Different takes on the Hero’s Tale; it seems the Eastern tradition begins with the young hero’s apprenticeship to some sort of fight Master, the Sensei — the Sensei’s wisdom, skills, the young apprentice’s bumbling, discoveries of self under discipline—etc.

In the West the stories concentrate more on the Band Of Brothers theme. Both are probably tens of thousands of years old. Band of Brothers, from Ulysses to Saving Private Ryan.

There are always exceptions but in general I am talking.

The Eastern tradition is in full flower on YouTube. So many young filmmakers or would-be filmmakers doing action shorts wherein fighters fling themselves at one another in the best Shinobi tradition and many of them have to do with the apprentice/master plot. Variations are endless. The apprentice who is talented, the one who appears to be a bumbler, the young man from a humble background, the apprentice who wants to use his skills for evil ends; a harsh master, a silent one; the variations are without number. There always seems to be the required scene of reverence for the Sensei, obedience to some strange requirement or task that turns out later to make sense.

In this Eastern aspect tradition is vital; the Shinobi Sensei has of course at one time been an apprentice himself, learning from a master, who learned from a master…going back centuries, perhaps millennia. Using the Band Of Brothers construction, the band of young warriors seem always to have sprung up w/o antecedents. The Band Of Brothers theme has a lot of energy to it.

In the Eastern take, deep respect for tradition. The Brothers in the Band, on the other hand, are irreverent and out to break rules. Much of the plot of the Young Apprentice revolves around a harsh master who seems to impose arbitrary and impossible tasks; young apprentice obediently takes them on, much hilarity ensues, finally triumphs.

The Shinobi Sensei also uses surprising methods to teach the young apprentice. Much depends on the Sensei’s ability to understand his students, to pay keen attention to their skills, failings, etc. In other words in the Eastern tradition a Good Parent we have, although often disguised as a martinet.

So in the Eastern tradition these tales have a two-part plot; apprenticeship, harsh master, then out into the world to involve oneself in revenge dramas or the destruction of thuggish persons etc. The Western tradition is far more individualistic. Both are interesting.

This is my grandmother’s first cousin, Stanley Speece. He and his brother Denver and my grandfather decided, when they were about 19, to leave Missouri and go out to Oklahoma and try to find work as cowboys for a while. But before they went, in case they didn’t get hired on, Denver and Stanley had pictures taken of themselves in cowboy gear so they could say at least they looked like cowboys. Apparently the three of them never stopped laughing and were terrible for practical jokes.

My grandmother was very close to her first cousins; her mother died and her aunts’ families raised them. When my grandfather was courting her, he got to know Denver and Stanley who were by all accounts Type A personalities (described as ‘monkeys’) and they cooked up this scheme to go to Oklahoma.

Denver’s picture (which I have here somewhere) is in exactly the same clothes. Evidently Stanley had his picture taken and then went back and gave all the gear to Denver who then had his picture taken. Same chaps, same white turtleneck, same pose, same rope. At any rate, they did go out to Oklahoma and got hired on and spent a year hustling cattle around and repairing windmills etc. etc. They had a great time. My grandfather told me about it and I wrote it all down. When he came back he and my grandmother got married.   This is my grandmother and her half-brother Alonzo King. Probably taken near New Lebanon Missouri about 1910. She was always this slim, this beautiful, even in her seventies.

Irony; it’s going over the edge and on its way down the falls but how will we live without it? David Foster Wallace, from A Supposedly Fun Thing I’ll Never do Again: “so then how have irony, irreverence and rebellion come to be not liberating but enfeebling in the culture today’s avant-garde tries to write about? One clue’s to be found in the fact that irony is still around, bigger than ever after 30 long years as the dominate mode of hip expression. It is not a rhetorical mode that wears well…entertaining as it is, it serves an almost exclusively negative function. ..persistent irony is tiresome. It is unmeaty.”

(Me; And so on and so on but what to replace it with? We have no larger cultural context to help us avoid sticky sentimentality as the only alternative.)

DFW: “Who knows? Today’s most engaged young fiction does seem like some kind of line’s end’s end. I guess this means we all get to draw our own conclusions. Have to. Are you immensely pleased.”

