The first function of violence in Native American literatures is simply to acknowledge that violence is implicit, like gravity and sunlight, in the world and our relations with the world.
The claim that myth is always a narrative spin-off of ritual; the claim that myth is the projection of human anxieties onto a cosmological scrim; the claim that myths are invented to give sanction to human predilections and institutions... These are ways of trivializing a mode of thought that has served humanity well for a very long time.
Nature, or the world, or reality, is what mythology is all about.
Anxiety projection can and does occur - in myth, in music, in fiction, and in the doctor's office too. That doesn't make it the basis of everything.
Many intellectual heroes in the European tradition seem to find the great outdoors a chilling prospect - and its literary analogue, the mythworld, equally chilling. As if a world in which humans have no leverage, and might not be present at all, couldn't be interesting to humans.
In the native literatures of North America there aren't any novels. Instead, the major genre is myth. And myths are stories that are fundamentally about the world, not about human individuals. A myth needn't include any humans at all. If it does include them, they're usually minor characters - imaginary humans sent out like scouts to report back on what's happening in the mythworld, but not central participants in the action.
A lot of poems seem, in some sense, to pull the outside world into the interior. They aren't perhaps emotion recollected in tranquillity but perception recollected in interiority.
It isn't so unusual for poems to situate themselves out of doors - though they may, at the same time, be set in an interior world: not inside the house but inside the mind and body of writer and reader.
Russian literature, like colonial Canadian literature, comes with a lot of landscape backdrop.
Every Native North American text I've ever grappled with has taught me something important about how to live on the continent where I was born.
Literature in the written sense represents the triumph of language over writing: the subversion of writing for purposes that have little or nothing to do with social and economic control.
With type as with philosophy, music and food, it is better to have a little of the best than to be swamped with the derivative, the careless, the routine.
A man who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep, Frederic Goudy liked to say. If this wisdom needs updating, it is chiefly to add that a woman who would letterspace lower case would steal sheep as well .
Typographic style is founded not on any one technology of typesetting or printing, but on the primitive yet subtle craft of writing.
Popularity isn't just something that happens. You have to give something in exchange for it, and that's the dangerous part of the process.
