Put Your Best Photo Forward
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Bill has already tackled the subject of author photos in a very funny post. But I want to chime in, too. As I mentioned in a recent cartoon, my author photo just celebrated it’s tenth birthday. To celebrate the occasion I’d like to suggest that it might be time for writers to start using more authentic author photos. Below on the left for instance is the photo I use on my book jackets and for talks, and more than one of my hosts at those talks have come up and given me a double take (as in “Is this the right guy?”) On the right is closer to what I really look like, a grumpy, constipated 50 year old.
I would suggest that the photo on the left demands the thought bubble: “I am up here on this windswept peak, contemplating nature and looking good doing it, and the west wind, like some majestic blowdrier, is fluffing up my hair just right.” While the writer on the right seems to be thinking “Where’s my fucking coffee?”
Ultimate Glory
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
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Well, Tommy, you asked for it. I know this one is old news to some of you, but here’s one I’m posting for the “Our Best American Essays” category. It is relevant to Bill’s post yesterday since it is very much an essay about my own experience (and memories) in Ultimate Frisbee, and the rest of the players (including some who occasionally comment on this blog) are relegated to bit parts. That said, I have had plenty of Ultimate players, including some who weren’t born when these events occurred, who have told me that this echoes their own ultimate conversions. Anyway, this is what I was doing while Bill played in bands.
ULTIMATE GLORY
A Frisbee Memoir
What you gave me you gave whole
But as for telling
Me how to best use it
You weren’t a genius at that.
Twenties, my soul
Is yours for the asking
You know that, if you ever come back
“To My Twenties” by Kenneth Koch
We labor over our big decision and big dreams, but sometimes it’s the small things that change our lives forever. What could be smaller than this: It is the first week of my freshman year of college and I, looking for a sport to play, am walking down to the boathouse for crew, resigning myself to four years of servitude as a galley slave, when I see a Frisbee flying across the street. The Frisbee, tossed from one long-haired boy to another, looks like freedom to me. Then I notice that there are several Frisbees flying back and forth between a band of young men, all wearing shorts, with cleats hanging over their shoulders. At the time I am quite shy but, uncharacteristically, I cross the street and ask them where they are going. To Ultimate Frisbee practice, it turns out, and I am going with them. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Memory Game
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Bill and friends, August, 1972
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One of the many curious things about the act of writing is the way it can give access to the unconscious mind. And in the hidden parts of consciousness lie not only hobgoblins and neurotic glimmers, but lots of regular stuff, the everyday stuff of memory. The invisible face of your grade school bully is in there, somewhere, and the exact smell of the flowers on vines in your grandma’s Continue reading →
How the Gingrich Stole Christmas
categories: Cocktail Hour
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When I lived in Boulder, Colorado I had a weekly cartoon called The Ballad of Boulder. After Newt won South Carolina I remembered that I had drawn a cartoon, almost twenty years ago, about him. Of course he hasn’t changed a bit……(note picture of tiny Nina in corner.)
Read Local!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I was sitting here musing the other night, and mulling (my friend Peter Campion told me on the same night that mulling refers to the medieval practice of heating an iron rod or poker white-hot and plunging it into your alcoholic beverage—instant boil, and instant vaporization of the alcohol, and so an efficient delivery of your musing fluid), that is, I was sitting here somewhat mildly fluthered (Irish for shitfaced, which I realize is a kind of absolute—I mean, what could “mildly shitfaced” actually mean?), anyway, sitting here pondering among and amid my bookshelves, and I thought, Think how far these books had to come to get here! Published all over the world, printed even moreso, Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Lia Pupura
Letter to my Representative by Lia Purpura
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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We are very proud to have Lia Purpura join us as our guest poster. She is the author of seven books of essays, poems and translations. Check out her latest book, Rough Likeness, which prompted Philip Lopate to say: “Lia Purpura is at the forefront of the New Essay, and this latest book (her best) takes us much closer into the rough terrain of her quirky mind than she has ever gone before. The surprises and insights keep coming.”
