An example of time and distance

These are photographs I recently posted on the Holscher's Hub site. Well, not really recently, but relatively recently.

Just the other day, here, I posted an article about the Revolution In Rural Transportation.  It can be easy to over do a thesis, and hopefully I haven't there, but that topic explored how parts of the Wyoming high country, or even just the back country, was inaccessible for much of the year.  Elsewhere here I've explored just how long it used to take to go from one area to another.

Here's a practical example from this Fall.  These are photos that were taking trailing out of the Big Horns.  Granted, this is pushing cattle.  If a person was just riding, they'd make better time.  Still, it's illustrative as to how distance used to be covered more slowly. And, and perhaps more significantly, it's an example of how distances once seemed so much more vast.  I can, at least in nice weather, easily drive up to this location and back home in much less than a day.  And some of these distances, which take a long time to cover pushing cattle, take under an hour on the road, by truck.

Day one, gathering and start of the trail.

 The Camp.

 Self portrait, day two.

 Lonely bull.

The slope, day three.

Writing What You Know

This is probably the third time in recent weeks that I've commented on something written by Tribune columnist Mary Billitier.  It's probably really unfair on my part, partially because her columns have been much less maudlin recently and she deserves credit for that.  It's also probably unfair as I tend to pick on the entire Casper Star Tribune every time I do that, and by recent observation their columnists aren't as bad as I have tended to portray them really. 

Here I'll give Billitier a little credit while, at the same time, criticize the publishing (and film) industry.  In today's Billitier CST article, Billitier notes that she submitted (resubmitted?) an old novel she had written to her publisher. She, as she recently related, is in her 40s, but the novel was written when she was in her early 30s, and features people in their 20s.

Now, I'm not privy to the rejection letter she received, but apparently her publisher gave the novel to some 20 year old employees who did not find it really credible, and therefore they gave her a re-write assignment, which I'll address in a moment.  But first I'd note that the entire idea that a person must be a certain age in order to portray it is bull. Rather, a person must be observant as to that age in order to portray it. As even Billitier noted, J. K. Rawlings hugely successful series of books was written to a youngish audience which she was far removed from. But, to give another more significant example, consider that Tolstoy was in his 20s when he started writing War and Peace, the greatest novel ever written.  The books starts out with observations of 20 year olds and teenagers, more particularly early teenage girls.  Tolstoy was never a teenage girl.  And the book goes through decades to where the characters are in their late middle age when it wraps up, with some elderly characters portrayed all along. It's often been noted how dead on he was in portraying people in context, and it sure wasn't because he was the ages of the people he was writing about at the time.  So here I think Billitier wasn't off the mark in feeling a bit wounded, even though she took the criticism to heart.  Here, for once, I don't think she should ahve.

Be that as it may, the next part of the column really bugs me.  Her publisher indicated that it wanted the re-write to feature a 40 year old woman who has to go back and patch up a rift in her ranch family.

What? 

If Billitier can't be expected to write accurately about the insights of 20s somethings, while would some dim bulb publisher seriously expect her to be able to write bumpkis about anything to do with a ranch family? Billitier is a Californian, not a Wyomingite, and the mere fact of her being transplanted here would no more guarantee that she has an insight into ranching than noting that my wife has a houseplant would make me an expert on horticulture.  I'm not criticizing Billitier at all on this, and to her credit, once again, she didn't indicate that she did know anything about this topic, and rather that she felt a bit humbled by the whole experience.  All the more so as she's apparently teaching a class on novel writing right now.

