Piercing the Non-Truth

[Steelhead]

Stumbling through the dark stacks at Powell's Books last night, I came
across an extradinary volume in one of the lesser visited haunts of this
musty warehouse for bibliophiles, trysters and glozing neuters:  Ella E.
Clark's Indian Legends of the Pacific Northwest, published in 1953 by the
University of California Press at Berkeley.

The book itself is a rather slapdash collection of Creation stories,
Coyote-transformer myths, scary-being tales, a particularly relavent Legend
of the Lake and a couple of versions of the Star-Husband legend.  Most of
the myths were collected from interviews with Modoc, Yurok, Klamath,
Tillamook, Quinault, and Columbia Basin tribes. All in all, fun, but rather
innocuous, anthropology.

The interesting part has to do with the bizarre illustations, drafted by
one Robert Bruce Inverarity. I'll leave it to more developed minds than
mine to explain the nuances and significance of this particular Kute
Korrespondence.

Steely

PS. The title of this book was familiar to me. This morning I found out
why. Pynchon pal, and my former writing instructor, Gary Snyder wrote a
fairly dismissive review of this collection in his wonderful book, Earth
House Hold: Technical Notes & Queries to Fellow Dharma Revolutionaries,
published by New Directions. Inverarity is mentioned but not commented
upon.