This is yet another page from CALAMITY and my own personal favorite so far.

* * *

It’s my day off. I’m hanging out, playing with my re-animated laptop, and listening to the soundtrack from Jackie Brown.

I saw the movie a year or two ago, but I got the DVD set out from library last week, and I’ve watched it three times since then. The acting is fantastic, the soundtrack kicks ass, the characters are warm and living and breathing. Quentin Tarantino’s best movie, hands down.

It’s based on Elmore Leonard’s Rum Punch, and just like any Elmore Leonard plot, as Martin Amis has noted, there’s a big bag full of money and everybody’s trying to get at it. Within this framework, the characters come alive. It’s a simple, genius formula.

Here’s a bit from Elmore Leonard’s website:

When Quentin Tarantino was a kid, he stole a copy of Elmore Leonard’s The Switch and got caught. Unrepentent, he later went back to the same store and stole the book again. Elmore Leonard was a beacon in the direction that he would soon head in his films. He wrote a movie directed by Tony Scott called True Romance which he said was “an Elmore Leonard novel that he didn’t write.” It certainly is an homage; it even opens in Detroit. After Reservoir Dogs came out, Elmore wrote Rum Punch which reprises the three main characters from The Switch. Tarantino read it and wanted to buy it but didn’t have the money. Elmore and his agent Michael Siegel offered to hold it for him. When he did acquire the book, Tarantino did not contact Elmore Leonard for a long time. When he did he said he was afraid to call. Elmore said, “Why because you changed the name of my book and cast Pam Greir in the lead? He said, “That’s Ok, just make a good movie.”

Dutch has said that he thought it was by far the best adaptation of his work. The DVD set includes some great interview with Leonard. (It also includes the hilarious, “Chicks Who Love Guns,” which QT wrote and directed specifically for the film.)

Anyways, if you haven’t seen Jackie Brown or read Leonard, you’re in for a treat.

THE BELIEVER has an article this month on “literary tattoos,” but what’s most interesting about it is the stuff about “our nation’s first tattooed white woman,” Olive Oatman, who was “released in California after four years’ captivity with Mojave Indians. Oatman was ‘repatriated’ (probably against her will) in 1856 and resurfaced wearing a tribal tattoo on her chin, which riveted the American public.”

Oatman, thirteen, and her younger sister, Mary Ann, seven, were captured in 1851 by Yavapais Indians who killed her family in southern Arizona (then Mexico) as they were traveling west on a wagon train from Illinois. The girls lived as slaves to the Yavapais for a year, until the Mojaves, who felt sorry for them, bought them and installed them in the family of a subchief, who treated them as his own. They were tattooed as part of a typical Mojave puberty ritual that guaranteed their entrance into heaven. Mary Ann died during a famine, but Olive lived for four years among the Mojaves until the U.S. Army rescued her—by force—in early 1856. Tanned, tattooed, and wearing only a bark skirt, she was virtually unrecognizable as a white woman when she was delivered, on the east bank of the Colorado River. As her rescuers approached, she sat in the sand, covered her face, and cried.

There’s a bunch of great stuff on Oatman, in the article, and I highly suggest you read it. There’s also an Elmore Leonard connection:

It was, oddly enough, crime writer Elmore Leonard who would return to Oatman and her tattoo in his 1982 Western story, “The Tonto Woman.” (Oatman’s face even appeared on the cover of his 1998 collection, The Tonto Woman and Other Stories.) Leonard, who had clearly done his historical homework, modified the details of her history by marrying her off before her kidnapping (in reality she was only thirteen when she was abducted), giving her twelve (not four) years with the Mojaves, and making her husband a cold, rich rancher who forces her, on return, to live alone in the desert instead of on his ranch with him. (By contrast, Oatman went to school and married a man she met postcaptivity).

But the main detail Leonard expands upon is her tattoo. His captive, Sarah Isham, asks the Mojaves to tattoo not just her chin, but also her cheeks: “I told them if you’re going to do it, do it all the way. Not like a blue dribble,” she recalls to Ruben Vega, a Mexican horse thief poised to steal her husband’s cattle. Impressed that she insisted on her own marks, he tells her to remember, “There is no one else in the world like you.” A fellow outlaw, he even touches the tattoos and says, “You’re in there, aren’t you? Behind these little bars. They don’t seem like much. Not enough to hold you.”

I read “The Tonto Woman” way back in early undergrad when I was trying to get into Leonard, and loved it. Read the article, then go get THE TONTO WOMAN.

All rules, of course, can be broken:

-adapted from “Easy on the Hooptedoodle,” first published in the NYTimes

click here to hear Dutch read the whole article

…the essence of Elmore is to be found in his use of the present participle. What this means, in effect, is that he has discovered a way of slowing down and suspending the English sentence - or let’s say the American sentence, because Mr. Leonard is as American as jazz. Instead of writing ‘Warren Ganz III lived up in Manalapan, Palm Beach County’, Mr. Leonard writes: ‘Warren Ganz III, living up in Manalapan, Palm Beach County’. He writes, ‘Bobby saying’, and then opens quotes. He writes, ‘Dawn saying’, and then opens quotes. We are not in the imperfect tense (Dawn was saying) or the present tense (Dawn says) or the historic present (Dawn said). We are in a kind of marijuana tense (Dawn saying), creamy, wandering, weak-verbed. Such sentences seem to open up a lag in time, through which Mr. Leonard easily slides, gaining entry to his players’ hidden minds. He doesn’t just show you what these people say and do. He shows you where they breathe.”

- Martin Amis’ review of RIDING THE RAP