Cocktail Hour
My Wife’s Secret Identity…..
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Alas, I used to be the prolific one in my family. But the other night my wife, Nina de Gramont, came up to bed and woke me up and whispered, “I’m catching you!” She meant in books of course.
What can I say? It’s not easy being married to a superhero. In fact Nina, the author of three books already, has four more about to enter the world. Two young adult novels, one normal novel (we don’t call them “adult novels” around here because, well, you know), and this, just today:
Yes, Nina (disguised as mild mannered creative writing professor Christine Woodward) has entered the Marvel Universe. And when she tosses her glasses and professor clothes aside, and dons her X-Men costume, I marvel too.
Of course it is not lost on me that she has chosen to write a book about a young woman who can kill her lover with one touch, but I choose not to dwell on it.
Bad Advice Wednesday: No Small Gift–An Exchange with Poet John Casteen
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
John Casteen [photo Anna Williams]
Dear Bill,
Haystack: The Writer as Craftsperson
categories: Cocktail Hour
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On the rocks at Haystack
I’ll be back at the Haystack Mountain School of Crafts in Deer Isle, Maine, this summer as the visiting writer during session 3. I won’t be teaching a workshop, but every afternoon I’ll lead a discussion or a walk or give a talk of some kind, suggest an activity, and one evening, certainly, I’ll give a reading. Otherwise I’ll be thinking and writing and reading and maybe drawing (there’s a nature drawing class while I’m there) or even blowing glass (there’s a beginning glassblowing workshop, too!). And staring at the ocean, also swimming, though the water is cold. There are seven sessions in all, six of two weeks, one of one week, and a tantalizing array of classes in all sorts of crafts are offered. And the thing that I love is that writing is one of those crafts. I’ve written about my experience at Haystack here. But just wanted to let you know what a great, peaceful, inspiring, experience it is. Plus, they’ve got application deadlines coming up March 1. Have a look: www.haystack-mtn.org. Catalog listing by session: www.haystack-mtn.org/summer_workshops.php. Continue reading →
Bad Advice: Super Bowl Sunday Edition (Wah!)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
Monica at the Bill and Dave’s REALLY Super Bowl
There he was, late in the fourth quarter, sacked again at third-and-long, the game out of reach. The game, that is: the AFC Championship game, the one that would have led him directly to a record-breaking sixth Superbowl. I averted my eyes in sympathy, reluctant to witness his marrow-deep humiliation, the future first-ballot Hall-of-Famer sitting on the 30-yard line, legs straight out, shoulders curved in despair. Tomorrow’s front-page photo: the great Tom Brady posed like a kid in a sandbox, wondering, like the rest of us, what the hell went wrong. Continue reading →
Night at the Movies: Silver Linings Playbook
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies
comments: 5 comments
About to not kiss, whoa.
I wasn’t in the mood yesterday and needed to get new glasses over in Waterville anyway, so to Railroad Square for a couple of movies, Silver Linings Playbook and Life of Pi. I live in a cave so I hadn’t heard of Silver Linings Playbook nor read a single word about it, always the best way to enter a theater. What’s more, I didn’t know who that actress was till after, when I stared at the poster outside in the rain: Jennifer Lawrence, whom I’ve written about here, for her performance in The Hunger Games. And that’s the mark of a great performance–I simply didn’t recognize her, not for one second, wondered who this unknown person might be. The kid’s got range. She pops out of nowhere to intercept a fellow jogger, several times. Her character is anti-suburban, which you know is my highest praise. People Magazine has named Bradley Cooper the sexiest man alive. But I think Jennifer Lawrence is much sexier. I didn’t recognize him, either, but that’s just creeping senility. Robert DeNiro I recognized, and was slowly won over–that is, I slowly forgot the actor and saw a character. Football, dance, mental health–wait a minute! Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: My Gulliver Complex
categories: Cocktail Hour
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If you are like me (god I hope not) then you sometimes think everyone is conspiring to get in the way of your writing (because they are, Precious, they are.) You want one thing: to write your great book! But a thousand things–normal life!—intrude. You rage, you shake your fist, you eventually give in.
I call it my Gulliver Complex, an appropriately megalomaniacal phrase, imagining myself a giant tied down and spear-poked by a hundred tiny people. These people want me to fill in forms, go to meetings, prepare classes for god’s sake. And what do I want? Well, I said it already: that one thing.
I had a cartoon to go with this piece, a really funny one I think, but I’ll never publish it. Why? Because on the way to the scanner at school I ran into one of my favorite students. I showed the cartoon to her, thinking she would laugh, but she didn’t. I asked her if I should publish it and she said I shouldn’t.
There was a moment of clarity for me. One of the little tiny spear-holding people in the cartoon was asking for a recommendation. Another was asking me to read his trilogy. To me, in my brain, I am still about my student’s age—early-mid twenties—a young excited writer who has somehow found himself disguised as a staid teacher and living inside a relatively normal adult life. But to her I was a fifty year old professor who had written a lot of books and who she might need to ask for a recommendation and who was now showing her a crazy drawing that said, in no uncertain terms, that he just wanted to be left alone. If I was her, I wouldn’t have been too happy with me.
Giants on the Road: Westward! (A Photo Ghazal)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Please turn off all electronic devices.
Table for Two: Interview with Wes McNair
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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This coming Thursday, January 31, Wesley McNair will launch his new memoir, The Words I Chose: A Memoir of Poetry and Family, at the Portland Public Library in Portland, Maine, always a good venue for writers, now a great one in its new renovation. And a brilliant evening is planned. It wasn’t hard to imagine where Wes and I would sit for our pretend meal–the porch of his camp on Drury Pond in in Temple, Maine, where in fact we sit many a summer’s evening, talking, talking. Wes likes a beer and a whiskey. I just go for the whiskey. Continue reading →
The Anatomy of a Hangover
categories: Cocktail Hour
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by special guest star Johannes Lichtman
“The reason why so many professional artists drink a lot is not necessarily very much to do with the artistic temperament, etc. It is simply because they can afford to, because they can normally take a large part of the day off to deal with the ravages.” –Kingsley Amis
The greatest hangover scene in literature? The Guardian claims it’s from Kingsley Amis’ Lucky Jim:
His mouth had been used as a latrine by some small creature of the night, and then as its mausoleum. During the night, too, he’d somehow been on a cross-country run and then been expertly beaten up by secret police. He felt bad.
A good hangover scene, no doubt. But Cormac McCarthy’s Suttree gives Amis a run for his money:
He woke with the undersides of his eyelids inflamed by the high sun’s hammering…His clothes cracked with a thin dry sound and shreds of baked vomit fell from him…He tried to swallow but his throat constricted in agony…staggering under the heat, his stomach curdling. He wandered into a narrow alley and fell to his hand and knees and began to vomit. Nothing would come but a thin green bile and then nothing at all, his stomach contracting in dry and vicious spasms that racked him and left him sweaty and shivering and weak when they ceased. Continue reading →
