University of Nebraska Books

I bought this book because I love childhood memoirs. This is a beautiful discription of a mother who is probably on the edge and you never know it from the little boy's point of view. He sees beauty, humor, and ugliness in a poor, but loving Port de France, Martinique. I loved it and look forward to reading another of Chamoiseau's books.

Diane Glancy composed a college of snippets, written over the course of a year in her life. She reflects on her marriage, her divorce, her mother's death - and most interesting, she confronts her own conflicts between her Cherokee heritage and her Christian training. Much of her material bubbled to the surface during the long hours on the road driving to schools to teach poetry. Glancy makes us feel we're accompanying her on her journeys, peeking over her shoulder - no, peeking into her mind as she explores memories and their relevance to the present.
Here's a telling line: "Aren't all of us made up of paradox and diversity, anger, hurt, hope, guilt, endurance?"
This is not an easy book. No real plot holds you to the structure. But it's an infinitely thought-provoking book, one to be savored in small doses and pondered upon in leisure.

For about a decade, the writings of André Breton (1896-1966) have become increasingly translated into English from the original French. It is clear his ideas hold relevance for a wide audience among English speakers of the 21st century. As with his view of dreams, Communicating Vessels (1932) is layered upon layers of interwoven levels of reality. Talk of dreams becomes descriptions of surrealistic paintings, which in turn transform into the revolution. Beginning his focus on the nature of dreams, he briefly treats continental dream analysts of the 19th and early 20th century, some of who are relatively obscure to us today. In this study, he inevitably speaks of the most influential of these thinkers, Freud, saying, while the doctor analyses the sexual symbols of numerous subjects in his The Interpretation of Dreams, he omits such details in the analysis of his own dreams. Breton sets about to correct this by example in Communicating Vessels.

For his efforts, Breton drew the attention of Freud himself, whose letters to the author, Breton included in his appendix to Communicating Vessels. These letters are translated by Breton from German into French and we can only trust the reliability of his pen. While collegial in tone, Freud takes exception to a remark Breton makes concerning an alleged bibliographical omission in The Interpretation of Dreams, claiming the oversight was the fault of a later editor. While apparently unconcerned about the larger charge of intentionally omitting the content of his own dreams, Freud is clearly concerned about the bibliographical data. The following day, he writes to Breton again further clarifying the details of that problem.

More interesting from the standpoint of the reader of Breton is Freud's comment in one letter, "Although I have received many testimonies of the interest that you and your friends show for my research, I am not able to clarify for myself what surrealism is and what it wants. Perhaps I am not destined to understand it, I who am so distant from art" (150). Breton's translators feel Freud's tone throughout is diminutive, beginning the correspondence, "Rest assured that I shall read carefully your little book" (149). If so, there may be a concealed massage in Freud's professed inability to understand surrealism. Freud may be saying: you artists claim to represent ideas from my work but 1) you do not; 2) my work is far superior to the frivolous concerns of artists; and 3) the positions of power are established in the fact that you know my works but I don't know yours. If, on the other hand, we take Freud's statement at face value, are we to believe he cannot understand the dreamlike confusion portrayed in such works as The Great Masturbator by Salvador Dali, a plate of which Breton includes in Communicating Vessels?

To understand what surrealism is and what it wants beyond representing dream-thoughts, one needs only to read through Communicating Vessels. While Dali and others furnished the painting media for the movement, Breton took up the task of collecting and writing manifestos for that cause. For Breton in particular, surrealism wanted nothing short of realizing the social vision of the revolution; not simply an artistic revolution (if such can be imagined simple), but indeed The Revolution: the Marxist-Leninist final transformation of humankind into unalienated, or to mix the media, self-actualizing beings. Proof of this being Breton's goal abounds in this and other writings by him. In fact, in speaking of a dream he had in 1931, Breton explains that was a year in which he was loosing faith in the potential of surrealism to reach the Marxist-Leninist goal. From the standpoint of those interested in Breton's thought today, one might expect to find from a writer so intimately tied to the founding and growth of surrealism, Marxism-Leninism in the service of that movement, rather than the opposite, which is the case.

Interwoven in and enriching the descriptions, commentary and analysis are artistic instances such as run-on sentences of dreamlike fluidity, nearly train-of-thought sequences Henry Miller would soon be proud to imitate. Likewise, a number of illustrations accompany the text. These are not merely to illustrate the events Breton recalls, such as a still shot of the vampire Nosferatu, who the author recalls appearing in a dream. Nosferatu appears in the picture with one hand raised on the right-side page, effectively pointing to the words on the left-side page - as translator Mary Ann Caws notes, pointing to the surreal, just as, circularly and dreamlike, the words point to him.

Breton considers the extremes of various theories of his time: are dreams independent of awake reality or are their content completely tied to events; is logic void in the dream world; does space have meaning and is time relevant? Breton professes a fondness for nineteenth century German philosophers, citing Hegel, Feuerbach, Marx, Engels and Freud. One wonders what he might have made of the inner-time analysis of his contemporary, principal founder of phenomenology Edmund Husserl (1859-1938).

