"Captain Fantastic": Matt Ross's Ode to Life Off the Grid

Posted on February 13, 2017 by williamjcobb

So I caught the indie-hit Captain Fantastic (2016) recently, and after my post not long ago about adventure stories gone wrong, this is a paean to adventure as a lifestyle choice. It’s also something of a genre mixer: adventure tale + psychological realism + family saga + vehicle for eco scenery chewing. Viggo Mortensen is the star, and carries the adult side of things, while his six precocious kids are the real charm of the film.
It’s set in the Pacific Northwest, and opens with a scene in which the family, face-painted and somber, ambush a mule deer for dinner. They’re living in the woods, completely off the grid, sometimes like a primitive tribe, in renunciation of the consumer-culture whoredom that is mainstream culture. There’s much to like about this little gem, which is at turns disturbing, silly, raucous, somber, inspiring, dignified, and rambunctious. I was impressed to learn it’s the brainchild of actor/writer/director Matt Ross, who plays to perfection the devious tech-billionaire Gavin Belson in HBO’s Silicon Valley, and who also played Alby Grant, the tortured closet-homosexual polygamist in HBO’s Big Love. The moment in which Viggo’s kids ask questions about sex and end up reading The Joy of Sex is arch, squirmy fun. The plot roughly revolves around the family adapting and grieving over the suicide of Viggo’s wife and the kids’ mother, and traveling out into mainstream America to confront their history, her legacy, and the limits of home-schooling. I’d qualify it as a comedy, but Viggo Mortensen does a great job in the most tragic moments as well.

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"The Americans": A New Reality TV Show Starring Melania and Donald

Posted on February 11, 2017 by williamjcobb

So FX has a series titled The Americans, now in Season Five, in which a pair of Soviet spies are masquerading as a married American couple. I’ve always liked the female lead, Keri Russell, who was in the charming indie movie, Waitress, back in 2007. She makes for a terrific spy, which is fun . . . as long as it’s fiction.

As fact—even “alternative fact”—the result isn’t quite so funny. (Okay, just a little bit. Lampooning Donald is like Ham on Wry.) Maybe it’s just me, but I’m starting to have the sneaky suspicion that what we’re experiencing with the U.S. presidency right now is more like a reality-TV version of the show, with worse acting—note Donald’s creepy handshake of the Japanese PM, Conway’s shameless hawking of Ivanka’s “products” on Fox News, the Orwellian doublespeak foaming out of the mouth of Sean Spicer. I mean, look at this picture: Doesn’t Melania look like a Cover Girl spy, a Victoria’s Secret version of the Angela Lansbury spy-mom/puppeteer in The Manchurian Candidate (1962)?
Melania is doing her best to remind us all of Boris & Natasha from Rocky & Bullwinkle fame, right? Or Helene, Pierre’s devious wife in Tolstoy’s War and Peace (1869). Hear the voiceover? A Russian accent hissing, “You stupid Americans. We steal country out from under your nose, and laugh at you. Ha ha ha! Welcome to gulag, Yankee pig dog!”

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"The Sailor's Gift": Short Essay in the Dallas Morning News

Posted on February 9, 2017 by williamjcobb

So as I noted in my previous post (The Goodwill Genius: On Discovering Vladimir Nabokov’s Bend Sinister) I actually wrote the “wrong” essay for my editor at the Dallas Morning News, remembering it only to be about a book that changed my life. The idea of the prompt, however, was supposed to be about a book given as a gift—in the spirit of the Christmas holidays, natch. Once I realized my mistake, I wrote another essay, which can be found here. (I’ll also post the text of it below.) It’s all true, and involves a high school student who was expelled from school for an entire semester (that miscreant would be, um, me) befriended by a literary sailor (oddly enough, I’m pretty sure his name was Bill, my own name). In the essay I mention two books—Larry Mcmurtry’s In a Narrow Grave (1968) and James Kirkwood’s P.S. Your Cat Is Dead (1972).

