Environment II by mark andrew york

The Funeral

2009-07-07T17:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-06-06T14:39:00.000-07:00

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!

2009-06-02T19:15:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-28T10:01:00.000-07:00

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

2009-05-23T19:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-26T21:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-15T21:22:00.000-07:00

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

2009-04-08T19:20:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-31T19:57:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-18T17:38:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-17T09:48:00.000-07:00

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

2009-03-09T18:59:00.000-07:00

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.

The Ole Vanity/POD Shuffle

2009-03-06T12:10:00.000-08:00

There's a statistical claim going around the net about the dismal performance, 70 percent, of new novels published every year by so-called traditional publishers not selling more than 500 copies. It's blatantly false.

First, there aren't 195,000 novels published every year as the statement claims.

According to Bowker.com for 2007, There were 50,071 new fiction titles introduced in the U.S. last year, up 17% from 2006, and the number of new titles in the category in 2007 was almost twice what it was as recently as 2002.

What is alarming is this: "While traditional book publishing was basically flat last year, there was a staggering rise in the reported number of “On Demand” and short-run books to 134,773, pushing the grand total for projected 2007 U.S. book output to 411,422 books. To maintain the continuity of statistics, Bowker is excluding this output from its traditional reporting and has begun tracking the On Demand industry segment separately."

Yeah Boy, Howdy. The claim made on these Web sites is bogus and seems to originate from a post by an author, sans source at this New Zealand Web siteHow many books do first-time authors sell? Over 195,000 new novels are published by traditional publishers in the U.S. every year. Of those, 70% sell fewer than 500 copies. Yikes..

Yikes indeed. Only 84 titles from iUniverse, now a part of Authorhouse sell 500 copies. This is a marriage of that pitiful and predictable fact and total books sold in 2005. Lies. Damned lies. And statistics.

Willful Disgrace

2009-02-23T09:22:00.000-08:00

George Will has lied through the years as it has suited his personal biases, as Media Matters points out.

"Washington Post can hide behind multi-layer processes all it wants, but as long as it publishes Will, it will continue to misinform its readers. The Post doesn't need to give Will a better fact-checker; it -- along with the rest of the media elite -- should instead give him a good, thorough shunning."

Will has no expertise on science or banking or anything except political history. One thing is certain: lies sell papers. And wars.

Send him over to The Washington Times where he belongs.

Willfull Ignorance Part ....?

2009-02-18T09:00:00.000-08:00

There's been so many it's hard to know, but George Will continues to spout lies about global warming. Are conservatives just blind on this or inherently stupid? It has to be deliberate. Then again opinion is opinion and some are worth less. His is one of the latter.

On Darwin

2009-02-14T19:10:00.000-08:00

"But what is astonishing," Olivia Judson writes, "is how much Darwin did know, and how far he saw. His imagination told him, for example, that many female animals have a sense of beauty — that they like to mate with the most beautiful males. For this he was ridiculed. But we know that he was right. Still more impressive: he was not afraid to apply his ideas to humans. He thought that natural selection had operated on us, just as it had on fruit flies and centipedes."

Elementary Watson, as Holmes would say. And the greatest idea of all time.

Here We Go Again

2009-01-26T18:57:00.000-08:00

The latest vanity press mega transition is making the news like some sort of new archeological discovery, since that's how rare these anomalies are.

By 2008 people were reading Still Alice. Not a lot of people, but a few, and those few were liking it. Genova wound up getting an agent after all--and an offer from Simon & Schuster of just over half a million dollars. Borders and Target chose it for their book clubs. Barnes & Noble made it a Discover pick. On Jan. 25, Still Alice will make its debut on the New York Times best-seller list at No. 5.

Yeah well, the real story is missing from this piece and lies between those few liking it...and wound up getting an agent and the half mil. I mean, really.

The best thing about about TIME is their archive is open and online. Come fish with Papa.

Two Writers Talk through the ages

2008-12-30T16:42:00.000-08:00

Some people hear their own inner voices with great clearness. And they live by what they hear. Such people become crazy... or they become legend.
Jim Harrison

Legend: A lie that has attained the dignity of age.
H. L. Mencken

The real Legend of the Fall

2008-12-24T14:33:00.000-08:00

Like most legends this one is purely fictional. The core character,General William Ludlow, never settled in Montana on a ranch near Choteau, had three Bonanzaesque sons who fought in WWI , a wife in Boston and a globetrotting wayward son Tristan played by a younger Brad Pitt so ably. Jim Harrison sure fooled me. I never thought to look until finishing the 1979 novella last night.

