Cocktail Hour
Writing About Real People (and their Houses)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 17 comments
One of my favorite grad students recently had a book come out. It is a triumph of course—a first book, what could be more exciting?—but also, ultimately, a cause for pain. He had written about his family, specifically his dead father, and his mother and grandmother were angry and upset to have the family “exposed” in print. The student is a stable and mature sort and did his best to keep his equilibrium, but it was clearly deeply confusing and hurtful to have his words, which, objectively could only be considered loving and sympathetic toward his deceased father and family, be taken in the way they were. Usually when students come to me with fears about how their Continue reading →
Farewell, My Lovely
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 19 comments
way before
Okay, today I’m in the garden planting peas, and I hear a roar and a bang up by the road. Pickup truck. So of course I go to see who. Young man with a terrible limp, no smile, no threat either. Familiar, I realize, then rejoice: the truck’s familiar too! It’s my old trusty F-150, and he’s fixed the body and painted it candy-apple red and got all kinds of chrome on the thing, and huge tires, stainless mag wheels, half the revised engine sticking up out of the hood, chrome running boards and racing stickers and exhaust and web tailgate Continue reading →
Gessner on Mailer (and others)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Striding toward his undergrad Forms of New Journalism class, David Gessner felt tired after a long term and two book
deadlines, but at the same time buoyed, as always, by the class itself, which had renewed his faith that young students still took reading seriously. In certain moods Gessner, an egoist if not a narcissist, considered himself America’s best essayist, though in others despaired that his work had not found a larger audience. Conflicted by these thoughts, and sweating from the summer-like humidity, he stopped at the water fountain (which they called a “bubbler” back in Worcester by the way) and drank deeply.
In the few seconds it took to sip from the arc of water, several thoughts rushed through Gessner’s mind. He wondered how the class would react to the assigned reading, Norman Mailer’s Armies of the Night. In that book, a piece of nonfiction that today might have led to a spanking on Oprah’s couch, Mailer follows the exploits of a character called Norman Mailer as he joins the
The Trickle Down Theory
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
My first true business venture, after college, was trying to make and market a poster in which one man urinated on another. That should be all I need to say to give you a sense of my basic business acumen. Somehow it never occurred to me that this concept–a guy pissing on another guy–was not going to make me rich.
To be fair the story is slightly more complicated: the poster was born of a political cartoon I drew in college for the Harvard Crimson. It was a picture of the back of Ronald Reagan, recognizable mostly by his ridiculous pompadour, urinating on an African American homeless man who was sleeping, covered with newspapers, in a gutter. It was called “The Trickle Down Theory.”
Not very subtle perhaps, heavy handed true, but it packed a punch. This was the early eighties, as you may have already guessed, and it was the time not just of Reagan’s ascension but of the newly formed conservative college newspapers, which anticipated the basic spirit of Fox News. These papers didn’t like my cartoon, not one bit.
Three Wishes
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 4 comments
Don't Let Your Dad Find This One
“I always labour at the same thing, to make the sex relation valid and precious, instead of shameful. And this novel is the furthest I’ve gone. To me it is beautiful and tender and frail as the naked self is.”
D. H. Lawrence (re: Lady Chatterly’s Lover)
#
Sorting books recently I found all sorts of old lost favorites in various categories from juvenilia to biography to popular science to spiritual to gardening and on and on, none so nostalgic as Candy by one “Maxwell Kenton,” really Terry Southern, a film writer mostly, working with his friend Mason Hoffenberg. My copy (not my first, which was an original Olympia Press edition, much pawed in my early teenage years: a genuine dirty book) is a Canadian edition with Marlon Brando and Ewa Aulin on the cover—he’s playing the phony guru, she the naïf. The movie’s not great, but the book is pretty funny, meant as a spoof, and in 1968 (in an era when porn was hard to come by and I fifteen) it was a turn-on, frequently referenced. Southern and his friend took turns writing chapters, and the chapters Continue reading →
Happy Earth Day
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
I’ve got a new creek near my house now, but to the right is my old one off Sesuit Harbor. I like where I am, but still have a soft spot for that one….
