Posted by Rich on January 27, 2002 at 12:25:49:
In Reply to: Are You Ready For This ... ??? posted by Rich/Mohican Press on January 27, 2002 at 05:33:24:
Two, actually:
1 - [above] ------- PROGRAM NOTES ---------
"The Last of James Fenimore Cooper: By A Mohican"
(For Narrator and String Quartet)
Story and Music by Brent Michael Davids
James Fenimore Cooper (1789-1851) penned his famous "The Last
of the Mohicans" in 1826, setting the stage for numerous films
and adaptations. Although a rebellious youth, Cooper married
and lived an agrarian life till his writing career proved
successful enough to cease farming.
Cooper's story takes place during the French and British war
of 1757 (The Seven Years War). Two Mohicans, Uncas and his
father Chingachgook, befriend Hawkeye and some English
colonists including Cora and Alice Munro, the daughters of a
British Colonel. In the original story, an Iroquois guide
named Magua (meaning "Bear" in Algonkian) kills the younger
Mohican, leaving the old man to be the final member of the
Mohican race.
Being a legitimate writer, anyone might assume that Cooper
would get the rightful facts -- but he did not. With his
mainstream acceptance and downright gullible popularity,
Cooper's DEAD "Mohicans" have overshadowed the REAL Mohicans,
who remain quite alive! I'm no Cooper literary critic, but
apparently Mark Twain had something to say about it:
"Cooper's gift in the way of invention was not a rich
endowment; but such as it was he liked to work it, he was
pleased with the effects, and indeed he did some quite sweet
things with it. In his little box of stage-properties he kept
six or eight cunning devices, tricks, artifices for his
savages and woodsmen to deceive and circumvent each other
with, and he was never so happy as when he was working these
innocent things and seeing them go. A favorite one was to
make a moccasined person tread in the tracks of a moccasined
enemy, and thus hide his own trail. Cooper wore out barrels
and barrels of moccasins in working that trick. Another
stage-property that he pulled out of his box pretty frequently
was the broken twig. He prized his broken twig above all the
rest of his effects, and worked it the hardest. It is a
restful chapter in any book of his when somebody doesn't step
on a dry twig and alarm all the reds and whites for two
hundred yards around. Every time a Cooper person is in peril,
and absolute silence is worth four dollars a minute, he is
sure to step on a dry twig... If Cooper had been an observer
his inventive faculty would have worked better; not more
interestingly, but more rationally, more plausibly. Cooper's
proudest creations in the way of 'situations' suffer
noticeably from the absence of the observer's protecting
gift. Cooper's eye was splendidly inaccurate. Cooper seldom
saw anything correctly. He saw nearly all things as through a
glass eye, darkly." [Mark Twain]
While Twain's 1895 essay "Fenimore Cooper's Literary Offenses"
(excerpted above) critiques Cooper's literary skills, it is
the last band of Mohicans living today that takes issue with
his subject matter. With only a hairbreadth appreciation for
the lives of American Indians, Cooper had no clue who he was
writing about, nor the effect his work would have on his
living subjects. Unknowingly, Cooper even confused the
Algonkian-speaking Mohicans with the Pequot-speaking Mohegans,
two differing tribes.
So, after hearing jokes such as "Oh ... are you the
second-to-the-last of the Mohicans?" and variations
ad-nauseam, I decided to compose my own story, "The Last of
James Fenimore Cooper." Not to be over-shadowed by
ridiculously bad spin-offs however, my version is different.
"The Last of James Fenimore Cooper" combines the plot of
Cooper's original story with that of a much older Mohican
story about the Snow Monster of the North. In my version,
Cooper is a character in his own story and becomes transformed
-- his brainless deed forgiven. "The Last of James Fenimore
Cooper" is an act of forgiveness and transformation by someone
who daily walks through the eclipse of his statue, blasting
sunlight through the dark silhouette. What would I tell
Cooper if I met him today? "Obviously, the best way to know
ABOUT Mohicans is to KNOW a Mohican -- better luck next
time!" I therefore dedicate this work to the surviving
Mohicans, the Stockbridge-Munsee Tribal Community, and to our
perseverance, longevity, humor and unique way of life. "The
Last of James Fenimore Cooper" was commissioned for the Miro
Quartet by the Caramoor International Music Festival for A
String Quartet Library for the 21st Century, and is published
by Blue Butterfly Group
2 - "Hi, dear mohicanpress creators!
I wish I had enough words in my heart to thank you for a wonderful thing you created. My name is [omitted] and I live in Israel. As a girl, I lived in Russia and used to be great fan of Cooper�s books. One of my all ever favorites was The last of the Mohicans. Unfortunately the movie never reached the place I was living in, so it took me� let me see� about 13 years to watch the movie based on the story which intoxicated my heart many years ago. Well, took me some time to see what was really happening there, because the original story was changed very much� But surprisingly, I loved the movie. I must say that only few movies surprise me.
Then I went online and looked for some information, as I usually do when I like a movie. And I found your site, You have no idea how many emotions it revealed and how much feelings overwhelmed me. All of a sudden I found a place to read about this wonderful piece of history and enjoy it the way I dreamt to many years ago.
Thank you for having been doing it for people like me,
Wish you luck and feel sorry for not being able to join this year gathering ..."