Ghost Town Research Articles

The Shortest Distance Between Me and the World

THE SHORTEST DISTANCE BETWEEN ME AND THE WORLO/Mark Kline OURTOWNHASnostreets.Pathswindthroughit.We'resurrounded on three sides by a city residential area. Three long narrow streets are aU that separate us from the city. One side of our town ends at the edge of a city cemetery. I love our town. It used to be an area of garden plots for people living Ui the city. People liked it so much that they began building small houses on the plots. People planted their lives here. The cemetery's caretakers call our town the nut town. One house is an overturned yacht huU on a taU foundation. It looks like a sculpture. Another house uses the shell of a rocket for an antenna tower. We caU the cemetery the ghost town. Some of us walk or bike or take a bus to get somewhere in the city. Some of us own cars and park them on the narrow streets surrounding us. My sister Asia and I don't own a car. Asia bikes to work. When I need to go somewhere she calls the handicap service. I use a wheelchati. The platform lifts on the sides of their vans make me dizzy. I don't Uke leaving our town. Asia is looking over my shoulder at my laptop. She asks me what Tm writing. Tm writing about our town. She asks me who Tm writing to. Tm writing to the world. She says that my writing sounds too stiff and that I should write as if Tm talking. Why should I write as if Tm talking? I can't talk. Asia says don't be a smart-ass. We've just finished eating. She keeps an eye on me at breakfast and supper. I have trouble swallowing. Maryam comes at noon. She's Iranian. She keeps an eye on me at lunch. She's a whiz at cleaning. Asia says thank Godfrey for that. Dad used to say "Thank Godfrey" all the time. He didn't like saying "God." Asia says Dad thought God was a butler or something. Our house is right next to one of the streets surrounding our town. People often walkby and stop to admire our house's wetid turrets. If Tm sitting outby our fence sometimes they'U ask if I Uke tiving here. I whip out my laptop and write that we love living here. When I srrule people don't always know Tm smiting. Sometimes I write a siruley. If I don't feel the energy to smile I don't write a smiley. Life can be this simple if you let it be. More women than men walk by. Some women stroll by pushing baby carriages. Others walk in patis and speak seriously to each other. The Missouri Review · 9 Asia says it's amazing how much I get laid considering I can't talk. I let my laptop do my talking for me. Asia says my laptop is a real hunk aU right. Not all women go for hunks. She says that some women come from the cemetery and they're vulnerable and horny from grief. I don't mind helping them. She says she doesn't doubt that one second. She says Tm an unprincipled little bastard. Then she gets up and starts mowing the lawn. Asia is wrong. I get laid about twice a year. Women taking their grief for a walk never notice me behind our fence. My last lay was a caretaker at the cemetery. She coaxed me into bringing my laptop along to bed. After a whUe she told me what to write. It was things she wanted me to want her to do. I didn't mind even though none of it was exactly true. Beggars can't be choosers. I love our town. I love small yards filled with tribes of flowers with hardly any space to walk. I love window shades ofAfrican beads. I love the row of porch windows painted over with a gallery of Norse gods. I love our mailman who stuffs the mail In my wheelchair's side rack without a word. I love one-story houses with a million angles...

Mysterious Crafts: The Figure of Printing in the Poems of Greg Delanty

For critic Sven Birkerts?author of The Gutenberg Elegies (1994)?the print ed word stands on verge of extinction, a casualty of electronic media and information technology. But for Irish poet Greg Delanty (b. 1958), who grew up in Cork in a family of printers, metal and ink of hot-metal print ing exert a continuing fascination and offer a fertile ground for metaphor. In The Hellbox (1998), Delanty's recent collection of poems, figure of printing becomes at once a conduit for memory, a vehicle for exploration of immi grant identity, and an emblem for poet's social role. Recalling the old names for printing; / The Mysterious Craft or simply The Mystery Delanty reclaims for craft an inherent dignity and an inveigling strangeness.1 The Hellbox is Delanty's fourth collection of poems. In theme and tone it extends enterprise o? American Wake (1995), his previous collection, but it also represents greater maturity of style and perspective. About a third of eighteen poems in The Hellbox reflect, fondly but realistically, on print shop where Delanty's father was foreman and poet was a lowly apprentice. Other poems explore Delanty's American experience, including his visit to a ghost town in New Hampshire, a stroll under cathedral arches / of Brooklyn Bridge that's strung like a harp, (HB 33) and a meandering trip through Ver mont with a fellow poet, a parody... of Brendan or Odysseus and their muti nous crews (HB 28). In tones ranging from buoyant to sad to bitter, Delanty addresses a spectrum of personal themes, most prominently loss of his father, humiliation in childhood, rejection in adulthood, emigrant identity, and?not least?the estate of poetry, contending at one point, that awesome poetry should be dumped (HB 42). Although Delanty gravitates toward sonnet, The Hellbox also contains poems in open, American-influenced form, among them title poem, which throws off fetters of meter, adopts a feck less tone, and rambles on for ten pages, exulting in its own asymmetries and imperfections. Common to many of poems is a fusion of conventional form with a vernacular diction which can embrace words as earthy as jawing, shagging, and shebang. And common to nearly all is conceit of printing,

