Mary Scriver (Prairie Mary)'s Blog (6)

When I was “doing education” for animal control, I used to complain that the four main things I needed to talk about were all taboo in polite society: Birth, death, sex and shit. Of course, the reason they cried out for education was that when something is taboo, it cannot be discussed and therefore no one knows anything much about it. They just wander around making guesses and accumulating wrong-headedness.



This is not just true of dogs. People are also much in the dark about their… Continue

Saturday, December 12, 2009

"THE EDUCATION OF LITTLE TREE:" A Reflection

“The Education of Little Tree” (1976) is one of the most notorious of the faux Indian identity books but I had not read the book (still haven’t) and just saw the movie last night. The movie the night before was “Gran Torino” about a cranky old white man who hates minorities. I had not understood the connection between the two when I started reflecting on them in my attempts to get a good grip on the psychological… Continue

Thursday, December 10, 2009

ZOMBIE GRIEFERS

The most horrible thing is not death -- it’s being stuck between life and death, not being able to die and not being able to get better. People in this situation are called zombies. The American culture likes zombies because they make money. Just in the movies alone they are box office gold, although not quite as good as vampires who are also stuck between states.



Also, real people who are only partly dead lie in beds with a lot… Continue

The blizzard started, as forecasted, just about suppertime last night and is roaring today. It roared all night. Now the world is submarine and somehow subconscious, altered and blurred as in a dream. When I woke up the second time, I spent a long time slipping back and forth into and out of a hypnogogic state. The forecast for Wednesday is forty below, unreal. I haven’t finished winterizing.



The hypnogogic state is when you’re halfway between dreams and consciousness, in a sort of… Continue

Instead of using fancy philosophers to peg my two forces, described in my fav Flaubert quote which I keep above the computer (“Be regular and orderly in your life so that you may be violent and original in your work.”), since I’ve never made a serious study of philosophers (don’t have the head for it) and since I’m moving around in the work of Hillman and Moore, I’ll say I’m working on Vesta “versus” Pan (the Cinematheque boys) and Dionysis/Hermes which I’ll assign to Barrus. This is using… Continue

Using the idea that an ordinary incident can be analyzed as though it were a dream, I used the hot news of Tiger Woods' accident to see what a little analysis could reveal. It's on my blog www.prairiemary.blogspot.com because it's too long for this venue, but it turned out to be quite interesting as well as touching. I pretended that the dream was one that most of us shared. Don't we all share the dream of being talented, handsome and… Continue