William J Cobb on books & film

Here’s the url to my review of Adam Haslett’s novel, Union Atlantic, which appears in the Dallas Morning News today. It’s a fast-paced read, a tale of creepy bankers, of which there seems to be no shortage in these times:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_unionatlantic_0214gd.ART.State.Bulldog.4b9f072.html

So I’m always suspicious (being at heart a Smartass Skeptic) of movie blurbs and call-out quotes, but several people had told me how “scary” Paranormal Activity was, and I was home late, wanting a movie to escape into a scary world of monsters and ghosts and clammy hands that grab in the dark . . . and somewhere I saw that quote “One of the scariest horror movies ever made.” Yeah right. There are a couple good & scary moments in the film, such as when the gal gets yanked out of bed and dragged down the hallway, but for the most part it’s like The Blair Witch Project meets The Amityville Horror, with less scenery-chewing than Blair Witch, and less old-fashioned goofy fun than Amityville. (Note: I’m a sucker for The Amityville Horror as a cautionary real estate nightmare. The 1979 version, not that putrid remake. Right before we closed on buying a house in Colorado, I asked my wife, “What if it’s haunted?” And I know The Amityville Horror was to blame for my second-thoughts. I like when James Brolin gets all freaky chopping the wood. I’m just like that at my Colorado house, and it turns out it’s not even haunted!)
Don’t believe the hype.
Now all I hear is how “great” Avatar is. I’m sure to be amazed.

I actually had two reviews appear on Sunday, one in Pennsylvania and one in Texas. I feel like I’m going coast-to-coast, almost. This one is about Matthew Flaming’s The Kingdom of Ohio, which appeared in the Dallas Morning News. As the review suggests, my quibble would be that the novel never quite adds up to much, but that’s not the whole story. Do novels really need to ‘add up’ to something? The best ones do. Yes. But The Kingdom of Ohio was certainly clever, and a fun read. Isn’t that good enough? Most films are nothing more than “mildly amusing wastes of time,” to quote myself from an earlier entry. Anyway, here’s the url:
http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/books/stories/DN-bk_ohio_0110gd.ART.State.Bulldog.4ba8b34.html

This review appeared in print yesterday. I did it as a favor for a Centre County Reads project, that chose Dashiell Hammett’s The Maltese Falcon as their 2010 book. It’s a hardboiled, gin-joint read, fun in part to glimpse the sexual politics of 1930. Sam Spade seems to sleep with every available female in the storyline, and isn’t shocked about the gay crime partners in the least. The review appeared in the Centre Daily Times, the local paper for the State College, Pennsylvania area, and here’s the url:
http://www.centredaily.com/497/story/1719314.html

So I was offline for almost a month, spending the holidays in Colorado, no landline phone, no Wifi, no email, no mornings spent perusing The Daily Mail or any other mildly amusing waste of time. The air tasted cleaner. I felt stronger. I talked to my neighbors . . . . Which is all true, although I would also add that it wasn’t that big of a deal. The internet is like indoor plumbing now, something you take for granted in a normal household. It did free up my mornings a bit. I tend to wake up and read the New York Times and a few other news sites to see what’s going on in the world. And is that necessary? I don’t know. Like anything else, you can get addicted to Information.
For Christmas my family received one of those framed gadget-things that display jpeg-images in a slideshow, and it seemed to land on my shoreline as one-too-many gadgets. I have iphoto and Picasa to display my jpegs on my laptop, and now I’m supposed to read the directions to setup this gadget to do the same thing? I’m over this Gadget Age. It’s draining the time of our lives.

So this is the best McCarthy interview I’ve ever read, more revealing than the one he did years ago in the New York Times to promote All the Pretty Horses:
http://online.wsj.com/article/SB10001424052748704576204574529703577274572.html

I like this quote: “I have a great sympathy for the spiritual view of life, and I think that it’s meaningful. But am I a spiritual person? I would like to be. Not that I am thinking about some afterlife that I want to go to, but just in terms of being a better person. I have friends at the Institute. They’re just really bright guys who do really difficult work solving difficult problems, who say, “It’s really more important to be good than it is to be smart.” And I agree it is more important to be good than it is to be smart. That is all I can offer you.”
I’ve always been appalled when I’ve met some famous/popular writer and he/she turns out to be worldclass creep. This has happened more often than I’d care to admit. (I won’t name names. I bite my tongue.) But I’m glad to get the feeling, from his comments, that McCarthy is the kind of man you’d expect from his fiction. Like my toothless uncle would have said, many years ago, “He’s a good egg.”
Also: Thanks to Morris Collins for alerting me to the interview.

