EGREGIOUS IDENTITY POLITICS:
THE SAGA OF HEHAKA SAPA (NICHOLAS BLACK ELK) AND
FLAMING RAINBOW (JOHN GNEISENAU NEIHARDT)
NICHOLAS BLACK ELK JOHN GNEISENAU NEIHARDT
1863
December: As Nicholas Black Elk would later confide to John Gneisenau Neihardt, “I was born in the Moon of the Popping Trees on the Little Powder River in the Winter When the Four Crows Were Killed.” HDT WHAT? INDEX
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1873
Nicholas Black Elk later reported that it had been in this year, at the age of about ten, that he had his Great Vision in which the Powers of the World, the Grandfathers who were the powers of North, South, East, and West, granted him special abilities. He would allege to have been granted the center of his nation’s hoop.1
1876
June 25: At the Little Bighorn River, the action figures of George Armstrong Custer were overcome by the action figures of Sitting Bull.2
(The manner in which this went against a generally recognized game convention –that you are always supposed to let White win– would engage the fascination of generations of children.3)
Allegedly, Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa), although barely a teenager, had taken some part in this fighting on the Little Bighorn.
1. I will footnote here a strangely asymmetrical factoid. Although this is a world in which many must remain in the background while only a few get to be a focus of group attention, one would expect that when people have visions, the typical vision would amount to a non-self-legitimating instruction that the person to whom the vision has been granted ought to remain in the background rather than attempt to seize attention. Quite to the contrary, however, the typical vision that a vision-seeker accomplishes amounts to a self-legitimating instruction, one that entitles them to be a focal point rather than a follower. It would appear therefore that the visionaries among us, the instructors among us, are God’s favorites, and that God does not communicate so readily with those of us who are merely the objects of other’s instruction. –Or something like that. 2. According to an oral history I overheard in Minneapolis, Custer’s last words were:
“Well, at least we won’t have to go back through Fargo!”
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1881
January 8: John Greenleaf Neihardt was born near Sharpsburg, Illinois, 3rd child of Nicholas Nathan Neihardt and Alice Culler Neihardt.4
1882
Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa) became a tribal medicine man.
1886
Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa) went to Europe as a performer in the William Cody “Wild Western” Circus.
The family of young John Greenleaf Neihardt moved to a sod house in rural northwestern Kansas.
1888
The Victoria Hotel in Kansas City, Kansas was the first to boast a bath for every room.
The family of young John Greenleaf Neihardt moved from their rural Kansas sod house into Kansas City.
3. It would also engage the attention of military historians, since General George Armstrong Custer had left his 300-bullet-per- minute Gatling guns behind despite the fact that they could have been disassembled for horse transport. The military historians would suggest that that may have been a mistake.
4. The infant was given the middle name “Greenleaf” in honor of John Greenleaf Whittier (in adulthood he would change this to “Gneisenau” in honor of a German military officer who helped defeat Napoleon).
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1889
Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa) returned from Europe.
1891
The father having abandoned his family, 10-year-old John Greenleaf Neihardt moved with his mother and sisters from Kansas City, Kansas to Wayne, Nebraska.
1897
Sixteen-year-old John Gneisenau Neihardt received his BS degree from Nebraska Normal College and completed his 1st book, a treatise on the philosophy of Vedanta titled THE DIVINE ENCHANTMENT.
1900
With the publication of THE DIVINE ENCHANTMENT, country schoolteacher John Gneisenau Neihardt’s treatise about the philosophy of Vedanta, the 19-year-old author moved from Wayne to Bancroft, Nebraska. There he would work with a trader among the Omaha while becoming something of a white authority on their traditions and customs.
1903
John Gneisenau Neihardt became co-owner and editor of the weekly Bancroft, Nebraska Blade.
1904
December 6, Feast of Saint Nicholas: Black Elk (Hehaka Sapa) was baptized and gave up his native medicine. The Catholic priest gave him the Christian name Nicholas.
