I am most definitely a “nostalgiac.” I find myself looking back, quite fondly, on those days as a twenty-something when I changed jobs like I did outfits before a night out of barhopping. Okay, yes, it was years, an epoch my mother referred to (then and now) as “Floundering Up in Ithaca” her lips pursed in distaste, as if she’d just gotten a whiff of ripe flatfish. Continue reading →
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[The ongoing saga, 500 words at a time, more or less. This week’s written on the plane from Boston Logan to Indianapolis this morning, and revised in a nicer hotel than Ted’s. Tune in next week for more, always more! To start at the beginning, scroll down to Episode 1]
The Weight of Light
Episode 9
“Tumbleweed”
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Ted woke to bright sunlight, woke again to darkness, felt heavy as a Richard Serra wall, felt the pillow sinking and sinking under his head, groaned Quiet, he remembered. Be quiet. Cautiously he patted the bed around him, the remains of a plastic tie catching painfully at his wrist. A red light shone intermittently close. He reached for it, found he could touch it. A clock. 3:57. On a table. He sat up, made out the lines of a small room, a dresser, an old TV set. Lamps. A motel room. He stood and tried the door, which opened out to a parking lot, not a single car, orangey halogen lighting, unreal, also a stiff, chill breeze, stars above. Continue reading →
Describing a football, or maybe a dance lift. [photo Stan Groner]
Roth Enjoying His Idyll
That notorious slacker, Philip Roth, decided to take a day off from work recently. Actually he decided to take them all off. At seventy nine, with thirty one books under his belt, he claims to be calling it quits.
My money says he can’t do it. My money says the habits of imagination are too ingrained. My money says that his quitting, described here to Charles McGrath in a piece in the New York Times, sounds a whole lot like another person’s writing: “Mr. Roth hasn’t given up writing entirely. He is collaborating on a novella, via e-mail, with the 8-year-old daughter of a former girlfriend, and he has been writing lengthy notes and memos for his biographer.”
Roth goes on to say that these notes and memos have begun to fill up boxes. Hmmm… Collecting elaborate notes on one’s biography so that they can later be integrated into a book. Sounds kind of familiar. But if he thinks that is quitting, then good for him.
So what else has he been doing during this downtime?
“I sat around for a month or two trying to think of something else and I thought, ‘Maybe it’s over, maybe it’s over,’ ” he said. “I gave myself a dose of fictional juice by rereading writers I hadn’t read in 50 years and who had meant quite a lot when I read them. I read Dostoevsky, I read Conrad — two or three books by each. I read Turgenev, two of the greatest short stories ever written, ‘First Love’ and ‘The Torrents of Spring.’ ” He also reread Faulkner and Hemingway. Continue reading →
Those who have seen the trailer for my book, My Green Manifesto, might have assumed that the film, to use that word loosely, developed in a natural and spontaneous manner. Not so. It was actually the result of hours, or at least minutes, of thought. As proof I present the original script, something I just discovered as I began the long, possibly endless, process of cleaning up my office at school…..
So yesterday was a pretty good day for Life Among Giants, Bill’s new book. And he topped it off with a reading at the KGB bar in NYC, with his daughter Elysia (and her friend Pearl) selling books.
Gloating is not something we want to teach our children but sometimes it’s okay to gloat a little. So let’s take a moment out here at Bill and Dave’s to gloat along with Bill.
Some review highlights from yesterday:
From Bloomberg:
David “Lizard” Hochmeyer is a former Miami Dolphins quarterback who’s now a successful chef. At almost 7 feet tall, he towers above most mortals, yet he is far from the only colossus in Bill Roorbach’s eventful, elegiac novel of sports and murder, food and finance.
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[The ongoing saga pauses for a lyrical moment unbidden, the sleep of reason and all that. 500 words at a time, more or less. These written in my late mother-in-law’s bedroom on Central Park West at the end of the first leg of my tour with Life Among Giants. Tune in next week for more, always more! To start at the beginning, scroll down to Episode 1]
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The Weight of Light
Episode 8
“Lyrical”
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Ted’s thoughts began to drift in the electric boredom of the chop and roar of the flying machine, the cold steel on his cheek, the woman he barely knew seemingly sleeping, and all the women he’d known seemingly sleeping, something in him listing them and rather combining them, a woman named Leslie in that town with the towers in Italy, that hill town with the great square and the many minarets and towers and Leslie the woman in the town with the towers in Italy and her hair so red it was almost orange and her Italian phrases in that town with the towers and her breath in his ear at the cafe in the afternoon where as it happened they’d both landed after fights with travel companions in the town with the towers in Italy and drank glasses of wine first at tables adjacent outside beneath the campanile in the town of many towers in Tuscany, was where it was, the Tuscan town with many towers, and red clay roofs and then together as she invited him to her table or somehow they got talking in the town with the towers in Tuscany–the bell tower, that was it, the bells in the tower began to chi Continue reading →
A “Where’s Bildo” haiku (guess all three and win an all-expenses paid virtual trip to KGB Bar for my reading tomorrow):
