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My Page: Allen M. Jones

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Slumgullion, Bear Posole, Ragout Celibataire...

Kim Anderson, Director of the Montana Center for the Book, was kind enough to recently throw some enlightenment on the genesis behind the new recipe collection, Eat our Words: Montana Writers' Cookbook, the state of western letters, and a look at the future arts scene in Montana. [more]

A Million Little Western Truths

Memoir, of course, is a venerable genre. It’s been around a while. The first guy to hunker down and scratch a few words in the dirt, ten to one he was writing about himself. Here’s what I saw, here’s what I felt. Judging by recent headlines, however, the breed is in the midst of taking a beating. Poor James Frey in his million little maligned pieces, the latest bad-assed spoiled rich kid to bleed all the way to the bank. What is it about telling our own story that makes us want to oversensationalize, inflate our own egos with endless puffs of hot air? Augusten Burroughs, running with the scissors that his foster family swears up and down were fabrications. Is it insecurity? Maybe our own lives really aren’t that important. Even here in Montana, Judy Blunt probably should have thought twice before writing that scene about her father-in-law going after her typewriter with a sledgehammer. In this cynical atmosphere, the new memoir by Tom Groneberg, One Good Horse, (Scribner, $24) is a kind of palliative. It’s like running into a buddy you haven’t seen for a while, arguing about who can buy the first round.
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Jim Harrison's Bear Posole to Ambrose's Undaunted Red Beans

If you’re a bachelor (like me), and thus stereotypically disinclined to turn on a stove, if you would have surely starved prior to the invention of the microwave, there's something vaguely plaintive about time spent with a cookbook. Paging through even the finest selection of recipes, the attention invariably wanders. There might be some good possibilities here, but they're all just out of reach. The recent collection, Eat our Words: Montana Writers' Cookbook (Farcountry Press, $19.95) is something of an exception. A compilation of recipes, sure, but the folks doing the recommending are all writers rather than (for the most part) professional chefs, and so have a knack for holding the reader's interest.
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Colt, Henry's, Spencer's, Sharp's...

It ain’t necessarily an easy gig, writing western history. There’s just so much cultural freight behind the genre, so much expectation. Unless you’re Bernard de Voto, how do you make an appeal to the general market without losing the respect of your peers? Unless you’re Wallace Stegner, how do you indulge the professorial without seeing your subject turn bland as Ovaltine? Charles G. Worman’s new coffee table book Gunsmoke and Saddle Leather: Firearms in the Nineteenth-Century American West (University of New Mexico Press, $55) goes a long way toward striking that difficult balance between authenticity and amusement, elbowing its way onto the short list of entertaining texts that nevertheless manage to make some contribution to their disciplines.
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An end of the year roundup

Here's a tiny little prediction: As the internet becomes even more ubiquitous, psychologists will start typing our various personalities based on our web-browsing habits. One can imagine a Jungian sub-specialty devoted to mailbox spam, streaming radio, bookmarks. Especially the bookmarks. Your "favorites" folder probably says as much about you as a Rorschach test, a word associations exercise. You can already hear the thick Austrian accent: “So! You have chose to go do ze shopping at ze Land’s End but not Eddie Bauer? Verrry interesting.� Over the last year or so, in the course of compiling regional "books and writers" information for New West, browser bookmarks have stuck to me like cockleburs. In the spirit of year-end reassessment, it seemed like a good idea to pass a few of these sites along, compare and contrast the links. Call it, The Best of the Bookmarks, 2005. [more]

Aimlessly Browsing Through The Web...

Turns out, the publicity-shy author Annie Proulx was recently cornered for an interview at the Harold Washington Library in Chicago by Bookslut contributor John Detrixhe. With the imminent release of her short story Brokeback Mountain as a feature film, Proulx comments (among other things) on the acting performances given in Brokeback Mountain, how she began reading by picking out books according to the color of their covers, and why she is drawn to writing about male characters. [more]

A New West Review

When he’s hitting on all cylinders, nowhere is there a more deceptively accessible writer than Larry McMurtry. He’s a pal hunkering down over his heels, blowing into his coffee, spinning a good yarn. His best novels – Terms of Endearment, The Last Picture Show, All My Friends Are Going to be Strangers – are all ambushes of emotion, everyman oomphs of grief and redemption. No flourishes of purple prose, no narrative strutting. Here’s just a handful of people you can care about, and here are some of the bad (and good) things that happen to them. His life’s masterpiece, the Pulitzer Prize winning Lonesome Dove, is a staggering achievement of invisible research and camouflaged, authorial labor. Anyone who can read about the death of Augustus McCrae without threatening tears has a chunk of vulcanized rubber for a heart. His most recent book, however, the slim and dismissible Oh What a Slaughter (Simon & Schuster, $25), while gifted with a great title, and valuable as a timely reminder of tragedy, has about it the distinct air of contract-fulfillment, of an author anxious to add one more book to an already mammoth personal bibliography.
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The Best Titles from the Small Presses

It can be tricky, choosing a book to give as a present. Apart from the unlikely possibility that the thing will actually be read, there are all sorts of other considerations roiling under the surface. For instance, is it expensive enough? Also, does it make me seem smart and sophisticated and in-the-know? And most of all, is it going to be easy to wrap? In the West, the smartest move is almost always to avoid the big Manhattan houses in favor of regional relevance. Anyway, pulling a book off the shelf as you walk into Borders violates the first rule of holiday book buying: Make it look like you’ve put some thought into this. And so, small regional presses. That’s the way to go.
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Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies, and Bull Riders

The author of the new, and very well reviewed book on the Professional Bull Riders circuit, Fried Twinkies, Buckle Bunnies and Bull Riding, was kind enough to recently sit down with New West and give us his opinions on everything from what makes a guy climb on a bull for the first time to why the sport has recently been finding such popular appeal. [more]

A New West Book Review

Rodeo. It’s hard to imagine a sport more freighted with American symbolism. Forget for a minute the whole cultural, Clint Eastwood romantic undercarriage. Six shooters and sunsets. That sort of thing. Instead, hold it up alongside our few other national pastimes. Like baseball, it’s a sport (arguably) born on American soil. With football, it often asks for a token sacrifice of cartilage and tendon. Next to boxing, it cultivates, in its fans, a remnant of coliseum, Christians-versus-lions schadenfreude, a screaming for blood. Unlike these sports, however, rodeo has its roots in practical hard work, in western capitalism, in utility. Breaking horses, twisting steers, calf roping, it all began as an exhibition of cowboy talent, an attempt to establish bragging rights. Turn er loose, open er up, grab some leather and roll your spurs. Here’s how you do it, fellers. But then there’s bull riding. Nothing practical here. No good, utilitarian reason in the world to strap yourself to an 1,800 pound slobber-slinging, horn-hooking, pissed off Brahma cross named Tender Kisses. No, bull riding is all about cojones, jewels, huevos. Who’s got the biggest. Being tougher’n a shelled cob. Getting hooked in the ass then buying a round, showing off your scars to a whole ‘nother set of hookers. Also, money. Making a hobo’s railcar living, sure, but with the elusive, unlikely possibility of a huge payoff at the end. It’s about entertainment. Ours more than theirs. The point could be argued, but seems like most people watch bull riding for the same reason they watch Nascar. For the wrecks. [more]

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