westerns

Great topic. I actually started a Zane Grey book last night. One regret I have is not growing up with more westerns and country music. I tried to get through the L’Amour collection, and did read most of them, but it ended up being very formulaic, but it’s one that works and never gets old. Louis was a former prize fighter and if you read about the man, he is considered one of the only alpha male authors, as he had size and strength. He’s one of the highest selling authors of all time. He’s like the Harry Potter of westerns and up there just behind the Bible is terms of books in circulation. I am enjoying the Zane Grey book so far.

What made me think about Westerns lately is the desert in the Big Empty of the USA with the cactus and the cow skulls and stuff like that. It makes me think of Dune, the westerns do, in that the cowboys ride horses and cross the mesa in the painted desert under the stars. In fact, if Denis Villeneuve is still into the desert thing after he finishes Dune, he should consider a biopic of Carlos Castenada, as it reminds of Dune because the character is in the desert, taking peyote and mescaline with a shaman teacher and communing with animals and stuff like that, so it’s along of the same theme as psychedelic desert.

Chuck Dixon said that when he was growing up, it was all westerns, whether books, movies or shows. He said it all ended almost overnight, the trends shifted and it was over, but as we see with modern entertainment, the westerns and the mafia stories are retold in space. I think anytime there is pioneering on a wild frontier, the cowboy character lives there and that was an interesting think that L’Amour said as an alpha male that he always wanted to be on the front-lines or on the outskirts or on the edge, so he took tough guy jobs. He said his family was military, so he did that, too, along with jobs like butcher, lumberjack or whatever.

Westerns remind me of something I heard from an arab sultan in a story, who said that he did not want his tribe getting used to cars and modernity because it made them soft. The sultan wanted them to continue riding camels. I’ve actually never ridden a horse and there are a bunch of them just on the outskirts of town where I hike in nature every day. I think that what the arabic sultan says applies to our people as well. Once men stopped riding horses, they became just a bit weaker and a bit softer. Back then, you had to work. This is another reason I like reading older books is that before the turn of the century, people did not even have the light bulb, so any writers before 1900 lived in a vastly different way. Books were their media back then, so authors were the top directors of their time.

Last thing is that my grandma told me that back then, people would talk about their horses just like they talk about their cars today. They would talk about the kind of horse, the breed, and other details. Types of horses just like types of cars.