Cocktail Hour
Marsh Man: The Trailer for My Green Manifesto
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
Okay, sure, this trailer for My Green Manifesto is a tad on the homemade side.. But I think you might smile if you click HERE.
Scraps from The Cutting Room Floor
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
Gessner arrived for a little R and R in the midst of his burgeoning book tour. My Green Manifesto is getting good attention, and it was Dave’s turn. We hadn’t had anything but a virtual cocktail hour for over a year and it was great to clink glasses. The conversation ranged from deep to silly, from sad to hilarious, and we really didn’t stop talking, usually over one another. Much of what we say is about our work (in fact, we filmed a couple of conversations, one sitting on a log in the stream: stay tuned). His at the moment is the preparation of his next book, Tarball Chronicles while publicizing the current one. Mine Continue reading →
The Myth of Dan (The River Man)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
- Drawing by Gary Hovland
So I am currently running around New England trying to make sure My Green Manifesto doesn’t die a quiet death. So far it seems to be going pretty well, but who the hell knows? I’m at a Starbucks in Watertown, about to drive up to Maine to have the first face to face Bill and Dave meeting since we started Cocktail Hour. (The guy near me just said into his phone: “I’m in a cafe so I can’t hear so well.” A cafe!)
Since I’m rushing around (and, honestly, feeling lazy) today I’m just going to post the first 2 pages of the new book. (If you like it, maybe buy a copy for your uncle.) Here goes:
We are paddling our rock-battered canoe down a particularly stunning section of the river, a twisting stretch of steep granite walls and overhanging trees, as we travel toward the hidden city at river’s end. Over the past hours we have heard coyotes howl and watched deer wade, observed a beautiful Continue reading →
Wednesday is Bad Advice Day at Bill and Daves: The Cutting Principle
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
Dave
My friend Richard Gilbert is working on a fascinating book about his years farming, and writes: “Well, I’ve made it through a light edit and effort to trim. Great: I cut 52 pages, the bulk of it including most of one chapter. That still leaves a 467 page ms., Lord. But I think I will pitch at that length. At this stage of completion and polish, isn’t it okay to do that? I don’t want to be an amateur or anything, but I am afraid any more cuts to get it even to 450 (my avowed pitching goal) might cut what an agent-editor-publisher would like. Or am I just being pathetic? Mine must be a common dilemma–a writer knowing his ms. is long but fearful of cutting it himself past a certain point. (And, really, unable to, because he can’t see it fresh or from enough distance. I mean, if I put it in a drawer for ten years this would be Continue reading →
A New Music
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
Adapted From My Green Manifesto: My new book is about many things, including the need to fight for a limited wildness, but it is also, to a lesser extent, about language. I’ve always wondered why our words grow soft and mushy when he began to talk about nature. Perhaps I am too persnickety, too preoccupied with the language that we use to describe the natural world, but I am in the minority that believes we should watch our words, that false language both reflects and encourages false thinking, that our lives depend on our sentences. I feel particularly strongly that “being in nature” should not be described as some precious or highfalutin experience. After all, didn’t we as a species evolve, along with our words, while spending a million years or so living in the midst of the natural world? And wasn’t our relationship with that world, among other things, quite practical and direct? “Nature” is where the living roots of our language evolved, which suggests that that language should still be able to circle back and describe the place from whence we came without fencing it behind some quasi-mysterious mumbo-jumbo.
Candling
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Incubation continues. The other day, Elysia and I cut a hole in a piece of cardboard, placed it over a bright lamp, and began inspecting our incubating eggs. According to our various on-line instructors (has the Internet replaced extended family? Local knowledge? (Every generation has its scourge, and they all seem to end up toothless (Comic books when I was a kid, and of course Mad Magazine (And TV)))) you start doing this at eight days, and then as you wish, watching the chicks develop, or trouble. Plenty of comparison photographs to be found, but none exactly like what we Continue reading →
Reviewing The New Yorker’s Summer Reading Issue: Two Thumbs Up, both Mine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 1 comment
Lauren Groff
The New Yorker’s summer reading issue is here, and I thought it might bear a close reading, here in the brave new world post Bill and Dave’s crash, which around here we’re referring to as 6/24. Our innocence lost, can we still read late into the night?
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The lead “Talk of the Town” piece is by Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of a New Yorker piece turned terrific book: Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (Bloomsbury, 2006), which I taught in a nature writing course when I was at Holy Cross. Students greeted all the facts and figures and warnings of imminent disaster with a Ho-hum on the one hand, and a What-am-I-supposed-to-do on the other. They were also seriously bummed out with what their world is shaping up to be. And they didn’t like the formulaic way Kolbert introduces a scientist, describes whatever shock of whatever color hair, a crooked smile, some clothing, and then lets him or her talk. I didn’t Continue reading →
The Return of Mr. Hopeless
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
Okay, so when we last spoke to each other I had posted a piece about the nature writer Derrick Jensen, adapted from my book, My Green Manifesto, which just came out. (I wasn’t crass enough to link to the book the first time and to try to get you to buy it, but apparently I’ve become bolder in the course of a week.) Soon after the post was posted, our world crashed here at Bill and Dave’s. I didn’t manage to save a copy of the post but I’ll try and re-create it here:
(You might want to listen to the Standell’s “Dirty Water” while reading.)
A few years ago I was on a nature writing panel with a writer named Derrick Jensen. A couple of weeks before the panel I sent out a friendly e-mail to the other panelists, suggesting we bounce some ideas off each other. Here is the gist of the e-mail I got in response from him:
“You ask me what I think about so-called nature writing? I think the same about it that I think about any beautiful writing. There is no time for it. There is time for only one thing: saving the earth. The world is being slaughtered and we need to stop it. At this point writing is beside the point: Continue reading →
Crash and Burn: Bill and Dave come Back From the Brink
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 7 comments
Yes, it's a re-run...but these are desperate times....
Well, dear reader, we crashed.
I will in no way blame this on poor Derrick Jenson and his eco minions, and will insist that the fact that we lost our site, and most of the posts from June (including my Bad Advice Wednesday where I lovingly scanned in my sloppy journal pages) just as the hits had started to roll in for my Jensen piece, Mr. Hopeless (I would link to it but, alas, there is nothing but ether to link too.) So feel for us readers. We have tried to bring you, free of charge (though not of ego) the humble gift of our prose, but this week we two old hippies learned a lesson about the modern world. Always back things up.
Over the next couple of days I’ll try to gather things together and get stuff back up, including Mr. Hopeless.
Wednesday is Bad Advice Day: Getting Started (Fiction Edition)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
Sonia Rykiel Pearl Sunglasses
I often have great, clear ideas for fiction, glorious stories blooming whole in my head, but when I sit down to write, something happens. Or more accurately, nothing. Or at least nothing like the vision that came middle of the night or driving to Portland, or (frequently) watching a good movie. Maybe this is because the crisp, beautiful idea I’ve envisioned is really only a series of events detached from person and place, or alternately an image attached to a problem–something like a dream, compelling and vivid but impossible to grasp in real time. Where to Continue reading →
