Cocktail Hour
Confessions of a Nature Writer
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Let me say this straight out: it’s not easy. You see the fame, the interviews on ET, the magazine covers, the late night chats with the President, all the trappings, and you say, “Man, I could do that, I could write lyrically about plovers and shit.” But then there’s what you don’t see. You don’t see the stress, the constant media scrutiny, the prying into your personal life, the paparazzi chasing after you as you try to take a solitary walk along the beach to contemplate sanderlings and profoundities. What you don’t see is how hard it is to focus on the sublime with all those flashbulbs flashing; what you don’t see is the mudslinging, the interviews, the fierce rivalries with the Matthiessens and Dillards. And of course the sex. A godawful lot of sex.
Perhaps I am revealing a little too much of what goes on behind the scenes in the life of a nature writer. But I do so in the name of honesty so that young people out there who are considering getting into this game will know it’s not all leaves and acorns and quoting Thoreau. Being quietly meditative is the least of it. There are the three martini lunches with Wendell Continue reading →
Green Headed Jelly Babies and Other Fruiting Bodies: Mushroom Day at Bill and Dave’s
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Green headed jelly babies
The woods have been full of mushrooms this year, as I think I’ve mentioned. Not yet a ton of edibles, as in years past, though I passed up a generous fruiting of black trumpets in the Big Reed Reserve, where you generally want to leave things alone. But I took photos, which I hereby share. This is by no means the best mycological fruiting season I’ve ever seen. That has to belong to the late summer of 2006, in the Kit Carson National Forest near Taos. Never before or since have I seen so many species fruiting in such profusion. But Big Reed this past month won the prize for corals, and for species I’d never seen before. Some of which I haven’t yet identified. Photos may not be adequate–but if you know any of these, let me know! 32 species here, and a lot left in my camera… My personal favorite? Green headed jelly babies!
Really Bad Advice Wednesday: Accept Being Poor!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Boy, this is a hard one. Even as I type these words I’m worried that no one wants to follow me down on this depressing bummer of a trip. Over the next few paragraphs I’ll try to convince you it’s not that depressing, but in a society that values wealth above else it’s hard to tell someone that the career you choose, even if you are talented and work as hard as humanly possible, will not likely bring you wealth. There are exceptions, you’ll argue–Charles Frazier, Tom Perrotta—quality writers who also are able to afford to pay for both home and car. It’s true, it’s true, but the vast majority of us who spend our time trying to make great sentences and books can barely pay our bills. This hardly makes us exceptional in these tough times, but that may not be much reassurance to a young writer choosing to pursue a life of word making.
So why do it? As hundreds have said before me, because you have to do it, you are compelled to, and you ain’t in it for the money. But more than that. Because there is joy in it. Joy in making your own worlds, thinking your own thoughts, creating individual art in our increasingly pre-packaged, Continue reading →
Table for Two: An Interview with John Clayton
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Mitzvah Man!
Today’s post marks the debut of a new feature on Bill and Dave’s: Table for Two. We’ll be talking to authors and editors and agents and just about anyone else we like, often in conjunction with the publication of a new book, often a book published by a small press. Our first interview is with John Clayton, whose latest book, Mitzvah Man, has just been published by Texas Tech University Press. Recently, John sent an email out to friends: “Tomorrow is my pub date. It would be terrific if you could ‘like’ my book on Facebook or even become a ‘fan.’ I remember Annie Lamott laughing, in Bird by Bird, at her own expectation that her pub date would change her life. What happened? Nothing. Her life went on. I don’t have any such expectations. But I do intend to enjoy tomorrow.”
