The Classic Library v. Kindle Disposability of eBooks

Posted on January 15, 2011 by williamjcobb

Over the holidays something struck me (as all wrong) about the rise of ebooks and “Kindle editions”: In Colorado I have a kind of classic library, not a zillion crappy paperbacks, but a good number (around a thousand, I would guess) of (hardbacks, mostly) top-quality titles, with a smattering of the Quirky. With the hardbacks, each has a history and a provenance of its own: a first-edition Lolita (1955), with the reference to the Olympia Press edition permission in the fly leaf (Nabokov had a serious row with the French publisher of the Olympia Press edition, which was its first appearance in print, before wrestling away the rights to publish it in a mainstream press in the U.S.), a first edition of Richard Wright’s Black Boy (1945), with dust jacket, bought for 25 cents at a garage sale in Colorado, complete with a plea to buy War Bonds in the fly leaf; a first-edition of Hemingway’s For Whom the Bell Tolls (1940) and a first-edition of William Faulkner’s Sanctuary (1931), with his funny, odd foreword. Plus a great collection of Richard Brautigan’s books and hardback climbing sagas, including a first-edition of Maurice Herzog’s Annapurna (1951), with slightly torn dust jacket, which tells of the first ascent of an 8,000 meter peak in 1950, and is still one of the greatest climbing books ever written.

Compare that history/complexity with what happens when you download all to a Kindle: No dust jacket, no different font, no history at all. If the power dies, so do your books. A Kindle ad could proclaim, “It’s not a book, it’s a library.” This is true. But you’d have to add to that, “It’s a disposable library.” Or dubious. I’m using my Kindle, but mainly for convenience. I checked a Macbeth reference with it this morning (Act V, v: “out, out, brief candle”), using the Search function. And I’m reading the Old Testament on it, when I’m in that ole biblical mood. But overall, it’s a forgotten stepchild library, the one whining in the corner.

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A Star Is Corn: "Country Strong" & the Gwyneth Paltrow Gagfest

Posted on January 11, 2011 by williamjcobb

There needs to be some complicated noun (perhaps the Urban Dictionary can get on this, better than “hiberdating” or “internet coma”) to express the rather long-winded “feeling of revulsion when seeing overexposed celebrities in internet-news headlines that you’ve just become sick and tired of because you’ve seen their names once too often.” See what I mean? Into that category would be the (easy, sad) Lindsey Lohan, (awful, repulsive) Sarah Palin, and now (cloying, smug) Gwyneth Paltrow has a country western movie, Country Strong, yeehaw! I even like C&W music, the best kind, like Johnny Cash, Hank Williams, and Willie Nelson. (Not to mention the terrific song, “The Happiest Girl in the Whole U.S.A.,” which David Bryne used in the best Big Love episode ever.) But a whole film about a c&w star just out of rehab, with a plot that reads like a mutant hybrid of All About Eve and A Star Is Born? Oh, what the heck. I’ll watch it when it comes to satellite, just to hear the bad lines of hokey dialogue.

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Prisons, Poverty, & Pickups: The Other West

Posted on January 9, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I’ve just driven 1720 miles from Colorado to Pennsylvania . . .

. . .  and the contrast between Western and Eastern U.S. is on my mind. One thing I notice is the discrepancy between the media myth of the West and the reality. When outsiders think of Colorado they (often, usually) think Aspen glitz, the playground of the rich, while most of southern Colorado seems noticeably poor yet hardly downtrodden. People make less money there, but they love the landscape, they love the hardbitten lifestyle. We were in Florence, Colorado, known for its tumbleweeds and vacant lots, piles of cinder blocks in the yard, trailers in various states of disrepair, when my wife jokingly said, “That’s what I like about Colorado. You know, the junk and the poverty.” She compared it nicely to the antiseptic consumer-whore atmosphere of suburban St. Louis, where we visit relatives to and from Colorado. Florence is also famous for its Supermax prison, which we drive by every time we visit, the highway signs warning us not to pick up hitchhikers. And virtually every other vehicle (besides the Subarus, which we drive) is a pickup. Welcome to the Other West. Real America for Real Americans, to play on the new Onion News Network catchphrase.
And here’s a photo of my beloved Custer County, east of my mountain house, out on the prairie:

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Deer & Coyotes in the New Year

Posted on January 3, 2011 by williamjcobb

I’ve had deer and coyotes in my yard at the start of this new year, so something must be right with the world. I double-checked and corroborated that the mountain scenes in True Grit were filmed near Santa Fe, which is the southern end of the Sangre de Cristos, what I rank as my mountains. The deer and coyotes all look healthy. It was 5 degrees when I took this picture:

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"True Grit" in the True West

Posted on December 28, 2010 by williamjcobb

So last night I saw the Coen Brothers’ True Grit in the mountain town of Canon City, Colorado, which was at one point in the 1880s the stagecoach stop east of Bighorn Canyon. A Western in a town of the New (Old) West. Jeff Bridges outdoes John Wayne easily, as the crusty Rooster Cogburn, his voice extra-gravelly and rough, saying lines like, “I don’t believe in fairy tales nor sermons about money, Baby Sister, but I do appreciate the cigarette.” The actress who plays Maddie Ross steals the show. Like Miller’s Crossing, which pays homage to other gangster and film noir directors/writers, True Grit seems to allude to other great westerns, especially Jim Jarmusch’s Dead Man and Cat Ballou—which, by the way, was filmed in Custer County, Colorado, where I am now. I liked the courtroom scene in particular, and the moment when Maddie Ross jumps into the river and swims it on her horse is thrilling. I still like A Serious Man better, but I’m sure I’ll watch True Grit over and over again.
It was dusk when we left the theater and we headed west toward home, into a sunset silhouetting the Sangre de Cristo mountains, and it was like we were headed into True Grit country, armed only with a halfbag full of popcorn and the black bones of Junior Mints rattling around in a waxy white paper box.

