Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail: What the Historian Did before He Started in on French Canada

For this nebulous book about roads I'm working on, I picked up American historian Francis Parkman's The Oregon Trail this week.  My
experience this summer in what was the Oregon Territory started me think about the routes that settlers took going West, and I wanted to refresh my memory.

Whoops!  To my surprise I found that I'd not read Parkman's book, although it has been sitting on my shelf for probably 20 years.  The historian was in his 20s when he set out with a friend in 1846 to travel across the continent.  He didn't make it to the Pacific, but his account of his travels has all the exciting immediacy of the very best travel writing, as well as the weight of an historical document.

His health, never all that good, was ruined on the trip.  Nevertheless, despite the fact his illness several times rendered him  blind so that he had to have documents read to him, he went on to write a series of about New France and its relations with the British that have no peer in English--and some would say, not in French either.

They are:
Conspiracy of Pontiac (1851)
The Pioneers of France in the New World (1865)
The Jesuits in North America in the Seventeenth Century (1867)
La Salle and the Discovery of the Great West (1869)
The Old Régime in Canada (1874)
Count Frontenac and New France under Louis XIV (1877)
Montcalm and Wolfe (1884)
A Half Century of Conflict (1892)

But The Oregon Trail is in a different register.  There are moment when I gnashed my teeth about his snobbism, but I was found myself being carried away just as I was by Darwin's The Voyage of the Beagle journals, and Bruce Chatwin's quite different but similarly thought-provoking The Songlines.  Great reading when Fall begins to settle down around us, but wanderlust persists. 

The book is available in several editions, and also as an e-book at Project Gutenberg.  The photo is of tracks left by wagon trains in Wyoming.

Racey Cover for Desire Lines!

Well, the old gal can rock, I guess!

 On Friday Oberon Press sent me the cover art for my new collection of short stories that will come out in November, Desire Lines: Stories of Love and Geography. My reaction was: Hey, not bad!  But then I blushed.

Can't say I was surprised at the basic art  since I'd suggested the painting "Nude" by Group of Seven artist Edwin Holgate.  Michael Macklem, the founder of the press, designs its covers personally, and I knew he likes to use Canadian paintings wherever possible.  For the last two books I'd published with Oberon--one other short story collection The Truth Is and a novel The Words on the Wall: Robert Nelson and the Rebellion of 1837--I'd also suggested a couple of works that might be appropriate. 

Told to suggest three possiblities, this time I came up with the Holgate, plus details from works by Ed Bartram  (Zebra Rock, bottom right) and Tom Thomson (Forest, October, 1916. top right)  I liked the  Holgate best, particularly because there are two stories that take place in the rocky wilderness.  As well the nude reflects a theme that recurs throughout the book. 

But, as you see from the small image that I'd photoshopped as a sample, I didn't think Oberon, a rather staid house, would go for so much flesh and I put the print in a couple of strategic places.

Macklem obviously disagreed and used far more of the nude as well as placing  the print to the side.  He also toned down the palatte so that the lines of the nude are almost abstract. 

But, wow! 

A Fresh Look at Shakespeare: a Rolicking New Webseries

This is the work of our former neighbor Geneviève Bolduc, now studying for an advanced degree in film at the University of Oregon, and her friends at the University of British Columbia.

There will be a weekly episode, loosely anchored (it appears) in Two Gentlemen of Verona. Here's the link to the first episode that aired (netted? what IS the proper term?) August 25, and to the second, from Sept. 2.

I wondered initially why the series has English subtitles, but an early reaction from a Brazilian blog for teenage writers and readers suggests that one motivation is to make the series a tool for English as a Second Language programs.

For the rest of us, it looks like the series will just be fun to watch.