My Page: Allen M. Jones
From the Author of The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine
Five Questions for Steven Rinella
"My feelings as an environmentalist come from my own realizations about my food sources. I feel compelled to protect them, because I see the beauty of their usefulness. The other day I was riding a bus into Boulder, CO to do a book signing and I overheard an upsetting conversation. The bus driver, a local, was telling a tourist that if mountain lions know people are their friends, then they won’t eat people’s pets. He said, 'We’ve given up hunting, and are at peace with animals.' In the next sentence he was suggesting steak houses. So, you see, there’s this duality of thought about food and wildlife, and that frustrates and troubles me."
So says Steven Rinella, the author of The Scavenger's Guide to Haute Cuisine
[more]
Chicks and Ducks and Geese Better Scurry...
The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, by Steven Rinella
I admit that I came to Steven Rinella’s excellent new book, The Scavenger’s Guide to Haute Cuisine, with a skeptical eye. Another first person adventurish kind of narrative from a youngish Outside writer. Having recently met the guy (he currently lives in Miles City), had a few beers at Chico, I'm relieved now to say that my skepticism was misdirected. Crackling with enthusiasm and energy, alive with honest curiosity, here’s a book that’s an altogether unexpected kind of creature: Adventure writing ameliorated by cooking school and natural history, with maybe a soupcon of ethical philosophy thrown in for the salt.
[more]
The critic that critics like to read...
A Temple of Texts, by William Gass
As a species, most critics are as common as field mice, in both senses of the word. Ubiquitous and plebeian. Parasitic cashers of paychecks, two-fingered typists and chin-rubbers, their alarums and excursions produce nothing but comment. Opinions, as most of us learned in grade school, are like assholes: Everybody’s got one. In a culture devoted to nothing if not its entertainments, when it comes to judging books, music, movies, every bum under his box has an opinion. But there are very, very few critics who, through their background in the canon, their intellectual acumen, their talent for aesthetic balancing, actually qualify themselves as capable. Rare is the opinion we consider more valid than our own. Not a reviewer per se, a critic only by coincidence, William Gass is most of all a lover of language and logic, syllable and syllogism, an oenologist of distilled verbage. When he pronounces on a book, it’s with the authority of a man who has read damned near everything. [more]
From the author of And She Was...
Five Questions for Novelist Cindy Dyson
"I don't think I could have created my first novel only from my head. I wanted a story with strong non-fiction components. In fact, it wasn't until I was researching the history of the Aleutians that I began to want to write a novel. Being able to dig into an obscure, meaty history satisfied the journalist in me and allowed me to slowly develop the freedom to write fiction, to just make it up. On those days when the muse was late for work, I could delve into research, dig into archeological studies and priest's journals. I love research, and I love the notion of taking a very real past and projecting it into very made-up characters to see what it will mean." [more]
A Mystery At The End of the World
And She Was, A Novel By Cindy Dyson
Not unlike the way your taste in cars keeps changing, evolving (high school camaro to sensible sedan to minivan), the sort of book you read comes to be a decent poker tell for your age. Lately, in my mid-thirties, I find myself enjoying nothing so much as a well-drawn character. Maybe it’s the equivalent of a mid-life crisis, a new jaguar for the balding old man. But for a writer to breathe real life into a fictional creation, to throw the switch and make a heart thump and cheeks flush, eyelids flutter, to make an imaginary person want something, truly want something in a way that resonates, I admire that the way little leaguers still admire Hank Aaron. The new novel by Montana author Cindy Dyson, And She Was ($24.95, William Morrow), although not unflawed, has at its tent pole core the abracadabra vibrancy of an utterly real heroine, Brandy. [more]
A Eulogy for Landscape
The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West by Steven B. Smith
Say you’re a landscape photographer in the West. Say you’d like to call yourself an artist. Aspire toward a body of work that is both original and emotive. You’ve picked yourself a hard row to hoe. At first glance, the entrenched visual vocabulary of big beautiful snowcapped mountains and Sensia-blue lakes disallows both originality and emotion. Does the world really need another calendar shot of the Tetons? The trick is always to find some new way of looking at the same old horizon. In this context, Steven B. Smith’s recent collection of black and white images, The Weather and a Place to Live: Photographs of the Suburban West (Duke University Press, $35), is a cool and cerebral compromise, a sharp spray of water, an artful kick in the ass.
[more]
Sportsmanship, Fair Chase Hunting, and Wildlands Conservation
The Boone and Crockett Club’s Records of North American Big Game, 12th Edition
I have an early memory: Me, six or seven years old, cross-legged in front of a bookcase, flipping through an edition of The Boone and Crockett record book. Hardbound in green cloth, about the thickness of an XYZ Encyclopedia Brittanica, the pages kept wanting to drop loose from the binding. Maybe this was the edition that first printed Dad’s Yukon moose. Anyway, just a few black and white photos of antlers and horns, thirty-some chapters of score listings running up the page (hunter, owner, date killed, etc.) in such a way that, to actually read the thing you had to tilt it sideways. For a certain kind of kid, though, a gopher shooter and perch fisher, this was pre-adolescent Playboy. [more]
Bookstores and Bars
Denver’s Tattered Cover Announces MoveOne of the West's largest and most distinguished independent bookstores, Denver's Tattered Cover, recently announced that, in June of this year it will be closing its venerable Cherry Creek store in favor of setting up shop in the refurbished Lowenstein Theater on Colfax Avenue. In an e-mail sent yesterday, Tattered Cover wrote, "While we have cherished our remarkable thirty-four years in the Cherry Creek area, recent years have seen a significant decline in business accompanied by increased costs, necessitating the difficult decision to move the store when our lease expires. Fortunately, this marvelous opportunity arose in the form of the Lowenstein Redevelopment Project." [more]
Experiments in Cowboy Color
My West: The Art of Larry Pirnie
If you’ve spent any time at all in Montana, you probably already know Larry Pirnie’s work. Billboards, t-shirts, menus. It’s Will James meets Jackson Pollock meets Roy Lichtenstein, with maybe a dab of Walt Disney pureéd into the mix for good measure. Pirnie’s new coffee table book, My West (aptly named, given that it was written by Pirnie, illustrated and designed by Pirnie, published by Pirnie) is a 132 page survey of one of the most dynamic careers this side of the Mississippi. As he writes in his first sentence, “This book is full of fantasy, hardship, great joy, and endless effort to live my dream of painting the West." [more]
One Good Interview
Six Questions for Author Tom Groneberg
Author of the highly praised memoir, The Secret Life of Cowboys, and now the upcoming One Good Horse, Montana author Tom Groneberg recently sat down with New West to offer opinions on horse training, Teddy “Blue" Abbott, and James Frey.
[more]