Crisis urbana y respuesta institucional en dos megaciudades. Lecciones del manejo de la devastación sísmica en las ciudades de México y Los Ángeles

Apoyado en un marco analítico derivado tanto de la teoría institucional como de la teoría de la planeación urbana, este estudio examina los resultados de dos programas creados para restablecer el orden y la estabilidad después de una situación de crisis urbana. Éstos son: el Programa de Renovación Habitacional Popular en la Ciudad de México, establecido luego del terremoto de 1985, y el Programa de Ghost Town establecido en la ciudad de Los Ángeles, California, después del terremoto de 1994. Ambos han sido encomiados por su accionar rápido, su financiamiento masivo, el mejoramiento de las condiciones preexistentes, la participación comunitaria, y la coordinación institucional. El argumento principal de este estudio es que las instituciones de planeación urbana en ambas ciudades fueron efectivas durante la crisis provocada por los sismos, principalmente porque se apoyaron en rutinas institucionales: un tipo de procedimiento que suele ser denostado o subestimado porque tiene la reputación de ser extremadamente burocrático. Las instituciones de planeación en la Ciudad de México y Los Ángeles respondieron con efectividad porque fueron capaces de adaptar rutinas institucionales, en forma rápida y eficiente, a circunstancias imprevistas y dramáticas. Planteado como un estudio de caso, este análisis se propone clarificar y explicar la dinámica de la planeación urbana en un contexto de crisis de dos maneras: Primero, los estudios de caso demuestran que un análisis institucional explícito y sistemático ayuda a entender mejor qué elementos dan buenos resultados en material de planeación urbana, y por qué. Segundo, el análisis institucional muestra bajo qué condiciones pueden servir las rutinas institucionales como herramientas poderosas y efectivas para resolver situaciones imprevistas sin importar el contexto sociopolítico dominante.

Big Horn Medicine Wheel: Ghost Town and Natural Machine of the Gods

The Big Horn Medicine Wheel (BHMW) is a living ghost town. It is also a natural machine used to commune with the spiritual world. It has been serving in such capacity for hundreds, maybe thousands, of years.

“Do you Really Live Here?” Thoughts on Insider Research

********** One summer Saturday I was sitting at the living-room table in a run-down old house in the gold-mining ghost town of Bodie, a California State Historic Park located in the high-altitude desert east of the Sierra Nevada. Signs on the outside walls of the house identified it as an "Employees' residence." A nearby number post linked the building to the park's self-guided-tour brochure, which described it as "the Gregory House" and detailed the lives of the home's historic inhabitants. I was busy writing when small running footsteps approached: children, some of the 200,000 or so annual visitors to Bodie. A brown-haired girl of about eight and her towheaded kid brother strained to pierce the relative darkness inside the house. What they saw was me. Turning away from the window, the girl hollered to her parents, "There's a guy in there! And he's dead! Lie died writing!" Being taken for dead--and for a man--may seem shocking to some, but this was not the only time that I was seen as a ghost--or as a man--during the fourteen summers that I worked and did fieldwork in Bodie. (1) But experiences like this one led me to contemplate the interactions between my physical presence and my role as insider in the public place that I was trying to study. As a researcher I was interested in how visitors and staff understood Bodie's past and made room for it in their present, in how they made meaning in and from the landscape. But as a staff member and part of the Bodie community, I myself was part of that process. An important aspect of my work became understanding how I was a part of my own research and negotiating the challenges that being an insider" presented. STUDYING YOUR OWN COMMUNITY Because gaining perspective on something you're in the middle of poses distinct challenges, texts on qualitative research methods often advise students not to study communities or situations of which they are already part. Robert Bogdan and Sari Biklen warn that since qualitative researchers regularly focus on the taken for granted, starting with an insider's perspective can make research harder rather than easier (1998, 52). "You may fail to notice pertinent questions or issues because of the inability to step back from a situation and fully assess the circumstances," add Rob Kitchin and Nicholas Tate (2000, 29). The insider researcher may be "over-familiar with the community," leading to "too much participation at the expense of observation," cautions Mel Evans (1988, 205). Furthermore, that can lead to other problems: Anselm Strauss warns that those who literally "live" a study may "know too much experientially and descriptively about the phenomena they are studying and so [end up] literally flooded with m aterials" (1987, 29). Those with a preexisting role can find that role in contradiction with the separate status of researcher; the transition between roles may cause personal difficulties; and ethical issues may arise when studying coworkers, particularly if a researcher is in a position of power over them (Bogdan and Biklen 1998, 52). Flying in the face of all that good advice, some researchers, like me, find topics close to home, or close to our hearts--topics so compelling we can't leave them alone--and we try to find ways to use our "insider" status to help, not hinder, insights. Of course, the distinction between insiders and outsiders is not a simple one. (2) When anthropologists are "adopted" by their communities, they may be criticized for "going native" (Tedlock 2000), and warnings against this are probably even more prevalent than are those against studying one's own community (Strauss 1987; Reinharz 1992). To me, the difference seems significant: Those who "go native" begin as outsiders, whereas those of us who study our own communities start as insiders and are "natives" before the research begins--a distinction not widely acknowledged in the literature. Some writers who describe "complete participation" (Kearns 2000) or a "complete member researcher" (Ellis and Bochner 2000) fail to distinguish between researchers who start by studying their own communities and the really quite distinct circumstance of growing deeply involved in a community after research is begun. …