Like the great novelist he is, he made it up.

The Future of American Literature

2008-12-20T17:12:00.000-08:00

Above all, I want you to expand your horizons and set sail for something bigger and better than either of the current branches of fiction. I want you to write novels that are larger than anything being written today. I want you to write stories that embrace the best of both worlds. I want you to write stories that are accessible by everyone. Do you want to do something for American fiction? Then write novels that weld the broken pieces back together.
The sage advice of novelist extraordinaire and my friend Richard S. Wheeler. Let the work begin.

Left Livingston part deux

2008-12-16T07:28:00.000-08:00

Since I've received attacks from some folks on the left and right about my recent separation from The Enterprise , allow me to clarify. First,an agent is reading my novel. Second, I have started working on a group biography of the Montana Bloomsbury group, and a full-time reporter job had become increasingly difficult to manage time-wise. I have bigger things going than worrying daily about virtually nonexistent local news in the wake of the election. And as I mentioned before, the economics and advancement opportunities just weren't there, nor would they ever be by my boss's own admission, so like the last four reporters I took it as long as I could and moved on. End of story.

Left Livingston

2008-12-13T10:36:00.000-08:00

It's my duty to announce that I've left The Livingston Enterprise. I won't go into the details, but let's just say there was a management style issue, excessive work expectations, and no raise in salary forthcoming. I couldn't support two houses on the money they paid, so a Solomonesque decision had to be made. I'm grateful for the opportunity. I made some great friends and powerful allies, made real change in the town and county in the way of bridges and roads being repaired as a result of my stories, have great clips to my credits file now, that are linked to the right on this blog, so I'm satisfied. I'll be back summers to fish.

Losing Winter

2008-12-13T10:31:00.000-08:00

Winter easing its grip on Northeast
Temperatures rising 0.8 degrees a decade

The comments from idiots at the end of the article resort to the same failed logic as always. It's a shame reasoned people don't comment more, but the right wing nutcases run roughshod at newspapers Web sites, which they claim to hate.

McGuane in Butte

2008-12-12T20:15:00.000-08:00

This is a nice little clip of Tom McGuane speaking to journalists in Butte, Montana in May. This is the man I came to know this same year. Gracious, funny and as entertaining as they come. He's true Americana. I'm honored to know him.

Erin Prophet publishes memoir of life with 'Guru Ma'

