Just a short post, to let readers know that ABE has headlined EARTH ABIDES in its “End of the World” book page:
Of course, we Stewart Scholars and fans know well the power of that book. It’s never been out of print, in 67 years, far outliving its author. The book is published in 20 languages. It still sells very well. At times, there’s talk of filming it.
For those of us who’s lives were so shaped by this book, it’s good to see it getting its due.
Say what? GRS a space explorer, decades before we had humans in space? How so?
In Ordeal By Hunger and Storm, Stewart writes the view from space into the work. The Ordeal By Hunger entry is especially interesting. He describes the view of northern Nevada along the California Trail so precisely that in the NASA days when I asked Astronaut Dr. Ed Lu to photograph it on ISS Expedition 7, and had the passage sent to him, the photos that came back showed how accurately Stewart had visualized the space explorer’s view – 25 years before any human actually saw it for themselves.
Storm begins and ends with a view of Earth from space – the opening passages, like those in Ordeal By Hunger, give a view from near space. The closing passages move farther out, into the solar system, where he gives the view from Venus.
Interestingly, he changed the space-perspective section in Ordeal By Hunger for the second edition; but once humans had gone into space, he put the original back.
He was a pioneer in the Whole Earth Perspective, including the close view from within the ecosystem here on Earth, and the overview, the Astronaut’s View, from Low Earth Orbit. So it seemed to make sense to use him as a model for a new way to interpret the Earth and educate others about it. When the opportunity came to present a teacher’s workshop at a Mars Conference, in 1998, I used that theme. Accidentally, today, I came upon that workshop paper in researching another talk. The paper lists all the resources for space education, many now gone, available to teachers in 1998. GRS wanders into the paper on page 8.
Here’s the paper, for your edification and amusement.
In William Least Heat Moon’s American classic, Blue Highways, Least Heat Moon explains that one of the goals of his 11,000 mile American journey was to visit towns with unusual names. Since another of his goals was to follow the old U.S. Highways, I guessed he knew the work of George R. Stewart. So when I met him, I said, “You’ve been influenced by George R. Stewart.” He looked up from the desk where he was signing books and said, “Yes. Profoundly. How did you know?” “Because I’m a scholar of GRS’s works, and Blue Highways is clearly influenced by U. S. 40, Names On The Land, and American Place Names.”
American Place Names is one of the last books – all about names – that Stewart wrote before his death in 1980. He had a fascination with names, of place particularly, and with what names tell us about the people who do the naming. Names on the Land is his masterwork, a history of American place naming – which Stewart considered untranslatable since it included so many unique American references. (But that’s not stopping Scholar Junlin Pan, who, following a request from one of the most distinguished publishing houses in China, is well along in her translation – with a little help from someone who knows American history and can give some sense of meanings of American place names.)
Researching Names on the Land, Stewart had built a huge file of the history of how places were named, far more than could be used in the book. So now, near the end of his work, he decided to publish those mini-histories of the names. Released in 1970 by Oxford University Press, American Place Names was described as “an instant classic.”
The book contains the meaning and brief history of approximately 12,000 names of places from coast to coast and border to border, in its 500 plus pages. Names like Arroyo Grande – Big Gulch or Big Creek or Big Ditch, named tautologically – Arroyo Grande Creek means Big Creek Creek – or for some prominent local feature. Pismo, as in Pismo Beach, means tar in Chumash, since the area is filled with tar seeps (and now oil fields and a refinery). Bug Scuffle warns the visitor that he or she should expect to spend time fighting off bedbugs or other members of the insect world. Likely was named because the locals believed it was unlikely that any other town with a post office would have that name. Nameless, a humorous name for a small feature or town; Accident because somebody surveyed some land by accident; Los Angeles, an Anglo contraction of the Spanish name “Nuestra Senora de los Angeles de Porciuncula; Angels Camp, for founder George Angel. And so on, and so on.
The book is a wonderful read….the type of book to keep by the bed so you can browse through it before sleep and thus perchance dream of all those exotic places on American roads and trails that you hope to see someday. I also suggest to friends that they keep a copy in their car, so that when they’re on a long trip, they can find the meaning of interesting names of the places they pass through- Devil’s Churn, say, or Ekalaka, or Deer Lodge, or Ten Sleep, or Monticello, or Yosemite.
William Least Heat Moon visited or acknowledged several places with unusual names on his great odyssey – Dime Box, Texas; Nameless, Tennessee; Igo and Ono, California. His chapter on Nameless is one of the great pieces of American writing, which everyone should read.
If you’re going to visit these places, you’d better hurry. The bowdlerizers are hard at work, removing some of the most interesting and important names from the map. Nellie’s Nipple may go; Shit House Mountain has probably gone. In some instances, the names are offensive; but they reflect a part or our history, and the censors should not be allowed to erase that from the map. But they’re in high dudgeon now, and have the ear – or some appendage – of the establishment, so much of our language is at the risk, including our place names. Visit while you can. And in preparation, read Stewart’s book.
The book is available used; check with your local bookseller to order a copy.
the EARTH ABIDES project 