Review of Bob Shacochis's "The Woman Who Lost Her Soul"

Posted on September 17, 2013 by williamjcobb

So my book review of Bob Shacochis’s The Woman Who Lost Her Soul appeared in the Dallas Morning News last Sunday, and can be found here. One thing remarkable about the book is that it’s quite long (720 pages), and I wonder who reads long novels these days. It seems there is never enough time. But I realize there are other books of equal length or longer that reached the best seller lists, so apparently there is still room for the long novel, which is good news. I particularly thought The Woman Who Lost Her Soul got better as it went on, as the story grew more and more complex, and Shacochis intertwined a series of stories that spanned from WWII to the mid-Nineties.

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On Being in the Center of Everything, With a Nod to the Master, Vladimir Nabokov

Posted on August 22, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I’ve just returned to my home in State College, Pennsylvania, a name that must rank high on a list of Least Imaginative Monikers, but it does have an odd distinction: It’s (more or less) exactly in the center of the state. (Perhaps to make it equidistant for all the college kids and their parents? Overheard at the local Target: Mom: “Honey, do you need some more pencils?” Son: “Mom? We don’t use pencils anymore.”) About a month ago I was in the center of Utah, in the town of Green River, which has this amusing wall mural:
I like the little dried-up puddle in the foreground, like an homage to the first paragraph of Vladimir Nabokov’s masterpiece Bend Sinister (1947), which has to rank as the No.1 best puddle description ever. It’s the first novel I read (at age 19) by him, and I’ve been a giddy Nabokov fan the rest of my life. In common parlance, “They don’t make ’em like that anymore.” If  you haven’t read all of Nabokov’s fiction, drop whatever you’re doing and do so now. Here’s the cover of the first edition.

I actually have a first edition Lolita (1955) and The Real Life of Sebastian Knight (1941), both of which certainly are, in common parlance, way cool.

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Encounter With a Lawman in Kent Haruf's Fiction Country: Hats Off to Sheriff Ken Putnam

Posted on August 16, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I’ve just driven 900+ miles to reach the (shopping mall) mecca that is St. Louis, Missouri, and leaving Colorado I was tooling along at the wheel of my ultracool Subaru Forester (well, let’s say it’s nicely functional, which isn’t really that cool, is it?), and perhaps I wasn’t watching my gauges as well I should have, and perhaps I was trying to make better time than I should have, but one way or the other, I found myself with the dreaded flashing red-and-blue lights in the rearview mirror, ready to bow down and accept an expensive speeding ticket and go on my way, shamed and in DOT debt (is that a word?). In walks Sheriff Ken Putnam of Cheyenne County, Colorado. This is the part of the state made mythic (and important) by one of our best novelists, Kent Haruf, most famous for his recent trilogy Plainsong (1999), Eventide (2004), and Benediction (2013). Like a character out of one of Haruf’s novels, Putnam was a good man, polite and respectful, and pointed out that driving even five miles over the speed limit would result in a fine of over $90. But he was letting me off the hook, this time. I thanked my lucky stars that I wasn’t in Cormac McCarthy country, where more than likely the man who pulled me over would be a crazed hitman/killer (a la Anton Chigurh in No Country for Old Men) with a pneumatic cattle gun in his hand, ready to punch a hole in my head. This good man shook my hand and sent us on our way, where we later saved a turtle (or is that tortoise?). Thanks, Sheriff!
Plus we liked his hat.

And here’s the tortoise we saved. The little armored beast was trying to cross the road (or was it The Road?), or maybe trying to commit suicide. One way or the other, we picked him up and carried him into a field, where he’s now wondering who were those strange people, and causing some slow mayhem, no doubt.

