Yeah, I Could Live Here...

                                        Beautiful emptiness, just east of Lewistown, Montana
                                (Yeah, I'm shamelessly copying your header pic, Eight More Miles...)

The weather station just to our west hit a record high of 94 degrees yesterday, while just to our east dust storms are shutting down interstates and causing major wrecks. Deaths in Oklahoma from skeeter-borne West Nile virus just hit an all-time high. We're still stuck in that high-achieving "exceptional drought" category. The grass is crunchy. So are the ponds. Duck season won't start until this weekend, for all the good it'll do. Quail season doesn't start until November 10th, if there are any quail left.

Meanwhile, the lucky bastards in Montana have been bird hunting since the first of September. Yeah, I think I could live there, long winters be damned.  How hard could it be, right?

What Would You Do With A $3.7 Million Advance?

Book publishing isn't dead. As long as guys like Steve Bodio and Tom McIntyre (via Bodio) can continue to get their work published, there's hope.

Or maybe there's not, at least for some publishers.

From Salon

I like Lena Dunham. But her $3.7 million book deal with Random House, after a bidding war involving all of the major publishers, is emblematic of what is wrong with corporate publishing today. My first publishing job, in 1987, was at Random House. Bennett Cerf’s publishing company, the home of Faulkner, Capote and Dr. Seuss, is now only one of a handful of “major” publishers, by which I mean publishers who are corporate, bottom-line-driven, freighted with massive overhead and generally reactionary. The Dunham deal smacks of a search for the “Barton Fink” touch, as in get me the next “Bossypants” — stat. I realize that Dunham is an easy target — only 26, from an artsy New York family, the creator, star and director of her own HBO show. And there is an element of sexism in the backlash — a young, strong, independent female scores a big deal — but I have no problem with her agent, Kim Witherspoon, shaking down the dinosaurs on her client’s behalf. What the market will bear. I imagine Dunham’s book will kick ass, yet it will also get its critical ass handed to itself because of the advance. If Random House is already hucking it as the next Tina Fey meets Nora Ephron meets David Sedaris (no pressure, Lena), then the critics will be expecting Fey meets Ephron meets Sedaris.

Needless to say, I don't (or at least didn't, prior to reading about her book deal) know who the hell Lena Dunham is. I love both Tina Fey and David Sedaris, so I guess Lena Dunham is some new wunderkind in that mold, only younger?

I don't watch her HBO show (mainly because I don't have HBO). I'm assuming it's about a group of smart, funny, good-looking, fashionable, affluent, artsy, slightly cynical, slightly neurotic (but in an endearing Woody Allen kind of way) New York-based twentysomethings trying to figure out their crazy, complicated lives while having more fun and engaging in more great sex than you or I ever will.

Because, you know, we've just never had a show like that before. I'm sure this one's different. It's probably one of those "voice of a generation" shows that come along only about, say, a thousand or so times every generation...

At any rate, sour grapes aside, the rest of the Salon story is interesting, and goes on to postulate what some publishers could have done with that $3.7 million if they had had it to spread around and perhaps roll the literary dice with some unknown authors. Which I'm assuming is what publishers actually used to do.

The more I read about deals like this, the more I come to believe (and the article points this out) that small publishing companies and presses are the future, and that the Random Houses of the world are like huge, buoyant turds slowly circling the low-flow toilet. It's gonna take a few revolutions around the bowl, but they're assuredly headed for the septic tank.

But it's their money, and if they want to gamble it on such things, more power to 'em. As for me, I will buy Steve's new book and I will buy Tom McIntyre's new book. But I won't be buying Lena Dunham's new book. Mainly because it's going to be an advice book for young women, and I'm a fat, unhip, 41-year-old man. And, well, that would just be kinda creepy, don't you think?

And Miles To Go Before I...Blog?

 It seems I've gone a few more miles off the publishing schedule than I had originally anticipated. Blame those damn lovely, dark and deep woods of the mind. That happens sometimes at the nexus of creativity (or lack thereof), motivation (or lack thereof), laziness (no lack thereof), despair (a bit of), and yes, discontent (again, no lack thereof).

 For whatever reason(s), I just have not been able to muster the interest to write for pleasure or whimsy these past few months. It's a cyclical thing that I suspect afflicts many writers who must juggle (and differentiate between) work writing and pleasure writing. Sometimes the former affects the latter to the latter's (and ultimately the former's) detriment. If that makes sense.

