Cocktail Hour
Mitt Romney’s Inner Selves (We Ain’t Seen Nothing Yet)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
Bill and Dave Just Want to Be Liked
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 7 comments
Here at Bill and Dave’s we recently hired a consultant. We were frustrated that we can’t seem to get more people to like us on Facebook, so we dished over big bucks to listen to a pro. The following are some of his suggestions for making our website more attractive. Please add your own (but don’t bill us).
Bad Advice Wednesday: Reelin’ in the Years
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 5 comments
Answer: the one in the middle.
.
Until yesterday, my yearbooks lived in a little-used closet at my parents’ house. Somehow they’d never made it (along with one gorgeous post-college wok) to Texas, where I lived for eleven years. Even after I moved back to New York last winter, a few towns up the Hudson from my folks, I still hadn’t managed to retrieve the yearbooks—the wok being first thing I re-claimed. Along with an electric guitar I don’t really know how to play. And the gnarly snowboard (mid 90s Gnu, electric orange and blue) covered with over a decade’s worth of dust. Continue reading →
How I Came to Write This Book
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 8 comments
During my college years I took time off to become a rock star. This was going to be a slow process, so in the meantime I had to support myself. Right away I landed a great job, which was to house-sit and maintain and generally prepare for sale a sprawling old mansion in Weston, Connecticut, a house so big that even after living there for months I found rooms I hadn’t seen before. The place boasted a crumbling three-story carriage house over a seven-bay garage (a mansion in itself), a long-defunct double-Olympic swimming pool, several overgrown and ruined Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: No Country for Waxwings
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 6 comments
Illegal to own, but not to photograph.
Yesterday morning I spotted Cedar Waxwings, not unusual, though I thought maybe they’d have left by now. And they seemed too big, too upright and sleek, a flock of ten or so, the cheerful tittering familiar, but one notch louder than you’d think. So I glassed ’em. In the binoculars, I saw they were Bohemian Waxwings, who will brighten our winter. Back early from parts north and hot on the fall berries. Maybe pickings were slim after a dry summer up tundra-wise. Later, a nice view of a broad-winged hawk lazing on the currents of heat rising from the fields, kind of late staying, this year (we haven’t even had close to a frost, which even just 20 years ago came regularly in late August. Not that I’m complaining). On this morning’s walk, evidence of their meeting: a pile of feathers around a log in the woods. It didn’t take long for CSI Farmington to figure it out. The secondary wing feathers here are about actual size, 2.5 to 3 inches in length. The blue-gray, the yellow tips, that’s Bohemian. Not a trace of bird, no feet, no beak, no bones, just feathers, very delicate, very soft to the touch. Illegal to possess, a good law, as the collection of feathers for hats at the turn of the last century nearly wiped out all kinds of species, hats with whole birds, some of them. So an index card, a photograph, and return all feathers to the scene of the crime. Which is no crime from the Broad-Winged Hawk’s point of view, but only a meal.
Reading Under the Influence: Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 6 comments
Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life
The cover of Encyclopedia of an Ordinary Life by Amy Krouse Rosenthal proclaims: “I have not survived against all odds. I have not lived to tell. I have not witnessed the extraordinary. This is my story.” A memoir that doesn’t wallow in personal suffering? Actually, I like to read about major pain and redemption, all the countless ways other people royally fuck up. (Mostly, because it makes me feel better about my own foibles and mistakes.) But I was drawn to this promise of an ordinary life because, well, I too, consider my life to be pretty darn run-of-the-mill. Though I couldn’t help but think: could such a tale engage, sustain, and entertain me? Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Learn to Take a Punch
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 8 comments
Writers are sensitive. If they weren’t they wouldn’t be writers.
I mean the good kind of sensitive here, not sensitive/touchy but sensitive/aware of certain currents that most people aren’t. The trouble is that in most people the good kind and bad kind of sensitive are all mixed up. And the reason that is trouble is that most writers, with very few exceptions, will stop writing unless they learn to be tough as well as sensitive. Or as Hawthorne put it:
It is requisite for the ideal artist to possess a force of character that seems hardly compatible with its delicacy; he must keep faith in himself while the incredulous world assails him with its utter disbelief; he must stand up against mankind and be his own sole disciple, both as respects his genius and the objects to which it is directed.
Which is a long way of saying that writers need to learn how to take a punch.
What kind of punch? Lots of kinds it turns out. The sleeper punch (years of non-publication), the belly punch (first rejections), the series of rabbit punches (workshop responses), the blow to the head (close to publication but rejection from an editor one has grown close to), the wild hooks (bad review), the battering punches of post-publication (worries about sales, attention, general failure), and the knockout blow (the doors of publication feeling like they have closed shut forever). Continue reading →
We The Animals: Book Spine Poem II
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 6 comments
(just read the titles…)
We the animals
writing down the bones,
working
alone with all that could happen.
You are not like other mothers:
Storyteller.
Savage girl.
Steering the craft,
burning down the house.
Attack! And Riposte! (Countering a Nasty Reviewer)
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 21 comments
A couple of days ago I came under attack in Terrain.Org, an on-line journal that I have always been, and remain, quite fond of. The gist of the review, if one can call it that, was that my primary concern as a writer was being “cool,” as if I aspired to be a kind of literary Fonzie. How did I go about that? By drinking beer in my pages and “dropping the F-Bomb.” The reviewer, Frank Izaguirre, made almost no mention of my topic, which was the disastrous BP oil spill, but made many references to how irritating he found me. (I’ve pasted the full review below.)
“Don’t reply to it,” my wife said. “It’s beneath you.”
I usually take her advice, and I quelled my initial response, which was admittedly angry and defensive. After all there was no mention of the humor in the book, and no mention of the anger or passion, and no mention of the people who I wrote about or the issues that they faced after the spill. Certainly the reviewer, who is obviously something of a bully, deserved to be stood up to, but I knew my wife was right: I didn’t want to descend to rebutting his points, or to bickering.
What I would like to do instead is perhaps kind of dull for most people. I would like to describe for Mr.Izaguirre what I was trying to do with my book, and what I try to do in my writing, which by necessity includes describing the literary tradition in which I work and what I have tried to do with that tradition. Continue reading →
