Cocktail Hour
Serial Sunday: Henry Miller’s Commandments for Young Writers
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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A photo of a page from a yellowed book has been going around Facebook: it’s Henry Miller’s commandments, just a note he jotted to himself while living and working in Paris, c. 1932. It’s collected in a New Directions paperback called Henry Miller on Writing. And he was a guy who had a lot to say on the subject. [here’s a great interview with him in The Paris Review]
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Getting Outside Saturday: Los Angeles (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Puddle in leaf beside sprinkler.
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Circle,” by Dave Eggers
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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From an inauspicious debut that became a publishing sensation, Dave Eggers has crafted a career remarkable for the breadth of its range across the worlds of literature, culinary arts, pop culture, politics, education and publishing. Eggers has parlayed the wholly unexpected success of his memoir, A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius, into a publishing powerhouse (McSweeney’s), two best-selling magazines (Lucky Peach and The Believer), a series of books focussing on the politics of incarceration and human rights abuses (Voice of Witness), a tutoring center for inner-city youth (826 Valencia) that now has an international presence and a ground-breaking series capturing the zeitgeist of literary pop culture (Best American Non-Required Reading). And oh yes, did I forget to mention that he has continued to write (Zeitoun, What Is the What, How we Are Hungry, A Hologram for the King), garnering nominations for the National Book Award, the Pulitzer and the National Book Critics Circle Award along the way? Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Let Politics In
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I don’t mean editorialize.
I don’t mean sound like you are on Fox or MSNBC.
I mean don’t erect a wall that separates the political from the rest of your writerly world. I mean don’t think that just because it is the current fashion to think that “literary writing” should be kept clean and separate from political writing doesn’t mean it should be.
As those of you who read this blog regularly know, I am working on a book about Wallace Stegner and Edward Abbey. One of the pleasures of studying the work of these two men is that even Continue reading →
Davey Does Harvard
categories: Cocktail Hour
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At my tenth college reunion I was an unemployed, unpublished ultimate Frisbee player. So it was kind of a big deal for me that on my thritieth I was one of five professors in my class of 1983 who were invited to give talks modelled on the Ted Talks and Harvard Thinks Big.
I was pretty nervous about it but it turned out to be a blast. It might be my favorite talk ever, and defintely to the most receptive audience I have ever had. It helps when everyone is exactly the same age with the same frame of reference.
The audio was good in the room, but not so great here. We were each asked to speak for ten minutes. Shockingly, I went long. Here is the talk:
Bizarre Copyright-Beating Pirate Computer Translation Attacks Invoice Roorbach
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Okay, this coming Sunday, November 10, my review of Eleanor Catton’s second novel, The Luminaries, will appear in the print edition of the The New York Times Book Review. The review has been online since October 16 in recognition of Ms. Catton’s winning the Booker Prize the day before, wonderful. But something strange–a friend googling to find the review came up with a site called Daily News. The photo of Ms. Catton is oddly stretched out, and then, so is my prose! Pirates! They’ve apparently used a computer program to slightly alter the text (no doubt in an effort to avoid the letter of copyright law, but maybe as a perverse courtesy, as they are no doubt in some other part of the world. I was given no by-line on their version, but the program did include my bio. I offer two paragraphs here for comparison. And my bio, which is meant to say: Bill Roorbach’s most recent book is Life Among Giants. He blogs at Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: See the Outer Banks Before They Are Gone
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Looks like bashing my adopted state is finally paying off. My piece on sea level deniers in N.C. is a finalist for Best Online Column or Blog in the Eddie/Ozzie Awards for media excellence:
* Chicago Magazine – Chicago Magazine, The 312
* Entertainment Weekly Magazine – Entertainment Weekly/EW.com
* Harvard Business Review – HBR.org
* OnEarth magazine – OnEarth.org, That Sinking Feeling: North Carolina Buries Its Head in the (Disappearing) Sand
Here’s the piece:
As you might have heard, my home state of North Carolina is trying to legislate against sea level rise. Having denied human nature by banning gay marriage, the legislators, feeling full of themselves, want to take on nature itself.
It all started when a group of respected scientists handed in a state-commissioned report that suggested that it would be prudent to anticipate a one-meter sea level rise along the state’s coastline by the year 2100. Not so fast, said a group of coastal developers, imagining all the soon-to-be underwater land they could no longer sell. With Orwellian brilliance, the developers decided to push for a ban — not on sea level rise itself (which is, even they might concede, impossible), but on any language that admits to it. And the legislators, exhausted from the hard work of dismantling the state education system and bashing gays, but still eager, agreed.
One of the small problems, both practical and intellectual, of this approach, is that there may be no more dramatic example of the effects of the rising sea than the state it may soon be banned in. [Ed.’s note: The bill requiring North Carolina agencies to ignore the latest scientific predictions of sea level rise passed the state legislature on Tuesday, the day after this commentary was published.] Hopefully the legislators don’t go to the beach in the summer, and so won’t be faced with this inconvenient truth. You could say they have buried their heads in the sand, though with regard to the Outer Banks, there may not be much sand left. Continue reading →
Kung Fu, Consciousness Change, and Sandy One Year Later
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Orrin Pilkey in Mantoloking (Photo by Jeremy Lange)
Today marks a year since Sandy hit the East Coast. The natural media tendency is to look for “lessons” on the anniversary of any big event. I won’t go that far but it is fair to say that I have noticed some changes since Sandy. When we followed the path of Sandy last February, Orrin Pilkey and I talked about how we were encouraged by the fact that suddenly people were at least talking about ideas that no one had been talking about during our earlier trips on the coast Maybe what was is surprising isn’t the fervor to re-build on the coast–that is same old, same old–but that this time there were actual murmurings about not re-building, and that those murmurings became official with the offer by New York State, backed by Governor Cuomo, to buy land and homes that was in the danger zone. Even the vain Weather Channel jocks, so proud to always be the only ones standing out in the storms (and so outraged when mere civilians dare to go outside and stand next to them) have begun to admit that things like climate change and stronger storms might just be real after all.
As for the damage from the storm itself, it was staggering, even when I saw it four months after Sandy hit. Here are some images taken my the photographer Jeremy M. Lange, who travelled with Orrin and I up the coast: A Sandy Gallery
And here is an excerpt from my Outside magazine piece of the moment when Orrin and I saw the worst of it:
All talking stops when we reach Mantoloking. Four months after the storm and the place still looks like it just survived aerial bombing. The signs of devastation here make that on Long Beach Island look mild. Crumpled houses, houses floating out in the bay, houses cracked in half with their innards—TVs, rugs, lamps, books, and in one even a comfortable looking easy chair—revealed, as if this were some giant’s diorama of a human habitation. All this time passed and the homes remain deserted, the power still off. Huge mansions lie splintered, and, on the bay side, formerly deep-water docks now float not on water but sand and debris. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Applying for an MFA Program? Whoa! Not So Fast
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Lee Martin
‘Tis the season when undergraduates’ thoughts turn toward applying for admission to an MFA program, which has me thinking of how different the culture is these days than it was when I got my B.A. in 1978. Although I knew I wanted to write, I also knew I needed a bit more seasoning. In those days, it was assumed that some much necessary time would pass between that undergraduate degree and the attempt to enter an MFA program. It was also very clear that the competition was fierce and admission wasn’t guaranteed. When I finally thought I was ready to try four years after that B.A., I wrote to the Associated Writing Programs and asked them for a list of MFA programs. When it arrived, it was a single sheet of 8 1/2” by 11” paper. The list from the front side continued on the back and stopped about half-way down the page. Continue reading →
