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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Aimee Bender reads "The Fake Nazi" & Timothy Egan Sees Through the Facebook Craze

Posted on February 26, 2011 by williamjcobb

So Thursday night I’m in the (not quite final, as I’m still feeling it) throes of a sinus infection, weak and tired and congested, home in my cold Pennsylvania house, shivering and threadbare, listening to the mice scrabble in the walls (ok: now I’m exaggerating), and I have to get up and go out in the cold world to oversee a reading on our Penn State campus by visiting writer Aimee Bender, which at this point ranks as just-another-chore, or JAC, if you will. And from the introduction on, all my miseries fade away, and I’m swept up in Aimee’s reading of “The Fake Nazi,” a sad and whimsical story published last fall in Ploughshares, here:
http://www.pshares.org/read/issue-detail.cfm?intIssueID=133
I don’t usually go all rhapsodic over the power of art: Why? I take it for granted. I’m usually too busy to notice. As I hope is obvious, I love my favorite books and enjoy meeting the authors, but it’s also like wallpaper in my life—nice cowboy with lariat design, if I ever bother to slow down and consider it. Aimee Bender’s reading took me away, to a sad & funny place, beyond the humdrum world of revolution in the Mideast headlines, Jersey Shore antics, and whatever that Charlie Sheen person seems to be up to this week. Read the story. It’s good. And will no doubt be in her next book o’ stories.
On a less-ebullient note, Timothy Egan has a good piece in the NY Times about the contrast between rich & poor, now and then, England and the U.S., while writing ostensibly about “The King’s Speech” and “The Social Network,” here:

It’s good, smart, and cuts through the haze that is now surrounding the Wisconsin Budget Battle. When the smoke clears, you can see it’s about the rich getting richer, and trying to take away the power of the middle-class to even argue about it.

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"Out of the Wild: Venezuela": "Survivor" Meets "I Shouldn't Be Alive"

Posted on February 25, 2011 by williamjcobb

For days now I’ve been pinned by a boulder of work and only last night realized I had to saw off my arm like that (dubiously motivated) Aaron Ralston dude in 127 Hours . . . . So I watched the second episode of Out of the Wild: Venezuela, my new favorite show. (In fact the only show I’m watching right now. Everything else seems awful. Even Wrong Turn 2, featuring reality TV show contestants attacked by cannibals, was a disappointment.) But Out of the Wild most definitely doesn’t disappoint. It’s like Survivor meets I Shouldn’t Be Alive.  (I’ve seen the first two episodes in the last week, on Discovery Channel.) Here’s the set-up: A motley crew of volunteers get choppered down to an awesome highland plateau near Angel Falls in Venezuela, then have to hike out of the jungle, bitten by mosquitos, eating snakes for breakfast, munching on tropical plants, and generally looking tired, grouchy, and sodden. There’s no prize money. They have a GPS thingy they can press if they want to give up, and a chopper will come swoop them away. No hokey teams, no immunity idols. I’ve only seen Survivor once but I’ve seen clips of later shows, which looked more like bikini shoots. This one is no babe parade. They all look a little bedraggled and swarthy, even the blonde. Two of the guys hate each other and after only a few days are ready for some serious manslaughter, if not aggravated homicide. One of them would drive me up the wall, I can tell. But he’s the one catching the snakes for breakfast, so maybe I’d make nice. It’s one of the few ‘reality’ shows where they actually do look in physical danger. It’s almost cruel to watch them, hungry and bitten and miserable. But the landscape is gorgeous and dramatic, too. What’s not to like?

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