I want to perform ‘My Old Man’s Pole’ at the Oregon Shakespeare Festival. It’s a White Man’s Regional Mermaid Tale. I’ll do a whole show by myself, that will include ‘My Spongy Break Dream’ my ‘Psycho Riverside Dance’ my ‘Praise Be To Zardoz’ flash dance.
Celebrating the genius of ‘Huckleberry Finn’ – Los Angeles Times (latimes.com)
Big River (musical) – Wikipedia
Fishing With Pops’s Pole West of The Water Tower
Posted on June 1, 2021 by Royal Rosamond Press
Here are two stories I improvise. I am the new Will Rogers and Mark Twain. I own a special contract as a minister, where all my recorded words, and telephone conversations are Copyrighted. Me – and the late Doctor Gene Scott? I need my own T.V. Show!
The Oregon Shakespeare Festival might want to redo Big River with Woke updates. But – get real! I want in on the rewrite.
Jake Soda Pop
Old Man’s Fishing Pole
West of the Water Tower
(47) Wes Of The Water Tower – YouTube
Praise Be To Zardoz!
Posted on August 12, 2019 by Royal Rosamond Press
Zardoz came to the Wayne Morse Free Speech Square. I saluted a fellow Wizard of Oz.
Come back………when you know something!
Play half the Shofar video, then hit the drum circle video. Halfway into that, play Shofar, and at end of drumming. The New Jubilee Week will end on Friday, and sundown.
King John ‘Antichrist After Merlin’
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Zardoz
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Jubilee_(biblical)
Miriam Starfish Christling
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Homer Croy, Al Capp, and, Moonbeam
Posted on January 5, 2020 by Royal Rosamond Press
I finally found out what the book ‘West Of The Water Tower’ is about. A minister’s son falls for the daughter of a wealthy atheist named Bee Chew. This is a modern version of Romeo and Juliet, and, ‘The Scarlet Letter’ co-staring my kin, Reverend John Wilson. I want Quibi to make a quickie movie about this water tower. I also believe ‘The End Time of Moonbeam’ would be a big hit. This is about a ancient Celtic Goddes who is kept a prisoner in a cave in the Ozark Mountains. Sone say she descends from Casandra of Troy. Rena was born to play Moonbeam McSwine.
Al Capp had a lot of power and influence. He attacked Hippies and was accused of exposing himself to women. I am a cartoonist who predicted Trump’s Christ-Complex in 1986. I see that my book ‘The Royal Janitor’ is Cappish. I believe Quibi can do a Lil Abner revival. I got much material. I got the Kimties, Rena belle, Dogpatch, Whoville, and Alley Valkyrie.
I wonder if my kin, Thomas Hart Benton, was aware of Al Capp’s Dogpatch people. Surely my grandfather was, who sold newspapers on a corner. My sister’s artwork told stories.
John Presco
Celebrating the genius of ‘Huckleberry Finn’
BY DAVID L. ULIN
NOV. 14, 2010 12 AM PT
LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK CRITIC
Mark Twain was not quite 50 when he published “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn” in February 1885, and in so doing, changed American literature. Until then, many of our writers had flirted with vernacular expression, most notably Thomas Paine, whose “Common Sense,” was written to appeal to (and to sway) the common man. To read Paine now, however, as well as other populists such as Thoreau and Whitman, is to confront a strange dichotomy between their democratic intentions and their elevated prose.
FOR THE RECORD:
A subheadline on an earlier online version of this article said the novel “Huckleberry Finn” turns 175 this year. As the article notes, it turns 125.
Not so with Twain, who with “Huckleberry Finn,” invented a new kind of American language. “All modern American literature comes from one book by Mark Twain called ‘Huckleberry Finn,’” Ernest Hemingway famously declared in 1935. “It’s the best book we’ve had. All American writing comes from that. There was nothing before. There has been nothing as good since.”