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Goodbye, Colorado, With a Great Horned Owl Sendoff

Posted on August 15, 2013 by williamjcobb

So it’s not exactly Phillip Roth’s Goodbye, Columbus, but yesterday, after a summer of writing/backpacking/river-rafting, I had to leave my beloved Colorado home to head back East, and it was a hectic packing morning. I was rushing about, filling bags of stuffed animals for my daughter, dashing down to the backyard to take down the badminton net, and I saw something fly above my head: a beautiful Great Horned Owl whom I’ve been trying to capture on film for over a year. I ran up to the house, got my camera, and this fine, healthy specimen of Bubo virginianus posed for me, and bid me a fond farewell.

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Back From Beyond: On Miles and Miles of the Ridiculous Names of RVs

Posted on August 5, 2013 by williamjcobb

So for most of July I’ve been traveling in Utah, Idaho, and Wyoming, rafting the Green River in Utah and then backpacking in Yellowstone, which was all lovely and adventurous, but going from place to place was a drive nearing 3,000 miles. Egads. I keep expecting RVs to die out, the way the dinosaurs did, but no, they’re still here and clogging up the roadways. All kinds of them, my (least) favorite being the ones as big as a tour bus for ZZ Top, often towing a car. Their names are always ridiculous, too, like Zephyr, Hitchhiker, Adventurer, and SeaBreeze. Let’s try for a little honesty, people. What about Gas Hog, Behemoth, or Campsite Monster? Lumbering Beast, maybe?
Meanwhile I’m back reading, reviewing books, and working on a new novel. But in the meantime, I’ll share this pic, taken on the outskirts of Idaho Falls, Idaho:

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Rafting the Green River & Digging for Trilobites: What We Do in the West

Posted on July 19, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I haven’t been blogging for a while because I’ve been manning the oars of a white water (well, sometimes brown, green, or just a little frothy) raft in central Utah, the 84-mile stretch of the Green River from Sand Wash to the town of Green River. It was a great trip, and we all survived without getting heat stroke or sunburn (though my lips did get baked and blistered). Saw many Bighorn Sheep, terrific birds (Blue Grosbeaks, Blue-Gray Gnatcatchers, Yellow-Breasted Chats), and fabulous cliffs. Then right after we finished the river trip we drove an ungodly distance to a remote fossil hunting site (called U-Dig Fossils) near Delta, Utah, and dug for trilobites, 550 millions years old, and my wife found the coolest, best one (together we have a bucket full). Next up is a 4-day backpack in Yellowstone. In the meantime, here’s a cool pic I took yesterday of some godforsaken tree covered with sneakers along a desert road in the Great Basin.

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On Morris Collins's Knockout Debut Novel, "Horse Latitudes," and the Anxiety of Influence, Part 2

Posted on June 26, 2013 by williamjcobb

So in my review/comments about Kent Wascom’s debut novel The Blood of Heaven I mentioned how the press release hyped it as being similar to Cormac McCarthy, which it is, stylistically, but how I don’t think his feet should be held over that (intense & burning) fire. And with Phillip Meyer’s Texas epic The Son coming out virtually the same time, which has subject-matter similarities to McCarthy, it does seem there’s a herd of All the Little McCarthys stampeding over the literary prairie. But it’s not like McCarthy—great (and my favorite) that he is—is the only writer in the world. There’s a Justice League of great writers out there for others to follow and emulate. I’m reading Dosteyevsky’s Brothers Karamazov (1880) right now, noticing how different the style is from the average North American Scribbler contemporaneous.
And reading Morris Collins’s terrific debut novel, Horse Latitudes, I’m impressed with the influence of Graham Greene on his fiction. You never seem to hear much about Graham Greene anymore, although in his prime, post-WWII, he was considered one of the greats, one of the Big Names. Novels like The Heart of the Matter (1948) and Our Man in Havana (1958) were all the rage. Greene deserves a place in the international company of greats such as Vladimir Nabokov and Joseph Conrad.
Greene’s a Brit, and Morris Collins an American, but Collins picks up on some of the same quirks and scratchy realities of being a less-than-innocent abroad. In Horse Latitudes Collins describes a man from Boston in Latin America, both hanging out and hanging on, and he makes for a 21st century anti-hero in the era of Globalization, trying to do the right thing but not without getting his hands dirty. Horse Latitudes has the best qualities of literary influence: Collins follows a great tradition while reinventing the world with his own individual stamp of originality. Plus he has a bird (and skull) on the cover, to boot.

