July 15, 2005

Billy the Kid in Literature
posted by Skrik 19 years ago
  • It was either this post or a vacuous anti-Harry-Potter rant. I will leave it to others to post Potter.
  • Nice post!
  • Very nice post. I loved the Ondaatje when I read it many years ago; I should reread it now that I've read The English Patient and his other recent works. Love the old-movie quotes: "And thees fellow, too, thees redhead, he pass this way, paso por aqui . . . and he mek here good and not weeked. But, before that -- I am not God!" May it be said of me when I've shuffled off the mortal coil: "He mek here good and not weeked."
  • I dreamed I saw Bill Bonney last night, Alive as you and me. Says I "But Bill, you're ten years dead" "I never died" said he.
  • Billy the Kid adjusted to the oddity of time travel with impressive ease.
  • RE the Old West: The old-time move from which languagehat quotes above is Four Faces West starring Joel McCrea. The film is based on a short story called "Paso Por Aqui" by the great writer of American westerns and cowboy tales, Eugene Manlove Rhodes, a longtime residenmt of the country around Tularosa and Roswell, who was himself a cowboy and a largely self-taught writer. Rhodes' work became widely known to the Amercian public from being published in The Saturday Evening Post. No one else has had Rhodes' ear for the speech and character of the folk living there, nor Rhoses' hands-on familiarity with how life in the latter 1900s and turn of the century was actually lived. If you crave autherntic western humour and characters, Rhodes is your man. The University of New Mexico has Rhodes' papers -- one of these years, if I am lucky, I hope to visit the Rhodes collection. The University of Oklahoma press has reprinted most of Rhodes' short stories and novels -- believe they're still available if anyone cares to hunt them up. And here's a link to a couple of his books.