Elliott lives on a tidal river in coastal Georgia, loves to fly, writes a bit, works in healthcare for the federal government, and is system administrator for the swiftpassage webs.
McMurtry’s books have never disappointed me. I picked up this and another, ‘Buffalo Girls’, at a flea market last month, without any sense of when they’d been written, and simply tucked into them one after the other. They were a well-chosen pair, in that both novels are concerned with converting the histories of rather unpalatable people into characters in a story worth reading, but with greater honesty than the dime novels of the early 20th century.
In ‘Anything for Billy’, McMurtry’s narrator, Ben Sippy, is, himself, a dime novelist, and arguably the true protagonist of the tale McMurtry has spun from the real history of William Bonney. Sippy’s voice and vision, his sense and durability, and the depth of his own experience provide the narrative grist that allows detail, clarity and perspective in the telling of events. “Billy Bone”, himself, proves too simple and erratic to make sense of his own being. Billy’s other trail companion, Joe Lovelady, alternatively, is too steady and phlegmatic to lend his voice. Sippy’s story, however, arcs out of an escape from genteel circumstances in Philadelphia, to land, finally, on the west coast of southern California, the two coasts of the American continent being the only “parentheses” broad enough to encompass McMurtry’s West.
If this book interests you, I’d strongly recommend reading this review by Jack Butler in the New York Times back in 1988.
On Christmas Eve, I took my wife and daughters to go see the new Sherlock Holmes film, ‘A Game of Shadows’, and we all enjoyed its clever re-imagining of the detective as played by Robert Downey, Jr, a rather darkly comic version of the sleuth, with equal parts ninja and omniscient adept. While Ann has a low threshold for weapons that go bang and graphic puncture wounds, despite plenty of those even she pronounced the film a good one. Go see it, and its predecessor, if you enjoy the Holmes cannon on any level. You’ll be glad for it.
This Christmas did have a new release from Laurie R. King for her Mary Russell series with Sherlock Holmes (out last September, actually, but close enough), ‘Pirate King’. Alas, my girls and I are so addicted to those that we read it before October was done, so it had no place in our stockings last week. It’s a larky sort of Mary Russell novel, with distinctly silly bits to it, and so harder for me to warm up to, but sustaining enough, I suppose. It’s my hope that King’s next in the series has harder edges. Even so, if you enjoy Russell and Holmes, it will suffice.
And just this morning, I stumbled upon this review at Tor.com, by Niall Alexander, of a pair of Neil Gaiman stories which have expanded the Holmes canon; magnifying and extending it into unanticipated realms. It is a beautifully written and illustrated homage to Gaiman’s extraordinary skill and finess as a crafter of stories. I mention it here to point my daughters at the link, and at the two Holmes stories it covers: ‘A Study in Emerald’ , and ‘The Case of Death and Honey’. Alexander has piqued my curiosity, and I’m off straight-away to re-read the first, via the link above. ‘The Case of Death and Honey’ may be found in the new release on the Poisoned Pen imprint, ‘A Study in Sherlock’, which is a collection of Holmes stories by contemporary writers.
It’s my fervent hope that some deductive skills will have rubbed off on me from all this recent contact with the great detective. Then maybe I could figure out who sent us the gift of a new corkscrew this Christmas! Ho, ho, ho!
Just got this notice from Facebook: “You currently automatically import content from your website or blog into your Facebook notes. Starting November 22nd, this feature will no longer be available…”
This bears close scrutiny, and loud protest, both because it is the craven and selfish move of a monopolist mentality, but moreover because it makes the Facebook community duller, more parochial, and more carefully controlled. This is facebook saying, you are MY EXCLUSIVE AUDIENCE. Do Not Stray! RESISTANCE IS FUTILE! Et cetera…
What facebook dreads are posts which entice you, the visitor, to click out of their wire-enclosed playground. What they prefer are “partner sites” where, as you click, you never actually leave the compound. It’s an aquarium, people.
