Christo's "Over the River" Project, Art in My Back Yard

Posted on May 19, 2011 by williamjcobb

So there’s a piece in the NY Times today about Christo’s latest art installation project, Over the River, which is (figuratively speaking) in my Colorado back yard: It will be located, if it happens, in the Bighorn Canyon between Salida and Canyon City, which is about 30 miles north of my house in Custer County. I’m all for it, and if you read the piece, I think the arguments against it are iffy. I agree with the fellow who points out the canyon, which has a number of bighorn sheep, also has much traffic on the highway and a railroad line, and the sheep seem to do just fine with those distractions. (Plus the note that they allow hunting makes the argument seem a bit absurd to me.) Support Christo’s Over the River! I think it would be way cool. Here’s the link to the Times piece:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/05/18/science/earth/18christo.html?hpw

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Neros Fiddling While the World Burns, Sooner Than You Think: the National Research Council's Report on Climate Change

Posted on May 15, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I’ve been (mildly) obsessed with Climate Change for a decade or more now, and am thoroughly disgusted at the anti-science, anti-education, pro-stupidity behavior of most of the Republican Party (i.e. Texas hick rep Joe Barton), or more accurately known as the Know-Nothing Party, even in the face of unified agreement of scientists and experts. So last week arrived the report titled “America’s Climate Choices” via the National Research Council, and I’ll note that even some Republicans advocated its stark and alarming findings. The whole report can be found here:
http://dels.nas.edu/resources/static-assets/materials-based-on-reports/reports-in-brief/ACC-final-brief.pdf
We’ve reached the point that only a combination of stupidity and greed can be offered as motivation for some of the anti-mitigation efforts that basically rule Congress: Big Oil has bought off the chumps, and our children will suffer. We don’t need to argue about the grandchildren. Children. It’s all happening faster than predicted and will likely have long-term consequences. Obama’s administration hasn’t been able to get anything done, in part because of the myth that these mitigation efforts will be expensive and ‘hurt business.’ (And I blame the Democratic-controlled Congress of his first two years for that, too.) They’re all short sighted and bought off by business. It’s hard not to shake one’s head and growl, “We’re doomed, man. We’re doomed.”
Here’s a picture of my Sangre de Cristo mountains this week, which have suffered a snow drought this year, even though most of Colorado has had a good snow season, due to La Niña.

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Sony CyberShot, Guilty Gadget Pleasures

Posted on May 12, 2011 by williamjcobb

So much as I deplore how we’ve devolved in this Gadget Age, I’m as bad as anyone with a new toy. For my birthday my wife gave me a Sony Cybershot—small and light, 16 megapixel pics, easy and quick to use. But the best wrinkle: you can take pictures underwater. No special case, no nothing. I’ve used it in the pool a few times already and it’s fun. Surprisingly hard to stay put to take a picture under water (basically, you don’t, but take it while swimming).

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Review of Lori Roy's "Bent Road," Text Version

