William J Cobb on books & film

So I realize that Facebook now has over 8.9 billion users and is spicing up the lives of so many by reconnecting them to all those people in high school that Lord knows we should never forget or move on from—Eddy the guy who ‘borrowed’ your cigarette for a puff and returned it all squishy from his mush-lips or Belinda the Beauty Queen who had to move away because of some mystery ailment . . . . But here’s why I really love it: Last weekend a friend came to visit whom we had not seen in over a year. First thing she did upon walking in the house was check her cellphone, something that always brings people closer together, standing there while someone talks to someone else on the cell, or reads her text messages. Second thing she did: Opened her laptop to her Facebook page, showing off new photos of (how’d you guess?) herself and (I’m not kidding here) posts from friends from high school saying, “You look terrific! I’m so jealous!” This person did not stop talking for 24 hours and ignored pretty much all her surroundings except her Facebook page. Which I’m sure enriches her life. Go cyberworld!

The following review appeared in the Dallas Morning News, 1 March 2009. I liked the novel, although the misery level was rather high. I received a condescending email from presumably the author’s agent, complaining that I didn’t gush about the novel enough. That’s rather ridiculous, considering I compared Meyer to Andre Dubus and Dennis Lehane. Plus it’s a tough-guy novel, so complaining I didn’t love it enough seems rather funny. (Meyer was graduated from my alma mater, University of Texas, so I’m simpatico. I don’t blame him for the silly email, either. He probably knew nothing of it.) Three things I didn’t address in the review, or only obliquely, for lack of space: 1) One of the characters wrongly accused of murder is sent to prison when he’s merely charged with the crime, before a grand jury, trial, any of that. Does that ever happen? Usually one goes to county jail before the trial, right? 2) The character who does cause the (accidental) murder does so by throwing a ball bearing and hitting some hobo dude in the head. I’m sure that could happen, but it seems unlikely and implausible, even somewhat goofy. 3) I live part-time in Pennsylvania, and his bleak depiction of it doesn’t ring true from my experience. Still, it’s fiction, a vision of the world, and doesn’t have to be ‘realistic,’ which can be too tedious anyway.
AMERICAN RUST/By Phillipp Meyer/Spiegel & Grau; 368 pages, $24.95
Down and Out in Pennsylvania
With a title like “American Rust” you know right off the bat this is not going to be another chicklit “The Devil Wears Prada,” but rather a peek into that dark underbelly of the American Dream. And yes, it not only peeks, it wallows. Phillipp Meyer’s debut novel features two bad-luck losers fresh out of high school and headed for nowhere: Isaac English, the smart one with literary pretensions; and Billy Poe, the angry one, with ex-football star credentials. Isaac and Billy get involved in the accidental murder of a homeless thug, and the rest of the novel details how they are haunted, punished, and redeemed for this crime. It takes place in the Rust Belt fringe of southeastern Pennsylvania, and is a vision of America in decline, a wasteland populated with angry young boys leading directionless lives.
The first half of the book is a bit lopsided: the murder occurs quickly and is not particularly convincing, but after that the pace slows to establish who these people are, and what’s at stake. Billy is in love with Isaac’s sister, Lee, who has left the downtrodden town of Buell for Yale and marriage to a wealthy yuppie. Isaac is intelligent, but emotionally disturbed. He put off college to stay home with his disabled father, and is now itching to flee. Billy’s father, Virgil, is a shiftless loser, and his long-suffering mother is involved with the police chief, Bud Harris, who managed to keep Billy out of prison on an assault charge in the recent past. Harris comes across as a good man with a soft heart and a flexible sense of justice.
Once the players are established, the story picks up steam. Isaac runs away, ostensibly headed for California, but also to escape criminal charges. While Isaac hops trains as a wannabe hobo, Billy is charged with murder and sent to prison, where he immediately becomes entangled with white supremacists. Billy’s incarceration is a loyalty test: if he would only tell the truth, he would be released, but he won’t implicate his friend. His stoic refusal to snitch gives him dignity, which is what this land of “American Rust” sorely lacks.
Although press material compares the novel to the likes of John Steinbeck and Cormac McCarthy, those forbears seem rather lofty, and the novel has more in common with TV dramas like “Law and Order” or “The Wire.” The prison scenes are rather standard, but nonetheless compelling, vivid and gritty. In contemporary fiction Meyer most resembles Andre Dubus, Dennis Lehane, or Richard Price. Bleak and nasty. He describes a dilapidated world with flashes of understanding, moments of misdirected animosity, and fistfuls of energy gone wrong.