Postcards from the Heartland: My second home (but first in my heart) lies in Custer County, Colorado, near the town of Westcliffe in a remote and lovely valley between two mountain ridges, the Sangre de Cristo and the Wet Mountains, notable for being one of the most sparsely populated counties in the U.S. The local newspaper there, the Wet Mountain Tribune, has been published since 1883, when the whole area was in the midst of the silver boom. Yesterday’s edition included this morbid headline: “Authorities Seek Identity of Headless Corpse”:
http://www.wetmountaintribune.com/home.asp?i=518&p=1
Our laconic lawman, Fred Jobe, tall and craggy, friendly enough to taxpayers like myself, is also known locally as The Singing Sheriff (he has his own CD). He resembles a marshal straight out of Dodge City, circa 1883, or an extra in one of the several iconic Westerns filmed in our county, including Cat Ballou and How the West Was Won. I love the hardbitten attitude in his final quote: “Jobe said as crime escalates in larger surrounding counties, he feels Custer County, due to its numerous remote locations, will continue to be a dumping ground for murdered bodies.”

Some nuggets of interest (such as that he has three unpublished book mss) in this NY Times piece about Cormac McCarthy donating his typewriter for auction. 
http://www.nytimes.com/2009/12/01/books/01typewriter.html?_r=1&hp
UPDATE: The typewriter sold for over ten times its estimated value, at $254K:

I’ve had Bill McKibben’s Deep Economy (2007) on my bookshelf for a year and now that I’ve finally got around to reading it, I regret the long delay. In a sea of admirable but gloomy titles, such as McKibben’s own The End of Nature (1989), Jared Diamond’s Collapse (2004), and Matthew Simmons’s Twilight in the Desert: The Coming Saudi Oil Shock and the World Economy (2006), Deep Economy touches on many of the same issues, such as climate change, peak oil, the abuses of Big Agriculture and multinational corporations, but he surprisingly offers a good deal of hope for change. For years now I’ve been skeptical of the mainstream spin on Globalization, basically that it’s always a good thing. If you criticize the outsourcing of jobs or manufacturing, you’re accused of being an Isolationist, Nationalist, or Protectionist. Or all three. A retrograde swimming against the lovely current of Global megaeconomies. I don’t buy it. Much as the Wall Street Journal can tell us that shipping all our manufacturing to China is good (it opens up their markets for our crap, which we can then shuttle back and forth across the Pacific in an endless consumer-whore cycle), carting natural resources thousands of miles back and forth, which entails gargantuan energy usage that is heating our planet into serious trouble, I still don’t buy the propaganda. It reminds me of the  dismissive rhetoric aimed at skeptics of the real estate boom a few years back, skeptics who proved to be right on target. We were in a New Economy, corrupt bankers told us, where housing prices would continue to rise under the wise and benevolent actions of a Free Market, no matter the obvious bubble in the real estate of Florida, California, and elsewhere, the burst of which has now plunged us into the Great Recession.
Mine is not a simplistic, knee-jerk Globalization Is Bad argument. There are obvious benefits of some aspects of Globalization, including the obvious result of raising the standard of living in developing countries. (Although American media tends to be naive to the point of stupidity about the actual breadth and problems of the Chinese monopoly on manufacturing. For a good analysis of this, read Peter Navarro’s The Coming China Wars (2006), whose title is a bit deceptive, because it’s actually an excellent book, compassionate toward the Chinese people, and really is not about war, even economic.) But definitely we have weakened our local economies by allowing Wal-Mart to undercut local stores and drive them out of business. Local manufacturing is a wiser use of energy and resource management. Period. Deep Economy does an excellent job of articulating this argument, and of suggesting ways that we can mitigate the gluttonous effects of Globalization through encouraging local solutions and local economies.

So I haven’t been posting much lately, my time being usurped with building a wicked TinkerToy airplane for my daughter and finishing a novel that seems unending, but here’s a recent struggle with the encroaching social network world: A couple mornings ago I was here at my keyboard, half-awake, yawning as I read the Times and email, and what do we have here? An innocent request from a friend to join Facebook in my Inbox, asking if she could add me as a Friend. No matter how much I make fun of Facebook, I’m certainly aware that most of the people I know and like are on it, and what the heck, why not join? Be polite? What am I supposed to do, deny “friend” status to a nice person I like? So I click on the icon to join, and that’s where the descent to Hell begins. I get a screen that has three innocent questions (or is it four?), name, email address, password, and age. (Why does that matter?) 
My biggest mistake was hitting Return.
Immediately I regret this rash act of foolishness. That’s only Step One, and since there were four more steps (or is it five?) to complete the process, and I have a ton of email to answer and a book to review and a novel to finish and my daughter to dress and get ready for preschool . . . well, you get the drift. I close the window, glad I dodged that time-suck bullet. But no. Next I’m hit with a blizzard of Friends requests. The fact that I didn’t fill in all the data or stumble through all the Steps doesn’t seem to matter. Suddenly an enormous tentacle reaches in the window and wraps around my face, gargantuan suckers popping out my eyeballs like Spanish olives, a tentacle like the one in that so-bad-it’s-good Stephen King mishmash known as The Mist (2008)—it’s actually fog in the movie, but they obviously don’t want to call it that, to get confused with The Fog (1980), starring the unforgettable Adrienne Barbeau. Did I forget to finish setting up my account? Forget to upload a glam photo? Forget to list my favorite songs/movies/turtle names?
Now I’m the bad guy, the one who doesn’t answer your friend requests. Forgive me. I won’t go there again.