As a friend of mine recently put it, "For the past six months or so it feels like I've been at about 80 percent." When you're already working on the margins, creatively speaking, that missing 20 percent makes a difference. What's to blame? Who knows, so I'll blame sunspot activity and too much aspartame. From now on it's nothing but sunscreen and Throwback Pepsi for this kid.

Hopefully I'll start finding a muse, and if that bitch doesn't show maybe I can find some inspiration and creative solace in the fact that summer's gone, fall's here and I've already had some great hunts both close to home and far, far from it. And if I can't find something to mine from that, I might as well go work in public relations...(I kid, I kid, all my PR/marketing friends...)

I'm Still Here. Really...

Just taking a little time off trying to decide if I want to continue writing for a (tenuous) living, or double my income by embarking on an exciting new career in the quick service food industry. I hear there's a job opening making children all over the world fat and happy.

Or maybe I'll just wait and decide after the hunting seasons are over. September and all that it represents is almost here (thank you, planetary orbit!) and perhaps the world will look a bit brighter from behind a shotgun and a dog.  

Signs Of The Times...

Tough times for the written word these days, at least the printed written word. First comes news that the cherished elementary school institution Weekly Reader is no more...

 From the New York Times... 

The current-events magazine Weekly Reader, a classroom fixture since 1928, will not be returning from summer vacation, its new owner, Scholastic, confirmed this week.
Instead, Scholastic will fold the publication into its own weekly magazine, Scholastic News; the first issues will be co-branded with both names, Kyle Good, a spokeswoman for Scholastic, wrote in an e-mail...
...Weekly Reader for generations has been summarizing current events, tailored to the specific grade level of its student readers. Depending on how you view it, the effort could be seen as talking down to students, or as holding their hands as they are introduced to the complexities of the adult world they soon will be joining.
“It was Andy Griffith-ish — a safe thing, no advertising, no selling, just about teaching kids to read, teaching kids about the world,” said Mia Toschi, who was senior managing editor at Weekly Reader from 2003 to 2008. “A lot of teachers used it on Friday afternoon; just a wonderful end of the week.”
The magazine is perhaps best known for its presidential poll of students, which proved uncannily accurate — since it began with Dwight Eisenhower vs. Adlai Stevenson in 1956, it was wrong only once, in 1992, when it predicted that President George H.W. Bush would defeat Bill Clinton (the poll did not include Ross Perot). The 14th poll predicted a victory by Barack Obama.

I, like pretty much everyone else, grew up with Weekly Reader. My youngest son, apparently, will not. Interestingly enough, a few months ago, as I was rooting around in the depths of our piano, trying to find the source of an irritating vibration, I happened to discover two old Weekly Readers from the late 50s that had apparently slipped down there at some point in the distant past when my mother was taking childhood piano lessons.

Then, I saw today where another venerable literary institution - this one for grown-ups - is also going four legs to the sky.

From this story on jimromenesko.com

Milwaukee-based Kalmbach Publishing is looking for someone to buy The Writer magazine, which goes on hiatus after the October 2012 issue rolls off Kalmbach’s presses.
“Our hope is that The Writer will re-emerge under the careful stewardship of a new owner,” says a letter to contributors. 
The Writer was founded 125 years ago and, notes Media Industry Newsletter, has “hosted some of the most illustrious talents and bestselling authors in American letters: Somerset Maugham, Ray Bradbury, Sinclair Lewis, John Updike, Joyce Carol Oates and Stephen King, among them.”

I used to read The Writer religiously back when I was younger and, well, wanted to be a writer. Now that I am one, I blame The Writer for my more-or-less permanent state of poverty, angst, and career uncertainty. Still, I'm sad to see it go.

And finally, a prediction that yet another venerable (which these days is apparently code for "doomed") publication may cease print publication and go all digital...

From this story on poynter.org

IAC/InterActiveCorp., which controls Newsweek, plans to announce a digital plan for the magazine this fall, though it’s unclear how that will affect the print publication.
Bloomberg reporter Edmund Lee, who listened to IAC/InterActiveCorp’s earning call, tweeted, “Barry Diller says there will be a plan in place later this year to take Newsweek digital only.” He tweeted later that he had confirmed this with a public relations representative.
All Things D’s Peter Kafka has a different take, saying his understanding is that Diller is “thinking about going Web-only with Newsweek, but hasn’t committed to it.” Kafka says he confirmed that understanding with a public relations rep.

Geez, Newsweek, too? I can't even begin to recall how many current-events assignments I plagiarized wrote back in junior high and high school from the pages of Newsweek. I guess today's kids can just cut-and-paste from their smartphones?