So part of the charm of having satellite TV is watching films (usually late at night, when I can’t sleep) that I would never see in the theatre, but what the heck. Who made this movie The Strangers, and why? It’s certainly scary and foreboding early on, but like many other ‘torture porn’ flicks, it gradually descends into murder and mayhem that seems seriously pointless. This is (obviously) The Point at the end of the film, after Liv and her feckless husband (who finds a shotgun and a barrel of shells, only to shoot the wrong person) are killed and bloody. I felt sorry for Liv Tyler in that final scene, when she is being slowly, inexorably stabbed to death. The last I saw of her she was wearing Star Trek ears and puppydog eyes in that idiotic The Lord of the Rings. (How that won Best Picture . . . .) I’m sure she’d rather lose her virginity again against the backdrop of gorgeous Italian vistas like in Stealing Beauty. I’m well aware of the old Aristotelian song & dance about tragedy exciting terror and pity, causing a sense of catharsis, and yes, it’s valid. But the couple in The Strangers really aren’t tragic heroes, or are so only loosely. They fit the ordinary yuppies category. The killers are creepy but not particularly diabolical: mainly they walk around slowly in masks. I don’t get the slow-walking killer in movies like Halloween etc. Jeez, I’d just book it out of there. I will give the movie this: I kept wanting to turn it off, but I couldn’t, compelled to watch the mayhem to the end, the final shots of the isolated suburban home on a quiet, hohum morning, with the killers driving away, scotfree.
The Descent, on the other hand, is another horror movie in the torture porn category that is worth watching, if you can stomach it. It features a plucky band of chickflick heroines going caving somewhere in Appalachia. (Admission: I’m a former caver and know something about this sport. There are big caves in Appalachia, so on that point, it’s accurate. However, I’ve never seen that many good looking women dirty in a cave before.) They soon encounter a race of cannibilistic cave people and proceed to fight them tooth and nail. (Like who hasn’t done that before?) Here’s where the torture porn comes in: Some of the footage of the babes being gobbled up by the cannibals is awfully graphic and gruesome. But as horror movies go, it’s pretty good. Predictably one of the babes survives, and when she turns her back on The Competitive Babe and lets the cannibals have her for dinner, it’s morally queasy at best, pretty horrible over all. Both are cycling into the endless repetition of sat TV fare.

So a couple weeks back I was in the desert of West Texas near Big Bend National Park, staying at the house of park ranger Marcos Paredes, who was the model for one of Nevada Barr’s characters in her new novel, Borderline. She’s a best-selling writer who pens mysteries set in national parks. One of her early novels has the same title as Walter Van Tilburg Clark’s famous western, Track of the Cat. (Clark is also the author of The Ox-Bow Incident, made into a good movie with Henry Fonda. Track is a bit like a Western version of Eugene O’Neill’s A Long Day’s Journey Into Night.)
Marcos is a nice guy who reminds me of the retired air force dude on the old Northern Exposure TV show. He’s built a beautiful and beautifully remote adobe house in the desert (see picture below for his the horses in his ‘front yard’) with a great view of the Chisos Mountains off his gallery and balcony. He’s an avid reader, too: We talked about No Country for Old Men, which takes place in the West Texas desert (specifically a bit east-southeast of there), and I asked, Is it realistic? “Nope. No way,” he said. He said the drug traffic didn’t much come through the Big Bend area, although while I was staying there he did apprehend a fugitive who had engaged in a shootout with border guards a few weeks back. He’s a first-rate birder and we saw Audobon’s Warblers, Vermillion Flycatchers, and Ash-throated Flycatchers from his porch. But here’s his best story: While driving through the park recently he came upon a badger dragging a deer carcass across the road. He stopped to watch it, being fascinated, and the badger (which are short, stocky animals, like a cross between a wolverine and a raccoon) reared up on its hind legs and hissed at him, thinking he was trying to take the deer. He said the last he saw it the badger was dragging the deer over a fence.
Here’s a picture of the horses that came to visit us while we were dinosaur fossil hunting (he has some cool dinosaur fossils).