Take it away, Lia:
Letter to My Representative: An Essay
Dear Representative,
Letters are so rare these days, and I believe we are sorely missing what they allow – a chance to feel oneself the sole subject of another’s attention.
Here’s the scene I’ve wanted to tell someone like you about for three years now. I had just finished watching Al Gore’s film, “An Inconvenient Truth” in a church fellowship hall in Iowa City. It was well advertised and the room was full – students, professors, artist, writers, townspeople of all ages had gathered on this snowy evening. Continue reading →
Reviewing My Reviewers: Part II
categories: Cocktail Hour
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As some of you remember, a few weeks back I reviewed my Amazon reviewer, a strange man named Dobyx who mistook On Golden Pond for Walden. A couple of people suggested that I e-mail Dobyx the link to my post, but I didn’t want to take it too far. (He lives pretty close, up in Duck on the Outer Banks, and I didn’t like the idea of him running down here in his aviator’s cap and sicking his water dog on me.)
Today’s task is a happier one. I want to thank Gina Webb of the Atlanta Journal Constitution for her review this week. It’s been a hard slog getting The Tarball Chronicles out in the world, trying to get folks to listen to a story they don’t really want to hear. How heartening to have someone understand what you are trying to do. It’s not just that it’s a positive review–that’s great of course–but the best part is that she gets it.
(Of course I especially like that she calls the book “a full-strength antidote to the Kryptonite of corporate greed and human ignorance,” which somehow calls for a Bill and Dave superhero cartoon.)
Here’s her review. If you’re short on time, just read the last ‘graph:
Bad Advice Wednesday: Jack Yourself Up! (Through Rituals)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
4 comments
There are those who think it’s hard to write every day. Maybe. I’m of the camp that it’s harder to write once in a while. The rituals of daily-ness are built to contain a writing life in a way that the formlessness of the occasional is not. And for most of us who have chosen to make knocking words around our life, there are rituals a-plenty. Mine include getting up early, stretching my back (chronically bad since I was a teenager), drinking a cup of tea for calm before starting in on coffee for intensity (I am currently on day 11 of no coffee for the first time in many years so I apologize if my prose is sluggish), keeping note of my hours at the desk on a chart, listening to music (different albums for different drafts—The Talking Heads Stop Making Sense, for instance, for rolling along on first drafts), and, later in the day, long walks by the Cape Fear river armed with a microcassette recorder (and later still, notes in my journal armed with a beer.) Right off I notice that there are a lot of liquids involved in my rituals which seems right since there is an element of communion, and ablution, in the whole thing. Like most daily rituals mine was never planned but rather evolved, and did so for the single purpose of getting words on the page.
At the moment I am teaching a graduate class called The Writing Life, and some of you might remember that I posted the syllabus last year (I’ll paste this year’s revised syllabus below). The class starts, fittingly, with Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and as I re-read that book I noted that her rituals were more extreme than my own, and seemed geared toward creating an intensity far beyond the everyday. She writes: Continue reading →
The Little Sweep
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This past weekend I was in my first theater production. As a member of the chorus in Benjamin Britten’s opera “The Little Sweep.” Elysia played Sophie, and Juliet was in the chorus, too. A very stressful way to spend time together! And fun! Don’t let me forget to say that! Three more shows this coming weekend, if you’re in the vicinity, paired with A.A. Milne’s short comedy, “The Man in the Bowler Hat.” The talent in this little community is dazzling. I don’t know where to start. But Jane Parker, the musical director, taught us the difficult music with great good humor and dedication (Britten and his dissonance, cantilevered waltzes, rockslides of emotion, and snowdrifts, too). And Dale Hill, the director of both productions, is a kind of wizard. He lets you Continue reading →
Do Not Taunt Happy Fun Ball
categories: Cocktail Hour
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There have been a lot of fine commercials in the history of Saturday Night Live, but my favorite has always been Happy Fun Ball (written by the brilliant Jack Handey and voiced by the great Phil Hartman). Now my daughter Hadley has discovered the happy fun and we repeat phrases from the mock-ad to each other (like “certain types of skin.”)
Enjoy: HAPPY FUN BALL!
