Cocktail Hour
Kirkus Loves our Bill
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 6 comments
Things have been kind of quiet this summer at Bill and Dave’s but that is about to change. For one thing, there is a certain novel that is about to take the world by storm (if you know what I’m saying). Publication day is October 14. Publisher is, once again, Algonquin Books.
Here’s what Kirkus Reviews has to say about The Remedy for Love, in the very first pre-publication review to appear:
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KIRKUS REVIEWS
The Remedy For Love
by Bill Roorbach
A closely observed meditation on isolation and loneliness “in a world in which no social problem was addressed till it was a disaster.”
Eric is a middle-aged “small-town lawyer with no cases,” struggling with separation and lost love, when he lays eyes on a young woman in the supermarket line who’s just such a disaster. Danielle is a hot mess brimming with suspicion and hostility, to say nothing of being hobbled by a bad sprain and no immediate prospects. When Eric helps her with her groceries—and then, episode by episode, with bits of her torn-up life—young Danielle responds mostly with cagey bitterness, dismissing the train wreck that is her existence with tossed-off observations like “[p]eople are complicated.” Yes, they are, and Danielle—if that is her real name, for, as she tells him, it’s “Danielle, for now”—is more complicated than most. Set against the backdrop of a howling Maine blizzard (“Storm of the Century, that’s what I heard,” says Eric. “Of course that’s what they always say”), Roorbach’s story never takes an expected or easily anticipated turn. Eric makes a project of Danielle, a project that brings some glimmer of meaning into his life. Danielle, in turn, resents being made into said project. She’s an exceedingly strange bird, but strange is better than nothing—maybe, for Danielle is harboring enough secrets to keep an NSA agent busy for years. “I’m sure I lied,” she tells Eric, simply, in one typical exchange. And so she has, though she has her reasons, which we learn as Roorbach’s superbly grown-up love story unfolds.
Lyrical, reserved and sometimes unsettling—and those are the happier moments. Another expertly delivered portrait of the world from Roorbach (Life Among Giants, 2012, etc.), that poet of hopeless tangles. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Wait Till the Last Minute Like Me!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
It’s still Wednesday, by nine minutes. I just want to say: don’t wait. Not only don’t wait till the last minute like me, but don’t wait. So many times an acquaintance with a great book idea or story to tell will describe it and then say: Can’t wait to get started. What they mean by that is: I’m waiting to get started. Till I have some time off. Till the kids are grown. Till I’m done with grad school. Till, till, till, till, till. Continue reading →
Some Nice Person Put This Together and Put it on Twitter
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
Serial Sunday: “Tough Island,” by Crash Barry (Episode 29)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Serial Sunday
comments: 3 comments
Captain Emery
“You know what ruined this island?” Captain Emery asked, slurring his words because the orange juice mixed with moonshine from his basement still was powerfully strong. “Radio! Radio ruined this island!” Continue reading →
Lungren’s Lounge: “The Last Magazine,” by Michael Hastings
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Michael Hastings
Michael Hastings was the personification of a modern day journalistic Zelig. Beginning his career as an unpaid intern at Newsweek magazine, he began covering the invasion of Iraq when his fiancee, working for an NGO, was killed in an ambush that received international attention and resulted in his first book, I Lost My Love in Baghdad. He later wrote a piece for Rolling Stone magazine that described the barely-concealed disdain that high-ranking military officials felt towards the politicians in charge of the war effort. The resultant political and media shitstorm ended with the resignation of Gen. Stanley McChrystal, commander of U.S. forces in Afghanistan and Hastings’ award winning book, The Operators. He next turned his attention to the Occupy Wall Street movement and the secretive surveillance of the movement by Homeland Security, and then penned a profile of Bowe Bergdahl, long before Bergdahl became the subject of international fascination after his release from Taliban captors in a prisoner exchange. Continue reading →
The Song of Valerie Macon
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
The Song of Valerie Macon
In the land of Pat McCrory,
Where we all live Art Pope’s story,
Where we all must praise the fetus,
Or else be damned as an elitist,
Came a poet brave and true.
