Sunday, June 06, 2004
High heels, suspenders, and a bra
Several weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing the current status of the American lumberjack. I believe lumberjack to be one of the quintessential North American professions. Sure, people have been chopping wood since the dawn of time, but only in the North Woods of the Nearctic did there emerge the pure lumberjack archetype: plaid, flannel shirt, steel-toed boots, penchant for appearing on paper towel wrappers, and a love of flapjacks. God, do they ever love their flapjacks. Lumberjack lore is central to the "American" mythology (by this I mean the folklore common to white settlers of America, of course, not the "true" American mythology of the native peoples.) Among the "tall tales" most Americans are familiar with, four figures reign supreme, and one of them is a lumberjack. These figures embody the breadth of American lifestyles, but all fill the classical "hero" role. They are larger-than-life men of might deeply connected to the expansionist spirit of the 19th century. The roster: Pecos Bill, super-cowboy, representing American expansion into the untamed West; Alfred Bulltop Stormalong, seaman supreme, representing the conquest of the seas achieved by New England shipping and whaling (and, according to his tales, the true source of the abbreviation A.B.S.); John Henry, steel-drivin' man, inextricably tied to one of the Ultimate Weapons in making destiny manifest, the railroad; and finally, Paul Bunyan. Some would include Johnny Appleseed in the above roster, but he was cut from a very different cloth than the American heroes, whose origins and exploits are more in keeping with the likes of Heracles and Thor than a nomadic horticulturalist. I mean, Appleseed never fought a monster or saved a maiden or even cooked a flapjack, he just wandered around dropping seeds for cripes' sake (although, in his mad quest for the total homogenization of North American flora, he is perhaps the best embodiment of expansionist tendencies.) Febold Feboldson, a fascinating character representing the inventive spirit of Scandinavian immigrants in the Midwest, is rarely even given casual lip service in discussions of tall tales. Of the American heroes listed above, Paul Bunyan is without a doubt the best known and most popular. Pecos Bill is a distant second, with most of his modern fame coming from a Disney cartoon of his life. John Henry has a song, but that's about it, and public knowledge of Stormalong appears to be diminishing at a frightening rate. Yet Bunyan's fame continues to grow. A CGI-laden Bunyan movie, starring Eddie Griffin as a jive-talking Babe the Blue Ox, is currently in production (may God have mercy on us all.) The indelible mark Paul Bunyan has made upon American lore is best demonstrated through the sheer number of cheesy roadside statues erected in his honor. (For a sampling of these, check out the Roadside America listing of Paul Bunyan statuary. Most of them are rather demonic in appearance.) And, of course, a Homer-as-Bunyan story kicked off "Simpsons Tall Tales" (Episode CABF17), cementing his position in the modern cultural consciousness.
Yet, revisionists will be quick to point out that Bunyan is not a real American hero, but rather, some logging company shill invented in the 1910s. In short, Paul Bunyan has no greater claim to the American pantheon than the Brawny man himself. Paul Bunyan was the main whipping boy of folklorist Richard Dorson, who coined the term "fakelore" in 1950 to describe material like the Bunyan tales. Dorson's fakelore encompasses bodies of tales that do not have organic origins, but rather are prefabricated pap designed to appeal to public conceptions. As he says it, fakelore is "synthetic product claiming to be authentic oral tradition but actually tailored for mass edification." (For more on fakelore, read Ed Cohn's take on the term's varied modern usages.) Dorson hated fakelore with a passion. He hated fakelore like we hate Nazis, or like Dr. Claw hated Inspector Gadget. Serious hate. I imagine him lurking in his office late at night, from time to time shaking his fist at the heavens and screaming, "FAKELORRRRRRRE!!!" Dorson pegged Bunyan as pure fakelore, but the real origins of the character and his role in "true" American legends, if any, have been hotly debated in scholarly circles ever since. From the fakeloric perspective, Paul Bunyan was created by the advertising pamphlets of the Red River Lumber Company. These pamphlets were first printed in 1914, though the giant lumberjack did not grip national attention until the '20s. Folklorists can agree on one thing: the author/illustrator of these pamphlets, William B. Laughead, is responsible for many of the canonical elements of the Bunyan mythos (much like Universal's Wolfman is responsible for most of the "classic" elements of the werewolf legend.) For example, Laughead almost certainly created Babe, the Blue Ox. Even so, Laughead did not create Bunyan himself. The first published record of Paul Bunyan is a version by James MacGillvray in a 1910 issue of the Detroit News-Tribune. MacGillivray attributed the tale to Michigan lumberjacks. (Laughead traced his version to lumber camps in Minnesota, hence Bemidji, Minnesota's claim as "birthplace of Paul Bunyan.") It is still unsure how much Bunyan lore was actually part of lumberjack oral tradition prior to 1910, and this is the core of the ongoing debate on the "reality" of Paul Bunyan. In his book Paul Bunyan: How a Terrible Feller Became a Legend, D. Laurence Rogers asserts that Bunyan has his origins in a real lumberjack, a French Canadian migrant worker from the 1860s named Fabian Joseph Fournier. Following Fournier's murder, tales of his feats became the stuff of legend, and when combined with the already outlandish tales associated with fellow French Canadian hero Bon Jean, the character of Paul Bunyan was born. Some of Rogers' historiography is rather tenuous, but his basic thesis nicely sums up the best ideas of the pro-Bunyan camp.
