Cocktail Hour
Table for Two: An Interview with Lauren Grodstein
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Lauren Grodstein
Bill: If we could meet anywhere we wanted for a meal and a talk about your book, where would it be?
Lauren: If we could go anywhere to talk about my book, I think we’d go to my grandmother’s kitchen in the Bronx. Now, it’s possible I’m just saying that because it’s Jewish holiday season and I’m feeling nostalgic – my grandparents have been gone for seven years, and I haven’t been to the Bronx in almost as long. But if we were at her house, at her table, she’d keep bringing us food (whether we liked it or not), and it would all be delicious: gefilte fish she’d ground with her own hands, matzah ball soup, jars of canned black olives because she knows I love them. We’d tell her to sit and eat, but she wouldn’t. The food would keep coming: roast chicken or pepper steak or brisket with the kinds of vegetables that have gone all limp and gravy-logged. Kasha. We could talk about my book a little; it’s about Darwin and intelligent design and love and grief. But let’s say you happened to be a Creationist and I happened to be an Atheist and the discussion got heated – that’s when my grandmother would bring out the sweet cheese blintzes. And we’d forget whatever it was that we were arguing about and when we came up for air, we’d agree that there couldn’t be a sweeter place on earth than my grandmother’s table. Continue reading →
Gliding Down the Hill: Escaping to Boulder
categories: Cocktail Hour
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So I’ve written in here a lot about climbing hills on a bike. “Boy you overthink that stuff,” another writer friend who bikes said, and he has a point. I suppose there is something zealous, even military in posts like my last Bad Advice, Get on Your Bike.
So today, as a corrective, we are posting this video about gliding down the hill, not getting up it. It is full of grace and humor. And since we are all, more and more, faced with dealing with natural disasters, these kids provide good role models.
And finally it doesn’t hurt that the ride they are taking is one I have made, in both directions, a thousand or two times before. I recognize every inch. Gentlemen, start your unicycles.
Bad Advice Wednesday: Art is the Solving of Problems
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 6 comments
I had a friend so, so many years ago in NYC who was a kind of general artist, when that was newish. She painted, she sculpted, she performed (when you least expected it), she was into concept, and conceptual art. She’d say things like, “Imagine a column of air a mile in circumference and a twelve miles high.” And we’d sit around and truly imagine it. Then she’d report it stolen. And the police would come. And usually arrest her. Stuff like that. Anyway, she got the best job, probably the only job she could actually have held down, at one of the big department stores: Continue reading →
Food and The Flood
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Today we have a special guest star at Bill and Dave’s. Karen Auvinen, who writes and cooks with equal grace, spent the days of the flood in her home above Jamestown. This originally appered on her One Hot Kitchen blog:
Joe Howlett
Then, as reports started to seep in of the absolute devastation being suffered by my friends and community just 4-miles down canyon, I lost my appetite. Lost, I heard, was Joe Howlett’s home to a mud slide, and with it, dear Joey, the former owner of the Jamestown Mercantile for whom I cooked for many years. More stories of wreckage and ruin poured in: Houses disappearing into the current, others off their foundation; Jamestown Main street gone, replaced by a furious river running through town dividing survivors on either side. Helpless to do anything but stay put, I listened in the following days as Blackhawk helicopters slice the air overhead and lifted my friends to safety from what was now the ruins of the little town that has been both my home base for almost 20 years. Suddenly, my need to eat or not was replaced by the need to feed. In circumstances like this, the instinct is to reach for something familiar, and having something warm and home-cooked and prepared with loving hands can cover over so many wounds. Continue reading →
An Open Letter to Bill McKibben
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 16 comments
Dear Bill,
I have been meaning to write you for a while. As you may or may not know, I shoveled some criticism your way, along with a heap of praise, in my 2011 book, My Green Manifesto. The gist of the criticism was that you were reasonable and right, but lacked fighting spirit. To which I now say: Ha!
Boy, was I wrong about that one. Then I was reacting to the reasonable arguments of your book, Deep Economy ,which seemed obviously right but sometimes had a Jimmy Carter cardigan sweater sort of feel. But you have certainly taken that sweater off. Ripped it off and burned it even. In fact, you have demonstrated more fighting spirit left than almost anyone else left on this overheated planet. So, sorry about that. My bad.
Of course you started to bring this whole thing to the country’s attention, long before Uncle Al’s slideshow, with your 1989 book, The End of Nature. I read it right when it came out, and was duly impressed, though I was also left feeling uncomfortable. The end of nature? I was still in my full-on Thoreau stage at the time and I knew I could experience wildness in nature, even if this nature had empty 7-up cans and cigarette butts in it. I didn’t like the idea that the world was as human controlled, or influenced, as you suggested. Jump ahead fourteen years and your book seems much more than prescient. It is not going too far to say that the facts of that book are now the backdrop for almost everything I write, whether it is about the western fires, Atlantic hurricanes, or oil spills in the Gulf. It deserves to be remembered as what it is: a classic of Silent Spring status. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Morning Glory (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 1 comment
Bad Advice Wednesday: Writing Tips from Annie Dillard and Rafael Nadal
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 10 comments
This was originally posted in January 2011, but given the results of the U.S. Open seems relevant:
There are those who think it’s hard to write every day. Maybe. I’m of the camp that it’s harder to write once in a while. The rituals of daily-ness are built to contain a writing life in a way that the formlessness of the occasional is not. And for most of us who have chosen to make knocking words around our life, there are rituals a-plenty. Mine include getting up early, stretching my back (chronically bad since I was a teenager), drinking a cup of tea for calm before starting in on coffee for intensity (I am currently on day 11 of no coffee for the first time in many years so I apologize if my prose is sluggish), keeping note of my hours at the desk on a chart, listening to music (different albums for different drafts—The Talking Heads Stop Making Sense, for instance, for rolling along on first drafts), and, later in the day, long walks by the Cape Fear river armed with a microcassette recorder (and later still, notes in my journal armed with a beer.) Right off I notice that there are a lot of liquids involved in my rituals which seems right since there is an element of communion, and ablution, in the whole thing. Like most daily rituals mine was never planned but rather evolved, and did so for the single purpose of getting words on the page.
At the moment I am teaching a graduate class called The Writing Life, and some of you might remember that I posted the syllabus last year (I’ll paste this year’s revised syllabus below). The class starts, fittingly, with Annie Dillard’s The Writing Life, and as I re-read that book I noted that her rituals were more extreme than my own, and seemed geared toward creating an intensity far beyond the everyday. She writes: Continue reading →
Lundgren’s Lounge: “A House in the Sky,” by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 2 comments
Life in the United States can be like living in a cocoon, a carefully constructed illusion built upon the false sense of security that we are immune from the chaos and anarchy that prevails in other parts of the world. It is why an event like 9/11 rattled our collective national psyche so deeply, with emotional reverberations that continue to this day. It is also why a book like A House in the Sky, by Amanda Lindhout and Sara Corbett, is so timely. Continue reading →
Skimmers!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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We just put up a beautiful photo of some black skimmers in our creative writing hallway. The phot0 is by MFA graduate, Eric Vithalani, who is a fantastic nature photographer.
I have framed the short essay below and asked permission to hang it below Eric’s photo. This piece appeared in Orion a while back. I might have posted the text here before, but I like the way the original looked in the mag so here it is again:
Serial Sunday: “Hoosac Tunnel,” a story by John J. Clayton
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
Hoosuc Tunnel
Because it matters so much whether the train comes through the tunnel when the children are still inside, in another sense it doesn’t matter at all: either way, nobody’s life will be the same. Continue reading →
