William J Cobb on books & film

So I’m reading the NY Times this morning and encounter a head-in-the-sand scolding the notion of Peak Oil here: www.nytimes.com/2009/08/25/opinion/25lynch.html
I’ve read much about this idea and some of it includes (hopefully) laughable doomsday scenarios, and some of it seems quite rational and worrisome, particularly Matthew Simmons’ excellent book, “Twilight in the Desert,” about the mysterious state of the Saudi oil industry. In a nutshell, the Saudis have historically one of the greatest supergiant (industry term) oil fields, which may be declining. Aramco, their oil company, keeps their information secret, so we don’t really know. Simmons is honest about this. He notes we still have plenty of oil, and make new discoveries all the time, but makes the logical statement that, from what we know, we do probably face the likelihood of declines in production during this century. He doesn’t predict the next Mad Max replay, but he does say it’s logical to face the fact that at some point, perhaps in the not-too-distant future, we will want to use more than we have, which will affect price, and global geopolitical stability. 
Lynch discounts that altogether, and moreover, makes not one mention of climate change. E.O. Wilson, the eminent science writer, makes the simple statement that if we burn all the oil we have underground, the planet will be uninhabitable. I imagine Lynch would discount that notion as well, and go shoot some birds with Dick Cheney. But you can’t talk about how much oil we have and use without realizing how it affects climate change.
Actually, perhaps Lynch’s vision of the future could be summed up by the film “Wall-E,” with its rusting tankers drydocked in a dead planet.

I wrote the following as a request for a former student, to be posted on the Southeast Review’s webpage:
Mystery in Storytelling
One of the tricks in story telling—and believe me, there’s a hundred tricks that the best writers use unconsciously, subconsciously, accidentally, purposefully, or not—lies in how to keep you interested, keep you turning the pages. As a young writer it was my good fortune to study with Donald Barthelme (whose Sixty Stories is only of the best book o’ stories ever) and Edward Albee (the Broadway boy wonder who was kind and generous as a professor, whom I saw direct a knockout performance of Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, only one of the best American plays ever), and both of them said, “Surprise the reader.” Yet a basic problem arises with the element of surprise: how to keep it from being corny or forced. That’s where it’s useful to have some idea of the greater notion of Mystery.
First off, let me dispense with the notion of Mystery as some trump card that’s played at the end of a mystery novel—murder with an icicle, where the weapon melts away, as in Sherlock Holmes and later, Alice Sebold’s The Lovely Bones (2002), as the way the murderer/rapist is ultimately dispatched by a hand from heaven. That’s all fine and dandy, but not what I mean by Mystery. It’s part of it, no doubt, but not the whole enchilada. The best sense of Mystery is almost indefinable, ineffable—a sense that things aren’t what they seem (in Life as in Fiction, they rarely are), that something is wrong here but you can’t put your finger on it, that there is something interesting just behind that door, lurking in the shadows, in the odd expression that woman at the dentist’s office just gave you, in the foreboding you feel as you hear the telephone ring in the dark of night.
One of the best novels of our fresh-faced 21^st century is Out Stealing Horses (2006) by the Norwegian writer Per Petterson.  From the get-go you know that something’s amiss: An aging man retires to the countryside to live in peace and harmony, after some implied calamity in his life, and meets an old acquaintance on the road of his remote neighborhood. Not to spoil too much—if you haven’t read this novel, you should—this brief meeting with an old acquaintance stirs to the surface a childhood tale of accidental death, unhappy marriage, and heroism during World War II. What I find remarkable about Horses is that all of the people are essentially good, decent, honorable human beings, although things go terribly awry by the end. There are no villains, but there are mistakes, misdeeds, cruelty and heartbreak. Even the Nazis seem like decent human beings, and you feel sympathy and compassion for them.
Here’s the trick, and I don’t feel any guilt here, as magicians do in giving up the illusion—Mystery lies in what is left unsaid. What is hidden. Held back. Until that perfect moment for it to be revealed, whatever it happens to be.  In Per Petterson’s Out Stealing Horses (a gorgeous title, isn’t it?), which is arguably one of the best novels of its time, he holds back a stunner about the narrator’s dignified, beloved father until the very end. At that moment, all the mysteries and quizzical, emotionally charged moments come into sharp relief, and it delivers a kick to the gut that is the mark of a terrific novel. Which is what we all want to write, isn’t it?
The only recent novel that outshines Out Stealing Horses in its darkest-of-the-dark way is Cormac McCarthy’s end-of-the-world howl to the human condition, The Road (2006). We all have our little special moments in our little careers and grab bag of Hopes & Dreams, and two of mine have involved somehow brushing shoulders with the greatness of McCarthy: once he won a literary book award the same year I won an award for a story, and we were listed side-by-side (he got more money, natch), and the second occurred at the release of my last novel, Goodnight, Texas, which was reviewed in one magazine side-by-side with The Road. A friend of mine criticized The Road’s plot because, “I could guess what would happen from the beginning.” As in that the father would die, the son would live on. I agree. That’s not hard to figure out. But then again, that’s not the Mystery.
In one of Vladmir Nabokov’s wickedly good novels of the 1930s, Laughter in the Dark (1938), he sums up the plot at the outset: “Once upon a time there lived in Berlin, Germany, a man called Albinus. He was rich, respectable, happy; one day he abandoned his wife for the sake of a youthful mistress; he loved; was not loved; and his life ended in disaster. This is the whole of the story and we might have left it at that had there not been profit and pleasure in the telling; and although there is plenty of space on a gravestone to contain, bound in moss, the abridged version of a man’s life, detail is always welcome.”
Mystery often lies in the details, what makes up the meat and bones of our lives. In The Road, the scene where the father and son open the trapdoor to discover the huddled slaves of the cannibal-clan is one of the creepiest, most horrific images I’ve ever read. The scene where the father/son stumble upon a cache of food just as they are about to starve to death creates a feeling of joy and exultation. That’s not a trick. It’s natural and true to the heart.
Part of the Mystery of The Road rests in what will become of the human race: Is the boy a savior? Will they/we all perish? It closes with one of the best endings in contemporary literature, and in that coda, McCarthy suggests a time when all that we know and care about will be gone and forgotten: “Once there were brook trout in the streams in the mountains. You could see them standing in the amber current where the white edges of their fins wimpled softly in the flow. They smelled of moss in your hand. Polished and muscular and torsional. On their backs were vermiculate patterns that were maps of the world in its becoming. Maps and mazes. Of a thing which could not be put back. Not be made right again. In the deep glens where they lived all things were older than man and they hummed of mystery.”
I can’t top that. The Mystery of the world. That’s what makes us gasp and glow.