Unsettled country: Reading the Australian ghost town

Unsettled country: Reading the Australian ghost town

"Do You Really Live Here?" Thoughts on Insider Research

********** One summer Saturday I was sitting at living-room table in a run-down old house in gold-mining ghost town of Bodie, a California State Historic Park located in high-altitude desert east of Sierra Nevada. Signs on outside walls of house identified it as an Employees' residence. A nearby number post linked building to park's self-guided-tour brochure, which described it as the Gregory House and detailed lives of home's historic inhabitants. I was busy writing when small running footsteps approached: children, some of 200,000 or so annual visitors to Bodie. A brown-haired girl of about eight and her towheaded kid brother strained to pierce relative darkness inside house. What they saw was me. Turning away from window, girl hollered to her parents, There's a guy in there! And he's dead! Lie died writing! Being taken for dead--and for a man--may seem shocking to some, but this was not only time that I was seen as a ghost--or as a man--during fourteen summers that I worked and did fieldwork in Bodie. (1) But experiences like this one led me to contemplate interactions between my physical presence and my role as in public place that I was trying to study. As a I was interested in how visitors and staff understood Bodie's past and made room for it in their present, in how they made meaning in and from landscape. But as a staff member and part of Bodie I myself was part of that process. An important aspect of my work became understanding how I was a part of my own research and negotiating challenges that being an presented. STUDYING YOUR OWN COMMUNITY Because gaining perspective on something you're in middle of poses distinct challenges, texts on qualitative research methods often advise students not to study communities or situations of which they are already part. Robert Bogdan and Sari Biklen warn that since qualitative researchers regularly focus on taken for granted, starting with an insider's perspective can make research harder rather than easier (1998, 52). You may fail to notice pertinent questions or issues because of inability to step back from a situation and fully assess circumstances, add Rob Kitchin and Nicholas Tate (2000, 29). The may be over-familiar with community, leading to much at expense of observation, cautions Mel Evans (1988, 205). Furthermore, that can lead to other problems: Anselm Strauss warns that those who literally live a study may know too much experientially and descriptively about phenomena they are studying and so [end up] literally flooded with m aterials (1987, 29). Those with a preexisting role can find that role in contradiction with separate status of researcher; transition between roles may cause personal difficulties; and ethical issues may arise when studying coworkers, particularly if a is in a position of power over them (Bogdan and Biklen 1998, 52). Flying in face of all that good advice, some researchers, like me, find topics close to home, or close to our hearts--topics so compelling we can't leave them alone--and we try to find ways to use our insider status to help, not hinder, insights. Of course, distinction between insiders and outsiders is not a simple one. (2) When anthropologists are adopted by their communities, they may be criticized for going native (Tedlock 2000), and warnings against this are probably even more prevalent than are those against studying one's own community (Strauss 1987; Reinharz 1992). To me, difference seems significant: Those who go native begin as outsiders, whereas those of us who study our own communities start as insiders and are natives before research begins--a distinction not widely acknowledged in literature. Some writers who describe complete participation (Kearns 2000) or a complete member researcher (Ellis and Bochner 2000) fail to distinguish between researchers who start by studying their own communities and really quite distinct circumstance of growing deeply involved in a community after research is begun. …

Ghost Towns Tell Tales of Ecological Boom and Bust

Scarred desert ecosystems are recovering at the sites of some abandoned boomtowns, but are slow to heal at others. Soil age appears to be the key difference; younger soils seem better able to bounce back from insults than older soils. The emerging data could help the managers of the Mojave9s six military bases and four national parks make ecologically sound management decisions.

