While Butch Robs Trains

Claudia Putnam

[washingtonpost]

Justice Dept. review finds pattern of racial bias among Ferguson police

The Justice Department plans this week to release evidence of racial bias found in e-mails written by Ferguson police and municipal court officials. 

A November 2008 e-mail, for instance, stated that President Obama could not be president for very long because “what black man holds a steady job for four years.”

[claudiaputnam]

Happy Harvey

Harvey, rescued Krabloonik sled dog (one of the eight seized dogs mentioned here), shredding Tiehack at AspenSnowmass. Life can be fun! 50 more of these dogs need homes. Some are too shorthaired to be outside all the time in winter, some are ready to retire, some are just extra dogs the operation doesn't need. Find yourself a new friend! Or help fund the adoption effort, spearheaded by a nonprofit group, Voices for the Krabloonik Dogs. Like them on Facebook for ongoing updates and great photos!

[claudiaputnam]

Poetry Chapbook Offered as Goodreads Giveaway

You can enter to win a free copy of my chapbook, Wild Thing in Our Known World, on Goodreads, now. 

[theparisreview]

In praise of finishing every book you start: “The most common defense of book-dropping I hear is that because there are more good books than any one person could possibly read, it’s stupid to waste time on a dull or otherwise unsatisfactory novel. That argument makes sense if the novel is utter trash—if it’s so bad that the reader needn’t respect the author and would possibly get dumber by going forward. But if a novel starts well and descends into trash, then it seems to me that it’s worth continuing to see if it gets better, or to see where the writer went wrong.”

[claudiaputnam]

Year of Our Lord

Found an old deed conveying the land on which my last home was built. It's dated the "25th day of January, in the year of our Lord one thousand nine hundred and sixty-two." I don't know about you, but I think the year of our Lord thing is a bit creepy, since 1962 isn't that long ago. I mean, this is about a year before I was born, and growing up it didn't seem to me as though everyone I knew defined the passage of time in terms of the LORD. And who knows exactly when he was born anyway. Sloppy. 

And, btw, the County sold the land, located on an old mining claim, to those named in the deed, for $10. Cheap even by 1962 standards. Also tendered were "other Good and Valuable Considerations." I'm guessing a land trade--my mining claim for yours--but who knows. 

[claudiaputnam]

Some things I have found out so far about the Wild West

Gun control was widespread. In Dodge City you were supposed to check your gun at the sheriff's office. The showdown at the OK Corral may have been about a failure to check a gun (also featured some of the same law enforcement who instituted gun control in Dodge City.

Six-guns were heavy and notoriously inaccurate, which is why they had six shots. Gunslingers were rare. No matter how good your aim, you really couldn't count on the gun.

Immigrants sent hundreds of thousands of dollars from their wages back to their home countries. Always have, always will.

When electricity was proposed for individual homes, people worried they'd suffer adverse health affects from the current in their houses.

As phones became more common, people made all kinds of crazy requests to operators, such as to call them back when their bread had risen enough, to listen in on a sleeping baby while the mother went for a walk, to keep an eye on train timetables and call if a train was going to be late.

Phone operators were initially men, but they were unreliable, and often drunk or rude to customers, so the phone company switched to hiring women. 

Telephone conversations changed the shape of our language. It became markedly less formal. Even written conversation became briefer, and sentence structure simpler. Catchwords like "give me a buzz" replaced "drop me a line." People bemoaned these changes much as they have the changes in conversational dynamics due to email and texting. 

Many of these factoids come from Victorian America, by Thomas J. Schlereth.

Not the part about the guns, though. You can verify by Googling. :) 

[mcnallyjackson]

We were a little skeptical of the concept at first, but we ended up deciding to participate in Banned Books Week. Here are the books we’ve chosen to ban. If you really want one they’ll be available again next week.

In Search of Lost Time, Vols. 2-7

No one gets this far anyway.

...

[aspensnowmass-blog]

The Maroon Bells wearing their fall colors as the Milky Way shines in a clear night sky. Another amazing photo by Jeremy Swanson. 

-Dave

[nevver]

Occupy Hong Kong

[washingtonpost]

You can register to vote on Tumblr! Just click on the flag for more info on how to make it happen. 

[claudiaputnam]

The Princess of All Princesses

So glad to see that Best American Nonrequired Reading 2014 editor David Handler (aka Lemony Snicket) has named Alice Stern's "The Princess of All Princesses," published last year in Santa Monica Review, as a notable story! It's one of the finest pieces of fiction I've seen in years. 

I was lucky enough to be in a workshop with Alice at Squaw Valley in the summer of 2012, when she brought this story in. Last year, I wrote this blog post about the excitement I felt upon reading it--and seeing it published not long after.

I mean, c'mon, how often does a single story get you that worked up?

(Alice Stern has other fine work in several literary journals, including a prize-winning piece, which I also saw in draft, forthcoming in Roanoke Review.) 

I highly recommend Santa Monica Review as a literary journal focusing on prose, and listed it in my Standout Reads 2013 post. You can't go wrong ordering the Spring 2013 SMR issue, where Alice Stern's story is featured. 