Kirkwood is most famous for writing the Broadway hit A Chorus Line, but P.S. Your Cat Is Dead is actually quite fun, and was an eye-opener for a high school kid, especially one who was waiting tables at his parents’ restaurant as he waited to be allowed to return to high school (which he never really liked anyway, but was smart enough to realize that, whether you like it or not, you have to finish high school; it’s a rule). Among other things, P.S. Your Cat Is Dead features a gay burglar tied up and held hostage by a (possibly/probably) gay tenant whose apartment he was burgling.
Larry McMurtry’s In a Narrow Grave is a horse of a different color, and is obviously more appreciated by Texans or those interested in Texas culture (read: Texans). I was never a huge fan of McMurtry’s novels, but I liked the early ones the best: The Last Picture Show (1966), Leaving Cheyenne (1963), All My Friends Are Going to Be Strangers (1972). I remember the funniest essay being a kind of ethnographic analysis of Texas sexual mores and practices, including the ranch kids’ habits of bestiality. I remember thinking: Not in my neighborhood they don’t.
For the full (and short) essay, see the text below. I never saw the sailor again. I hope he never sank.

The Sailor’s Gift to the Kid
Bearded, sunburnt and gentle, his long hair in a hippy ponytail, clothes spattered with paint and sealant, every day the sailor would come into my parents’ honkytonk café for lunch, and I would take his order and chat. Our café, aptly named The Tall Tale, was off Fulton Beach Road on the Texas coast, a couple blocks from the boat basin, where he worked. He was building a trimaran sailboat with the ambitious, starry-eyed goal of sailing around the world. The year was 1974. I’d been kicked out of school that Fall (which is, as they say, another story) and had time on my hands. He was a nice guy in his twenties, adventurous and educated, with a Master’s degree in literature from the University of Texas—where I wanted to go, if they ever let me back in high school. You could say our lives were headed in different directions, his up and mine down, and we hit it off in a Luke-Skywalker-and-Yoda way. He turned me on to several books, including James Kirkwood’s “P.S.: Your Cat Is Dead,” a zany comic novel published a couple years earlier, which opened my eyes to a world of lit quite different than, say, high-school favs such as Hemingway’s “The Sun Also Rises.” Around Christmas the sailor gave me a paperback whose jacket featured an image of a cowboy boot decorated with the lone star emblem of the Texas flag, the first book I was ever to read by the author Larry McMurtry—“In a Narrow Grave: Essays on Texas.” I was already a wannabe writer but had read more books about life in New York or Paris than Texas, and McMurtry’s little gem showed me even the salt-marsh prairies beyond my back door could be as interesting as Greenwich Village or the Left Bank. One day I looked up to find the sailor gone. Just like that, his boat was finished and he sailed away. But he left a note for me to keep reading and writing, and I’ve come to think, in the odd way common enough in real life, that he made a difference in mine.—December 2016

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The Goodwill Genius: On Discovering Vladimir Nabokov's "Bend Sinister"

Posted on February 6, 2017 by williamjcobb

So back in December my editor at the Dallas Morning News asked me (and other contributing writers) to pen a brief essay about a book I’d been given as a gift some time in my life, and I actually wrote two. The first one turned out to be a mistake, in that I neglected the “gift” angle, and only remembered the essay prompt to be about a book that changed my life. When my editor explained it didn’t quite fit the prompt, I wrote another. Here’s the first one, about one of the great writers of the Twentieth Century.