Why Did Seattle Fail? Globalization and the Politics of Trade

THE THIRD MINISTERIAL MEETING OF THE WORLD TRADE ORGANIZATION (WTO), held in Seattle from 30 November to 3 December 1999, was a resounding failure. It was intended to launch a new round of multilateral trade negotiations, in succession to the Uruguay Round which had ended seven years before. But even before it could begin, the proceedings were disrupted by massive demonstrations. Central Seattle became a war zone, with tear gas and rubber bullets, and then a ghost town, with empty streets and boarded-up windows. Inside the conference hall the atmosphere was little better. The conference chair (Charlene Barshefsky, US Special Trade Representative) and the WTO Director-General (Mike Moore, new in office) were booed in open session. In the end, the ministerial meeting was suspended with nothing agreed, only an exhortation from the chair ‘to take time out’ in the hope of resolving disagreements and reconvening later.This article looks at what went wrong and why and what will be needed in future. It contrasts the failure at Seattle with the undoubted achievements of the international trade system in the 1990s. It examines three possible causes of failure: disruption by NGOs; organizational weakness in the WTO; and errors of government. Of these three, it finds governments most to blame. Governments generally, but especially the United States and the European Union, have not grasped the full extent of the demands placed on them by the advance of globalization. Seattle was a setback but need not be a disaster – provided governments correct the errors that allowed it to happen.

The Towns that Coal Built: The Evolution of Landscapes and Communities in Southern Colorado

Geographers have identified three alternative fates for mining towns in the United States that exhausted their primary resource during the late 1800s and early 1900s: prompt abandonment, slow stubborn decline, or post-industrial survival by repackaging and marketing their old landscapes. Lacking is a comprehensive view of the specific factors that might promote the long-term sustainability of these resource extraction communities. This paper examines a former coal-mining region in southern Colorado to see how its post-mining landscape fits into the patterns previously identified in the geographic literature. From the 1880s to the 1920s, coal extraction dominated the economy of Las Animas and Huerfano Counties, boosting population, numbers of mainly company-run mining towns, and rail connections. However, since the 1930s production has declined, and with it all but a few communities have become ghost towns. Today, little evidence of the mining past remains on the landscape, and even the surviving towns that coal built have distanced themselves from their past, rather than marketing it. Economic survival in these post-mining communities now depends on service industries and administrative functions. Several factors are identified that affected the sustainability of these former resource extraction communities.

Authenticity on the Ground: Engaging the Past in a California Ghost Town

This qualitative study explores how the concept of authenticity is constructed, experienced and employed by visitors and staff in the provocative landscape of the ghost town of Bodie, California. Bodie State Historic Park, once a booming gold-mining town, now greets some two hundred thousand tourists annually and is widely applauded for its authenticity. In this paper, I explore the meaning of this term in its ghost-town context: while boom-town Bodie was a bustling commercial center, ghost-town Bodie appears abandoned and devoid of commercial activity. Thus, authenticity in a ghost town is not tied to the accuracy with which it represents its past. Yet a version of Bodie's past is what both visitors and staff experience: they employ Bodie's authenticity to engage with the mythic West, a romanticized version of the Anglo-American past that upholds dominant contemporary Anglo-American values. Bodie's false-fronted facades and ramshackle miners' cabins call forth these images, familiar to visitors from movie Westerns. Since ghost towns have few or no residents, it is largely through the landscape and the artifacts that are part of that landscape that these mythic images are experienced. Thus, an experience of authenticity is not the end result of a visit to Bodie; rather, authenticity is a vehicle through which both visitors and staff engage with powerful notions about American virtues. In this paper, I explore how the notion of authenticity is triggered by landscape, and examine the narratives about the past that the concept of authenticity enables.

Institutions, routines, and crises

This is a study of how planning institutions deal with crisis recovery; that is, recovery from situations marked by complexity, uncertainty, and sudden change that increasingly characterize contemporary cities. Based on an analytical framework derived from institutional literature and planning theory, the study examines two successful housing recovery programs during crisis situations: the Renovación Habitacional Popular program in Mexico City following the 1985 earthquake, and the Ghost Town program in Los Angeles following the 1994 earthquake. The study addresses the following research questions: In what manner were the planning institutions successful, if at all? Which familiar and established institutional arrangements, policies, programs, and practices (ie routines) did they adopt when faced with large, unexpected shocks (ie crises)? How do institutional actors in different political-economic contexts respond to similar crisis situations? What are the lessons of these institutional actions for future crises, and for normal operations in planning? The study argues that planning institutions perform successfully during crises due primarily to routines, which are usually overlooked or decried as being bureaucratic. Planning institutions responded effectively to the crises by adapting institutional routines quickly and efficiently to new circumstances. While these routines can be constraints under normal conditions, they also act as powerful tools during exceptional times, serving as catalysts to release the disciplined energy of institutions to perform effectively, resolve problems, and re-establish order.

