripheral Produce AUTO-CINEMATIC Video Mix Tape (1996) on DVD

Miranda July saluted her Peripheral Produce days with a Portland-centric screening at the Hollywood

David Walker lectured on Portland’s B Movies

Oregon Cartoon Institute brought Robert Johnston to lecture on Mel Blanc’s Portland

Matt Love wrote Sometimes A Great Movie

Dan Fiebiger wrote a history of Oregon filmmaker Tom Shaw

Bill Plympton wrote Independently Animated: Bill Plympton: The Life and Art of the King of the Indies

Anne Richardson presented Oregon Goes To The Oscars at Oregon Historical Society

Ken Nolley hosted a One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest (1975) retrospective in Salem

Northwest Film Center hosted mini-retrospectives of Will Vinton, Joanna Priestley, Chel White, Lawrence Johnson, Kelley Baker, Ron Finne (with Jim Blashfield upcoming ) at the Whitsell Auditorium

Anne Richardson introduced the Dill Pickle Club’s Portland film lecture series with David Walker, David Cress, Walt Curtis, Shawn Levy, Jim Blashfield, Brooke Jacobson, Matt McCormick, Joanna Priestley, Joan Gratz, Rose Bond, Tom Robinson, Tom Chamberlin, Dennis Nyback.

Michele Kribs secured National Film Preservation Board protection for The Boy Mayor (1914)

Mary Erickson’s University of Oregon dissertation on independent filmmaking in the Pacific Northwest went online

Heather Petrocelli completed her masters thesis about the Center For The Moving Image at PSU

Lucy Burningham wrote about Oregon film history in the Bend based magazine 1859

Stan Hall wrote about Oregon film history in OMPA’s annual directory

And tomorrow, Portland Monthly’s November 2012 issue hits the stands with an article by yours truly, Anne Richardson, about Portland’s history of  independent filmmaking.

SCORECARD:

Number of public lectures: 15

Number of retrospectives: 9

Number of public screenings of historic films: 4

Number of films permanently protected by the Library of Congress: 1

Number of new films (about Oregon film history): 3

Number of new books (about Oregon film history): 2

Number of new scores to silent films:  2

Number of articles (about Oregon film history):  3

Number of academic papers: 2

Walt Curtis and Matt Love celebrate Matt’s new book SOMETIMES A GREAT MOVIE …..Photo credit: Paige Tashner

Last weekend, as if to keep an invisible, necessary balance in Portland’s cultural eco system, we celebrated director Bill Plympton at the Bagdad, writer Ken Kesey at the Hollywood, and cartoonist Joe Sacco at Mercy Corps Action Center. Never have I seen such swift response to criticism in my life! Portland seems to have taken seriously my request for more ancestor worship, in the arts department.

I take entire responsibility for this surge of civic pride.

I use the word surge advisedly. Greg Hamilton reported 150 Ken Kesey/Matt Love fans were turned away from Saturday night’s screening of SOMETIMES A GREAT NOTION, held to celebrate the publication of Matt Love’s Sometimes A Great Movie.

Hey! Here’s a new niche for The Hollywood Theatre to occupy: film experiences for people who love being surrounded by other people.

Hundreds and hundreds of other people.

Time to restore the balcony seating, what say, Doug Whyte?

How about asking an architect to invent a flexible wall system so the second floor can either serve as two screening rooms (as it is now), or be opened up, as needed, to temporarily reassume its original identity as a balcony.

Back to this extraordinary weekend…..

Balancing out all this ultra regional genius, and ensuring that we don’t collapse upon ourselves in self regard, Hannah Piper Burns and Ben Popp scheduled Portland’s first Experimental Film Festival. International in scope, the five day festival included work by founding Oregon avant garde scenesters Jim Blashfield and Vanessa Renwick. Matt McCormick, whose own Peripheral Produce Festival helped launch the turbo charged indie energy which swirled all over the Rose City this weekend, gallantly used his time in front of an EFF audience to show work by other filmmakers, not his own.

In a similarly large hearted gesture, S. W Conser arranged a party at Jack London Bar specifically so that boundary defying artist John Frame could see rare stop motion animation from Dennis Nyback’s equally boundary defying collection.

So concludes the weekend wherein Portland’s major export was pure authenticity. The weekend gave every appearance of a well coordinated festival of Oregon arts – yet it just happened spontaneously. Each individual arts organization toiled in darkness for weeks/months of planning, emerging with miraculous simultaneity into the spring sunshine.

And its not over yet.