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1905
John Gneisenau Neihardt left the Nebraska Blade in order to devote himself to the writing of fiction and lyric verses.
1908
John Gneisenau Neihardt voyaged by canoe down the Missouri River (he would write this up in 1910 as THE RIVER AND I).
He proposed to and was accepted in marriage by a sculptor he had not yet met in person, his correspondent Mona Martinsen (the couple would produce four children — Enid, Sigurd, Hilda, and Alice).
1910
John Gneisenau Neihardt’s THE RIVER AND I.
1912
At the age of 31, John Gneisenau Neihardt began work on his A CYCLE OF THE WEST: THE SONG OF THREE FRIENDS, THE SONG OF HUGH GLASS, THE SONG OF JED SMITH, THE SONG OF THE INDIAN WARS, THE SONG OF THE MESSIAH. He would not complete this massive project until 1941. (Eventually, A CYCLE OF THE WEST would be described by Men and Women of Letters as “one of the 3,000 best books in the 3,000 years from Homer to Hemingway.”)
1919
John Gneisenau Neihardt was awarded the national prize of the Poetry Society.
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1920
Nicholas Black Elk went to the reservation hospital for treatment for his ulcers, and there received the Holy Sacrament. Evidently his baptism as a child had not “taken”? When his ulcers disappeared, with the encouragement of his friend Kills Brave, he became for the first time seriously involved with Roman Catholicism.
John Gneisenau Neihardt relocated with his family to Branson, Missouri (where they would reside until 1947).
1921
By legislative action, John Gneisenau Neihardt became Poet Laureate of Nebraska.
1925
John Gneisenau Neihardt became the 1st civilian member of the Order of Indian Wars of the United States (whatever that amounted to, it certainly sounds repulsive).
1926
John Gneisenau Neihardt became literary editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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1931
Nicholas Black Elk and John Gneisenau Neihardt met for the first time.(Since neither spoke more than a few
words of the other’s language, this must have been a teeny little bit like Paul meeting Jesus for the first time. For certain sure, Neihardt glommed onto the idea that Identity Politics was going to get him everywhere. This dude was an authentic grade A certified redskin — all the white poet would need to do was glom onto his voice, and then everybody would need to listen respectfully to the white poet. Can you spell S-E-L-F-L-E-G-I-T- I-M-A-T-I-O-N?)
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1932
John Gneisenau Neihardt. BLACK ELK SPEAKS, BEING THE LIFE STORY OF A HOLY MAN OF THE OGLALA SIOUX. NY: Morrow, 19325
1934
January 26, Friday: Samuel Goldwyn purchased the film rights to L. Frank Baum’s 1900 children’s novel THE WONDERFUL WIZARD OF OZ.
Germany and Poland entered into a non-aggression pact.
Prime Minister Camille Chautemps, despite the fact that his government was enjoying majorities in both houses, needed to resign due to his inability to cope with rightist street demonstrations (he was being accused in the streets of complicity with a corrupt bond dealer Alexandre Stavisky, who had recently died in police custody).
Nikola Uzunovic replaced Milan Srskic as prime minister of Yugoslavia.
Nicholas Black Elk wrote (or created in collaboration with his daughter Lucy) a letter complaining about the manner in which his life had been truncated and misrepresented by John Gneisenau Neihardt in BLACK ELK SPEAKS, BEING THE LIFE STORY OF A HOLY MAN OF THE OGLALA SIOUX:
5. No less popular an authority on native stuff la-de-da than Dee Brown, white perpetrator of BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE, would endorse this new book: “Thousands of books have been written about Indians, and there are many fine ones. But if you could only preserve one book about the American Indian, it would have to be BLACK ELK SPEAKS.” This sort of stuff was Dee’s cup of tea!
According to Alan R. Velie “It is inconceivable that Neihardt knew nothing about Black Elk’s religious life as a Christian. It seems rather that he had little interest in it, and pretended that it did not exist.”