Even if Paul Bunyan is fakelore through and through, however, this does not negate his place in American culture. The character strikes a definite chord with us. Take, for example, this nigh-hagiographic treatment in the July 1944 issue of Fortune Magazine:
"Paul Bunyan is a genuine American folk character, created by the people themselves. He is one of the few characters, among the mythical heroes of the earth, whose stories do not spring from the gray depths of antiquity. The great folk heroes of Europe and Asia were born before history. They lived in the dim universal wonderland of the earth's beginning, breathing fire and changing their shapes, slaying their dragons and conquering the wizards in the days before learning and facts and statistics placed their gentle curbs on man's imagination.
"But Paul Bunyan was born when almost everyone could read and write. He was created in a bunkhouse, in an ordinary loggin camp. His deeds were made up by grown men. They sat around the stove, after working all day in the woods--woods that were just as dangerous, with their toppling trunks and falling widow-makers, as the Black Forests whence came European fairy tales--and told stories of spontaneous exaggeration and odd combination of practical work and extravagant fantasy. It was the loggers, by reputation the most violent roughnecks of all industry, who made up the innocent legend of Paul Bunyan, a lumberman the size of a Douglas fir.
"Paul Bunyan's task was not to create, invent, govern, or reform. It was to clear the ground so that a new America could spread itself upon it. His size is the measure of the task that the pioneers undertook. His spirit is the reflection of the vitality and exuberance with which they made their country grow. Paul Bunyan's task is complete. But a land of machines, cities, and slums needs Paul Bunyan's overbrimming energy and spirit even more than a land of mountains, timber, and plains."
Lies, all lies? Perhaps. But they're darned convincing lies, ones that the people of this nation want to believe. Paul Bunyan: born of the minds of simple but noble woodsmen, and dedicated to the spirit of taming the wilds, shaping the land, and eating thousands upon thousands of flapjacks. The kind of figure that made no less a figure than Carl Sandburg write (in "Who Made Paul Bunyan?"):
"Who made Paul Bunyan, who gave him birth as a myth, who joked him into life as the Master Lumberjack, who fashioned him forth as an apparition easing the hours of men amid axes and trees, saws and lumber? The people, the bookless people, they made Paul and had him alive long before he got into the books for those who read. He grew up in shanties, around the hot stoves of winter, among socks and mittens drying, in the smell of tobacco smoke and the roar of laughter mocking the outside weather. And some of Paul came overseas in wooden bunks below decks in sailing vessels. And some of Paul is as old as the hills, young as the alphabet."
I think ol' Carl may have been stretching a bit on the whole "wooden bunks below decks" thing, but his point is well taken. The essence of the Bunyan legend taps into a basic optimism on the nature of Americana, regardless of its genesis. In the world of legend, how much does the origin of a story matter as long as the people believe it? Remarkably, the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, is fakelore, but its cultural importance should not be underestimated as a result. Furthermore, the exact character of Paul Bunyan being contrived does not undercut my contention of the iconic status of the lumberjack in North America. Bunyan, Fournier, Jean, what-have-you, lumberjacks certainly did have an oral tradition, one whose trappings are permanently interwoven with our conception of the lumberjack trade (and is also the source of the "Fearsome Critters" of the Northwoods, of which the Wisconsin hodag is the best known example, and whom I might cover in-depth at some future date.)
