Weird History
Let me make it clear from the beginning that Desert Oracle is very different from the books I generally share with you here on the Margins. It is not a work of narrative history, but history is woven throughout it. Weird history, true, but history nonetheless.
Desert Oracle is the outgrowth of a more-or-less quarterly “field guide” to the deserts of the American southwest of the same name, written and published by culture writer and former Wonkette editor Ken Layne. Following the publication of its first issue in 2015, the periodical established a cult following for its quirky and passionate exploration of the desert’s landscape, history, myths, and inhabitants (human and otherwise).
Desert Oracle’s new incarnation is an expansion of the periodical, combining previously published pieces with new material. Beginning with a piece titled “Try Not to Die,” Layne introduces readers both to the desert’s beauty and to its danger. He talks about missing hikers, ancient desert cultures, the rise of Western swing, colorful characters from the recent past, UFO and Yucca Man sightings, and the impact of Edward Abbey on the desert conservation movement.
Written in a matter-of-fact style that belies their contents, which are anything but matter-of-fact, the pieces run in length from short to very short. At first the collection appears to be a disjointed collection of fascinating pieces: a musing on ravens is juxtaposed to the story of a medical con man, which is followed by a complicated essay that begins with the Goldstone Deep Space Antenna Station and ends with occultist and rocket scientist Jack Parsons. In fact, the book is held together by what Layne has described in interviews as the “weirdness of the desert:” the cruel, the terrible, the sublime and the inexplicable. With an emphasis on the inexplicable.
I found it fascinating.
Most of this review previously appeared in Shelf Awareness for Readers.
In Which I Read the 1932 Sports Pages
Anyone who knows me In Real Life knows that I am not much of a sports fan. If there had been a “least likely to read the sports pages” category in my high school yearbook, I would have won it hands down.
Left to my own devices, I might not have turned to the Chicago Tribune’s sports pages in 1932. But one of the facts about foreign correspondents in the years between the World Wars is that their beats were large. In addition to covering stories like the fall of the German economy, the rise of the Nazis, and the threat of Soviet Russia, Sigrid Schultz and her counterparts were expected to cover major sporting events, the arts, crime, human interest stories and above all, the American angle in foreign news.*
The fact that a term of German boxers was traveling to the International Golden Gloves tournament in Chicago was a natural for Sigrid Schultz to cover. If Schultz reports on it, I’m reading it, so July, 1932, finds me in the unlikely position of reading international boxing coverage. It’s been a nice change from reading articles about the Nazi rise to power.
In fact, I have found Schultz’s approach gripping. She treats sports coverage as human interest rather than giving the reader play-by-play accounts of qualifying bouts. She does profiles on each of the eight team members. The ones who have been jobless for months. The ones who work in a factory to support widowed mothers and young siblings. The middleweight boxer who is a precision lens crafter for an instrument making company. The featherweight who was told he was too weak to learn to box.The near-sighted shipbuilder who is studying an English phrasebook because there might be things he wants to ask about in Chicago. She describes their training regimens. She tells us about the local groups who club together to buy them gear for the trip and throw them farewell parties.
And then there was this story, which choked me up:
Campe Studies Tribune to Learn About Chicago
Erich Campe, welterweight champion who will fight in the International Golden Gloves bouts in Chicago, July 26, called at THE TRIBUNE office in Berlin today to read recent editions of THE TRIBUNE and admired photos of Tribune Tower,
The police cadet was somewhat downcast when asked how his departure is being celebrated. “I don’t even know whether anybody will accompany me to the station,” he said. “I don’t expect my parents will, but maybe my sister Gretchen will be there.”
Campe has done little traveling. He is in the police school at the little town of Brandenburg and boys being trained there do not have much chance to make friends. It is almost impossible for their friends to visit them should they feel like it. Visitors must submit to long-cross-examinations before they can call on your police cadets in the barracks.
Campe has been granted leave until Aug. 2, which is the day the boat on which he scheduled to return to Germany lands at Hamburg. A shadow of anxiety crossed his face at the idea that he might miss the train and not get back in time to resume duty in the school at Brandenburg.
He momentarily forgot his worries to discuss the prospects of his first crossing. This reminds him of his packing. He managed to borrow a suitcase only to find it so large that it would block an entire stateroom. There he departed to try to find a really cheap suitcase. **
In her boxing coverage, Schultz gave me a glimpse of Germany outside the worlds of art and politics that dominate my reading these days. The specter of nationalism appears in the edges of some of the stories, but for the most part she is focused on the young athletes and their grand adventure, even if the next day’s article returns to the scary politics of the time.
