My Page: Allen M. Jones
"I don't film dreams that lack narrative drive."
Saving Daylight, New Poems by Jim Harrison
Jim Harrison's tenth book of verse, Saving Daylight (Copper Canyon Press, $22), has about it all the blue collar wisdom of a Philip Levine. The political conscience of a Carolyn Forché. The finger-shock mysticism of Hopkins. Maybe a rose garden whiff of classical Keats. There's the naturalism of a Mary Oliver, the family preoccupations of early Sharon Olds. Most of all, though, there's Harrison himself. The eccentric, walleyed assuredness of a personality utterly at home with itself, a curiosity equally as willing to peak into his own garbage ("...the food / thawed in the freezer I grieved / over the five pounds of melted squid,") as into a good ontological mystery or two ("None of us is the same person as yesterday. / We finally die from the exhaustion of becoming.")
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New West Book Review
David James Duncan’s ‘God Laughs & Plays’
They don't make writers like David James Duncan anymore. A novelist (The Brothers K, The River Why) and essayist / fly-fisherman (My Story as Told by Water), screenwriter (the documentary Trout Grass), academic lecturer and environmental activist, the guy's been all over the map, a regular road show of impassioned curiosity. Unsurprisingly, then, his newest book, the wonderful God Laughs & Plays: Churchless Sermons in Response to the Preachments of the Fundamentalist Right (Triad, Books, $22.95), tends to resist comfortable categories. An important book, absolutely; a fierce and polarizing call to arms, you bet; a tender tribute to his cohorts in the fight, no question. But, really... what is it?
As published by The Triad Institute, if you had to boil out the common themes from God Laughs & Plays (essays, interviews, parables), you would tend to arrive at sensibilities rather than ideas. These writings are all about wonder and mysticism, pity and anger and love, they're about doing what you can -- doing anything -- in the face of impending environmental, political and spiritual catastrophe.
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The Literary Art of War
The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers, a novel by Delia Falconer
Delia Falconer’s, The Lost Thoughts of Soldiers (Soft Skull Press, $16.00), is a historical novel about Custer the way, say, Duchamp’s Nude Descending a Staircase is about a nude descending a staircase. The General George is one of her characters, sure. The men are all a-horseback and carrying guns, you bet. But historical specificity is very much outside her area of real interest. Cannons and encampments serve only as backdrop. No, the author here is less curious about events 130 years old than she is about certain universals of human character. Her subject is men at war, and the friendships that grow from war, and the aimless, endless daydreamings of sex, regret, and childhood that occur during war; and perhaps most of all, what it’s like to grow old after war. “The urge to urinate is constant, the results always paltry.” Her method is meta and modernist, a conflation of Woolf and Faulkner, Barth and Brecht, but her subject predates language entirely: What becomes of boys when you send them off to kill and die?
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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
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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.
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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.
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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]