If memory serves me right, I started out this entry talking about the current status of the American lumberjack. Ah, yes. The world of Paul Bunyan has been lost to the ages, and with it any reality for what we would consider a traditional lumberjack. I really don't know that much about the logging business nowdays, but I think it's a pretty safe guess that there's a lot of automation and corporate bureaucracy involved. No sitting 'round the fire eating flapjacks, that's for sure. Yet the spirit of the olden lumbermen must live on somewhere...but where? In pondering this with my associate, I recalled having seen "Lumber Games" on ESPN2 at various times. Perhaps, I reasoned, there is a old-style lumberjack subculture, much akin to the Society for Creative Anachronism or any such "RenFesters." I derive no end of fascination from observing the various activities to which humans obsessively spend their time and swear their allegiance. In my circles, most of the subcultures I encounter can be written off as belonging to a general "nerd" category, which is why I hold special interest in those outside of that label, such as the "folksy" subcultures: quilting bees, chili cookoffs, and the like. Old-style lumberjacking definitely falls in this category. Since the initial discussion, I have done some research into the world of lumberjack competition, also known as "forest sports." And what a world it is. There's a whole mini-Olympics of timber events, most involving sawing, although axe-throwing and tree-climbing also play a large role. Examples of events include standbys like the standing block chop, the two man crosscut, and the "hot saw" (lumberjack aficionado-ese for "tricked-out chainsaw competition.") There's even a whole sub-subculture of lumberjack water sports, championed by the American Birling Association (birling, a term I was unfamiliar with, apparently being synonymous with log-rolling.) Like all subcultures, which breed obsession as point of fact, people get really into the lumberjack scene, probably way too into it. The United States Axemen's Association guide to getting started in lumberjack competition includes such amazing factoids as, "If you're more interested in the sawing events you are looking at a substantially larger investment. A practice saw will cost you around five hundred dollars and a decent competition saw will run around twelve hundred dollars." $1200? For a frickin' saw? What, is the thing made of platinum? Admittedly, some of these saws can be as much as 24 feet long, but still! Similarly intense is the raging argument among birlers over whether to allow standardized, carpeted logs in place of the real deal. A snippet of the ABA statement on the issue: "Not only does pushing for carpted logs threaten the integrity and well being of the sport, but also degrades the sport. Rolling on regular logs requires a greater amount of skill, and athleticism than is required by carpeted logs....The American Birling Association does not support the move to carpeted professional logs, as it threatens the sport of log rolling's integrity and future. With a sport as diminishing as ours, the last thing we need is to put another nail the sport of log rolling's coffin." Wow, that may one of the most depressing policy statements I've ever read. Chin up there, guys, I'm sure someone wants to roll on logs with you.
If you're curious about the wild world of lumberjack contests, a good place to start would probably be ESPN's "Great Outdoor Games" (this year, July 8-11 in Madison, WI). Timber events take up a good chunk of the proceedings, balanced out with the classic redneck sporting trifecta of huntin', fishin', and jus' plain shootin' stuff up. There is some lumberjack contest information on the internet, but I've already linked to most of it in this article, and I wouldn't pry to deeply into the web if I were you [although I dutifully avoided them, what with this being the internet, I'm sure the horrifying discovery of lumberjack (and lumberjill) fetish sites is pretty much inevitable.]
According to the North American Lumberjack Guide, there are a number of collegiate forest sports team in both the U.S. and Canada. (Pretty much who you'd expect, you've got Idaho, Oregon, Maine, Washington, and of course, the overwhelming might of the Canadian Intercollegiate Lumberjacking Association.) Is it time for a University of Chicago Lumber Sports Club? No, no it isn't. Even so, I could really go for some flapjacks right about now. Mmmm, flapjacks. Never forget that when you eat them, you're eating America. And to some extent Canada, but it has that weird bacony aftertaste.