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Guest Blog Post on Dan Bloom's "CliFi" Blog

Posted on June 26, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I have a guest blog post/interview on Dan Bloom’s “CliFi” blog today, here. As I mention in the post, I’m working on a novel set during a catastrophic wildfire, and there’s one going on right now west of where I’m living in Southern Colorado, the West Fork Fire, which is near the town of Creede, a great little town where I lived the summer of 1999. I keep writing about various issues that I imagine taking place in the near future, and that future quickly becomes the present.

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Review of Kent Wascom's "The Blood of Heaven," Plus a Mission Debrief

Posted on June 24, 2013 by williamjcobb

So my review of Kent Wascom’s impressive debut novel, The Blood of Heaven, appears today in the Dallas Morning News, here. It’s a rollicking book, and I have to say I keep thinking of that Hatfields & McCoys miniseries whenever I think of the novel. As I mentioned in an earlier blog post, the PR materials compare Wascom to Cormac McCarthy, and stylistically I can see why, but it’s also not a fair comparison. Let The Blood of Heaven stand on its own right. McCarthy will not be outdone, but every new writer can strike his or her own chord, remake the world anew.
This morning I’m sore from hiking in the dark last night for five hours straight, in steep and rugged mountain terrain west of Pueblo, Colorado. We probably hiked about 10 miles. I was out on a mission as part of the Custer County (Colorado) Search & Rescue team, of which I’m a member. We were looking for a lost fourteen-year-old boy, and we (there were several teams, including Pueblo County groups, maybe 20 people or so) covered a lot of trail, but didn’t find him: This morning he wandered into the campsite, and all is well. We hiked in the fog of wildfire smoke, and saw the super moon rise blood red in the sky. The picture below shows the smoky landscape, though it’s really hard to capture that burnt haze.

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On "The Road," Choking on Smoke

Posted on June 20, 2013 by williamjcobb

So I’ve owned a house in southern Colorado for ten years, and during that time have seen our summer weather go up and down, some years wet and some years dry, only it always seems to be trending toward hotter and dryer. The locals all remark on that, how things have changed in the last two decades. Traditionally summers have been generally wet, marked by afternoon rains that occur during the monsoon season, which is about to start. But during this decade the amount and frequency of fires has changed enormously.
In the past, fires were common enough, but also rare enough that large ones were strange and unusual events. Now they’re common and, at least on the national scene, taken for granted. Each year we seem to set a new record for number of homes burned. Over 500 homes just burned in the Black Forest fire in Colorado Springs, and last year nearly 400 burned in the Waldo Canyon fire. If 900 homes burned in any city in the U.S., but especially New York, it would be talked about as a great disaster, akin to the Hurricane Sandy hoopla.
People have described Climate Change as a slow motion disaster, and I think that’s apt. But for the people living out in the West, the motion is not so slow. Right now we have four fires (or more) burning in our area. Yesterday we woke to blue skies and by days end our whole valley was choked with smoke from a fire over a hundred miles away. (We just happened to be in the wind drift.) Last September I drove a hundred miles across Montana in a haze of smoke. This is getting to be the “new normal.” And that’s bad news. It’s like waking up and suddenly you’re in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, only without all the cannibals, and where the supermarkets are still open (thank goodness). My novel The Bird Saviors, which is out in paperback right now, features a refrain of fires in the hillsides, the townspeople choking on smoke. That’s a reality now. Here’s a picture of the road to my house, which is on a beautiful hillside, below a former ski resort (abandoned due to lack of snow, among other things).

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