William J Cobb on books & film

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.

First, a confession: I’m no great fan of M. Night Shymalan’s films. Some of my students think him a “genius” but that seems a bit giddy: The Sixth Sense (1999)  and Signs (2002) are watchable and clever in moments, but The Lady in the Water (2006) was beyond stupid. So I put off watching The Happening (2008) until curiosity got the best of me. It reminded me of a book I’ve mentioned here before, James Lovelock’s The Revenge of Gaia (2006), which is an interesting read, frustrating and contradictory in its own right, but insightful. Lovelock argues that the affects of Global Warming will be like a fever for the planet, and that the super-organism of Gaia will heat up to eliminate and expel humans as a kind of sickness.
He also makes the crucial point that his is not a consciousness at work, or a conscious action, but one of the complexity of life, of its synergy and interconnectedness. The Happening seems to be making a similar point, although clumsily adding a conscious decision on the part of plants to eliminate humans. It’s hard to say exactly, since he couches every answer to the mystery as a theory, but it’s strongly implied. It’s worth watching for the unintentionally laughable dialogue, most of it coming from Mark Wahlberg, who has actually made some good movies, so I blame the director, not the actor: “No, what?” he cried. After hearing about a terrorist attack in Central Park, he says, “Central Park? That’s odd.” And there are others.
As a way to cleanse my video brain, I just had to watch The Big Lebowski (1998) this morning, one of my favorite films ever. Or as The Dude tells Jesus, “Well, yeah, like, that’s your opinion, man.”

So a friend of mine (Yo, Morris) recently sent me this link to a trailer for the film version of Cormac McCarthy’s The Road, starring Viggo Mortensen, Charlize Theron, and Robert Duvall:  http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5GACx8We7Vo. It looks to be the awesome apocalyptic film of the fall season. That’s a genre rife with laughers and almost-rans, as well as unintentionally funny scenes, such as Charlton Heston pounding the beach before the broken Statue of Liberty (with a bikini-clad babe on horseback behind him) in Planet of the Apes (1968), or crying out “Soylent Green is people!” in Soylent Green (1973). I saw Sean Connery in Zardoz (1974) at the Drive-In, on a high-school date no less: the beach rape scene was not a turn-on, either. Then again there’s Don Johnson in A Boy and His Dog (1975). The apocalyptic films seem to come in clumps, don’t they? The mood of the times. More recently there’s the pretty awful I Am Legend (2007), which had too many ridiculous car-chase scenes and a happy ending that was opposite of the novel’s end—a book weighed down by another stupid vampire plot angle.
 
Which is all to say that The Road may be, for the apocalyptic genre, The Best Ever. I hope so. From the trailer it looks like Charlize made the mother role quite a bit longer than the novel, where she gets a couple paragraphs before she bows out of existence.

So I’ve just returned from a six-day river rafting trip in western Colorado, on the Gunnison River in Big Dominguez Canyon, which my pal Barack has recently approved as a Wilderness Area. Beautiful redrock canyons, great birds: We saw Bullock’s Orioles, Canyon Wrens, Blue Grosbeaks, Scott’s Orioles, Western Kingbirds, Bank Swallows, Bluegray Gnatcatchers, Yellow-Breasted Chats, Bald Eagles, and Peregrine Falcons, among others. Also spotted a beaver, a fox, deer, bighorn sheep, and a lone donkey on a hilltop. The river is mellow enough for my two-year-old, with only Class II rapids. There’s rock art dating back to the Anasazi era and up to 19th century (see photo below).

Our favorite spot was the junction of the Gunnison River and Big Dominguez Creek, where Big Dominguez Canyon meets the river (see photo below). The worst moments included a sea of mud after a thunderstorm and a swarm of ungodly mosquitos.

If I hear another idiotic, brain-dead plug of Twitter from the mass media I’ll be screaming like Robert Downey Jr.’s gay monk character in the trailer for Satan’s Alley (for this little gem, see the opening credits of Tropic Thunder). I’m sure Twitter is no worse than blow driers or mascara, something I don’t use but I’m sure provides a useful function, as it is blah blah blah friggin’ blah. The constant chatter about it falls under the category of What’s Wrong With America. Frank Rich recently reported in his NY Times column a factoid that 60% of Twitter-ites drop it within the first month. Presumably because they have something better to do.
I realize, of course, that I’m writing a blog here, meant to be read by the same people who might follow someone else on Twitter. And being a human who tries to keep up with the world while living in the hinterlands, I love my WiFi access, and read a few excellent blogs (NY Times DotEarth blog is one of my favorites, and sports blogs as guilty pleasures). But the mediaworld plugs Twitter shamelessly, as if it’s the cure for hemorrhoids. With all the problems in the world, they seem to think that another instant-gratification Tweet makes a difference in our lives. God help us.
On a less-disgusted note, I have three wild turkeys living in my yard, who remind me daily to forget the idiocy of Twitter, American Idol, Britian’s Got Talent (groan), and whoever those pathetic losers are named Jon + Kate + 8 sad, soon-to-be-children-of-divorce. We’ve had regular visits from deer and a shaggy, cinnamon-colored black bear.
Plus I’m going river rafting this weekend (Gunnison River) and expect to be serenaded by coyotes and owls.