Tonight Brian Kellow, author of Pauline Kael: A Life In The Dark, speaks at NWFC. Born and raised in Tillamook, Oregon, educated by OSU, Kellow now lives in New York, edits Opera News, and writes the occasional book. If you lived in New York, you would understand what this means: Mr. Kellow is the winner of the Game of Life.

Speaking of NWFC, indie legend Jon Jost, familiar to readers of Oregon Movies, A to Z as a well qualified lillypadder, having made his first film in Cottage Grove about a zillion years ago, will introduce the May 31 screening of Last Chants For a Slow Dance ( 1977), one of his most highly regarded films.

I am aware not everything happens in Portland! This weekend, just up the river, writer-producer-actress Carrie Brownstein performed with Wild Flag at Sasquatch. But some important stuff does happen here. Or at least will, come next September. It only took 50 hours on Kickstarter for Andy Baio’s Portland-centric XOXO Festival to sell out.

That’s pre-selling tickets at $400 a pop!

As Portlander Curtis Salgado, no slouch himself when it comes to authenticity, recently opined: “People came from blocks around/Just to hear his righteous sound”

Given the turnouts at the multiple arts events in Portland this weekend, I have to say …..seems to be true!

Here are the organizations behind the above described synergy:

Clinton Street Theater

The  Dill Pickle Club

Experimental Film Festival

Hollywood Theatre

Jack London Bar

KBOO’s Word & Pictures

McMenamins/Bagdad Theatre

Mercy Corps Action Center

Oregon Cartoon Institute

Oregon Media Producers Association

Portland Art Museum

Northwest Film Center

Sasquatch

XOXO Festival

I first met Bill Plympton at the Oregon Book Awards. He arrived at the Scottish Rites Temple with Walt Curtis, who was wearing a tie and jacket several sizes too large, his hair in its signature white aureole around his poet’s brow. Walt was with Marjorie, his long time friend and familiar. They entered single file, circling around the back of the room.

I was at the refreshments table, eating miniature cream puffs. Bill joined me, and we began discussing the evening’s awards, our shared New York City citizenship,  and fact that I had been to a party he gave in New York some years before, although neither he nor I remembered anything about it. We stood there talking these things over, and I remember realizing that I was thinking of things to say so that I could continue eating cream puffs, and furthermore, that he was doing the same thing. That was my bonding experience with Bill Plympton. Eating cream puffs, waiting for Ken Kesey to receive a lifetime achievement award, and silently plotting how to meet Walt Curtis.

The next time I met Bill Plympton, I was with Walt Curtis, taking him around New York.  Walt had come to give a live introduction to Peckerneck Poet, the feature length documentary Bill had made about him. Bill didn’t come to the screening, so Walt and I visited him the following day, on the roof of the building which held his studio in Chelsea. We sat around in the dusk of the city, and talked. I had picked Walt up at Bill’s apartment. It was spare and featureless, the home of a man who was never home.

The third time I met Bill Plympton was at his annual summer gathering on the banks of the Clackamas River, on his parents’ property. He was demonstrating to a young child how to use a water cannon which shot great burst of water. His mother had waved us down to the path to the river, telling us to look out for the llama. Bill was everywhere, a solicitous host. There was no hostess, although there were several women in bathing suits who were jostling for position next to Bill.

The fourth time I met Bill Plympton was at a party in SE Portland. I had come specifically to invite him to speak at a film festival the following spring. It sounds as if I only go to parties to proposition people, and that’s pretty much true. So be forewarned, when you see me at a party. Bill listened, and said yes. From that moment on, I no longer met Bill as a distant friend of a friend. By asking Bill to speak at the festival, I had invited him to join me in some serious work. This is the way to Bill’s heart, to be hard at work on something. Bill understands work. He works all the time. How else can he draw all the tens of thousands of frames he needs to complete a feature length film? Bill lives in his work. It vivifies him. Once he and I were working together on something, all the other pretexts, the cream puffs, the water cannons, the Manhattan rooftops, fell away. We achieved perfect communion in the shared vision of work. So I have been privileged to collaborate with Bill. This is what it feels like to work with an Academy Award nominated director.

It feels like this:

Bill is practical.

Bill is concise.

Bill is effective.

Here’s the things he is not:  he is not neurotic, not self aggrandizing, not long suffering, not wasteful, and not filled with false modesty.

He is extremely focused.

