Picturing a Different West - Janis Stout

Picturing a Different West:

Vision, Illustration, and the Tradition of Cather and Austin.

By Janis P. Stout. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2007. 352 pages. 7 b/w photos, 69 b/w images, notes, and bibliog. ISBN 089672610X $40.00 http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/ Texas A & M University scholar, Janis Stout, offers students of alternative literary and art history the opportunity to find an absorbing exploration of Mary H. Austin and Willa Cather and by extension both women and the American experience.It’s a window to Western topography for understanding rather than its immediate use in the usual male stereotype of physical exploitation. Austin’s and Cather’s perception of the West was indirect by their seeing of printed illustrative matter and indirectly by their direct, first-hand sight.

Their mental processing, their own written narrative describing the environment, and their influences on illustrator selection, the actual illustrations, and page design all “informed a new literary tradition – that of an ungendered American West … not feminine so much as androgynous.”Here, Stout sees the West as a physical place rather than a geopolitical condition. She finds three important focal points:·

1) Austin and Cather’s personal experience of the West·

2) Art and illustration in the book-making experience·

3) Their revision of gender assumptions

For this volume Stout’s stimulation rose from her recognition of similarities of illustrations in Austin’s Land of Little Rain and Cather’s My Antonia. From there, she draws on many titles and dozens of authors.

Among the principals are the elders Elsie Clews Parsons, Mabel Dodge Luhan, Georgia O’Keeffe, and Laura Gilpin, and the newer hands Leslie Marmon Silko, Margaret Randall and Barbara Byers. Stout clarifies that women see and do things differently, although not all the time.

Oh, the Hell of It All:

A Memoir.

By Pat Montandon.

NY: HarperCollins, 2007. Illustrated. 353 pp. $25.95. Who’s Pat Montandon? Well, as this preacher’s daughter’s biography recounts she grew up in the 1930s in Texas and Oklahoma, got a job at Neiman-Marcus and then left. She dated Frank Sinatra and she lost a Peace Prize to Elie Wiesel.

Well, a gal could do worse. http://www.harpercollins.com/books/

Jane Gilmore Rushing - Lou Halsell Rodenberger

Jane Gilmore Rushing: A West Texas Writer and Her Work

By Lou Halsell Rodenberger. Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2006. xiii, 175 pages, classified bibliography, index. 7 b/w photos ISBN 0896725936. Hardback, wheat colored cloth with elegant blank lettering on the spine. $29.95 http://www.ttup.ttu.edu/

The jacket carries a Rushing quotation, “The land of West Texas encompasses more than climate and landscape; it’s a breed of people, a style of life, a way of freeing and extending the mind and imagination.”

The title to chapter 2, “A Regionalist Without Apology,” tells much to the reader, and Lou Halsell Rodenberger, professor emerita at McMurray University in Abilene is the one to tell this story well. Rodenberger’s purpose “in this work is to convince readers that an unbiased study of Jane Gilmore Rushing’s fiction leads to the discovery of a courageous writer, whose angle of vision on West Texas’ past is consistently from the point of view of women.” From the now vanished Texas hamlet of Pyron, Rodenberger traces Rushing’s life with particular literary criticism on her writings (six novels between 1963 and 1984, non-fiction books, and other). Rushing often wrote of the reality of people, often good people, caught in the contradictions of life, the hypocrisy, out of step with the norm or the often unacknowledged norms of women’s lives. Throughout, the Rolling Plains under-gird the stories where friends, neighbors, and strangers express their religion and work, courage and cowardice, romance and cruelty and murder, and hopes and fears in a dynamic relationship with the codes of conduct. Rushing may bring to mind Dorothy Scarborough and Katherine Ann Porter. This reviewer may add this West Texas writer to his list of “Revolting Texas Women Novelists.”

Wouldn’t you, as did Rushing, love to see Halle Berry and a red-headed cowboy in a movie adaptation of Mary Dove?

Madam Mayor:

How I Learned to Love Government and Hate Politics in Ten Intriguing Years.

By Marcy Meffert. Leon Valley: the author, PO Box 680262, Leon Valley, (printed by Watercress Press http://www.watercresspress.com/), 2006. 182 pages, paperback $15.00 (all costs included) ISBN 978-0-934955-68-3. Contact: marcellaa@aol.com

Men with low self-esteem should not read this review. Women, however, who’ve found their shoes, should read on. Meffert, now 72, wants you to consider public service, because she found it wonderful. Her book reflects on 50 years of community service and focuses on her time in elective politics on the Leon Valley city council and then her mayoralty. Her 12 chapters are informative and entertaining and insightful regarding matters in her near-San Antonio small town. But politics is politics wherever you are. After reading Meffert’s volume, you’ll be better equipped to stand up, speak, take stands, maneuver the snake pits, and pull yourself from quagmires. It is straight talk on how she did it and the kind folks and real jerks she met along the way. She wrestles with the Good Old Boys, the Citizens Against Virtually Everything, grateful citizens, keeping taxes low, improving the environment, and a few meetings from Hell. “How Not to Be a Sitcom” may be her best chapter. But “Quotes from Officials and 10 Basic Rules” is delightful for its human insight. Inspirational and down to earth, Madam Mayor should be read and on shelves where little girls grow and big women command. (Thanks to Joyce Miller Trent for the lead on this volume.)
Her Honor relates by email to WTM a special volunteering effort, “While every Christmas is special when we share it with loved ones, sharing Christmas with strangers can be a truly memorable experience. For me, Christmas, 1956, is forever in my heart as one of the most rewarding volunteer efforts I have ever experienced. We were stationed with the U.S. Air Force at Naha AFB, Okinawa, and I volunteered to chair the Naha AFB Catholic Women of the Chapel’s project to share the Christmas spirit with a local group. The event was “my choice,” and I chose to have a party for the island’s Airakuen leper colony.” The balloons, cookies, carols, and dancing girls must have brought joy and delight amid the celebrants; and certainly love was spread deeply. Leon Valley is a lucky place.