On Dave Eggers's "Zeitoun" & the Odd Feel of Finishing a Book via Kindle: the Latex Comes Between Us

Posted on November 7, 2010 by williamjcobb

So I’ve just finished reading Dave Eggers’s Zeitoun, and here’s an easy reaction: It’s certainly a good addition to the many books written about the Katrina disaster. It makes you feel ashamed of our government’s disaster preparedness and, in particular, our reaction to the flooded city of New Orleans. Although I don’t blame the ex-nitwit president George W. exclusively, Zeitoun is also a testament to the embarrassment of the Bush years. I’ve read (and reviewed) several books about Katrina, and this one has the most egregious examples of bad behavior by government, and in particular the much-vaunted Office of Homeland Security, which has always sounded (and seemed) Orwellian from its outset. Zeitoun’s story is harrowing and all wrong: In a nutshell, and without giving too much away, a good man is falsely imprisoned by our government during the aftermath of Katrina. This should never happen. But it did.
On a writerly note, Zeitoun is utilitarian, efficient, and almost without style. Like many gripping nonfiction chronicles, it sticks to the unfolding story and builds a great deal of momentum. It’s a fast read, to put it mildly. I calculate my total reading time for the book around four to five hours, max. Some of the editing seemed rushed: There are obvious comma errors, verb conjugation errors (‘lay/lie’ mistakes, for example), and simple constructs that seem rather basic, like obvious thoughts quoted in italics. (Why did I just say that? I’m not going to be arrested, am I?)
On a readerly note, I read it via a Kindle edition, perhaps the fifth or sixth book I’ve now read on Kindle, and I’m noticing an odd facet of this ebook craze: Finishing an ebook is a flat, somewhat disappointing experience.
You don’t have an actual book to place upon your desk or nightstand, admire the cover, savor the good moments from the book. You hit the ‘Home’ button and move on to the next book. (Of course in some ways that’s a good thing. I think the Kindle people should use this ad phrase: It’s not a book, it’s a library.)
But back to that odd feel of a Kindle finish: It’s like sex with a condom. You’re know you’re done, but it’s not the same. The latex comes between us.

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"127 Hours" in Theaters Now, But Not Everyone in Utah Loves Aron Ralston

Posted on November 6, 2010 by williamjcobb

Last summer I stayed a few days in Green River, Utah, at the River Terrace Inn, a cool hotel right on the river, with a pool and hut tub, plus great birding: Scott’s Orioles, Western Tanagers, and Bullock’s Orioles, all showy types, just to name a few, winging through the mass of trees and rush of water just beyond our balcony. The restaurant had good food, and after the knockout breakfast, the owner came out to chat with guests. Somehow the subject of Aron Ralston came up, and apparently he had visited town during the filming of the movie, which was set nearby. The owner recounted how he went up to Ralston in the cafe and told him he wasn’t welcome there, because his stupidity had cost the state a huge amount in fees for search and rescue people, and Ralston, who made a considerable amount of money from his book/movie deals, did not pay them. **Note: This is what was said, but I don’t know if it’s actually accurate.** I thought it was a funny example of that, “We don’t like your kind around here” staple joke, only “your kind” refers to a rock climber off alone (a serious no-no, for good reason, in the rock climbing world), who later doesn’t show enough appreciation for his searchers. I used to be a (somewhat) hardcore rock climber, and yes, I can vouch for many who would frown at Ralston’s foolishness. But then again, he paid a high price for it, right? But then again, I read how he has habitually done risky things, like ski alone and get caught in an avalanche, so I suppose at some point we can just shrug.
The film, “127 Hours,” actually looks intense, from the trailer. Here’s a url to a piece in the Huffington Post about how the movie is making people faint and vomit. So it must be good:
http://www.huffingtonpost.com/2010/11/04/127-hours-causes-fainting_n_779118.html

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On the Republicans Return to Power: The Empire Strikes Back!

Posted on November 4, 2010 by williamjcobb

After all the blathering about the midterms elections (“Let’s Dumb Down America Now!”), at least one of the news sites should have led with the headline, “The Empire Strikes Back!” The least they could do. Boehner is a Darth Vader with orange makeup, and hats off to Mitch McConnell, who essentially embodies the corruption of his party by stating his goal (as legislator) to be ensuring Obama is a one-term president. How’s that for cooperation?
McConnell is a no-chin wonder that makes dogs howl in pain when he walks down the street. He’s so ugly they should pixilate his image just to give the rest of us a break.

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A Smidgen of Hope in the West, and Another Good Defense of Obama

Posted on November 4, 2010 by williamjcobb

If you’re like me, last night’s election seemed a triumph for the latest version of the Know Nothing Party, and in honor of the writer who mentioned that historical reference most eloquently, I should note that Tim Egan sums up the various campaigns (and Sarah Palin’s poison touch) in the West here:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/03/not-quiet-on-the-western-front/?hp
I hope he’s right and the Dems hold on to both Colorado and Washington senate seats. A smidgen of hope.
Tim Egan also confronts Obama’s critics quite smartly, and specifically, here:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/11/02/how-obama-saved-capitalism-and-lost-the-midterms/?src=me&ref=homepage
I like how he tackles Jon Stewart’s whiny complaints. Stewart can make me laugh, but his “rally” might as well have been held for the Republicans, and for his trying to stick Obama with a “Timid” label, what’s so bold about the Stewart/Colbert rally, which ultimately seems no more than a milquetoast lovefest for nothing?