The Goodwill Genius: On Discovering Vladimir Nabokov’s “Bend Sinister”
On the dusty shelves of a Goodwill store in Austin, Texas, circa 1979 (in the dimly lit rear of the store, by the flyspeck shelves of plastic toys and dented cookware), I came across a book I’d never heard of by a writer I’d never heard of, and without fanfare or fireworks, it changed my life. It was Vladimir Nabokov’s novel Bend Sinister, first published by Holt in 1947, but due to the success of Lolita (1955), reissued in the Sixties. The paperback copy I bought for fifty cents includes Nabokov’s supremely haughty and gently comic Introduction, in which he urges readers not to make comparisons they will obviously make, and admits, “The title’s drawback is that a solemn reader looking for ‘general ideas’ or ‘human interest’ (which is much the same thing) in a novel may be led to look for them in this one” (xii). I only bought the book because I liked the garish, trippy cover—shades of Edvard Munch’s “The Scream”—and because the novel begins with one of the greatest descriptions of a puddle ever written: “An oblong puddle inset in the coarse asphalt; like a fancy footprint filled to the brim with quicksilver; like a spatulate hole through which you can see the nether sky. Surrounded, I note, by a diffuse tentacled black dampness where some dull dun dead leaves have stuck. Drowned, I should say, before the puddle had shrunk to its present size.” I love the use of oblong, tentacled, and spatulate, as well as the alliteration of “dull dun dead” and “fancy footprint.” It reminds me of a review of The Bird Saviors I received years ago by a petulant twit who argued I “used too many metaphors.” Which was said about Nabokov by various critics, otherwise known as other nitwits.
It’s not an exaggeration to say I learned to write by reading Nabokov—all his books, several times. Bizarrely, after thirty-seven years and several lifetimes, I still have that dog-eared copy of Bend Sinister, which has now lost its cardstock covers, front and back, yet has my quaint, loopy signature on the first page, a physical scratching of my life so long ago, put there as a marker in case it, or I, ever got lost.—December 2016
Tomorrow I’ll post the other essay, the one that did make it to press.

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On Adventures Gone Wrong: Stephane Gerson's "Disaster Falls" and Jason Kersten's "Journal of the Dead"

Posted on February 5, 2017 by williamjcobb

So I stumbled upon a book that touches close to home for me, as a naturalist who drags his young daughter with him to various outdoor locales seething with both beauty and danger, filled with the confidence and aplomb that would perhaps be best summed up with the phrase: “It’ll never happen to me.” The book is Stephane Gerson’s nonfiction/memoir Disaster Falls: A Family Story (2017), about a whitewater rafting trip on which he eight-year-old son died. (You can find the New York Times review of it here.)

It’s actually one of my greatest fears: doing something foolish that would result in a child being injured or dying, which is why I wrote my story “Letting the Dog Out” years ago, which is included in my book of stories The White Tattoo (2002). To make a short story even shorter: in “Letting the Dog Out” a man accidentally runs over a child. How could you live with yourself after that? In the particular circumstances of my short story, I really don’t know. To quote T. S. Eliot’s poem “Gerontion” (1920): “After such knowledge, what forgiveness?” It would be catastrophic. I don’t think I could go on. And I think this awareness guides my behavior, directly and subtly.

“Letting the Dog Out” features an auto-accident of sorts, but the synopsis of Gerson’s book is quite another thing, and hit home for a number of reasons: I’ve taken my daughter whitewater rafting many times now, starting when she was two (!!), and have rafted the Green and Colorado rivers in Utah, as well as the Gunnison River in Colorado, and Disaster Falls unfolds on the Colorado River at the Colorado/Utah border. Its drama hinges in part on the boy’s parents taking him into harm’s way, with tragic results—a risk I’ve taken many times. Although Secretary of Education nominee/dimwit Betsy DeVos may worry schools need guns to protect themselves from grizzly bears, I can report that I’ve taken Lili backpacking in Yellowstone National Park a half-dozen times now, most recently last summer to Heart Lake, armed with nothing more than a can of pepper spray. For me Yellowstone is no less than a spiritual center of North America, and one of my favorite backcountry areas to visit, but it comes with serious danger: grizzlies. I’m always a bit nervous about this, and am inveterate reader of grizzly lore and grizzly attack stories. Last summer I read Lee H. Whittlesey’s Death in Yellowstone (2014) right before our trip—which has the rather surprising info that many more people have died falling into hot springs in Yellowstone than have been attacked by grizzlies.

But do I worry when I take her into Yellowstone’s backcountry? You bet. I worry. Last summer I was awakened in the middle of the night by what sounded like a large animal snorting outside my tent, and immediately went into action, waking up all my camping companions (two families) by shouting, “Bear! Bear! Everybody up!” (It later turned out, to my chagrin, that I was probably awakened by one of my campmates’ loud snoring.) I always keep the pepper spray handy, knowing full well that there are many situations in which it would not be of much help. Do I want my family to end up like Leo DiCaprio in The Revenant (2015)? I do not. Here’s my intrepid camper at Heart Lake, doing her best Tom Hardy imitation.