That was 22 years ago. Still, at present, in order to keep the reader’s interest these constructions called “characters” do head-bangingly stupid things in order that they might involve themselves in desperate situations. I think there is some unknown program running on every author’s computer which if words like loyalty, courage, love or honor come up the entire manuscript is killed.

Thus, fiction continues to slide and people flock to Guardians Of The Galaxy, which is actually a fun film. Sardonic heroes but heroes, great dialogue, action. Fights. Evil crushed by rough men and raccoons standing ready in the night.

Movie quote; African Queen. German colonial official; But you can’t have come through those swamps!

Filthy ragged Katherine Hepburn; Nevertheless.

So I put it down after getting halfway through and am giving it away. I don’t think there was one likeable character. It became exhausting and in a way a kind of incessant nattering monotone. I read this repeatedly in Amazon reviews; ‘All the characters were unlikeable’ and ‘I couldn’t relate to the major figures in this book’.

And so after all this, finally, I realize that it is the present fashion. It’s not that the writer has no ability (I think) to construct interesting people-on-the-page, it is that unlikeable characters are presently stylish.

This book takes place in a place called New Carthage, Missouri so women are either Steel Magnolias chewing gum or swoshy clods with Keds and multiple chins. But then the people in New York are all awful as well.  This gets monotonous, as in monotone, as in one single note played over and over, a Guantanamo torture.

So these are the present rules for stylish contemporary literary novels in case you are thinking of writing one, which I would sternly discourage unless you have the capacity to sustain a mean-spirited irony for about 300 pages:

—construct shallow, haughty main characters.

—-have them make stupid, nay, witless ‘choices’

—lots of random sex graphically described; afterwards participants more or less forget about each other and might even at some point say, Now what was your name again? Are we married?

—make some off-hand reference to the evilness of George Bush

And there you about have it.

A good thriller, takes place on the Texas Gulf coast, which ain’t all that fancy a place, the authors are actually three guys who’ve known each other for years, one is a lawyer, another an engineer and I forgot the third. Have been at a couple of author’s festivals with them and they are a comedy team. Very funny. the book is great, they have a website.

I was never really able to get a handle on my character Adair in Enemy Women until I found the right image for her. Then she just jumped out at me and was herself. It’s not really a photo from the Civil War era, I found it in a book about women’s clothing, styles, fashions during the 19th century. The woman and era were unidentified but my best guess is that she is from a Mediterranean or Greek ethnic group and the photo is of a quality that would put it in the late 19th century. But it would serve; for Adair, from the Ozarks, 1861. it fired my imagination and I had my character. There you are, where have you been?

German troops surrendering, D Day.

There are so many pictures of the wounded on the landing at Normandy, and I think this is because the photographers were not in the middle of the action, up forward. Mostly they were back with the wounded at the aid stations although some were in the first wave.

It is nearly impossible to protect yourself or be aware of enemy fire when you are looking through a lens and taking a picture. To go into action with your face up against a camera sight is suicidal. Although some have done it. I have been in fast-moving situations taking photos and you forget where your feet are, or anything else except that small field in your lens and so this is very dangerous to the photographer.

So this is one of the rarely-seen photos. instead of the wounded, here are the Nazi troops surrendering, which is, after all, what the soldiers were there for.

Shortly after this my dad was drafted into the Navy and spent a year on a destroyer escort, The USS Finnegan, in the Pacific. He was at Iwo Jima and the battle of Letey Gulf.

Blue Creek Canyon in Big Bend National Park. April Baxter was taking the picture so she wasn’t in it but that gray horse is her pretty little Andalusian mare named Indira. This was back in March.

A most amazing photo by Hattie Barham of Utopia. The Ranch Rodeo was on Memorial Day and on that day the big eight-inch rainfall happened. I could see the lights of the arena from my ridgetop home here and I thought surely it would be cancelled but it was not. Hattie is one of the best — she and her husband are living here (where they’re from) but Hattie has shot for AP, Agence-France Press and all the top venues. so much talent here in this little town. Terrific photo! See them all at Hattie’s site, LoneStarPhotos.com

Love these old sci-fi illustrations!

Some story lines and concerns in the ‘Fifties as now; catastrophic climate change and zippy personal vehicles. I too am writing about ‘after the rain’ or at least ‘during the rain’.