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On Leslie Kean's "UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record": We Are Not Alone, and the Visitors Have Some Awesome Toys

Posted on November 2, 2010 by williamjcobb

So I’m a sucker for UFO stories, though I remain a fairly strong skeptic. For instance, the more I’ve learned about the much-vaunted Roswell Incident the more I lean toward it being a rather complicated story of interstellar hooey. I’ve watched the many UFO programs on TV over the years, and most of them are so bad they’re good—funny, that is—but now and then you see one that seems hard to dismiss. Particularly the stories that issue from the experiences of military figures and airline pilots, backed up by air traffic controller transcripts and multiple witnesses.
Enter Exhibit A, Leslie Kean’s new nonfiction book, UFOs: Generals, Pilots and Government Officials Go On the Record, which is fascinating, eye-opening, and also somewhat hokey, sometimes tedious.  Actual witnesses (as opposed to Kean, who tends to rant a bit) tell the best stories. For instance, the former governor of Arizona, Fife Symington, during the famous 1997 Phoenix Lights mysterious event goes on record to admit he lied, that he actually saw the craft! Which was huge, silent, and not just a matter of dubious ‘lights.’ I’ve seen a documentary that “proved” the Phoenix Lights were military flares, which appears to be, in its own way, a cover story. Symington, the ex-governor (Republican, no less), saw them with his security corps, as in a group of several people, and like most of these witnesses, admits he had no idea what to do. He actually staged a silly press conference, complete with Halloween-costume-aliens, as a kind of cover up. But he admits the U.S. government was of no great help, and did not want to investigate the matter. Kean insists that various documents presented via the Freedom of Information Act imply that our government does have a “super secret” UFO investigation team (Muldar & Scully, most likely), but it’s hard to find any actual data to back that up.
The flaws of Kean’s UFOs: She proselytizes too much, harps on the same thing over and over again (our government’s reluctance or policy of denying UFO reports), and generally her prose is rather flat-footed. THAT DOES NOT, HOWEVER, ruin the book. Several witnesses recount stories that are fascinating simply from the technology involved: The Rendelsham Forest incident in the 1980s, with multiple witnesses who actually touched a UFO, the Japanese Air cargo flight over Alaska, where the UFOs were tracked and recorded on radar, and, most recently, the appearance of a UFO over Chicago’s O’Hare airport in 2007 are convincing, and amazing. If these are aliens, they have some kickass toys. Spacecraft that can hover, go from standing still to several thousand miles an hour in an instant, even seem to move many miles in a second . . . .
Kean makes a big deal about claiming We don’t know they’re extraterrestrials, which is true, but also obvious, and disingenuous, because that’s what we think. The Belgian ‘wave’ of UFOs in the 1980s is another highlight of the book. If you’re the least bit interested in the subject, you’ll dig this book.
Weird note: I read this book on my Kindle, which made it seem like The Future Is Now.

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ABC News as Conservative Media Bias

Posted on October 30, 2010 by williamjcobb

I watch network TV these days only to keep an eye on what mainstream media bullshit is being tossed about, and the last week or two have seen several doozies: Last night their “White House correspondent” (nitwit in D.C.) Jake Tapper finished his segment on the president’s reaction to the possible terrorist bombs with the implication that Obama was hitting the campaign trail tomorrow, purposefully ignoring the danger that these terrorist bombs pose, which is absurd. Consider that our “intelligence gathering” budget was revealed at $80 billion dollars: http://www.latimes.com/sc-dc-1029-intel-budget-20101028,0,2145088.story
So with all those (bogus) professionals at the CIA, Obama has to stay in D.C., in case he might need to don a cape and fly out to save an airline?
When interviewing Bob Woodward about his latest book, Obama’s Wars (a doubly bogus title, that: like he chose them), Dianne Sawyer ended the segment with Woodward emphasizing the president said, “We can survive another terrorist attack,” as if this were anathema to admit. But it’s obviously true: What would he have Obama say? “I don’t think we’ll survive another terrorist attack”? That would please everyone, wouldn’t it?
And lastly on an interview about recent natural disasters, they actually interviewed Michael Brown, Bush’s head of FEMA during the Katrina disaster, as an “expert”! Where do spectacular incompetents and failures serve as experts? On ABC News, for one.
It leads me to wonder: Do they really think the “repeal healthcare legislation/tax cuts for the wealthy” is a sound policy? Perhaps so. It does favor the status quo, after all, and that’s what mainstream media tends to reinforce. Let’s bring back the Bush years! He’s got a memoir coming! Maybe we’ll find out things were great for those eight years. Ignore the fact that the Great Recession followed his economic policies. It’s back to the past!

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Stephen Graham Jones's "It Came From Del Rio"—Is that Jack Nicholson or a Chupacabra?

