Cocktail Hour
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Shotgun Lovesongs” by Nickolas Butler
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Sometimes it’s hard to discern why a piece of literature resonates so deeply. In the case of Shotgun Lovesongs by Nickolas Butler I’m still unsure… is it the way that Butler so perfectly and evocatively depicts the culture of small-town Wisconsin, where I was born and raised and spent the first three decades of my life? Might it be the clear narrative connection with the musician known as Bon Iver, whose music has been haunting me since I first heard it? Or maybe it’s simply the breathtaking storytelling talent of first time novelist Butler? Continue reading →
Great Advice Thursday: Don’t be a Dummy. Get Health Insurance Now.
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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March 31 Deadline to sign up for this year. If your application is in progress by that date, you will be included!
Self-employed folks, adjunct profs, artists, musicians, under-insured, catastrophic coverage drones, uninsured friends: take notice: I just jettisoned my catastrophic coverage ($15,000 deductible PER PERSON per year at $684 a month, 3 people, criminal), in favor of a far more generous policy ($4000 deductible for all 3!), with out-of-pockets caps, etc.). I was under the impression from quick looks at the Health.gov site earlier and invidious rumors that I’d be paying more, but with the under-heralded automatic tax credit for families making under, like, 94K, the new amount here is $419 a month. I could have gone $10,000 deductible for $129 a month!). Thank you Obamacare. And fuck you Fox News and half our governors and every Republican in Congress for all the disinformation. It’s still not single-payer, but it’s something! The health insurance marketplace works, it’s far cheaper for all of us (lies aside), and it’s going to save my ass. No doubt surprises loom, but after five years of paying a great deal for NOTHING (but denials of service), I’m pretty happy, and can’t believe I waited even this long. Deadline for this year is March 31, get on it.
Here’s the link for the Health Insurance Marketplace. I’d suggest using the site, which any 12 year old should be able to understand, as brokers just add expense. You’ll find bronze policies, which are cheap and basic, silver, gold, and maybe platinum. Remember that health insurance is not the same as healthcare, and you get nowhere comparing your healthcare expenses for a year with projected premiums. What you are getting is production against financial disaster if you fall sick, get in an accident, etc. But most of all, don’t fall for the bullshit.
I put this call to action in a public post on Facebook last week, and what follows is the passionate and sometimes hilarious public dicussion that ensued. Feel free to join in here or there. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: A Yurt of One’s Own
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I am thrilled to announce the publication of The Map of Enough: One Woman’s Search (Counterpoint Press, March 2014) by Molly Caro May.I was lucky enough to read an early copy and this was my response: “To read The Map of Enough is to go on a joyful adventure of retreat. It doesn’t hurt that our guide on that adventure is the exuberant, complex, thoughtful, funny and boisterous Molly Caro May, a placeless woman trying to find her place. It turns out that that place is a yurt in Montana, which, by story’s end, seems as archetypal as Thoreau’s cabin. In sentences that are beautiful and lyric, but also as resilient and tough as the woman writing them, May makes us think about our own lives and how we choose to pass our days on earth. By book’s end most readers will wish their own lives were simpler and more elemental, and, with the author’s encouragement, may just set out to make them that way.”
Since you can’t live in Molly’s Yurt, today’s bad advice is “find a yurt of your own.” (It may be a metaphoric yurt.) Here’s an excerpt from the book. (Background info: Chris is Molly’s husband, Diane her neighbor, Bru her Great Dane mix dog.)
Winter was on its way. In mid-October, the grass outside our yurt sparkled blue with frost, but no snow like the first snow last year that slowed our yurt process. I grabbed Chris’s hand and we stepped further into a blue-gray world.
Lie down with me, I said when we reached the sponge grass.
I did not want to charge the moment by turning to love on him, or have him love on me, no. He hadn’t rested here for longer than a minute and I thought he should know about it.
This is more comfortable than our futon, he said, arms flung out widely.
We are growing up, I said.
Mmmm.
Late Encounters with Flannery O’Connor
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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The zenith of my literary fanboy life surely came in those minutes I sat on Flannery O’Connor’s toilet.
Blame it on the Chinese food. For weeks, I’d looked forward to this moment: the day I would first set foot inside Flannery’s childhood home. I’d Googled, I’d Mapquested, I’d made dry runs on the route through southern Georgia, I’d Wise Blood-ed myself to death. But now something stood in the way of Complete Flannery Fulfillment: the Chinese food.
