Pedestrian View

I’ve never read any true crime.  For my first one, I guess it was fitting that I should pick up Truman Capote.  It was pretty darned good.

It’s the story of the Clutter murder in Holcolm, Kansas in 1959.  I’m not spilling the beans here.  There’s never any mystery as to what happened.  Four Clutters - dad, mom, teenage son, teenage daughter - are brutally murdered in their rural home.  The bulk of the book delves into the lives of the murders - Dick Hickkock and Perry Smith.  Capote follows them up through their hangings.

What I found most compelling were the portraits of these two murderers.  They killed the family in cold blood - and weren’t even on meth.  They deserve no compassion, but Capote shows them to be human, vulnerable, and memorable.  Capote’s journalism and objectivity is remarkable.  He never preaches, never condemns.  He just tells the story in all it’s sordid, gory, horrific detail, and I’m not just talking about the murder.

The surprise favorite character, by the way, was Big Red the squirrel.

I whipped through this 1997 Tony Hillerman in two days.  I don’t think I’ve read a Hillerman for ten years, so it’s fitting that I picked up this decade old work.

I lived on the rez in Shiprock from 1986-91, and Hillerman definitely makes me nostalgic for the high desert and Navajoland.  Fallen Man in particular was poignant because much of it was climbing around Tse’bit’ai, the Shiprock, which I saw every time I walked outside my front door.  I never climbed it, but I poked around its base many times.  It’s an awesome piece of rock, for sure.  He also makes frequent geographic references to other places I instantly recognize, like the Carrizzos, Lukachukai, Hogback, and Table Mesa.  I’m so lonesome I could cry.

The premise is that a long-dead climber’s body is found on Shiprock.  Leaphorn comes out of retirement to figure it out and get’s Chee to help.  Chee is still having problems with his love life, which Hillerman handles about as delicately as, well, Ted Koppel in cowboy boots.  He also throws in lots of useful but clunky cultural tidbits that I’d probably think were insightful if I hadn’t lived there.  To me they read like something inserted from a National Monument display.

Still, it was a great read.  I love Jim Chee’s trailor.

My wife brought this Willa Cather classic home from the Peace Church library recently.  I’d just finished another book and it was handy, so I read it.

The only other Cather I’ve ever read was Death Comes to the Archbishop, which I’d found to be a very dramatic title for a pleasant and unmemroable little piece of pastoral prose.  I was living in New Mexico at the time, so I enjoyed the setting and the history, and it was a pleasant read, but I wouldn’t ever have called it gripping or powerful.  My Antonia is much the same.  I’ve travelled across Nebraska and lived in western North Dakota, and so the prairie descriptions made me nostalgic, but the book seemed rather rambling and purposeless much of the time.

The premise is that we’re reading the remembrances of Jim Burden about his compelling childhood friend, the immigrant Antonia.  What we really read are stories about Jim where Antonia occassionally make appearances, and frankly doesn’t stand out as all that remarkable.

Sill, I really like when Jim and Antonia wander into the prairie dog town and Jim kills a rattler with a stick.