But . . . what? Should we stay home? Stay inside? Take up needlepoint, jigsaw puzzles? Or for my daughter, the glorious online seductions of AnimalJam and Minecraft? You can guess where I’m going with this: I love the outdoors and know the calculated risks of backpacking in grizzly country. Or whitewater rafting, during which you have to deal with the complex dynamics of rushing water. Three things stand out about the boy’s tragic death in Disaster Falls: It was the first day of their rafting trip; they tried something too risky for their skill level; and they weren’t comfortable with what they were doing, seemed to be trying to push themselves beyond their limits. It’s easy for me to say those are all mistakes, but I’ll also say I don’t judge the family one bit. It’s the old saw: There but for the grace of God go I.

For those who are captivated by these “adventures gone wrong” tales, Jason Kersten’s Journal of the Dead (2003) is a heartbreaker. It basically describes the mystifying tragedy of two college friends, David Coughlin and Raffi Kodikian, whose overnight camping trip near Carlsbad Caverns National Park in New Mexico turned into a survival ordeal, one that ended with Kodikian stabbing Coughlin to death. Although there were theories about other motives, the truth of what actually happens seems fairly evident, through a preponderance of evidence: the two young men became disoriented, were lost in the desert, could not find the way back to their car, ran out of water and started to die of dehydration. Coughlin urged Kodikian to kill him, to put him out of his misery, and Kodikian did so. It’s bizarre, horrible, inexplicable . . . but true. And I should note this biographical tie-in: The incident took place in August 1999, and that semester I was teaching at Penn State. (Note that Kodikian grew up in a suburb of Philadelphia.) Talking to a writing class one day, I mentioned reading about the story in the news, and one of my students explained he knew Raffi Kodikian, and that Kodikian was a good person. I think that personal recommendation is what led me to read  Journal of the Dead when I came across it, years later.
Ultimately Kersten’s description and analysis of the tragedy is both dramatic and sound. If there’s a connection between the tragedies of Disaster Falls and Journal of the Dead, it’s that both tragedies occurred in part due to the people being unfamiliar and new to what they were doing: In Gerson’s book it was whitewater rafting, and in Kersten’s it was desert hiking and camping. I’m going to continue adventuring in the West, and am already making kayaking and backpacking plans for next summer in Utah and in Grand Tetons National Park (grizzly country!), and although I’ll try to be as careful as possible, I know there will be risks. Still, adventure is worth it. Life itself is a risk.
Here’s my (then) nine-year-old daughter, Lili, paddling her own kayak last summer (going solo, upon which she insisted) at String Lake in the Grand Tetons National Park.

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On the National Embarrassment of President Trump: "The Manchurian Candidate" Meets "The Bad Seed"

Posted on November 9, 2016 by williamjcobb

So waking up to the nightmare of a Trump presidency (who really wants to look at this guy for four more years?), I’m reminded of two great classic films: the original Manchurian Candidate (1962) and a quirky predecessor, The Bad Seed (1956).

Trump is a hybrid of the two. He’s got the Russian backing of Raymond Shaw (played with great coldness by Laurence Harvey, opposite the nervousness of no less than Frank Sinatra) and the temperament of Rhoda Penmark (Patty McCormick)—the adorable, jealous brat who kills the little Daigle boy because she wanted the medal for penmanship that he won. Like Rhoda, Trump carries a grudge, and like Raymond, he’s a homegrown American who plays into the Russian’s hands.
I was glad to see my second home state, Colorado, didn’t drink the Kool-Aid. Not that it’s much consolation. In the words of Bette Davis in All About Eve (1950), “Fasten your seatbelts. It’s going to be a bumpy night.”

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Slouching Toward Bethlehem (While Walking Across Campus, Staring at Their Phones)

Posted on October 9, 2016 by williamjcobb

So for many months now I’ve watched (along with most other people) the rise of Donald Trump with a mixture of bafflement and dismay, contemplating the scary possibility that he could actually be Leader of the Free World (seems bizarre, yes) in one month. I’ve even noticed the squirming goblin of this horror wriggling into the novel I’ve been writing, though painted in broad strokes, for good reason—ultimately I think Trump will be tossed into the trash heap of history, and one doesn’t need to add the dregs. Still I’m reminded of the old ad campaign for David Cronenberg’s remake of The Fly (1986): “Be Afraid, Be Very Afraid.”

