Cannary Vortex Protest Hmm

The computer is in the hottest room in the house. And it's just been too muggy to spend too much time in here, though I did get quite a bit of poeming done over the weekend. I haven't made it into the city for the protests. And not having taken time off from work, I'm sure I won't be. I can't even make up my mind about the usefullness of it all at this point. It just befuddles the mind that any voters could be undecided at this point. Unless, maybe, a few are considering Nader versus Kerry. But anyone who has stuck with Bush this far—I mean what more can the man do?

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Today at work I caught some fragments about Calamity Jane. I'm not even sure I knew she was real. These paras are lifted from The Rocky Mountains. One in a series of regional reference books forthcoming from Greenwood Press. The lit section in this one makes no mention of the Jack Kerouac School of Disembodied Poetics (they do cover the writing programs at the large state universities), which was surprising because it's an adequate section (it at least didn't overlook Dorn). Unlike The Great Plains, which besides being just generally thin, made no mention of Ronald Johnson or "Wichita Vortex Sutra".

A notable example of the historical creation of semifictional characters whose identity is then ripe for film exploitation is Calamity Jane. Calamity Jane, who was known to have lived in Virginia City, Montana, was the nickname of Martha Jane Cannary, a woman who dressed—and swore—like a man and who appeared on stage as "the Famous Woman Scout of the Wild West." Calamity Jane is perhaps less interesting as a historical figure than as a site of ambiguous representation in fiction and then in film. She was fictionalized in the dime novels of Edward L. Wheeler and then in such films as Will Bill Hickock (1923), Custer's Last Stand (1936), and two versions of The Plainsman (1936 and 1966). The best known screen portrayal, however, is that of Doris Day in the musical Calamity Jane (1953). As might be expected of a musical, Calamity Jane's foul language and heavy drinking are removed, her dubious morals are papered over, her buckskins are clean, and her character is reduced to, well, Doris Day: perky and full of vim. This gesture of simplifying and cleaning up history for the sake of the plot is common to Hollywood, but the case of Calamity Jane and the eponymous film gives us a measure of the Hollywood film's unreliability as a historical account. Calamity Jane suggests that film, whether documentary or fiction, drama or musical, treats and represents the Rocky Mountain region, but always at an aesthetic or rhetorical remove, so that we have to read between the lines or look for mythic structures hidden in the stories that are told and in the images that are re-presented.
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Calamity Jane received her name from a Captain Egan. During a battle with Indians, an arrow struck Egan, and Calamity Jane turned around, put Egan's body across her horse, and delivered him to safety. Upon waking, Egan humorously nicknamed the former Martha Canary, Calamity Jane.
    During her time in the Rockies, Calamity Jane served with several military units as a scout but also as a participant in numerous battles. Known for wearing men's clothes and her hard drinking, she rode one of the most dangerous Pony Express routes, encountering little opposition, and she saved a coach filled with six men, all too timid to grab the reins when their driver was killed. She is buried in Deadwood, South Dakota, next to Wild Bill Hickock, with whom she is said to have been in love.
—I'll have to wait for the revised pass of this book to see how "Cannary" vs. "Canary" plays out. (Googlefight gives the slight edge (of 159 hits) to "Martha Jane Cannary".)