Here’s my Earth Day continuation of the radio series I did for WHQR, our public radio station:
April Fools
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Tarball Wars
Today is the anniversary of the day the BP Deepwater Horizon blew. If you are in the business of collecting small ironic tidbits then it’s a pretty interesting date. Take for instance the fact that the day the rig toppled into the sea, two days after the explosions, was April 22nd, or as it’s also known, Earth Day. Or try this one on for size: President Obama announced that he was opening up more United States waters to off-shore drilling, a decision that would benefit BP first and foremost, twenty days before Deepwater blew. The president let the press know this on March 31st but he really missed a golden opportunity Had he only waited a few more hours, he could have made his announcement on April Fools.
For the anniversary I have recorded a couple of radio features for Wilmington’s public radio station, WHQR. Please take a listen here: Gulf Radio Piece for Anniversary (Produced by Roderick McClain.)
Apes of God
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 10 comments
Never read it, might one day
I cleaned out my studio, everything including desk, shelves, chairs, bedroll (I’m a serious napper), and books. Lots and lots of books, about 900, too many to keep in the new, ergonomically uncluttered space of my dreams, and including atlases and dictionaries and a seriously outmoded Columbia Encyclopedia that I love nevertherless, fifteen pounds if it’s an ounce, endpapers red. That joined the elite group of books that would stay, safely out of the way of my renovations in the long row of shelves under the windows. Another group of keepers were headed to the house, where I’d have to make room for them. The final group, the tough-luck crowd, were going to have to leave the property altogether. Continue reading →
Sidekicks
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
There was one difference between my trip to the Gulf last fall and my trip in the summer. In the fall I did not travel alone. A hairy man out of myth, a Sasquatch-like creature from the north accompanied me. Mark Honerkamp, or Hones as his friends call him, has accompanied me on other adventures, for instance to Venezuela to follow ospreys. Over the years he has taken on, against his will, that most unrewarding of jobs: the literary sidekick. Hones is a big, bearded man, 6’4” and easily 250 lbs at this point, but mostly jolly, and possessing enough of a sense of humor and knowledge of natural history to make me forgive him his animal ways, the flatulence and snoring and the gradual and steady devouring of every morsel of food in sight.
In the past when I have written about Hones, people always mention Katz, who was Bill Bryson’s unsavory sidekick in , A Walk in the Woods, his story of walking the Appalachian Trail. This irritates me, and I point out that Hones made it into print well before Katz (A Wild, Rank Place, 1997). I also suggest that some kind of sidekick challenge may be in order, a fight to the death, a naked cage match between Katz and Hones, or better yet some kind of eating and drinking duel.
Happy (Oily) Anniversary
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 7 comments
Bill wrote yesterday asking me what I wanted for our anniversary.
And it’s true—we are almost one year old. This Wednesday, the 6th, marks a year of Bill and Dave’s. For us it’s been a great year, full of dialogue with other writers and the discipline of cranking these posts out a couple of times a week in the midst of school, book projects, family and neck surgery. “What is blogging but writing without editing?” a friend asked me. Of course that friend is an editor. Bill and I are not looking to put editors out of business, and we still work quite happily with them, but there is a real pleasure in the autonomy, and speed, of having an idea, committing it to (virtual) paper, and hitting the little “publish” button, occasional typos (me more than Bill) and all.
This April also marks a darker anniversary. It was on April 20, 2010 that the Deepwater Rig blew and the millions of gallons of oil started gushing into the Gulf.
Yesterday, the New York Times reported that BP is almost ready to again start deepwater drilling in the Gulf and the Obama administration is close to granting them permission. The Times writes of the tough year that the company has had, and say of being able to drill again: “It would give BP a boost of confidence.” Oh, good. I was getting worried about their confidence. Continue reading →