What's next? Going to the doctor's office and not finding a copy of Highlights For Children? Then I'll know the end is truly nigh...

Cutthroat Slam Quest #2: Green With Envy

I have no idea why I want to catch all 14 subspecies of our native cutthroat trout. It's not like I'm a great flyfisherman. I'm not. I don't live in the heart of cutthroat country, I live in Oklahoma, where a cutthroat is what happens when you come between a redneck and his beer.

Hell, I don't even know my trout very well. Three years ago I (and I'm not making this up) probably couldn't have told you the difference between a cutthroat - any cutthroat -  and a brown. I knew what a rainbow looked like, and that was about it.  Again, please refer to my geographical location and distinctly warmwater redneck upbringing if you find that hard to believe.

But about three years ago, I started reading about our native cutthroat trout species, the tragic arc of their story, which is so goddamned familiar to anyone concerned with our fast-disappearing native species, and what can I say? The doomed little bastards drew me in. The cutthroat is, in so many ways, the lesser prairie chicken with gills, and with only slightly better long-term prospects.

So two years ago I decided that in order to raise public awareness of the cutthroat's plight I would buy myself a three-weight rod I couldn't cast for shit, a bunch of flies I couldn't identify, and boldly announce to the world that I was setting out on a quest to catch every subspecies of cutthroat trout in North America.

OK, so maybe it didn't go down quite like that. In truth, one day a couple years back, in response to a Field & Stream blog I had written, I got - out of the blue -  an invite to go fishing for Rio Grande cutthroats from a then-unknown-to-me Greg McReynolds, who worked (and still does) for Trout Unlimited.

So we met up in southern Colorado, spent a few days exploring and fishing, and Greg put me on my first-ever cutthroat. It was, I have to say, something of a Harry Middleton moment for me, holding that fish and everything it represents, in my hands.

That's when I decided that, as far as bucket lists go, that you could do a helluva lot worse than trying to catch all the various cutthroat subspecies before you die. At the very least it beats the living shit out of golf, baseball or any of those other stupid "Fifty Ego-Driven, Self-Indulgent Things For the One Percent To Wank Off To Before Passing Their Offshore Tax Shelters On To Their Children" books that are so depressingly prevalent these days.

So I decided that I would. Try, anyway. I have no specific timeline to this quest. I am, quite frankly, too poor to. I have neither the time nor the money to actively pursue each individual subspecies. Rather, I just have to sort of catch them as catch can, so to speak, which means I may very well kick off before actually holding this particular Grail in my hands. But that's OK. It's the journey, not the destination, right?

Which brings me to the fish in the picture. As luck would have it, my wife's family has a long-standing tradition of spending a week in Estes Park every summer. As luck would have it, I'm now a member of the family, which means that, for better or for worse, I spend a week in Estes Park each summer. As luck would have it, one of the rarest of the cutthroat subspecies, the greenback cutthroat, resides within the high-altitude confines of Rocky Mountain National Park, which, as luck would have it, sits right smack next to Estes Park.

But as my luck would have it, I have whiffed in spectacular fashion the past two years trying to catch one of the elusive little bastards. This is quite an accomplishment, because cutthroats are not (or at least so I've read) a particularly sophisticated fish to catch. Which makes sense, because I'm not a particularly sophisticated angler. Nevertheless, the last time we were up there I caught browns. I caught brook trout. I caught rainbows. Lots of them. But I caught no greenbacks.

So this summer I revamped my strategy, and decided that if I wanted a greenback I was going to have to earn it by leaving the easy fish far below and hiking up to where the greenbacks - and greenbacks only - reside.

And whaddya know, all it took was six miles of hiking in, a couple thousand feet of elevation, a dozen lost flies, an entire dictionary of new curse words and the humiliation of having an oxygen-bottle toting grandmother, a group of schoolchildren and some dude in jorts, high tops and an Iron Maiden concert t-shirt with the sleeves cut off pass my wheezing, flatland ass on the trail up the mountain.

But when it finally happened, when I finally slid that first jewel-like trout into the shallow water at my feet to take a quick photograph before release, it was all worth it. That wasn't just a fish lying there glinting in the sun, it was a little bit of American history, and a living, breathing cautionary tale about why we should never stop giving a shit about such fragile treasures. What a beautiful thing, huh? (The second pic is actually a different fish...)

Been A Little Slow Around Here...

                                       With apologies to Thomas McGuane. I suck at Photoshop...

