Sneak Peak at Susan Orlean's new book

Posted on September 26, 2010 by williamjcobb

So in the shameless-namedropping category I have to dish that this last week I was in the company of Susan Orlean, author of The Orchid Thief (1998) and many others, not to mention being a terrific writer for The New Yorker, in which she appears regularly and has a blog on their website. I was in charge of her visit to our campus here in central Pennsylvania, which was a major headache until she arrived. All the busywork was worth it. These events are common for writing programs/English departments: she met with students, gave a reading, that kind of thing. What was different about her visit? It was drop-dead, knockout good, box-office boffo. (Many of these gigs are rather so-so.) She was funny, charming, nice, confident without being arrogant, kind to the students. In short, all the right stuff.
AND she read from a new book she has in the offing, described as “a cultural biography of Rin Tin Tin,” starting all the way back in 1918, when RTT apparently had his debut in the world. Her reading was one of the best I can remember: funny, insightful, full of zingy lines and twists of thought. She read a piece that was amazing, published in Esquire many years ago, about a ten-year-old boy. In her preamble to it, she described how the Esquire editor asked her to do a profile of the actor Macaulay Culkin. She admitted to the editor that she’d love to write for them (it was her first piece for the magazine), but wasn’t interested in the Home Alone actor (now perhaps best known for just that, Home Alone). She had some great things to say about our obsession with celebrities, and how they essentially become too “known” to make a good piece. So she proposes a piece on an average ten-year-old boy, finds one, and does it. I’ll let it speak for itself. Here’s a url:
http://www.courses.vcu.edu/ENG200-dwc/orlean.htm
As most people probably know, the film Adaptation (2002), starring Meryl Streep, Chris Cooper, and Nicholas Cage, was based (in part) on The Orchid Thief. Before Susan came I told my students we should pretend we had not read her book and only ask her questions based on the film, which is essentially totally different, just to irritate her. (See under, My sense of humor.) Of course we didn’t do that. She spent much time with the students one-on-one, visited several groups, and was open and dynamic through it all. We had dinner with her one night and she regaled us with stories of traveling to Cuba in 1989, knowing no Spanish, and having no connections there. She’s witty, clever, the real deal. And a gracious person. There should be more like her.
Watch for that Rin Tin Tin book.

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"Woman Fends Off Attacking Bear With Zucchini"

Posted on September 24, 2010 by williamjcobb

I love bear stories. Especially the kind where a plucky gal manages to fend one off with a large garden vegetable. Thanks to Natalie for sharing this one:
http://missoulian.com/news/local/article_aaae89f6-c741-11df-9ea6-001cc4c002e0.html
We have frequent bear encounters at our Colorado home, and I’ve experienced the surprise that this woman faces, when the bear rushes into her yard so quickly she barely has time to react. Your average bruin can morph from Winnie-the-Pooh into Usain Bolt in an eyeblink. They mainly ransack our bird feeders. But we love our bears, and following the old dictum, “A fed bear is a dead bear,” actually take down our feeders if the bears start to show up. Here’s a photo of one of these desperadoes in our backyard, circa 2008, menacing a soccer ball:

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On Timothy Egan's "The Big Burn," the Boulder Fires, & the Fires to Come

