Cocktail Hour
Happy Birthday to the National Park Service
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I am going to take a short break from full-time Trumping to say happy birthday to the National Park Service, which turns 100 today. Here is my birthday card to the Service, sent courtesy of The American Scholar.
The Taming of the Wild by David Gessner
Bill and Dave Jump on the Naked Trump Bandwagon
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Dave TV
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Oh, how Bill and Dave’s has fallen…..I’ve taken to simply cutting and pasting my Facebook posts in here. Like this one:
Okay lame-o friends who never watched this even though, and let me stress this next point, I WAS HOSTING A FUCKING TV SHOW. Now there are no excuses. For six months people said to me, Well is there a link or something so I can see it?, and I muttered, Well, I don’t really know….Finally, I decided to take action and did what I should have done long ago: I asked for help from a young person. It took her about twenty minutes to google around and find this link:
Ventriloquist Days: A Memoir
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This morning I found myself feeling wistful about my years on the road as a ventriloquist. It was good honest work and I miss it. And we sure entertained a lot of people, didn’t we Bill Roorbach?
On the Road with Noah
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We have been in Boulder now for over two weeks but other than scribbled journal notes detailing my daily rides and bird sightings I haven’t written much about it. Been too busy revising the Ultimate Frisbee book and enjoying being back here.
But I feel obliged to say a few words about how I got here. While Nina and Hadley flew out, I drove with my nephew Noah. Noah is 19 and about to be a junior at the University of North Carolina Asheville, and before this summer he had never been west of Birmingham, Alabama. We drove his car west three weeks ago, heading to Silver City, New Mexico, where I had a talk to give. There we explored the Gila Wilderness and the great cave dwellings, before winding our way north toward the Grand Canyon and Canyonlands. We also spent a night camping in the La Sal mountains in a beautiful aspen grove.
It rained almost every day we were in New Mexico and Arizona, prompting Noah’s disbelief in the region’s famous claims to aridity. We stopped at Ken Sleight’s place after the La Sal night and then worked our way back east on 70 to Boulder. Noah spent 10 days with us there, hiking, chauffeuring Hadley, and beating me at ping-pong.
Noah meets the Grand Canyon
Twain’s End
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When I was at the Tucson Book Festival I was lucky to meet a great writer and generous soul named Lynn Cullen. Now her book about the relationship between Mark Twain and his secretary, Twain’s End, is out in paperback.
The Huffington Post wrote: “Lynn Cullen is the Bronte of our day.”
In the book Lynn re-imagines the tangled relationships between Twain, Isabel Lyon, and Ashcroft, as well as the little-known love triangle between Helen Keller, her teacher Anne Sullivan Macy, and Anne’s husband, John Macy, which comes to light during their visit to Twain’s Connecticut home in 1909. Add to the party a furious Clara Clemens, smarting from her own failed love affair, and carefully kept veneers shatter.
“Reputation-squaring novel. Cullen splashes a surplus of fuel onto her incendiary raw material.” – New York Times Book Review
“[A] fascinating interpretation of this early 20th century literary immortal, distinguished by incisive character portrayals and no-holds-barred scrutiny.” – Publishers Weekly, starred review
Read more at:http://lynncullen.com/
The Taming of the Wild
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I have an essay in the new issue of The American Scholar. Here’s how it starts:
I am standing on top of Bald Mountain in Sonoma Valley, staring profoundly off toward the far Pacific and the dying sun. I scrunch my eyebrows and squint a little, thinking this will add to my overall air of deep thoughtfulness. My facial muscles are responding not to the transporting magic of nature, however, but to another imperative: I need to look good for the camera. Cameras, actually. Off to my side, a young man named Jimmy, whose easygoing professionalism I’ve come to respect over the past 10 days of shooting, points a surprisingly heavy (I have tried to lift it) camera at my head to film me in profile. Up above, a drone swoops over to capture the full grandeur of the moment. Following instructions, I move closer to the edge of the mountain, striking a pose that is meant to say part world conqueror, part shaman. I am a New Age Cortés.
Later, in search of the perfect shot, the drone will crash into a tree and be rendered inoperable. Later still, when I see the drone footage on TV, I will realize for the first time that I have a significant bald spot.
The idea of the show, put oversimply, is that nature is good and that screens—whether those of computer, camera, TV, or phone—are bad. But of course it takes a lot of screens to get this point across. The irony of this is the sort that is easy for a sixth-grader to comprehend. I know this for a fact, because when I use the TV show as a teaching moment with my 12-year-old daughter, railing against all her texting and phoning and computing, and telling her she should get out in nature more, she rightly points out that the whole time I was out in nature, I was being filmed.
Read the rest HERE
