New mexico

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

Thursday

Dave Seminara

Splitsville: separatist movements are gaining steam in blue states

Matt McCaw doesn’t want to live anywhere but in Oregon. But during the pandemic he felt like he was living under tyrannical rule imposed by the state’s progressive majority in metro Portland. The school that his six children attended closed for more than a year due to a state mandate — and they received just four hours of online instruction per week. His church was forced to close, and his business selling textbooks suffered because school districts were buying online curricula, not physical books. Mask and vaccine mandates were ubiquitous; McCaw couldn’t even take his wife out to dinner to break the monotony, because all the restaurants were takeout-only. “I thought there would be a huge political backlash against all that,” he says.

separatist

Monday

Chilton Williamson, Jr.

Overnight in New Mexico

The three of us sat on folding chairs around the table where Dick had the microphone plugged into a tape recorder and directed toward the high-altitude evergreen forest and the sheer granitic bowl behind and above it. On the table also were three magnum revolvers and three blue enamelware cups of red wine. “I don’t expect anything the first night,” Dick McCuistion said. “Let’s forget about a watch, shall we?” The sound was the familiar half-human howl, beginning with a whoop, sustaining itself on the exhalation, and lasting three and a half minutes by my watch. It was a cry such as a man — a nine-foot-tall one — could produce; a headvoice bonded to a deep chest tone.

encounter