Well, I am here to tell you that there is a whole other universe of internet sites out there to explore and join. Spending hour after hour browsing facebook is the web equivalent of always eating at MacDonald’s: it boring, and ultimately bad for you; fatal even. Today, why don’t you make a pact with yourself and go visit Google Plus, Tumblr, WordPress, Twitter, or even DiasporaAlpha? Create a new web presence for yourself, or at the very least revisit a social network that you used to enjoy, and devote extra time to it today. Craft something NEW in an unexpected place and way, AND THEN TELL ALL YOUR FACEBOOK FRIENDS! Encourage them to go take a look at it…
Take a stroll beyond the wire today… beyond the limits of the compound… It’s a beautiful day out there, people.
A few minutes ago I read a post on Google + from an acquaintance of mine. This fellow flies, as I do, but with rather more passion, I think. I mean in addition to flying, he’s been building an airplane in his garage. Yes, that speaks of passion. It’s an undertaking that takes years to accomplish. Learning to fly is something any reasonably intelligent person can accomplish in the span of a summer, but to fashion an aircraft with your own hands and tools? That is passion.
Anyway, he posted a short article about his flight yesterday, round trip from Raleigh to Asheville and back, on a day that was tailor-made for aviation; blue skies, gentle breeze, and no doubt a landscape rolling by beneath touched with brush-strokes of reds and yellows from the shift to autumn foliage. I smiled because I too spent yesterday absorbed in “flying”, and with my own kind of passion, but a bit different.
My yesterday was consumed with fixing my autopilot, which has never quite worked right in this airplane of mine; a wonderful “bird” which I’ve owned since the mid-1990’s. At times, it has demonstrated a willingness to work well, but never for two flights in a row, and for more than a few years now not even one flight in three. It came that way at point of purchase. I remember what the previous owner said about it when he was showing me my purchase. “How does this work?”, I asked, pointing to the autopilot control console. “Oh, that thing…”, said he, “ I can fly the plane better myself.” Yup, that was truth.
An autopilot is not a necessity in light aircraft; to have one in the plane is luxury, a frivolity even, if you never practice instrument flight. That’s flight where you enter and fly within clouds, of course. All an autopilot really does is permit a pilot to focus his attention elsewhere while the craft maintains a certain heading and altitude. Ok, it’s true that a modern autopilot interfaced with the right kind of navigation gear can also fly you all the way to where you’re going, without you doing much else than programming it.
Mine is very old school: it will hold a certain heading from the compass, and will also hold an altitude, sort of, within a hundred feet or so. It is rumored that it is capable of intercepting a course on a navigation radio, and then turning to and flying that course. Radical! In short, it is an archaic dinosaur. Even with these limitations, it would be a fine thing if it did those things CONSISTENTLY, and so I spent my day yesterday probing its deficiencies, in search of an answer to this question: why, dear God, please tell me WHY does it work well at times, but not at others?
I spent almost eight hours in and around my aircraft yesterday in pursuit of an answer to that question, and learned much, but not the answer. I may even be within a few more hours of having my answer, and will likely spend more time today. And yet more in the future, on this or other “old airplane” problems. Let me tell you something that surprised me as I sat with my feet up, after yesterday’s workshop time: it was fun. It was absorbing. And it put me in touch with an aspect of flying that I haven’t previously connected with.
I realized my friend’s joyous flight yesterday was only half of the equation, and that maintaining the craft, making it work, making it a bit better through effort (not just money spent), maybe even building it from the ground up, any or all of those, IS the other half.
We awoke to torrential rain and uncertain power this Columbus Day morning, and by the time high tide rolled in on the South Newport River, the east wind had driven the tide to the highest I’ve ever experienced here.
More images from the day:
Note the two pictures of the two docks, taken from the same vantage, from storm tide to mid-tide…
Today I shall blog! I’m a federal employee, I’ve cleared my desk of all the necessary work, and for the next 30 minutes I’ll be feeding the blog, which says something about the value I put on keeping in touch with… um, … with THE WORLD! Or, y’all… or …whatever.
