Cocktail Hour
Dave’s Random Doodle Day
categories: Cocktail Hour
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There's a Wren in my Shack (Part II)
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take a Circuit
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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An Early Circuit
Part of the writing day for me is a circuit. This has been true no matter where I’ve lived, and I’ve lived a lot of places since I started writing seriously. The country circuit is the one I’m on now–every morning out on skis at this time of year, or walking in the summer, or maybe riding a bike, sometimes swimming. The idea is a similar or the same route each day, preferably a loop (no backtracking), one that takes me through my thoughts as surely as through the woods or through the streets of whatever given city. The first twenty minutes are often a tumult of spare Continue reading →
Reading Under the Influence: Joan Didion
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 6 comments
No
A critic on a radio show not long ago asked how Joan Didion could write about the death of her husband, the death of her daughter, two books, implying something that went unsaid, maybe that Ms. Didion was exploiting her tragedies. But, Radio Guy, she’s a writer. That’s who she is. She writes about her life. Was she supposed to not write about this? Her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly at their dinner table. Not long after, their adoptive daughter, Quintana, died as well, a little more slowly. Strangely, Didion doesn’t mention Quintana’s death in the first book. But I agree: that’s a different story. In these books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Didion explores what we go through in the face of such loss. I say we, because while she is recounting her own experience (and very bluntly) she is speaking universally. She does this by never using a single bromide. Nothing like “Everything happens for a reason,” or “Whatever Continue reading →
David Byrne Meets Ned Ryerson
categories: Cocktail Hour
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We are fans of quirky here at Bill and Dave’s. (We even like to think we are a tad quirky ourselves.) And lately I’ve come upon a couple examples of this here inter-web at its quirky best. For instance, my friend Betsy sent along this great lecture/animated film on education. For another, there’s the pleasure of having Groundhog Day’s Ned Ryerson come back into my life. You remember Ned (if you don’t, or even if you do, here’s a Youtube video with all his scenes from the movie.) Anway, I hadn’t thought about him in years until a student of mine, Carson Vaughn, sent me this note:
“I meant to send this after the first day of class, but bit-part character actor Stephen Tobolowsky (think Ned Ryerson on “Groundhog’s Day”) has a fabulous podcast called “The Tobolowsky Files” available for free on iTunes. Episode 12, “The Voice From Another Room,” is about his relationship with David Byrne and his work on the film “True Stories.” You mentioned being a big Talking Heads fan, so I thought I’d shoot you the link:
http://itunes.apple.com/us/podcast/the-tobolowsky-files/id339001481?ign-mpt=uo%3D4 (Episode 12)
Tobolowsky is also just a really great story teller. I recommend almost all of them.”
R.I.P. Mighty Waddles: A First-Class Rooster
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Movies
comments: 6 comments
Click above [>] to hear Mighty crow, and to see him strut his stuff.
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Our beloved rooster, Mighty, a handsome barred rock, has died. He started life as a chick among chicks, but slipped on newspaper bedding (we didn’t realize that newspaper is too slick for chicks), damaging his feet early on. And then, we noticed, he was far smaller than the other birds. We babied him, thought him a girl. Elysia named him Carmen, as he sang a lot more than the others. About the time the pullets began laying their first eggs, we noticed that Carmen was growing. Soon, he was the biggest bird in the yard, half again as large as everyone else. He grew a magnificent plume of a tail. And he grew spurs at his ankles. And with those sharp thorns he came after us when we went to tend the coop. With them, he held the dog, Baila, at bay. He mated with the pullets, frequently, a process that looked like a stomping and a squashing, but which is known in ornithology circles as a cloacal kiss. His carriage was erect. His wattles were elegant, but froze some in winter. The feathers of his neck were subtly layered in black and white. He was a one-man op-art painting. Elysia renamed him Mighty Waddles: that foot injury. Soon, however, he was merely Mighty. First to the food! Last out the door! Irritable as my Continue reading →
Live Report From AWP…….
categories: Cocktail Hour
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It’s noon at the AWP (Association of Writers and Writing Program) in Chicago. I start drinking again in about an hour. This is just another way that AWP is not like my normal life. In my normal life I go to bed at 9:00 and get up at 5:00. In my AWP life I go to bed at 2:30 (and get up at 5:00). In my normal life I don’t drink 3 vodka martinis and talk to hundreds of writers. In my….well, you get the point.
