Gangs of the West

            On Thursday I finally got an email from my Aesthetics TA, Melissa Rees, confirming that I got an A on my applied essay.

            Her note said, “This is a very successful essay, which weaves together analysis of a complex work of art (Leonard Cohen’s Beautiful Losers) with a cogent discussion of a complex theory of high versus low art. Very well done. It is persuasive and insightful. Further discussion of literary tropes in particular would have been illuminating, but that is supererogatory”. I think she was saying that me erogatory is super! Supererogatory is how one would describe the first erotic experience of Superman when he was a boy; either that or the name of his pet frog. It looks like what it really means is that it would be beyond what was required.

            It’s been quite a year. Back in November I got the first solid A I’d ever gotten in Philosophy, so that was shock enough, but then I got another A for my second paper. It almost seems like the secret is to just crunch essays on the same day they are due because it prevents one from over thinking them. It’s also weird that I would get a solid A in Philosophy and only an A-minus in English, considering that when I write an English paper I actually know what I’m talking about.

            I spent most of the day writing my review of Tuesday night’s Shab-e She’r poetry reading. These reviews are very time consuming! I still wasn’t quite finished by the end of the day.

            I watched an interesting episode of Johnny Ringo, though it wasn’t interesting for anything other than the guest characters. There were two surviving members of a family of train robbers called the Reno brothers. The opening segment showed them in action and they were like superheroes in their acrobatic gun fighting, but also comical in that they had this catchphrase when they were trying to decide which one of them would go out into the open and draw fire: “I died last time! It’s your turn now!” The way they were showcased it looked pretty certain that it was on the producer and writer, Aaron Spelling’s mind to promote these characters towards having a show of their own. Perhaps if Johnny Ringo had continued past one season it might have happened. They looked like they would have been much more interesting than the other thirty western shows that were on television at that time.

            It turns out that the Reno Gang were a real life and very notorious family of criminals in the old west and they not only staged the very first train robbery in history, but the second one as well. The last of them were hanged in 1868 when Billy the Kid was nine years old and when Jesse James and his brothers were two years into their bank-robbing career. The difference between the Renos and the Jameses is interesting and is most telling in how they lived during the Civil War. The James boys were brutal bushwhackers working in the service of the Confederate Army while the Reno brothers were bounty jumpers who would enlist in the Union Army to collect the bounty offered, then immediately desert, change their names and then enlist somewhere else to collect the bounty and desert again and on and on throughout the war.