Posted on September 19, 2010 by williamjcobb

Living in green & leafy Pennsylvnia part of the year, and (sometimes green) & (always) gorgeous Colorado the other part of the year, I notice how forest fires seem rather abstract for the East, a dreaded reality for the West. Timothy Egan’s nonfiction novel (my usage, I’ll admit) The Big Burn (2009) is a gripping, amazing book about forest fires, American history, the West, and a portent of things to come—as was his National Book Award-winning The Worst Hard Time (2006), about the Dust Bowl of the Great Depression. Here’s a quick excerpt:
“It felt as if the town was under artillery fire, the mile-high walls of the Bitterroots shooting flaming branches onto the squat of houses in the narrow valley below. Between flareups and blowups, the hot wind delivered a continuous stream of sparks and detritus. . . . Earlier in the day, ashes had fallen like soft snow through the haze. At the edge of town, where visibility was better, people looked up and saw thunderheads of smoke, flat-bottomed and ragged-topped, reaching far into the sky” (3).
The Big Burn focuses particularly on the catastrophic fires of 1910, centering the story in Wallace, Idaho, a town that was virtually engulfed and destroyed by the flames. It has a great beginning, situating the reader (in medias res, if we want to get Latin about it) at the moment just before Wallace is about to burn to the ground, then backstepping to the history of Teddy Roosevelt and Gifford Pinchot, the first head/originator of the U.S. Forestry Service, along with other key figures such as John Muir, the robber barons of the West, and even Grover Cleveland, who helped get the Forestry Service off the ground.
The recent fires near Boulder, Colorado, are unfortunately probably a Sign of Things To Come: As temps heat up, drier weather will prevail, and the only thing that keeps Colorado—and other parts of the West—from burning every summer is the summer monsoon rains, but those can fail, as they did most recently in 2002. I was there. It was freaky. Clouds would form and pass over. Hardly any rain fell for months. I think there was a county in Eastern Colorado that recorded less than one inch of rain over a full year. The Iron Mountain Fire, in my home area of Custer County, Colorado, destroyed over 100 structures. I saw people crying in the convenience store, ready to get payback on the yahoos who started the fire by walking away from an outdoor grill (banned at that time), which was then knocked over by gusty winds. Many of these people owned homes but had no insurance. And for all those who do pay for insurance annually, it makes your rates go up if they have to pay out claims (of course insurance companies raise rates for many other reasons as well, such as price gouging/fixing, but that’s another story).
Read The Big Burn. It’s a great book.

Posted in books, The West | Leave a comment

On "Freedom" and Facebook Hoopla . . . I'm Just Saying

Posted on September 18, 2010 by williamjcobb

I’m just saying: Let’s drop Franzen’s novel Freedom—currently being crammed down our collective throats by mediaworld frenzy—and all the annoying Facebook (& Mark Zuckerberg) overhype into a Time Capsule, bury it, then look again in ten years. Predictions, anyone?
I haven’t read Freedom yet, and am not rushing to either: Why: The Corrections seemed a total bore to me, and Freedom (makes me think of Bush Jr.’s bombing campaigns: Ah, the Oughts, what a time) is being touted as “Better than The Corrections!” Well, that’s nice.
I also can’t forget being excited to read Lorrie Moore’s new novel (though a bit suspicious), A Gate at the Stairs, last year, after the rave/ravier/raviest review by Jonathan Lethem in the NY Times, only to discover a rather tedious experience. A Midwest dysfunctional family saga? Why does that sound familiar?
Of course now’s the time to quote a true masterpiece, The Big Lebowski: “Well, that’s like, your opinion, man.”

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On the Idiocy of the Tea Party Express

Posted on September 16, 2010 by williamjcobb

Other people (and politico bloggers, I’m sure) have written more about this than I, but the sheer idiocy of the Tea Party movement is making me embarrassed for our country. (That and The Bad Girls Club, but that’s another story.) The idea that cutting taxes (and spending on domestic agenda, but don’t cut the military! we need those bombs!) will solve our economic woes is categorically idiotic: especially when you’re talking about extending the Bush tax cuts, which mainly benefit the wealthy. If I hear one more thing about Sarah Palin and Glenn Beck, I’m going to jump out a window. (Actually, scratch that: I’d be dead before 10 a.m.). This stupidity is given much airtime and credence in mainstream media venues (such as CNN, Fox News), so I have to share a video sent to me by a friend (Thanks, Morris!) on YouTube, which shows some Tea Partiers at that Godliness rally in D.C. I applaud the young guy doing the interviews here.

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British Grandma Goes to Bed With Headache, Wakes Up Speaking French

Posted on September 14, 2010 by williamjcobb

This story, fresh from the U.K.’s Daily Mail, appeals to my sense of humor, so I have to share:
http://www.dailymail.co.uk/health/article-1311835/Gran-Kay-Russell-goes-bed-migraine-wakes-French-accent.html

Posted in Weird Science | Leave a comment

My Kindle Arrives! (Big Deal.) Now What?