His “policies” have been laughable to ridiculous: build a two-thousand mile wall at the (mostly desert) border of the U.S. and Mexico, ban Muslims, reintroduce “stop-and-frisk” police tactics, big tax cuts for the wealthy—the list goes on and on. But he’s the Republican candidate for President: enough said.
Sometimes it seems it’s all my friends and colleagues have been talking about for months, with one big exception I discovered starting in September: college students. I’ve also found that somewhat baffling. All the adults I know (even the children) have been talking about the election—a turning point in history, no less, perhaps the election of the first woman president—but my college students have been noticeably quiet about it. True, it’s not my position to proselytize to them about the importance of voting for Hillary Clinton, though I have urged them to vote, and to vote for an smart, sane candidate. But after I noticed the lack of discussion in before-class chitchat among the students, I directly asked my classes why. The best explanation seemed to be along the lines of “We’re over it” and “They’re both equally bad candidates,” the second statement of which I totally disagree, but hey, it’s a common opinion. The “We’re over it” response is a repudiation of our campaign system itself, for being too long and drawn-out. And the students who voiced this had a valid point: after the drama of the primaries—and for many, the supporters of Bernie Sanders’s disappointment—they feel as if it’s now a slog toward Election Day, which is, to some extent, correct.
The one unifying activity in this last month? Staring at their screens. The most common image of a college student in 2016 should be Student X walking across campus, staring at his/her smartphone, or walking along talking to the air. The media is often filled with prognostications about Millennials, most of which I find rather dubious. And even though I’m experiencing this myself, I realize how arbitrary my classes are, as any sampling of the thousands of students that make up a large university such as Penn State (population of @ 42,000!). But still: It has me worried. I quoted a William Butler Yeats poem, “Crazy Jane Talks to the Bishop,” in class the other day, and students looked at me as if I were being a bit loony. Yeats’s “slouching toward Bethlehem” line is so oft-quoted it’s a cliche that needs updating: Add the image of a person walking along, staring at a smartphone—right or wrong, that’s what October 2016 feels a bit like to me.

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On HBO's Westworld: Where Humans Go for Fun, Known to the Hosts as Hell

Posted on October 5, 2016 by williamjcobb

So out of pity for my poor blog that never gets attention, I’ll download myself out of the iCloud in which I reside to report that I’m jazzed about the new HBO series Westworld. For one thing it takes me back, back in time, to when dinosaurs ruled the earth . . . . Um, wait: Nope, not that long ago. Back only to the glorious and oft-misrepresented 1980s, when I was living on Palisade Avenue in the Jersey Heights section of Jersey City, NJ, working at various editorial jobs in Manhattan (back in the day when I could see the Twin Towers from our living room window), and before cable came to our street. (Hard to believe but I think that’s true.) It was in the era of less-technology options (how we suffered! and were free, yes, free!), and our TV viewing options were either network channels or some indie stations in the NYC area. One of these stations was like Netflix only different: It’s “playlist” included about eight films (it seemed) in the late-night options, and one of those was the original Michael Crichton Westworld (1973), which starred James Brolin and Richard Benjamin as the humans, and the incomparable Yul Brynner (you have to love him for the name alone) as the bad guy robot. Crichton actually directed the film, based on his own script. (Note that in the original film, there was also a Medieval and a Roman World.) I saw it over and over again, a kind of guilty pleasure. It’s no great movie, but it’s certainly fun. Brolin and Benjamin together was a nice bit of casting, as one is the more macho type, one the more bookish (guess who survives), and Brynner as the stony-faced Gunslinger.
Flash forward to October 2nd, 2016, and the debut of HBO’s new Westworld series, which seems to have one-upped the original concept. The debut is both bloody violent and conceptually fascinating. As we have advanced in our notions of what A.I. is capable of—think of Ray Kurzweil’s The Singularity Is Near (2006)—the stakes have risen on what might happen if we create these robots for our pleasure and amusement.
Judging from the first episode, here’s a good theory of what’s taking place in the series: the Anthony Hopkins character (Dr. Robert Ford, a bland-enough name) is the brains behind the Westworld theme park, and has become an aging, hoary god-like figure, improving his technology so that the “hosts” (what they call the robots) are not exactly machines anymore, but sentient beings, who are being tortured and raped and killed for the amusement of the “newcomers” (what they call the humans who visit the park). And as the hosts have advanced, they’re no longer so cool with playing this game. Essentially we humans have inadvertently created a Hell for robots: They do the same thing over and over again, suffer and die and love and yearn over and over again, and a glitch in the updating process has made them realize and recall their past lives, so they are beginning to realize what is happening to them, and to really feel it.
I was leery of the show when I read that J. J. Abrams was involved, as I’m not a fan, but so far it seems addictive. James Marsden and Evan Rachel Wood are two of the central host characters, and both are doing a good job, while the Gunslinger role is now craggy-faced Ed Harris’s, who uses it to great scenery-chewing affect. Even the setting is rather cool, a mash-up of famous Western locales, principally Monument Valley in Arizona.