Several weeks ago, a friend and I were discussing the current status of the American lumberjack. I believe lumberjack to be one of the quintessential North American professions. Sure, people have been chopping wood since the dawn of time, but only in the North Woods of the Nearctic did there emerge the pure lumberjack archetype: plaid, flannel shirt, steel-toed boots, penchant for appearing on paper towel wrappers, and a love of flapjacks. God, do they ever love their flapjacks. Lumberjack lore is central to the "American" mythology (by this I mean the folklore common to white settlers of America, of course, not the "true" American mythology of the native peoples.) Among the "tall tales" most Americans are familiar with, four figures reign supreme, and one of them is a lumberjack. These figures embody the breadth of American lifestyles, but all fill the classical "hero" role. They are larger-than-life men of might deeply connected to the expansionist spirit of the 19th century. The roster: Pecos Bill, super-cowboy, representing American expansion into the untamed West; Alfred Bulltop Stormalong, seaman supreme, representing the conquest of the seas achieved by New England shipping and whaling (and, according to his tales, the true source of the abbreviation A.B.S.); John Henry, steel-drivin' man, inextricably tied to one of the Ultimate Weapons in making destiny manifest, the railroad; and finally, Paul Bunyan. Some would include Johnny Appleseed in the above roster, but he was cut from a very different cloth than the American heroes, whose origins and exploits are more in keeping with the likes of Heracles and Thor than a nomadic horticulturalist. I mean, Appleseed never fought a monster or saved a maiden or even cooked a flapjack, he just wandered around dropping seeds for cripes' sake (although, in his mad quest for the total homogenization of North American flora, he is perhaps the best embodiment of expansionist tendencies.) Febold Feboldson, a fascinating character representing the inventive spirit of Scandinavian immigrants in the Midwest, is rarely even given casual lip service in discussions of tall tales. Of the American heroes listed above, Paul Bunyan is without a doubt the best known and most popular. Pecos Bill is a distant second, with most of his modern fame coming from a Disney cartoon of his life. John Henry has a song, but that's about it, and public knowledge of Stormalong appears to be diminishing at a frightening rate. Yet Bunyan's fame continues to grow. A CGI-laden Bunyan movie, starring Eddie Griffin as a jive-talking Babe the Blue Ox, is currently in production (may God have mercy on us all.) The indelible mark Paul Bunyan has made upon American lore is best demonstrated through the sheer number of cheesy roadside statues erected in his honor. (For a sampling of these, check out the Roadside America listing of Paul Bunyan statuary. Most of them are rather demonic in appearance.) And, of course, a Homer-as-Bunyan story kicked off "Simpsons Tall Tales" (Episode CABF17), cementing his position in the modern cultural consciousness.
Yet, revisionists will be quick to point out that Bunyan is not a real American hero, but rather, some logging company shill invented in the 1910s. In short, Paul Bunyan has no greater claim to the American pantheon than the Brawny man himself. Paul Bunyan was the main whipping boy of folklorist Richard Dorson, who coined the term "fakelore" in 1950 to describe material like the Bunyan tales. Dorson's fakelore encompasses bodies of tales that do not have organic origins, but rather are prefabricated pap designed to appeal to public conceptions. As he says it, fakelore is "synthetic product claiming to be authentic oral tradition but actually tailored for mass edification." (For more on fakelore, read Ed Cohn's take on the term's varied modern usages.) Dorson hated fakelore with a passion. He hated fakelore like we hate Nazis, or like Dr. Claw hated Inspector Gadget. Serious hate. I imagine him lurking in his office late at night, from time to time shaking his fist at the heavens and screaming, "FAKELORRRRRRRE!!!" Dorson pegged Bunyan as pure fakelore, but the real origins of the character and his role in "true" American legends, if any, have been hotly debated in scholarly circles ever since. From the fakeloric perspective, Paul Bunyan was created by the advertising pamphlets of the Red River Lumber Company. These pamphlets were first printed in 1914, though the giant lumberjack did not grip national attention until the '20s. Folklorists can agree on one thing: the author/illustrator of these pamphlets, William B. Laughead, is responsible for many of the canonical elements of the Bunyan mythos (much like Universal's Wolfman is responsible for most of the "classic" elements of the werewolf legend.) For example, Laughead almost certainly created Babe, the Blue Ox. Even so, Laughead did not create Bunyan himself. The first published record of Paul Bunyan is a version by James MacGillvray in a 1910 issue of the Detroit News-Tribune. MacGillivray attributed the tale to Michigan lumberjacks. (Laughead traced his version to lumber camps in Minnesota, hence Bemidji, Minnesota's claim as "birthplace of Paul Bunyan.") It is still unsure how much Bunyan lore was actually part of lumberjack oral tradition prior to 1910, and this is the core of the ongoing debate on the "reality" of Paul Bunyan. In his book Paul Bunyan: How a Terrible Feller Became a Legend, D. Laurence Rogers asserts that Bunyan has his origins in a real lumberjack, a French Canadian migrant worker from the 1860s named Fabian Joseph Fournier. Following Fournier's murder, tales of his feats became the stuff of legend, and when combined with the already outlandish tales associated with fellow French Canadian hero Bon Jean, the character of Paul Bunyan was born. Some of Rogers' historiography is rather tenuous, but his basic thesis nicely sums up the best ideas of the pro-Bunyan camp.
