On Reading T.R. Fehrenbach's "Comanches: The Destruction of a People" and Jared Diamond's "The World Until Yesterday": A World Without Laws

Posted on February 27, 2013 by williamjcobb

So while teaching Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian recently, I learned he’d been inspired by T.R. Fehrenbach’s Comanches: The Destruction of a People (1975), so I picked it up. Suffice to say it was a gripping read, as I had a zillion other things to do, and couldn’t put the book down until I reached the last page. If you’re interested in the history of the Southwest, and Texas in particular, I think you’d love the book. It’s more balanced and less histrionic than S.C. Gwynne’s Empire of the Summer Moon (2010), and more sweeping in scope; while Empire is focused mainly on the latter period of Comanche history in Texas—and particularly on its last great chief, Quanah Parker—Fehrenbach’s Comanches provides a greater context, particularly describing the Comanche raids and depredations in northern Mexico, which figures prominently in Blood Meridian. But I also found a connection of this bloody period of American history with the “traditional culture” worlds Jared Diamond describes in his new book, The World Until Yesterday. Simply put, in a world without “the rule of law,” interactions with strangers could have dire consequences. The horrible violence that unfolded during the Comanches reign in Texas and Mexico was in part due to their not being bound by any laws, but only by their own traditions, in which warfare and violent raids were a rite of passage for young men. Add into that equation that the Comanches were at times justly resisting the oncoming wave of Texan emigrants who eventually displaced them altogether. It’s given me a greater appreciation for the idea of “law and order,” something I was writing about in my recent novel, The Bird Saviors.

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Good Review of "The Bird Saviors" in the San Francisco Book Review, and Eerie Similarities to Alex Prud'homme's "The Ripple Effect" in Recent L.A. Tourist's Death Case

Posted on February 23, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I’ve been too busy reading/teaching to blog lately, juggling about four books at a time and finishing all of them (more on that later), but had a nice surprise to be told about a good review of The Bird Saviors in the San Francisco/Sacramento Book Review website, here. I like this quote especially, the opening: “The Bird Saviors is a novel of great achievement. Not often enough does a book come out that carries with it the magnitude of talented story crafting, pristine language, and unforgettable characters. This holds a light to that candelabra.” Whoever this reviewer is, I like the way she thinks.
The other thing I’ve noticed in the last few days was the eerie similarity of the recent tourist death in L.A.—whose body was discovered in a hotel water tank (for an article about it, “Corpse Found in L.A. Hotel’s water tank,” click here)—with the opening chapter of Alex Prud’homme’s The Ripple Effect (2010), about our growing water crisis, which describes the death of a New Jersey area water official, found decomposing in a water tank that had been providing drinking water for people for many days. It makes you wonder: How often are people falling into water tanks? It’s an awful fate, for everyone involved, and is part of the Infrastructure Crisis (as if we need one more crisis, please) in the U.S.

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Life Imitating Art, But Softly: Russian Meteor a Mini-Version of the Fireball That Ends Civilization in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road"

Posted on February 16, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I’ve been teaching Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) for the last two weeks, although the more I know about the novel, the more I’m struck that it needs an entire semester to cover thoroughly—though if I did that, I imagine the students would rebel like Comanches. This week I was comparing the end of Blood Meridian with the end of McCarthy’s end-o-the-world masterpiece, The Road (2006), and as if on cue, here comes a meteor streaking across the Russian skies, causing $33 million dollars in damages and injuring over a thousand people, the same day as a bigger asteroid made a close fly-by. As readers of The Road well know, the event that kicks the apocalypse in motion is some mysterious flash in the sky, followed by horrific fires that burn the world to an ashy crisp. Various interviews and glimpses of what Cormac had in mind are available online, some that hint of an asteroid impact, such as here, while others that hint at a super volcano.
Here’s what he said in an interview with the Wall Street Journal, regarding what caused the destruction at the outset of The Road: “A lot of people ask me. I don’t have an opinion. At the Santa Fe Institute I’m with scientists of all disciplines, and some of them in geology said it looked like a meteor to them. But it could be anything—volcanic activity or it could be nuclear war. It is not really important. The whole thing now is, what do you do? The last time the caldera in Yellowstone blew, the entire North American continent was under about a foot of ash. People who’ve gone diving in Yellowstone Lake say that there is a bulge in the floor that is now about 100 feet high and the whole thing is just sort of pulsing. From different people you get different answers, but it could go in another three to four thousand years or it could go on Thursday. No one knows.” http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html
Personally I think he’s being coy—the clocks stoppage at 1:17, the streak of light in the sky both tip the hand toward asteroid impact. There are also later descriptions in the novel that detail a line of cars fleeing from an area, buildings that seem to have withstood some great cosmic blast, with their glass now melted, and I think you could posit that the asteroid actually impacts somewhere in the southern United States. And, tellingly, meteor is the first thing he mentioned when asked the question. So watch the many terrific videos on YouTube of the Russian meteor lighting up the sky, and think The Road. Count your lucky stars you’re not trying to outrun a cannibal, too.

