The Funeral

Just happened to be on my vector control beat here in Burbank. I took it in to start the day. Fans gathered at the park across the LA River, which affords a ringside seat to Forest Lawn. Forest Lawn Drive was closed.

Flim Flam WSJ

They keep at it over at The Wingerville Journal.

My response on the forum page.

"poster child for how to lie with statistics"

Doesn't this title belong to Bjorn Lomborg? It still does. The logical fallacies in play here are evident and not on the side of the so-called true believers of Anthropogenic global climate change. As long as true deniers don't connect random weather events, and their disastrous results, to a long term trend of a warmer climate that is undeniably attributable to emissions then it will all be moot for you. I suspect your heads will be in the sand long after the waters dry up inland and inundate coastal areas worldwide. It may be caused something else? Your job as a critic is to find it. What is your theory?

Salinger Sues Fanficcer!

Salinger calls the new book "a rip-off pure and simple." Gee, ya think?

"The sequel's author, 'J.D. California,' explains that 'Just like the first novel, he leaves, but this time he's not at a prep school, he's at a retirement home in upstate New York. ... It's pretty much like the first book in that he roams around the city, inside himself and his past.'"

The old man still has it in him. Keep out signs posted and shot gun at the ready. Bravo.

Amazon's Bonfire of the Vanities Finale

James King won the Amazon Breakthrough Novel Award yesterday. It was certainly the best novel of the bunch even if I found some of his skill-craft lacking, such as passive constructions and the like, for a man with a recent MFA. But well-deserved nonetheless.

I found the selection process to be corrupted by so-called Vine Voice reviewers who had a vital screening role in a contest in which some members were also contestants. Houston we have a problem. This has an appearance of a conflict of interest. Naturally, Viners don't think so. I'm shocked. My count was four in the semi-final 100, but in the end the fold folded. No amount of gang reviewing of friends excerpts mattered, as a Viner tossed out an an early stage lamented. That can happen when an Amazon editor decides to as can a bad manuscript moved on. Mr. King had only five reader reviews. In the end, Penguin decided who they wanted and why. He's lucky he slipped by. Well done.

Global Warming's First Victims

Are the animals of course. Here, grizzly expert Doug Peacock makes the case for the Yellowstone grizzlies, whose food source, the whitebark pine has succumbed to beetle kill in a vast way, due to warm winters for just seven years. It's a typical house of cards, with one piece falling and others in a textbook domino event.

I had lunch with Doug and his wife Andrea last October in Livingston, a month before I was run out of town by the Evil Editor. Peacock was a good friend of Ed Abbey and the prototype for Abbey's protagonist, George Washington Hayduke in The Monkey Wrench Gang. For me it was meeting a legend, an introduction arranged thanks to ousted Park County Commissioner and chair, Dr. Larry Lahren, the man who also introduced me to Tom McGuane in Missoula at the Montana Book Festival, as "The man who ruined my political career,'Bless him!'" It's a tribute to my journalistic skills and Lahren's great character, that he didn't consider me an enemy. I'll always remember what he did for me.

The bears need to be protected again under the ESA. There aren't that many of them left and the curious matter of most native Montanans being afraid of the bears and wolves and bison be damned. The sad fact is outside of the liberal enclave of Hollywood insiders clustered at Deep Creek in the spectacular Paradise Valley south of Livingston, where the Peacocks live, most regular rancher folks hate wildlife, especially if they can't kill it, eat it, or sell it to tourists. It's a real problem in rural America. Saving wildlife isn't a priority with heartland types.

LA Times Festival of Books

Another excellent time today at four fiction panels.The first described here. Dark humor abounded with novelist and screenwriter Jerry Stahl playing everyone and everything as his straight man on two panels. Good stuff.

McGuane on Hunting

Wall Street Journal Sports

An excellent essay as only Tom McGuane could live and write. I know how honored I was when he invited me to the ranch in McLeod, Montana. I pulled in one Sunday afternoon in the fall on my way to fish the West Boulder River, upstream of Michael Keaton, Tom M., Tom Brokaw and Walter Kirn. I drove through his open gate down into the ranch. His pack of dogs greeted me en masse. I parked and went up to the old log ranch house escorted by the dogs and knocked on the door.

The window to my right framed the bald head of a familiar music figure, and quite a good novelist in his own right. Tom came to the door and we exchanged pleasantries. His brother in law blew in from Alabama, he said. I glanced at the SUV with Bama plates in the driveway. We talked about our visit in Missoula two weeks prior at the book festival where he spoke and we met formally after I interviewed him for a story in the local paper where I worked.

What are you up to today?" he said.

Oh, fishing the river."

He looked wistful. "Bad timing today for that."

"It's okay," I said. "We'll get to it anytime."

I handed him 50 pages of my novel he'd asked about and let him get back to lunch and visiting with family. Jimmy Buffett.

Jungle Bob Durr RIP

Well I just got ripped for a book review I did in 2005 of my short time neighbor in Chase, Alaska in 1976, ex-professor Bob Durr of Syracuse NY. They weren't very friendly when I tried living "up the tracks" north of Talkeetna. People are animals who guard their territory. This is what the Durr's did.

