Americana

Wednesday

H.A. Scott Trask

The Last Westerner captures the American Southwest

 The epigraph to this novel is from Chretien de Troyes’s Lancelot, one of the French author’s Arthurian romances. It is fitting because The Last Westerner is a medieval romance, as well as an epic set in the American Southwest in the closing years of the 20th century. The dedication is to the author’s wife and to the late Edward Abbey, a personal friend. It is equally fitting because The Last Westerner is a western novel in setting and theme and will bring to mind other western novels such as Abbey’s The Brave Cowboy (1956) and Cormac McCarthy’s All the Pretty Horses (1992). Abbey’s book is subtitled, An Old Tale in a New Time. That could be the subtitle for The Last Westerner too, and as for pretty horses, Chilton Williamson, Jr.’s novel is full of them.

horseback last westerner

Sunday

Christopher Sandford

Springsteen’s Born to Run turns 50

Bruce Springsteen chuckled when I asked him about the making of Born to Run. “I was just a kid in my 20s trying to keep a record deal together – there was nothing more to it than that,” he told me. One way to see the Springsteen of the summer 1975, just before Born to Run released, is to imagine a wispy-bearded, 25-year-old man hanging around a beachfront New Jersey bar, telling you about his life. He relates slightly improbable tales of having attended a local Catholic high school, where one of the supervising nuns expressed her misgivings about his scholastic performance by stuffing him upside down in a garbage can in the classroom.

Sunday

Teresa Mull

The right to keep and bear fireworks

The political arena is hotter than ever with fights raging over rights and freedoms and all that good American stuff. But one topic missing from these debates only gets the attention it deserves for about a week every year each July: the right to keep and bear fireworks. It's a right heavily restricted in sixteen states and straight-up illegal in Massachusetts. Yes, Massachusetts, home of the Boston Tea Party, that act of defiance that sparked our patriotic tradition of blowing things up. In the Pennsylvania Wilds — the romantic name a tourism agency gave to the hick region of the state where I reside — things go boom year-round.

Sunday

Teresa Mull

America’s rural population is shrinking

A new report finds that for the first time since these things have been kept track of, rural America’s population has shrunk. This trend is a shame for all Americans (except for a few of us who inhabit rural America and enjoy the solitude). The University of New Hampshire Carsey School of Public Policy findings are based on Census data from April 2010-April 2020, pre-dating the Covid outbreak and its dubious effects on people’s migratory habits (a Pew Research survey suggests that reports of a mass urban exodus during the height of the pandemic were overblown).