Cocktail Hour
Wicked Pissah, or, Not So Dirty Water
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Photo by John Tlumacki
Here is part of the latest post for my Wilf Life blog at OnEarth.org:
“Contact!” was Thoreau’s famous cry upon encountering raw nature. More than 150 years later, it still has a nice ring to it. But how to directly experience nature in an increasingly crowded, cluttered, and technological world?
One way, I’d argue, is by swimming in it.
My family and I are now vacationing in Massachusetts, and at each stop on our trip we have made it a point to dive into the local waters. Two days ago that meant wading into the ocean off osprey-thick South Dartmouth; yesterday it meant diving off a boat in Buzzards Bay; and today it means swimming in Cape Cod Bay. And while we may not make it back to Boston on this trip, if we do, I know just where we’re heading. The latest news—thrilling news, I think, maybe even historic news—is that the Charles River is open for swimming. Earlier this summer, on July 13th, the Charles River Swimming Club hosted a group of 144 swimmers who took the plunge, jumping off a dock in the Esplanade, and splashing around for 30 minutes or so. Continue reading →
Table for Two: Derek Alger Interviews Alan Cheuse
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Alan Cheuse
Derek Alger: Your most recent novel, Song Of Slaves In The Desert, is a complex one dealing with an especially turbulent time in history.
Alan Cheuse: Slavery is America’s curse, as Faulkner called it. Biology is just a long line of people trudging through time. History is what they did as they trudged, both good and bad, and despite the “family values” document that those political ignoramuses Michelle Bachmann and Rick Santorum recently signed about the good in slavery that held black families together, there was nothing good in that so-called “peculiar institution”. Slavery wasn’t peculiar among the Greeks and the Romans, but when it became tied to racial theory, as it did in England in the 16th and 17th centuries, its radical cruelty became more apparent. But why should a writer from Jersey become interested in it in a deeply personal way? Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Get on Your Bike!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Today’s bad advice is simple: bike more, write better!
I now have a daily loop at school, through the woods, out on the road, back through the woods. Nothing particularly strenuous, but by adding another ten minutes I’ve pushed the total time up over an hour. And I find this makes the rest of my day, and my writing, both easier and, I think, better.
Lundgren’s Lounge: “I’m Losing You,” by Bruce Wagner
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Winston Lives!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I cried at the end. Really.
Not just for Winston who, at 95, had led a relatively full life as human lives go. But for myself and the end of what was a three decade-long reading odyssey.
When I finished I couldn’t immediately peg the year that I read the first volume of William Manchester’s The Last Lion (did they really use that same title for a biography of Teddy Roosevelt? Jesus.), but I knew my father was alive, remembered reading it in his living room and shouting funny quotes over to him. It was a bonding thing for us, me and my Dad, right up there with watching Doug Flutie throw his Hail Mary. I was in my twenties, I know that, dogged by my own black dog of depression, and I tried to put some of the lessons of Churchill’s life to use in my own. (I couldn’t go more than a week without saying “A change is as good as a rest.”) Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Ex Factor
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Randy and me
I have this ex who demanded a mutual photo-destroying ritual. He was marrying me, and thought that in starting this new chapter we should purge ourselves of all photographic evidence of our exes (this, of course, before digital cameras, iPads, and Facebook.) I balked, reasoned, begged, and he pouted, whined, and bullied, and so I did what any self-respecting writer might do: I lied. Hid the evidence in my parents’ garage, two thousand miles away. I treated this red flag like a napkin I neatly folded into a swan. I wasn’t about to destroy my photos of a four-month-long, cross-country camping trip and National Park extravaganza just because some of them featured my sweet, shy college boyfriend. WTF? Continue reading →
Five Crappy Things an Emerging Actor Goes Through Way Too Often
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies
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5. Sweating in front of your mirror.
Held As Earth
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Cache Valley, Utah, on a day when air pollution can look pretty, as long as you don’t breathe.
Remember that line from Cracker’s “Teen Angst”? Sure you do and you can belt it out with me: “What the world needs now is another folk singer like I need a hole in my head.”
Insert “nature poet” for “folk singer,” and you have my attitude on bad days. But, truth to tell, I’m a nature poet too, and in reading some recent criticism on “the pastoral” I was reminded that nature poets have been complaining about urbanization for a long time, like, since antiquity. The pastoral took off (if we can say that of Theocritus and Virgil) when the ancients really started to sprawl, plopping their temples onto vineyards and olive orchards.
It’s an old story, but one we need to keep telling…this story of loss. But, also, and this is important these days, loss met with an eye toward beauty and some kind of persistence.
I’ve also been reading Ray Kurzweil and Donna Haraway on the Singularity and cyborgs…in fact, I was re-reading Haraway’s “A Cyborg Manifesto” last month on the Logan River, in northern Utah, where I used to live. And, as though I were in a Timeless National Geographic Moment, four minks came chattering down river, their little black heads sleek and just above water. The first made a bee-line toward my pale leg, and I thought, “I will not be bitten by a beautiful mink,” lifted my leg, sending the water-slick slinky to a quick course correction that its minions followed. They were racing from whatever threat they were racing from and into a bundle of branches latticed over the river bank. They disappeared among branches and roots of paper birches. I eventually went back to reading, smiling all the while. Continue reading →
