A Night at the Movies: “The Island President”

categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics / Getting Outside / Movies

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President Mohamed "Anni" Nasheed

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Another trip over to Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, Maine, to see Jon Shenk’s The Island President, a brand-new documentary featuring the incredibly charming and very courageous (and sadly now former, after threats of violence and a coup d’etat) president of the Maldives, a 400-mile chain of 2000 inexpressibly beautiful (as the film shows) islands off the southwestern tip of India.  The movie, though, is sad: the Maldives are in imminent danger of sinking under rising sea levels as global warming proceeds unchecked.  The happy part is that a man like Anni Continue reading →

Letter to my Representative by Lia Purpura

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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 →

Chester Greenwood Day: Our Parade

categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics

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Broadway and Main

The first Saturday of December may be a lot of things a lot of places, but here in Farmington, Maine, it’s Chester Greenwood Day, and we have a parade.  It’s not quite the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade (which I wrote about last week), maybe two blocks worth, but it’ll do!

Chester Greenwood invented the earmuff, among other things, and almost anyone in town can tell you how it happened: he loved to skate as a young teen, 1873, but his ears got cold. He wrapped his woolen scarf around his head, but that was too itchy and uncomfortable, so he got his grandmother to sew circles of beaver pelt on a metal frame he’d fashioned, and (as a French-challenged college student of mine once wrote): wallah! Continue reading →

Big Wind

categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics / Getting Outside

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Some of the Towers on Kibby Ridge

I’m writing this column and you’re reading it on a computer powered by coal smoldering somewhere.  There may be some diesel fuel thrown in, and some waterpower, and no doubt a little biomass, a spot of nuclear, a few turns of wind.  But it’s only been ten years or so that my writing required any power at all beyond breakfast—I went from a Hermes portable typer straight to an old MS-DOS PC by Zenith, enormous learning curve, hours of study, all those arcane pathways, nothing I need to know anymore, six generations of computers later. Continue reading →

Obamas and Ospreys: A Vacation Tip

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You are half-way through your vacation, Mr. President.  The kids are bored, and you’re getting antsy, too.  Now that we are friends (sort of) I want to give you a little tip about the island you are on.  Here’s the thing about it: it is lousy with ospreys!  “Ospreys?” you ask in your almost-as-deep-as mine deep voice. “What do I, the leader of the free world, and my kids, the kids of the leader of the free world, care about birds?”

A fair question, Mr. President, but I have an answer for you.  You are a sports fan, right?  And out there on the Vineyard you aren’t seeing much in the way of pro sports.  But right around the corner, in fact maybe right in your backyard at the Blue Heron Farm, the greatest athletes in the world are flying and hovering and diving.  If you don’t believe me take a gander at this video that my friend Ian just sent me:  WILD OSPREY DIVES

Impressive, right?  They really are.  They are big, black-masked birds that hover like giant Continue reading →

Obama’s Summer Reading: A Look Inside

categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics

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            I hope it’s a nice day up on Martha’s Vineyard.  Nice, but not too nice.  Actually a little rain would be good—good reading weather.  Enough time for the president to find a little corner of the house, away from the girls and Michelle, and, with some rain pattering on the roof, finally get a chance to through the books he bought the other day at Bunch of Grapes.

I imagine him picking them up, looking them over, skimming here and there, and then doing what we all do despite the famous admonition—judging them by their covers. He likes the novel he bought, and is looking forward to starting it, but it seems more of a nighttime book.  He dips into the one that’s gotten all the praise but the first sentences seem lifeless and dull.  He puts it down and stares out the window. One thing he has been noticing since landing on the Vineyard is how green everything is, the world full and bursting, but at the same time the salt winds nudging it toward fall. He likes those moments of Continue reading →

My Presidential Address: Obama and I go one on one….

categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics

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Watch this new video as I try to convince the prez that, rather than read the five books the Boston Globe said he should read while on vacation in Martha’s Vineyard, he should just read one.  I think this is going to be big, people.  Soon I’ll be invited to hoops in the White House, beers with O and Clooney, the whole deal…….I love Bill R., I really do.  But I also like the sound of Barack and Dave’s Cocktail Hour……

Health Insurance and the Independent Writer

categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics

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Cobra

When my wonderful five years at Holy Cross were up I was able to take advantage of COBRA health coverage.  The acronym stands for Consolidated Omnibus Budget Reconciliation Act, but it’s appropriately threatening, deadly snake, right.  All the act states is that employers’ insurance plans must continue to cover employees terminating for any reason for eighteen months after termination.  This protects many people, but for an example, think of someone battling cancer: can’t work anymore, gets to keep insurance.  For a while.  If she can pay.  My own COBRA amount was about $2200 a Continue reading →

Bill and Dave’s Kochtail Hour

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Taxpayers, just like you and me.

Like most of my fellow Americans, I recently got a piece of mail from my state congressional representative, a survey he claims will help him determine what his priorities should be since he is, after all, representing me.   It’s a push-poll, of course, with origins in a national “conservative” vision, several local twists added to add authenticity, the most toxic proposals attributed to the weakest local links, these dumb local reps desperate for favor.  I put conservative in quotes because the vision is anything but—it’s a radical corporatist agenda, the one that operatives Continue reading →