» Elmer Kelton: Greatest Western Writer of All Time

This from Bill Kaufman's article over at The American Enterprise Online, "Stubborn Cowboys":

Elmer Kelton was voted "Great Western Writer of All Time" by the Western Writers of America, a daunting title to work under, though he bears it modestly. There is, after all, that modifying adjective: Western.

Kelton, who turned 80 in April, has his academic champions, but he acknowledges that "the Western field is a literary ghetto. Critics don't read a Western unless the book is contemptuous of its subject matter. If you write out of love for your subject matter they'll dismiss you."

Elmer Kelton loves his subject matter. He was born to it, after all. And if the Western is a ghetto, it is a remarkably rich ghetto populated by the likes of Edward Abbey (The Brave Cowboy), Jack Schaefer (Shane), Larry McMurtry (Lonesome Dove), and other novelists whose mortal sin, it seems, is setting their tales in open spaces rather than in the confines of the faculty lounge or city tenement. Elmer Kelton has an utter mastery of his subject; a distinctive, even arresting, point of view; and a narrative talent honed by writing for the Western pulps. His best work, The Time It Never Rained (1973), can be read as character study, regional literature, and philosophical novel: find me a navel-gazing New Yorker writer who has squeezed out a single book as rich, layered, and unsettling.

Also note John D. Nesbitt has website now. I'll be commenting on his dissertation on the western here.

» What will stick to them like burrs....

From Robert Frost's “The Figure a Poem Makes”:

Scholars and artists thrown together are often annoyed at the puzzle of where they differ. Both work from knowledge; but I suspect they differ most importantly in the way their knowledge is come by. Scholars get theirs with conscientious thoroughness along projected lines of logic; poets theirs cavalierly and as it happens in and out of books. They stick to nothing deliberately, but let what will stick to them like burrs where they walk in the fields. No acquirement is on assignment, or even self-assignment. Knowledge of the second kind is much more available in the wild free ways of wit and art. A school boy maybe defined as one who can tell you what he knows in the order in which he learned it. The artist must value himself as he snatches a thing from some previous order in time and space into a new order with not so much as a ligature clinging to it of the old place where it was organic.

» Gary Shapiro's Tribute to Hilton Kramer

An article by Gary Shapiro in the NY Sun abut the honoring of Hilton Kramer, the founder of the New Criterion,

a magazine that recalls a time - according to the editor's note in its first issue - "when criticism was more strictly concerned to distinguish achievement from failure, to identify and uphold a standard of quality." It has sought to "speak plainly and vigorously about the problems that beset the life of the arts and the life of the mind in our society."

Norman Podhoretz honored Kramer this way:

"More than any other critic of our time - more energetically, more relentlessly, more brilliantly, more courageously - Hilton has stood out against the degradation of modernism in the arts and the symbiotic degradation of liberalism in politics and culture," Commentary magazine editor-at-large Norman Podhoretz said at the dinner.

(ht: John Miller at the Corner)

» In One Era and Out the Other....

From Terry Teachout's "In one era and out the other"

Overheard yesterday at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival:

• Middle-aged woman in socks and sandals: “Have you seen The Diary of Anne Frank yet? I decided to go, even though I don’t like seeing depressing shows—George Bush already has me depressed enough.”

• Older woman: “It says here in the program that William Inge—he’s the man who wrote this play, honey—was ‘ashamed at being homosexual.’ What do you think of that?”

Older man: “Huh.”

Older woman: “Well, what I want to know is, if he was so ashamed, why didn’t he just stop?”

posted by terryteachout @ Friday, June 2, 2006

» Narration

Found this Discussion on voice and narration in poetry. It is part of a larger publication on poetics, prose, poetry, and drama. Very interesting and helpful. I'll have to sift through it.