Posted on October 28, 2010 by williamjcobb

So Stephen Graham Jones is at it again, offering us a new, seriously weird novel with the kickass title of It Came From Del Rio. I just started it and don’t want to give too much away, but it’s not exactly Catcher in the Rye, featuring instead a narrator named Dodd, who I imagine speaks in a voice like Jack Nicholson’s, and who has a connection to the legendary chupacabra of South Texas fame. As with most all Jones’s fiction, it starts with a rip, hits the page running, and leaves your head spinning. Here’s a passage for all the animal lovers:
“Because I didn’t have any clothes, and because the rabbit dead on the floor had been my god, I stripped his skin off, used it to bandage my own. And then, because I had a taste for it now, I ate as many of his organs as I could scoop out. His muscle was too tough, though, and for some reason trying to tear it with just my fingers, it felt like sacrilege. But the kidneys and heart and liver, they were enough.”—p102

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You Give Me Planetary Fever: On China's Coal & Global Warming

Posted on October 27, 2010 by williamjcobb

There’s a good piece in today’s Scientific American about China’s coal use/addiction, located here:
http://www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=can-china-avoid-the-carbon-trap-of-coal
It has some excellent quotes, including this one: “Described with a little poetic licence, global warming is a planetary fever caused by burning too much of our past.”

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Corporate Shills Screwing Democracy, Plus Tattoo Publishing

Posted on October 22, 2010 by williamjcobb

It seems everyday brings a new (at least ‘recent’) low to our wobbly democracy: the Republican-dominated Supreme Court aka Justice John Roberts, Clarence Thomas, Scalia et al have rigged the campaign finance laws to be now meaningless, allowing huge corporations to pour money into campaigns and for candidates who are their shills. (Stateswomen like Christie O’Donnell, who doesn’t know the 1st Amendment guarantees freedom of religion.) There’s another good piece in the Times this morning about that outrageous situation of corporate money flooding into campaigns:

But notice the Tea Party Express, ostensibly all about being a voice of the “people,” doesn’t seem outraged to be funded by a few billionaires out to protect their interests? And influence elections so thoroughly it feels we’re back in the Boss Tweed days? (At least Boss politics got you drunk on election day.) No, their platform consists of anti-healthcare reform (which means what? it’s fine as it is?) and climate change denial.
On the lighter side of the news, this just in from a lit magazine call for submissions:
“We are currently in the process of creating the inaugural issue of “Apropos,” an online journal which aims to demonstrate the symbiotic relationship between technology and the arts. Our publication will serve as a forum to promote poetry, prose, fine arts, music, crafts, tattoos, and all other forms of art.”
Note the slip-it-in-there mention of “tattoos”? They’re publishing tattoos now? What’s next? Scars? Wounds?
I want a story collection called “Warts and Other Blemishes.”

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Kent Haruf in the House and Thomas McGuane in the News

Posted on October 21, 2010 by williamjcobb

For the last two days I’ve had the good fortune of a visit from novelist Kent Haruf, who gave a reading on our campus last night. Kent’s a natural raconteur (I’ve been waiting years to use that word) and told the audience how he grew up in eastern Colorado, the son of a Methodist preacher, and couldn’t wait to leave the high plains, about which he said, “It’s flat, treeless, unpopulated, and windy most all the time.” Once he left, to live in Turkey as a Peace Corps worker teaching English to rural students who “would probably never use it again in their life, and didn’t need it,” and to serve as a conscientious objector in the Vietnam War, he later came to miss Colorado and the high plains, which now he admits, “It’s not pretty, but it’s beautiful.”
All this explains his focus on the fictional (or mythic) town of Holt, Colorado, the setting for all his novels—The Tie That Binds (1984), Where You Once Belonged (1990), Plainsong (1999), and Eventide (2004). I was surprised to hear that he didn’t begin publishing until into his Forties, which runs counter to the media myth of the Brilliant Young Writer. He claims to be a slow learner and made a point that he’s not so much a writer as a person learning to write. He’s a true gentleman, soft-spoken, with a somewhat raspy voice, and paid attention to others, including the many students who asked questions during the Q&A at the end of the reading.
We were lucky to be in his presence, and at a bar after the reading, I pulled out my new Kindle (which he’d never seen before) and showed him Eventide in Kindle form. But that’s probably a dangerous thing to do, for a writer—powering up your Kindle in a bar, surrounded by other writers. We argued over a sex scene in Lolita so much I ended up purchasing it (while I have probably four to five copies, including a first edition, of Lolita already), plus some Chekhov stories, just to show others how easy it was. Literary impulse purchasing! The future is now.
And another Western writer is in the news this morning: Tom McGuane has a new novel about to appear, titled Driving on the Rim. Here’s the piece in this morning’s NY Times:

While I’ve never been fortunate enough to have Tom McGuane over to the house, I’ve seen him read at a small bookstore, where he was both rugged and gracious. What I remember most about him is his fiction, a scene involving illicit-love-gone-wrong at a drive-in theater making me laugh out loud. That he’s a rancher in Montana, and honors a tradition and a love of the land that I share, only makes him more interesting to me, and perhaps genuine.

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