The day before yesterday I had one of those unpleasantly instructive days where you rediscover a truth about yourself. It was this: I can be seriously thrown off balance by a tiny episode of personal embarassament. It doesn’t even need to be particularly public, like when Nixon threw up on Chairman Chou En Lai, or when Reagan joked into a live microphone about launching a nuclear assault on Soviet Russia. Or perhaps you “know someone” who farted noticeably on an elevator. That sort of thing…
The thing is, this was really nowhere near as bad as those gaffs, but still managed to leave me rattled to a point where I doubted my ability to unwrap and chew gum without injuring myself, or marring the furniture.
So what did I screw up? I was suddenly called upon to make an introduction, and then, without thinking, I extended a handshake to one of them, as if it was me who had been introduced. Yeah, I know, pretty clumsy… I don’t get a lot of practice at social graces, and this sort of thing has blindsided me before.
Lord knows, I’ve been a social twit all my days, so why do I worry about it, or keep trying? I mean, I really admire those gifted with that easy grace, so suave there’s never a sense that they so much as think of what to do in a social moment. It just comes naturally to them. I simply can’t trust myself to navigate those moments on autopilot, I dream someday I might. Big mistake.
What really alarms me is how much personal embarrassment AFFECTS me. I’m absolutely sure there are people who shrug off their clumsiness, social or otherwise, with nary a cough, shrug, nor blink, but why not me?
I even get upset at movies that depict people similarly plagued. If it ever came to torturing me to extract the location of the terrorist bomb, they need only lash me to a chair and force me to watch a Ben Stiller film. If they used ‘There’s Something About Mary’, I’d offer to ingest the plutonium to defuse the thing…
So my “misplaced” handshake left me shaken, in a cold sweat, and wanting to cower in a dark closet until my self-confidence might return, which it did the next day, albeit, with me being very careful not to undertake any introductions for a while. Y’all can just sort yourselves out without my help, thank you very much.
This feels awkward, because ‘All Clear’ is not so much a sequel, but is in fact a second half of its counterpart, the earlier novel, ‘Blackout’, which I reviewed prevously here. My assessment of ‘Blackout’, could be described as “tepidly enthusiastic”. I was so enthralled by her work,’To Say Nothing of the Dog’, and was primed for some wild kind of “book-gasm” with ‘Blackout’. Well, I was disappointed, but hopeful as I launched into ‘All Clear’.
When I wrote my little review of ‘Blackout’, I should explain that I had no conception of Ms. Willis’ stature and success in the SF/F genre. Holy cow! Ten Hugo Awards, seven Nebula Awards, (which INCLUDES the award for ‘Blackout/All Clear’), and a flotilla of nominations besides. So why, I ask myself, does this monumental and highly regarded dyptych still leave me unimpressed, and, frankly, a bit confused?
I think it comes down to this: that some “genre writing” (as one author recently referred to a conglomerate of SF/F/YA books) doesn’t necessarilly require nor focus on STORY as its main staple for the reader, or maybe a tight, well-crafted story. The Aristotelian model of beginning, middle, end, with lovely, crisp story-arcs, that sail and rebound like the path of a tennis ball in a spirited volley; THAT is what I was left craving as I read through the 1000+ pages of Willis’ masterpiece. This book hinges much more on setting, atmosphere, the ephemera of bric-a-brac, costuming, the tinge of colors borrowed from other literature of the time and place of which she is writing. It IS brilliant, and wonderful in its way, and necessitates a wholly different approach to the reading of it to extract and enjoy its savor.
Alas, it requires work and patience.
Two other comparisons come to mind: these books flow and feel a bit like quest-gaming. Reading them reminds me of my hours spent in the world of Zelda-Twilight Princess. There’s such sumptuous detail, and a grinding journey through a hazardous world. The other comparison I would make is that of listening to complex music. You cannot breeze through a 40 minute sax improv by John Coltrane, and you cannot breeze through ‘Blackout/All Clear’, but you would do very well to devote the energy and attention to either.