Creating Colorado: The Making of a Western American Landscape, 1860-1940

Sprawling Piedmont cities, ghost towns on the plains, earth-toned placitas set against the Sangre de Cristo Mountains, mining camps transformed into ski resorts-these are some of the diverse regions in Colorado explored in this fascinating book. Historical geographer William Wyckoff traces the evolution of the state during its formative years from 1860 to 1940, chronicling its changing cultural landscapes, social communities, and connections to a larger America and showing that Colorado has exemplified the unfolding of a complex western environment. Wyckoff discusses how nature, capitalism, a growing federal political presence, and national cultural influences came together to produce a new human geography in Colorado. He explains the ways in which the state's distinctive settlement geographies each took on a special character that persists to the present. He leads the reader through the transformation of the state from wilderness to a distinct region capable of accommodating the diverse needs of ranchers, miners, merchants, farmers, and city dwellers. And he describes how a state created out of cartographic necessity has been given uniqueness and meaning by the people who live there.

Treasure from the painted hills: a history of Calico, California, 1882-1907

Originating as a silver-mining camp and marketed today as a silver-mining ghost town, Calico, CA outlived the silver era when borax was discovered in its hills. Supplying Borax worldwide-employing the twenty mule teams still associated with Twenty-Mule Team Borax-the Calico mines played a pivotal role in the evolution of the less glamorous industry, borax mining. Correcting the image sold to tourists, Steeples provides a tight geographic, economic, social, political, and business history of Calico, a once thriving community struggling to survive in primitive conditions. He tells the tale of three Calicos: the silver-mining town, the borax-mining center, and the ghost town, providing a masterful history of regional silver mining and national borax mining, processing, and marketing. The book provides an essential chapter in the development of western mining, the borax industry, and western mining camps. But it is more than the story of silver and borax in Calico. Steeples probes beyond the mines and mills in search of the community's soul, considering, for instance, the local paper, the Calico Print, the creation of the twenty-mule team image of Borax, the entrepreneurship of Francis Marion Borax Smith and his multinational organization, the education of the children, and the creation of the modern-day myth. Contrasting the working Calico with the illusory Calico, Steeples writes the complete history of the town from its natural setting to its imaginary legacy.

Postmodern Policy Analysis in the Premodern West: Problem Definition in the Yellowstone Bison Case

Responding to calls for revised pedagogical strategies this article highlights the use of postmodern techniques in applied policy analysis. Focusing on the crucial role of problem definition in the Yellowstone National Park bison controversy of 1996-97, a postmodern approach is briefly examined and then applied in the form of a narrative analysis. An analysis of original survey data, newspaper articles, letters to the editors, public speeches, and public texts producedfive narratives: 1) “Hidden Agendas and Heroes,” 2) “Winter Ghost Towns and a Hobson’s Choice,” 3) “Two Goliaths and Little (David) Montana,” 4) “Blue Ribbons, a Mercy Harvest, and Anti-Recreationist Conspirators,” and 5) “Wild Bison and Wild Bureaucrats.” The article touches on language, power, democracy, and the relationship between positivism and postmodemism. It is argued that postmodem techniques can move from the realm of theory to the realm of practice and make significant contributions to applied policy analysis.

Old Heart of Nevada: Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Elko County

Book Review| April 01 1999 Old Heart of Nevada: Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Elko County Old Heart of Nevada: Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Elko County, Shawn Hall. Stephen L. Carr Stephen L. Carr Search for other works by this author on: This Site Google Utah Historical Quarterly (1999) 67 (2): 185–186. https://doi.org/10.2307/45062521 Cite Icon Cite Share Icon Share Facebook Twitter LinkedIn MailTo Permissions Search Site Citation Stephen L. Carr; Old Heart of Nevada: Ghost Towns and Mining Camps of Elko County. Utah Historical Quarterly 1 January 1999; 67 (2): 185–186. doi: https://doi.org/10.2307/45062521 Download citation file: Zotero Reference Manager EasyBib Bookends Mendeley Papers EndNote RefWorks BibTex toolbar search Search Dropdown Menu toolbar search search input Search input auto suggest filter your search All Scholarly Publishing CollectiveUniversity of Illinois PressUtah Historical Quarterly Search Advanced Search The text of this article is only available as a PDF. © Copyright 1999 Utah State Historical Society1999 Article PDF first page preview Close Modal You do not currently have access to this content.