Bill showed me something I hadn’t known before. It is possible to carry on an extended, productive conversation with an extremely busy person IF you are willing to grab it during interstitial moments. In the months Dennis and I planned the festival Bill was coming to, he gave us more input than I dreamed he would have time to give. Some of it came over the phone from New York.  Some of it came during brief moments we could grab while he was in transit from one place to another. We talked during a ride he needed to the airport, or between courses during a dinner he was having with friends at Jake’s, or between speaking gigs at the Ashland Independent Film Festival. He wasn’t multitasking, he was eliminating empty spots in his day. Why do nothing, when he could consult with us and improve our film festival? So that’s what he did.

At the festival, Gus Van Sant tapped Bill to present James Ivory with the Oregon Sesquicentennial Lifetime Achievement Award. I knew Bill was jet lagged, so tired he could barely stay awake, so I was surprised at the end when he asked James Ivory the final question of the evening: what is your dream project? what film would you most like to make?

I never knew that film directors wondered these things about each other.

James Ivory said the film he next wanted to make was a love story set in Peru. He told us “I want people to clutch at their hearts at the beauty I’ve made.” After the festival, perhaps not coincidentally, Gus’ next film was a love story. Bill’s next film, which he is still drawing, is a love story

All of Bill’s films may well be love stories. The stories are getting deeper, the love more mysterious and spiritual. It is as if Bill, having grown accustomed to sharing his innermost sexual fantasies in vivid, comic detail, has become so divested of inhibition that there is nothing to stop him from sharing his deepest worries, his sorrows, his pain and his soul. In Idiots and Angels, the story is so large, so expansive and so filled with grief, that it requires three endings.

Since the festival, Bill has written two books, toured the world with an award winning short, adopted an entirely new identity as a film preservationist, started an animation school, and transformed himself into a married man. And all the while, he continues to draw his next feature. I won’t say “I don’t see how he does this!” I do see how he does this. He takes everything he does very seriously. He likes to work. He likes the people he works with, he is a clear communicator, and he doesn’t waste time. Bill’s  formula for filmmaking success, repeated to audiences around the world,  is “short, fast and cheap.”

Excuse me, Bill, but what an act of artistic camouflage!  Some of your films may meet these three criteria, but your entire career defies that description.  I write this appreciation as a salute to that fact.

====================================================

Photo credit: Shawn Levy took the photo of James Ivory, Gus Van Sant, Bill Plympton and Mike Rich on May 1, 2009 at Marylhurst University’s Oregon Sesquicentennial Film Festival.

Gray H. Whaley’s brand new guide to the first five decades of European American presence in Oregon uses the Chinook concept of “Illahee” (homeland) as a counterbalance to the American concept of “Oregon”, the idea of an empty, fertile wilderness bequeathed directly to settlers by God. The title of the book,  Oregon and the Collapse of Illahee: U.S. Empire and the Transformation of an Indigenous World, 1792-1859, uses words which imply the erasure of Native American culture: “collapse” and “transformation”.

However, in real life, in the Oregon I live in, erasure is not the right word for what happened to the First Oregonians.

Testimony to that could be seen on stage and screen last month.

Matt McCormick originally imagined Carrie Brownstein in the role he eventually gave Renee Roman Nose in Some Days Are Better Than Others. Roman Nose plays a woman who in the course of her work sorting donations to Goodwill discovers a funeral urn filled with the remains of a human being. McCormick didn’t write his screenplay with the goal of balancing his tiny cast racially, it just happened in the casting.

Umatilla musician and music historian Thomas Morning Owl, Jr co-wrote the stage musical The Ghosts Of Celilo with Marv Ross over a period of ten years. The Ghosts of Celilio is based on true events which occurred when The Dalles dam inundated a ten thousand year old fishing village in 1957. Morning Owl Jr has appeared in both Portland productions of The Ghosts Of Celilo, playing the heavy.

The ghosts of Celilo also haunt Chief Bromden, the character played by Tim Sampson in Portland Center Stage’s production of Dale Wasserman’s adaptation of One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest. Sampson is the son of Will Sampson, the actor who made his debut playing the same role in Milos Forman’s 1975 film. Wasserman’s stage treatment preserves the centrality Ken Kesey’s novel assigned to Bromden, a bi-racial, self elected mute whose stream of consciousness narrates the action.

In Meek’s Cutoff, Rod Rondeaux plays the Cayuse Indian who crosses paths with a hopelessly lost, and perilously thirsty, wagon train. Screenwriter Jon Raymond based his script on an actual event, recorded in an 1845 pioneer diary.