The fault in my earlier take is one of learning to appreciate a different kind of reading. I will try to get better at it, for it does have its rewards…
In the wake of reading the most recent Thursday Next novel, ‘One of Our Thursdays is Missing’, I found myself reaching for an earlier volume,’First Among Sequels’ and re-reading it, in doing so, I discovered that ‘One of our Thursdays…’ is actually a kind of re-boot of ‘First Among Sequels'(TN-5).
This is interesting, because I hadn’t realized that the practice was becoming commonplace, or could work so well, but I’ve noted it in the work of at least one other writer in my reading of late (John Scalzi’s ‘Zoe’s Tale’, as a re-working and re-release of ‘The Last Colony’).
And in this case, Fforde hasn’t actually re-written TN-5, but he HAS appropriated a lion’s share of the groundwork of the earlier novel, and re-imagined it afresh. In ‘One of Our Thursdays…’ he provided yet another construction of his BookWorld, with vast interconnected islands of the genres, transit between them in flying taxis, the mechanics of life for its populace, to include the sundries of life as a book character, the politics of the place, and the special role of his heroine, Thursday, in stabilizing it all.
The real Thursday Next is, as you probably know, an Outlander; not of the BookWorld, but deeply concerned with safeguarding it. Then there are the various iterations of the “written” Thursday Next. Both of these novels hinge deeply on the relationship and interaction of the real Thursday and her written representations.
All of this material is the mortar and brickwork of the newest TN novel. Re-visiting ‘First Among Sequels’ has made that much clear to me. That said, I’m also delighted to report that the additional work does no harm to the earlier book, and magically avoids feeling stale or repetitious in the new one. The whole TN canon is a wonder of imaginative, playful, literary delights. My hope is that Fforde tries this approach again.
The “western” in Amercan cinema was never one of my favorite genres in my youth. My father had a taste for “cowboy shows” on television back then, and I never much cared for them. I think the stylization and falseness of the archetypical towns, “good guys”, indians, crooks, cavalry, et al, just added up in my kid’s mind to so much phony dreck.
Since then, there have been a number of western films that have won me over: ‘McCabe & Mrs. Miller’ comes to mind, along with ‘Silverado’, and ‘Jeremiah Johnson’. To those, I can now emphatically add the Coen brothers’ ‘True Grit’. It has a clarity and honesty throughout that just never lapses. The settings, costuming, language, action, story and music are convincing and with a “rightness” that is nearly flawless.
I was surprised to read on wikipedia that it was filmed, edited and brought to market in very short order, with a shooting schedule that started in March of 2010, in time for a “Christmas” release on December 22 that same year. The notes in wikipedia, however, don’t report exactly when set construction or any of the other heavy lifting of other pre-production began. The project was rumored as early as February, 2008.
My admiration for the flick derives almost entirely from the authenticity of these western characters, and, too, how clearly this is a western story told from a young woman’s perspective, or, more accurately, a precocious child pressed into early adulthood through unfortunate circumstances. It is Mattie Ross’ “true grit” which drives the story, not the force of Marshal Rooster Cogburn’s fading “grit”, or the staunch honor of the Texas ranger, LaBoeuf. Mattie is beautifully played by newcomer Hailee Steinfeld, Cogburn by Jeff Bridges, and LaBoeuf by Matt Damon. While Steinfeld and Bridges both scored Academy nominations (Best Actor and Best Supporting Actress), it was Matt Damon who better deserved an honor for transforming himself within his role. He was not recognizably himself, and became the spit and image of the rough but knightly Ranger LaBoeuf.
If an honest “western” is your thing, and you missed this one, or if you, like me, cannot let one of the Coen Bros. films pass you by, be sure to see this one when you can. The dvd/blu-ray disc was released on June 7th. And if you know of other western films you think I might like, please put it in a comment to me below, and I’ll give it a try. Thanks!
Anything for Billy by Larry McMurtry