“Huckleberry Finn” turns 125 this year, which is also the 175th anniversary of Twain’s birth and the 100th of his death. It’s a perfect time to reconsider his importance, not because of these anniversaries but in spite of them. Such occasions, after all, often obscure our ability to engage with a writer; they become mausoleums built around the life and work. What does it mean to call “Huckleberry Finn” a great book, and Twain a quintessential American voice? Such praise means nothing if we can’t feel it, if we can’t get inside the language, the world view, if we can’t experience it as living literature, something that transcends its time.
For this reason, Norman Mailer chose, on the occasion of “Huckleberry Finn’s” centennial, to celebrate it as if it were a new book, transformative and fresh.
“The book was so up-to-date!” he wrote in the New York Times Book Review. “I was not reading a classic author so much as looking at a new work sent to me in galleys by a publisher. It was as if it had arrived with one of those rare letters which says, ‘We won’t make this claim often but do think we have an extraordinary first novel to send out.’ So it was like reading ‘From Here to Eternity’ in galleys, back in 1950, or ‘Lie Down in Darkness,’ ‘Catch-22,’ or ‘The World According to Garp.’”
“The World According to Garp”? That one’s a bit of a stretch, but Mailer’s point — like Hemingway’s — was that Twain’s great rolling river of a novel set the stage for everything that was to come. It’s not just the writing, although the decision to tell the story in the voice of a country boy enabled Twain to experiment with language in a way few works of fiction had before. “You don’t know about me without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’; but that ain’t no matter,” he begins. “That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.”
Here, we see the setup in a nutshell. This is a novel meant to be read as if it were a found document: a personal history, a bit of testimony. This is the first person point-of-view taking root in American literature, the voice of the outsider, cut adrift from all he thought he knew. This is the lost boy going on the road (or the river), living beyond the strictures of society, while in the service of a bigger truth.
“All right, then, I’ll go to hell,” Huck exclaims when he finally decides he’s not sending Jim back to slavery, and the choice is epic in its Americanness, its reckoning between public law and private conscience. “It was awful thoughts and awful words,” Huck continues, “but they was said. And I let them stay said; and never thought no more about reforming. I shoved the whole thing out of my head, and said I would take up wickedness again, which was in my line, being brung up to it, and the other warn’t. And for a starter I would go to work and steal Jim out of slavery again; and if I could think up anything worse, I would do that, too; because as long as I was in, and in for good, I might as well go the whole hog.”
This suggests another aspect of American culture that “Huckleberry Finn” effectively challenged: our tortured relationship with race. It’s one of the miracles of the novel that a white man, born and raised in slave territory, would come out so forcefully and subtly for the human rights of blacks. Jim is the moral center of the book, and in some sense became the progenitor of such works as “Pudd’nhead Wilson” (1894), praised by Langston Hughes for being “as contemporary as Little Rock, and Mark Twain as modern as Faulkner.” That’s a fine comparison, if only because without Twain, it’s hard to imagine what Faulkner’s fiction might have looked like, just as it’s impossible to consider the quiet power of a Faulknerian character like Dilsey (“They endured,” Faulkner wrote of her in his 1946 appendix to “The Sound and the Fury,” using the plural to imply not just the depth and breadth of her perseverance but also a sense of connection, of lineage) without the influence of Jim.
And yet, there is something of the accident in “Huckleberry Finn,” which is, in its own way, without antecedent, not only in American literature but also in Twain’s own body of work. Of the 20 or so books he published before its appearance, only a handful — “The Innocents Abroad,” “Roughing It,” “Life on the Mississippi,” “The Prince and the Pauper” — remain with us, as if the first quarter century of his career was more or less a prelude to “Huckleberry Finn.” (Even “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer” is slighter in comparison to Huck’s tale: It is a story for boys, of small-town life and the bogeyman, Injun Joe.) No, as Kurt Vonnegut once suggested about the creation of “Huckleberry Finn,” Twain simply “flabbergasted himself by writing a novel as comically profound as the masterpiece ‘Don Quixote’ … How the heck did he do that?”
How indeed? This remains an open question today, but isn’t that the way with all great art? Twain went on to write many more books, including the bleak and beautiful efforts of his final years, “The Mysterious Stranger” and “Letters From the Earth.” Still, “Huckleberry Finn” is the one that dominates, in Twain’s oeuvre and in all of American literature, the book that started it all. Here, we have the emergence of an American voice in all its idiomatic grace and power, the raw expression and the moral vision, brought together in the figure of this young boy.