The Ghosts of Sigmaringen

There seem to be two ways to write about Sigmaringen, the German town where an incapacitated Vichy government landed in September 1944... This article is available in Studies in 20th Century Literature: http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol23/iss1/4 The Ghosts of Sigmaringen Philip Watts University of Pittsburgh There seem to be two ways to write about Sigmaringen, the German town where an incapacitated Vichy government landed in September 1944. The first is to cast the town as the site of an operetta, a fantasy world in which the Vichy government is seen as nothing more than a spectacle, a parodic version of its former self. The second option consists in describing Sigmaringen as a ghost town, a phantasmal city with its haunted castle frequented, for a period of 8 months, by the shadows of the men who had ruled France for four years. Historians today, as well as eye-witnesses of the time, Vichy journalists in exile, and novelists, all turn to a language of operetta and ghosts to describe Sigmaringen. While these metaphoric systems tell of the demise of a regime, they also ask us to reflect on the forms the takes when it revisits the present. Sigmaringen has a particular status among the sites of memory of the Second World War. As with Oradour-sur-Glanes or the Glieres Plateau, though perhaps to a lesser extent, the German town remains one of the memorable sites of France's war, remembered in historical studies and tour guides alike. It is invested with the will to remember that makes it a presence of the past in France's present, to retain Pierre Nora's phrase (20). At the same time, however, perhaps precisely because it is outside of France's borders and because it represents France's treasonous past, Sigmaringen remains today on the margins of the nation's collective memory; it has never become the site of an official, or even officious, commemoration. Sigmaringen remains between two worlds. It is both present and strangely absent, a transitional realm between France and Germany, between Main's reign and his demise, between the Occupation and the postwar period, between Vichy and the Vichy syndrome. Always men1 Watts: The Ghosts of Sigmaringen Published by New Prairie Press 28 STCL, Volume 23, No.1 (Winter, 1999) tioned in studies of the Occupation, Sigmaringen remains a reference in the appendices, a footnote in the last chapter of the war. From Petain's arrival on September 8, 1944 to April of the following year, Sigmaringen was the site of exile for some 2,000 French collaborators. Main was there, harbored in the castle of the Hohenzollern dynasty, as was Laval, though both considered themselves prisoners of the German authorities and both had desisted from their official government functions. Indeed, Main cut all ties with the German authorities and communicated only through his physician, Bertrand Menetrel. Fernand de Brinon was in Sigmaringen, and, alleging Petain's support, he became head of the French governmental commission whose putative role was to look after the approximately two million French men and women in Germany at the end of the war. Joseph Darnand, head of the Milice, held the position of Secretary of the Interior at Sigmaringen; Marcel Dem, editor of the collaborationist journal L'Oeuvre and founder of the Rassemblement national populaire party 'the National Popular Mobilization Party,' became Minister of Labor. The journalist Jean Luchaire was named Commissioner for Propaganda and Information, and under his direction, the French refugees published a daily paper, La France, from October 26 to April 7, and established a radio station that alternated programs on the Milice with musical recordings. Lucien Rebatet from Je suis partout was there, as were the pianist Lucienne Delforge, the actor Robert le Vigan, the Academician and ex-Minister of Education Abel Bonnard, and Louis-Ferdinand Celine, whose novel Castle to Castle is one of the richest chronicles of this little bit of French history (Celine, Romans 936).' In Sigmaringen, the French put together the last collaborationist government of the war. The town, however, was also an antechamber to the purge courts; with only a few exceptions, all of the major figures in exile were tried and convicted for treason upon their return to France. Seeking to render the atmosphere of despair and artifice in this community, historians have used the metaphor of the operetta to represent Vichy's last days. One of the most spirited accounts of this period was written by Henry Rousso, several years before he published The Vichy Syndrome. In Petain et la fin de la collaboration, Rousso outlines the intentions of the Germans in forcing Main and Laval to go into exile recalling the intrigues of the French politicians and highlighting their futile gesticulations and false hopes. The constant image through these descriptions is the stage: Petain's 2 Studies in 20th & 21st Century Literature, Vol. 23, Iss. 1 [1999], Art. 4 http://newprairiepress.org/sttcl/vol23/iss1/4 DOI: 10.4148/2334-4415.1453

I Spit on Their Graves (Book Two of The Past Tense...): Testimony Relevant to the Democratization Struggle in Cameroon, and: Wading the Tide: Poems (review)