This morning I thought I had a panel on Thoreau at 11. I was up and ready to go when I finally looked at the program and found out my panel was actually at 9. I asked someone what time it was and it turned out it was 10:01. My panel ended at 10:15 and I was staying a mile away from the hotel. Kind of a nightmare….I had flown out here and would miss it. But no! I sprinted for a cab, told the driver to step on it, (“Hurry, man, I’ve got to talk about Thoreau!”) and then sprinted into the panel with five minutes left. Turned out that was enough time for me to quote Thoreau a few times–“The life that men praise and call successful”–tell some jokes and, despite my slamming heart, not die of a heart attack.
SUMMERS WITH JULIET is Twenty
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 8 comments
Summers with Juliet, published February, 1992
Summers With Juliet started as an idea for a personal essay, one of my first ever (before that I’d only written formal essays and fiction), nothing more than this: My not-yet wife and I had seen an enormous fish in Menemsha Pond, Martha’s Vineyard, a sea sunfish, Mola Mola. One January day I started to write that story, and by late March, I finished it. After a year of revising and Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Be Like Nixon!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This may seem like really bad advice at first….be like…Tricky Dick? Of course he is starting to seem less creepy in a world of Santorums and Gingrichs and Ws…..But still plenty creepy.
No, I am not suggesting that Nixon should be your moral model, just that he had one habit that comes in handy when you are a writer. The guy taped everything.
For my part, I use a Sony micro-cassette recorder, and this recorder has become an integral part of my writing life. My goal is to re-create my voice on the page. What better way to do that than to actually re-create my voice?
Be warned that it can be an awkward tool at first. I quickly got over the whole “I don’t like the sound of my voice” thing, but back when I started, over two decades ago, you looked a little crazy if you talked to yourself in public. Continue reading →
Table for Two: An Interview with Michael Martone
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Michael Martone
Recently I got a postcard from Michael Martone announcing his newest book, Four for a Quarter. Beneath several vintage-looking photo strips, the postcard and book cover show an old photo booth tucked into a tattered post-no-bills wall somewhere in post-industrial America. The booth sports a sign that says PHOTOS, of course, but it took a little staring to notice that the designer (Lou Robinson) has inserted the word FICTIONS in a font so much the same size as PHOTOS that at first (and then for several weeks) I didn’t notice it. It’s as if the booth sold PHOTOS FICTIONS. But the fictions referred to are Mr. Martone’s. The book is nicely made, beautifully printed and presented, kudos to the The University of Alabama Press (and a notation that much of the great literary work being produced these days is being picked up by university and other small presses).
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Four for a Quarter is a delightful book on the page, as well, a stream of meditations, of stories, of collectibles, of comedy, of tragedy, of every possible thing grouped in four. Or it seems every possible thing until you walk away and find the world falling into infinite fours, yet another organizing principle and OCD tic to contend with. Continue reading →
On the Netting and Tagging of Babies
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I net and tag Hadley. She is 4 weeks here, the optimum age for radio collaring.
I understand why some people are against netting and tagging babies. But the crucial issue here, I hope you understand, is control. We simply can’t have babies running wild over the marsh and through the woods, going hither and yon, completely unmanaged. In the end the goal is to protect babies and to protect them, ultimately, we need them to be tagged and tracked. I would think this would be obvious, even to the lay person.
If I seem insensitive, please understand, that I know of what I speak. We first trapped and tagged my daughter Hadley in the salt Continue reading →