A fourth element (along with dreams, surrealism and the revolution), Breton calls love, is interwoven, becoming the focus of the middle of Communicating Vessels. This subject receives further elaboration and, in my view, better treatment in Mad Love, another work by Breton. In Communicating Vessels we come to realize the woman receiving Breton's complete devotion in Mad Love and elsewhere, may be most any woman. Near the beginning of Communicating Vessels, Breton marvels at an experiment by the dream analyst Marquis d'Hervey-Saint-Denys. In the writing Dreams and the Way to Control Them: Practical Observations, Hervey tells of conjuring a vision of one of two women by having a certain song played while he sleeps. Each of these women is associated with a particular song, because Hervey has arranged, in wakening life, to dance with them only during the performance of the particular song he is trying to associate with each respectively. Breton, devoted as he was to the ideal of love existing between one woman and one man only, is astonished that the experiment would proceed with two. Herein lies the first glimpse of Breton's greatest prejudice: his fanatic (should I say 'religious' since Breton calls surrealism an 'anti-religious' movement?) belief that what he is convinced is right for him, which may well be true, is likewise and necessarily the universal truth, which it certainly is not.

As Breton elaborates this view, we discover at the time of writing he is without a romantic partner and is in search of a suitable woman to fill this role. In his pursuits, which is precisely that to the point of stalking, Breton describes how one night strolling by a boulevard, he approached eight women he did not know, asking each for a date. Likewise, in a coffee shop, he ogles the legs of a woman, who is sitting with a man at another table. Breton decides the woman is much too beautiful for the less attractive man she is with and later tries to discover her name and address from anyone who might know. Meanwhile, he complains that his last girlfriend left him due to the unjust reasoning of social disparity, as explained, according to Breton, by Engels. While the entire book is riddled with small and large examples of interacting facts, events and seeming contradictions, Breton is so persistent in his pursuits of unknown women, the reader must conclude he is unaware of the consequence: that he wishes to impose the same injustice on the man, whose girlfriend he hopes to lure away; doing so both through judgment (by believing there is disparity) and through action (by matching her with a presumed social equal: himself).

In the days to follow, Breton, having never spoken with the woman, looks for her in the coffee shop and on the street. He has composed a calling card to present to her if they should meet. The card says, "I no longer think of anything but you. I madly desire to know you. Might that man be your brother? If you are unmarried, I ask for your hand in marriage," and following his signature, "I beg you" (75).

Breton accused Freud of not revealing the true content of his own dreams, Freud having a scholarly reputation to uphold. To the contrary, as a proponent of surrealism, Breton's reputation could only be enhanced by expounding upon the quirks and turns of his dreams. However, in his blatant objectification of women, having no concern with personality when desiring marriage based on appearance, is not only bourgeois (yes, I dare apply the term most repugnant to him), but bourgeois in the worst way: exploitative. Breton says he finds it in some ways lamentable that he can never live the structured life of the bourgeois family man, even while criticizing the hypocrisy of that arrangement vise vie Engel's The Origin of the Family. We must consider, from the point of view of the revolution, the way he pursues a relationship, and there are numerous example in the book, would be more vehemently condemned. Yet, without 'love,' Breton assures the reader, he would not be able to go on.

The dreams and other events accounted in Communicating Vessels take place from 1931 to 1932. In these we find a multi-layed picture of Breton's life in Paris, his views on literature and art, and a variety of valuable insights into the day. Regardless of the value of his take on 'love,' interspersed are some of Breton's most lucid statements on surrealism to be found. He writes, "I hope it will be considered as having tried nothing better than to cast a conduction wire between the far too distant worlds of waking and sleep, exterior and interior reality, reason and madness, the assurance of knowledge and of love, of life for life and the revolution, and so on" (86). Though writing his book from the vantage point of having seen the surrealist movement abandoned, Communicating Vessels is a vivid instance of just such a conduction wire.

Isaac Cowie sailed to Canada from the Shetland Islands in 1867 with prospects of joining the Hudson's Bay Company. After arriving at York Factory via Hudson Bay, he was assigned to Fort Qu'Appelle, where he remained until 1874, the last two years as manager. Cowie kept a journal (now lost) during these years from which he wrote a series of articles for a Manitoba newspaper that was published in 1912; a year later the series was issued in book form, a reprint of which is presented here.

The first hundred some-odd pages include a brief history of the HBC and Cowie's voyage to Canada. Once at Fort Qu'Appelle in southern Saskatchewan the book's focus on the life of an HBC official and western frontiersman begins in earnest. Cowie relates fur trading activities, frequent trips to outlying posts (one in the middle of a blizzard), and relations with the Indians, especially the Metis - mixed-bloods who began to see themselves as a separate tribe. Chapters are divided into numerous subsections, often each one relating a separate vignette or impression. Cowie is content with describing routine business, occasionally mentioning an interesting character here and there. No one will accuse him of exaggeration or embellishing incidents to make them more dramatic - that's just not in his character. The most valuable information in the book has to do with the Indians and the growing unrest that was occurring across the plains after 1869, especially with some of the tribes (Sioux, Cree) who had ventured across the border from the US hoping for better treatment, which was wishful thinking only. The book ends in 1874 when Cowie was relieved of his duties and, as he says, "the Mounted Police took effective possession of the plains." Not the most exciting first-hand account of one's experiences in the western regions, it's still a valuable account of life on the Canadian plains and in the employ of the HBC.

