Cocktail Hour
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Epicure’s Lament” by Kate Christiensen
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Kate Christensen
Hugo Whittier, protagonist of Kate Christensen’s beguiling novel The Epicure’s Lament, is an incorrigible cad to rival any similar miscreant in recent American literature. Hugo is not a criminal exactly, unless we are talking about moving through life without the slightest regard for the basic laws of social niceties. What he is, is brutally honest, without artifice or any semblance of regard for the feelings of the various targets of his invective. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Toss the Noodle at the Wall
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Snow and Snowys Part II
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The snow has started in earnest now. Just got back from West Dennis beach where I watched a snowy in a tree. They are such a vibrant white that they shine out against the pale landscape, but if we get the expected snowfall the bird’s camouflage will be working again tomorrow.
From the tree it flew to its next perch, pictured below. After it flew off again, I asked David Rotman to take a picture of the nest from up close so I could write about it later. A guy nearby thought that we thought it was the owl’s own nest. “It’s just an osprey nest,” he explained to me.
The Snow Owl
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I am back on Cape Cod (“where I belong” are the next words that spring to mind.) Saturday was my first night here and when the light shafted down on the beach and bog after a day of rain I fell right back in love. Color and light like nowhere else (except maybe Iceland, where I looked out during a stopover on a flight to Europe and swore I was in East Dennis). My goal here is to, in Melville’s words, “take a book off the brain.” It has been a long time since I have spent full days writing to the exclusion of all else. It isn’t easy–this morning was a bitch until I had a “formal” breakthrough–but it’s undeniably great. I was worried I might go crazy being here alone, and while I still might, I am excited about the big writing days ahead. My companion in all this is Buddy, who I am dog-sitting for.
While writing is my top priority here, I thought it would be nice to have a complementary quest. I’ve always loved quest books where the quest is never quite completed. The Snow Leopard comes to mind. And since I had heard there were snowy owls here, I decided that I would not just write a book but see an owl. I had seen one once before on my beach off of Sesuit Harbor fifteen years ago. It was just sitting there in the sand not ten feet away from me, an ambassador from the arctic.
So today I set out after a morning of writing, binoculars in hand. But the thing about quests is that they are supposed to be difficult, sometimes to the point of being impossible. My quest for the next three weeks will be a failure I’m afraid, not because what I sought was unattainable, but because it was too easily attained. What do I mean? Well, here are the results from day 1 at West Dennis Beach:
Getting Outside Saturday: The Garden Keeps on Giving (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Purple Peruvian Potatoes
Bad Advice Wednesday: Why, Thank You Sir. I Do Have Great Tits!
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I was walking along the side of a road in rural Maine, on a hot July day. A rusty pickup truck, its rattle announcing its presence before the man in the driver’s seat became visible, slowed as it approached.
“Hey, big ol’ titties!”
I stood there, shocked, as the car sputtered off into the distance. Not because of what had been said. Because I had spent years living in a big city and it suddenly occurred to me that this was the first time in weeks that something like this had happened. Continue reading →
Howling with the Trickster: A Wild Memoir Part I
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Coyote by Hadley (a couple of years ago she wants me to add)
PART I. TRICKSTER IN THE CITY
Here is how it begins:
I am driving from Cambridge to Cape Cod to get my last load of belongings, my final trip before our move to the city. I am resolved to make this move, despite some apprehension. The sun is out and the snow melting when I start the drive, but by the time I reach the bridge at the canal the clouds have bulked up, and fifteen minutes later I am in the midst of something just short of a blizzard. Right after exit 8 the car in front of me slows and I slow to see why. There, by the side of the road, stands a beautiful black and gray coyote in its full winter coat. The coat gives it the illusion of great bulk, so that an inexperienced observer might think it a wolf. Snow swirls around the animal as it waits patiently at the very edge of the highway, waiting for a gap in the traffic to cross. I glance to my left, the north, toward the woods that are its destination. Then, before I pass, I get one last look at the coyote’s eyes. They shine orange. They are intelligent, watchful, intent.
It is that glimpse of the eyes that scrambles something inside me. Before then I had resolve, plans, deadlines. But the eyes introduce uncertainty. Somehow they change everything.
Getting Outside Saturday: Flying in Alaska
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Michael McBride
The throttle moves smoothly forward with the pressure from my left hand, as my right hand pulls the control stick back between my legs as far as it will go. The engine roars like a startled lion as it advances to twenty-three hundred rpm, and the floatplane lunges forward across the still surface of the remote mountain lake. Continue reading →
E.B. White and Me
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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“I am always humbled by the infinite ingenuity of the Lord, who can make a red barn cast a blue shadow.” —E.B. White, One Man’s Meat
During the years I worked on a memoir of farming, I learned that book folk interested in country matters wanted assurance my literary-agrarian pedigree was pure. Maybe that I had one. Those early draft-readers wondered if I’d read Wendell Berry and Wes Jackson. This irked me. Sure, I knew their work. Their writings on agriculture and American society have informed my thinking from my late teens; Berry’s Jayber Crow is one of my all-time favorite novels. Continue reading →
Meet the Keatles
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This essay originally appeared in this summer’s Oxford American:
