184 Western American Literature small West Texas town in the late ’40s; they are groping for something mean ingful in life and in the meantime, they’re groping each other and calling it love. The best character, Gus, owns the beer joint where most of the action takes place. He has an uncommon interest in the fate of these older young people, largely because he is Nellie’s real father. The sheriff is the villain, and comedy and color are provided by the town character, Moon, and Nellie’s mother, Vida, a Bible-thumping, guilt-burdened bigot. The action is quick, one-liners abound, and the ending is predictable. The script lacks the spontaneity of Jones’s plays, the freshness of other Texas dramatists’ work, and returns to the old habit of playwrights finding humor and pathos in Texans being rustic rubes and bumbling bumpkins in the dry climate of West Texas. Perhaps it plays better than it reads, but I somehow don’t think it works as well as it should given King’s talent and abilities. I tend to think that a well-published volume of Jones’s work would serve Texas and western literature better, or perhaps a full volume of all King’s work would do more to advance this much neglected area of letters. CLAY REYNOLDS The University of N orth Texas H ead ed Upstream: Interviews with Iconoclasts. By Jack LoefHer. (Tucson: Harbinger House, 1989. 194 pages, $10.95.) This book contains interviews by oral historian Jack Loeffler with 14 people “whose minds have evolved beyond the mean imposed by advertising and commercial entertainment,” plus several of Loeffler’s own essays on the Hopi and Navajo. The iconoclasts are Edward Abbey, Gary DeWalt, John Fife, Dave Foreman, Garrett Hardin, Alvin Josephy, John Nichols, Douglas Peacock, Godfrey Reggio, Gary Snyder, Anna Sofaer, Stewart Udall, Andrew Weil, and Philip Whalen. Since most of the interviews were for the radio program Southwest Sound Collage, there is a distinct regional emphasis to the book. Here is interesting history, thought-provoking commentary on the increasingly monolithic structure of modern life (over-population, runaway technology, commercial irresponsibility and arrogance, bureaucratic incom petence, government intimidation, etc.), and personal experiences of political resistance to the same. The resulting combination confirms Oliver Wendell Holmes’s remark: “Rough work, iconoclasm, but the only way to get at truth.” Two features mark this collection: a rejection of our dominant cultural paradigm and a defense of traditional cultures in the American Southwest. The interview with Gary Snyder, the last in the book, combines these features by introducing bioregionalism, a movement that fractures monoculture and re-creates small, singular cultures grounded in a particular place and particular traditions—what might be called “new traditional cultures.” Few movements Reviews 185 can be as radical, for bioregionalism cuts across the grain of all our current political categories, forcing us to think anew the structures that relate us to each other, our place, and its flora and fauna. Another commonality is this: most of Loeffler’s iconoclasts are moralists, a title that no longer has a positive connotation in our relativistic culture. Throughout these interviews there is concern with the good, the moral, the ethical, with oughts and obligations. Whether it is John Fife’s Sanctuary move ment, the insistent anarchism of Abbey’s novels and essays, Reggio’s brilliantly aggressive use of the media, Nichols’ subtly Marxist novels, Foreman’s trans lation of traditional non-violent tactics into an environmental context, or Weil’s subversion of accepted medical models, these interviews offer a vision of a better life. No doubt these iconoclasts would feel uncomfortable with this title “mor alist,” but as recent events in Europe have demonstrated, it is the moralists— grass roots activists, intellectuals and spiritual leaders—who hold the symbolic power that on occasion overwhelms the more conventional forces of mass consensus, law, public apathy, and fear, and generate social change. Loeffler’s inspiring book suggests the same possibility exists for us. JACK TURNER Cold M ountain M ajor Canadian Authors. Second Edition, Revised and Expanded. By David Stouck (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1988. 330 pages, $23.45/ $9.95.) In re-issuing David Stouck...
Read full abstract
May 21, 2010
Donatella Valente 
Open Access