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Holy Rosary Mission Pine Ridge, S. Dak. January 26, 1934 Black Elk Speaks Again — A Last Word I shake hands with my white friends. Listen, I speak some true words. A white man made a book and told what I had spoken of olden times, but the new times he left out. So I speak again, a last word. I am now an old man.... In the last thirty years I am different from what the white man wrote about me. I am a Christian.... I say the Apostle’s Creed and I believe every word of it.
In a 2d letter this would be added: Three years ago in 1932 a white man named John G. Neihardt came up to my place whom I have never met before and asked me to make a story book with him.... He promised me that if he completed and publish [sic] this book he was to pay half of the price of each book. [He told me] he hasn’t seen a cent from the book which we made. By this I know he was deceiving me about the whole business. I also asked to put an the end of the story that I was not a pagan but have converted into the Catholic Church in which I work as a catechist for more than 25 years. I’ve quit all these pagan works. But he didn’t mention this. Cash talks.
1938
John Gneisenau Neihardt left off being the literary editor of the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.
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1941
John Gneisenau Neihardt’s A CYCLE OF THE WEST: THE SONG OF THREE FRIENDS, THE SONG OF HUGH GLASS, THE SONG OF JED SMITH, THE SONG OF THE INDIAN WARS, THE SONG OF THE MESSIAH. (Eventually, this effort would be described by Men and Women of Letters as “one of the 3,000 best books in the 3,000 years from Homer to Hemingway.” Have you ever read it? Have you ever so much as heard of it? Have you ever heard of any organization called “Men and Women of Letters”? –Extra points if you have ever so much as driven through Missouri. :-)
1942
John Gneisenau Neihardt became an employee of the BIA, the Bureau of Indian Affairs, and was commissioned to write a cultural history of the Dakota (this would appear in 1951 as WHEN THE TREE FLOWERED).
1948
At the age of 67, John Gneisenau Neihardt began to offer a class titled “Epic America” at the University of Missouri.
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1949
John Gneisenau Neihardt became poet-in-residence and lecturer in English at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.
NICHOLAS BLACK ELK JOHN GNEISENAU NEIHARDT
1950
Nicholas Black Elk died on the Pine Ridge Reservation in South Dakota.
1951
John Gneisenau Neihardt’s WHEN THE TREE FLOWERED.
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1953
Joseph Epes Brown’s THE SACRED PIPE (this photograph is of Nicholas Black Elk near his death in 1948).
1961
A bronze bust of John Gneisenau Neihardt was positioned at the Nebraska State Capitol building in Lincoln, Nebraska.
1963
John Gneisenau Neihardt was awarded the gold medal as foremost poet of the nation by the Poetry Center in New York.6
1966
John Gneisenau Neihardt retired from being poet-in-residence and lecturer in English at the University of Missouri in Columbia, Missouri.
6. Unfortunately, this reputation as a poet would not prove long-lasting.
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1968
By proclamation of the Governor of Nebraska, the 1st Sunday of each August was designated as Neihardt Day in Nebraska. During this year, also, Poets Laureate International awarded John Gneisenau Neihardt the citation and title of Prairie Poet Laureate of America.7
1969
Age 88, his eyesight failing, John Gneisenau Neihardt retired in Lincoln, Nebraska.
1971
John Gneisenau Neihardt’s ALL IS BUT A BEGINNING. When he appeared on The Dick Cavett Show on TV, by all accounts he wow’d ’em.
1972
Spring: Sally McCluskey’s “BLACK ELK SPEAKS: And So Does John Neihardt” (Western American Literature 6: 231- 242).
In a plan to divide and conquer the Democrats and cause them to nominate to run against him the candidate whom he might most readily defeat at the polls, the aides of President Richard Milhouse Nixon played various dirty tricks including the forgery of letters expressly calculated to produce ill-will.