Even if Paul Bunyan is fakelore through and through, however, this does not negate his place in American culture. The character strikes a definite chord with us. Take, for example, this nigh-hagiographic treatment in the July 1944 issue of Fortune Magazine:
"Paul Bunyan is a genuine American folk character, created by the people themselves. He is one of the few characters, among the mythical heroes of the earth, whose stories do not spring from the gray depths of antiquity. The great folk heroes of Europe and Asia were born before history. They lived in the dim universal wonderland of the earth's beginning, breathing fire and changing their shapes, slaying their dragons and conquering the wizards in the days before learning and facts and statistics placed their gentle curbs on man's imagination.
"But Paul Bunyan was born when almost everyone could read and write. He was created in a bunkhouse, in an ordinary loggin camp. His deeds were made up by grown men. They sat around the stove, after working all day in the woods--woods that were just as dangerous, with their toppling trunks and falling widow-makers, as the Black Forests whence came European fairy tales--and told stories of spontaneous exaggeration and odd combination of practical work and extravagant fantasy. It was the loggers, by reputation the most violent roughnecks of all industry, who made up the innocent legend of Paul Bunyan, a lumberman the size of a Douglas fir.
"Paul Bunyan's task was not to create, invent, govern, or reform. It was to clear the ground so that a new America could spread itself upon it. His size is the measure of the task that the pioneers undertook. His spirit is the reflection of the vitality and exuberance with which they made their country grow. Paul Bunyan's task is complete. But a land of machines, cities, and slums needs Paul Bunyan's overbrimming energy and spirit even more than a land of mountains, timber, and plains."
Lies, all lies? Perhaps. But they're darned convincing lies, ones that the people of this nation want to believe. Paul Bunyan: born of the minds of simple but noble woodsmen, and dedicated to the spirit of taming the wilds, shaping the land, and eating thousands upon thousands of flapjacks. The kind of figure that made no less a figure than Carl Sandburg write (in "Who Made Paul Bunyan?"):
"Who made Paul Bunyan, who gave him birth as a myth, who joked him into life as the Master Lumberjack, who fashioned him forth as an apparition easing the hours of men amid axes and trees, saws and lumber? The people, the bookless people, they made Paul and had him alive long before he got into the books for those who read. He grew up in shanties, around the hot stoves of winter, among socks and mittens drying, in the smell of tobacco smoke and the roar of laughter mocking the outside weather. And some of Paul came overseas in wooden bunks below decks in sailing vessels. And some of Paul is as old as the hills, young as the alphabet."
I think ol' Carl may have been stretching a bit on the whole "wooden bunks below decks" thing, but his point is well taken. The essence of the Bunyan legend taps into a basic optimism on the nature of Americana, regardless of its genesis. In the world of legend, how much does the origin of a story matter as long as the people believe it? Remarkably, the Finnish national epic, the Kalevala, is fakelore, but its cultural importance should not be underestimated as a result. Furthermore, the exact character of Paul Bunyan being contrived does not undercut my contention of the iconic status of the lumberjack in North America. Bunyan, Fournier, Jean, what-have-you, lumberjacks certainly did have an oral tradition, one whose trappings are permanently interwoven with our conception of the lumberjack trade (and is also the source of the "Fearsome Critters" of the Northwoods, of which the Wisconsin hodag is the best known example, and whom I might cover in-depth at some future date.)