While doing research on a pandemic angle of a novel I’m writing, I stumbled across two nonfiction books that offer some useful context for the recent outbreak of Swine Flu: John M. Barry’s The Great Influenza: The story of the deadliest pandemic in history (2004) is an excellent and gripping read, recreating the events that led up to the Spanish Flu of 1918. This flu, considered one of the most deadly pandemics in modern history, is now widely believed to be a bird flu strain, but one that appears to have originated on a pig farm in Kansas. Barry offers clear and penetrating analysis of the scientific foundations of epidemiology, and this understanding actually works to allay fears about the present Swine Flu, although create concerns about the future. Our medical industry is vastly superior to that of 1918, when they didn’t understand viruses, didn’t know what they were confronting. Soon the media will be presenting the greater flu scare, and one that has already been labeled The Armageddon Virus by a British doctor, aptly named Dr. John Oxford (I’m not making this up): viruses of similar nature sometimes do combine and create mutations with both properties. In this case, it would be the human-to-human, airborne component of the Swine Flu, which seems to be passed easily, and the high death toll of the bird flu, which, up to this point, is difficult to contract, only through close contact with infected birds. (See BBC online here for his quotes: http://news.bbc.co.uk/2/hi/uk_news/8023977.stm.) A flu of that makeup would be deadly and easily caught. That will likely be the next worry. Viruses are complex and tricky, and this could be a highly unlikely combination, or a real possibility. 
An even better, grislier, and more shocking disease book is John Kelly’s The Great Mortality: An Intimate History of the Black Death, the Most Devastating Plague of All Time (2005), about the bubonic plague of the 14th century in Europe. It’s a horror story in some respects, but here the science is also a bit comforting: The bubonic plague still exists but is considered a relatively easy disease to treat and to handle. Not in the 14th century: Kelly does an especially good job of conjuring up the gruesome reality of Italian towns devastated by the Black Death and the social turmoil it caused, including anti-Semitism and the rise of Flagellants, an extreme Christian sect who traveled from town-to-town whipping themselves bloody.

Nathaniel Philbrick is on a roll: Several years ago he won the National Book Award for In the Heart of the Sea (2000), about the wreck of the whaling ship Essex, which was staved in by a whale in the 1830s and became the impetus for Melville’s Moby Dick. (Melville is believed to have actually met the captain, Owen Chase, who survived the shipwreck and impossible long journey in a small boat to shore, a saga marked by the sailors having to cannibalize the dead, and even kill the living, to survive.) A couple years back Philbrick’s Mayflower came out and didn’t get quite the attention of In the Heart of the Sea, but it’s an outstanding book of early American history, especially the history of European immigrants clashing with Native Americans. The main focus of the book is King Phillip’s War, its causes, events, and aftermath, which is essentially the first volley in three centuries of Indian Wars. Mayflower makes a great bookend for Evan S. Connell’s Son of the Morning Star (1984), which is nominally about George Armstrong Custer and the Battle of the Little Bighorn. But Son encompasses most of the Plains Indian Wars of the late 19th century. Both books have a rhetorical angle that suggest ‘it didn’t have to happen this way,’ and both books are good at setting the events in historical context. Evan S. Connell is also a knockout novelist, most famous for Mr. & Mrs. Bridge, novels that seemed well ahead of their time. 
There’s an eerie symmetry to the timing of King Phillip’s War (1676) and the Battle of the Little Bighorn (1876), with the Revolutionary War (1776) sandwiched between: Flash forward to the end of the Vietnam War (1976). It makes you wonder what 2076 will bring: The end of the Chinese War?
From a 21st century perspective, the gruesome violence of 17th century Massachusetts is shocking. It seems that beheading was a common occurrence. There’s always someone getting his head chopped off and placed on a pike. At the end of the war, King Phillip, a Pokanoket (Indian tribe close to Plymouth) sachem or leader, is killed, his head chopped off, and placed on the gates of Plymouth, where it stood for twenty years. It seems pretty common for the unlucky in this conflict to be burned alive, torn apart by dogs, drawn and quartered, or tortured. 
This horrific violence puts me in mind of Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian and The Road: When I first read Blood I thought it offered an exaggerated, over-the-top vision of the Texas/Mexico border violence of the 19th century. I later learned that McCarthy did a good deal of research about the Glanton gang. This is lifted from Wikipedia: “Much of the book is based on Glanton gang member Samuel Chamberlain‘s My Confession, which has been criticized as unreliable, but Blood Meridian is historically accurate in general, and includes numerous references to contemporary occurrences.” I now think it’s more accurate than not, as brutal as it is. When I first read The Road I thought it had that similar outrageousness, projected onto a future apocalypse. Considered through the lens of 17th century violence, perhaps The Road is also more “accurate” than we would like to believe.