*If there was a single truth that news editors in all media hold to be self-evident it is that the further away the news is happening, the less people are interested. In the 1920s the editor of the Brooklyn Eagle summed this up in a sign over his desk that read: “A DOG FIGHT IN BROOKLYN IS BIGGER THAN A REVOLUTION IN CHINA.” As a result, foreign correspondents were encouraged to find the point at which foreign news intersected with local interest.
**In a brief piece two days later, Schultz reported that Campe’s sister and sweetheart surprised him on the train platform in Berlin, where members of the team were boarding for the port of Bremen. I choked up again. At this point, I don’t know whether or not he wins. But I’m rooting for him!
Damon Runyon is Not Ring Lardner
This post has its roots in one simple fact: Damon Runyon is not Ring Lardner. Or perhaps I should say that Ring Lardner is not Damon Runyon.
As I mentioned in my last blog post: I mixed the two men up in my head. My fingers typed Ring Lardner in my original notes but my brain immediately jumped to Damon Runyon’s short stories set on Broadway in the early years of the twentieth century and Guys and Dolls, the musical based on those stories.* (One of my all-time favorites.) I didn’t remain confused for long. The first source I looked at in preparation for writing about the Chicago Tribune’s Army Edition, made it clear that Runyon was not the sports writer I was looking for. It also made it clear that while I know and love Runyon’s stories, I knew nothing whatsoever about Runyon. That was easily fixed.
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- Ring Lardner
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- Damon Runyon
It turns out that confusing Lardner and Runyon wasn’t that big a jump.** They were close in age, born in 1885 and 1880 respectively. Both recreated themselves with a strategic name change. Ringgold Wilmer Lardner decided to go by Ring for obvious reasons. Alfred Damon Runyon dropped the Alfred when he enlisted in the Army during the Spanish American War and discovered that Alfred was one standard deviation from Percival as far as the average enlisted man was concerned. Both were popular sports writers whose syndicated columns reached a national audience : Lardner with the Chicago Tribune and Runyon with the Hearst papers. Both successfully made the leap into fiction, writing in what purported to be very specific regional vernaculars, though I suspect that in both cases the idiom was in large part their own creation. And both traveled to Europe to report on the experience of American soldiers in “the war to end all wars”— the point at which my confusion between the two started.
Their war coverage is a good place to look at the differences between the two.
As I mentioned in my previous post, the Tribune send Lardner to France to report on “the funny side of the war.” He was there for two months soon after the American Expeditionary Force arrived. His first piece of “war reporting”, titled “Lardner Meets Horrors the Wake of War,” begins with the fact that the water in his Paris hotel was turned off for a course of several hours and turns a small inconvenience into a satirical, stereotype-laden piece about the French not liking to drink water or to bath in it.
Runyon, by contrast, was an actual war correspondent. World War I was not his first experience of war. Runyon fought in the Spanish-American War, where he was wounded twice and earned the nickname “The Colorado Kipling” for his stories and verses about the experience. Later he traveled as a correspondent with Black Jack Pershing’s Punitive Expedition in search of Pancho Villa. He arrived relatively late to World War I, in October 1918,**** and primarily covered the Meuse-Argonne Offensive . His most powerful pieces were written not from the battlefield, but on the way home aboard the USS Leviathan, traveling with a large number of wounded men. And perhaps that is not surprising, given that his best work is stories of the man (and woman) on the street, even if that street is very specifically seventeen blocks of W. 27th Street, peopled by “burlesque dolls and hoofers, and guys who write songs, and saxophone players, and newsboys, and newspaper scribes, and taxi drivers…” Not to mention bookies, horse players, gin runners, and other “wrong gees.”
I bet none of us ever confuse Ring Lardner with Damon Runyon again.
*One of those stories, “Little Miss Marker, also inspired a movie by the same name starring six-year-old Shirley Temple. A reminder that sent me down the rabbit hole looking for streaming options.
**FYI: You also have to be careful not to confuse Lardner with his son, Ring Lardner Jr, who turned his own satirical voice to screenwriting, winning Oscars for Woman of the Year and M*A*S*H. I would apologize for the digression, but this post is essentially me taking you with me down a series of rabbit holes, and giving you all too clear a picture of how my brain works in the process.***
*** I would like to think that my mind is as orderly as library card catalog: the old kind that literally had little drawers that held 3 by 5 cards, arranged alphabetically by author’s last name, title, and subject headings.
Instead it looks more like this:
****For those of you who don’t carry the relevant dates in your head, the Armistice that ended the war was signed November 11, 1918.