Cocktail Hour
Point of View, or Happy Thanksgiving from NYC
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
The view from here
The view from my father-in-law’s apartment in New York is always nice–Central Park. But the sixth floor is just about right on Thanksgiving Day, when the Macy’s Thanksgiving Day Parade goes by. This year we trimmed things down quite a bit, as Grandpa Frank wasn’t up for the usual party. But over the years he’s always given a speech and hosted the parade as if it were his own. My favorite year was the one the Harvey Fierstein played Mrs. Santa. Santa, of course, always just plays himself. As the last celebrity on the route, he ushers in the Christmas season, and reminds us that it’s all a big commercial, after all! But don’t those floats warm my heart, and the balloons, many of them ragged, pull me back to more innocent days.
In 1929, one of the first parades, the balloons were released at the end of the route, with address tags for return. There’s an amazing video extant that shows Wimpy, the Popeye character (“I’ll gladly pay you Tuesday for a hamburger today.”) being let go and disappearing into the sky. I can’t find the clip right now, as the new Diary of a Wimpy Kid balloon is obscuring all searches. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Turn the Page
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 9 comments
Betsy Lerner (Bill’s agent by the way) said this in her terrific book on writing, The Forest for the Trees : “I urge all my writers to get to work on their next project before publication. Working on a new book is the only cure for keeping the evil eye away.”
This is sound advice, and it is grounded in the fact that the writer’s mind, when stripped of its main obsession—writing—will turn to other darker objects.
So today’s advice: turn the page. Which makes great sense but, as I learned over the last few months, is a little harder these days. Ideally, I think, all of us writers would swing from book to book like Tarzan from vine to vine. But what sometimes interrupts all the swinging is the necessity of selling the book. Reviews, Amazon, sales, slights, good readings, bad readings, victories, losses. For a while after publication all the focus is on the past book, the done thing, the dead thing. Continue reading →
Americature
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
This is a project that I worked on in my twenties. Like all the other projects from that time, it never saw the light of publication. I’ll be excerpting from it from time to time.
Visual Haiku
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Reading Under the Influence
comments: 4 comments
wild cucumbers
Herewith, a couple of visual haiku. Three lines invoking a season, denoting a shift or change. Silence.
Mr. Hopeless Redux
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 16 comments
Some of you may recall the post I wrote in June called “Mr. Hopeless,” in which I took on Derrick Jensen, and tried to explain why his world view chafed against mine. Well, this comment just appeared on that post and I think it merits being more than just a comment. Here it is:
98% of the old growth forests are gone. 99% of of the prairies are gone. 80% of the rivers on this planet do not support life anymore. We are out of species, we are out soil, and we are out of time. And what we are being told by most of the environmental movement is that the way to stop all of this is through personal consumer choices. It’s time for a real strategy that can win.
Where is your threshold for resistance? To take only one variable out of hundreds: Ninety percent of the large fish in the oceans are already gone. Is it 91 percent? 92? 93? 94? Would you wait till they had killed off 95 percent? 96? 97? 98? 99? How about 100 percent? Would you fight back then? Continue reading →
Beyond Flipper
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 2 comments
Like any sane person, I am fond of dolphins. For the last seven years or so, since I moved south, we have been on neighborly terms. I remember my first New Year’s Day in the South, eight years ago, when I kayaked over to Masonboro Island. Escorted by a squad of pelicans, I paddled across the channel thinking of birds and looking to the sky, until, suddenly, something rose out of the water. A dorsal fin. Then three more, close by. I’d like to say that I reacted immediately with sheer delight at the wonder of nature, but that would be a lie. The first moment was one of panic, before slow identification of friend, not foe. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Memoir, Don’t Do It!
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
comments: 41 comments
My father and mother
People keep asking. “I’ve been writing about my parents and I don’t see how I can publish.” “My daughter has always been sooo sensitive about this stuff—she’s going to kill me.” “The good news is a contract from Scribner. The bad news is that I just realized my PASTOR is going to read this. I mean, ANYONE can read it.” “One of my friends here in [an assisted living facility] has read my book and loved it, but she says no way can I publish it. I’ll be shunned [by the community]. She Continue reading →
Big Wind
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics / Getting Outside
comments: 8 comments
Some of the Towers on Kibby Ridge
I’m writing this column and you’re reading it on a computer powered by coal smoldering somewhere. There may be some diesel fuel thrown in, and some waterpower, and no doubt a little biomass, a spot of nuclear, a few turns of wind. But it’s only been ten years or so that my writing required any power at all beyond breakfast—I went from a Hermes portable typer straight to an old MS-DOS PC by Zenith, enormous learning curve, hours of study, all those arcane pathways, nothing I need to know anymore, six generations of computers later. Continue reading →
Why Thoreau Wouldn’t Drive a Prius
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 4 comments
I guess what I’m about to do qualifies as cross-blogging. The below originally appeared in Wild Life, my blog at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and then got picked up by Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast and the Wall Street Journal. Now, more impressively, it has been picked up by Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour.
WHY THOREAU WOULDN’T DRIVE A PRIUS
The short answer: he couldn’t afford it.
The long answer: he wouldn’t afford it.
Let me explain:
Last weekend I spoke at the house where Thoreau was born, a talk sponsored by the Thoreau Farm Trust. I got out to Concord early and took a walk around Walden. The place was crowded on a fall Sunday, and what was once a one-man show was now a crowd of more than a hundred. The last time I had visited, during summer, SUVs crammed the parking lot and an ice cream truck played its seductive tinkling song.
Learning to Surf
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
comments: Comments Off on Learning to Surf
We are in the process of converting and re-stocking are other categories, including “Our Best American Essays,” which this is a part of. To read this essay in its original form as it appeared in Orion magazine (beautiful painting and all), click here.
LEARNING TO SURF
by David Gessner
Out just beyond the breaking waves, they sit there bobbing, two groups of animals, avian and human, pelicans and surfers. As they rise and fall on the humps of water, the pelicans look entirely unperturbed, their foot-long bills pulled like blades into scabbards, fitting like species-wide puzzle pieces into the curves of their throats. The surfers, mostly kids, look equally casual. In fact one girl takes this to an almost ostentatious extreme: she lies on her back on the surfboard, looking up at the sky, with one leg crossed over the other in an exaggerated attitude of relaxation. For the most part the birds and surfers ignore each other, rising up and dropping down together as the whole ocean heaves and then sighs.
Pelicans are particularly buoyant birds and they bob high on the water as the surfers paddle and shift in anticipation. There is no mistaking that this is the relatively tense calm of before, rest before exertion. Soon the waves pick up and the surfers paddle furiously, gaining enough speed to pop up and ride the crests of breaking surf. They glide in toward the beach where I stand, the better ones carving the water and ducking under and cutting back up through the waves.
We only moved to this island town a month ago, but I have been here long enough to know that those who pursue this sport are guided by a kind of laid-back monomania. Each morning I bring my four-month old daughter down to the local coffee shop, and each morning the talk is of one thing. It isn’t only the southern lilt that is new to me, but the surfing lingo. The ocean, I’ve learned, is always referred to as “it.”