Posted on September 10, 2010 by williamjcobb

So I’ve been swamped lately with too much reading, including reviewing Joseph Skibell’s 593-page novel titled A Curable Romantic (“It’s okay, but I really wish it were longer . . . .”), & really don’t even have time to think (or blog). But when I do pause to (try to) have a thought or two, I’m thinking: What’s the cure for too much reading? Get a Kindle!
It arrived yesterday, and I do like it, other than some obvious glitches (like why does it put em dashes in where all the hyphens should be, as in “a big—breasted hitchhiker” instead of “a big-breasted hitchhiker”: and then I might wonder what’s that big-breasted hitchhiker doing in Melville’s Moby Dick? Answer: It’s the Kindle ‘updated’ edition. You should see what they did to Ahab). This little reading gizmo was “free,” by the way: Not that the wise folks at Amazon.com tossed one my way to “beta test,” but because I had accumulated many points on a credit card and had to buy something with them, for Chrissakes. You must consume! But hey, there’s an adage here somehow: If you must consume, books are better than most of the junk we buy.
A few observations for those who might be interested in hopping on this bandwagon: It’s smaller than I thought it would be, which I like; purchasing the books is amazingly easy; the typeface (I had heard this before getting one) is rather clunky, but okay; the web-surfing capability is pretty cool, although the screen is small.
I’ve read of many writers lamenting the rise of ebooks, but I’m not one of them. I read a lot and it seems some books would probably be best via e (is this a term?), rather than, say, hardcover. I can see why people who travel a lot (as I do, sometimes) would love them. Bring on the future! Plug me in and beam me up.

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Another Example of How Facebook Marks the Beginning of the End

Posted on August 31, 2010 by williamjcobb

Another example of the slogan, “Friends Don’t Meet Friends on Facebook,” is this grim story, about the consequences of inopportune Facebook postings:
http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/38928514/ns/us_news/
I’ve long felt the long tentacles of the Facebook empire closing around my world, and at this point I’m, like, whatever. Mainly I cringe at seeing that little icon (now even on the NY Times webpage) everywhere, reminding me to become One Of Us. And I may soon give in, let that pod person into my house, make him dinner and go to sleep: I’ll wake up happy and in touch with everybody!

Posted in Social Networking | Leave a comment

Timothy Egan on the Know-Nothings

Posted on August 26, 2010 by williamjcobb

Today’s NY Times has an excellent piece by Timothy Egan about the current Know-Nothing movement in the country, and its dangerous implications:
http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/08/25/building-a-nation-of-know-nothings/
What he does best is summarize some of the most ridiculous claims of this fake movement, a bedraggled dog trotting along the heels of the Tea Party parade. Obama is being targeted as “guilty” for the failure of bailouts that occurred during the Bush administration, and even the success of some of these bailouts (that personally I have mixed feelings about, but you have to read a book as detailed as Sorkin’s Too Big to Fail to understand what led to some of these bailouts) is being ignored—such as the resurgence of the American auto industry—in a clamor against the fraudulent Socialism claims.
Timothy Egan’s The Worst Hard Time (2005) is an amazing book about the Dust Bowl of the 1930s, and won the National Book Award for Nonfiction. His new book, The Big Burn (2009), is on my wannaread list. He’s one of our best nonfiction writers, and is particularly good on issues of the West.

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On Getting Skunked and the Disaster in the Arctic

Posted on August 24, 2010 by williamjcobb

My cat, Iris, got skunked this weekend, always fun. I woke in the middle of night to a horrible smell, wandered down the hall half-asleep into the living room, and—I’ve been dying to yank out this Weather Channel phrase—”It was like a war zone.” Well, a war zone minus all the IEDs, M-16s, replaced with a stinky cat. She looked chagrined, cowering there on the floor, emitting a skunk smell so strong I could barely breathe. It was a fog of musk. That intense, it doesn’t even smell like a skunk anymore, but something scorched and funky.
And to follow up my Heidi Cullen post a few days back, here’s a piece in the NY Times that sounds appropriately dire, Thomas Homer-Dixon’s “Disaster at the Top of the World”:

Posted in Climate Change, Weird Science | Leave a comment