“[S]o,” Huck tells us in the closing lines of the novel, “there ain’t nothing more to write about, and I am rotten glad of it, because if I’d a knowed what a trouble it was to make a book I wouldn’t a tackled it, and ain’t a-going to no more. But I reckon I got to light out for the Territory ahead of the rest, because Aunt Sally she’s going to adopt me and sivilize me, and I can’t stand it. I been there before.”
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Al_Capp
A publicity still for the film West of the Water Tower (1923)
Croy’s novel, a drama set in the fictional town of Junction City, was a thinly veiled critique of his own hometown, Marysville, Missouri. He published it anonymously because its serious tone so conflicted with his well-known light-hearted writings about midwestern life. The novel, and the ensuing film adaptation, concerns a couple who elope in the face of their disapproving families, and subsequently become the subject of scandal when they have a child and the marriage certificate cannot be found.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Li%27l_Abner
https://norman.hrc.utexas.edu/bookshopdoor/signature.cfm?item=171#1
Daisy and Rena
Posted on January 20, 2014by Royal Rosamond Press
Rena had it all over Daisy, the babe in Dukes of Hazard. Rena had Daisy’s look, but she had a perfect body. Only the Victoria’s Secret models come close to the perfection I got to see almost every day for fifty days. When Rena took off her halter-top, and let her cut-offs drop, it was show time! There were wealthy and powerful men attending the Bohemian Grove Hijinks, taking it all in, the most beautiful woman in the world who knew how to wear a bikini like no one hence. It was a size or two too large. It looked like it would fall off – real easy!
Exert from Ravola of Thunder Mountain by Royal Reuben Rosamond.
I met her in Eminence this morning. I never beheld another such being. She is like the beautiful notes of an organ with all the stops subdued. You see by this that the very implication of her is wonderful. She’ll stand fully six feet tall in her bare heels and this means that, in high heals, she can pick up a shingle and mend leak in most Ozark cabins. She can look down on most men. Her figure if that of a model, rivaling even the dreams, I vow, of the artists of ancient Greece. Her perfect body needs no no adornment in exquisite , clinging garments. Her features have class; her complexion is pink and healthful, her air of grandeur is almost appalling, cowing most men with her sheer superiority. Her eyes large and luminous, deep chestnut, are thrilling, but not come hither. Those great and beautiful orbs seem seem to be a lover’s moon rising over the horizon of her lower lashes. Yes she is temptation, her generous lips and full mouth the last straw to break a mans resistance, She’s exotic and provocative in the same wondrous breath, made but for the arms of a man, made to love and be loved. Have I describe her?
I would add a marked timidity, that gleam of wildness to be found in the does demure eyes” suggested teacher.
Yes, I notice her inward struggle to be natural and unafraid – not bashful, to speak plainly?.
Which hid the air, I take it, of knowing how really superior she is.
“Yes, she would make a great actress, But we must not think of spoiling her with sham. How sweet she is in just being her, her American Frontier self, let me say. Of the wild flowers I’d call her India Paint brush, and equally as brilliant. But, enough. Please let me aloud this, A Few Come Our Alive”
She was tall, dark, half developed, beautiful as a poet’s dream, her rope of hair hanging to her waist. We could tell them what a raving beauty she was due to become.. Shell stand nearly six foot tall.”
https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2011/11/27/daisy-mae-rosamond/
Moonbeam
Posted on February 5, 2018by Royal Rosamond Press
The Midwest Muse
Hollywood Hillbillies
Posted on January 20, 2014by Royal Rosamond Press
Just saw on T.V. a new show is going to premiere called ‘Hollywood Hillbillies’. I already posted in ‘Sweet Home Alabama’. My grandfather and his family are turning over in their grave. This blog is full of Hillbilly history and threats to turn my family chaos into a reality show. I have compared Rena to Moonbeam McSwine. Too bad my siblings and daughter didn’t let me do my thing as the family writer.
