Cocktail Hour
Table for Two: an Interview with Maureen Stanton
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Today I’m going to meet Maureen Stanton, a native New Englander (or Massachusetts, anyway, good enough, and not her fault) whose first book, Killer Stuff and Tons of Money, was published this past summer by Penguin. It’s a work of anthropology as much as it’s anything, with a deep look at the psychology, the social dynamics, and the caveman economics of flea market and antiquing culture. The book soars way beyond the multiple TV shows on the subject, which tend to focus on objects more than people, on dollars and cents rather than the mechanics of deals made on folding tables and in barns. And don’t forget the Internet. Maureen teaches at Missou, now, the University of Missouri, in Columbia, Missouri, and though this is a virtual meeting that could have taken place anywhere (Paris would have been nice, with its vast and famous flea markets—Les Puces, par example!—or in Georgetown, Maine, where Mo lives in summer, only a couple of hours from here, and Maine practically a flea market on its own), I find myself at Shotgun Pete’s BBQ Shack, at 701 Business Loop I-71 W, hardly a romantic address. Continue reading →
Cover Me (Part III)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Today’s sad and unexpected news combines elements of our last two posts. The news is of the death of Dugald Stermer, who was many things during his varied career, including the editor of the radical 60s magazine, Ramparts. He was also a stunning artist. One of my favorite of his drawings was the cover he did for my book, Return of the Osprey. He also drew a bird in flight for the back, and as an added touch he painted an osprey egg for the back flap. These drawings alone give you a sense of craftsmanship, dedication, and grace he brought to all his work. We need more human beings like Dugald Stermer on this planet. He will be sorely missed.
Here’s a link to today’s obituary in The New York Times.
Cover Me (Part II)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Here’s a few of the possible covers that the designer came up with for The Tarball Chronicles. Below is an interesting link where he tells the story of finding the right cover. (And I do think it’s the right cover.)
Bad Advice Wednesday: A List From John Lane
categories: Cocktail Hour
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John Lane’s Bad Advice
1. Don’t follow your bliss.
2. Don’t always write about what you know.
3. Never believe there’s a light at the end of the tunnel.
4. Don’t wait for the Luck Bus.
5. Never expect a promotion with that MFA.
6. Don’t invest in plastics in spite of the current nostalgia for Simon & Garfunkel.
7. Practice brevity, especially when it comes to introductions.
8. Ignore the prizes and dream only of swimming with Keats.
9. As Isaac Denison so famously said, Write every day without hope and without despair.
10. If you break it, you buy it.
11. Never lie about the truth.
12. Feelings can be rented. You don’t have to own them.
13. If you want to acquire a dog make it a low maintenance one.
14. The New Yorker’s jokes are better when the issues pile up.
15. Don’t believe there will be cell towers on Mt. Parnassus.
16. Yes, Kerouac did die unhappy, but his heirs are not.
17. Don’t buy too many envelopes, even if they are on sale.
18. If you purchase first class stamps make sure they are eternal.
19. “Don’t let it sleep in the house” doesn’t work with email.
20. ABC. Mamet’s “Always be closing.”
21. Save the few letters you get for any available archive.
22. What’s published on line stays on line.
23. Lay your dreams to rest and you’ll come in second.
24. Unlike yogurt, literature never expires.
25. There are only two types of river stories: upstream and down.
26. Talking animals are hard to pull off.
27. Read The Odyssey again.
28. Holiday stories usually disappoint.
29. Don’t call “Eleanor Rigby” a poem.
30. Measure twice and cut once still works.
Keep Hope Alive (In the South No Less)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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John Lane is the author of many books, including two very recent ones, Abandoned Quarry, his new and collected poems, and My Paddle to the Sea, which the literary critic David Gessner has called “beautiful—full of contemplation, life-and-death, humor and derring-do.” John is going to be taking over grease cook duties here at Bill and Dave’s Bar and Grill for the next couple of days, including the offering below and tomorrow’s bad advice:
I know Dave is planning on writing about the west and Wallace Stegner in his next project and I just finished listening to Crossing to Safety, Stegner’s story of two academic couples who have been friends for fifty years, one couple is from the west and one from the east. This plot got me I’ve been thinking a lot about the differences between regions, particularly about my native south and every other region. I haven’t come to any profound conclusions, but I have formed some ideas. Continue reading →
Chester Greenwood Day: Our Parade
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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Broadway and Main
The first Saturday of December may be a lot of things a lot of places, but here in Farmington, Maine, it’s Chester Greenwood Day, and we have a parade. It’s not quite the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day parade (which I wrote about last week), maybe two blocks worth, but it’ll do!