Reviewed by: I Spit on Their Graves (Book Two of the Past Tense . . . ): Testimony Relevant to the Democratization Struggle in Cameroon, and: Wading the Tide: Poems Robert Ness Gobata, Rotcod. 1996. I Spit on Their Graves (Book Two of the Past Tense... ): Testimony Relevant to the Democratization Struggle in Cameroon. Bamenda: Kola Tree Press; Bellingham, Wash.: CamNexus. $10.00 (paper) Doh, Emmanuel Fru. 1998. Wading the Tide: Poems. 2d ed. Bamenda: Kola Tree Press; Bellingham, Wash.: Camnexus. $10.00 (paper) Rotcod Gobata, the nom de plumeof a faculty member at the University of Yaoundé, Cameroon, has a taste for vituperation and a knack for arresting titles (his previous collection of essays, to which this is the sequel, was called The Past Tense of Shit). The 50 essays in this collection were originally published between December 1992 and January 1994 under the column “No Trifling Matter” in the Cameroon Post, an English language newspaper allied with the political interests of the main opposition political party in Cameroon, the Social Democratic Front (SDF), headed by John Fru Ndi, who wrote a forward to this edition. These publication dates coincide with the most crucial political events in Cameroon in this decade, and thus the essays serve as witness, from an extremely partisan point of view to be sure, of the turmoil following the presidential election of October 11, 1992. For the reader unfamiliar with this period, I will provide a brief outline, without which the “Son of Gobata”‘s caveats and recriminations might be a bit obscure. Although democratic reforms were undertaken in Cameroon in 1990, political power remained in the hands of the President, Paul Biya, and a small circle of advisers drawn primarily from his own ethnic group (Beti) and the former single party, the Cameroon People’s Democratic Movement (CPDM). By 1992, the date of Cameroon’s first multiparty elections since single party rule had been declared in 1966, Biya had been in power for 10 years and appeared headed toward almost certain defeat. Biya’s principal opponents were John Fru Ndi, a bookseller from Bamenda in the English speaking part of the country, and Mäigari Bello Boúba’s National Union for Democracy and Progress (UNDP), with support mostly in northern Cameroon. The government refused to convene a national conference to devise rules for the upcoming local and national elections. The opposition responded by calling in June 1991 for a series of general strikes, dubbed Opération Villes Mortes(Operation Ghost Town), designed to shut the country down. The economy was already in tatters (per capita income had fallen by nearly half since 1985), and many observers predicted that Fru Ndi would [End Page 133]be elected. According to official results, however, Biya was reelected with 40% of the vote. Biya won the election through widespread fraud, according to international observers. He was assisted by the military, which zealously harassed the government’s opponents. Cameroon’s foreign patron, France, played a malign role, as well. Distrustful of “Anglo-Saxon” influence in its former colonies, France assisted Biya’s cause by retiring part of Cameroon’s debt and twice during 1991 paying the back salaries of civil servants. The fragmentation of the opposition did not help the cause of change; an alliance between Fru Ndi (whose “official” total was 36% of the vote) and Bello Boúba (19%) would have been virtually impossible to beat, but Bello Boúba had refused to step aside for the more popular Fru Ndi, insisting that Cameroon was not ready to be ruled by an Anglophone. Many Cameroonians believed that John Fru Ndi had been fraudulently defeated. Rioting erupted, especially in Bamenda. Martial law was declared, and many beatings, arrests and killings followed. Police tried to arrest Fru Ndi but were prevented by human shields of thousands of civilians. Rotcod Gobata’s acrimonious essays are a mirror of these events and speak to the frustration felt by the opposition SDF, whose every move had been trumped by the wily Paul Biya and his domestic and foreign supporters. Their republication is not without risk to their writer, whose first collection, The Past Tense. . ., was confiscated by the police at its Yaoundé launching. Journalists...

The energy Crisis in the Russian far east: Origins and possible solutions

MORE THAN SEVENTY YEARS AGO the famous GOELRO plan proclaimed the need for the electrification of the whole country as a prerequisite for the victory of Soviet-type communism. It is an irony of history that the current market reforms in Russia go hand in hand with shortages of fuel and energy, with some remote cities becoming real ghost towns in the late evening hours. For miners in Vorkuta and the Kuzbass or ordinary citizens in Vladivostok and on Sakhalin the all too often quoted 'light at the end of the tunnel' can literally not be discerned.1 This applies particularly to the geographically remote areas of the Russian Far East (RFE), which under Soviet rule were predominantly developed as a resource-based frontier and military fortress locked into a typical configuration of metropolitan-periphery structural dependency.2 Here extremely harsh climatic conditions have made it necessary to provide heavily subsidised energy for most of the year. Additional complications include railtracks that run predominantly from west to east and a seasonally limited navigation period for the transport of coal from as far as the Kuzbass in Western Siberia and fuel from the Angarsk oil refinery in Eastern Siberia. Mainly owing to all-embracing military security concerns, the region has a separate energy system based predominantly on thermal, but also some hydroelectric and nuclear power, providing autonomous power generation close to resource extraction sites and defence-related production in widely dispersed and scattered settlements. Additionally, the lack of agglomeration effects and economies of scale in a huge territory populated by less than eight million people provided little incentive for central planners to extend and modernise the existing energy system. With the start of market reform and change in the relative prices for energy and transport the economic viability of the RFE fuel and energy complex (TEK) has come into question. This is largely due to limited consumer demand, the need for long-distance transport of coal and fuel oil and the inability of the military-industrial complex (VPK) to pay its bills after the central ministries dramatically cut military state orders. A vicious circle of non-payments between coal and energy producers and industrial and household consumers has further aggravated a difficult situation. This is the result of sluggish financial discipline and excessive federal and regional subsidies for energy in which industrial enterprises have paid a high price for populist measures to keep household energy prices far below cost-recovery levels, thus further undermining the profitability of the region's TEK. In addition, regional authorities have tried to manipulate the energy crisis politically by openly encouraging miners'