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Peter Benchley's "Jaws," the Novel, as Toothsome Holiday Reading

Posted on December 23, 2010 by williamjcobb

One thing good about the holidays, and about being away from home and routine, is Weird Reading. I have a first edition hardback of Peter Benchley’s “Jaws” (1973) on my bookshelf in Colorado, and picked it up to pass the time while watching it not snow again. It’s actually pretty good. “Toothsome” I think is the word. I read it years ago when it came out, but I didn’t remember that in the novel, the couple actually has Sex On the Beach before she gets chomped while swimming afterward. The sentence that describes it is almost an entry for that Bad Literary Sex Award, the one for which John Updike was a perennial favorite: “They fumbled with each other’s clothing, twined limbs around limbs, and thrashed with urgent ardor on the cold sand” (10). Note the obvious parallels to the woman’s death in the maw of the Great White and her thrashing with weekend hookup stranger (this is revealed in subsequent paragraphs). The ending is lifted straight out of Melville’s Moby Dick, but it’s grisly fun.

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Review of The New Yorker's "20 Under 40" Anthology, and a Nod to Holiday Pleasures, of the Guilty Variety

Posted on December 23, 2010 by williamjcobb

I’m on holiday vacation, offline for the most part, doing all those things one does on holiday, like witness TV programs I generally wouldn’t be caught dead watching, such as anything involving “. . . With the Stars!” in the title. Like “Skating With the Stars.” They’re upping the ante, aren’t they? But let’s take it one step further: What about “Brain Surgery With the Stars”? Let’s get Lindsay Lohan on that one.
My review of the New Yorker’s “20 Under 40” anthology is here in the Dallas Morning News:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_20under40_1219gd.ART.State.Edition1.436f4c2.html

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On Chuck Closterman's Zombie Analogy and Stephen Graham Jones's "The Ones That Got Away"

Posted on December 5, 2010 by williamjcobb

It seems everyone is trying to deconstruct and decode the recent zombie craze, including Gail Collins in the NY Times, who wrote a funny piece about the zombie Congress, and this morning Chuck Closterman has a good(ish) piece in the NY Times describing how modern life is like a zombie attack (failing to mention dinner parties, I might add):
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/12/05/arts/television/05zombies.html?pagewanted=2&hpw
In the interest of “transparency” (and so Julian Assange doesn’t rat me out) I should declare that I’m not a fan of zombie movies, stories, or the “zombie mythos,” as one of my students recently put it. It all seems pretty dumb to me, frankly. As do vampires. Too one note. I live in Pennsylvania at least half my life, which is the setting for the original Night of the Living Dead and some of the subsequent sequels, so maybe it seems too close to home. I once told a class at Penn State that Night of the Living Dead was filmed here, and proposed that we should emblazon our license plates with the legend State of the Living Dead. (They frowned and didn’t think it was funny.) But the best writers can always put a new spin on any idea/metaphor: Stephen Graham Jones has a new book of horror fiction out, titled The Ones That Got Away, and it includes his killer story “Monsters,” which is (somewhat of) a zombie story, and puts a coming-of-age spin on it: troubled teen meets girl and has incipient romance, only to be undone by the undead. It’s a great example of genre mixing, a way to reenergize the undead. Or we can just eat their brains. And start saying, “You know, maybe the Republicans are right.”

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On the New Yorker's "20 Under 40" Anthology: Attack of the Dinner Party Zombies!

Posted on December 4, 2010 by williamjcobb

So I’ve been swamped with work the last few days, not to mention trying to decide what Christmas presents to give family members who fall into the Seriously Irritating category (Ah, festive cheer!), but I have managed to review The New Yorker‘s new anthology, 20 Under 40, which is billed, partly, as The Future of American Fiction. (Here let Santa say, “Oy.”) Many of the stories were quite good, and I’ll gladly single out Chris Adrian’s “The Warm Fuzzies” and Joshua Ferris’s “The Pilot” as two of my favorites. Too many of them seemed reminiscent of that blast from the past, Lifestyles of the Rich and Famous. Oh, the horror of a dinner party gone wrong! Oh, the agony of our child getting rejected by the tony preschool! Where is Robin Leach when you need him? Nicole Krauss takes the cake when describing a successful writer (not her, no, seriously) who walks around the Village looking in bookstores to see if they’re stocking copies of her book and displaying them sufficiently to contribute to her self-esteem.
This other little tidbit caught my eye, on MSNBC: Those dastardly dastards at Wikileaks have now promised we’re going to get the dirt on UFOs in diplomatic cables:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/40491489/ns/us_news-wikileaks_in_security/
I can’t wait. Seriously. I’ll probably have a dinner party to celebrate.

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A Reason for Holiday Glee: Coen Brothers' "True Grit" to Open December 22nd

Posted on November 28, 2010 by williamjcobb

So the filmmakers who are putting pretty much everyone else to shame have a Christmas present (and they’re Jewish, to boot) for the world, their adaptation of True Grit, starring Jeff Bridges stepping into John Wayne’s boots. Here’s the official website, which includes some killer trailers: http://www.truegritmovie.com/
I’m old enough to have seen the 1969 original, which garnered an Oscar for John Wayne, although it was comically bad in parts, mainly for having Kim Darby and Glen Campbell in key roles. I remember a goofy scene in a rattlesnake pit. Whatever the original was, the Coens are going to blow it out of the water, and probably most every other film of 2010, considering the rather weak year it has been, mainly one anonymous romantic blahmedy after another. All is not lost. If I can swing it, I’m seeing this one in Colorado, on a snowy night.

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