Came a poet brave and true.
Not some fancy, school-learned bard,
Using words that are too hard,
No! A rhymer for the masses,
(When she wasn’t taking classes,
Or awards she wasn’t fakin’,)
In she strode, our Valerie Macon.
My Budding Ears, or, On Being an E-Hypocrite
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
Dawson, sad about his creek
I’ve spent an inordinate amount of time on Facebook over the last 14 hours (these hours included eight hours of Facebookless sleep) which of course leaves me feeling a little bit guilty, unworthy of the serious writer mantle that I like to wear (except in summer). Part of this spasm of activity was due to the fact that Salon picked up my “Up Shit Creek” piece and then a few other places picked it up after that. Which is to say I enjoyed the small ego buzz of being noticed while at the same time cringed at the exhibitionist spectacle of yet another author (in this case me) waving his arms around and yelling “Hey, look!”
But that’s not entirely fair–to myself or others–and what I’d like to try to be here is fair, or at least a little balanced, rather than blasting away, in grumbling old man fashion, at all things E. I’ve been doing a lot of that this summer by the way. Grumbling and cursing. With good reason. As bad as it was back on the campus in Wilmington, it’s much worse in Harvard Yard. You have to remember that here, unlike in the South, people never said hello or looked at each other in the first place. Now there’s not a chance of it happening. At night they all stagger around the Yard like zombies, their faces lit up by the machines they stare down into. To further insulate themselves, many of them have buds in their ears and talk out loud with no one around like packs of schizophrenics.
And so I have muttered and cursed my way through the summer. One night, with my poor appalled daughter walking next to me, I started actually accosting the i-people, saying things like “What are the orders from central control?” or “What is the robot leader telling you?” “Dad!” Hadley yelled. Until that moment she had through the height of being appalled was the fact that neither of her parents owned an i-phone.
But of course, like everyone else this side of Wendell Berry, I am a big fat hypocrite. In the late spring, training to run a 5k with Hadley, I broke down and bought an i-pod. Maybe I once romanticized running, liking the animal aspect, but at this point it is everything I can do to run 3 Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: On Getting It All Wrong
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
I re-discovered George Orwell in a Paris bookstore in July of 2013. I was scanning a case of books about Paris, hoping to find a title that would help me better savor the pleasures of the city, when I spotted a forlorn copy of Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London on the bottom shelf, eclipsed by the glitzier travel offerings. I brought it back to my hotel and started it that afternoon.
As I read Orwell’s nonfiction account of living and working among the lower classes in two of Europe’s capitals—washing dishes in the basement of a swanky Parisian hotel, sleeping with the homeless in Trafalgar Square, picking hops with migrant workers in the London suburbs—I was astonished at how beautifully and insightfully he captured the lives and conditions of the poor and marginalized members of his time. His analysis of poverty, its causes and effects, struck me as deeply relevant for today, since Orwell was writing at a time of swelling industrialization and an increasingly globalized economy.
Down and Out sent me into Orwell’s other writings about the poor and oppressed classes of his time. He chronicled the horrific working conditions of miners in the north of England in The Road to Wigan Pier; he gave an account of sleeping in homeless shelters in “The Spike”; he depicted the oppressed peoples of the British empire in “Shooting an Elephant” and “A Hanging.” I found all of these analyses equally penetrating and eloquent.
Continue reading →
The New Ecotone is Coming!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The cat is out of the bag. Our summer issue is now at the printer and heading for newsstands soon. Look for new essays by Belle Boggs, Joni Tevis, and Ander Monson; poems by David Barber, Carrie Fountain, Vievee Francis, Margaree Little, Dexter L. Booth, and Melissa Range; and Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island” (Episode 28)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Serial Sunday
comments: 2 comments
Edwin and Nan dropped me off on Route One. My cardboard hitchhiking sign read: “PORTLAND: Poet, will rhyme for ride!” Tall and strong, with long hair and a beard, I looked like a cross between Charles Manson and Jesus Christ. The first ride gave me a lift as far as Waldoboro. Continue reading →
