ATDDTA (6) 175 S 2

[mikebailey at speakeasy.net]

bekah noted:
> 
> 
> 175:4 "At the next convenient rise, he paused and regarded the 
> peaceful valley. Maybe he had not yet seen it all, but Lew would be 
> reluctant to wager more than a glass of beer that Chicago, for all 
> its urban frenzy, had much on this country out here. He guessed that 
> every cabin, outbuilding, saloon, and farmhouse in his field of sight 
> concealed stories that were anything but peaceful - horses of 
> immoderate beauty had gone crazy, turned like snakes and taken from 
> their riders chunks of body flesh that would never grow back, wives 
> had introduced husbands to the culinary delights of mushrooms that 
> would turn a silver coin to black, vegetable farmers had shot 
> sheepherders over some unguarded slide of the eye, sweet little girls 
> had turned overnight into whooping, hollering brides of the 
> multitude, obliging men in the family to take actions not always 
> conducive to public calm, and, as boilerplate to the contract with 
> its fate, the land held the forever unquiet spirits of generations of 
> Utes, Apaches, Anasazi, Navajo, Chirakawa, ignored, betrayed, raped, 
> robbed and murdered, bearing witness at the speed of the wind, 
> saturating the light, whispering over the faces and in and out the 
> lungs of the white trespassers in a music toneless as cicadas, 
> unforgiving as any graved marked or lost."
> 
> 
> I just typed that out because it's so beautifully written in a 
> classic western style (only with long sentences) but briefly very 
> different from most of the book. 

it does stay in the mind.  It has some similarities with the "girls of 
the Midwest passage, too, doesn't it?  Only here Lew is looking through
a stencil shaped by being a detective, where Merle's ogling the women.

"as boilerplate to the contract with its fate" also sticks in my mind.
I'm familiar with the term, but not its genesis.
Wikipedia said: "Boilerplate refers to any text that is or can be reused in new contexts or applications without being changed much from the original. Many computer programmers often use the term boilerplate code. A legal boilerplate is a standard provision in a contract.

"The term dates back to the early 1900s, referring to the steel used in steam boilers. From the 1890s onwards, printing plates of text for widespread reproduction were cast or stamped in steel (instead of the normal re-useable lead alloys) ready for the printing press and distributed to newspapers around the United States. They came to be known as 'boilerplates'. Until the 1950s, thousands of newspapers received and used this kind of boilerplate from the nation's largest supplier, the Western Newspaper Union.

"Some companies also sent out press releases as boilerplate so that they had to be printed as written. The modern equivalent is the press release boilerplate, or "boiler," a paragraph or two that describes the company and its products."

So used, it would indicate that any and all stories about the
Wild West are like filling in some blanks in a standard form spelling
out the background of injustice.

It's a fact (you could look it up) that every breath a person takes 
contains an atom from Caesar's last breath; this is part of the 
associative complex formed by "whispering over the faces 
and in and out the lungs of the white trespassers in a music 
toneless as cicadas" -- Shea and Wilson talk about how repressive
societies cause people to ignore their perceptions; but Lew is
abnormally perceptive, so these things are clear to him,
and becoming clearer.