2008-11-29T07:04:00.000-08:00

By Mark A. York
Enterprise Staff Writer

Erin Prophet's long-awaited memoir of her years at CUT in Paradise Valley, "Prophet's Daughter: My Life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet Inside the Church Universal and Triumphant," hit book store shelves recently.
Calling the book an "extraordinary memoir," Publishers Weekly says, "Prophet pulls the curtain back on the highest levels of life inside a cult, documenting her life inside as the daughter of cult leader Elizabeth Clare Prophet, of the Church Universal and Triumphant, from her birth through 1990, when the Church's long-awaited apocalypse failed to materialize."
Prophet writes with empathy and respect for her mother and for the followers of the faith her parents founded, but also with equal alarm at what it had become.
According to Prophet's brother Sean, who was with Erin and his other sisters Moira and Tatiana through much of the years in CUT with their mother, the memoir was 10 years in the making.
"It is to Erin's credit that she did a decade of research, and consulted a wide range of sources both within our family and outside of it," Sean Prophet writes in a reader review at Amazon.com. "Her book is factually unimpeachable when it comes to its representation of the lives of our parents and the church they founded. The story is told against a backdrop of constant crisis, 'divine revelation,' fame and the idolatry of followers."
The book opens in the night of March 14, 1990, when the 18-year old Erin Prophet, now 42, and her young son Mark are entering through a four-foot tunnel into the CUT's 756-person fallout shelter built the year before.
The underground shelter complex, built in a meadow high in the Gallatin Mountain Range alongside Mol Heron Creek, was known as "The Heart."
The CUT had built a multi-million-dollar bunker system designed to protect followers from a nuclear holocaust they believed was imminent on that night in March.
There, in her sleeping quarters, she waited along with the others for impending doom.
Erin Prophet writes of a friendship with a journalist in Livingston she had imaginary conversations with that night in the shelter while she lay in her bunk. He is Scott McMillion, formerly of The Bozeman Chronicle, whom she met a year before while he was writing about the CUT and whom she describes as a "benevolent, disinterested voice of reason, a defender of the right to be human."
The CUT organization had prepared for the worst at the hands of Soviet nuclear warheads and an anarchic aftermath.
"Underneath the floor of the Deep Cor shelter, a gargantuan underground storage warehouse, named for the thick folds of corrugated steel that formed its shell, was a secret twenty-five-foot-long tank filled with fifty AR-15 rifles, the semiautomatic civilian version of the Vietnam era M-16, along with tens of thousands of rounds of ammunition," Prophet writes.
"Stored in the the same tank as the weapons was a horde of coins - more than $5 million in gold and silver, and $25,000 in pennies specially ordered from the Federal Reserve Bank. The coinage was meant to establish a currency 'apres la guerre.' (After the war)
"This tank, whose existence had been concealed even from me, was hidden beneath a special panel topped with a car-carrying trailer filled with Isuzu pickup trucks."
There was enough food stored underground to sustain them for seven months in the shelters, and seven more years when they emerged, Prophet writes.
"Most followers weren't aware of the seven-year scenario," Prophet said in a telephone interview Friday. "They were used to authoritarian power, so most people didn't question those types of directives."
The seven-year provision requirement caused logistical problems for the CUT engineers and incurred great expense, but there was no going back. She had seen the way through the voice of El Morya, one of the ascended masters, Prophet said.
Ascended masters are spirits that guide CUT followers on earth.
CUT sold holdings all over the country and even its warehouses in Livingston, Prophet writes.
But the nuclear holocaust that Elizabeth Prophet, known to followers as Guru Ma, predicted, never came to pass and members emerged from the shelter the next day disillusioned and for many, financially broken.
"We followers participated in and even reinforced my mother's prophecies," Erin Prophet attests in the book's preface. "Our faith in her bolstered her faith in herself - and her need to give ever-more precise answers."
"I began to have serious doubts in 1990," she said. "But I hoped we could reform because I thought there was a lot of good in it."
In the wake of the shelter phase, Prophet said, "I think reform efforts were made by my mother, but (CUT) returned to authoritarian rule. The reforms didn't go as far as I thought they should.
"I did begin to consciously moderate her decisions and was successful in some areas, such as the code of conduct was relaxed and some matters of behavior were left to individual conscience."
Of faith, she said, "I came to believe that faith should not be a factor in whether someone can participate in a religious experience.
"The way a group is structured is a very important factor in the behavior of its members."
She added, "I'm more tolerant toward religious beliefs and experiences than my brother. We both like to see more education on religious history of how religion evolved over time. Sean and I would agree on that.
"I wanted to write a book that told the truth of what we were really like. There was a lot of stereotyping. I couldn't make people understand what we were like back then. At the same time, we were doing things that were strange."
Erin said she visits her mother, who is suffering from Alzheimer's disease, in Bozeman from time to time.
"Her illness is continuing its progression," she said. "It's difficult to watch."
Erin Prophet works as a project manager for a hospital in Boston, the city where her mother first met her father, Mark Prophet, decades earlier.
"Sometimes, I imagine her racing down Commonwealth Avenue for that fateful meeting with the messenger Mark Prophet. I pull her aside and beg her to stop," she writes, warning her mother of the dangers of infallibility that lie ahead and leading her down another path.
"In reality," she writes, "she would have brushed me aside and continued toward her destiny, believing in the power of her intentions."
Erin Prophet will be in in Montana Dec. 14 signing books at Fact & Fiction in Missoula. She said she will be in Bozeman or Livingston near that time but did not have a firm date or place yet.
"Prophet's Daughter: My life with Elizabeth Clare Prophet, Inside The Church Universal and Triumphant" (The Lyons Press, $24.95)accomplishes with precision and clarity what its author intended.