On Blogs: A New Media Elite

AQQ

Fareed Zakaria writes:

In the world of journalism, the personal Web site ('blog') was hailed as the killer of the traditional media. In fact it has become something quite different. Far from replacing newspapers and magazines, the best blogs — and the best are very clever — have become guides to them, pointing to unusual sources and commenting on familiar ones. They have become new mediators for the informed public. Although the creators of blogs think of themselves as radical democrats, they are in fact a new Tocquevillian elite. Much of the Web has moved in this direction because the wilder, bigger, and more chaotic it becomes, the more people will need help navigating it.

The Future of Freedom (2004), p. 254.

More on Fareed Zakaria.

This is justification for Archival Quality Communications

Col. Zebulon Montgomery Pike

Col. Pike married Clarissa Harlowe Brown of Boone County, Ky. They were married in 1801 in Cincinnati.

Read more about Zebulon Pike.

John Tanner and the Landscape of Life

I have been reading an essay by Ms. Erdrich in her Books and Islands (2003), entitled "John Tanner and the Landscape of Hunger", in which she states that his book was about the "relentless efforts of a man to feed himself." Is this the truth? What about feeding his adopted family, later his wife and children, and many other Indians whom he lived among? It is true, according to Tanner's book, much of the time it was feast or famine, though there must have been many times of sufficient, but not too much, as well.

Is The Narrative of the Adventures of John Tanner (1830) really the sequel to The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn (1884)? I think the time sequence is a little out of order. This suggestion, which Erdrich borrows from her sister, is especially misleading, if, as Wendell Berry thinks, Huckleberry Finn was trying to escape growing up. I do not get the impression that John Tanner was trying to escape growing up; he was living the life that destiny had given him, and doing it at least as well as most people do in the situations in which they find themselves. As Ortega y Gassett remarks: "Nothing so saps the profound resources of a life as finding life too easy." This is the real landscape of Tanner's life. He had developed profound resources for dealing with people and nature "in the raw", so to speak. When he came back among his white kin he was nearly stifled by the comparative ease of their lives. He needed the challenges of the Indian life to pit himself against great natural forces, and realize his potential for meeting these challenges.

The book he wrote, with the assistance of Dr. James, is a tribute to the value of such a life. Despite the flaws of the book, words and phrases rather obviously inserted by James, that a man in John Tanner's position would never use, his stunningly stubborn and unique personality come through. Like Esau, his hand may have been against every man's, and every man's against him, but he is a real man, and his care for his children, and others about him, and his participation in that culture, means that he lived, in that culture, a life successful in the only way human life can be. As Ortega y Gasset says: "Every life is, more or less, a ruin among whose debris we have to discover what the person ought to have been."

It may have been, as Erdrich quotes her sister as saying: "He vanished into his own legend." Adding for herself, "His end was as mysterious and tragic as the outline of his life in this beautiful, unforgiving country." He did one thing at least that had never yet been done, for as she states: "his is the first narrative of native life from an Ojibwe point of view."

James Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone University: Think Tank & Public Policy Center
Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.
2008

Faith in the Past v. Fear of the Future

"The man who has not lost faith in the past is not frightened by the future, because he is sure that in the past he will find the tactic, the method, the course, by which he can sustain himself in the problematic tomorrow. The future is the horizon of problems, the past is the terra firma of methods, of the roads which we believe we have under our feet. Consider, my dear friend, the terrible situation of the man to whom the past, the stable, suddenly becomes problematical, suddenly becomes an abyss. Previously, danger appeared to lie only before him, in the hazardous future; now he finds it also behind his back and under his feet."

Ortega y Gasset, "In Search of Goethe from Within," (1932); in The Dehumanization of Art, and Other Essays on Art, Culture, and Literature (Princeton, 1968), p. 134.

Ira et Studium

Historiam puto scribendam esse et cum ira et cum studio.

Water Purity

"Water's a very peculiar thing—you can't pick it up with a pitchfork. That's why it's been nuts to Old Harry and the lawyers."

George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860).

"Water needs soil, soil needs vegetation, vegetation needs animals, animals need water — and all these factors compose a single cycle. It is a cycle of which man in a part. If thrust from that cycle, he dies. What he does to parts of that cycle, which he denominates as separate resources, what he does to forests, game, crops, water, affects the whole cycle, and ultimately affects the conditions of his life, or whether he shall have a life."

Earl F. Murphy, Water Purity: A Study in Legal Control of Natural Resources (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1961), p. 5.

John Tanner On His Life among the Indians

"As long as I lived among the Indians, I made it my business to conform, as far as appeared consistent with my immediate conscience and comfort, with all their customs. Many of their ideas I have adopted, but I always found among them opinions which I could not hold."

