Cocktail Hour
Benediction
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Bate as a younger man.
The following originally appeared in The Georgia Review and was included in the Pushcart Prize Anthology in 2006.
BENEDICTION:
On Being Boswell’s Boswell
I sat in the front row like a rock groupie, straining forward so that I could catch every word. He sometimes spoke in a plaintive whisper and, never having quite mastered the use of the clip-on microphone, presented no more than a dramatic mime show to those seated in the back of the class. He was frail with wispy tufts of white hair floating out above his large ears and thin bones canopied in oversized clothes, a mismatched plaid jacket and striped pants. Occasionally his lectures, like his appearance, were haphazard, dissolving into wistful monologue.
“Let’s skip some of this stuff,” he’d say, waving it off.
Once, I remember, he looked down at his watch and, startled by the amount of time left in the class, exhaled a loud woof. His comments could be dream-like: “I may have mentioned this to you earlier—or was that years ago?” Or halfway through the lecture, he’d apologize: “I’m sorry that this wasn’t better.”
The transition of English literature from neoclassicism to romanticism was our stated theme, but a leitmotif of old age and melancholy ran through the lectures. Aging and Loneliness 104. “Don’t let anyone tell you about how wonderful it is to grow old,” he sighed. “The only value of getting older is that you care less about what other people think of you.” He looked down from the podium with his elastic face, twisting and pulling at it as if it were made of putty. It was a great comic face, a gentle clown’s face that had led a studious and difficult life. Introducing Keats’ Endymion, he took off his glasses and stared out with blue eyes. He referred to the biography of Keats he’d written “in my greener, happier days.”
Those were the moments that made me love the man, but there were other moments, too, when an idea would catch his fancy, and he would spark alive. Then his hands slid from their resting place below his chin. First, the right hand would pulse to life, slowly rising up from the podium in a circling flight. It opened and closed steadily, then began fluttering and darting, dipping and rising as if barely within his control. When his point was made, the hand would fall gently, a leaf dropping in slow, unpredictable swoops, back and forth, never twice along the same path, finally landing on the podium, or nestling back into the folds of his face and resting for its next flight. Then, just as the room was calming, the other hand would take off, dipping and flying out toward the class. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Practice, Practice, Practice
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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At big college reading recently a very tall and bristly young man loomed over me with my new book in hand. He wasn’t buying it, he was just holding it. “Is it worth it?” he said. Continue reading →
Bill’s Pub Day!!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Books are dead, they say. Not true, we say here at Bill and Dave’s.
Well, okay, maybe books are dead, but not this one book……For today is the official pub day–trumpets please–of Life Among Giants. (Great title, Bill, did Dave help you with it?)
One of the pleasures of this book is that it is so very much Bill. “A man is best when he is most himself,” said Thoreau. Of course Bill is not really being himself here, for one thing he is not 6’8” like Lizard, his protaginist. But the book is him. The spirit is him, And it’s a spirit that you will like being with for a few days and 300 pages.
Below find a bunch of early reviews collected by Bill’s agent, Betsy Lerner, at her website:
CONGRATULATIONS BILL (old friend, great writer, sweet as pineapple) ROORBACH
on the publication of:
Serial Sunday: The Weight of Light, Episode 7
categories: Cocktail Hour
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[The ongoing saga continues, Ted using his wits (and his mouth). 500 words at a time. These written at the Bar Harbor Inn. Tune in next week for more! To start at the beginning, click here.]
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The Weight of Light
Episode 7
“French Kiss”
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The big man had taken the co-pilot’s seat, and he and the unseen pilot shouted back and forth in some fast language that sounded Asian, though the big man had looked more European, maybe Slavic. Behind their backs on the icy steel deck of the chopper, Ted lay in misery, the plastic bands cutting into his wrists. Ellen began to writhe, her eyes very wide, a message there, writhed and wriggled till her face was upon his. “What?” he said in her ear. Continue reading →
On Superstorms and Sea Level: Interview With the Man Who Saw it Coming
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Photo for OnEarth by Coke Whitworth
Thought it was the right time to break this out….
For decades, Orrin Pilkey has warned that our coasts are in a state of constant flux, and that the relentless pace of coastal development is a recipe for disaster. Pilkey, James B. Duke professor emeritus of geology at Duke University, has made both friends and enemies as a result of his unabashed mix of science and advocacy. He was famously at the center of the controversy over what to do about the ocean-threatened Cape Hatteras Lighthouse in North Carolina. When the lighthouse was finally moved inland, the decision was seen by many as a vindication of his coastal philosophy, which can be described in a single word: retreat. It’s a word that irks realtors and other proponents of development, as do the gusto and glee with which Pilkey puts forth his opinions.
