The Good, The Bad, and the Socialist- Dashiell Hammett and Red Harvest

When the Bruce Willis movie Last Man Standing came out in 1996, astute viewers noticed that the plot was essentially the same as the Sergio Leone classic A Fist Full of Dollars.  That movie, as many know, is itself a remake of the Akira Kurosawa film Yojimbo.  What is less known is that for his film Kurosawa sought inspiration in the Western, and took his plot almost entirely from the Dashiell Hammett novel Red Harvest.

While best known as the creator of Sam Spade, Hammett’s most frequent character is the Continental Op, who appeared in a number of short stories as well as the novels The Dain Curse and Red Harvest.  The Op is a nameless detective (much like Leone and Eastwood’s later Man with No Name) working for the Continental Agency, a thinly disguised version of the Pinkerton Detective Agency.  In Red Harvest, he is hired to investigate a murder in the Prohibition era mining town of Personville, aka “Poisonville”, deep in the Rockies.  The crime is quickly solved, but The Op settles in to dig further into the vice and corruption of this remote town.  Setting one side against the other, feuding gangs and politicians descend on each other in a frenzy, letting The Op cynically observe humanity at its worst.

Hammett had an amazing career, moving from Pinkerton detective to mystery writer to socialist agitator.  Red Harvest is the amalgamation of all those aspects of Hammett.  Red Harvest has been described as a novelization of Thomas Hobbes Leviathan, the work that brought us “life is nasty, brutish, and short” without the rule of law.  Hammett exposes this darkness of the West in this classic.  As the Native American faded and the United States advanced, there was always a borderland of lawlessness that Hammett captures perfectly in Red Harvest.

The Cowboy Yogi, Part 2- The Tantric Lone Ranger and Atmamya Kosha

In the last post I discussed classical yoga, the five Koshas, and the ability of the Rawhide Kid to exist daily in the Anandamaya Kosha.  Today, however, is all about Tantra.  Whereas classical yoga is about transcending the world, Tantric yoga rejects this dualistic philosophy and sees that world as something to be lived in, not transcended.  The physical world is something that we are intimately connected to, not something to be rejected or moved past.  Because of this, in tantric yoga philosophy there are two additional layers of the human experience that go deeper than the classical Koshas.  Once one has found the Anandamaya Kosha, the pure space inside where our perfect self lives, we can go further to the Cittamaya Kosha.  Here we start to understand where our perfect self exists in relation to the world.  Yet deeper, there is the pure awareness of Atmamya Kosha, where we realize that our perfect selves are not alone, and that we share a connection to the possible perfect selves, perhaps even the divinity, that exist in each of us across the world.  This is the enlightenment of the Lone Ranger. 

No matter the incarnation, whether in film, radio, or comic, there is a sense of urgency in the Lone Ranger’s actions.  This urgency is not a need for action, but a need to do on behalf mankind.  The Lone Ranger creed, devised in the old radio days of the character (and copied in this post) clearly lay out an almost holy responsibility to the greater world, suggesting an understanding of the deep connection between us all as found in the two innermost Koshas of Tantra.  Indeed, the Lone Ranger’s mask sheds his individuality in favor of integration with humankind.

The Lone Ranger has achieved a deeper awareness than the Rawhide Kid, moving past the Anandamaya Kosha through to the Atmamya Kosha.  By connecting to the wider world, his worth as a hero far exceed his talents.  While I will always take joy in the Rawhide Kid, it the example set by the Lone Ranger that informs my day, and my yoga practice.

Namaste.

“I don’t like westerns (except for Unforgiven)”

I was talking with an intelligent, well read coworker recently about this blog when she told me that she doesn’t like westerns.  Over the course of the conversation, she listed a few exceptions, namely any movie with Clint Eastwood, any book by Larry McMurtry, adaptations of Shane, and a handful of others.  I hear this a lot.  At a picnic years ago I was talking with a woman writing her PhD dissertation on homosexuality in 1800’s Colorado and the backlash of anti-sodomy laws that followed.  To show her that I was interested in her topic, and by extension the history and culture of the 19th century frontier, I told her that I like westerns.  There was a quick sneer of derision, then we spent the next half hour talking about Clint Eastwood’s Unforgiven.  By next summer I expect that True Grit will take the place of Unforgiven in these conversations.

I also have these conversations about science fiction (“I hate that crap, except for Avatar, Terminator, and Empire Strikes Back”) and fantasy (“All that pansy elf stuff sucks, but did you see Lord of the Rings?  That rocked!”).  All this leads me to believe that people don’t really dislike westerns, or fantasy, or sci fi.  What they really dislike is bad writing.  A lot of what people think of as westerns are the paperback genre westerns, which I hate to admit are often not that well written.  There are some great ones (Peter Brandvold’s Lou Prophet: Bounty Hunter series comes to mind), but there is a certain amount of mass produced, low expectation novels that are regularly turned out.  Surely there are gems out there, but you need to kiss a lot of frogs to find them.