1973
November 3, Saturday: John Gneisenau Neihardt died in Columbia, Missouri at the age of 92, in the home of his daughter, Hilda Neihardt Petri. During is lifetime he had produced some 26 volumes of poetry, fiction, and philosophy. His ashes would be mingled with those of his deceased wife Mona Martinsen Neihardt, taken up in an airplane, and allowed to blow into the winds above the Missouri River.
7. Unfortunately, this reputation as a poet would not prove long-lasting.
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1979
Michael Castro described the “Poetic License in BLACK ELK SPEAKS” at the annual meeting of the Modern Literature Association.
The corpse of Charlie Chaplin having been dug up and absconded with in Vaud, Switzerland to be held for ransom, when it was recovered it was reburied beneath a layer of concrete. DIGGING UP THE DEAD
In a related piece of news, the tomb of Pharaoh Rameses XI (Menmaatresetepenptah) (1,102 BCE-1,069 BCE) in the Valley of the Kings (#4) was re-excavated by John Romer (1941- ).
1982
Posthumously, John Gneisenau Neihardt was designated “Poet Laureate in Perpetuity” of the state of Nebraska. –He had done Identity Politics so well that he was going to be encouraged to get away with it forever.
1989
G. Thomas Couser’s ALTERED EGOS: AUTHORITY IN AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY (NY: Oxford UP): Is the voice of the Indian really heard if it is attended to only when it concedes the inevitability of its eventual silencing — that is, when its discourse confesses, under duress, that aboriginal culture is doomed, and hence somehow inferior? ... scholars ... have increasingly acknowledged that Nicholas Black Elk and John Gneisenau Neihardt had different notions of, and objectives for, the dictations that resulted from their meeting.... The white writer envisioned the end result as autobiography, whereas the Lakota visionary saw it as communal or sacred history.... Neihardt’s decisive, costly misstep was his failure to honor –perhaps even to understand– this motive.... Unfortunately, Neihardt seems to have viewed his adoption by Black Elk as licensing, rather than restricting, him. Ultimately, his disposition of Black Elk’s narrative violated the ritual context in which it began.... If biography is the literary equivalent of murder –character assassination in print– and autobiography the literary equivalent of suicide –the taking of one’s own life in words– as Henry Adams suggested, then collaborative autobiography may be a kind of literary mercy-killing — the taking of one person’s life, by mutual agreement and prearrangement, by another. With literary as with literal euthanasia, however, the quality of mercy is sometimes strained: it is not always clear whose interests the act serves.
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When the already equivocal act involves members of different – and historically hostile– races, then the arrangement becomes especially charged.... [T]he entire text ... is an act of bicultural ventriloquism.... When Black Elk relinquished his precious vision to Neihardt in the hope that he could translate it intact out of the reservation, on which tribal religion had been literally outlawed, he surrendered it to a process whose outcome he could neither foresee nor control. Ultimately, Neihardt’s narrative remains confined within the invisible reservations of its own unconscious ethnocentrism. What is surprising is not that the narrative is tainted with ethnocentrism, but that it passed for authentic for so long. The reason for this is perhaps not far to seek: the truth of Indian- white relations is so intolerable that we seek desperately to deny it. Lacking historical instances of harmonious relations between the races, we invent literary ones.
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RACISM AND THE NEIHARDT AGENDA OF NATIVISM
Nicholas Black Elk in actuality had been: • a faithful reservation Roman Catholic • a performer in the William Cody “Wild Western” Circus • a world traveler, visiting not only the East Coast but also England and Europe • a poser in costume for tourist postcards (I possess one of these postcards) • a quoter of Bible verses who repeatedly quoted verses at John Gneisenau Neihardt (all of which this “white amanuensis” would ruthlessly suppressed as uncongenial to the nativist-wise-old- primitive-red-man persona which this author needed to fabricate in order to perpetrate his own religious agenda)
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In real life, Hehaka Sapa (Nicholas Black Elk) had not taken this misrepresentation lying down. He had written indignantly, in great embarrassment, in English, protesting the manner in which he was being falsified by “Flaming Rainbow” John Gneisenau Neihardt in the 1932 publication, BLACK ELK SPEAKS, BEING THE LIFE STORY OF A HOLY MAN OF THE OGLALA SIOUX. Also, we now have on the record Neihardt’s own late-life oral confession. Unfortunately it would appear that, in our for-profit bookstores, truths are not leaping off the bookshelves and queuing up at the cash registers nearly so eagerly as good-sounding crowd-pleasing misrepresentations are leaping off the bookshelves and queuing up at the cash registers. Ka-ching!
