William Stobb

Lights up on interrogation room, dim lighting except spotlight on SUSPECT   SUSPECT is visibly afraid DETECTIVE ONE is slick and intimidating DETECTIVE TWO lurks in the background SUSPECT It was just cheese!   I swear to God!       DET. ONE Just cheese, huh?   Well then how do you explain this ?! DETECTIVE ONE reaches across the table and grabs SUSPECT’s shirt, revealing a big blobby white stain.                         SUSPECT All right.   All right.   It was squeeze cheese.                         DET. ONE Liar!  [sniffs stain]  Think I don't know what yogurt smells like?  DETECTIVE ONE begins to throttle SUSPECT.            ...

In Basin and Range , John McPhee explains that, for the most part, we're capable of living with five generations in our minds--our own, two before us and two in the future.  Meanwhile, the Earth is telling us a story in hundreds of millions of years.  "Numbers do not seem to work well with regard to deep time.  Any number above a couple thousand years--fifty thousand, fifty million--will... awe the imagination to the point of paralysis." Applying the Bible story of creation's seven days to the geological evidence of 4.5 billion years, McPhee concludes that Jesus appeared at one fourth of a second before midnight on Saturday, the seventh day.  McPhee quotes David Brower, founder of Friends of the Earth and the Sierra Club: "at one fortieth of a second before midnight, the Industrial Revolution began.  We are surrounded with people who think that what we have been doing in that one fortieth of  second can go on indefinitely.  They are considered n...

Mojo magazine recently celebrated the 25th Anniversary of The Smiths' fabulous album, The Queen is Dead .  The issue features a calendar of the Smiths' Meat is Murder tours, during which the songs for Queen were written and recorded.  In an insightful essay, Jon Savage explores the album's political / cultural significance.  His take is really interesting, and illustrates the continuing relevance of the album: when the cultural mainstream is uptight and dangerously self-interested, how does one become a true individual?  It's a great issue, and it's satisfying for someone like me (I had the huge Queen is Dead poster on the wall in my dorm room, circa 1990) to see music that meant a lot to me continue to be appreciated.  But that's not why I'm writing this post.  Two moments in the magazine's spread really struck me.  One was Smiths fan Bernard Butler's breathless description of Johnny Marr, Smiths guitarist, during a performance of "Bigm...

Are we dumber?  It's a question we're asking ourselves all the time now.  I encountered the query most recently in an episode of Californication , when struggling novelist Hank Moody (David Duchovny) laments the deterioration of the English language represented by such acronyms as LOL, BRB and even BJ.  I'm not a big fan of language policing, and I tend not to worry about the surface manifestations of linguistic evolution.  But the episode got me thinking about the larger question, again: despite the various acoutrements of "developed" economies, are we actually less advanced than previous generations?  Are "advancements" really regressions?  Are we dumber? Midwestern Americans of my generation arrived just a little too late to have much say in this debate.  By the time we matured, we were reacting.  Corporate farming had overtaken the family farm ideal.  Our parents had moved into town, gotten ...

As Associate Editor of the best literary magazine out there, Conduit , I am frequently met at my front door by a box of poetry and fiction submissions.  It is my job to fairly ruthlessly cut a box of a hundred or so submissions down to the best ten or twenty, and then pass them up the editorial chain of command.  This process is meaningful to me in myriad ways, and I may, on occasion, use this blog as a space to work through observations that arise out of editing for Conduit .   Last week, I worked through a box of submisisons in four work sessions--reading about 25 submissions in each two-to-three-hour sitting.  I try to work quickly but carefully, to remain open to my own interests as I work, and to allow myself to pursue tangential energies as they arise.  For example, I often find people's cover letters interesting, and I might take a moment to look up the website of a writer w...

Charlie Sheen is "winning."  So too is Republican strategist Frank Luntz, whose new book about successfully packaging ideas in persuasive language is called Win .  Luntz is perhaps most famous for having engineered the phrase "death taxes" to raise republican ire over previously benign "estate taxes."  Well... maybe "climate change" instead of "global warming" is more famous.  In any case, Luntz is well known for his ability to frame concepts in inflammatory or understated ways, usually to the advantage of right-wing constituencies. I first learned about Luntz through Frontline 's great episode "The Persuaders."  In that program, we see how Luntz uses focus groups and technology to determine which language resonates most with people.  His methods were fascinating, and there's no arguing with the success of his concepts.  Today, Luntz was a guest on NPR's Talk of the Nation , and I found his analyses both insight...

Running errands around town the other day, I realized how voyeuristic my interest in all the North African / Middle Eastern unrest is.  I had been listening to more news than usual, just wanting to keep up on the latest from Egypt and now Libya.  The Libyan situation was so tense at the moment that Minnesota Public Radio had given its broadcast over to the BBC, which was reporting exclusively on Libya for that full hour.  As I listened, I realized that I was enjoying the coverage, much as I might enjoy a documentary.  I recalled that very morning, when I had said to my daughter "the world is really interesting right now," and we had discussed a number of news stories that had captivated our attention.  Then, even while I was listening and reflecting on my own distance from the events, I realized that I was tracking another thought at the same time: I'd been all over town that day, and had noticed for the first time that a strange number of spas have op...