Chester Greenwood invented the earmuff, among other things, and almost anyone in town can tell you how it happened: he loved to skate as a young teen, 1873, but his ears got cold. He wrapped his woolen scarf around his head, but that was too itchy and uncomfortable, so he got his grandmother to sew circles of beaver pelt on a metal frame he’d fashioned, and (as a French-challenged college student of mine once wrote): wallah! Continue reading →
Poker with Nelson Algren
categories: Cocktail Hour
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My old friend, Burns Ellison, is our featured guest this week. Burns and I met in grad school twenty years ago and this week he writes about a time–long before we met–when he played poker with Nelson Algren. “The First Annual Nelson Algren Poker Game” is a great essay, one of my favorites, and he first published it in the Iowa Review in 1988. Since I don’t know a lot about Algren, I asked Peter Baker, who does, to write a short intro. Here it is:
At some point American letters forgot about Nelson Algren. If we hear about him at all, we hear two things: he wrote about Chicago, and he wrote about life’s losers and the dispossessed. Implicit–and sometimes explicit–in our Algren non-conversation is the notion that he was an unsophisticated writer of lefty agitprop. What has been forgotten is that Algren became early in his career–after, indeed, writing some unsophisticated lefty agitprop–a great American stylist, a man capable of bringing poetry to bear on his given subject, and insisting upon the humanity of those dehumanized by the state.
Burns Ellison puts Algren where he belonged: at the center of a young writer’s pantheon of idols. For Ellison, Algren was someone to learn from and to seek, however uncertainly, a place alongside. In relatively few pages, his essay gives as good a sense as any I’ve encountered of the way Algren made his way as a writer in the world. Here’s his essay: The First Annual N. A. Poker Game
Bad Advice Wednesday: Do Something for Someone Else (30 Ideas for Writers)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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A little help?
How to get published, how to get an agent, how to be a better writer, these are all high on the list of common questions we get asked here at Bill and Dave’s. Where there’s not a bit of desperation in the question there is often anger, and where the anger has faded there’s sometimes sadness, maybe a whiff of self-pity. Or is that me, feeling all those things no matter where the writing takes me, often in equal measure with pleasure, even elation (but that comes most often in the making, sitting at my desk alone, lovely, soon to be dashed). What I’m proposing today is forgetting about our own careers (or lack) and thinking about what we can do for others, what we can do to make the world a more hospitable place for art, and for artists, which is to say for writing and writers. Doing for others may be your key to success, and is certainly the key to happiness. Herewith, 30 suggestions for writers. Karma, anyone? Continue reading →
Maps and the Mind
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I don’t think I’ve ever written a book where I didn’t draw a map about the landscape I was writing about. This goes for both fiction and non-, and includes the fantasy apocalyptic young adult book I’ve been writing with my daughter. (For that one we’ve each drawn about a dozen maps.) Maps serve as, among other things, living malleable outlines for my books. They also serve as procrastination, inspiration and, in the case of two of the maps below, tools for the reader, since they actually ended up as the books’ frontispieces. The one directly below is from Return of the Osprey, and marks out the four nests that I watched regularly during my osprey year.
Seven Good Things About Fall
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
comments: 7 comments
1. Jumping in leaves.
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I don’t love fall: the shortening days, the daylight-savings axe, the opening of troubling views through once-impenetrable forest, the birds of summer abandoning me, the regressive chores, the incremental turning inward. It’s a big breath in, and hold, and wait, like waiting for death, or at least December 21, when you can breathe out again, and the light grows. Then again, Fall. You don’t burn the leaves anymore, but still you can smell them. The kitchen’s full of food from the garden. It’s back to school, a rhythm I’ve never shaken. Continue reading →