NICHOLAS BLACK ELK JOHN GNEISENAU NEIHARDT
There is not so much reason for us to change our perception of Black Elk, who seems to have been a decent and honest and religious person who made no more attempt to conceal his having been a circus performer than he made to conceal the fact that he was a faithful Catholic, a fact which indeed he “wore on his sleeve,” as for us to change our perception of visionaries such as Neihardt. It was not Neihardt who was the decent and honorable and religious man who was being misrepresented; it was the self-privileging Neihardt who was using someone else, someone who because of his race did not have equal access to the media, to create a media fabrication.
There has been a similar debate surrounding the representations created of Jesus by “Mark,” “Matthew,” “Luke,” and “John” — Jesus could not deny anything that was being said about him, because he had been crucified and was dead. There has been a similar debate raging for awhile about Carlos Casteneda’s “Don Juan” which has now been satisfactorily resolved by coming to regard Castaneda as an unrelenting fabricator — “Don Juan” could not deny anything that was being said about him, as he did not exist. In the case of Nicholas Black Elk, he did exist and he lived long enough to deny and protest on the record what Neihardt had been writing about him.
His letter of repudiation was both very general and very specific. It was generally to the effect that for many
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years he had been a lay counselor or “celebrant” of the Catholic faith, after his return from England and his departure from the Wild West show of which he had been a part, and feared that all this nativist wise savage stuff would impact upon his Christian testimony. His specific objection was to the manner in which Neihardt, in order to portray him as some kind of untainted primitive font of intuitive wisdom, had polished all BIBLE quotations out of his discourse.
It is illuminating, to seek out what specific citations from the Neihardt corpus white people have been focusing in on the very most as primitive wisdom sayings, as evidenced by quotation counts. A number of the comments which Neihardt later admitted were his own peculiar contribution, turn out to have been precisely those comments which white people have found most congenial and most typical of what they mistakenly understood to be “Black Elk’s primitive wisdom.” Two examples of fave white-people quotes are “This they tell, and whether it happened so or not I do not know; but if you think about it, you can see that it is true” and “But if the vision was true and mighty, as I know, it is true and mighty yet; for such things are of the spirit, and it is in the darkness of their eyes that men get lost.” I do not know whether these words had been created by Hehaka Sapa or by Flaming Rainbow, but to me such comments sound almighty fishy. They sound like the sort of self-legitimating words which a fabricator like Neihardt, intent on promulgating his own musings through the authority of a native-sage persona or mask or mouthpiece, would include in his corpus — to use later in his own self-defense. What these comments mean to me is “It is not wrong to tell a lie if in so lying in an insignificant manner, what I am doing is revealing a higher truth to which, otherwise, people would not be willing to attend.” And that, I’m sorry, seems to me to be in the same league with “I’m going to steal this so someone else doesn’t have a chance to” and “Let’s execute murderers so that people will be able to understand that it is always wrong to take human life.”