All four stories – Meek’s Cutoff, Some Days Are Better Than Others, One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest, and The Ghosts Of Celilo – seamlessly incorporate  European American and Native American characters. Meek’s Cutoff and The Ghosts Of Celilo were based on historic events; Some Days and Cuckoo’s Nest based on imagined ones.

Whether the events were real or imagined, all five Oregon writers – Jon Raymond, Matt McCormick, Ken Kesey, Thomas Morning Owl, Jr. and Marv Ross –  tell stories set in biracial worlds because that choice most faithfully reflects the world in which they live.

When did Oregon writers start exploring the bi-culturality of our state ?

1873: Joaquin Miller writes Life Amongst The Modocs: An Unwritten History

1883: Sarah Winnemucca writes Life Among The Piutes: Their Wrongs and Claims

1890: Frederick Homer Balch writes The Bridge of the Gods: A Romance of Indian Oregon

1901: C.E.S. Wood publishes A Book of Tales: Being Some Myths of the North American Indians

1902: Eva Emery Dye writes The Conquest: The True Story of Lewis and Clark, with Sacajawea at the center of her narrative

1940: Yellow Wolf dictates Yellow Wolf: His Own Story to Lucullus Virgil McWhorter

1960: Don Berry writes Trask

1962: Ken Kesey writes One Flew Over The Cuckoo’s Nest

1983: Ron Finne makes Tamanawis Illahee: Rituals and Acts In A Landscape

1987: William Kittredge writes Owning It All

1993: Elizabeth Woody writes Seven Hands, Seven Hearts

1995: Craig Lesley writes Winterkill

1998: Chris Eyre makes Smoke Signals

2000 Marv Ross and Thomas Morning Owl, Jr begin writing & composing The Ghosts Of Celilo

2010: Matt McCormick makes Some Days Are Better Than Others

2010: Jon Raymond writes Meek’s Cutoff

In Meek’s Cutoff, the wagon train has to decide whether they want to kill the one human being they have found in the desert or entrust their lives to him. Oregon literature has been grappling with the repercussions of that decision ever since.

The above book list is not comprehensive! I am not covering all related works of art, nor all artists. Please feel free to add names/titles I have omitted.

For people who would like to know more about the books on the list — several are on Walt Curtis Recommends: Top Nine For Oregon Bookworms. Another great list can be found on the Oregon Cultural Heritage Commission website.

For Oregon newbies who want to get to know their new home better, here’s some advice. You can’t go wrong going straight to the source, and reading Oregon authors. Even where they do not take Oregon as their subject  (but choose, say,  Pancho Villa), much is revealed about the regional character just in the way they write.

Walt Curtis compiled this list of his top recommended Oregon books originally for the Clinton Street Quarterly. It is still the best list I have ever seen: direct, pure, idiosyncratic. Just like Walt.

Walt Curtis Recommends

1. Far Corner: A Personal View Of the Pacific Northwest by Stewart Holbrook. Debunking and delighting, the Portland historian writes of the Wobblies, Erickson’s Saloon, Aurora Colony, logging, and the myths and symbols of our region of the U.S.

Anne’s commentary: Stewart Holbrook cast a long shadow. Brian Booth edited a collection of Holbrook essays, Wildmen, Wobblies and Whistle Punks, and spoke about Holbrook at a recent Dill Pickle Club meeting. John Daniels chose The Far Corner as the title for his most recent collection of essays as a tribute to Holbrook.

2. The Selected Poems of Hazel Hall is the crippled seamstress’ marvelous work. Beth Bentley introduces this only volume of Hall in print, which needs to be amplified. An early feminist, her distinguished poetry deserves national attention once again. She is as good as Emily Dickinson.

Anne’s commentary: As Walt predicted, a second collection of Hazel Hall’s poetry did find its way into print. John Witte published a collection with OSU Press in 2000. Oregonian film critic Stan Hall, no relation to Hazel Hall, named his daughter after this forgotten Portland poet.

3. The Distant Music by Harold Lenoir Davis. This chronicle of the Mulock family and their relationship to the land is Davis’ last novel. Winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1936 for Honey in the Horn, Davis wrote as well as anyone in the Pacific Northwest, including Ken Kesey. He has justly been compared with Faulkner and Twain.

Anne’s commentary: Walt’s contrarian choice, to list a lesser known work by Davis rather than his Pulitzer Prize winner, means there must be something to The Distant Music. I have not read it but this year I will.

