How I Came to Write This Book
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 8 comments
During my college years I took time off to become a rock star. This was going to be a slow process, so in the meantime I had to support myself. Right away I landed a great job, which was to house-sit and maintain and generally prepare for sale a sprawling old mansion in Weston, Connecticut, a house so big that even after living there for months I found rooms I hadn’t seen before. The place boasted a crumbling three-story carriage house over a seven-bay garage (a mansion in itself), a long-defunct double-Olympic swimming pool, several overgrown and ruined Continue reading →
Reading Under the Influence: Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
The cover of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal proclaims: “I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.” A memoir that doesn’t wallow in personal suffering? Actually, I like to read about major pain and redemption, all the countless ways other people royally fuck up. (Mostly, because it makes me feel better about my own foibles and mistakes.) But I was drawn to this promise of an ordinary life because, well, I too, consider my life to be pretty darn run-of-the-mill. Though I couldn’t help but think: could such a tale engage, sustain, and entertain me? Continue reading →
We The Animals: Book Spine Poem II
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 6 comments
(just read the titles…)
We the animals
writing down the bones,
working
alone with all that could happen.
You are not like other mothers:
Storyteller.
Savage girl.
Steering the craft,
burning down the house.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Writing by the Think System
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Your job as a writer is making sentences.
Most of your time will be spent making sentences in your head.
In your head.
Did no one ever tell you this?
—Verlyn Klinkenborg, from Several Short Sentences About Writing
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In his intense little essay http://opinionator.blogs.nytimes.com/2012/08/13/where-do-sentences-come-from/ August 13 in The New York Times promoting his new book, Several Short Sentences About Writing, Veryln Klinkenborg clears his throat for three paragraphs, takes a swipe at American education, and unveils how beginners might learn to write. He’s a stylist I admire, so I drew near. Continue reading →
A Book Spine Poem
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 12 comments
Just the titles, not the authors…
Alise Hamilton is a bookseller at Andover Books in Andover, Massachusetts, and is the events and marketing coordinator for HugoBookstores. In addition, she’s an MFA student at Lesley University in Cambridge, Massachusetts, working on a collection of linked stories. In honest fashion, she says: “The book spine poetry I created, but the idea to do it is stolen: http://www.brainpickings.org/index.php/2012/04/16/book-spine-poetry-future/ ” This is her first guest post at Bill and Dave’s. Continue reading →
Stay Awake for the End is Near: Literature Meets Slumber Party at a Moby-Dick Marathon
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 4 comments
Under the bones at the New Bedford Whaling Museum
Call me Willy. My father does.
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I traveled down from the forests of Maine through Boston and further yet to the sea like a young man in another century looking for his ship. My paler but still daunting adventure was simply this: attendance at the sixteenth annual marathon reading of Herman Melville’s Moby-Dick at the New Bedford Whaling Museum. Twenty-five hours, 160 readers, “light whaleship fare” the only sustenance promised. Continue reading →
Wild, by Cheryl Strayed
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 30 comments
Far from my studio, in the world of Wild.
I really loved reading Wild, by Cheryl Strayed. I’m not alone in that, of course. The book has had the trajectory of a rocket and has left earth’s constricting atmosphere, bound for the heavens, and history. Cheryl Strayed has built the most compelling narrative out of a walk on the Pacific Coast Trail. Walk, ha. It’s 1100 miles of difficult terrain, from desert to snowfield to deep, dark forest. Also the forest of the soul. And that’s where the irresistible drive of this book takes place, the soul. Trail stories are nearly universally boring—a privileged person wears out some shoes, or a funny person mocks the enterprise, or an achiever overvalues his experience and documents every hard-won sandwich. Whatever, in the end they are victors, and their triumph has a moral. Continue reading →
The Hunger Games, Movie and Book. Is this for kids?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 11 comments
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It’s been a long time since I read a book and saw the movie in the same day. Last time was “To Have and Have Not,” the Hemingway potboiler, not bad page for page, and I read it in an afternoon. The movie happened to be on TV that night, and I remember watching in my parents’ basement (I would have been home from college), really surprised: aside from the title and the names of the characters, it had nothing to do with the book. Turned out that William Faulkner (“Out of work and broke”) had re-written the screenplay under contract with Warner Bros, putting together what amounted to a parody of his rival’s work. Starring Bogart and Bacall.
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My daughter is eleven and read The Hunger Games before either her mother or I had heard of it. Of course, the kid loved it, and downplayed the violence we’d begun hearing about. To me it sounded like an allegory for life in high school, which is in turn an allegory for corporate life, if Continue reading →
My Kindle Nook
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 10 comments
Lifetime supply
A year ago I wrote here about my big push to organize and clean out my library, such as it was. And is. You can see the results above–the main bookcase is jammed, still, even with nearly 900 books carted off to various rescue shelters. I posted this photo on Facebook a while back and it seemed to strike a chord. On the right, I achieved a certain order. Poetry, biography, psychology (those are Juliet’s, primarily), gardening. On the left, chaos continues to reign: fiction. Some of these books have been with me from high school–40 years, that is–a few from childhood (Aesop’s fables in a box with my mother’s lovely handwriting). Large numbers are from college and the years after, which is odd, since those were peripatetic years and books incredibly cumbersome. Larger numbers were lost, of course, or given away. But never fear, I was a bibliomaniac, and Continue reading →
Emma, by Jane Austen, Poolside, With Crocodiles
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 8 comments
Books in My Suitcase
In college I often was sad for my future self. For one thing, I was sure I wouldn’t have any fun on the millennial new year. I’d be 47 and dull and would have forgotten how to party, if still alive. But I was still alive back then in 2000, and still knew how to party. And still now, too, actually, even further into the Jetson era. Callow college fellows don’t know about the stamina of late middle age. Continue reading →
