Wednesday's Western: Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine

Firsts: The Book Collector's Magazine occasionally devotes an issue to westerns, and the current issue is a fine example.

The works of western author David Lavender are discussed in detail in an article by Jerry Bartholomew, with pictures of dustjacket art and a listing of current market prices.  I had read Lavender's history of Bent's Fort, back when it won the Spur Award, but I had no idea that he had written so many other fine books, both history and fiction.  Lavender's work was lauded by A. B. Guthrie, jr., and nominated for a Pulitzer Prize.  He even wrote a rather conventional western novel under the pen name of Ralph Catlin.

Also in this issue is a long interesting article on Howard Fast's The Last Frontier (North Castle Books) , Mari Sandoz's Cheyenne Autumn: An American Epic, and John Ford's transformation of the history into film.

Back in February, 2008, Firsts devoted an issue to "The Books of Texas" and featured Elmer Kelton's The Time It Never Rained on the cover.  Inside are articles by Bill Hanrahan and Robin H. Smiley and on the works of Kelton, Benjamin Capps, John Graves, Gail Caldwell, and many others--some of them little known gems.

The September, 2010 issue featured works pertaining to George Armstrong Custer, the works of western novelist Ernest Haycox, and many other fine features.  The books-into-film segment in this issue was The Stalking Moon based upon a book by that sadly neglected author of western novels, Theodore V. Olsen.  The life  and other works of T. V. Olsen are also discussed.


Firsts can sometimes be ordered from Amazon, and you can directly subscribe or order back issues from their website, at this link.

Transcendental Tuesday: Emerson's Influences And Other Secular Buddhist Sources

"Emerson started with the traditional Christian notion of individual souls as unique and of God as a Person; yet, through his reading, he became intrigued by the old Pythagorean doctrine of anima mundi, "into which the Soul of the individual was absorbed and afterwards emanated again."  With this question of absorption-emanation continuing to haunt him, Emerson once again observed that moral law sanctions the Platonic notion that the individual soul is "but an emanation from the Abyss of Diety, and about to return whence it flowed." --Beongeheon Yu, from The Great Circle: American Writers and the Orient.

Beongeheon Yu's scholarship in tracing the origins of American Transcendentalism is amazing, especially as it was done long before the internet.  He has chapters on Emerson, Thoreau, Whitman, Yankee Pilgrims in Japan, Fenollosa, Hern, Babbitt, O'Neill, Eliot, Pound, and The Beat Generation: Salinger, Kerouac, and Snyder.

This week I reread his chapter on the secular buddhist motifs of Eugene O'Neill.  I had just read Barbara Hunt Watters review of O'Neill's personality and work, and this month's issue of Firsts: The Magazine for Book Collectors is entirely devoted to the O'Neill's works and the movies made from them.  A fine reading experience.

Of course, my list of favorite Secular Buddhist and Transcendental Novels and Interpretations is at Amazon, at this link.  I first published it long ago as a part of the Readerville site, a fine book world unfortunately now vanished into the ether.

Kimberly French at the Unitarian Universalist site published such a list in the spring of 2010 at this link.

There are, of course, a good many such works that don't appear on either of the above lists, above and beyond those works which, though not particularly Eastern, feature some Eastern concepts such as reincarnation.  I'll review some of them as time goes on.