4. The Conquest, or the True Story of the Lewis and Clark Expedition by Eva Emery Dye. Dye popularized the expedition, creating a memorable feminist heroine in Sacajawea. She is the Northwest’s finest historical novelist, readable, upbeat, well researched. Her books should be brought back into print so school kids can get a sense of Northwest history. The Oregon Trail and all of that! Go to the library to read her work.

Anne’s commentary: Eva Emery Dye uses dialogue in a way which astonishes modern readers — putting words in the mouths of all her historical figures – but what a storyteller!  Read her (out of print, as Walt noted) novels for a still vivid portrait of a community trying to balance their ideal of a democratic society where all men are equal against their own historical record of  displacing the First Oregonians.

5. Life Among The Modocs: Unwritten History by Joaquin Miller. A seventeen year old boy went to live with gold miners and Indians near Mt. Shasta. From his experience would come an American classic. Miller himself would become the archetype of the Western man, making Buffalo Bill jealous.

Anne’s commentary: Joaquin fights both for the Indians and against the Indians, ping ponging from one side to the other. He knows exactly who he is and where his primary allegiance lies — with himself. The self portrait of a scoundrel in love with language. Is this the blueprint for future Oregon wildmen Ken Kesey and Gus Van Sant? Written in 1873, when Joaquin Miller was a lionized poet living in London.

6. The Bridge Of The Gods, a Romance of Indian Oregon by Frederic Homer Balch is reminiscent of Nathaniel Hawthorne. The missionary Cecil Grey has been drawn to the Northwest by a vision of the bridge and a need to convert natives to Christianity. Himself a melancholy preacher, Balch died tragically at age 29 of tuberculosis.

Anne’s commentary: Walt has been after me to read this 1890 novel for as long as I can remember. I promise this year I will repair to Cascade Locks to sit and read this book within view of the steel cantilevered Bridge of the Gods which replaces the land bridge commemorated by its title. I will do this as a tribute to Walt, and despite the great misgivings I have about works of art created by melancholy preachers. Available on Google Books.

7. Heavenly Discourse by Charles Erskine  Scott Wood. Can you imagine someone’s life spanning the era from the days of Chief Joseph to the bombing of Pearl Harbor? Wood’s satirical sketches, disgracefully out of print, would rock conservative minds even today. Intelligent, classical, radical, libertarian, “Ces” Wood is the patriarch of Portland arts and letters.

Anne’s commentary: Walt is right. C. E. S. Wood is the patriarch of Portland arts and letters. He commissioned the Skidmore fountain, helped found the public library, worked as a corporate lawyer for lumber companies by day and as an essayist for radical East Coast magazines by night.  A litmus test: You’re not a real Oregonian if you don’t know who he is.

8. Insurgent Mexico by John Reed, the Northwest’s most internationally acclaimed author! What do we gringos know of the history of Mexico, our closest neighbor? John Reed was there, riding with Pancho Villa in 1913. Raw, passionate, poetic, the great journalist gives us a visceral, unforgettable account.

Anne’s commentary: Another contrarian choice by Walt, since Reed is more famous for writing Ten Days Which Shook The World, his eyewitness account of the Russian revolution.

9. The Singing Creek Where The Willows Grow : the rediscovered diary of Opal Whiteley by Ben Hoff . This rediscovered diary and biography is a standard for the re-issuing of Northwest classics! Opal is the “flower child”, charismatic and schizophrenia, who captivated readers of the Atlantic Monthly in 1920. She grew up in a Cottage Grove lumber camp, and is still alive in a mental hospital in London. Fascinating story!

Anne’s commentary: Since Walt wrote this, Opal Whiteley died. I belong to the camp which classifies her early childhood literary achievements as fraud. Hoff takes the opposing view. Her story, real or no, is part of Oregon history.

Walt’s original list, written for the Clinton Street Quarterly, was a full dozen titles. The additional three were by Washington State writers.

Here again is Walt:

1. The Egg and I by Betty MacDonald. Life on a Puget Sound chicken ranch. Ma and Pa Kettle are their closest neighbors! This book is still a bestseller. A housewife’s eye-view of geoducks and other curiousities peculiar to our landscape, including the people.

2. Paul Bunyan by James Stevens. In a literary manner, Stevens popularized the mythical logger of American folklore. Stevens also co-authored Status Rerum, a manifesto on the deplorable state of Northwest letters, with his close friend, H.  L. Davis.

3. Skid Road by  Murray Morgan. The first skid road, logger’s Valhalla or bowery was located in Seattle. Where the human and wood debris were dumped in the bay! Ox teams skidded logs to Yesler’s mill. Doc Maynard took over and the red light district became legendary.