Cocktail Hour
Obamas and Ospreys: A Vacation Tip
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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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
comments: 4 comments
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……
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Character Files
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
Notes in the dark at a movie, then put through the wash, all on the way to my new novel...
It may be a legacy of minimalism, or of a misreading of so-called minimalists like Raymond Carver, but in so much of the work of new writers, both fiction and nonfiction, characters get almost no, um, characterization. There’s a lot in a name, Shakespeare notwithstanding, but a name is often all we get to go on, that and a voice, if there’s dialogue, sometimes not even a name. I like a writer who lingers over a character, especially at first appearance, but only if the lingering is deft and vivid and puts a person in front of me. Even better I like a writer who captures some essential, unforgettable thing about her character in a line, nothing to slow the action down, but Continue reading →
A Moonlight Paddle
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 3 comments
After dinner last night I thought to take a break from the usual work session, picked up my canoe paddle and drove the three miles over to Drury Pond, which I usually visit in the afternoon for a swim. Drury is big as beaver impoundments go, held in a natural bowl by very extensive and actually ancient log dams, likely maintained for millennia. It’s not a quarter mile wide, and not a half mile long, with just a few active camps, as cabins are called around here, one of them owned by my fine friends Wes and Diane McNair. Continue reading →
We Are Not Alone: The Other Bill and Daves’
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Bill and Dave During the War Years
We’re tired here at the Bill and Dave’s Lit Shop. Weary. Perhaps you can tell…..the summer doldrums have set in. I blame the string of near 100 degree days, but a thousand miles to the North Bill reports the same symptoms. Suddenly writing–that thing I do all the time–is not happening, and the projects that come relatively easily during the rest of the year now seem daunting, stripped as I am of the super power of momentum. Or maybe I’m just resting…..
But don’t fret. Soon enough we will once again be delivering those crisp and brilliant posts that help you make it through your day. But, just this once, we are going to lean on others. Like pro-wrestlers tagging out, we are, for today only, going to hand you off to the other Bill and Daves. Because, as it turns out, we are not the only Bill and Dave out there. And we are confident that these fine websites can fill your void:
* First and foremost, as anyone who has ever tried to google us knows, there’s Bill and Dave’s Smokin’ Pit. True, they don’t quip much and rarely make fancy highbrow comments about lit-er-rat-ture, but Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Keep a Writing Chart
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
A few weeks ago I posted a piece about getting on a roll. Today I’m writing about a very specific tool to help you get rolling and stay rolling. Up front warning: it’s going to seem a little dorky at first. And I admit that the idea of keeping a chart where you record the hours that you write sounds somewhat un-artistic and self-help-y. But my experience keeping charts over the years reveals this important aspect of the activity: it works.
As a younger writer, I was prone to self-exhortation, to making great vows and resolutions to work more and harder, and then, when my actual writing days fell short of those vows, to plunge into despair. For a while in my twenties I kept this Isak Dinesen quote above my desk:”write a little every day, without hope, without despair.” But despite that scrap of paper, I was always full of both hope and despair, often within the same hour or minute, and at heart I never really did like the whole “a little” part. I was also facing an inherent problem, one that any young writer faces. Your workday is formless and you don’t know how to fill it. It isn’t just your writing voice you haven’t found yet but your work habits. If you turn to “normal” standards of work—an eight hour workday, right?—and Continue reading →
Blues Machine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Short Stories
comments: 1 comment
Here’s a story from my collection Big Bend, one that appeared in a very small magazine called Whetstone, which I think has since disappeared. It was edited by a kind poet named Jean Tolle, and came out of Barrington, Illinois, published not by a college but by some dedicated writers working from the Barrington Area Arts Council. I visited once, gave a reading, would love to hear if the group is still active, as I find no current refs on the Internet. But many thanks to them, as this was one of my first publications. The story must have been written–at least an early draft–sometime in the mid-eighties. I can feel where it came from, memory of Ithaca years a decade previous, and particularly Trumansburg summers, when all of we young musicians moved from farmhouse to farmhouse and apartment to apartment, depending on the band we happened to be in. The famous old guys would come staggering back to refresh their lives, if they weren’t dead, and it was possible to make friends with some real rock stars here and there, or at least drink too much with them. But this is a love story. I can’t say where the boy came from, but I do recall a kid who worked hard to help his mom find a partner. And I fixed someone’s water system once in exchange for some meals… Continue reading →
If Hemingway Wrote Portnoy’s Complaint
categories: Cocktail Hour
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It was cold and clean in the city during those years and I would walk home to the neighborhood past the butcher shops with the meat hanging down and past the dry cleaners to our warm apartment. I would sit at the hard table and I would sharpen my pencil and then do my work, my home work, and then I would retire to the bathroom and click the lock into place. The bathroom door was oak and solid and hard and you could feel the spot where the wood knotted above the lock. It was the one private, well-lighted place in that crowded house and there I would take my penis from my pants and massage it many times. It was a good place, and I was young and strong, and my penis was young and strong too and able to withstand repeated massagings. When I was done there was always a moment of clarity, a clean moment despite the mess, and for a while, before the remorse set in, I would feel a little less afraid of death. But the remorse and guilt would always return, as would my mother, always my mother, banging on the locked door to find out just what her eldest son had been doing behind it.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Start a Writers Group?
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 17 comments
My Writing Group
A long time ago I would write a story, feel good about it, and send it out to the Paris Review or the New Yorker. I recall putting the very first of these in a blue mailbox in Ithaca, New York (which dates it early ’70s), and actually going to visit the mailbox for the next week or so. After a month I got the rejection slip and the story back (remember paper? envelopes? “stamps”? one-month manuscript turnaround?) and then I’d decide one of two things, or I’d pick both: 1) The story sucked. 2) The magazine and its editors and readers and the whole culture that spawned it and them and pretty much everyone in the world sucked. And so back to my typewriter (remember typewriters?), a fresh story. Because why would you revise something that sucked? Continue reading →
