I have met with hundreds, if not thousands of people who have formed their opinions of my appearance, habits, language, and every thing else… They have almost in every instance expressed the most profound astonishment at finding me in human shape, and with the countenance, appearance, and common feelings of a human being.

~ Davy Crockett

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People feel fame gives them some kind of privilege to walk up to you and say anything to you — and it won’t hurt your feelings — like it’s happening to your clothing.

~ Marilyn Monroe

The task of effectively conveying an oral storyteller’s expansive humor to readers was more problematic than most of the writers who originally undertook the attempt probably realized. Walter Blair observed that “if an author merely set down the golden words of a fine storyteller, a funny thing happened on the way to the printer: they turned to dross.” The challenge for writers was to transfer a tale to print without abstracting it from the context of performance, in which every word is accompanied by gestures and expressions of the speaker, who may in turn be responding to the gestures of listeners in the audience. Mark Twain, one of the great literary yarnspinners, referred to the problematic undertaking as “an attempt to use a boat on land or a wagon on water.” The emergence of a hybrid literary tall tale during the first half of the nineteenth century provides a case study of the formal and stylistic concerns that accompany such an inauspicious attempt. Furthermore, it is a case study that is of particular interest to students of American social and literary history, because while the assimilation of oral forms by their literary progeny occurs repeatedly throughout the history of narrative, this is one instance in which artistic concerns surrounding the birth of a literary genre were raised and answered almost exclusively by Americans. Europe has its own forms of narrative fantasy, like the German Lugendichtungun (poems of lying), and certainly tall humor exists in European folklore, but the tall tale as a literary experiment remains essentially an American phenomenon.

~ Henry B. Wonham

Tall-tale postcards emerged around the turn of the 20th century, when postcards came to function as surrogates for travel. People soon realized that postcards could be used to create or sustain a certain utopian myth about a town or region, and crafty photographers began to physically manipulate their photographs. Nowhere did these modified images, or “tall-tale postcards” as they came to be called, become more prevalent than in rural communities that hoped to forge an identity as places of agricultural abundance to encourage settlement and growth. Food sources specific to the region — vegetables, fruits, or fish — were the most common subjects.

Understanding Ó Criomhthain as the mouthpiece of his community, as expressing only thoughts held in common with the other islanders, is perplexing in light of what he writes about himself, namely that he was engaged in producing literature. Partly the confusion seems to lie with critics’ understanding of the dynamics of orality and literacy. Ó Tuama’s statement that An tOileánach (The Islandman) “is more the biography of an island community than of a single islander” foregrounds Ó Criomhthain’s lifelong participation in the oral traditions of the Blasket, but overshadows his career as a writer, since he began writing during the later part of his life. Ó Criomhthain’s work does retain many elements of what Ong identifies as the psychodynamics of orality; however, it is a fundamental misunderstanding of orality to suppose that the individual has no place in it.

~ John Eastlake, “Orality and Agency: Reading an Irish Autobiography from the Great Blasket Island”

What does it mean to say that postmodern interest in first level folklore is no longer based on the grand themes of humanism, that the motivations expressed so admirably by folklorists such as Wilson (1988) are irrelevant, or to say along with Lyotard that second level criteria of competence “no longer make the grade” (1984:51)? Aside from telling us that the process of postmodernization is a story about posthumanism, it draws our attention to three related aspects of folklore of postmodern folklore. First it means that first level folklore is recast from an object of knowledge into an object of consumption; postmodern folklore is folklore commodified. Second, it means that in contrast to the modern disposition to invest oneself in folklore in order to mark a social difference, in postmodern culture one consumes folklore in order to achieve self-fulfillment.

~ Gerald E. Warshaver, “On Postmodern Folklore”

Dogtown is located between Gloucester and Rockport on Cape Ann, Massachusetts. In the late 17th and early 18th century it was a village of about one hundred families, who had settled on the plateau as a refuge from pirates and the British navy. After the war of 1812 the coastal areas became safer, and most villagers moved to Rockport and Gloucester.

Only a handful of widows, independent-minded women and vagabonds remained, and they soon acquired a reputation as witches. The feral dogs they kept for protection gave the village its name. In 1830 Dogtown’s last inhabitant, freed slave Cornelius Finson, was moved to the Gloucester poorhouse. Dogtown became a ghost town.

@ New England Folklore

The holiday season has come and gone, but we still have two months of winter to get through. What better symbol of the coming cold months than the cannibal giants of Algonquin mythology?

Many people have heard of the wendigo, the cannibal monster found in American Indian folklore across much of the northern US and Canada. Wendigos have been featured in movies, comic books and TV shows. In northern New England, the five Wabanaki tribes talk about a similar creature, known either as the chenoo, the giwakwa, or the kiwakwa. You should avoid it no matter what it’s called!

@ New England Folklore

Domain of Mount Greylock – Video Portal is a community web portal for everyone in the area of Mount Greylock. Some communities and neighborhoods are already on the map, but more will be added as needed. You can participate by submitting short videos for the site. “Domain of Mount Greylock – Video Portal” is another virtual bringing together of the Adamses. Adams and North Adams sit at the base of Mount Greylock, the highest point in Massachusetts—it is our unifying landmark, and according to local Indian legend a spiritual beacon. This project brings together all the communities, not just Adams and North Adams, that surround the mountain. Please join the project by submitting any kind of short video. Videos can be video art, documentary, animations, personal stories related to place, family histories, short film, experimental, or whatever else. A united portrait of the towns, their people, and the history is created by many voices contributing to the domain.

Well, Paul Bunyan had been busy out in the woods for a while when the Internet came up, so he came to the party kind of late. But it wasn’t too late — what really piqued his interest was when he heard about editorials, or ‘blogs’ as they used to call’em back then.

Paul had always been the world’s biggest logger, so naturally he took a real cotton to the word “blogger”, once he’d heard it. He had to ask what exactly it meant, though — fortunately, Babe the Blue Ox had considerable Google-fu, and was able to point him in the right direction almost immediately. And while they were all sitting around the camp jawboning about this new development out in the city world, his old friend and camp cook Sourdough Sam made him a bet that, even though he was the world’s most famous logger, he probably couldn’t be the world’s biggest blogger.

(via Jerz)

The sea continues to inspire skilled traditional artists who make both functional and commemorative objects. Here you will meet a handful of artists who still make their livelihood building wooden boats and marine hardware. Others create objects evoking the golden era of tall ships, or the whaling and fishing industries. Some artists revitalize maritime crafts once practiced by sailors, while other artists create highly personal work, memorializing those who lost their lives at sea.

@ Mass Folk Arts