you can't sow complex derivatives...
...and I am a square root.

One of the LIW members mentioned THIS review of Laura Ingalls Wilder's The Long Winter. I really should applaud anything that celebrates Laura Ingalls Wilder (but I'm an elitist snob, so I don't), but it was interesting to read the 78 comments so far in which practically everyone waxes nostalgic about the "Little House" books and how much they love them. Bravo! The review itself? It didn't do a thing for me.

I think the writer spent more time trying to come up with cute, catchy, and wordy sentences and analogies than she did on understanding the book itself. Lord knows she doesn't understand the Hard Winter or the Homestead Act. (At least somebody pointed out that De Smet is in South Dakota, not North, and she made the correction.)

The review and book both open with Wilder's "The mowing machine's whirring sounded cheerfully from the old buffalo wallow south of the claim shanty, where bluestem grass stood thick and tall and Pa was cutting it for hay." Contrary to the reviewer, I don't see a bit of dread foreboding, abject harm, pathos and heartache OR misery in this sentence. I see waving grasses and I hear Pa on the mowing machine, hard at work in those grasses; that's all. If we're playing freshman English and you made me find something foreboding in the first sentence of The Long Winter, I'd probably predict that there was going to be some sort of mowing machine accident, but I've read "Little House" often enough to know that those sort of things don't happen. And btw, the sun above did restore [the grass] the next season; nature has a way of doing just that. I also got the impression that the writer thought bluestem was a crop Pa planted. It wasn't.

As for The Claim, we're told in the same paragraph that the Ingallses are living on a homestead, which means that "in exchange for breaking and settling the land, the settlers will own it." We're also told that "Pa worked on the railroad in order to earn the money to buy the claim in the first place." Which is it? And how is it that the townspeople "have houses waiting for them" when they decide to move to town, yet most of them have never lived in a town before? And what "regulations" exactly made the settlers "have" to build houses in town?

Does the reviewer really believe that the Ingallses are better off on their "break-and-settle-and-you-will-own-it" homestead than they were in the Big Woods on the farm they sold for $1000? Or on their homestead instead of the farm on Plum Creek that they sold for $500? They "used to depend utterly on themselves.... [and] they're now... linked to the railroad." How do you think those goods got to Oleson's Store in Walnut Grove?

One can predict what will happen to the Ingallses because, as Dr. Phil says: The best predictor of future behavior is past behavior. Pa moves the family to Indian Territory to get a jump on settlers. How did that work out for them? Pa takes a farm on Plum Creek during grasshopper weather, but doesn't bother to find out what that means. He uproots the family to help run a hotel and is somehow cheated out of his share. Pa keeps the family in De Smet after everyone else has left in order to be the first to get a homestead. Then he's kept so busy boarding other settlers arriving to get a jump on the railroad that he almost misses out on filing his own claim. ("How's that working for you, Charles?")

The reason the Ingalls family faces such hardships during the Hard Winter is that they didn't arrive with the railroad and the emigrant cars full of provisions that the other settlers knew not to leave home without. Why do you think the Ingalls family is living on brown bread with nothing on it while Royal and Almanzo are sitting down to country ham, pancakes, brown sugar syrup, and coffee? Who do you think the starving "women and children" really are? They're Caroline Ingalls and her daughters. Pa provides for his family with pails of wheat, not emigrant cars full of provisions.

I'd like to stop and point out that when Pa sold his homestead in 1891, it was with a net profit of less than $400. It's no wonder that Rose Wilder Lane later took a less than charitable view of the attempts in the 1930s to imbue the pioneers with mythic qualities. The fact that we all love "Little House" is a testimony to Laura's writing skill, not the subject matter.

But I digress about the review. There's then some blather about "the gummint" and the rules that don't work "as they were intended to." What about Almanzo's blatant disregard for the rules? Maybe the trains quit running because somebody back east lied about his qualifications for a job he thought he could do, hang the resume and references. And is there really anybody out there who doesn't question why Almanzo is a hero for talking Mr. Anderson out of his seed wheat using the same arguments he used to refuse sell his own? Makes you wonder what the townspeople thought about Almanzo when he was out there sowing that hoarded wheat in April, before the train arrived with seed for everybody else to be sowing.

What a perfect opportunity missed, not to point out how racist Laura was when writing about the Indian warning. "You white men," he said. "I tell-um you."

Does anybody else feel like they must have missed something, the way the review ended? What the hell does "You can't sow complex derivatives" mean, and what does calculus have to do with The Long Winter in the first place? Is the point to end with a catchy phrase? I'm tired of ripping apart that lousy review, but how's this?

You can't produce crap and then wonder why flies are hatching.
- posted by pioneergirl at 7:21 PM