Varnum's firsthand accounts are at once interesting and revealing. He tells his tale twice. First, he tells it as Reminiscences. Then we read much of it again as his Testimony at the Reno Court of Inquiry. In either telling, we see much that is now accepted by recent writers. I also sensed there was a great deal he was holding back that lend credence to the Carter allegations of the officers banding together for the honor of the regiment and in deference to Mrs. Custer. In testimony, he was often evasive.
For me the most revealing statement was toward the end, when Varnum states that Reno sent a messenger to Gen Terry on the 26th. On the morning after the Custer battle Reno is asking for help from Terry!
If Reno believed Custer was still alive, then wouldn't he have sent the request to Custer, his commanding officer, who they claimed to believe, must have to join up with Terry? This may have been the first crack in the cover up shell. Panzeri, LBH 1876, states that Edgerly admitted years later that they could see the bodies of Custer's men from Weir's Point.

Mary Leefe Laurence' childhood experiences on various military posts during the American Indian Wars, 1878-1890 was facinianting because it "fleshed out" the American soldier of the period and filled in the blanks of life on a remote Western post when the men were not fighting Indians. Ms. Laurence' Victorian politeness still left gaps that today's writers would have filled in. Mr. Smith's excellent editing and annotations caused me to read this book with two bookmarks to gather every bit of inforation available, much the same way I would read one of Dan Thrapp's books on this period.

This is a highly useful dictionary. Although its entries total to just over 100 pages, it is remarkably complete. Prince offers short, to the point explanations of terms that in other dictionaries are notoriously fuzzy explained. Moreover, he provides a very helpful set of crossreferences that goes with each entry, thus enabling the reader to find out more. Among the outstanding explanations is the description of point-of-view, in which Prince sets forth the proposals of Friedman, Genette and Stanzel complete in just two pages. Useful bibliographical references substitute for the fact that Prince could not adress every controversial discussion in full. Everyone interested in literary theory should own a copy, even if the work was not updated to take aboard recent developments.

This is definitely an excellent gold rush diary. It is very detailed and well-written by a man with obvious intelligence. However, compared to "The World Rushed In" it is really lacking in those personal touches that make the diary more "gripping." Dr. Lord's writing is a bit clinical in comparison, which doesn't hold the reader's attention so well when describing the more monotonous details of his journey.

E.A. Bode is an unknown German immigrant who needed to eat, so he joined the Army. His well-written memoir was found and edited by Thomas Smith and published by The University of Nebraska Press (with whom I've come to develop a deep respect for finding and publishing jewels). Bode, who spent five years as a regular (1877-1882) does not shirk from his opinions on officers he served under, nor does he shirk from the day-to-day duties that were the reality of being an infantry regular.

Bode served as a private, corporal and sergeant. Most of his duty was with the 16th Infantry Regiment in close contact with Indians, whom he came to befriend and respect. Mostly.

There's never been any flash or glory in serving the infantry, and there probably never will be. While the cavalrymen and their exploits get made into movies (hooray for John Ford!), it was the infantry who did the unsung work of building telegraph lines, guarding the tribes, tracking down thieves, cutting firewood, cutting ice in the winter and any other task that was thrown their way. From jumping grass fires to guard mount at 20 below zero, soldiers then- just as today- did their duty as they were ordered.

Excerpt: "Our hands were sore and blistered from handling the tools and hot iron telegraph poles for the first few days, but soon got accustomed to the work and burning sun. We moved along in pairs to the designated spots for the holes, here digging in loose sand, there in solid sandstone or gravel, or trying our muscles and temper on the very sticky black sod of rich bottom lands. It was altogether a very dry and tiresome piece of work for our unaccustomed backs. But this lasted on a few days and we were soon as well acquainted with handling a crowbar as we were in the manual of arms or any other military exercises."

You got it- a crowbar and a shovel, sixteen men, digging 3-foot holes and covering 4.5 miles each day. Are you impressed yet? I was.

Funny? Oh, yes. He was tasked once with firing the salute cannon at the evening flag ceremony, and he had put a large stone into the piece. As he's waiting for the band to finish playing, the Commanding Officer comes walking around underneath where the cannon is aimed. He pours sweat waiting for the song to end, but fortunately, the Major marches on and doesn't hear the stone go whizzing overhear and into the hillside. "Nothing is easier for a soldier to get [in] as an escapade." says Bode.

Got hold of a copy of the book at the Edvard Grieg Museum in Norway. The book gives a full introduction to Grieg's life in a chronological as well as a thematical order. It is possible to read for nonmusicians, but with some knowledge of music, the book is simply excellent. The list of works, both with opusnumber and those without, is valuable to everybody who wants to have an overlook of his works.