Cocktail Hour
Lance Link, Secret Chimp
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
I like this blogging thing, I really do, and think it is a true genre onto itself that, when I’m not buried in a book (as I have been the last couple of months), seems a good and valid way to pass one’s creative time. That said, I, like a lot of us, have a sometimes ambivalent relationship with new technology. Proof of this is in the piles of floppy disks all over my desk in my office at school, piles that students look at in wonder, laugh at, or stare at uncomprehendingly (depending on their age).
Likewise, I have been told by so-called young people, students mostly, that my weakness as a blogger is my “lack of links.” I write little essays, true, and the words are nice enough, but they have suggested that more of those words should be in color, so that the bored reader can, if she or he chooses, zip off to someplace else in the electronic world. Well, sorry about that. I don’t have an elaborate defense, as Wendell Berry did of his typewriter, and I vow that from here on I, and my writing, will be more linky.
The Adventures of Mr. Id–Part VI
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 3 comments
I’ve decided to serialize the first section of The Adventures of Mr. Id, which is the opening of a novel I wrote three summers ago. It may be the first novel to be based on a Youtube video, since I got the idea while filming my own little film, Transformation. I have always been obsessed with transformations, loving werewolves and Altered States and having re-read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde not long before deciding to try my own hand at the form with this project.
Part 6
Later he tried to figure out why he had revealed his secrets to Pam, after being so stingy for so long when talking about his work. First what it wasn’t. It wasn’t drunken/drugged confession or pride in his discovery or the fact that he wanted to impress Continue reading →
Reference Season
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 33 comments
hiring committee
It’s always reference-letter season, but this season is one of the big ones for a writer and former professor of writing like me: MFA program application deadlines start in December and concatenate all the way along through February, probably some beyond that. Guggenheim letters are due, and most assistant professor refs, too, though new jobs keep getting posted, and new requests keep coming in. All sorts of internal fellowships at various colleges require letters, as do tenure and promotion cases, which are the hardest Continue reading →
The Adventures of Mr. Id–part 5
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The Adventures of Mr. Id
Part V
Charles forgot about the boy and again concentrated on the women in the group. It hit him with the force of minor revelation that he had been so focused on breasts earlier, that he had given short shrift to that other darker subterranean manifestation of the female sex. Now it came at once to mind, and to nose. Too much so, he realized. Musky, insistent, and each odor as individual as a fingerprint or snowflake to his newly-honed nasal receptors. Charles had been circling for some time but now he plunged himself into the crowd, into the swirl of smells. He found he was capable of siphoning the world in through his olfactory cleft, detecting the subtle odorants that came off his colleagues, reading their chemical trails. It seemed he could even smell their moods—apprehensive, bored, jaunty, miffed—by focusing on the effluvia rising from their scent glands. In this way he gleaned secret messages sent out by their scalps, armpits, and groins. Exercising an older brain, a limbic wordless brain, he could suddenly read a language, a language he had long forgotten or never known.
Thanksgiving
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Short Stories
comments: 3 comments
Various vegetables with dead bird
Here’s a seasonal offering from my story collection, Big Bend. “Thanksgiving” is placed first in the book–not my idea, but Charles East’s, the wonderful (former) series editor for the Flannery O’Connor Prize, who paid close attention to every aspect of my work (the new series editor is Nancy Zafris, also a past winner), all by US mail. I wrote him that I was worried people would think the story was autobiographical, since it borrows a little from the statistics of my family. And Charles replied, “Whether it is autobiographical in this or that detail hardly matters–this scene will be recognized as the universal Thanksgiving story, the opposite of the one Americans like to tell themselves.” Anyway, nothing like this ever happened to me or my family, though at times I used to feel just a little like Teddy. This is an early story of mine, first draft dating back to graduate school in the late 80s. And not the 1880s, okay?