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"The Altered States of Stuffed Animals" in The Superstition Review

Posted on May 4, 2016 by williamjcobb

So I have an essay titled “The Altered States of Stuffed Animals” published in the latest issue of The Superstition Review, which can be located here. I have a fondness for TSR, as they have published some of my work in the past, and twice have invited me to do guest blog posts.

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On Ian McGuire's "The North Water": a Revisionist "Moby Dick," With Echoes of "Blood Meridian" and "The Revenant"

Posted on May 4, 2016 by williamjcobb

So last week I had the gripping-if-ghastly reading experience of zooming through Ian McGuire’s new novel, The North Water. I’ll try to be circumspect in my comments here so as not to spoil the reading “fun” for others, as I do heartily recommend it. Simply put, I’d rank it as one of the best new novels I’ve read in the last few years. It’s a literary adventure tale of sorts, not for the faint of heart. At times I’m sure the gore would be over the top, or too much, for some readers, but eventually I think the power and eccentricity of the language is more important than the blood, pus, and other bodily fluids that leak or gush about on one page or another. You could certainly label it “Tarantinoesque,” but it’s smarter than Tarantino’s films, and the gore has more seriousness to it—more shocking than, say, humorous, as some of the scenes in Django Unchained (2012) are downright funny, not particularly thoughtful.

The obvious comparison is Herman Melville’s Moby Dick (1851). The story unfolds in 1857-59, and the point is made repeatedly that it’s the end of the whaling era, which figures into the plot dynamics. There’s a good vs. evil dynamic with the characters of Patrick Sumner vs. Henry Drax, although Drax is not the maniacal captain a la Moby Dick’s Ahab, and Sumner is ultimately both more fallen and resourceful than Ishmael. The North Water is less philosophical, shorter, and tighter than Moby Dick, and obviously is a child of the 21st century, as Melville’s masterpiece is a child of the 19th century. Even though Queequeg and Ishmael sleep together at their first meeting, and become bosom buddies, Melville is hesitant to write about homosexuality, which plays a bit part in the plot of The North Water. Both novels have a “mythic” feel to them, and as far as what’s realistic or not, I’d give Melville more credit there, for having actually been a sailor on a whaling ship in that era. To me that doesn’t matter. The North Water isn’t necessarily trying to be realistic, and the one work of literature that figures prominently in the background of the story is The Iliad, and that touchstone of myth is telling.
Other comparisons are to Cormac McCarthy’s Blood Meridian (1985) and the recent Leo DiCaprio film, The Revenant (2015).  The Sumner/Drax dynamic corresponds to the Hugh Glass/Fitzgerald of The Revenant, with Drax being the implacable force of blunt trauma, and Sumner being the more reflective and wronged party in this death dance. What sets The North Water apart is its archaic, elaborate language, which includes some knife-edge descriptions of the frozen Arctic seas. In that respect it more closely resembles McCarthy’s Blood Meridian, which is famous for its Satanic character Judge Holden, but which also owes much of its power to its baroque language and the fantastic descriptions of the desert wild lands of Mexico and the Southwest.

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