So I noticed this little gem this morning, in Newsweek, an article titled “Isolation Increases in U.S.” (www.newsweek.com/id/213088)
Here’s a quote from it: “Social-networking sites like Facebook and MySpace may provide people with a false sense of connection that ultimately increases loneliness in people who feel alone. These sites should serve as a supplement, but not replacement for, face-to-face interaction, Cacioppo says. He compares connecting on a Web site to eating celery: “It feels good immediately, but it doesn’t give you the same sustenance,” he says. For people who feel satisfied and loved in their day-to-day life, social media can be a reassuring extension. For those who are already lonely, Facebook status updates are just a reminder of how much better everyone else is at making friends and having fun.”
What keeps me away from more digital socializing is the time-suck factor. We only have so much (tiny) time in our lives, and when I’m knocking on heaven’s door, I wouldn’t want to regret the many hours I spent texting. Sure, texting is a form of writing, and writing is communicating, and twittering is . . . well, twitter. We all draw the line somewhere. I know I spend too much time on email, but most of it is business-related, so it’s part of the job. Mainly I think I want more Time. To finish that book (Pete Dexter’s new novel, Spooner, is terrific), to play with my daughter (we shot hoops in the park yesterday, and she’s only almost-three), to do all those things that don’t involved keyboarding . . . .

After about two weeks of traveling, which included visiting family in St. Louis, I’m back in Pennsylvania, house painting, breathing a sigh that I have DirecTV again. The various motels we slept in while crossing the Heartland all seemed to have the same horrible cable TV, with a lineup that resembles what a victim watches in a tacky motel room as we go to “Killer Cam” viewpoint: Chuck Norris kicking or exploding something, infomercials about miracle towels and natural male enhancement pills, the occasional AMC classic like Red Dawn.
I just saw an infotainment piece about Tom Cruise’s son starring in a remake of that grade -B action movie where the Soviets invade and take over the US, starting in Colorado, of all places (“Go Wolverines!”).
http://www.ew.com/ew/article/0,,20285234,00.html?xid=partner-CNNHome-%27Red+Dawn%27%3A+Casting+exclusive%21
The best scene is the Soviet paratrooper invasion at the beginning, machine-gunning the school like the ruthless do-badders they were.
It makes me wonder: How old is Cruise’s son? Is this going to be Red Nightlight: The Toddler Invasion?