[smithsonianlibrariesarchives]

This is Martha, the last Passenger Pigeon. She died on September 1, 1914 in the Cincinnati Zoo. Shortly thereafter, her body was packed in ice and sent by railroad to Washington, DC, to become a part of the National Museum of Natural History’s collection as a lasting legacy of the harm that can be done to the natural world by humans. Just decades prior, the Passenger Pigeon was the most abundant bird in North America. The disappearance of the species helped ignite the modern conservation movement.

For the Centennial of her death, Martha was recently brought out for display and is currently on view in the exhibition Once There Were Billions, Vanished Birds of North America. Sponsored by the Smithsonian Libraries in partnership with the National Museum of Natural History and the Biodiversity Heritage Library, the exhibition tells the story of the last Passenger Pigeon, a member of a species that once numbered in the billions, along with the disappearance of the Great Auk, Carolina Parakeet, and Heath Hen. These extinctions reveal the fragile connections between species and their environment. 

The Smithsonian Libraries, National Museum of Natural History, and the Biodiversity Heritage Library will be hosting a Twitter Chat on September 2, 2014 from 2-3 pm Eastern Time. This is your chance to ask questions about the Passenger Pigeon, extinction, and biodiversity literature.

Follow @SILibraries, @NMNH, and @BioDivLibrary and use the hashtag #Martha100 to tweet your questions.

[claudiaputnam]

However, in 1491, Charles Mann reports that the billions of passenger pigeons seen by early white Colonists may have been a sign of an eco-system out of balance, due to the disease-vector die-off of 70-90% of the existing human population in the Americas. You see, the Native Americans ate these birds, and they kept populations in balance in order to keep the pigeons from eating their crops. So, the huge flocks darkening the sky weren't natural, either. Extinction sucks in any case. 

[aspensnowmass-blog]

Summer isn’t over and there are still plenty of wildflowers up in the high country. So get outside, and go for a hike! 

-Dave

[claudiaputnam]

Dystopias

Reading Julianna Baggott's Pure right now.

I didn't mean to, but the writing pulled me in. I didn't want to read it because I am tired of post-apocalyptic scenarios in which brutality reigns. Why should this be so? Why wouldn't survivors band together and collaborate on rebuilding? After all, early humans worked together, and their cooperation is the reason for our complex brains. Collaboration has been the key to human evolution. 

I had this problem with The Road, The Dog Stars, The Windup Girl, and many others, although I enjoyed those books for other reasons. Ursula Le Guin's Always Coming Home is nice contrast (there is conflict, but there is also a great deal of human cooperation). 

And Octavia Butler offers a vision of coming through economic and social collapse. 

[theparisreview]

“As I write a novel, I’m aware that I’m struggling against the ‘obligation’ to solace.”

Norman Rush (via theparisreview)

[theparisreview]

“No one in the Midwest is familiar with the phrase ‘tall poppy syndrome,’ but the idea, which can be traced from Herodotus, is abundantly familiar: those that stand out are cut down.”

Dan Visel on a forgotten Midwestern religious sect and the strange novel it inspired.

[believermag]

What Would Twitter Do?

Welcome to What Would Twitter Do? the ninth and three-quarter edition with Roxane Gay! Next week will be Week 10, the final interview. In this series, I talk to some of my favourite people on Twitter about their Twitter philosophies and practices. Roxane Gay, in addition to being a brilliant fiction writer, blogger and essayist (this season she published her collection Bad Feminist to huge acclaim), is a seasoned and constant Twitter user. It’s possible that it was her, more than anyone else I follow, who made me begin to wonder: What is Twitter? She used the medium in the way other people did—posting links, declaring things—but in another way, too: as a constant running monologue, a real stream of consciousness, a literary Modernist on Twitter. There isn’t a sense of hierarchy among her now 80,000+ tweets. It almost seems part of her living—in the way that you wouldn’t say this breath is particularly important, while those twenty other breaths I took are less important. One begets the next. She was also maybe the first “Twitter celebrity” to me, in that I knew her “Twitter work” before I had read any of her other writing. She seems to be one those people always in centre of the swirl of the debate—especially around feminist issues—while also managing to stand cooly outside it.

—Sheila Heti

SHEILA HETI: I remember when I first started following you, I couldn’t believe how often you tweeted. It’s not like you’d save up and tweet special thoughts. It was more like a constant stream for your life.

ROXANE GAY: Living in a rural town really compelled me to start tweeting so much. Mostly, my Twitter usage is fueled by loneliness. I can go days without talking to another human being unless it’s my mother, especially when I’m not teaching or on break. 

SH: Many of your thoughts must now just appear as tweets. Is that so? Is there a portion of your brain that is always tuned to tweeting?

RG: Hmm. There’s certainly a portion of my brain that is always tuned to making wry observations about the world, but that portion of my brain was alive and well before Twitter. 

SH: Do you always tweet on your phone or from the website, too? 

RG: I tweet from my phone, the Twitter app on my computers, and once in a while, the website. 

SH: Do you care whether an individual tweet be “good,” or is more the overall approach that you think about?

RG: I don’t care. Twitter is my happy place. I am not there to overthink 140 characters. 

SH: What has tweeting done for you on a professional level? 

RG: Tweeting has definitely expanded the reach of my work.

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