Re: Almost Forgot ... The E-Mail of the Week!

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Posted by Sarah M. on January 27, 2002 at 18:52:32:

In Reply to: Almost Forgot ... The E-Mail of the Week! posted by Rich on January 27, 2002 at 12:25:49:

Regarding the first email, I'm going to say to this person what I said before: Can you spell FICTION??

Jeez.

Thanks for sharing, Rich!!

Sarah M.

: 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 ..."



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