That’s like a J.P. Donleavy title, isn’t it? No one mentions Donleavy anymore. He was a great comic novelist in the Sixties and Seventies. One of his titles is The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B (1968). He’s good. His best novel is The Onion Eaters (1975), about a plan to bring the snakes back to Ireland. But that’s not what I’m thinking about this morning. I’m glad I’m not at a press conference, like Obama being asked about Henry Louis Gates getting arrested at his own house. I’d definitely blurt the wrong thing and get CNN all righteous on me. Look, even my text is blue. (Can’t figure out how to fix it, either.)
So my last post mentioned the theory that a cataclysmic “impact event” (usually thought to be either an asteroid or comet) wiped out the Clovis Culture around 12,900 years ago. Here’s an article about it in yesterday’s Scientific American: www.scientificamerican.com/article.cfm?id=did-a-comet-cause-die-off.
It’s a good piece, giving voice to the theorists and skeptics as well. One skeptic argues that evidence shows there was never a great die-off to the Clovis people. I’ve heard that, but the evidence he’s arguing for is rather scant and sketchy as well. Few archaeologists (but some) will admit we really don’t know much of what happened 13,000 years ago. We do know that period was the last gasp or so of the large mammals, like mammoths and ground sloths.
But one thing they left out or touched on only tangentially: The period between 12,900-11,500 is known as the Younger Dryas in climate terms, a return to Ice Age conditions in North America for 1,500 years. The cause remains a mystery. Some argue the impact locale was the Great Lakes region and that it loosed a mighty rush of fresh water into the Atlantic, flooding and stopping the Gulf Stream. It’s relevant today because a similar event is projected if too much fresh water from Greenland ice cap melt floods the Atlantic once again. For a great read about this and other possible global warming ramifications, check out Tim Flannery’s The Weathermakers.

So this morning the NY Times reports that an amateur astronomer discovered what appears to be an impact spot on Jupiter that’s the size of the Earth. Check it out here: thelede.blogs.nytimes.com/2009/07/21/amateur-astronomer-finds-new-earth-size-impact-mark-on-jupiter/?hp
At first I puzzled over what could be the cataclysm in Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, brushing off the fuzzy-thinkers who said “It doesn’t matter.” I thought maybe a meteor/comet, but the details are rather sketchy—basically a series of bright flashes in the sky. A student of mine repeated my suspicion, and as we discussed it, I became convinced. (Nuclear war doesn’t fit; there’s no fallout described in the aftershock.) Later I heard McCarthy admitted that it was an impact.
Being an inveterate Discovery Channel watcher and lover of loopy meteor/comet theories, such as the one that posits an impact event 12,900 years ago wiped out the Clovis Culture in North America, I think it’s a great use of science with a soft touch. McCarthy didn’t have to get all Michael Crichton about it, just a few details and then launch the human and philosophical drama. Not to mention the cannibals, to boot.