Posted on May 12, 2011 by williamjcobb

Now that the Dallas Morning News is charging to view their content I realize when I post a book review here you can’t read it unless you pay, so since it’s a few days old, I’ll post the text here. I liked the book and think it’s a gutsy novel.
BENT ROAD/By Lori Roy/Dutton; 368 pages, $25.95
Pain & Suffering on the Great Plains
Thomas Wolfe famously proclaimed “You can’t go home again,” and with her first novel, “Bent Road,” Lori Roy proves that if you try, you’ll regret it. The story begins in 1965, when race riots in Detroit force the urbanized Scott family to return to their Midwestern roots in Kansas, to a small town that seems to have one thoroughfare, Bent Road. It’s a world of church-going farmers with closets so full of skeletons you couldn’t find a shoebox without a few bones in it. An example of Kansas Gothic, “Bent Road” has enough turmoil to make Truman Capote’s “In Cold Blood” appear rather genteel. In Capote’s hands, strangers were the menace. Here it’s family.
As a mystery novel, “Bent Road” delivers: the story telling is taut, suspenseful, and compelling. From the moment the Scott family drives up to their new home in the dead of night, only to be spooked by a shadowy figure running across the road, you know there’s trouble ahead. The point of view shifts between Celia, the wife and anchor, and (mainly) her two children, Daniel and Eve-ee. Celia does a great deal of dish-washing and cooking, and provides the outsider’s perspective of what it’s like to return to a Kansas farm where a shed in which the darling daughter and sister died some twenty years ago still stands.
Mystery surrounds Eve’s death, and the family doesn’t discuss it. Was she murdered by Jack Mayer, escaped lunatic? By the alcoholic Uncle Ray? To complicate matters, only a few days after the Scotts return to Kansas, another young girl goes missing, Julianne Robison, who happens to look much like the lost Eve. Plus Eve-ee also happens to look like the lost Eve. Descriptions are rather minimal here—small, blonde, cute—so perhaps half the daughters in Sixties-era Kansas looked like Eve.
Celia’s husband, Arthur, is the father figure who moves them back to Kansas, and who knows what happened to Eve. His sister Ruth also knows what happened, it seems, but she keeps the truth from her husband, Ray, who famously loved Eve. Townsfolk believe Ray murdered Eve years ago, and that perhaps now he’s responsible for Julianne Robison’s disappearance. Ray assaults Ruth not long into the story, and she then moves in with the Scott family. Smart mystery readers will smell a rat, though, as Ray’s in the suspect file labeled Too Obvious.
In its best moments, “Bent Road” portrays the loneliness and claustrophobia of life in a small Great Plains town, in the tradition of Kent Haruf’s “Plainsong.” It’s much gorier and melodramatic than Haruf’s fiction, however, and by the novel’s end, the body count is high, placing it in the Gothic tradition. But if you like a gutsy, gritty read, you’ll love “Bent Road.” Spoiler alert: The shadowy figure crossing the road in the first scene is probably Orville Robison. (Or Bigfoot.) Roy never actually reveals who it’s supposed to be. Robison is a good guess. But I’m giving nothing away. You’ll have to read the book.

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Review of Lori Roy's debut novel, "Bent Road"

Posted on May 8, 2011 by williamjcobb

My review of Lori Roy’s debut novel, Bent Road, appears in today’s Dallas Morning News here:
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20110506-book-review-bent-road-by-lori-roy.ece
I call it Kansas Gothic, which I think is kind of a fun/gruesome idea. There’s a braided pattern of badness and the ramifications of it that comes to a fantastic, bloody climax at the end. It was definitely in the lively, page-turner category. I liked it.

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Werner Herzog Goes Caveman: "Cave of Forgotten Dreams"

Posted on May 8, 2011 by williamjcobb


So I caught Werner Herzog’s new documentary, Cave of Forgotten Dreams, at a theater in St. Louis today, and it’s one of the best docs I’ve seen in a while. It’s all about his visit to the Chauvet cave in southern France, with Paleolithic art dating to 32,000 B.P.E., in 3D to boot. (I’m not a great fan of 3D, find it mildly annoying at times, impressive now and then.) The cave art isamazing, lots of charcoal rhinos, lions, horses, bison, mammoth, and cave bears. Cave bear skulls covered in stalactites/stalagmites, cave bear footprints alongside human footprints, and even torch fragments dating to 28,000 B.P.E. Herzog always does a great voiceover. He’s like the voice of a bemused god. The horse figures are fantastic. One of the coolest images—among too many to mention, you have to see the film—is a Great Horned Owl figure scraped into the side of the cave wall. I love owls and in our mountain home we’ve identified seven different species, including one day when we watched a Goshawk and a Great Horned Owl eat and fight over a Snowshoe Hare.

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"Cinema Verite" Worth Watching

Posted on April 24, 2011 by williamjcobb

So last night was the premiere of HBO’s Cinema Verité, the film about the film of the Loud family, billed as the first reality TV show, which is both a ground-breaking achievement, and considering our times and the Kardashian family alone, a dubious accomplishment. Tim Robbins and Dianne Lane are great in their roles, as overly suntanned upper middle-class Californians, although the kids in the film tend to blur together, save for the gay son in NYC. James Galdolfini has a bad hair day throughout the film, which is the result of making him look much like the actual film director. I liked the film, but think I would have appreciated it more if I’d actually seen the ten-hour PBS series about the Loud family when it aired. I was a kid myself then, younger than most of the Loud family siblings, and only heard about it obliquely. My family did watch Archie Bunker and Meathead in “All in the Family,” which was great, timely fun back then. And my favorite show was “Kung Fu,” which every time I’ve seen it as an adult strikes me as Awful. But the Loud family perhaps gets some web redemption (a la Tosh.0), in that they seem more human and resilient by the end of the film.