If memory serves me right, I started out this entry talking about the current status of the American lumberjack. Ah, yes. The world of Paul Bunyan has been lost to the ages, and with it any reality for what we would consider a traditional lumberjack. I really don't know that much about the logging business nowdays, but I think it's a pretty safe guess that there's a lot of automation and corporate bureaucracy involved. No sitting 'round the fire eating flapjacks, that's for sure. Yet the spirit of the olden lumbermen must live on somewhere...but where? In pondering this with my associate, I recalled having seen "Lumber Games" on ESPN2 at various times. Perhaps, I reasoned, there is a old-style lumberjack subculture, much akin to the Society for Creative Anachronism or any such "RenFesters." I derive no end of fascination from observing the various activities to which humans obsessively spend their time and swear their allegiance. In my circles, most of the subcultures I encounter can be written off as belonging to a general "nerd" category, which is why I hold special interest in those outside of that label, such as the "folksy" subcultures: quilting bees, chili cookoffs, and the like. Old-style lumberjacking definitely falls in this category. Since the initial discussion, I have done some research into the world of lumberjack competition, also known as "forest sports." And what a world it is. There's a whole mini-Olympics of timber events, most involving sawing, although axe-throwing and tree-climbing also play a large role. Examples of events include standbys like the standing block chop, the two man crosscut, and the "hot saw" (lumberjack aficionado-ese for "tricked-out chainsaw competition.") There's even a whole sub-subculture of lumberjack water sports, championed by the American Birling Association (birling, a term I was unfamiliar with, apparently being synonymous with log-rolling.) Like all subcultures, which breed obsession as point of fact, people get really into the lumberjack scene, probably way too into it. The United States Axemen's Association guide to getting started in lumberjack competition includes such amazing factoids as, "If you're more interested in the sawing events you are looking at a substantially larger investment. A practice saw will cost you around five hundred dollars and a decent competition saw will run around twelve hundred dollars." $1200? For a frickin' saw? What, is the thing made of platinum? Admittedly, some of these saws can be as much as 24 feet long, but still! Similarly intense is the raging argument among birlers over whether to allow standardized, carpeted logs in place of the real deal. A snippet of the ABA statement on the issue: "Not only does pushing for carpted logs threaten the integrity and well being of the sport, but also degrades the sport. Rolling on regular logs requires a greater amount of skill, and athleticism than is required by carpeted logs....The American Birling Association does not support the move to carpeted professional logs, as it threatens the sport of log rolling's integrity and future. With a sport as diminishing as ours, the last thing we need is to put another nail the sport of log rolling's coffin." Wow, that may one of the most depressing policy statements I've ever read. Chin up there, guys, I'm sure someone wants to roll on logs with you.
If you're curious about the wild world of lumberjack contests, a good place to start would probably be ESPN's "Great Outdoor Games" (this year, July 8-11 in Madison, WI). Timber events take up a good chunk of the proceedings, balanced out with the classic redneck sporting trifecta of huntin', fishin', and jus' plain shootin' stuff up. There is some lumberjack contest information on the internet, but I've already linked to most of it in this article, and I wouldn't pry to deeply into the web if I were you [although I dutifully avoided them, what with this being the internet, I'm sure the horrifying discovery of lumberjack (and lumberjill) fetish sites is pretty much inevitable.]
According to the North American Lumberjack Guide, there are a number of collegiate forest sports team in both the U.S. and Canada. (Pretty much who you'd expect, you've got Idaho, Oregon, Maine, Washington, and of course, the overwhelming might of the Canadian Intercollegiate Lumberjacking Association.) Is it time for a University of Chicago Lumber Sports Club? No, no it isn't. Even so, I could really go for some flapjacks right about now. Mmmm, flapjacks. Never forget that when you eat them, you're eating America. And to some extent Canada, but it has that weird bacony aftertaste.
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