{"id":39,"date":"2015-05-22T23:45:25","date_gmt":"2015-05-23T06:45:25","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jamieking\/?p=39"},"modified":"2015-05-23T14:50:02","modified_gmt":"2015-05-23T21:50:02","slug":"assignment-1-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.ubc.ca\/jamieking\/2015\/05\/22\/assignment-1-2\/","title":{"rendered":"1:2 – Cowboyism is live and well and living in Vancouver"},"content":{"rendered":"

Words<\/em>. Chamberlin talks a lot about language, in particular the strangeness and wonder of how language works. Stories, he says, \u201cbring us close to the world we live in by taking us into the world of words\u201d<\/i> (italics mine,1).\u00a0 He describes learning to read and write as learning \u201cto be comfortable with a cat that is both there and not there\u201d \u00a0(132). Based on Chamberlin\u2019s understanding of how riddles and charms work, explain this \u201cworld of words.\u201d Reflect on why \u201cwords make us feel closer to the world we live in\u201d (1). (Paterson<\/a>)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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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<\/a>\u00a0being presented at the Cultch<\/a>. Last week, a fellow student spoke about the importance of naming<\/a>; 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<\/a>, the write up for the show describes it thusly, “Hell of a Girl<\/em> 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<\/a> and country<\/a> music and black and white movies<\/a>. (It was<\/em> 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?<\/em> that really resonated with me were his writings on cowboys and their language.<\/p>\n

\"Grand<\/a>

Grand Canyon<\/p><\/div>\n

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). \u00a0Certainly, cowboys exist in a space of inbetweenness, they are both free and yet bound to a location. In most imaginings\u00a0they exist in the\u00a0American plains, roaming throughout, but locked into that landscape. In my opinion the appeal of cowboys comes from the nostalgic freedom associated to them. Real<\/em> 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\u00a0and\u00a0performative 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,\u00a0their language must also exist solely for their usage, adapted and created for their tongue.<\/p>\n

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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:\u00a0criollo\u00a0<\/em>was applied to cattle and horses as much as to people of mixed blood;\u00a0reata<\/em> migrated to “lariat,”\u00a0vaquero\u00a0<\/em>to “buckaroo,” and\u00a0dar la vuelta<\/em> (wrapping the end of a rope around a saddle horn) to “dally”… (Chamberlin 37)<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

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\u00a0exclusivity in most cliques or professions, e.g. performers, coders, lawyers, cops, teenagers, etc.<\/p>\n

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\u00a0desire or a connection\u00a0to the freedom a wandering cowboy’s life\u00a0represents. 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\u00a0over the statement that\u00a0criollo\u00a0<\/em>was used synonymously for both cattle and\u00a0people 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.<\/p>\n

Once, when\u00a0I 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.<\/p>\n

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Work Cited<\/p>\n

BassClef707. “Brief Encounter (final scene).”\u00a0YouTube.\u00a0<\/em>YouTube, 24 Feb 2007. Web. 22 May 2015.<\/p>\n

Brenn, Moyann. “Horse.” Flickr.<\/em> Yahoo!, 27 May 2011. Web. 22 May 2015.<\/p>\n

Chamberlin, J. Edward.\u00a0If This Is Your Land, Where Are Your Stories?<\/em> Toronto: Vintage Canada, 2004. Print.<\/p>\n

“Festival About.” Upintheair Theatre.<\/em> 16 Apr. 2013. Web. 22 May 2015.<\/p>\n

Franey, Evan. “Introduction.” Liminal Space between Story and Literature.<\/em> WordPress, 15 May 2015. Web. 22 May 2015.<\/p>\n

“Hell of a Girl.” The Cultch<\/em>. Web. 22 May 2015.<\/p>\n

MinistryofStabbing. “Stan Rogers – The Maid On The Shore.”\u00a0YouTube.\u00a0<\/em>YouTube, 26 Oct 2010. Web. 22 May 2015.<\/p>\n

Paterson, Erika. “Lesson 1:2.” ENGL 470A Canadian Studies Canadian Literary Genres May 2015.<\/em> WordPress. Web. 22 May 2015.<\/p>\n

Spolar, Steven. “Tom T. Hall – That’s How I Got To Memphis.”\u00a0YouTube.<\/em> YouTube, 15 March 2011. Web. 22 May 2015.<\/p>\n

“The Cultch | Vancouver BC Theatre, Dance and Music.” The Cultch. Web. 22 May 2015.<\/p>\n

“Dead Horse Pt First Light #2 — 9\/2004.” Flickr.<\/em> Yahoo!, Sept. 2004. Web. 23 May 2015.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

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