I can't help but laugh at the fact that you're blogging about this. A whopping thirty years later and that one incident still bothers you. Goodness. While the fact that you've labeled the Durrs as “snobs” and the lake as a "strange place" irritates me to this bad point where if I ever saw you I might poke you in the eye, I am happy to fill you in on some details. Jon and Steve do small time music money making. Playing gigs (which by the way is not "panhandling", Talkeetna summers bring in a lot of tourists a gig at the Fairview pays at least $200 depending on who owns the place), selling CD's to tourists, that kind of stuff. Jon also hunts and sells a lot of skins. Bob has done well as an artist, and his paintings sell for good money across Alaska. And, as you know, he's written novels that have been published and that brought in a fair amount of revenue as well.
As for the past, Bob wasn't exactly the most responsible and Carol most likely handled what little money they had. So it doesn’t surprise me that he didn’t know where the money came from. Also, with hunting and gathering a lot of their food, and no electric bills, rent, or car payments the living expenses were not much. Yes they did have some money in the first cabin when it burnt down, you surely don’t think that they had ALL of their money in a book in the cabin? They had just enough to pack up their stuff and go to NY because his father was dying, I can’t really remember but I’m pretty sure it was his father. There, Carol got a job at a hospital, and their rent was free since Bob’s father owned an apartment that he let them stay in.
One of my favorite things that you wrote about Bob was your question about his life. “Does he intend to just hang out on a biologically dead lake until the end?” It makes me smile because that was in fact what he intended to do and did. Back Lake was everything to Bob, he lived and breathed it, and it meant more to him than just about anything or anyone. Although my grandpa did a lot of horrible things in his life, but the one thing he did right was Back Lake. So it doesn’t surprise me that he shooed you away from his paradise. And when I inherit the lake, I’m sure I’ll do the same.

PS, the outhouse holes are REALLY deep.

As I told this young lady, who is Durr's granddaughter, I call them as I see 'em. It's my recollection of my time there at Chase and a critique of Bob's memoir The Coldman Cometh. Durr passed away onFebruary 25. He did it his way, no question.

Critical Birds of a Feather: Kookaburras

Reached by telephone, Hansen [Dr. James Hansen, NASA Climatologist] sounds annoyed as he says, “There are bigger fish to fry than Freeman Dyson,” who “doesn’t know what he’s talking about.” In an e-mail message, he adds that his own concern about global warming is not based only on models, and that while he respects the “open-mindedness” of Dyson, “if he is going to wander into something with major consequences for humanity and other life on the planet, then he should first do his homework — which he obviously has not done on global warming.”

Global warming is a Rorschach test on the foibles of human reason and of projection. The handful of kooks aren't right. The consensus is. This the outsider is right business is the stuff of novels but rarely is in real life. Dyson and the whackjobs on FOX play the victim when the truth is they're just flat wrong. See Occam's Razor. ex parsimoniae. End of story.

The Bonfire is a Pyre

Not only were many of the 500 quarter-finalists in the ABNA contest hopelessly flawed by bad grammar, wordiness, editing problems and cliched scenarios such as "a writer finds his muse while reeling from rejection letters;" a plethora of prologues, which violated the rules, and now some of the poor rejected masses got a corrected email saying their pitch eliminated their entries after the first one declared they made it into the 2000 and would get reviews soon. Oh Brother, where art thou?

Amazon sent them a $5 gift card for the mistake. Talk about a sad comedy of errors. Pathetic.

Amazon's Bonfire of the Vanities

For the second year in a row Amazon.com sifted through some 10,000 entries for their Breakthough Novel "Award" contest. Amazon is a vanity press in addition to online only bookseller and hopeful these reams of losers will buy their vanity press product at Createspace that entrants were required to join in order to participate.

What slush contests like this do is illustrate that the goal of any novelist is a commercial contract. That's the carrot: $25K and a contract with Penguin. That's a bargain for Penguin. How they get there is another matter. Entrants write a 300-word pitch and an excerpt of 5000 words. Nebulous Amazon editors, whoever the hell they are, determine if the pitch works or not. If it does, those writers go into a group of 2000. Then Vine reviewers, a special group of amateur reader reviewers, randomly chosen, some who are also in the contest, are shipped 40 excerpts to read, also random. Yeah, that's bright. Talk about a crap shoot. So last night they announced the 500 winners and posted the excerpts on the Web site, including the two random reviews that helped determine the book's future in the contest. Final decisions came from the same unnamed group of Amazon employees. Later on an expert judging panel comes into play, but they have no hand in this phase. This is all about amateurs picking amateurs, many of which are perennial contestants with the same books.

As if by magic, many of the losers in last years' affair randomly made it through. Uh huh. Yeah, as if there was no memory of the same books. Consider this gent who made it all the way to the final three last year and then Penguin decided his bizarre entry wasn't fit to publish. It wasn't and still isn't, yet here it is.

Review
I'm confused after reading this excerpt, but since the writing is so clear I have faith that the author will pull this plot together and help it make sense later in the book. I just don't "get" how it all works - how a family gets to try a potential child out, and how the child gets to decide if they live or not. Regardless, it is a highly original concept and I'd be interested to read more.

Yeah. I was confused too when I read the same excerpt, which the author flogged for the last two months on the forums. Just think of all the possible decent manuscripts rejected while "glowing" reviews like this moved the author on? The number of other examples of this flawed decision process are the majority of the 500 winners from what I could tell surfing through. That and Vine reviewers also being dubbed by Vine reviewers. Ahem. Little conflict of interest scarecrow? I said this during the first Gather.com contest. In vanity world, crap floats.

Andy Revkin Drinks the Kool-Aid

NYT science reporter Revkin on a so-called exaggeration of Al Gore."While climate scientists foresee more intense droughts and storms, there is still uncertainty, and significant disagreement, over whether recent patterns can be attributed to global warming."

Right. It's either that or the Tooth Fairy. That's a tough one. There's been a huge flap over this and with the wingnut Glenn Beck vilifying climate modeler and T. Texas professor Dr. Michael Tobis, in a breathtaking case of creative defamation that headlined on Beck's show on FOX. It's bad news personified. And totally false at its core. I'll not repeat it here, but as I told Tobis, this is the skeptic media modus operandi. I'm sorry to see Revkin co-opted in this way in another example false equivalency comparing Al Gore's so-called exaggerations to the falsehoods of George Will.