Words. Chamberlin talks a lot about language, in particular the strangeness and wonder of how language works. Stories, he says, “bring us close to the world we live in by taking us into the world of words” (italics mine,1). He describes learning to read and write as learning “to be comfortable with a cat that is both there and not there” (132). Based on Chamberlin’s understanding of how riddles and charms work, explain this “world of words.” Reflect on why “words make us feel closer to the world we live in” (1). (Paterson)
While pondering how to start this week’s post, I was sitting at my desk at work looking at the list of shows in the rEvolver festival being presented at the Cultch. Last week, a fellow student spoke about the importance of naming; live theatre often relies heavily on show names to carry the weight of value for the show. Instead of a trailer or visuals, festival theatre relies on the few sentences in a brochure and word of mouth to secure audiences. This year, the festival has a show called Hell of a Girl: A Cowboy-Noir Opera, the write up for the show describes it thusly, “Hell of a Girl is a fresh take on the Orpheus myth, set in a timeless world with cowboys, nymphs and demons, and told through 26 original songs” (Hell of a Girl). I’m not going to lie – the description sold me; I grew up on folk and country music and black and white movies. (It was the 90s though, I swear!) So naturally, between the title and the description (or the naming and the definition) they had aroused my interest. Through a similar sense (of enticing old interests), the bits of J. Edward Chamberlin’s If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? that really resonated with me were his writings on cowboys and their language.
Grand Canyon
In his chapter “Doodlers,” Chamberlin muses on the lasting image of the cowboys, “maybe the appeal of cowboys has more to do with that conflict between wandering and settling down, and between the useless and the useful, than it does with their B-movie fights with the Indians” (35). Certainly, cowboys exist in a space of inbetweenness, they are both free and yet bound to a location. In most imaginings they exist in the American plains, roaming throughout, but locked into that landscape. In my opinion the appeal of cowboys comes from the nostalgic freedom associated to them. Real cowboys exist in a time before fences and restrictions, a time before technology changed how we communicate. Communication for cowboys also exists in an inbetween space: in order to calm the animals they sing their speech, creating their day-to-day lives into an almost operatic state of being (Chamberlin 37). Their daily communication lands somewhere between the exaggerated performance space and conversational reality; therefore, in phenomenological performance theory, they exist in both the frontside (ie. their singing, hollering and performative elements) and backside (is. the cowboys themselves, behind the mask). In this way, their adoption of foreign terms into their “lingo” can be seen as another aspect of their performativity. As true cowboys they are self governing, their language must also exist solely for their usage, adapted and created for their tongue.
Cowboys worked and played with language, as they worked and played with everything else, creating a lexicon of technical terms lovingly twisted and translated into cowboy lingo: criollo was applied to cattle and horses as much as to people of mixed blood; reata migrated to “lariat,” vaquero to “buckaroo,” and dar la vuelta (wrapping the end of a rope around a saddle horn) to “dally”… (Chamberlin 37)
Words were the cowboys way of connected them to their world, or in Chamberlin’s terms, to make them “feel closer to the world [they] live in” (1). Their word creation almost has a sing-song quality to it, existing as an extension of their performance. This specific vocabulary creation was not new to the cowboys and is still used contemporarily; it’s easy to apply language creation to academic jargon that is used almost exclusively in academic circles, or like the lingo found exclusivity in most cliques or professions, e.g. performers, coders, lawyers, cops, teenagers, etc.
At this point I feel I should link back to the reasons I started my blog post talking about a new musical being created in Vancouver, because these nostalgic attachments still affect contemporary creations. Artists create with both one eye on the past and one on the future. We look at this pictures of epic expanse like the Grand Canyon and grazing horses, and feel desire or a connection to the freedom a wandering cowboy’s life represents. Their creation of lingo for their way of life exists with us still, through tradition and nostalgia, and we get often so lost in the dream of the epic past that we gloss over the statement that criollo was used synonymously for both cattle and people of mixed blood (37). The associative images surrounding naming can be passed down in their friendliest form, but these names still carry weight and the world they were born in.
Once, when I was little and swore in front of my mother, she said to me, “you can’t say it until you can spell it.” I wish at times she had asserted the same for words that fell casually into my vocabulary, that I shouldn’t say them until I know the history they carry.
Work Cited
BassClef707. “Brief Encounter (final scene).” YouTube. YouTube, 24 Feb 2007. Web. 22 May 2015.
Brenn, Moyann. “Horse.” Flickr. Yahoo!, 27 May 2011. Web. 22 May 2015.
Chamberlin, J. Edward. If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories? Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.
