Cocktail Hour
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Driving Mr. Albert,” by Michael Paterniti
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Mike Paterniti
Working in a bookstore affords me the enviable opportunity to read things hot off the press, sometimes even earlier, with galleys and advanced reader’s copies. But occasionally the deluge can become overwhelming and then it’s time to go back to the dusty stack in the corner and grab that long-neglected classic, the one you’d always meant to read… Recently I did just that with Michael Paterniti’s classic from 2000, Driving Mr. Albert: A Trip Across America With Einstein’s Brain. Continue reading →
Anxious Bode in the House of God
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Anxious Bode
Back when Anxious Bode was still just Thierry, we were trying to blend in, my folks and I, and we were observing and copying what the crowd did on this Sunday morning in Saint Michael. I was living in Lincoln Park, near North Chicago. My parents were visiting from France for Christmas. There was snow on the ground, and a sharp wind as we walked the cobbled streets leading to church. It should have been easy—we were all Catholics, even if some of us were foreign—and in a sense it was. Until the offertory. The silence that fell on the congregation as members prepared their donations impressed us with the necessity to be ready when our time would come. We were quick to notice that the man who collected the donations, did so with the help of a basket attached to a pole. He would push the basket through the pews, serving the farthest away first, and retreating toward the aisle. My father-Anxious Senior—was not entirely ready when our turn came. He could not find decent bills to put in the basket. He gathered all the coins that he had accumulated in every American store he’d gone to. When the deacon stopped at our pew and vigorously pushed the basket in front of us, my father, worried he’d miss his chance, lunged. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Over Six Feet by Solstice (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Ostrich Fern
“Big Bend” is Back and Better than Ever!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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The University of Georgia Press recently re-issued my book of stories, Big Bend, in a new paperback edition, and, for the first time, as an e-book. So bug your local bookstore, and load up your e-reader! Continue reading →
Up Shit Creek (Or, Dawson’s Creek is Full of Shit, the Actual Creek, not the Show)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Here is my essay from the last print issue of OnEarth magazine:
To get to the island I push off from my own backyard. I did not become a homeowner until I was 49 years old, and perhaps the greatest pleasure of this property in coastal North Carolina is that water laps its edges. In this way, and by the liquid tendril of a salt marsh, I am connected to so many other places in the watery world, and given enough energy, time, supplies, and fair weather, I could paddle to the end of my creek, bang a left, and end up back on the beaches of Cape Cod, the place I moved here from. My journey today is more modest: I am paddling my kayak downstream to a neighbor’s dock, where I will ready it for tomorrow’s three-mile trip east to Masonboro, one of the few undeveloped barrier islands left in this region, where my friend Hones and I will camp for four days. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Let’s Write Some Fiction
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Let’s write some fiction. First, we need a character, a time, and a place, everything as usual.
Jack arrived at the shoe store at nine Monday morning as usual, tidied as usual, unlocked the door as usual at ten to the quiet mall. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: “Tough Island,” by Crash Barry (episode 25)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Lunch wagon
My pal Tommy loved Claire, who worked the lunch wagon, the island’s only restaurant. Problem was, Claire was married to Todd, Tommy’s captain. A complicated triangle. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Na Pali Sea Cave Sojourn (a Hawaiian photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Bottom of a 1200 foot waterfall ending in a sea cave, wow.
Lundgren’s Lounge: “The Painter,” by Peter Heller
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Here’s a book to add to the summer reading list: The Painter by Peter Heller. Though highly recommended, I began this story with guarded expectations and then was slowly and inexorably seduced by the voice and ethos of the novel’s narrator, Jim Stegner. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Try This Little Exercise in Empathy
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The other day I was re-reading Robert Richardson’s Splendor of Heart, a short and wonderful memoir of his (and my) teacher, Walter Jackson Bate. The second half of the book consists of an interview with Bate, conducted by John Paul Russo, in which Bate compares the temperaments of Samuel Johnson and John Keats, both of whom he had written biographies of.
“Johnson is so psychologically snarled up in ways and had a much rougher life than Keats,” Bate said. “Keats had a tragic, early death, but Johnson was by far the unhappier person.”
Of course I loved the phrase “psychologically snarled up” and underlined it. But later I got to thinking about the idea of comparing what it felt like to be in two different writer’s, two different people’s, minds—that is what it felt like to inhabit their inner worlds. And I started to play a little game. I thought of five of my friends and began to kind of rank them from whose mind would be least pleasant to inhabit, on a minute by minute level, to whose would be more pleasant, or healthier.
Obviously this sort of listing is superficial. But what came along with it was less so. I found I was actually imagining how one of my friends dealt with anxiety, how she sometimes gave into it and sometimes kept it at bay, the courage required as well as the failures of nerve. In other words what started as a game led to a deeper imagining of what it felt to be inside someone’s skin, something that, I think you’ll agree, is good for a writer (and human). Continue reading →