In addition to G. Thomas Couser’s ALTERED EGOS: AUTHORITY IN AMERICAN AUTOBIOGRAPHY, the following more recent works may be worth perusing:
Black Elk, Wallace H. and Lyon, William S. BLACK ELK: THE SACRED WAYS OF A LAKOTA (San Francisco CA: Harper & Row) NICHOLAS BLACK ELK
Holler, Clyde. BLACK ELK’S RELIGION: THE SUN DANCE AND LAKOTA CATHOLICISM. Syracuse NY: Syracuse UP, 1995 NICHOLAS BLACK ELK
The materials on the “Flaming Rainbow” Neihardt publishing agenda are very widely distributed, and not at all recent. Those who pay attention to this sort of racial agenda of nativism already know all this, have known for a very long time. The problem seems to be a very general one, that discredited works which sell well remain on the shelves of our Borders, and our Barnes & Noble bookstores for a long, long time, misleading generation after generation of casual browsers and seekers after easy spiritual gratifications. There doesn’t seem to be any way –except continuing higher education in the Humanities– for people to come to be aware of the problems of these well-selling but exceedingly problematic books. We must simply be alert, and aware that the mission of the public bookstore is to generate revenue for its owner through the availability of well-selling titles — rather than to share the truth.
Beware. Racism does not consist simply in hating those of races other than one’s own. It may also consist in adoring them falsely, while “othering” them by accusing them of possessing a discrete variety of wisdom — a discrete variety of wisdom which apparently one may acquire merely by the hue of one’s skin.
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1990
Wallace H. Black Elk’s and William S. Lyon’s BLACK ELK: THE SACRED WAYS OF A LAKOTA (San Francisco CA: Harper & Row).8
NICHOLAS BLACK ELK
8. Black Elk, Wallace H. and Lyon, William S. BLACK ELK: THE SACRED WAYS OF A LAKOTA (San Francisco CA: Harper & Row) NICHOLAS BLACK ELK
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1995
9 Clyde Holler’s BLACK ELK’S RELIGION: THE SUN DANCE AND LAKOTA CATHOLICISM.
NICHOLAS BLACK ELK
2004
Alan R. Velie’s “BLACK ELK SPEAKS, Sort Of: The Shaping of an Indian Autobiography” (LISA e-journal). NICHOLAS BLACK ELK
2012
Winter/Spring: In the Thoreau Society Bulletin, #277, Michael Frederick attempted to explicate Thoreau’s parable of the lost hound, bay horse, and turtle-dove by way of the old one about the group of blind men in India, attempting to describe an elephant, in the course of a recitation of Nicholas Black Elk’s native wisdom (“seeing in a sacred manner”) which he picked up from an incautious reading of John Gneisenau Neihardt. BLACK ELK SPEAKS, BEING THE LIFE STORY OF A HOLY MAN OF THE OGLALA SIOUX (NY: Morrow, 1932):
9. Holler, Clyde. BLACK ELK’S RELIGION: THE SUN DANCE AND LAKOTA CATHOLICISM. Syracuse NY: Syracuse UP, 1995 NICHOLAS BLACK ELK
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Experiences like Black Elk’s are necessarily obscure in their retelling. Thoreau famously reflects upon losing the hound, the bay horse, and the turtle dove. You would be more likely to find the hound, and then the bay horse, but as soon as you find one, you lose the other, and the turtle dove is perched behind some distant cloud. It’s a bit like the blind man trying to describe the elephant.
WALDEN: In any weather, at any hour of the day or night, I have been anxious to improve the nick of time, and notch it on my stick too; to stand on the meeting of two eternities, the past and future, which is precisely the present moment; to toe that line. You will pardon some obscurities, for there are more secrets in my trade than in most men’s, and yet not voluntarily kept, but inseparable from its very nature. I would gladly tell all that I know about it, and never paint “No Admittance” on my gate. I long ago lost a hound, a bay horse, and a turtle-dove, and am still on their trail. Many are the travellers I have spoken concerning them, describing their tracks and what calls they answered to. I have met one or two who had heard the hound, and the tramp of the horse, and even seen the dove disappear behind a cloud, and they seemed as anxious to recover them as if they had lost them themselves. To anticipate, not the sunrise and the dawn merely, but, if possible, Nature herself! How many mornings, summer and winter, before yet any neighbor was stirring about his business, have I been about mine! No doubt many of my townsmen have met me returning from this enterprise, farmers starting for Boston in the twilight, or woodchoppers going to their work. It is true, I never assisted the sun materially in his rising, but, doubt not, it was of the last importance only to be present at it.
