I like what’s known as ledger art. It represents a period of American Indian history, specifically on the plains and primarily between the years of 1860 and 1930. What they mostly document is the large scale arrival of Europeans, their soldiers, the life ways of those tribes who produced the artists, and the contact between the two. Probably the most famous ledger books come from the Indian prisoners that were held at Fort Marion in St Augustine, Florida. Captain Pratt, their supervisor, gave them the paper, colored pencils and paints and presumably, retained at least some of the completed books. The Indians, having time on their hands, used their own experience with art (tanned hide, mineral and fat based paints, representational topics of note in Indian Country) and translated them into the new medium made available by Pratt.

There’s a contemporary collectors market for ledger books and some of them are available to the public through places like the Smithsonian and the Nebraska State Historical Society. I came across this picture on the net, which had an attached provenance.

The provenance reads:

Keeling Ledger Book, Nebraska State Historical Society (11310-55), is from the collection of William Henry Keeling of Falls City, NE. Major Keeling served with the Army in Montana in the 1860s. It is likely that the ledger book was collected at Camp Cooke, Montana in 1866-67. The William H. Keeling was received by the Nebraska Game and Parks Commission staff at Arbor Lodge in 1925. The inventory entry appears as “Book of Indian Drawings, history of the Nez Perces Indians”.

“collected at Camp Cooke, Montana in 1866-67…”

“collected…”

Sort of like Lord Elgin “collected” the loose stones at the Parthenon?

Camp Cooke was the first permanent military base in Montana.  It was deemed necessary because in 1862 gold was discovered at Bannack in what was then Idaho territory but is now Montana. By 1863 President Lincoln had appointed Sidney Edgerton as the Chief Justice of the Territory. He arrived with his wife and kids. She and her husband’s niece set up a school.  He tried to deal with the increasing violence that sudden wealth so often seems to inspire.

And of course there was the Indian problem. Prior to the discovery of gold there weren’t so many whites as far out as the Idaho Territory. In the two years following the announcement at Bannack there were some 16,000 of the suckers and because of that things began moving along. Montana Territory was created in 1864 out of the eastern part of Idaho Territory. Edgerton was its first governor. By 1866 there were numerous Indian raids against the influx of white settlers. Indians burned white-owned buildings, ran off stock, and occasionally killed people. Edgerton, and then later Thomas Meagher, were tasked with getting up a local response. It didn’t work that well, and to a large degree, the policies, historical accidents, and attitudes generated during those years ended up being the genesis of the militia mindset that still pervades the region.

As winter burned itself out during those years between 1862 and 1866, the rumors of Indian attacks would predictably surface sort of like the black-boogey men stories white parents told their kids in South Africa before the end of apartheid. There’s a particularly funny Indian War of 1867 in which an attack (as it turned out by four or so Indian men) was anticipated and met with a million dollar military response. The thing is that the rumor mill of the time, the conspiracy theorists who predicted an uber-Indian alliance against the whites, had, in their late-winter by-the-fire-stories, 11,000 warriors pounding at white doors come one dark spring night. One of the things that makes this so funny is that the fact that it turned out to be four dudes didn’t stop the rumor mills any more than continual human and societal survival stops apocalyptic religions.

But I get ahead of the story here. The year before this happened this ledger book was “collected” by Major Keeling at Camp Cooke. So now what do you think “collected” means given the tenor of the times?

I don’t know much about Major Keeling. There is a newspaper mention of him in The Washington Critic dated December 3 1885. It describes him as the “post-trader” at Fort Leavenworth. So he survived the 1860s and ended up running the trading post? I wonder, all those years later, if he sold stuff to the Indian from whom he’d collected the ledger?

There’s another mention of Keeling in a text that recounts the history of the churches and schools in Fort Leavenworth. In recounting the somewhat meager situation of Father Kinsella as he tried to minister to a rather large area, the report has him taking up a room (when not otherwise occupied) in the hotel/military residence managed by Major Keeling. This is sometime around or after 1884. Keeling provided the Father board at $15 a month. The room, though, turned out to be a brief reprise from Kinsella’s homelessness because pretty soon there were so many young military trainees on the frontier that there just weren’t empty rooms in which the Father could kip.

Anyway, all these years later, the Keeling Ledger is taken care of by the Nebraska State Historical Society. It looks like Keeling’s family presented it to the Nebraska Parks and Game Commission in 1925, although I could be wrong about that.

You can buy a limited reproduction of ledger pages for between $250 and $5000 a pop.

While I was in the hospital my kids, knowing me rather well, brought me several books to read.  One of them, written by Charles Demers, is called Vancouver Special. It was a good choice since it is filled with really good black and white photographs and short essays that are themselves structured much like images. (For some reason I find images easier on the body than narrative.) The book is organized around different elements that make both a city and an image. For the city these are things like neighborhoods, people and what the author has called culture but is in fact the relationships that bind and make meaningful the first two.  For example, he has a essay on nature in the culture section that, while informative and dryly funny by itself, side-lights and connects the chapters on First Nations and Kitsilano.

Reading it is quite a bit like interacting with a Vasily Kandinsky painting. I was thinking of this one. The blue bits are the essays on people, the green and orange are neighborhoods, the lines and arcs that delineate and connect are the bits on culture.

To get the painting, you have to get the relationships between the elements, which, I suppose is true of all narrative, but with Demers’ book as with art like Kandinsky’s, the way in which those elements are displayed has much more to do with space than with time. And narrative arc is almost always about time. This is, in itself, something deeply “Vancouver.” If Demers did that on purpose, I not only like his book but deeply respect his ability as a writer.

