"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.

Posted in Good TV, The West | Leave a comment

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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Supercomputer Cheats on "Jeopardy," Ray Kurzweil and "The Singularity Is Near"

Posted on February 18, 2011 by williamjcobb

So I actually watched a bit of “Watson” the computer on Jeopardy, and it was obvious the computer seemed to have a huge advantage in timing, that he wasn’t pressing that buzzer gadget that slowed the humans down, particularly noticeable on the easier questions. ABC News reported last night that yes, the computer could answer in 1/100th of a second, faster than the humes (let’s invent a word!) could press that buzzer. Which is in effect cheating, if normally the humes are competing with each other for buzzer timing. Here’s a piece in the NY Times about the show: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/17/science/17jeopardy-watson.html?_r=1&src=me&ref=homepage
But a better comparison here, and one that will give you a more complicated perspective, is the fascinating/wacky nonfiction book, Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near (2005) all about advances in A.I. and bold predictions for the future (Immortality, anyone?). It’s not a great book, but it’s charming in its loopyness. “Watson” actually reinforces some of his arguments, about the advances in computer power and abilities, including the reverse-engineering of the human brain, a way to get computers to have the creative and deductive power of humans. He’s very sanguine about it, but I find it a bit scarier, myself. And totally fascinating.

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J. D. Salinger Bio Sounds Good, and a Writers Party in Austin, circa 2006

Posted on February 11, 2011 by williamjcobb

So back in 2006 I was at an opulent writers’ party, a post-event thing at the Texas Book Festival, standing next to Frank McCourt and Maureen Down, Richard Ford and Jay McInerny, who today is reviewing a new biography of J.D. Salinger, here: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/13/books/review/McInerney-t.html?hp
I’ve always liked Salinger and admired his reclusiveness. This sounds like a good read. But back to that party in Austin: My best friend picked up a bottle of wine from somewhere (of course it was all free, great food and drink) and was heading upstairs with it, to hang out on the roof, and a caterer person asked him to leave the bottles on the tables please. He kind of slunk away, telling me later he felt like Ratso Rizzo in Midnight Cowboy, in the Andy Warhol’s Factory party scene, where he’s stuffing the sandwiches in his coat, and the woman tells him, “You don’t need to steal them, they’re free.” My other friend (female) tried to pinch Richard Ford.

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Hype Aversion to Facebook & Twitter, Nod to Evgeny Morozov's "The Net Delusion"

Posted on February 6, 2011 by williamjcobb

Leave it to the folks at the Urban Dictionary (who sometimes seem to have too much time on their hands: check out the P-words and you’ll get an idea of what I mean) to come up with a term for my response to the constant Facebook/Twitter tweets coming from the moronic media talking heads: Hype Aversion. Definition: “Rejection of an insanely popular idea, game, show, place etc. simply because it is so insanely popular.” That’s me all right. Although of course I’d say it’s more than “simply because it is so insanely popular,” more so because we hear about it too much. Frank Rich has a good piece about the myth of Facebook/Twitter’s power in today’s NY Times, specifically debunking the twin bogus “Twitter Revolutions” of Iran and Egypt. He also mentions Evgeny Morozov’s “The Net Delusion,” which sounds right up my socialnetwork-skeptical alley:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/opinion/06rich.html

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In the Footsteps of Richard Alley: Mark Hertsgaard's "Hot: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth"

Posted on February 6, 2011 by williamjcobb

So today’s NY Times Sunday Book Review has a review of what sounds like a good book in the climate change library, HOT: Living Through the Next Fifty Years on Earth, by Mark Hertsgaard, here:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/02/06/books/review/Stephenson-t.html?_r=1&ref=books
I asked Richard Alley, in our parking lot climate change conversation, if there was any good news, and he said yes. After describing how ranchers/farmers were warming to the idea of wind farms, we agreed that the entrenched business interests of the old energy economy were inhibiting research/adaptation toward the new, and he had a good quote: “The people who will lose money from this shift know who they are, but the people who will gain money from this don’t, yet.”
And the reviewer wisely identifies a significant problem lies in our own country’s and culture’s dim-sighted refusal to believe in the urgency of climate change: “In fact, Hertsgaard’s reporting makes me wonder if there isn’t more hope for the Sahel than for the vulnerable South and Southwest of the United States. After all, why prepare for something — much less try to halt it — if you refuse to believe it’s happening? The American social context too often remains the largest obstacle, Hertsgaard observes, not only to adaptation at home but to cutting emissions globally. It’s not clear how to change this, but an honest, urgent, grown-up national conversation — beginning in Washington — would be a start.”
Obama’s bold (and very difficult) vision and plan for renewable energy is a shift in tone, shooting for a more politically feasible way to approach the problem—convince the culture that jobs will not be only be lost off of a foreign-oil-based economy to one based on local renewables. It’s a start.