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Review of "The Bird Saviors" in the High Country News, and a Literary Find in Cormac McCarthy's "Blood Meridian"

Posted on February 8, 2013 by williamjcobb

So there’s a nice review of The Bird Saviors in the High Country News (not to be confused with High Times, which is a fuzzy horse of a different color), a great journal about the West, here. I’ve been too busy to blog much recently, but one thing I’ve been doing is rereading Cormac McCarthy’s epic novel Blood Meridian (1985), where I noticed this similar phrasing: Note how the following passage—”They drank on and the wind blew in the streets and the stars that had been overhead lay low in the west and these young men fell afoul of others and words were said that could not be put right again . . . .” (page 43, italics mine)—compares to the phrasing at the end of The Road (2006), in which he refers to a “world that could not be put right again,” both passages about going so far that you can’t go back, be it the end of mankind or the end of a young man’s life.

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Review of Jared Diamond's "The World Until Yesterday" in the Dallas Morning News

Posted on January 31, 2013 by williamjcobb

So after a flu relapse that made me resemble one of those dudes on The Walking Dead, I’m struggling to maintain an upright position, and get back on with the business of the Living. Last Sunday I had a review of Jared Diamond’s new book, The World Until Yesterday, in the Dallas Morning News, here. As readers of this blog would probably notice, I’m a fan of Diamond’s work, my favorite still being Collapse, though Guns, Germs, and Steel is probably still his most popular. The World Until Yesterday is a different beast altogether, more academic than the other two, although perhaps more daring in its comparisons.

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From the Flu Ward, a Guest Blog Post in The Superstition Review

Posted on January 28, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I’m still sick with the flu, ugh, or double ugh. If it were any worse I’d be chanting “Brains! Brains!” But I do have a guest blog post today in The Superstition Review, here.

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Greetings from Planet Flu, and a Few Thoughts on the Virus in "The Bird Saviors"

Posted on January 25, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I should say “Greetings, Fellow Flu Victims!” as it seems everyone I know, have ever known, or will know has the flu right now, which is to some extent why I haven’t posted anything in a while. My bout with it wasn’t too bad, but bad enough to knock me out for several days. The best flu/literature story I have is that way back when (1979?), when Stephen King’s The Stand was first published, I read it one holiday season in college when I was sick with the flu and could not go home for Christmas. I did research on viruses for my novel The Bird Saviors, which features a wicked virus outbreak, though much less damaging than the bird flu pandemics often imagined, such as in the film Contagion. The virus I cooked up is actually more realistic, I think, than these doomsday scenarios, and boils down to mortality rates. One of the scary things about a potential bird flu outbreak, if it were easily transmitted airborne particles, is that mortality rates for it now are upwards of 50% of people infected, which is a very high mortality rate for any virus. The one I imagined is a more difficult virus to understand (like HIV), yet with a much lower mortality rate, say 5-10%. That would be catastrophic for the world, and would probably be classified as a pandemic (if it circulated widely), but would not cause the extreme social disruption often imagined with a virulent bird flu outbreak. Why I think this is more realistic: There are a great number of virus outbreaks in the world over any given period of time (say, a decade or two), and most of them, even the worst, have lower mortality rates than that astronomical 50% figure. Which brings us to the current flu outbreak: It’s bad, but of course it could be much worse. I hope all you sufferers are feeling better, or will get better soon.