What this shows is how amazingly ignorant publishers are, at least as to certain formulas.  I noted on my Today In Wyoming's History blog recently that it seemed to be the case that there are a fair number of local authors who we could hope would do better, although some are, while we have always had some people who write about the West, or Wyoming, whose closeness to it we might question. This is not to say that a person must have grown up here, or even live her, to write about here. But why on earth would a publisher assume that mere residence here would mean that a writer would know anything about ranching?  It's absurd.  Most Wyomingites, of course, aren't ranchers at that, and in order to know anything about ranching, you pretty much have to ranch or really deeply immerse yourself in it.  I frankly think you'd have to do it. That makes me also suspect, fwiw, that this is equally true about any novel involving farming, livestock, riding horses, or the military.  If you haven't experienced that to some degree, you aren't going to get it quite right, I suspect.  Having said that, there are quite a few novels on these topics that are excellent, and I don't know if the writers had experienced those things or not.  I do know that merely living in an area does not make a person an expert on that areas culture or occupations.  I once spent a month in South Korea, for example, but that doesn't make me an expert on Gangnam Style.

This does explain why nearly every recent televised portray of Wyoming I've seen, however, is ubersappy.  Hollywood appears to seriously believe that Wyoming looks like the area just outside of Los Angeles, and that every single Wyomingite is a small rancher.  It also seems to believe that it is actually possible for a person to just go buy a ranch.   Hardly a reality.  And Hollywood also seems to really like the ranch girl goes home to patch up big crisis genera, of which there are a whole host of recent examples.

Well, I don't wish Billitier ill on this.  I actually sympathize with her.  She is probably legitimately an expert on a topic that's far more common than her publishers want her to write on, given her domestic travails,and it's too bad they want her to write a Horse Opera when she would have no apparent background, that I can see, to write it.

Some Recent Columns of Note:

This isn't a general editorial page, of course, but there's been some recent columns running in our local newspaper that have brought up some interesting points somewhat worth looking at.

For instance, there's Cal Thomas' Sex and the city (of Washington).

This ran in our local paper on Saturday, November 24, and it raises some interesting questions about double standards and changing standards in the context of the Petreaus resignation.  I mentioned some of these exact same items here myself a bit earlier in my The Novelty of the Normal, and the Banalty of the Unusual... a writing dilemma, post, those being that there's a real double standard in what used to apply and what currently doesn't apply to most people, and is even lampooned in the popular media, but which is supposed to apply to high governmental officials.  It's a real oddity, and Thomas does a nice job summing it up.

Speaking of Petreaus, Froma Harrop mentions something that is apparent to any student of American history, on her blog, that being that our current crop of military men sure wear a lot of fruit salad.  She's unfair in her criticism of Patton, however, who normally didn't wear all of his decorations and who actually, contrary to widespread assumption, stuck pretty strictly to uniform regulations, all in all.

 

General Patton.  His modified B-3 aviators' jacket would have actually fit within the uniform standards of the time for a high ranking officer.

 

General of the Army Douglas MacArthur, who actually oddly departed from the official uniform in the form of pleated trousers and the "egg salad" on this hat, which, however, may have been appropriate for his other rank of Field Marshall of the Philippine Army.

Speaking of Harrop, an interesting article hers is to be found in her recent article The Curious Item of Mitt's Gift List.  I like Harrop's observation's as a rule, and find that she doesn't really fit into the conservative or liberal camp, even though she protests that she's a liberal from time to time. But I think she's way off the mark here.  Her thesis is that statistics demonstrating that there's a flurry of new entrepreneurial endeavors by people when they hit age 65 supports an assumption that extending the ability to list children on parent's health care up to age 25 will result in the same.  The reason, she claims, is that people in their 40s and 50s are working for health insurance benefits.

No doubt, in some cases they are, but I've known people much younger than that who did the same. And is that so much the reason that people take one job or another that they continue to work at any one particular job?  I doubt it.  That is, I doubt that this will mean that people will suddenly be freed up to start new businesses because they no longer have to be concerned about their 20 something kid's health care.  Its the sort of simplistic view of the economy and everything in it that leads people to so many simple, erroneous, assumptions about it, and in turn leads to unreasonable political expectations.

George F. Will's article from just before Thanksgiving was one of his recent bests, although I don't like the irreverent title.  The article does a good job of pointing out some recent absurdities with some pretty acid wit, sweetened by an accurate concluding observation.