Posted in books, Climate Change | Leave a comment

Climate Change Expert Richard Alley in the Parking Lot, Obama in the House

Posted on February 4, 2011 by williamjcobb

So yesterday President Obama visited Penn State and I wasn’t able to go, having to teach a class at that time, but the whole town (and my students) were atwitter with excitement, and irritation, because the traffic was all screwed up. I’m an unabashed fan of Obama’s, and was mildly disappointed that he came to town but I couldn’t get a ringside seat. Later in the day I’m at a local supermarket with my wife and daughter and a man walks by who I’ve seen on numerous climate change documentaries and programs, and I tap my wife and say, “That’s the climate change scientist.” It was Richard Alley, a world-famous global-warming expert, known for his ice-core analyses. He was leaving the supermarket at the same time as us, hopping onto his grocery cart and riding like an excited kid through the parking lot, to a car parked right next to ours. I went up and introduced myself, and we had a good chat. He’s a great guy, energetic, upbeat, a little kooky, as all us professors should be. (He was one of the few profs at Penn State I had always wanted to meet.) I asked if he had any good climate news and he said Yes, that there was a special coming up on PBS in a few weeks about alternative energy. He told some anecdotes about technological advances and alternative energy sources that have been known for some time, but are starting to be taken seriously, like wind and solar. If I’m quoting him correctly, he said we could 20% of our power from wind farms in the windiest areas of the Great Plains, and that the economic conditions were getting better for it, by paying ranchers for the wind turbine leases. It was one of those Meetings With Great Men, my wife and I standing in the parking lot and listening to him, trying to corral our daughter running around our feet. Way cool.

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On Neil Genzlinger's "The Problem With Memoirs," a Witty Look at Bogus Memoirs in NY Times, or a Book Review With Balls, plus a ShoutOut to Karen Russell's "Swamplandia!"

Posted on January 29, 2011 by williamjcobb

I haven’t been blogging much lately because I’m caught in a vortex of Academic Hell, coping with various problems brought on by our sickly economy, and here’s to hoping it will end soon: the bad economy, that is. Academic Hell is generally a netherworld of neuroses and anxiety—the flames are usually papier mache, and the ragged clothing includes crewneck sweaters. But I just read a great piece that is worth sharing, Neil Genzlinger’s “The Problem With Memoirs,” here in the NY Times:
http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/30/books/review/Genzlinger-t.html?pagewanted=2&_r=1&ref=books
Here’s a paragraph: “That you had parents and a childhood does not of itself qualify you to write a memoir. This maxim, which was inspired by an unrewarding few hours with “Disaster Preparedness,” by Heather Havrilesky, is really a response to a broader problem, a sort of grade inflation for life experiences. A vast majority of people used to live lives that would draw a C or a D if grades were being passed out — not that they were bad lives, just bland. Now, though, practically all of us have somehow gotten the idea that we are B+ or A material; it’s the “if it happened to me, it must be interesting” fallacy.”
Why I like it so much: The world of book reviewing creates parameters that generally dissuade the writer from negative reviews, even if those are sometimes the most insightful (and funny). Many years ago I reviewed for the NY Times until I wrote a negative review of a rather overstuffed novel, and that was it. That’s how the censorship goes. They pull the plug on you. (Genzlinger is an editor there, so he has greater leeway.) What I do now, instead of blasting a bad book, is refuse to review it. But that negates the nasty fun. I can live with it, of course. Karma and all that. But still, the only reviewer I light up at seeing his name in the NY Times tends to be Joe Queenan, who gets to say nasty, funny things, but often about old books, instead of the new. From my sometimes insider look at memoirs, I think Genzlinger is right. I know of a memoir out right now by a person I know (I won’t name names) that I think is pretty much 90% b.s. But you wouldn’t know that from the jacket copy. It’s about a dysfunctional family. A story we all love, right?
Right now I’m reviewing Karen Russell’s new novel, Swamplandia! and am glad to report it’s a fun read, about a smalltime alligator themepark in Florida. And it’s blessedly not a bad memoir.
Continue reading →

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