Two hours before our arrival in downtown Savannah, my wife and I stopped for a quick meal of meat, vegetables and MSG. The food was good and quickly settled into our stomachs. In my case, it also traveled farther south at an alarming pace. Continue reading →
Absinthe
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
comments: 2 comments
“After the first glass, you see things as you wish they were. After the second, you see things as they are not. Finally, you see things as they really are, and that is the most horrible thing in the world.” — Oscar Wilde
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Absinthe. Wormwood. The Green Fairy. Rumors of hallucination and poisoning have surrounded this emerald drink since Oscar Wilde said it made him see flowers growing in cafes, but in truth, it is simply very strong alcohol—over one hundred proof—and has been legal in the United States since 2007. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: “Tough Island” by Crash Barry: Episode 18
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Last summer, Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour began serializing Crash Barry’s gritty memoir Tough Island. Then, in August, Crash took a break from Bill and Dave’s in order to turn his novel Sex, Drugs and Blueberries into a feature film. Now, he’s back and ready to finish telling the rest of his true stories from his time living and working on Maine’s most remote island. Click here for episodes 1 to 17.
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The morning after Donald fired me, I emptied my room and stowed all my gear at Benny and Paul’s, then flew off the island and hitchhiked to southern Maine. I knew I’d return to Matinicus because I had no place else. When I arrived at Alice’s, I called Captain Edwin Mitchell. Word on the island was he was looking for help. I didn’t know Edwin, other than to wave, but he was Paul’s uncle and Paul had a phone number for him down south where he was having a vacation. Edwin was well-known as a lone wolf who stayed out of island politics and didn’t belong to any of the lobster mafia families. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Wipe Out!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This is from my essay, “Learning to Surf” which appeared in Orion magazine in 2006 and won the John Burroughs award for best nature essay:
Of course the year didn’t conclude triumphantly with me astride the board, trumpets blaring, as I road that great wave to shore. I kept surfing into late fall, actually getting up a few times. But then one day I abruptly quit. On that day “it” was big, much too big for a beginner like me. I should have understood this when I had trouble paddling out, the waves looming up above me before throwing my board and self backward. And I should have understood this as I waited for the waves, the watery world lifting me higher than ever before. But despite the quiet voice that told me to go home, I gave it a try, and before I knew it I was racing forward, triumphant and exhilarated, at least until the tip of my board dipped under and the wave bullied into me from behind, and I was thrown, rag-doll style, and held under by the wave. Then I was tossed forward again and the board, held to my foot by a safety strap, recoiled and slammed into my head. I did not black out: I emerged and staggered to the shore and touched my hand to the blood and sand on my face. The next night I taught my History of the Essay class with a black eye.
Take a Course with Dave (or Nina) This Summer
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Nina, Hadley and I will be spending the summer in Cambridge, back in the same apartment Hadley spent her second and third months. We will both be teaching classes at Harvard Summer School. Mine will be an advanced creative nonfiction workshop, with some of my ideas on the writing life bleeding in, on Monday and Wed nights (Bad Advice Wednesday–Live!) while Nina’s will be an advanced fiction workshop on the novel.
Here’s the link to register: http://www.summer.harvard.edu/courses/32836.
Here’s the info on mine:
CREA S-108r Advanced Creative Nonfiction
In this course we read and write in a variety of narrative nonfiction genres. Students write, workshop, and revise two pieces over the course of the term, one of which will grow out of class exercises. We also study the work of writers such as Vivian Gornick, John Jeremiah Sullivan, Joan Didion, and Richard Rodriguez. We experiment with less traditional forms like the braided essay, but also look at the way journalism and literature can meet in work like Sullivan’s. We break down the essays we read and think about the way we build up our own essays. Students should have some previous workshop experience and should bring a 500-word writing sample to the first class
(4 credits)
And on Nina’s:CREA S-105r Advanced Fiction: The Novel
Bad Advice Wednesday: UCLA Q and A, with Rona Elliot
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Virtual Bill
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Recently writer and professor Shawna Kenney invited me to take part in an online class at the UCLA Extension Writers Program, visiting virtually by way of Blackboard. Students asked questions, I did my best to answer, and discussion ensued. I got permission from a number of students to use their questions, and I got permission from myself to use my answers. Today my interlocutor is Rona Elliot. Continue reading →