Yeah, I took a month or so off from writing the blog. Just felt like I needed a little break. I chalk it up to not being much of a summer person. In fact, I think summer pretty much sucks, at least in Oklahoma, and I spend most every summer doing pretty much nothing while waiting around for fall to get here. That includes writing for pleasure. If you don't have anything to say, there's not much point in pressing the issue, right? Not like I have much to say in the first place, but the point holds...

At any rate, despite my dislike of summer, I have been busy with a number of activities during my literary absence, including a much-needed getaway to New Orleans with the wife, a much-needed week-long respite from the heat in Estes Park, Colorado, and some much-needed time sitting around drinking lots of much-needed beer.

I stripped and refinished our kitchen table, which looks pretty damn good, stripped and refinished a gunstock, which doesn't, and built a semi-permanent pigeon coop, which despite looking like it was constructed by a blind man, does manage to hold pigeons. That's all someone with my skills can ask for.

Thanks to the intense heat and drought we've been enduring, I have done very little in the way of dog training, which is good, because the dogs seem to want to do very little in the way of anything but lie listlessly in the shade and pant. Can't say as I blame them.

But September is creeping up on us, and though it can be (and most always is) every bit as brutal as August, that's when I finally shake off the summer blahs. September, despite what the thermometer often says, is fall. And I've got a surprisingly busy September planned. There is, of course, the Sept. 1 dove opener. I  recently learned that I got drawn out on an Oklahoma panhandle antelope hunt, so I'll be cluelessly traipsing about Cimarron County, Oklahoma the week of the 10th trying to shoot my first pronghornless pronghorn (doe permit). Then I'll be in Montana the last two weeks of the month on the one big bird-hunting trip I have planned this year. After that it's back to a more normal schedule for me, which is code for I can't afford to do anything else.

Until then, however, I've got another month (I'm hoping that's all) of heat-induced hopelessness to endure. And I'm not the only one. Seems to be a slow time for a lot of bloggers wilting under the heat. I have a feeling that catastrophic worldwide climate change is going to be a real bitch not just for birds, trout, global food supplies and the future of the human race, but self-indulgent creativity, too...

Further Justification For A Wall Tent...

I like wall tents. Always have. The one in the picture is, alas, not mine. It's Greg McReynolds' wall tent, looking right at home on the Cimarron National Grasslands in southwest Kansas a couple years ago. It slept three hunters and their dogs very comfortably, and we had the added bonus of being able to sit around a fire, eat dinner and drink beer under the stars, whereas the night before, exhausted after our first day of hunting and with the sun going down and camp not set up, we just said screw it and tumbled into a cheap, sketchy, astoundingly nasty hotel room in nearby Elkhart. Big mistake.

I cannot imagine, nay, I shudder to think what the researchers in this study would have found in our room that night...

From this story on abcnews.com

Picking up the remote control in a hotel room may also mean picking up fecal matter, a new study found. Researchers from the University of Houston swabbed 19 hotel room hideouts, from door handles to headboards, and found the fecal bacterium E. coli hiding on 81 percent of the surfaces, including the remote control, the telephone and the bedside lamp.

“Currently, housekeeping practices vary across brands and properties with little or no standardization industry wide,” Katie Kirsch, an undergraduate student at the University of Houston and author of the study presented at the General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology, said in a statement. 

This study “could aid hotels in adopting a proactive approach for reducing potential hazards … and provide a basis for the development of more effective and efficient housekeeping practices.”

Or, it could aid me in finally getting off my ass and buying a wall tent of my own so I don't have to spend any more terrified, disgusting nights paying for the privilege of sleeping in a petri dish...

Of Summer Sloth, the Fourth Estate and Viral(ity).

First off, apologies for the slow posting schedule the past month. School's out, the family's home and I've been busy with various and sundry "stuff" around the house. The pace will pick up a bit as I get into a summer routine. I've got dogs to train, gunstocks to refinish, fish to catch and vegetables to grow.

And if past summers are any indication, I will more than likely fail miserably at all tasks, instead choosing to sit on the back porch all summer drinking beer and cursing (depending on conditions) either the heat, the wind, or the heat and the wind while drunkenly swearing that next year the family will "by gawd be in Montana and out of this miserable frikkin' hellhole!" Or something to that effect.

Second, there was an interesting article on Salon recently that explores something I and every other reporter who's ever schlepped a beat at a small to mid-market daily have realized for years (and I'll bastardize a famous Tip O'Neill quote to give you the nut of it), and that is: all democracy is local.