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"Django Unchained": Cloudy With a Chance of Spaghetti Western & Meatballs

Posted on January 12, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I saw Tarantino’s Django Unchained yesterday—out of curiosity, not out of a being any huge Tarantino fan. (At their best, as in Pulp Fiction, Tarantino’s films are clever and zingy, and at worst—that unwatchable B-movie Grindhouse he made with Robert Rodriguez—just awful. And I’m a B-movie fan.) I have to say I’m surprised Django got nominated for Best Picture. Best picture of the year, really? Who thinks that? It’s kind of fun in the Spaghetti Western way, with villains and good (tough) guys bent on revenge, full of unlikely and completely kid-fantasy violence, but at times it slides into the territory of a Western parody a la Sixties TV shows like F-Troop, which the Coen Brothers’s A Serious Man (a great film, there) makes much good fun of. At times it’s downright laughable, although not always when it means to be. On the plus side, however, are actors in scenery-chewing roles that you just have to see to believe, including Christopher Waltz as King Schultz, Jamie Foxx as Django, Samuel L. Jackson as Stephen, and Leo DiCaprio as Calvin Candie. All of these actors/roles are terrific, and worth the price of admission. I couldn’t take any of the slavery depiction seriously, as it’s such an inside-joke film, but you do root for Django to slay and punish the wicked, that’s for sure. Tarantino apparently just got into a huff while refusing to answer questions about the violence during a TV interview. So I’ll take the question: Does it glorify violence? Of course it does. As do countless other films, so what else is new. That doesn’t mean we should scapegoat films and refuse to apply some common sense to gun control laws. I’m teaching a class in Westerns right now, and Django is a good example of the Revisionist Western, so if you like those, you’ll probably love it. But the best Revisionist Westerns are still novels from the mid-Eighties: Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) and Pete Dexter’s Deadwood (1986)

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"The Bird Saviors" on a List of Best Books of 2012, Plus Is It Getting Hot, or What?

Posted on January 9, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I was glad to learn today (belatedly, but better late than never) that my novel The Bird Saviors was listed as one of the Best Books of 2012 by the San Antonio Express-News, to which I say, “Wow, man. Thanks.” The article is here. That’s the good news. The bad news? 2012 is also officially now the Hottest Year Ever for the U.S., as detailed here. Win some, lose some.

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Review of Melanie Challenger's "On Extinction," Plus Attack of the Gadget Zombies!

Posted on January 4, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I’ve been more or less off-line for a couple weeks now, enjoying the holidays and some glorious snowfall, but my review of Melanie Challenger’s nonfiction book On Extinction appeared in the Dallas Morning News last Sunday, here. I liked the book, which was surprising in some ways, not really focusing on animals going extinct—such as those polar bears in peril in the Arctic—but more so on the idea of extinction, and what it means for cultures and ways of life to go extinct. It’s something I’ve noticed in the various vestiges of Abandoned America you see when driving across the heartland, which I just did, returning to Pennsylvania from Colorado—abandoned shopping malls, Circuit Citys, Blockbuster videos, farms, gas stations. There’s a lot of detritus out there in the boonies, and it’s a twist on the idea of extinction.
For New Year’s I ended up at a restaurant in Ohio, loud and obnoxious, full of ‘hootin’ and hollerin’ for the New Year’s, but while waiting for a table, we were surrounded by roving bands of Gadget Zombies. I’m sure you’ve seen them, know one, or are secretly one: People so addicted to their smartphones or various gadgets that they go en masse out in public, then don’t interact with each other, but rather spend their time staring at the gadget screens. My wife said, “We’ve become accessories to our gadgets.” I like that.
Here’s my daughter throwing a snowball at me, spending some important gadget-free time:

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