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Thanksgiving
When the phone rings in the empty loft Ted knows exactly who it is: exquisite Mary, gentle Mary, tough Mary and brainy—his brother’s wife—for whom Ted would fall in a minute if such things were permitted. She seems cold as they climb through some small talk, gets to the point fast, warms to her task: “Oh Teddy, really, you have to come this year. You ought to come this year. Lily wants to show you her watercolors.” Lily is the oldest of Ernest and Mary’s three little daughters. “And your mom would like you here.” Continue reading →
The Adventures of Mr. Id–part 4
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Part IV
The pleasant activity of snorting in those odors was interrupted when Stanwurst, quite unexpectedly, slapped him on the back. It took a second or two for Charles to comprehend that his intent was bonhomie, not violence.
“How’s your father?” Stanwurst boomed. “How’s Old Hank?”
Old Hank was the absolute last person Charles wanted to think about at that moment but now his father’s visage appeared on the screen of his brain: the skull-like head and tight jawline and straw blond hair now turned straw white. The face his father wore at home, tight-lipped and temples always at the throb was so contrary to the one they knew at Harvard: the jovial, avuncular crew coach, so long a Crimson icon. Hank drove his boys hard, but they loved Continue reading →
Border Patrol
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 9 comments
Green Kingfisher
In March of 2006 I gave a talk and reading at the University of North Texas, which is in Denton, an agreeable prairie city north of Dallas. A week later I attended the AWP conference in Austin, a lot of fun—Gessner and I were on a panel together about science writing, I think it was. In between I drove down to the Aransas National Wildlife Preserve north of Corpus Christie and about wore out my binoculars on all the unfamiliar bird species I was spotting, a great time of year to be there, hot and dry and migrations in progress. From Aransas I had a look at Corpus Christie and all the people driving on the tar-stained beach at Padre Island, then down to Brownsville, the very southern tip of the state, tropical characteristics, where I found the mouth of the Rio Grande (and many birds I Continue reading →
The Adventures of Mr. Id–part 3
categories: Cocktail Hour
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PART III
Everyone now focused on finishing their meals. Kronin, with his pinched ant-like face, paused, and with the slightest smile, gestured at the small blood stain on Charles’s plate, the only evidence that it had once held food.
“You must have been quite hungry,” Kronin said.
Just a droll little comment from a droll little person, but at first Charles took it entirely the wrong way. Was this a challenge? he wondered. An insult? Did this pale aged stick of man really want to fight? Kronin had gained a sort of scientific celebrity back in the 70s by extrapolating the lessons he’d learned from ant society into the world of human beings. What, Charles wondered, was the protocol for battle within his beloved ant colonies? How should he respond? Should he mock Kronin’s food, too?
Cowboy Words
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 38 comments
Absquatulating Cowboy
I’ve been collecting oddball words for many years, always called them cowboy words, since they sound to me made up to cover situations smart but poorly educated wild-west types might find themselves in, certainly the case with “absquatulate.” I’d like any help you might have with etymologies and meanings of the following (beyond the usual dictionary stuff), but also citations—where have you seen these words lately? But most of all I’d like more words for the list. Any candidates? And are these really of a type? I notice a lot of double vowels, a Continue reading →
The Adventures of Mr. Id–part 2
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
I’m heading back to the Gulf of Mexico again for a week and this time likely won’t be blogging. While I’m gone I’ve decided to serialize the first section of The Adventures of Mr. Id, which is the opening of a novel I wrote three summers ago. It may be the first novel to be based on a Youtube video, since I got the idea while filming my own little film, Transformation. I have always been obsessed with transformations, loving werewolves and Altered States and having re-read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde not long before deciding to try my own hand at the form with this project.
PART II
Charles was saved from his moment of unease by a high-pitched and raucous tintinnabulation at the end of the table. The noise flew formless through the air, insensible, indecipherable, out of place, until his mind arranged it into what it was: the clinking of glasses in a toast. He was busy trying to actually visualize the tinkling serenade, wondering if it were truly possible to see sound molecules with the bare eye, when the noise called forth a great breaching at the table’s far end, like trumpets announcing an emergence. And so it was: there rose Dean Stanwurst, pale and bibulous and proud, smiling at the prospect of monologue, a great hog of a man breathing in deeply as he prepared to go about his usual business of boring them all to death. He held up his glass as if ready to toast but anyone who had ever encountered him before knew that we would be some minutes until they got to drinking. Continue reading →