“Festival About.” Upintheair Theatre. 16 Apr. 2013. Web. 22 May 2015.
Franey, Evan. “Introduction.” Liminal Space between Story and Literature. WordPress, 15 May 2015. Web. 22 May 2015.
“Hell of a Girl.” The Cultch. Web. 22 May 2015.
MinistryofStabbing. “Stan Rogers – The Maid On The Shore.” YouTube. YouTube, 26 Oct 2010. Web. 22 May 2015.
Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 1:2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genres May 2015. WordPress. Web. 22 May 2015.
Spolar, Steven. “Tom T. Hall – That’s How I Got To Memphis.” YouTube. YouTube, 15 March 2011. Web. 22 May 2015.
“The Cultch | Vancouver BC Theatre, Dance and Music.” The Cultch. Web. 22 May 2015.
“Dead Horse Pt First Light #2 — 9/2004.” Flickr. Yahoo!, Sept. 2004. Web. 23 May 2015.
Hey Jamie,
Thank you so much for your post, it was a very interesting and insightful read. I found it very interesting that you linked your deeper discussion around the cowboy culture that created its own words and languages and the culture/histories/norms perpetuated by this language to the notion of naming and defining.
Your example of the importance of show names and short, sparky summaries of the plays reminded me of some of Erika’s discussion around how language and story telling translates in the cyber world. The strategic and clever naming of plays is similar to that of the titles of links leading to hypertexts. With the online world, we are all kind of able to be little internet cowboys: we are immensely rooted in our own positionality in the internet, but context of space is overwhelming and ambiguous–we aren’t really accountable to anything but whatever identities and subcultures we wish to be a part of. The vastness of the internet compared to our concentrated rooted dependence on it (for identity) is fascinating and absurd–the semi-final frontier that challenges space and physical place. Anyway, going back to naming and hypertexts, the space of the internet is so so rich with stories and information. We see truth in numbers via Google, but possibilities for subjectivity are endless. The thing is, even though I, presumably like many, many people spend outrageous amounts of time in the guts of the internet, binging on “information” (the other day I read an in-depth article about the process of obtaining milk from pigs to make pig ricotta lolol), I feel like the vast majority of what we read is just headlines. Or listicles. The short, catchy flashes of information that our attention span has an increasing preference for. I don’t know if you watch Portlandia, but there is a sketch in the third (?) season where Fred and Carrie go to work at an Elite Daily type organization called LinzPDX and Fred writes a three-word article and gets, like, a billion hits and everyone celebrates.
It is hilarious, but very true that successful journalism in the cyber world is inclined to keep things short and sweet, or include a video, at risk of not being read. I mean, let’s not get too Y2K, newspaper articles are often just as vague, but there is this general acceptance that you’ve got to keep things poppy to keep them relevant. And otherwise, straight up, people will read 1/4 of the article and talk about it as if they’ve read the whole thing and had lunch with the author. I do it all the time.
You got me thinking about this in your last bit when you mentioned the danger of using language one doesn’t know the history of. Failure to read past the link speaks to this in that, while we have such an ongoing abundance of stories thanks to online publishing, it is still so easy for us to take the first blip, unload all of our previous language and assumptions onto it and call it knowledge. Our understanding of Cowboy culture as this surreal, “timeless” point of awe speaks to our current online approaches to storytelling and identification of groups and cultures. The name is presented to us and we metabolize it. Not always a bad thing, but something to be aware of in the process of unlearning.
Thanks again for your inspiring thoughts!
x
Jocelyn,
Thank you so much for your comments!
I haven’t seen that particular sketch in Portlandia but it seems very apt and yes, I do think that we have a tendency to lean towards poppy or punchy short reads instead of actually sitting down and reading an in depth article – I definitely only do it when I have a specific interest in the topic. And yes, I also find myself lost in the depths of the headlines-internet. I often wonder if the reason that I am more hesitant to embrace longer articles is that I am usually on the internet in the midst of doing other things, e.g. at work, on the bus, waiting for class to start or in line, etc etc. The internet provides punchy headlines for when we need them – when we only need a couple seconds/minutes of distraction. Starting and stopping long articles is frustrating and breaks the focus towards the topic. While writing this my neighbor starting shouting and I left to investigate, put the kettle on, checked my phone and washed some dishes… where was I going with this?… oh yeah – this new style of writing works with our smartphone handy/connected society, and honestly… I don’t think it’s a bad thing… at all, I think it’s just a change we’re getting used to. The real problem is like you said and I tried to put across in my post, that there is a tendency to abridge our knowledge, to only see things through a limited scope and lose their value or potency. I loved your phrasing that a name is presented and we “metabolize” it, yes – totally, and yes – not always a bad thing, but we should be aware that so much of our language has formed and changed and still can carry the weight of the past.