As a writer it’s easy to kvetch and snipe about other writers and the failings of their books, and especially what makes up the Bestseller List, which often seems like crap in one form on another: For a funny take on this see the review in yesterday’s NY Times (www.nytimes.com/2009/07/13/books/13maslin.html?hpw) of a new novel titled How I Became a Famous Novelist, which sounds fun, though I doubt I’ll have the patience to stick with an entire book of it. There are immensely popular genres that make me cringe, including zombies, vampires, crackpot ‘symbolist’ mysteries, and anything to do with magical British children and their ‘dumbledore’ adventures. But I begrudge them nothing. For all the fans of that stuff, good for you. I’d rather people read a fantasy than no book at all. And when writers carp about the success of other writers, it always seems like sour grapes, envy, or “misdirected animosity,” to (badly) quote Charles Bukowski in Barfly.
What I like best is when a new book comes out that makes me excited. That’s a good way to wash away any negativity. And soon we’re going to have a treat: a new Pete Dexter novel is, as they say, “Coming Soon!”
Here’s my take: Pete Dexter is no less than one of the knockout writers of his time, having written two novels that make it to the rarified realm of ‘classics’: Paris Trout (1988), a hardbitten vision of what’s (been) wrong with The South, and Deadwood (1986), a hardbitten vision of a raunchy and funny Old West. Plus all of his novels are good. The ending of Brotherly Love (1993) has one of the best mobster moments I can remember reading, way better than Mario Puzo’s Godfather. Recently I reread The Paperboy (1995), a newspaper-biz novel with an undercurrent of deviant sexuality. His last novel was Train (2004), not his best, but still pretty good. This fall comes Spooner (pub date listed as September), which I’m reading and liking right now. (Note: I was sent an Advance Reader’s Copy, which used to be known as ‘galleys,’ and is what book reviewer’s tend to get to read and time the reviews appearance with the final hardback release date to bookstores.) The advance copy features a quirky, oddball author’s note. I’ll share an excerpt:
“As far as I know, sometime in November of last year, the book you have in your hands was three years late. There are many reasons it was three years late, probably the most conspicuous being that it was once 250 pages or so longer than the version you hold, and it takes maybe half a year to write an extra 250 pages, and at least twice that to subtract them back out. I realize this leaves another year and a half unaccounted for, and all I can say about that, readers, is get in line. Whole decades are missing from my life, and I am pretty sure I wouldn’t have it any other way. 
“All to say that what you have here, while not exactly a first draft, is further away from the finished product than most advance readers’ editions are, and when you come across sentences you don’t particularly like, keep in mind that I probably didn’t like them either. On the odd chance that the bad sentences are still there when the book comes out, then you should keep in mind that you’re reading somebody who is still missing 18 months of the last 36, and has no idea about 2006 at all.”—Pete Dexter
So far what I’ve read is a funny, picaresque novel about an unlikely hero’s birth and early years in Georgia.

Here’s the link to my review of Marcel Theroux’s novel, Far North, published today in the Dallas Morning News:  http://www.dallasnews.com/sharedcontent/dws/ent/stories/DN-bk_farnorth_0705gd.ART.State.Edition1.4bb28ee.html

So like all good Americans I spent the 4th of July chopping wood for winter and taping my two-year-old capering about in my backyard, wearing a bucket on her head and swinging in the hammock, crying, “Higher, please!” Later I tuned the tube to a (seemingly, to me at least) obscure film called Margot at the Wedding (2007), starring Nicole Kidman and Jennifer Jason Leigh, as sisters no less. 
This ain’t Will Smith in Independence Day, that’s for sure. Replace the diabolical aliens with screwed-up humans who fear themselves rather than E.T.
It’s surprisingly good, especially considering Nicole’s character is a writer: ugh, nothing worse than writers. As characters at least. They tend to be done so unrealistically and clumsily that it’s laughable. Though the exceptions are always worth it: the frosty children’s book writer in Burn After Reading, the nebbishy loser Miles in Sideways, and now Nicole as “Margot,” who seems very much the contemporary version of the neurotic writer, the falling-apart-slowly kind, the hurting-everyone-nearby kind. The tree climbing scene is worth the whole movie. Plus Jack Black as an artist: I still cringe when I see this guy, but he’s making some good movies. He plays Jennifer Jason Leigh’s pathetic, feckless fiance. Noah Baumbach is the writer/director, and he also made another good movie about creepy writers in New York (throw a rock and you’ll hit one), The Squid and the Whale.
With all the crap filling up the airwaves, like Paul Blart: Mall Cop and its ilk, this is worth seeing. “But it’s so depressing!” say my students. Well, true. But it’s also funny. Depressing and funny trumps stupid.

So the threat of environmental mayhem is real and disturbing, from Nicholas Kristof’s article in the NY Times about genital mutations to both animals and humans caused by chemicals in our drinking water to reports that M.I.T.’s climatologists have bumped up their prediction of global warming by the end of the century from 4 to 9 degrees. Here in Custer County we have a plague of wasps. Yellow jackets, I believe. There must be millions of them: It seems every house in the county is under siege by these pesky wasps buzzing around our houses, doors, windows, trying to get in, stinging when they aren’t dispatched quickly enough. I’m killing a dozen a day and not even trying. It’s kind of freaky. The seriously dopey The Happening opens with a class of highschool kids (seriously dopey doubletime) discussing the disappearance of Bees. Well I don’t know about the bees (actually, we have a lot of them, too), but the wasps are here. I’ve lived here now for my eighth summer, and this is the first time I remember any wasps. It’s like The Birds, only much smaller, with no Tippi Hedren to go all hysterical on us.