Gerald Vizenor’s Almost Brown

In response to Vizenor’s short story chronicling a portion of the life of the fictional Aboriginal character Almost Browne, I’ve chosen to recreate a page of one of the blank books that Almost and Drain decided to sell to college students in the story. It is mentioned in the short that each blank book included one page on which Almost had painted a “tribal pictomyth” in green ink, so I have included my own imagined pictomyth: a green drawing of a Thunderbird character. The choice of picture is a deliberately stereotypical, chosen to highlight the issues with the commodification of culture that Almost and Drain present in their sale of the books and their use of shaman drum tapes to increase profits.
I have also written in the “blank book” from the perspective of a college student, using the page as a weekly agenda detailing my assignments and the mundane to-do lists. The purpose of this is twofold: to highlight the juxtaposition of the student’s writing and the tribal pictomyth, and to address some comments in Vizenor's narrative, namely, “students were tired of books filled with words behind double doors that never pictured anything,”(2780) and the idea that the blank books with the pictomyths were a “ ‘spontaneous overflow of powerful feelings’” (2781).This last phrase alludes to Wordsworthian ideas of expression and the notion that poetry and creativity are the result of “emotion recollected in tranquility.” In a slight rearrangement of the original phrase, I’ve scribbled directly beneath the pictomyth in my blank book the line, “a space where my own spontaneous overflow of feelings is powerful,” pointing out issues of authority in the writing of words and the publishing of books.

Focusing on a literary context in particular, who has the authority to decide what’s worthy of publication? Professor Monte Franzgomery (2781) deems the blank books to be fit for use in his romantic literature course because he sees them as adhering to the Western Wordsworthian ideas mentioned above. Would the books have sold as well if they contained words written by Almost or Drain, or would the romantic mystery of the pictomyth have been ruined this way?

(click image to enlarge)