The pictures in the book, black and white photographs by Emmanuel Buenviaje, can be “read” right along beside the text. I mean, if you can imagine text structured as a complex image, then it shouldn’t be so hard to connect the pictures into meaningful series using the rules of narrative. But I’ll leave that up to you. You’d have to spend time with the book, with its elements and its arrangement.

This is not one of his but it (very vaguely) gives you the feel of the ‘graphs. If you want a better idea, you can click on this link and it will take you to his Flickr account. There are a number of black and white Vancouver shots there plus plenty of colour. One that caught my eye is here. I like it for a number of reasons but partly at least because I happen to occasionally catch the bus on that corner.

The book was published last year and opens by talking about the social, historical and political implications of the 1986 Expo and the 2010 Winter Olympics. This is not just a planar tourist book. It has depth: achieved by both political and historical knowledge and awareness. Vancouver, for all its wonders and beauty, suffers from the general North American dis-ease with its history and its past and, therefore, present choices. I was here during Expo and now the Olympics and the same battles for and with the homeless population have occurred both times, as an example. It’s a bit like a woman so obsessed with her aging face that she goes in for a lift and then there, as she turns grinning at herself in front of a mirror, on top of her completely ignored and clearly aging 50 year old neck and shoulders is the face that befits a 25 year old.

The thing about a person (or city) like that is that what this means has everything to do with the eyes of the beholder.  In this case Demers looks on with honesty, but also with love, more like compassion than pity or disrespect. Because of all these things, Vancouver Special really is a very good introduction to what it’s like to live here. If you’re interested.

Here’s a woman I appreciate:

I almost never use a seatbelt, so I watched this with that as a behavioural premise. Having said that, the following is the most effective wear-your-seat-belt ad I have ever seen. What makes it effective: I don’t mind that I am being manipulated emotionally and it’s imagery that I won’t forget. That’s good in an ad.

Well it was shit.  I just got out of the hospital. The pain did not go away on Sunday.

So much for my career as a health prognosticator.

(BTW – the pain is gone now but I caught a cold in the hospital. That last bit actually makes me giggle.)

although noting what what I am not sure, but I like it, I really like it,

by an artist named Pauline Wooley.

This is from a series called “Emergence.” She focuses on the structures of things in the universe (cells and planetary surfaces, for example) and gives a view of them filtered through human experience and by virtue of that makes them meaningful to us in a way that is just at the edge of intelligibility. Or at least that’s how it seems to me.

I was just able to have a shower and wash my hair without pain (my hair is very long and washing it is no mean feat). And my body is making weird ass noises. I think this episode of pain is nearing its end. Just in time for work! Oh joy.

(Odd what pain does to a mind. I can’t believe I just wrote about my body’s funny noises. Bleh.)

Dr. B be warned. I am coming to your office tomorrow and I am not in a jovial mood.

This more or less constant illness is a pain in the ass.  Still, it seems to me that it has taught me something about limits.

I had agreed, several weeks ago, to man a telephone for a charity telethon today. So I got up and went.  I had to think about how best to negotiate the particular possibilities of this illness so I stopped at the grocery store first thing and got something to drink and some plain buns to 1)keep the hunger at bay and 2)not upset my system any more than it already is.  I took the car, because long rides on public transit are simply too risky at the moment. And it worked for the most part. The nasty pains were kept at bay and all I had was the occasional, and manageable, cramp.

This compromise seems to me to be the key. I cannot just ignore the limitations this thing has set upon my life but I cannot let it rule me either. So I push, I hope intelligently, against the boundaries it has set for me.  One hopes that once this thing is fixed that I retain the lesson. I suspect it will be useful if generally applied to my life.

So I after my largely sleepless night I went to work. Walking down the hill to the bus wasn’t bad, in fact it felt good to be out in the incredibly warm (for January) air. I could feel the tiredness buzzing in my head but I thought tea or coffee (or both) would help that. I vowed to take a pill if I had any problem sleeping that night.

I got through most of the day more or less without incident and if I’d stopped at the soup for lunch I would have probably been OK. But I didn’t. I ordered an egg salad sandwich as well, with lots of vegetables. I ate the soup and then half the sandwich and within minutes the abdominal pain started. Exhaustion proves to be some sort of vulnerability amplifier. The pain was mild, so I went back to work and threw away the other half of the sandwich. The pain grew a little as I worked, but I thought it might settle with nothing else added to my system.

Between the tiredness and the pain, I did not stay late. The minute my time was up I shuffled out to the train. The walk home was nothing like the walk down the hill in the morning. The weather was still lovely, a few spitting rain drops, the smell of damp earth — the world was fine, but every step increased the pain.

When I got home I went straight to bed and struggled with sleep, exhaustion, pain and nausea. By evening, with the aid of a sleeping pill and antinauseant, sleep managed to win the battle.

It’s 09:30 the next morning, and the pain is largely gone. Still, no food yet; I think I’ll try soup later, if the pain stays away. Definitely no sandwiches, nothing solid, nothing with fiber.

Exhaustion is such a powerful thing and sleep it’s only antidote, so if it doesn’t come, all is screwed.

So yesterday’s cartoons were partly correct. I did feel like a frazzled cat by the end of business, but the works below by Zhiwan Cheung are a bit more accurate. The first: how I felt by yesterday evening before sleep finally bore me down.

At the moment I feel more like this:

It’ll be interesting to see what happens by the end of the day. The thing about moving through extremes of delight and exhaustion is that life is certainly interesting.

I haven’t been able to get back to sleep. I now have a new imagined state at the end of this day. Rather glad it’s Friday.