Cocktail Hour
Dave, Lost and Wandering, Part III
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
This is part 3 of a series. Here is Part 1 and Part 2.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Get Parkinson’s Disease
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 11 comments
Anxious Bode
-Good morning! Welcome to the writers show. Today we welcome Anxious Bode, writer, distinguished professor of panic at Frost University. Anxious is the founder of the magazine Milk Shake. Professor Bode we’re happy to have you with us.
-Call me Anxious. Continue reading →
Meet Me at the River
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
I am proud and delighted to announce that today marks the release of my wife Nina de Gramont’s new book, Meet Me at the River. It is being published by Atheneum Books, an imprint of Simon & Schuster for young adult readers.
I have spent the last few days in the world of Tress and Luke, the not-really-quite siblings who fall in love, a love so deep, that as the jacket copy says, “not even Luke’s death can keep them apart.” The book is told in the alternating first person voices of the two characters, and begins with Luke paying ghostly visits to Tressa’s bedroom, where the two can see but not touch each other, and where they can talk freely except about anything that has happened since Luke’s death. They can also skate and ski, and do so down by the river where Luke drowned. One of the deep pleasures of the book is the gradual unraveling of the couple’s past and murky future. The language is lyric but energized, the portrait of young love alive (despite, you know), the sadness laced throughout. (If I were a young girl I’d be heading over to Amazon right now. It’s true that this is Bill and Dave’s and young girls are probably not our demographic, but I’m guessing a few of us have daughters (and sons) who read.) Continue reading →
Literary Death Match Portland, ME, 2013 (a primer in photos)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
My secret weapon
Bill is King!
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
Against all odds, Bouncin’ Bill Roorbach wins the Literary Death Match in Portland.
Hurricane Watch
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Photo by Coke Whitworth
Some of you may remember that last March I took a trip up the coast from North Carolina to New York with Duke coastal Orrin Pilkey, who has long warned against overbuilding on the shore. The idea was to follow the path of Sandy and see the results of the storm, while doing some thinking, and talking, about the future of our coasts. The story of that trip is available in this November’s Outside magazine (on the newsstands now) in a piece called “Down by the Seashore with Doctor Doom.”
One fact that somehow didn’t make it into the final article was that traveling along with us in our car were giant cartoons of Bill and Dave. Or, as I wrote in the first draft:
We push off and head into Durham to pick up Jeremy Lange, the photographer for the magazine that is funding our trip. Jeremy seems a nice guy, young and clearly accomplished: both Orrin and I saw his recent spread of pictures in the New York Times sports pages on the former Duke player, Jason Williams, who almost died in a motorcycle crash.
Jeremy tries to jam his equipment into the back of my rental car.
“What are those things?” he asks Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Last Car Over the Sagamore Bridge,” by Peter Orner
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 1 comment
Peter Orner
Bad Advice Wednesday: Steal from the Great
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
Balzac, After cup # 36
As I’ve mentioned here before, I am teaching a class called “The Writing Life,” and before each class we have gotten in the habit of reciting a little benediction. Specifically, I read a couple passages from Mason Currey’s new book, Daily Rituals: How Great Minds Make Time, Find Inspiration And Get To Work. It’s a terrific book, full of short passages that describe the routines of some of history’s greatest writers, artists, and scientists. You can learn about Balzac gulping down his fifty cups of coffee, or Margaret Mead getting up at 5, or, conversely, Jackson Pollock starting each day bright and fresh at 1 pm. Read a few of these and you will discover they are contagious. they all convey the excitement–the thrill really–of doing creative work.
Oliver Burkeman, in a review in the Guardian, admits that there is great variety among the lives and habits of the great, but then aptly boils the book down to “six lessons from history’s most creative minds.”
1. Be a Morning Person (With exceptions)
2. Don’t Give up the Day Job (You know that free time you’ve been longing for? It might kill you. Or at least drive you crazy.) Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: “Original and Solitary Lovers” (Another Great Short Story by John J. Clayton)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Short Stories
comments: Comments Off on Serial Sunday: “Original and Solitary Lovers” (Another Great Short Story by John J. Clayton)
“I am getting used to considering every sexual act as a process involving four individuals.” -Freud in an 1899 letter to Fleiss.
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But why, my beauty, stop at four? Of course, yes, there’s my mother, never one to diminish her importance, filling the bed as she filled a room, and your father, critical of the whole world, especially his family. They take up a lot of space. Hardly any left for us. But that’s hardly the end of it; it gets much worse. For there’s also my father, weighing in at 200 blustering pounds, swinging that belly of his around the bed, and your mother, who, God knows, never stopped talking, never stopped talking never. Continue reading →