I’m glad to see that my comments on Stephen Graham Jones’ Ledfeather have drawn much attention on the site, and next on my reading list is his (other) new novel, The Long Trial of Nolan Dugatti. (He also just told me he’s recently finished another novel. Slow down, Buddy. You’re making the rest of us look bad.) Plus, in the spirit of the customer-is-always-right, I’m posting my review of Stephen’s first novel, The Fast Red Road. It’s still one of my favorites. I claim Stephen as a protege, as he was my student years ago, although he’s such a talent that I’m sure all I did was point him in the right direction, which is what professors often do, I think. It makes us feel warm and fuzzy when our former charges do well: see my recent reference to Alita Putnam’s knockout essay in Narrative. Here goes: The following review appeared in The Houston Chronicle’s Zest Magazine, 24 June 2001, pp 20, 23.

THE FAST RED ROAD: A PLAINSONG/By Stephen Graham Jones/FC2; 326 pages; $13.95

The Real Thing

With the disarming title of “The Fast Red Road: A Plainsong,” Stephen Graham Jones’ first novel roars onto the literary landscape like a Seventies muscle car hellbent on nothing less than genius. Its subtitle echoes Kent Haruf’s critically acclaimed “Plainsong,” and both novels stake out similar high plains territory. But the comparisons end there. While Haruf offers a reserved, sober evocation of a town forty years past its heyday, Jones’ novel looses a rebel yell about a Native American culture a thousand years old and utterly of the moment. It’s a hallucinatory, beguiling ride through a world both painfully real and utterly hypnotic.

The refrain of Marty Robbins’ classic country-western hit “El Paso” functions as both motif and Rosetta stone for the convoluted and juxtaposed workings of the plot. One of the seminal events takes place at a hip hootenanny gone wrong: “There was more that Birdfinger wasn’t telling him. A lone Goliard standing squat and misshapen at the edge of the floodlights once, unspeaking the world, pulling Cline from his paranoid salesman life back in time to WWI—Willie and Waylon and the boys—letting him remember how it was before Marina died, when they were postal thieves, the hammer thumbed back every minute of every day, the ’69 Ford faster than radio. . . . There was the graven image of his dad as seen from a shelter, holding the leopard woman’s forehead to his limited-series commemorative beltbuckle, both of them framed by the trailer window, backlit by Gunsmoke” (38).

That passage introduces two motifs: the importance of names and the unriddling of songs. The names in this novel are original, quirky, and mysterious. It’s as if Thomas Pynchon’s patterns from “V.”  have finally been updated and one-upped. The principal characters are brothers Pidgin del Gato and Birdfinger. The interment of their father, Cline Stob, jump-starts the action of the story, even though Cline died some eleven years prior to the moment of his burying/mock funeral, which, for various woolly reasons, Pidgin fails to attend. Marina is their mother, and died mysteriously some years before all of the present action, but her fate ricochets through her grown sons in psychic ripples.

Yet the main characters are only half the fun. Secondary characters with shape-shifting identities and handles abound, complete with thumbnail biographies and razorblade-sharp descriptions. For instance, there’s Vanetta, a some-time love of Birdfinger’s and shamanesque Gal Friday: “Birdfinger had told her once that her red hair was why he chose her out of all the others in the first place, that it was opposite enough from his long-gone Marina that it didn’t remind him of her so much. Vanetta had just looked around and said ‘What others, Bird?’ then went on, that night, to prove to him that her hair was just dyed red, faux fox. Midafternoon he woke to her watching him. She was smoking a miles-long aftersex camel, her nails witchblack, no make-up. She laughed and said, ‘You’re a hornbrowed, unclever man, Bird,’ to which Birdfinger added he was a little long in the tooth to boot, but who was counting?” (68). There’s also the weird configurations of the Leopard Woman, and a nurse who dispenses painkillers, Anodiana. When late in the novel a character pops up named Patience Patience, you just have to love the invention.

Once you puzzle through what exactly happens at WWII (the second Willie and Waylon concert), you’ll eureka outloud, having unraveled a mystery that reads like a hybrid of Stephen Hawking’s“A Brief History of Time” and the gunslinger bios of Billy the Kid. Suffused in the strata of story is a challenging and post-eclectic philosophical stance. At one point Pidgin struggles to come to grips with a suitcase that may or may not contain a dead dog: “Pidgin sat . . . watching the suitcase for signs of life, knowing it was pointless: the dog would be neither dead nor alive until seen, realized, labeled. Until then it was in quantum limbo. That was the way things were. He’d had it drilled into his head before he was ten, by Sally, with her ergodic theory flashcards and her nicotine lectures on Schrodingerian paradox and Poincarean recurrence” (36). That’s a mouthful. But if you puzzle through the ideas and the lingo, it makes perfect, cut-to-the-quick sense.

