Cocktail Hour
Bad Advice Wednesday: Never Surrender! (But be Flexible)
categories: Bad Advice
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I have been sick the last few days and have spent most of my time, not with my family or on my work, but in bed with Winston Churchill. I’m on page 742 of The Last Lion, the third part of the great Churchill biography begun by William Manchester, who wrote the first two volumes and did the research for the third, and finished up, quite ably I think, by a journalist named Paul Reid.
It is always fun and inspiring to hang out with Churchill. I love that during WWII when he is flying on a plane with no heat or oxygen, he has the crew design a special oxygen mask so that he can still smoke his cigar. I love that he snorts when someone offers him tea and says that his tea is yellow (whisky). And I love that when he is monologuing while steaming across the Atlantic, and Lord Beaverbrook dares interrupt him, he pats the Beaver on the knee and says “You don’t talk anymore.” (For a different kind of Churchill humor, see our post on National Lampoon’s “The Churchill Wit.”)
But this is Bad Advice Wednesday (something Churchill, sadly, never lived to see) and so it won’t do to just pass along Churchill quips. You are hungry for advice after all! And it turns out that Winston has come for you:
“We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender.”
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Massacre Pond,” by Paul Doiron
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Paul Doiron at Camp Van Otterloo (photo Kristen Lindquist)
Observing the course of Maine game warden Mike Bowditch’s career, as depicted in author Paul Doiron’s award-winning series, has been endlessly entertaining because of the strong current of authenticity driving the narrative. In the first three award-winning novels (The Poacher’s Son, Trespasser and Bad Little Falls) we meet young Bowditch, headstrong, intelligent and impetuous. Bowditch has always been an interloper, an unwelcome guest to the party of policing an immense tract of what passes as wilderness in the 20th century, while trying (mostly unsuccessfully) to ‘fit in’ amongst his game warden colleagues. It does not help that he is the son of the northwoods’ most notorious and legendary poacher and a Colby grad to boot. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: “Tough Island” by Crash Barry (episode 15)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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“Bone-chilling waves broke and tossed them.”
In the summer of 2009, Matinicus made national headlines after one lobsterman shot another in the neck during a trap war. The shooter, Vance Bunker, was ultimately found not guilty. Rightly so, because Vance, frustrated by harassment and threats from longtime enemies of his family, merely defended himself against a couple of scumbuckets. And the shooting wasn’t the first time he acted like a hero.
From my perspective as a sternman, Vance Bunker was an awesome guy. A gentle, funny giant. An island Renaissance Man. He was old enough to remember hauling spruce traps, but young and intelligent enough to embrace modern improvements. Smart about the ocean, he drove a boat like it was an extension of his body. And he could fly. On several occasions he gave me a lift to the mainland in his tiny plane. He was kind and generous, tough and strong – his hands as big as heads, his arms mighty muscles developed during a lifetime of hard labor, working the waters off Maine’s most remote island. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Moss (A Photo Haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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On Barred Island. Off the coast of Maine, but not by much.
The Autocorrected Sonnets and Love Poems of William Shakespeare, by Meg Pokrass
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
Professor Meg Pokrass (Courtesy University of Bob)
@hideme
Alas of that sort I may be
For to withstand her jokes I am not able,
And yet can not I hide me in no dorkier place,
Remembrance so flowery of that face ;
So that with trick yen, swine and unstable dog,
My Desitin to behold her doing me lingereth
Yet do I know her? I run into the glade. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Try it Without Words
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Shell beach at Haystack, with mermaid Elysia
I have often been jealous of painters and crafters and bus drivers, who can do their work while thinking of other things, or listening (really listening) to music, or even books on tape. Also cartoonists. When I worked construction, conversation was the balm that sped the day, always a parade of other tradesmen from around the world, and music, often serious, a new Charles Mingus collection, say, with commentary by the plasterer, who had a doctorate in music history, a German guy who’d had to leave home under mysterious circumstance. We’d listen to the same solo fifty times in a morning, everyone tuned in, me sweating pipe, the electricians dropping cable, the carpenters priming baseboards so as not to make a lot of hammer noise, NYC, 1979. Continue reading →
Lungren’s Book Lounge: “Blue Plate Special,” by Kate Christensen
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I cracked the pages of this delightful new memoir, Blue Plate Special: An Autobiography of My Appetites by Kate Christensen with a vague expectation that I was about to enter a world extolling the pleasures of food. Not that I minded–I love good food and I love the work of this immensely talented writer, whose novel The Astral was one of my favorite reads of the past year. But from the opening sentences it was clear that this book is more, much more than a simple paean of praise to the culinary arts–this is a classic bildungsroman, a coming-of-age tale suffused with the kind of honesty and insight and narrative force that makes the best of this genre so compelling and enlightening and culturally resonant. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: Crash Barry’s “Tough Island” (Episode 14)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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“Looking straight up through the shadowy mist…”
The phone rang just after I snorted the third long line of cocaine. It was Captain Donald calling. We were supposed to have the night off, but an unforeseen ship was heading out to sea, and it was our job to pick up Cap’n Craiger, who was piloting the visiting vessel. Continue reading →