Also, the comparison of internet culture to cowboy culture is something that I totally agree with and actually had in an earlier version of this post that I edited for space. The anonymity that comes from expressing yourself online really comes from a sense of overwhelming freedom and so there’s often a kind of performance that comes with an online presence. I know a few people that have a certain personality carved out by their online presence that they don’t normally subscribe to during the day. Eg: https://vine.co/v/OxB9bwtmTez
In a similar way, I think that cowboys had the freedom to subscribe to performative identity because they were alone amongst animals – they could perform their identity without the risk of personal persecution if they were held accountable, it was only to a small group of people who usually identified as they did.
It’s a fascinating parallel for sure.
Thanks for taking the time to swing by ~ bizarrely, I was about halfway through your blog post when you commented on mine!
Best,
-J
🙂
Thanks for the shout out! I’m feeling the love.
I also found his discussion of cowboys really interesting. Mentioning that they often sang profanities while herding cattle made me think of my uncle and his sheep and laugh. But the more profound discussion was around what you alluded to–their inbetweenness. The desire to not be fenced in was kind of what connected the cowboys and Indians, besides their common horse culture; as the latter were displaced the former never really settled down. I found this quote really powerful:
“Barb wire is what ruined this country. At first we could keep it cut pretty well, and use the posts for firewood, but it got so, after a while, they were putting up the damned stuff faster than a guy could cut it down… When I saw that I said to myself, I says, ‘This country is done for’–and you see now that I was right”
The characteristic playful way of speaking is there, but so is a kind of truth. Which is why it led so well into the story of the Navajo, who were so connected to their horses that sheep units was like cutting off a hand.
Your discussion of criollo makes me think of White God: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=kIGz2kyo26U
It’s set a movie set in Hungary, and “mutts” are used to represent immigrants or non-full blooded Hungarians that are discriminated against. It’s not for the faint of heart, but you might like it.
I definitely want to see Hell of a Girl.
Evan,
Ok, so White God looks great and I definitely plan on watching it. I got shivers at the line: “Most extraordinary is that the dogs are not acting like dogs, but like a well-organized army.”
In a note to your quote about barbed wire, that was another section of the book that I responded to. Barbed wire has some really horrible imagery it carries with it, and I have some more personal stories about an old vet. that used to work on the same farm as me who, when watching my coworker roll out some barbed wire for one of the fences, looked at it with real sorrow in his eyes and said it was ‘one of the worst things in the word’. I can’t see barbed wire without this story now; considering the topic of this class it’s interesting how a single story has entirely changed my association to an object.
Thanks for stopping by!
-J
🙂
Hi Jamie,
I think it is fitting that your post on cowboys started out with a description of a theatrical festival (which sounds awesome, by the way, and I wish I could be in town to check it out). In so many ways, our modern perception of the “cowboy life” is based on film and theatre instead of reality. When I think of a cowboy, I think of Western films and Clint Eastwood, and the realization of “hey, those were real people once” comes in as a slow second. Your idea about the appeal of cowboys coming from a place of nostalgia really resonated with me; I think everyone at some point in their lives wants to pack up and move into nature to “find themselves” or be “free” in a stereotypical Wild West way. In the same passage, you also mention that “real cowboys exist in a time before fences and restrictions, a time before technology changed how we communicate.” How exactly do you think technology has altered our methods of communication? Do you think the introduction of technology into our cultural lexicon has hindered or advanced our ability to connect with those around us?
Looking forward to hearing your thoughts,
Hava
Hava,
When speaking about technology changing how we communicate, I maean primarily in this context the length and amount of communication. Certainly, for wanderers like cowboys, communication came sporadically, unlike today where most of us are easily contacted through one of many mediums (texting, facebook, email, etc) and the length of these communications was usually more than 140 characters. These were letters or conversations not rapid fire bursts like a lot of communication is today. I don’t think one form is any better than the other; in fact – I think we need a bit of both.
Fred Eaglesmith has a beautiful song (although a bit more contemporary) about communication between a couple in love, one who is settled and one who is a wanderer: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SJEkvJVJPl8
To your point about theatricalization of the idea of the cowboy – yes, for sure – it’s a set of imagery & an aesthetic that is tuned to it’s most appealing form – rough edged people living free in a hard world. A stripped down existence. There is for sure a performativity that comes cowboys now, but I think part of it existed even then, which I did try to touch on in my post.
Thanks for stopping by!
-J.
🙂