Elizabeth and Alex left this morning. They are driving back to Delton to grab some stuff and coming to Grand Rapids and catching a plane around 4 PM. They will land at the Reagan Airport in D.C. where Elizabeth has already booked a room and a car. Jeremy will join them there. Jeremy’s Dad died Tuesday after a long debilitating illness. Jeremy’s brother Michael was there when he died. The rest of the family has quickly gathered there. Jeremy flew over on Wednesday. This has been long expected but it doesn’t make it any easier for everyone.

Eileen and I went to the hearing aid people on Wednesday. We have very good insurance and if we go through the right people (TruHearing) we can both get a set of hearing aids for about $1400 each. They list at about $5k. They should arrive in about a week and then we will go get fitted. Ah, old age!

I had a nice chat with Elizabeth over coffee before she left this morning. She was up last night booking all the stuff for today. I admire her energy and fortitude. I do enjoy those little moments when I can sit and listen to her. It’s not as easy as it sounds since Alex like most seven year olds takes up most of the oxygen in the house when she is here.

I am enjoying getting into Gerald Vizenor’s work. I am carefully rereading the introduction to Fugitive Poses. As I was telling Elizabeth this morning that since Vizenor is in his eighties, I am processing a lifetime of astute and astounding Native American perspective and a parallel and related path of journalism and scholarship.

I was tickled to see that I already had a book by him in my library.

The Heirs of Columbus looks to be a fun read. Wikipedia tells me it’s one of fourteen novels he has published. I hope I continue to feel so enthusiastic about this man and his work. That’s a lot of novels plus his other works that will provide me a lot of enjoyment.

While thumbing through The Heirs of Columbus I recognized a story he told at the lecture. Here’s how he told it in his novel.

“The Anishinaabe … remember that Naanabozho, the compassionate tribal trickster who created the earth, had a brother was a stone: a bear stone, a human stone, a shaman stone, a stone, a stone, a stone.

“Naanabozho was the first human born in the world, and the second born, his brother, was a stone. The trickster[Naanabozho] created the new earth with wet sand. He stood on his toes as high as he could imagine, but the water rose closer to his nose and mouth. He would dream without a mouth or a nose, but he would never leave the world to the evil gambler and his dark water. The demons in the water caused him to defecate, and with pleasure, but his shit would not leave; several turds floated near his mouth and nose.

“Naanabozho was at the highest point on the earth and could not move, so he invented meditation with trickster stories and liberated his mind over his own excrement. The trickster created this New World with the sand a muskrat held in her paws.” from The Heirs of Columbus by Gerald Vizenor

Again I’m in the position of wanting to write quickly so that I can spend time reading. It looks like Gerald Vizenor is my flavor of the month. He is amazing. I find it difficult to say exactly why since his ideas are so wide ranging. In the introduction to Fugitive Poses he draws on time as a visiting professor at Tianjin University. While there he taught The Red Pony and Being There. He ran into some censorship problems since the only way for him to get his students access to books was to have a few pages photocopied to be read each day in class. This allowed the censors to monitor every word he was having them read. The photocopier “broke down” around page 90 in Being There due to some explicit sexual description.

Two pages later he describes provoking a censorious reaction in Elaine Kim, chair of The Comparative Ethnic Studies Department at the University of California, Berkeley. Shadow Distance: A Gerald Vizenor Reader was featured in a locked glass cabinet where faculty and their recent publications were displayed.

Kim ordered the removal of the book cover because, “I feel an obligation to the women of this department who are always subjected to sexual harassment in the media. I to am sick of naked ladies—and men too, for that matter–in the media.”

Here is Vizenor’s description of the above cover: “The cover of Shadow Distance is a color reproduction of an original painting by German artist Dirk  Görtler. The expressionistic montage of totemic and trickster scenes from Bearheart [a novel by Vizeno], on the right, a portrait of the author an a Conoco truck stop sign in front of a bear. An androgynous nude trickster figure faces the bear, the omega letter is painted on the back of the trickster. The word muralts, a neologism, mounted on the truck stop sign over the head of the trickster, and omega, the end, are ironic, not erotic.”

There’s more by Vizenor but he did not include a picture of the book as I have.

Two pages later Vizenor sent me scrambling to get my Modern Library Thomas Jefferson as he delves in some detail in Jefferson’s odd contradictory writings both about Native Americans and Blacks.

I’m only on page twenty of this book and my head is reeling.

Vizenor combines an amazing erudition with the perspective of the trickster and he calls them: “storiers.”

Just for fun I have linked the lecture I listened to this morning to begin with a couple stories he tells during the Q and A.