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Missoula Notebook

My cure involves Nyquil, that syrupy sickbed absinthe. Amy shudders and gasps when she swallows it, and requires a chaser of chilled juice, but I find I quite like the taste and prefer to let it linger, so that I can savor its bouquet. Nyquil tastes to me sort of like Jagermeister mixed with a little cough syrup. Perhaps the bars should offer this combination, with a thermometer in it as a swizzle stick. Back in high school, a friend of mine and I were two of the only people who ever bought Dr. Pepper from the hallway soda machine. “But it tastes just like cough syrup,” I remember someone saying, to which my friend replied “What’s wrong with cough syrup?” [more]

Missoula Notebook

To his credit — and I want to be as even-handed as possible here — Rick did leave behind the cast-iron curtain rods and muslin drapes (which Amy was really hoping he’d leave), several elk skulls (which I was really hoping he’d leave), and some sort of device for suspending dead animals from the ceiling in the garage, which we hadn’t noticed on any of our previous inspections of the property but which seems like a handy thing to have in these parts. And, as if to make up for the state of the toilet, there was a fresh roll of toilet paper in the bathroom cupboard, right next to the February 2008 Playboy. (“Miss February wishes you a happy Valentine’s Day.”) [more]

Missoula Notebook

I will later learn that the lights-off rule is not an absolute necessity, but as we drive I am worried. Will my headlights spook the geese into a pre-dawn departure, when they would otherwise wait until just after dawn to take off? Will I ruin the “seventh wonder of the natural world” — as Professor Greene calls it — that about 20 teachers, students and tag-alongs like me are here to see? About 50 yards in, though, the road’s slight downward grade suggests a solution. I kill the engine and, with it, my headlights, and coast the next 500 yards in neutral and in darkness.

The eastern horizon is pinkening with the first hint of dawn, but the sky above us is inky black. All around, still invisible in the gloom, 35,000 geese are starting to think about breakfast. [more]

Missoula Notebook

By noon, as speaker after speaker mounts the podium, the crowd’s groans grow louder and more sour. The consensus among the bystanders near me is that it is to the mayor’s great credit that he is up here with us and not contributing to the delay by standing in line at the podium. We are momentarily excited when a man in a fleece vest leaves the podium and it stands empty for a few minutes, but he is replaced by a man in a green blazer. We can see flashbulbs popping. [more]

Missoula Notebook

In a way, the problem with evaluating modern, formless, envelope-pushing poetry is similar to the problem with taking your car in to get that clunking noise checked. You listen (to the poems, to the man explaining why you must now write him a large check), and in both cases it is hard to avoid the suspicion that someone is taking advantage of your good nature. I hope I’m not breaking any earth-shattering news to the poets out there when I mention that the general public is a little scared of poetry these days, or at least can’t seem to find an important place for the most modern instances of it in their lives. Can this be for any other reason than that, as an art form, its standards and goals seem unclear to the lay public? [more]

Missoula Notebook

Last week, Amy and I finally closed on the new house over by Westside Park. We won’t be moving in for another week or so, but we’ve already met our neighbors. By one of those happy coincidences that are so common in a small city like Missoula, they turned out to be friends of a friend, and he invited us all over to his house a few weeks ago for venison and introductions. It was nice to meet some actual residents of the Westside, because they were able to confirm many of our so-far good but mostly second-hand impressions of the neighborhood. [more]

Blog: Missoula Notebook

The question is whether we have any good way to prevent gun sales to the stupid at the policy level, as opposed to, say, harshly punishing the Smails of the world. If gun sales were to become illegal tomorrow, there would of course quickly be even more of a flourishing illegal market in the things than there is right now (and it’s already pretty flourishing). I’d refer you to, say, the market in illegal drugs, and point out that a lot of people who would like to see a prohibition on gun sales might be open, on the other hand, to a decriminalization of some forms of currently illegal drugs. Of course there are huge distinctions to be made (pot never killed anyone, but handguns — not so much), and I’m not saying that holding the two views makes anyone a hypocrite, but I do think it would be foolish to ignore the apparently powerful desire of vast numbers of people in this country to own guns, and to fail to consider the evidence from the “drug war” that a lot of people are quite willing to disobey laws they consider unjust. [more]

Missoula Notebook

At various points in my life, I have resolved to remember that statements like this one are suspect at best and great huge red flags of warning most of the time. “Unsinkable”; “what’s the worst that could happen?”; “she’s never done that before”; etc. The problem is that every time I relearn this lesson, I start to fly right for a while, which means I get used to nothing going wrong, which means I start to let my guard down. Especially in situations where the stakes seem low, which they certainly did as we looked at the two simple circles on the ranger’s map, one green, one blue. [more]

Missoula Notebook

It’s not that I was expecting a brilliant, transcendent viewing experience (which turned out to be smart of me), but rather that Stand By Me has long been on an informal mental of list of mine containing various movies and television series that were popular while I was growing up but that I missed seeing for an assortment of reasons, including (1) parents who actually paid attention to MPAA-rating age limits, (2) lack of a television in the house when I was between the ages of 4 and 8 (and relatively restricted viewing thereafter), and (3) a sort of general pop-cultural tone-deafness resulting from the interaction of these and other factors. [more]

big sky documentary film festival

A few years ago my mother gave me a photograph of my grandfather, taken in about 1953. He is sitting with several fellow miners in the rock-walled tunnel of a copper mine, their black metal lunch boxes at their feet and the ore-cart tracks curving into the darkness beyond. I keep this photograph above my desk to remind myself what hard work is really all about when I’m whining over a deadline or wondering how to cut down a word count, but I never understood what that hard work consisted of until Thursday’s screening of Butte, America, the kickoff film of this weekend’s fifth annual Big Sky Documentary Film Festival.

Producer and director Pam Roberts and associate producer and co-writer Edwin Dobb tell the story of Butte not only with epic historical sweep (as befits a place where mere humans have wrought such immense changes to the surface of the earth) but also at a very personal level, foregrounding and respecting the reminiscences of the men and women who lived through the booms and busts of Montana’s legendary mining town. [more]

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