The The WALDEN other parable analyses
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(Clearly, Mike needs to be advised to reread BLACK ELK SPEAKS paying attention to the fact that the author Neihardt is a white man who is pretending to channel the thoughts of a native man whose Dakota language he does not comprehend —and then go back and study the old Indian tale about the group of blind men experiencing the elephant sufficiently to pick up the essential detail that its wisdom entirely depends upon this being not one blind man but a group —and then perhaps go back and reread page 17 of WALDEN, grasping this time that whatever the author Thoreau is up to in this passage, he is definitely not attempting to convey a wolf, a goose, and a bag of beans across Walden Pond in a rowboat.)
John Gneisenau Neihardt. BLACK ELK SPEAKS, BEING THE LIFE STORY OF A HOLY MAN OF THE OGLALA SIOUX. NY: Morrow, 193210
10. No less popular an authority on native stuff la-de-da than Dee Brown, white perpetrator of BURY MY HEART AT WOUNDED KNEE, would endorse this new book: “Thousands of books have been written about Indians, and there are many fine ones. But if you could only preserve one book about the American Indian, it would have to be BLACK ELK SPEAKS.” This sort of stuff was Dee’s cup of tea!
According to Alan R. Velie “It is inconceivable that Neihardt knew nothing about Black Elk’s religious life as a Christian. It seems rather that he had little interest in it, and pretended that it did not exist.”
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COPYRIGHT NOTICE: In addition to the property of others, such as extensive quotations and reproductions of images, this “read-only” computer file contains a great deal of special work product of Austin Meredith, copyright 2013. Access to these interim materials will eventually be offered for a fee in order to recoup some of the costs of preparation. My hypercontext button invention which, instead of creating a hypertext leap through hyperspace —resulting in navigation problems— allows for an utter alteration of the context within which one is experiencing a specific content already being viewed, is claimed as proprietary to Austin Meredith — and therefore freely available for use by all. Limited permission to copy such files, or any material from such files, must be obtained in advance in writing from the “Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project, 833 Berkeley St., Durham NC 27705. Please contact the project at
“It’s all now you see. Yesterday won’t be over until tomorrow and tomorrow began ten thousand years ago.” – Remark by character “Garin Stevens” in William Faulkner’s INTRUDER IN THE DUST
Prepared: June 16, 2013
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NICHOLAS BLACK ELK HEHAKA SAPA ARRGH AUTOMATED RESEARCH REPORT
GENERATION HOTLINE
This stuff presumably looks to you as if it were generated by a human. Such is not the case. Instead, upon someone’s request we have pulled it out of the hat of a pirate that has grown out of the shoulder of our pet parrot “Laura” (depicted above). What these chronological lists are: they are research reports compiled by ARRGH algorithms out of a database of data modules which we term the Kouroo Contexture. This is data mining. To respond to such a request for information, we merely push a button.
24 Copyright 2013 Austin Meredith HDT WHAT? INDEX
NICHOLAS BLACK ELK HEHAKA SAPA
Commonly, the first output of the program has obvious deficiencies and so we need to go back into the data modules stored in the contexture and do a minor amount of tweaking, and then we need to punch that button again and do a recompile of the chronology — but there is nothing here that remotely resembles the ordinary “writerly” process which you know and love. As the contents of this originating contexture improve, and as the programming improves, and as funding becomes available (to date no funding whatever has been needed in the creation of this facility, the entire operation being run out of pocket change) we expect a diminished need to do such tweaking and recompiling, and we fully expect to achieve a simulation of a generous and untiring robotic research librarian. Onward and upward in this brave new world.
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“Stack of the Artist of Kouroo” Project 25