brian's books

First paragraph of three of Brian’s books:

His Autobiography, Paradise Lost and Found, and Uto-Aztecan Comparative Vocabulary

Learning to Love Life and Live with the Limp:

The First 62 Years before I Forget (first paragraph)

            I was told either to get a biopsy, colonoscopy, etcetera, or to start writing my life history.  So I wrote my life history.  Most autobiographies are written by persons appearing in Who’s Who.  Less celebrated individuals like myself belong in Who’s He?  Though priorities may lead to neither fame nor fortune, who is to say that the lives of us more menial meanderers through life are less interesting or less beneficial to learn from? Among politicians, manufacturers and farmers, the former make names for themselves while the latter two make what we need and can balance a budget. Whether one’s name is known by nations or neighbors is not so much a matter of greatness or intelligence as it is simply a matter of direction, misdirection, occupation, or bad luck. By bad luck I mean that judging by the number of perfectly normal lives later ruined by luck in the lottery or other luxuriant living, the misfortune of fortune must be a terrible burden.  I’m glad I have had to work and struggle through life … I think.  In any case, I am limited to myself as sole subject for whom I can write an autobiography. (for more, see brianstubbsbio.blogspot.com)

PARADISE  LOST  AND  FOUND

a comic novel by Brian Stubbs

Introduction (to the novel)

            Paradise Lost and Found is a comedy novel, rather than the usual romance, mystery, or historical novel.  Based on Brian’s musical of the same title, this novel’s light style and disproportionate comedy are better understood when imagined on stage in a context of light-hearted musical theatre.  Thus, this rather novel novel’s comic nature may seem to some as hardly serious enough to be deemed or redeemed as a ‘real’ novel by conventional standards, though the novelists who create the standards are hardly conventional themselves, except when it comes to writing and critiquing novels, then they suddenly wax conventional.  So maybe this author is the unconventional among the unconventional.  Nevertheless, the status quo of literary expectation, as established by the anti-establishment humanities’ global cloud of influence, ‘highly’ recommends that literature be somewhat encumbered with levels of meaning and message, rather than pure fun and delight.  So in partial homage to that unwritten rule of the proponents who say “there are no rules” because they do not like rules, or at least do not like to write the rules by which they rule, except for the rules to avoid long awkward sentences and passives and not state outright the work’s message, an attempt was made that this work be accordingly encumbered with substance as well, illustrating how one person’s nightmare can be another person’s dream come true and exploring what keeps paradise from being found wherever we might live.

Uto-Aztecan: A Comparative Vocabulary

PART ONE: INTRODUCTION (only the first paragraph)

            This comparative vocabulary of Uto-Aztecan (UA) languages is a work in progress, not a finished product. The size of UA and the regular emergence of new materials guarantee that any comprehensive comparative effort is but a new horizon for viewing the next, but never finished. Yet many a linguist’s life work finds its final resting place in files or landfill due to (1) lack of time to finish it, despite the potential value to future researchers; (2) uncertainty about certain details, perhaps 3%, though the other 97% would have benefited all else studying the matter; and/or (3) not relishing the prospect that condemnations of the 3% may seem louder than commendations of the 97%. So let the latest from three decades of doing UA be made available lest it be lost to landfill should I exit without warning. Publishing, despite its pretense of completion, is as often only the latest draft of endless endeavor. The original hope of finishing such an undertaking before one’s own undertaking gradually gives way to time’s reminder that no one gets every-thing right the first time, or even the last time in mortal exertions the magnitude of a language family, and our assumptions about when the last time might be are regularly erroneous, as we hardly get glimpses of our hourglasses. The tragic unpredictable passing of our mentor Wick Miller in May 1994 is an example.

…

As is the nature of research, this work also builds on the good work of many others; thus, I am greatly indebted to the excellent output of scores of scholars before me. This work is finally made available after previous mentions (Stubbs 2000a, 2003) in spite of one lifetime being a few short of what is needed to do it.  (for more, see Stubbs' Uto-Aztecan website at uto-aztecan.org)

Morsels for the Mind Mingled with Mirth is Brian's English textbook and is represented below in past posts.  White Mesa Ute is a dictionary with lessons on the White Mesa Ute dialect, compiled by Brian along with Mary Jane Yazzie, Aldean Ketchum, and Loretta Posey.