What does that mean? I'll use a tired old cliche to illustrate the point...If a tree falls in the forest and there's no one around to hear it, does it make a sound? Who gives a shit, right? Well, if a civil liberty or Constitutional right is trampled upon, if a public or elected official violates the public trust for personal gain or for special interests and there's no one around to report it, is it really a violation?

Increasingly, (for a variety of reasons related to the general and terribly depressing state of awareness in this nation) it seems the answer would be no, and apparently no one really gives a shit. Otherwise they'd be paying a helluva lot more attention to the sorry (and getting sorrier by the minute) state of local and state journalism, because that, my friends, is where we get down to the true down-and-dirty nut-cuttin' of democracy.

Every time a minimum-wage beat reporter files a local or state-level open records request, every time they attend a county commission meeting, every time they question an elected official and every story they publish as a result of those questions, they're lubricating the engine of democracy at its most fundamental and important level, and the level that most acutely affects all of us. And it's all going away, very fucking quickly.

And when all the local small-circulation newspapers have folded or turned into weekly shoppers, when all the state newspapers have been downsized into toothless irrelevance? Well hell, at least we'll still have Facebook, right?

And on a completely, utterly, sadly related note, here's a fascinating story on niemanlab.com 
about what makes things go viral on the Internet.

From the story:

In March, I wrote about Gawker’s new quantity-over-quality experiment. Each day, one Gawker staffer was tasked with pageview-chasing duty, a quest to post enough cat videos, Miley Cyrus pics, and local news ephemera to keep the clicks coming en masse. That staffer’s work would free up others to work on longer, more involved pieces. Pageview duty rotated, because — who could stare too long into the Internet’s bright raw id and not go blind?
Neetzan Zimmerman, apparently. Editor A.J. Daulerio hired him two months ago to focus exclusively on viral content. Zimmerman’s title at Gawker is Editor, The Internet. He is assigned to cover the Internet.
This machine-like person has generated more than 300 bylines for Gawker since he started on April 9. These are not lengthy tomes, usually; nearly every post is just a funny photo or video, with body text barely longer than a caption. The average word count of a sampling of his recent stories is about 200.
Zimmerman sits comfortably atop Gawker’s leaderboard, garnering two to five times more pageviews than his highest-performing colleagues. Zimmerman is so prolific, his posts so magnetic, that Daulerio has now relieved all 10 full-time Gawker staffers of their pageview chores.

I just pasted the first few grafs, but really, the whole story is well worth a read. It is truly fascinating, and as someone who, for the past four years has derived a portion of my income from doing for F&S pretty much exactly what Zimmerman does for Gawker (and at about the same level of substance and gravitas, I might add...) it gives some insight into the mechanics of online information dissemination, as well as confirming my basic suspicion that most of us are happily, blissfully pissing our lives away watching other people being stupid.  Myself included, of course...

Well, I guess it's a helluva lot easier than reading a newspaper, right?

Another Great One Gone...

I've been reading the news this morning of Ray Bradbury's passing. Longtime readers of the blog (all three of you) know that Bradbury has long been one of my favorite authors, and although death is an inevitability for all of us (and even more so when you're 91) it still comes as a surprise when the moment arrives for such a longtime literary icon.

It's hard to peg any one of Bradbury's works as a definitive favorite. Obviously he's best-known for Fahrenheit 451, but Bradbury's total body of work is huge. Few could write a short story like Bradbury, so for me, his collections of short stories are certainly up there, as is The Martian Chronicles, Dandelion Wine and Something Wicked This Way Comes.

Here's a link to the New York Times obit and here are a few links to my Bradbury-themed blog posts. The first one is comedian Rachel Bloom's screamingly funny but oh-so-not-safe-for-work tribute ,next is a blog I did on Fahrenheit 451 and e-books and the last is a rather dyspeptic rant I banged out in the wake of a particularly irritating Halloween experience last year (I still rather like that one, and still stand by everything I wrote...)

Bradbury was one of the last of the great fiction/fantasy writers to emerge from the mid-20th Century Golden Age of magazine writing. Hell, he may have been the very last. Off the top of my head I can't think of any others that are still alive, and with the state of publishing, reading, and the general level of intelligence and attention span these days, I rather think we'll not see his kind again, so read 'em if you got 'em. And if you don't got 'em, go find 'em, somewhere in the musty, dusty, forgotten corners of those fast-disappearing used bookshops. Preferably a tattered old sixties-vintage pulp paperback with yellowed pages and early space-age era conceptual cover art. That's the only way to read a Bradbury story.