John Tanner's Narrative, Cap. IX (Loomis Edition, p. 145-146)

The Past: A Different Universe

AQQ

"The past isn't simply another country, it's an entirely different universe."

Mark Gregory Pegg, A Most Holy War: The Albigensian Crusade and the Battle for Christendom (New York: Oxford University Press, 2008), p. xii.

He continues with the following observation:

"History is more art than science, striving for the precision of the imagination. Only through imaginative rigor does the imaginative sympathy occur. That is why historical prose must experiment with narrative styles and structures. The past is hard enough to write without thinking there is only one way to write about it."

(Ibid., xiii.)

I would say, rather, that history is both art and science. The part Pegg calls "rigor" is simply science, or knowledge. That is hard enough to accomplish, but to imaginatively re-create the past as a structure built up from the materials created by historical method is indeed the difficult part, and requires the greatest artistic effort of which the writer is capable. Only a great artist can write a great historical work.

Jas. Duvall, M. A.
Big Bone University

Nec ossa solum, sed etiam sanguinem.

2008

Chronocosm

"The protected, and usually large, physical spaces that creative individuals demand for their work — studios, libraries, laboratories — are matched by the protected expanses of time that they stake out, day after day, across their careers. These regularly repeated periods, often whole mornings or afternoons, are so massive that they become quasi-physical presences whose substance can be sculpted into regular achievement. I call these expanses of time 'chronocosms' (time worlds): periods that set up their own unique time dynamics, develop an integrity all their own. People unaquainted with such time worlds have little chance to experience creative insight."

Robert Grudin, The Grace of Great Things: Creativity and Innovation (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1990),p. 83-84.

Or as Rousseau wrote in Émile, to teach a child (or anyone for that matter) we must lose the time in order to save it. That includes teaching ourselves.

"Intellectual Property"

"Intellectual property" names
the deed by which the mind is bought
and sold, the world enslaved.

"Some Further Words" by Wendell Berry, American Poetry Review, May/Jun 2002

Read the entire poem "Some Further Words". It contains much good philosophy for living, such as these lines: "I don't want to live on mortal terms forever, or survive an hour as a cooling stew of pieces of other people. I don't believe that life or knowledge can be given by machines."

And

                                            I know
a "fetus" is a human child.
I loved my children from the time
they were conceived, having loved
their mother, who loved them
from the time they were conceived
and before. Who are we to say
the world did not begin in love?

"Some Further Words"

The Lost Silver Mine of Kentucky

AQQ

John Swift is the true forefather of our history here . . .

One of the oldest and most persistent legends of the white man's occupation of Kentucky is that of John Swift's silver. Swift was a silver miner who is supposed to have wandered in the Kentucky mountains in about 1760. He left a journal describing his adventures, paramount among which was the discovery of a marvelously rich lode of silver. The journal contained directions for finding this wealth and also a map, but because of Swift's poor knowledge of the country and its landmarks both directions and map have proved meaningless.

And that very meaninglessness has assured the survival and the dispersal of the legend, and of the indefatigable dream that the legend represents. Today, according to Thomas D. Clark, there are still people in the Kentucky mountains 'who had rather seek fortune by searching for nebulous silver than by plowing corn.' And that region is said to be littered with vaguely defined sites where maybe John Swift found and then lost his silver mine. One of those places is the Red River Gorge, and a tributary of the Red is named in commemoration of Swift's passage through that country: Swift Camp Creek.

There could be no better parable of the white man's entrance into Kentucky. For John Swift is the true forefather of our history here, and his progeny have been numerous. The have descended upon this land from the eastward passes and from their mother's wombs with their minds set on the dream of quick riches to be had, if not from a vein of precious metal, then from coal or from logs. Or from the land itself, for those who preferred to plow rather than hunt silver have all too often followed the agricultural method known as 'mining,' by which the growth is taken from the land and nothing given back, until the fields are exhausted like a mined-out seam of coal.

Wendell Berry, The Unforeseen Wilderness: An Essay on Kentucky's Red River Gorge (Lexington: University Press of Kentucky, 1971), p. 13-14.

This is an Archival Quality Quotation

Here is a version, http://www.rootsweb.ancestry.com/~kywolfe/swift.htm, that claims the story began in 1755, the year Mary Ingles was captured and brought to the Big Bone Lick in Kentucky. If Swift had simply "followed the rivers", like Mary and her companion, he could have found his way out, and back again. Here is the link to an article that gives the story a masonic twist: Joe Nickell, "The Secrets of Oak Island" Skeptical Inquirer, March, 2000. The paragraph on Swift's mine is on page 4 of the internet version. Nickell wrote an article on the subject for the Filson Club Historical Quarterly 54 (Oct 1980): 324-345, and the entry in the Kentucky Encyclopedia (1992), p. 863-864.