Cocktail Hour
The High Side (an announcement)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Back on May 10, 2010, I posted a nervous piece called LAND OF GIANTS, about going out with my new novel, working title, The High Side. After five years of work and readings from several great writer friends, after many stops and starts (I couldn’t write for a year after my mother’s death, for example), the book was finally ready to show. My agent, Betsy Lerner
(who has, btw, a great blog called “The Forest for the Trees”), had read about ten drafts, felt we were ready, our fourth book together. Her strategy was to go to the heaviest hitting heavy-hitter editors at the best and most prestigious Continue reading →
I Used to Play in Bands is Back: Spinal Fusion Edition
categories: Cocktail Hour / I Used to Play in Bands
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I Used to Play in Bands: Chapter 15 (Spinal Fusion)
A Good Luck Gannet Day (Check out Gannet video below)
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From the Treknature site
As I mentioned in this space, both John Hay and John Haines died within five days of each other last week. I’ve written quite a bit about the uses of elders, how we define ourselves both by and against writers we admire who came before us. I consider myself very lucky to have spent a lot of time with older writers, not just Hay but Haines, who I had a long and wonderful conversation with at an AWP conference a few years back.
What follows is, again, modified from my book The Prophet of Dry Hill:
When I lived on Cape Cod I was only about a mile from John Hay’s house and I visited him often on his small fortress of land on Dry Hill.
John was famously private and before I started working on my book about him the produced of a New England TV show had warned me: “He didn’t greet me at the edge of his property with a shotgun, but close. That old bastard is one tough interview.”
Ergonomics
categories: Cocktail Hour
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author photo
I wish I could say I was all fixed and ready to go, but two months out, physical issues remain. The nerve that runs from its root in my neck out to my left thumb and forefinger was damaged before the operation and remains irritated. Thumb still numb, all sorts of random pains and muscle tightness and odd sensations. Similar to before the op, except that now I know it’s going to better and not worse, which is a big deal. To some extent, this is a writer’s injury–if you’re using a keyboard and monitor that makes you look downward all day, and if you read with your head down a lot, you may be heading my direction. Especially if you used to be a plumber and a sometime builder, drove a car into a telephone pole at age sixteen, had multiple ski wrecks over 50, and so on, a long list once you start compiling it, including a fall onto a pointed rock in a lake in New Hampshire a couple of years ago (just remembered that one) that left me lying face down in the water! (My brother came running
and pulled Continue reading →
A Tribute to John Hay (1915–2011)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The great writer, John Hay, died on Saturday in Bremen, Maine. I have not yet had time to organize my thoughts but here are some sentences adapted from my book about John:
If you were to suggest to the fishermen and carpenters who had lived down the street from John Hay that he was one of the great artists and original thinkers of the latter part of the 20th century you could forgive them if they rolled their eyes. The old guy in the baseball cap, baggy khakis, and flannel shirt who grumbled about traffic and tourists didn’t exactly look the part of environmental prophet. Just another salty Cape Cod crank.
And the Oscar for Revision Goes to….
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I like Oscars night. Is that okay to say? I like the whole thing, from the Barbara Walters special to the runway rubbish to the ridiculous dancing acts to the dresses to the actual awards and speeches. I loved the year Pavarotti was ill and so Aretha Franklin got up and sang “Nessun Dorma” in his place and just smashed it, smashed it, gorgeous, who know she was an opera person along with everything else? The Oscars come during school-vacation week, so I’ve often seen them in hotels—in Texas, in Rome, in Florida, in California. One year I was invited to an Oscars party in Los Angeles, bunch of writers and directors, a few actors, with a betting pool to rival any Super Bowl, catered dinner, inside information, hilarious byplay, a great night, though I knew I didn’t really fit in (“What does a novelist do?”). The woman on my left was an actress everyone knew who’d played in, I think, “Battlestar Gallactica,” but aside from her dazzling beauty and the steel-encased breasts, I Continue reading →
Our Favorite Story
categories: Cocktail Hour
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It is our favorite story. My wife Nina’s and mine. It used to be hers but now it’s ours.
It’s “Her Favorite Story,” by Mark Richard from his collection, The Ice at the Bottom of the World. I am thinking of the story, and teaching it in both my classes this week, because we are lucky enough to have Mr. Richard visiting us here in Wilmington (where he will be reading from his new book next Monday night, February 21 in Kenan 1111.) My colleague, Clyde Edgerton, just finished the new memoir, House of Prayer No. 2, and writes: “Many paragraphs in this book are more memorable than most short stories or novels….written with Richard’s powerful talent, his genius.” (For Clyde’s entire review in Gun & Garden magazine click here.)
But back to our story. The story, that if you have not gotten by now is my favorite, is that of a grief-addled, mentally unhinged marsh man, mucking his way up coastal rivers and living off what he catches by hand and net, and mourning the loss of his lover, who once lived with him (and his big-headed dog) in a cabin off the same creeks he roams. Our marsh man narrates the story in a strange and wonderful first person language that is equal parts Faulkner, Van Gogh, and Southern fishing coastal, and through this peculiar language–gnarled sentences that are hard to understand at first, as if you are de-coding something, but ultimately absorbing and illuminating–you are brought into a vivid world of madness, love and loss Continue reading →
Late Night Cable, or, Tales of Recuperation
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Robert Irvine
The convalescence after spinal fusion surgery has brought me to netherworlds I’d scarce imagined, worlds more strange by half than the mere hallucinations of my struggles with pain meds. Summer before last the Bee Line Cable truck passed the house and then a few hours later passed again, back toward town. This is a rural area in a rural state and cable was something I only experienced at hotels and at my brother’s house when I visited, a great luxury happily left behind to remain a treat. But high-speed Internet, that was the next great thing of the Universe, and we didn’t have it. I saw the Bee Line guys the next day working on the state road behind traffic cones so I stopped and got out and shouted up to the guy in the bucket: “Are you going up Clover Mill Road?” Continue reading →
For the Love of Work, or,Tea with Melville
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A while ago–fifteen years ago? longer?–my friend the writer Burns Ellison gave me Donald Hall’s book, Life Work. It was love at first sight. I’ve re-read the book twice since and I’m re-reading it again for a grad class I’m teaching this term called “The Writing Life.” One result of the book was that it freed my inner workaholic. Some (my wife) might argue that that workaholic had been free for years, slamming away like a madman on a keyboard in his study. That may be true but the book confirmed in me something that I have always felt: a love of those long stretches of diving down and staying immersed in work, what Hall calls “absorbedness.” (“‘Absorption,'” he argues “sounds too much like paper towels.”) He means of course when you are so far in it that you don’t know that you are for a while.
A couple of years back I wrote an essay about how teaching sometimes got in the way of my writing. It pissed a few people off, and they told me about it. They assumed that I was a so-so teacher who didn’t care much. I can’t judge my own teaching but I do know that I care. It’s just that I care about my writing more. In the piece I argued that a great writer “must travel daily to a Continue reading →
Learn to Type in Ten Days: Neck, Part III
categories: Cocktail Hour
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keith with his hand on my neck
At some point during my nap before the football game, one of the nurses had taken the IV port out of my hand—I kept crimping the line with my thrashings and setting off an alarm. So at midnight the Queen came in and said I’d have to take my pain meds by mouth, but first I’d have to eat something. The last thing dripped into the IV had been an anti-emetic and I was feeling pretty good and actually a tiny bit hungry. My dinner had mysteriously disappeared without my ever having looked under the pressed post-consumer recycled-plastic cover, and I felt this as a loss. Continue reading →