Somewhere between the high literature of Blood Meridian and Lonesome Dove and the mass produced paperbacks are the westerns that people want to read.  Let me humbly suggest a starter list of engaging and well written westerns:

The Devil’s Lair, Peter Brandvold

Long Ride Home, W. Michael Gear

Appaloosa, Robert B. Parker

Deadville, Robert F. Jones

Bloody Season, Loren D. Estleman

Once you take a stab at a few of these, we can talk James Carlos Blake before you take of Cormac McCarthy.

Via con dios!

Jubal Sackett: This Thing That Is Me Is Not Yet Finished

I find myself early in my blogging life facing a fairly frightening, anxiety inducing situation involving my future health and well being.  Last night as I drifted off to sleep, facing the long dark night, my mind kept coming back to a single phrase that anchored me: this thing that is me is not yet finished.

It is a somewhat inexact quote from Jubal Sackett, one of the Louis L’Amour Sackett series, detailing a family’s history from the 16^th century Fenlands of England to early America and eventually into the 19^th century West.  The series is 17 books long, covering the lives of 13 main family members.  I have been an indifferent reader of Louis L’Amour for many years, never quite enthralled but never disappointed enough not to pick up another novel every few years.  The Sackett series in particular has always appealed to me, as the year I spent living in the East Anglian Fenlands was the year that I consider myself to have become an adult.

Last year I sought out a just opened used bookstore in a local college town, intent on buying something off of their western shelf.  The shelf was a total of four novels, one of which was Jubal Sackett.  I had a vague memory of reading that Jubal was the quiet and introspective member of the otherwise raucous and adventuresome group, so I selected that novel and set about reading.

It turns out that Jubal Sackett was the last of the series that L’Amour wrote, and one of the last novels written in an amazingly prolific career towards the end of his life.  Jubal Sackett seems to be a departure from his previously formulaic books, where L’Amour clearly had some things to say.  Jubal, the “ghost in the woods”, the proto-mountain man, is loner, wanderer, natural philosopher, who drops lines like the following throughout the course of the novel:

“It is not enough to do, one must also become.  I wish to be wiser, stronger, better.  This… this thing that is me is incomplete.  It is only the raw material with which I have to work.  I want to make it better than I received it.”

This thing that is me is incomplete.  This thing that is me is not yet finished.  Thank you, Jubal Sackett.

Lone Ranger’s Creed: “God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather and light it himself"

The final issue of Dynamite Comic’s current run of The Lone Ranger is coming to an end this month, and with that it is a good time to take a look back at the Ranger.  A jaded 21^st century audience will remember the hokey black and white television show or perhaps even the radio show and think of it as silly and innocent, and some days I would agree.  However, I have occasionally come back to The Lone Ranger Creed, written as a moral guide to the character, and seen that something pretty good.

The Lone Ranger Creed

"I believe.....

That to have a friend, a man must be one.

That all men are created equal and that everyone has within himself the power to make this a better world.

That God put the firewood there, but that every man must gather and light it himself.

In being prepared physically, mentally, and morally to fight when necessary for that which is right.

That a man should make the most of what equipment he has.

That 'this government of the people, by the people, and for the people' shall live always.

That men should live by the rule of what is best for the greatest number.

That sooner or later...somewhere...somehow...we must settle with the world and make payment for what we have taken.

That all things change but truth, and that truth alone, lives on forever, in my Creator, my country, my fellow man."

"Come back, Shane, the bed is getting cold!"

One of my New Year's resolutions this year was to read as many classic westerns as possible, starting with Shane.  It may be a sign that I spent too much time in college in late night discussions of Quentin Tarantino movies, but I am seeing homoeroticism everywhere.  I am only halfway through this book, which deserves a more thorough posting, but I am really shocked by what I see.  At first I was a bit taken aback at the long, languid, loving descriptions that the narrator gives of Shane, from his dapper clothes to his lean, taught body.  Shane then goes on to pluck a flowers from the garden before proceeding to discuss ladies fashions with a ranchers wife.  In the next chapter Shane and the rancher go out into the field, take off their shirts, and get to work on a stubbornly erect stump.  Much of the chapter is devoted to the men working up a sweat as they silently gaze into each other’s eyes, ignoring the rancher’s wife who desperately wants to be let in on their manful activities. 

“Shane, opposite him, stiffened, and together they pushed in a fresh assault…Father climbed slowly out of the hole…Shane was with him, across from him, laying a hand gently on the old hard wood.  They both looked up and their eyes met and held as they had so long ago in the morning hours.”

Oh my.