When Past Met Present: Vintage Colorado Short Stories ed. by James B. Hemesath

Book Reviews 309 scout Jim Beckwourth, Brigham Young, Gen. William Tecumseh Sherman, and Mariano Vallejo. But the bulk of the selections comes from diarists or letter writers who have little or no fame but whose varied backgrounds ereate a gripping diversity of incident, detail, and perspective: reports by or about common miners, criminals, clergy, doctors, high-born and educated travelers, Europeans, Mexicans, Chileans, Blacks, Chinese, Japanese, Jews, Indians. There are fond memories recorded as well as bitter memories, admi­ ration and horror, humor and tragedy. It is difficult to summarize such variety except to say that this collec­ tion is, in parvo, a kind of gold rush itself. In it, truth once again has outrun fiction. It is hardly necessary to reinvent or reimagine a phenomenon with such a rich and real historical and biographical diversity as this collection demonstrates, that has yet been so slightly tapped. W hen P a st M et Present: Vintage Colorado Short Stories. Edited by James B. Hemesath. Niwot: University Press of Colorado, 1997. 191 pages, $19.95. Reviewed by Jam es H . M aguire Boise State University In 1994, James B. Hemesath compiled a sampling of Colorado fiction and titled it Where Past Meets Present: Modem Colorado Short Stories; now, in the book under review, he gives us a companion volume. Comprised of thirteen stories, the new collection begins with a brief introduction by the editor and is then framed by two poems: John Van M ale’s “The National Western Stock Show” (1933) and Alan Swallow’s “Ghost Town: Night” (1946). Far better than the framing poems, the stories “explore the Centennial State from the late nineteenth century, through the Great Depression and World War II, and into the cold war era of the 1950s” (ix). The authors include “well-known, little-known, and ‘discovery’ literary per­ sonages,” namely, Sanora Babb, Verlin Cassil (R. V. Cassill), Marie Chay, John Fante, Steve Frazee, Joe Hansen, William M. John, Florence Crannell Means, Damon Runyon, Wilbur Daniel Steele, Bert Stiles, Chauncey Thomas, and Frank X. Tolbert. In theme and subject matter, the stories resemble more famous fiction by western writers from other states. Joe Hansen’s “Donovan and Gary” calls to mind depression-era western works such as John Steinbeck’s In Dubious Battle, Tillie Olsen’s Yonnondio, and Frederick Manfred’s The Golden Bowl. Wilbur Daniel Steele’s “Survivor” is similar to some of Willa Cather’s sto­ ries about struggling artists. Chauncey Thomas’s “Why the Hot Sulphur Mail Was Late” strikes me as being like Eugene Manlove Rhodes’s Paso Por Aqui. Although a native Coloradoan like me does not like to admit it, the literary quality of these thirteen Colorado stories does not surpass (and in 310 WAL 3 3 (3 ) Fa l l 1998 most cases fails to match) the quality of similar western works. Hemesath obviously knows of some better Colorado stories, for he dedicates When Past Met Present to Jean Stafford. None of her work appears in his book, however, presumably because, as Hemesath notes, her Collected Stories has “been reprinted by the University of Texas Press at Austin” (x). Still, since Hemesath excerpted parts of novels to make up several of his selections, one wonders why he chose not to include excerpts from novels such as Upton Sinclair’s King Coal or Frank Waters’s Pike’s Peak. Perhaps obstacles such as exorbitant permission fees made some choices virtually impossible. Whatever the ideal anthology might be, Hemesath has compiled an interesting collection with some memorable stories. Sanora Babb’s “That Presence Out There” hauntingly evokes a strange childhood encounter on Colorado’s southern plains. John Fante’s “In the Spring” captures a moment of discovery in the tragicomedy known as adolescence. Damon Runyon’s “My Father” rivals the period’s best western comedy (as, for example, in works by Alfred Henry Lewis). Hemesath’s greatest achievement lies in having assembled stories with such a rich variety of subjects, characters, and settings. From a dirt dugout to a sculptor’s studio, from Hispanic villagers to a girl homesick for China, When Past Met Present brings to life the Colorado of the years from about 1890 to 1960, a...