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On Finishing a Novel, Softly

Posted on April 2, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I haven’t been posting anything of late as I’ve been plunged into my own writing—specifically, finishing a novel.
I’m usually amused at depictions of writers in movies, how cornball they often are: Usually the writer begins a novel by sitting an old-fashioned typewriter (do they even exist anymore?) and typing “Chapter One.” After a lot of hijinks involving wives, girlfriends, or ex-wives, the (somehow triumphant) writer then gets to the final page, types, “The End,” and that’s that. Then he or she is on to cashing fat advances and being obnoxious at cocktail parties. Wouldn’t that be nice.
My own experience with writing novels, and from what I know of others, is much more angst-ridden, demanding, draining, soul-searching, and creative. Starting out on the daunting task of writing a novel often begins gradually, with an image or anecdote, or with writing a short story and then realizing it didn’t do the story in your head justice. My new novel, The Bird Saviors, began with both: I heard an anecdote about a young woman whose boyfriend broke up with her, then demanded the expensive engagement ring back. I also wrote a story about an ornithologist, set in the near-future, titled “On the Decline of Sparrows,” published a few years ago in The Antioch Review. I wrote a quick first draft the summer of 2006, and kept meaning to back it up somewhere, as it was only on my laptop harddrive, but I was busy and my daughter was being born and . . . .
The harddrive crashed. Novel gone.
Back to the drawing board. I basically rewrote it from memory, and of course (believe) I improved it, starting with the line, “Officer Israel James did not like motels.” (That’s not the beginning, but is what I remembered most clearly.) It was much work, and this time I backed up the laptop often enough. I even had one harddrive crash during the process, but had the whole thing retrieved in good shape.
Now, five years later, it’s done. More or less. My editor is reading it now, and will no doubt have suggestions for me. But I completed it today with two sentences describing one of the characters drinking a glass of water. It’s actually an important detail. You’ll have to read it to know why.
So know I’ve reached the end game: Both Susan Orlean and Kent Haruf told me this year how they usually hate their books by the end of the editing process, after seeing the pages so much. It gets repetitive, seeing the same thing over and over again. Hopefully, it’s all worth it, in the end.

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"Big Love" Swan Song: Goodbye to All Those Sister Wives

Posted on March 8, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I’ve been a fan of HBO’s series Big Love since it began, and now that it’s in the final episodes (I think there are two left now), it’s going out with a dramatic bang. Bill Paxton and Jeanne Tripplehorn are great, although more often than not Chole Sevigny, as Nikki, steals the show, getting to play the bad girl of the sister wives. (It’s about FLDS polygamists in Utah.) Last season it jumped the shark when Bill got elected to the Utah State Senate, which didn’t really make much sense or seem very plausible, but that did set up the death knell for the show. Like Jon Krakauer’s excellent nonfiction Under the Banner of Heaven, it’s an interesting look at Mormons and polygamists in the West, a more common phenomenon than most Easterners might think. My second home in Custer County has one of the highest populations of FLDS outside of Utah, dwarfed only by the infamous Zion Ranch in Texas. Although Big Love was never quite as good as, say, The Sopranos, it was a good show, whose swan song time has come.

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Review of Karen Russell's "Swamplandia!"

Posted on February 28, 2011 by williamjcobb

Here’s a url to my review of Karen Russell’s debut novel, Swamplandia! that appeared in today’s Dallas Morning News. It’s a good, fun read, not a great literary book, closer to a Young Adult novel than most reviews are acknowledging, such as Janet Maslin’s gusher in the NY Tiimes. It’s a book that wants to be loved/lovable, in the “luminous” category, following the tradition of Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones, but with less violence.
http://www.dallasnews.com/entertainment/books/20110224-book-review-swamplandia-by-karen-russell.ece

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