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My Page: Allen M. Jones

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Bookstores and Bars

One 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

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

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.
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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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