Handwriting

Last week, I posted an entry about Pens and Pencils. That naturally leads to this topic; handwriting.  And, by handwriting, I mean cursive hand writing.

 Sergeant George Camblair writing letter home from Fort Belvoir, Virginia, during World War Two.

When I was a kid a great deal of time was spent learning "cursive writing" via the Palmer Method.  The Palmer Method, the way we were taught it, featured writing books in which the student practiced writing the loopy flowing lines of English script.  Up on the borders of the classrooms, where the walls joined the ceilings, many class rooms had examples of Palmer Method script up near the ceiling, running along the entire border of the wall/ceiling junction.  Pre-printed Palmer Method wall paper supplied the example.  Teachers, for their part, had a means by which they could put the same lines we found in our work books up on the black (or green) boards to help provide examples to us on who to write it.

That would have been in the 1970s.  I'm not sure what grade were first introduced to cursive script, but we were practicing it, if my recollection is correct, by 3d or 4th Grade.  For many of us, once we learned it, it stuck, and we still write with it.  In that fashion, we were like our parents.

Both of my parents had beautiful examples of handwriting, with my father's being particularly nice and legible.  While he could type (and my mother normally typed, even if she was writing short items) when he wrote letters or notes, he normally wrote them in script.  His script was amazingly legible, with there never being any guess as to what he was writing.

 This is not to say, of course, that everyone's script, back in that era, was equally legible.  In fact, quite the opposite is the true.  I've seen many examples of handwriting from the 1950s and earlier that was nearly completely illegible.  Perhaps the most surprising thing of all, regarding legibility, is that some official documents, almost certainly written by scriveners, are darned near illegible.

A scrivener  is an occupation that has ceased to exist; the occupation being the victim of technology. The technology, in this case, was the typewriter.  The typewriter was invented in the 1860s and had a very rapid spread.  It wiped out scriveners as an occupation and rendered the word itself so obscure that generations of high school students have had to have the term explained them when assigned to read Melville's Bartleby the Scrivener. Now, the term seems to show up solely in court decisions when a court wants to use a fancy word for "drafter".  So, instead of a person being the "drafter of a contract," they are the "scrivener."  Oddly, this is actually an incorrect use of the term, as a scrivener is not the drafter.

Typewriters belonging to RKO being turned over to the U.S. Government during World War Two to help ease the critical shortage of typewriters.

A person would be inclined to think that scriveners must have had beautiful handwriting, but it simply isn't the case.  I've read more than one official document that was set out in perfectly awful handwriting.  Some U.S. land patents, for example, are darned near impossible to read.  The scriveners, who perhaps were actually occupants of other occupations, had hideous handwriting.  Indeed, at least by my observations, early land patents are difficult to read, due to the handwriting, more often than not. And bad handwriting shows up in lots of other official documentation as well.

British soldiers in North Africa writing home.  Note the fountain pen.

Still, I miss cursive writing and really feel it should still be taught.  At some point schools just stopped teaching it.  I'm not sure why, but now at least one or two entire generations of Americans can barely write in cursive, if they can at all.  My son, for example, started off writing with it and was affirmatively stopped from doing it as school, meaning that instead he was taught to print everything.  Printing is slow, and frankly a person with bad cursive hand writing will usually have equally bad printing, so nothing is achieved by the omission.  And cursive is much more rapid to write.

On that latter point, that may perhaps explain the demise of cursive writing.  Just as the typewriter eliminated the scrivener, the computer may have eliminated cursive writing.  Now, younger people take some sort of a computer,. whether it be a true computer, or a miniature computer such as smart phones have, and are, with them everywhere.  Most younger people are capable of keyboarding extraordinary rapidly, and the modern thought is, no doubt, that they learn to write rapidly that way.

But, even in this day and age, there are times when  you need to take notes, or write.  Cursive writing was quickly, and somehow more charming, for that.  I miss it.