Now, with sea-level rise from global warming an accepted fact and the idea of increasingly intense storms gaining credence, Pilkey’s warnings sound prophetic. David Gessner spoke with him at North Topsail Beach, North Carolina, a place that epitomizes Pilkey’s fears about coastal development.
From where we are standing right now, we can see dozens of houses that have either fallen into the ocean or are about to fall. Are you suggesting that we do nothing to save them?
Yes, that’s exactly what I’m suggesting. What we are looking at here is the future of the American shoreline. While this is personally tragic for a few homeowners, it is overall a beautiful sight. The cost of trying to save a few threatened homes is tremendous, and the environmental cost is even greater. To save these houses you would ultimately have to put up a seawall, and as sea level rises and the waves get bigger, you would have to build a bigger one. By then the beach would be gone and you wouldn’t have anything worth saving.
But who gets to decide whether to preserve the beach or protect the homes? Continue reading →
It’s Lonely Out There!
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Nothing sucks more than when no one shows up for a reading or event when you’re on the road. And nothing is nicer than a drink with friends in strange towns. I mean, the towns aren’t strange. I like the towns. But being alone is strange. So I’ll paste my tour schedule as it currently stands and hope you’ll come out and see me, also let friends and family know if I’m coming to their part of the country. Because they’ll like me! And I’ll like them. Continue reading →
Cartoons and Notes From a Big Night
categories: Cocktail Hour
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FROM DAVE’S PEN AND BILL’S I-PHONE:
This moment in history
categories: Cartoons / Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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Re-Build? Re-think.
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Foundations and pilings are all that remain of brick buildings and a boardwalk in Atlantic City, N.J., Tuesday, Oct. 30, 2012, after they were destroyed when a powerful storm that started out as Hurricane Sandy made landfall on the East Coast on Monday night. (AP Photo/Seth Wenig)(Credit: AP)
Here’s a piece that I wrote that appeared here in Salon.com over the past weekend. (Despite the fact that Bill is visiting and making me drink way too much.)
Rebuilding is Madness
“No one could have predicted this.”
Those were the words of President Bush after Katrina, and as soon as they came out of his mouth you could almost imagine a hundred coastal scientists shaking their heads all at once, thinking, no sir, this is exactly what we predicted. So, too, New York City last week, though honestly — and I know that this isn’t what people suffering right now want to hear — a lot of the predictions painted a picture that was a lot worse. Water higher, winds wilder, buildings down.
Where I live we are used to such beatings. While I’ve lived on the Atlantic Coast for the better part of my life, it wasn’t until I moved to a barrier island off of North Carolina that I started to think hard about hurricanes. That thinking progressed, as thought often does, by way of metaphor. One day I was kayaking from the island I called home, Wrightsville Beach, over to our sister island to the south, the uninhabited Masonboro, a nature preserve which, bolstered by its backside marsh, still handled hurricanes in the old fashioned way. Pancake flat and nearly treeless, Masonboro doesn’t look particularly hardy, but its healthy marshes allow it to receive and interact with storms in ways my developed island could not: sand spilling over the island and the marsh growing, the island gradually but constantly migrating landward. It is through this sort of elemental rope-a-dope that the coastal islands have always interacted with storms, water rushing over land, sands breaking down and reforming, those sands retreating to the marsh on its backside, rebuilding in a new place, giving and taking.
My cluttered island, by contrast, looked decidedly fragile as I kayaked back toward it. In fact, paddling home, a strange metaphor came to mind. With its flat treeless land and tall buildings, the island looked like nothing so much as a dinner table full of empty plates and bottles after a party, waiting, I thought, for an angry drunk to come along and sweep it clean with his arm. Of course the hurricane is the angry drunk.
To read the rest please visit Salon here: http://www.salon.com/writer/david_gessner/
Serial Sunday: The Weight of Light, Episode 6
categories: Cocktail Hour
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[An ongoing story, 500 words at a time. This week’s episode written on an airplane between Buffalo, New York, and Wilmington, North Carolina. To start at the beginning, click here.]
The Weight of Light
Episode 6
“The Need Shall Not”
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“One and all,” someone said halfway around the world.
“Then with no further ado,” said Mr. Ricketts.
Signatures were appended to documents in three conference rooms. The fax machine beeped and whirred. “Did you get my gift?” One of the Shanghai set said. Continue reading →