Although this is a novel “about” Native American culture, it’s much wilder and more profane than the digestible visions of Louise Ehrdrich or Sherman Alexie. It’s more like Leslie Marmon Silko on drugs. Does it matter that Jones is Native American himself, a Blackfeet? Yes. There’s an utter credibility, a sureness to the writing, a confidence to parody Native American stereotypes in everything from “Gunsmoke” to  John Ford Westerns to porno flicks. And does it matter that Jones grew up in Lubbock, got a PhD from Florida State, and is now teaching at Texas Tech? That he’s only twenty-nine years old? Perhaps it should. It’s a book by not only a Native American, but a Native Texan, that deserves lavish praise. It’s the real thing.

April 2009 Update: Stephen now teaches at the University of Colorado at Boulder. He’s older, too.

So there’s an article in the Washington Post today (I found it here: http://www.msnbc.msn.com/id/30360872/) about dust storms becoming more common in the West, with threats of a new Dust Bowl by mid-century, which fits my new novel, The Bird Savior, which opens with a dust storm. About a couple weeks ago our deck was covered with red dust after a snow storm. People don’t realize just how dry it can be out here. At my level of the mountains, though, we still have plenty of snow in the yard, if it is finally melting. It makes for good tracking, and we’ve had bobcat and turkeys in our yard lately. Here’s the bobcat track:

The carmex tube (only thing in my pocket) used for scale is 3 1/4 inches long. Here’s the turkey track, even bigger:

The turkeys look prehistoric, or atavistic, a throwback to the first Thanksgiving. (I’m reading Nathaneal Philbrick’s Mayflower right now, which takes me back.) We have them in the yard every day lately. They strut and fan their tails.
As an added bonus, click here (https://narrativemagazine.com/issues/winter-2009/fisherman’s-daughter) for an excellent essay about growing up in Alaska, by the one and only Alita Putnam, lately of Penn State.

You always hear how the past haunts the present, like Faulkner’s oft-quoted adage about the South, “The past is not dead. In fact, it’s not even past.” Here in backwoods Colorado the past haunts the West, partially in the frontier hardiness, where you stand side-by-side with ranchers at the supermarket and coffee shop, or in the ruins of a frontier-era cabin in my front yard, a 12×12 foot square home to an aspen now. But the haunted West reveals its ghosts also in the landscape: This morning we saw an albino crow in the springsnow mud along the aptly named Muddy Lane, and yesterday we heard thundersnow during this storm that dropped as much as two feet of snow on our valley. It’s a wildness of the landscape not yet overrun by people, perhaps never to be. On our return from Texas we passed through unpopulated Huerfano County, and saw a herd of some 200 buffalo, 50-60 pronghorn antelope, and over a dozen elk. Our ponds are filled with geese, and the roadside busy with killdeer, meadowlarks, magpies, kestrels, redwing blackbirds. The other morning of flock of over twenty wild turkeys marched past our front windows and across our yard, the tom spreading his tail wings like he was showing off. With black bear and mountain lion in our yard regularly, along with mule deer, raccoon, badger, and pine marten, we’re close to the animal world, to those energetic claws.

So I recently finished Fawn Brodie’s biography of Mormon prophet Joseph Smith, No Man Knows My History, and I rank it as one of the best biographies of an historical American figure I’ve ever read, although T.J. Stiles’s Jesse James: Last Rebel of the Civil War is a close second. Both feature frightening depictions of Independence, Missouri in the pre-Civil War era. The Haun’s Mill Massacre episode and its aftermath—when the Mormons were expelled from Far West, Missouri—should be a movie, and shows the violent and shocking side of frontier life.
What’s most impressive about Fawn Brodie’s explanation and explication of Joseph Smith: She makes the wacky ways of the early Mormons—the gold plates, the seer stones, the invented history of the Native Americans and Jesus in the New World, and polygamy—make total sense. In the East this seems like a quaint, odd corner of American history. In the West it’s part of our daily life. The other day the playground where my daughter slides and swings was full of girls in prairie dresses. Some of them might be Amish or Mennonite, as we have a community of both in Custer County, but we also have a FLDS community here, too, newly formed and growing. One of their 80-acre plots of land is only a couple miles from my house.
The story of how polygamy developed in the Mormon church is odd and rather unremarkable, save for the ego and energy of Joe Smith, and the fact that it has lived on, even after the U.S. government made the Mormons give it up. I’m a fan of HBO’s Big Love, which recently wrapped up its third season. It seems fairly realistic but for the main family of Bill Paxton, Chloe Sevigny, Jeanne Tripplehorn, et al. They seem a bit too glamorous for that world.