Hell, they got my truck and the first car I owned in two different museums. I’m going to write a script and send it out! It’s going to be titled ‘Me and My Redneck Muse’
Jon Presco
Copyright 2014
http://on.aol.com/video/hollywood-hillbillies–sneak-peek-517875977
Three days ago I discovered there is a television show called “Sweet Home Alabama”. It is a dating show built around the theme of “Cultural Warfare” the major theme you will find in this blog. For years I have been threatening to turn this blog into a Reality Show, especially after my daughter mated with a fake NASCAR drunk whose daddy is a Tea Party Crazy living in Texas. Bill Cornwell is a chip off the old block, and my daughter Heather – the country western singer – could have been a contestant on this show when she was younger. At least she would have been wooed by some City Slicks verses the Yokels she’s been bonding with in Santa Rosa because there is a cultural fight over these Southern Belles, just like the fight I had over Rena Christensen and Dottie Witherspoon. Dottie is kin to Reese Witherspoon who starred in the movie this show is name after. Here is my prophetic post where I title members of the Tea Party “insane” in 2011. Most members of my family, and most of my friends, have been calling me insane.
https://rosamondpress.wordpress.com/2011/09/12/saving-dottie-witherspoon/
Once again my family is out of the dough due to the cultural warfare they have been waging against me with the help of outsiders. They just don’t want me to succeed. I got no one on my side. The Galls turned on me when their son died in August. I was not invited to Jon Gall’s memorial held in the Gall backyard. When I asked Mark Gall why I wasn’t allowed to say goodbye to my friend, he told me I would not get along with HIS NEW friends who are radical Christians, Zionists, and Tea Party admirers. I then find out other old friends were not invited. It just so happens we are Democrats.
Posted on January 20, 2014by Royal Rosamond Press
When Rena was sitting in that bar nursing a cola, she was looking way out to sea Could she see the Channel Islands that clear sunny day? My grandfather used to go camping on these Islands. He wrote a story about a man who goes to Santa Cruz Island and befriends a young pig. He is tried in court and found ‘Guilty’.
Here is a young woman who came west from Nebraska. She has no idea she is about to have an impact on California History.
After Mary Rosamond told her husband not to come home, and I must assume after he failed to get a book contract with Homer Croy, Mary dressed the four beautiful Rosamond sister in the Indian costumes that Royal picked up somewhere, and had them drag out boxes full of his little novel he could not sell. After Mary poured some gasoline on the pile of ‘The Copper Indian’, Mary made her daughters whoop and dance around the bonfire. My aunt Lillian says they were crying their hearts out. They were forbidden to mention their father’s name or repeat any of his history. When I exhibited a gift for writing poetry, I became a marked man. The Rosamond sisters, and my grandmother, got spooked.
Roy Reuben Rosamond was a very early promoter of Sunny California and the California Dream that Rena Victoria Christensen may have wanted to sample.
Jon Presco
Copyright 2014
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Charles_Fletcher_Lummis
http://www.mocavo.com/Out-West-Volume-3/448611/92
http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Santa_Cruz_Island
https://archive.org/details/outwestamagazin00leaggoog
Overland Monthly was a monthly magazine based in California, United States, and published in the 19th and 20th century.
The magazine’s first issue was in July 1868, published by Bret Harte, and continued until the late 1875. The original publishers, in 1880, started The Californian, which became The Californian and Overland Monthly in October 1882. In January 1883, the effort reverted to The Overland Monthly (starting again with Volume I, number 1). In 1923 the magazine merged with Out West to become Overland Monthly and the Out West magazine, and ended publication in July 1935.
Famous writers, editors, and artists included:
Ambrose Bierce
Alice Cary
Willa Cather
Frona Eunice Wait Colburn
Bret Harte
Ina Coolbrith
Edgar Fawcett
Henry George
John Brayshaw Kaye
Clarence King
Jack London
Josephine Clifford McCracken
Joaquin Miller
John Muir
Hugo Wilhelm Arthur Nahl
Stephen Powers – on California Native Americans.
William Saroyan
Clark Ashton Smith
Charles Warren Stoddard
Mark Twain
Joseph Pomeroy Widney – contributed 8 articles.
Rosamond Press 