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I first met John in 1997, when I was part of the graduate faculty in the English Department at Ohio State, newly tenured. I’d helped start the Sandstone Prize for Short Fiction and was running it with the help of a large pool of our graduate students, a lot of work, also a lot of Continue reading →
Boletus Edulis?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Boletus edulis
In my Big Reed post I mentioned all the mushrooms and other fungi we spotted. I’m still working on a more general mushroom post, with tons of photos… But yesterday morning I spotted a tall, lone Boletus edulis under a white pine in a mixed forest on the daily walk. My daily walk–the mushroom was standing still. This time of year the bugs aren’t bad and beetles hadn’t gotten to it, nor slugs. King bolete! I hadn’t seen one for a few years, luck of the weather. This one was fairly pale on top with a heavy stem–every other mushroom on the morning’s walk Continue reading →
Movie Time! The Tarball Trailer…..
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies
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It’s five in the morning in Mobile. Yesterday walked the beaches at Fort Morgan and it was deja vu all over again. Tarballs and orange smears and dozens of tarball farmers with giant nets. Same as it ever was. Too bad the story is over!
Here’s my trailer for The Tarball Chronicles. Hope you like it!
Bad Advice Wednesday Live!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Movies
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This week, Bill and Dave discuss reading, but they do it two months ago sitting in Temple Stream behind Bill’s house in Maine. Here’s the video.
Nabucco in HD: Opera Too Close for Illusion
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Nabucco set at the Roman Quarry of St. Margarethen
Last night at Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, Maine, for a mere fifteen bucks, I saw a great performance of Verdi’s Nabucco, a confusing opera about Nebuchadnezzar conquering Jerusalem. He goes mad, his daughters fall in love with the same guy, a lot of singing ensues. The evening was filmed in Austria at the 2007 Festspiele at the truly amazing and ancient Roman quarry of St. Margarethen, which has been converted into a concert venue, high cliffs of stone carved into various staircases and theater wings. It’s a gonzo performance, with actors being hung by the neck and stuntmen leaping off the walls like so many college drunks at whichever reservoir or football game, and Continue reading →
Can Anderson Come out and Play?
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I am reading at Octavia Books in New Orleans at 6 on this coming Tuesday, and I’ll be very disappointed if my close personal friend Anderson Cooper doesn’t show up. Is it possible that he doesn’t know that he has a bit part in The Tarball Chronicles? Or maybe he does know, and thinks he may have been treated a tad too harshly. Some of you may remember my Anderson encounter from last summer’s blog. Here is how it came out in the book:
Kristian Sonnier joins me around drink two. An outgoing and generous man, Kristian is a regular here and is therefore a pal of French 75’s renowned bartender, Chris, a bald man with thick black-framed glasses who struts about the place in a white suit coat and black bow tie. Chris seems a little full of himself, but I like him because he feeds me my Daisies and then a delicious Cornish game hen and perfect little fries thatlook like their middles have been inflated with a tiny bicycle pump. I probably weigh about fifty pounds more than Kristian, but I notice that when we shift to beer I start slowing down and he begins to pick up the drinking pace. I have never been to this city before but maybe in New Orleans I’ve found my lost tribe of eaters and drinkers. We take our legal “walking beers” through the French Quarter and head down to the river. Continue reading →
From Blog to Book
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Next Monday The Tarball Chronicles comes out. The book represents my personal landspeed record from inception to publication. I went down to the Gulf to report, but also with an eye toward a book, in July of 2010, and now it is being published in September of 2011, about fourteen months later. As well as being written fast, there was something else unique for me about it. This was a book born of a blog. This blog specifically. That’s why I thank each and every one of you (true, I do this as a group) in the book’s acknowledgements. Unlike my earlier books, which were created in solitude, this one was the product of a community. And I hope the readers of this blog feel some ownership for the resulting book. Not so you run out and buy it, but because it’s true. This is the soil the thing grew out of.
At first, a few years back, I had the usual tssk-tssk fuddy-duddy reaction to “blogging.” What changed this for me? I think seeing my former students, many of them my most talented students, find in blogging an outlet for their abilities. Speed of publication was appealing and also there was this: it looked kind of neat. Anyway, Bill and I started this one up in April 2010, around the time millions of gallons of oil started gushing into the Gulf. One reason I went to the Gulf was because I was pissed off about what was happening there, but there were other factors involved too. I had just had a book proposal rejected by the douchebags in New York, one I had been Continue reading →
