Cocktail Hour
The Innards
categories: Cartoons / Cocktail Hour
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For those who missed the eye-opening New York Times story on data centers and the energy we use to fuel our computer worlds, here is the short version:
Bad Advice Wednesday: Steady as she Goes!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Don’t get your hopes up.
My long-time agent and old friend Betsy Lerner has often offered wise counsel. For some reason (perhaps to be revealed at a later date), tonight I’m remembering a time before the turn of the millennium, my first novel (The Smallest Color) about to sell after its protracted season of rejections. I was on the road, in a motel somewhere near Palm Springs, CA, quail running everyplace. Phone booth in the sun, door open for the heat, children playing in an emptied pool. And news: Dawn Seferian, a senior editor at Counterpoint, had expressed an interest in the book, and was taking it to her board. I’d have to wait two weeks to hear what turned out to be good news. But in that moment Betsy said, “Don’t get your hopes up, but don’t get them down, either.” And that’s what allowed me to breathe in the breach. Continue reading →
Serial Sunday: “The Weight of Light”
categories: Cocktail Hour
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[I know it’s not Sunday. I was busy Sunday. But today we inaugurate a new feature–an ongoing story offered 500 words at a time and written on the fly, so to speak. Guarantee: I will never be more than one episode ahead of you. I’m hoping it’ll come out unlike anything I’ve ever written, and won’t kill me. And so, without further ado, episode one of “A Heavy Weight,” which I don’t know where it’s going.]
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The Weight of Light
episode one
A Heavy Weight
Ted rushed up the stairs from the A-train at Columbus Circle with the crowd, a shuffling mass of humanity heading for work, as he was. Ahead of him a man in a suit slipped and stumbled, caught himself, stood again, then fell. The crowds just coursed around him, but Ted stopped. The poor guy’s face was right on the cold cement and hardened gum and spittle. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: A Rainy Day Haiku
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Telephone: The Translation Game
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I’m thinking about foreign-language editions of my books, including a Japanese version of Writing Life Stories. My friend Lily Funahashi read it in both languages and said that the Japanese was much, much different. For one thing, they’d swapped out my friendly, conversational, demotic tone for a formal diction–the voice used between teachers and students. They’d also removed any overly friendly storytelling. So where I’d say, “Try getting up in the morning for the next few weeks and free writing for ten minutes while you’re still half-dreaming.” They’d say: “You will get up early and write ten minutes daily for three weeks to clear your mind.”
. Anyway, I thought I’d run a paragraph from my new novel, LIFE AMONG GIANTS, back and forth through various translation services and see how meanings might shift. These are machine translations, and really pretty amazing–no criticism is implied (though I will say Google and Babylon are the fastest and easiest of those I found). It’s just that over the course of re-translation, the little shifts in meaning are amplified. Like the game we used to play in school: telephone. Remember that? You whisper the phrase the teacher gave you into the next kid’s ear and around the room it goes, losing words, gaining phrases. Continue reading →
Romney’s New Campaign Slogan
categories: Cartoons / Cocktail Hour
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They’ve decided, what the hell, why not just be honest….
Bad Advice Wednesday: Research Creatively (and Empathetically)
categories: Bad Advice
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Larry Bird
A broom
We don’t use sports metaphors here at Bill and Dave’s. Well, we try not to. Or at least one of us tries. But the other one (me) has frequent lapses and it so happens that I feel another one coming on now. Please bear with me.
It was right before the 1981 NBA finals, Larry Bird’s first. The Celtics were playing the Houston Rockets, which meant that they were facing two giants (for more on giants see Life Among Giants) in Hakeem (then Akeem) Olajuwan and Ralph Sampson. Sampson, at 7’4”, would sometimes be guarding Bird and, as I remember it, the sports writer Bob Ryan reported that one day he walked out to find Bird taking dozens of baseline jumpshots over a man who was holding a broom up as high as he could. The broom, of course, was meant to simulate Ralph Sampson’s outstretched arm. The takeaway from the story, according to Ryan, was that Bird even practiced more creatively than other people.
Why did this pop into my mind? Not only because I like to annoy Bill by using lots of sports metaphors. But also because I have been in the research phase of my new book, and I have been thinking about ways that I can research more creatively, and effectively. I have heard stories about writers who see research as a period of happy procrastination, who love to hole up with their notecards and files and new pens and spend hours in the library reading every book and manuscript they can about the development of the cattle industry in southeast Texas. If these stories are true, I am happy for the practitioners and envy them their serenity. But for me that kind of work leads to a kind of intellectual sluggishness, a state of mind where writing the actual book begins to seem impossible. Continue reading →
Happy Birthday Poppy
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Virtually actual Elysia in Uncle Doug’s actually capable virtual hands, Aunt Carol in cousin Johnny’s.
My Dad turned 86 yesterday, and as he’s been a bit of a presence here at Bill and Dave’s, I thought I’d send along some photos from the virtual (and also real) party my brother Doug set up. It was a little surreal, skyping in to their dinner table in Atlanta, where Poppy sat unsuspecting. Here’s a guy born in 1926 looking at his kids and grandchildren on video screens after a big meal and finding it confusing rather than amazing, as if someone had strapped Dick Tracy’s two-way wrist TV to his arm. My sister Carol was there from Snohomish, Washington. My sister Janet lives near Doug, and so she and her partner Brenda and their son were there in person. Elysia and Juliet and I found ourselves right next to the old man as he tried to figure out where to look, and who on earth was talking. Across from us was a laptop with Carol on it! Nuts. To complete the weirdness, I’ll embed an I Used to Play in Bands video that Poppy stars in, playing himself putting on his grouchy guy persona, hilarious. And there he was last night, the middle of nine decades of life, taking his teeth out to make the kids laugh, accepting an Obama bumper sticker on his head with great sputtering, and generally having a good time. Happy Birthday, dear dad! Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: When Bill and Dave Came to Doe Branch
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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A meeting of minds at Doe Branch.
Doe Branch Ink is a writers’ retreat in the Blue Ridge mountains north of Asheville, NC. Bill and Dave know the place and have left their mark on the writing lives of participants from around the country. Cocktail hour at Doe Branch is part of the fun, but the fun is serious when it comes to sharing work in progress, getting feedback on a tricky passage, or cuddling up with a hot cup of coffee at first light to get the night’s ideas on paper. Bill and Dave are inimitable, but we’ve seen the magic too of other accomplished writer-teachers working with their small groups, sharing inspiration, confidence and wisdom. And we’ve seen our guests leaving their new friends with Continue reading →
