Cocktail Hour
Great Minds, Little Minds
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 9 comments
One of the deepest pleasures of reading literature is being in the presence of great minds. Please note that I didn’t say socially-responsible minds or consistent minds or minds that are exactly in step with how we are told we should think in the year 2015. I said great.
Conversely, one of the frustrations of the present is what you might call the tyranny of the small and rigid-minded. To be honest I’m not a big reader of magazine articles, though I sometimes write them, and I especially avoid pieces where I know I’ll end up feeling like I’ve been dragged down into the muck. “Largeness is a lifelong matter,” said Wallace Stegner. For some people so is smallness.
All this to say that I tried to avoid the recent New Yorker piece on Henry David Thoreau, despite the fact that more than a few people pushed it on me. With a title that seemed more suited for reality TV than a New Yorker piece–“Pond Scum”–you pretty much knew what you were going to get before reading it: a straight take-down piece that was meant to get hits and attention (look–it worked!).
The piece is consistently unpleasant, dragging out the boring old Thoreau laundry crap that we thought Rebecca Solnit had finally swept away years ago, but it is also, in its own strange way, kind of funny. Funny in that its author seems to be completely unaware that she embodies exactly what she criticizes in Thoreau. This is a writer (Schulz not Thoreau) who seems to love broad statements about what humans are and what they should be, who speaks with an apparently never-wavering sense of certainty, and who is always insisting on consistency in the way of the Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Fall Color (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Photo Haiku
comments: 1 comment
Bad Advice Wednesday: Make Your Own Work
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Movies
comments: 4 comments
Vasilios, cast and crew, Sixty Grades of Cray
Last November, I directed a movie from a script I had written.
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Lundgren’s Lounge: “The Narrow Road,” by Richard Flanagan
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
comments: Comments Off on Lundgren’s Lounge: “The Narrow Road,” by Richard Flanagan
I have been a fan of Tasmanian writer Richard Flanagan ever since reading Gould’s Book of Fish (Stuart Gersen’s all-time favorite novel). Flanagan’s work might at first seem preoccupied with man’s abject cruelty to his fellows, as many of the stories take place in wretched prison settings. But if one looks more closely, there is a discernible thread weaving itself through through each narrative, examining the nature and limitations of human love and man’s capacity to endure the most dire circumstances.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Celebrate! (Or How I Won the U.S. Open)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
I’ve always been jealous of the way tennis players act when they win tournaments. The way they hurl their racquets in the air, drop to their knees, lift their arms to sky, lie on their backs. The way they exult in a manner that you rarely see in other professions.
Writing, for instance.
It’s been my experience that almost every writing triumph, no matter how large or small, comes with some qualification. Trained to deal with rejection, we are wary of jubilation. We know that after the rise will come the fall. We temper triumphs with the word “But” followed by some discounting phrases. Our inner Bill Belichicks squash whatever celebration we hoped for.
But this August, watching the U.S. Open and witnessing players in the throes of joyous celebration, I decided I wanted some of it. I vowed that the next time something good happened I wouldn’t immediately reach for my qualifiers but would do a little reveling instead.
Save the Shack!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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We all have a place where our writing comes from and we should do all we can to protect that place. Alas, I left home at 5 am yesterday without even putting up the plywood window protector on the windows of my writing shack. It was muggy in North Carolina but the first I heard about a hurricane was when I landed in Montana (71 and dry). Now, if I understand it correctly, Joaquin Phoenix is taking aim at the shack. Here are some pictures from earlier this week BEFORE a new storm was thrown into the mix. With the rains and super moon there was already 2 feet of water inside. Not sure if it will be there when I get back Monday….
Anxious Bode Tries Out at the Comedy Cellar
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns
comments: 2 comments
Thierry Kauffmann, aka Anxious Bode
Hi, I’m Anxious. I want to thank Bill and Dave’s Comedy Grotto for inviting me to try out for the Comedy hour. But let’s get right to it! I love flying. I do. Getting on the plane can be tricky with Parkinson’s, but once I’m seated, I’m good. Now I’m supposed to make jokes about airplanes and flying and how horrible the food is. Actually the food is pretty good, especially the stuff that doesn’t land on the floor. Have you ever seen the floor of an airplane? Amazing what you find. I was looking for my dessert. Still wrapped in its aluminum foil. I started leaning back at around 4:45pm. At 5pm I was so low I could actually reach the dessert. My neighbor was down too. He had lost his smartphone. So we were both down. He looked panicked. In a cheerful way. He was an actor. Expecting calls. I thought I would help him. Continue reading →
OBITS
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
We are lucky to have this beautiful essay on facing death by my former student and current friend, Tara Thompson.
OBITS
“Sometimes you wake up. Sometimes the fall kills you. And sometimes, when you fall, you fly.”
—Neil Gaiman, The Sandman, Vol. 6: Fables and Reflections
The doctor shows it to me on my CT scan as I prop myself up in the bendy, mechanical hospital bed where I’ve spent several consecutive, restless nights with an IV trickling into my veins. You see, here, he points to the computer screen, that’s fluid, which isn’t good, and this is where most of the damage is, scar tissue in your upper lobes. (I’ve been told already by other doctors that this recent lung disease is probably from the chemo and radiation I had years ago for my former disease: leukemia. How many diseases must one person have?) The pneumonia is colonizing here, he says.
Colonizing? I think that was the word he used. With the IV Dilaudid, Phenergan, and antibiotics coursing through my body, I visualize a colorful map of the thirteen original colonies and images of Pilgrims and Indians fighting each other. These lungs I am viewing stand alone on a textbook page or pixilate on a computer screen. They are not the ones inside my body. Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Lounge: “How to Cook a Moose,” by Kate Christensen
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 1 comment
Early in her career author Kate Christensen consistently published some of the smartest, cleverest and most entertaining works in contemporary fiction (The Astral, The Epicure’s Lament and The Great Man. among others). Then she turned her extraordinary talents to memoir with Blue Plate Special; An Autobiography of My Appetites. Now she offers a love affair to her newly adopted home of Maine and the unique culinary culture flourishing there, in How to Cook a Moose: A Culinary Memoir (Islandport Press). Continue reading →
