Comments on: Cover Me

By: dave

dave — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 14:17:09 +0000

Thanks Peter! We’ve missed you lately at Bill and Dave’s Bar and Grill.

By: Peter Peteet

Peter Peteet — Sat, 04 Jun 2011 10:48:02 +0000

Cracking up’s o.k.-perhaps even the highest form of flattery for humor -of the black sort especially.The cover’s cracking good,here’s a Georgia crackers crack at “covering you”.
Tar baby’s monocle
Is very old
Tar baby’s monocle
Rimed with gold
But if tar baby’s monocle you wish to hold
Snatch it only when it’s very cold.
For if you grab it in the heat,
Right there where tar and gold meet,
The bond will hold and the tar will come.
Stickier by far than any gum,
It will first show on your hand,
Where without a thought you tried to clean that band.
From there the tar will quickly flow
As heat and haste thin it you know
Till tar will be most everywhere
And La brea’s pits stink up the air
Dinosaur’s smirk says
It’s only fair.

By: Dave

Dave — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 17:14:35 +0000

I’ll make sure the pelican rests!

By: Bethany

Bethany — Thu, 02 Jun 2011 02:13:25 +0000

Just remember that when wearing a hazmat suit in the Alabama sun one must take a 40 minute break every twenty minutes. I’m still not sure how that works out with the whole time/space continuum thing. Regardless, wonderful cover!

By: dave

dave — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:26:54 +0000

In the other book the same press is putting out, My Green Manifesto, I’m upper case. So maybe I fell from favor between one book and the next.

I have gotten some suggestions, mostly from the Orion people, to legally change my name to just Gessner. But I don’t like the ring of Bill and Gessner’s Cocktail Hour.

By: An Alewife

An Alewife — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 13:19:43 +0000

Interesting.

When did you become the lower case david gessner?

Was that a considered decision?

By: Amysue

Amysue — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 11:29:01 +0000

Despite my deep and abiding love for my tech and especially my iPad and Kindles and similar devices….I will be purchasing the book in dead tree form so that I can read it in my new kayak while in the meander through various Cape waterways this summer.

Paine’s Creek swallowed it’s parking lot for good by the way..not sure if you heard.

By: Dave

Dave — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 10:48:25 +0000

Big Congrats! And it’s good to see your name back in the comments. It just wasn’t the same without you…..

By: john lane

john lane — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:23:24 +0000

Ok, Dave, damn you. You win the cover competition for 2011. This one is better than ABANDONED QUARRY and better than MY PADDLE TO THE SEA!

By: John Jack

John Jack — Wed, 01 Jun 2011 00:01:43 +0000

Hi, Dave, and Bill. Just stopping by to let you-all know I’m still following the Cocktail Hour, albeit from a waterwagon’s quiet remove.

A cover on par with Hunter Thompson’s Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas. I’m struck on first impression by the metalic quality of the hazmat suit counterposed by my perceived notions of pelican’s fragility. Fireproof-like, futuristic, reminiscient of my creative vision of Ray Bradbury’s Farenheit 451‘s firemen bookburner’s outfits. I guess my imagined expectations of The Tarball Chronicles storyline conflates those two novels into a Roman à clef journey into the savage failing of the fossil fuel progress trap addiction.

The Deepwater Horizon tragedy on its surface is a noteworthy bookend complete natural plot structure, perfectly packaged and well-orchestrated by circumstances, a current event story reliant upon high-concept premises universally accessible to reporting news media entities and news watchers alike. It had an unequivocal beginning, middle, and ending. For all intents and purposes, the story’s over, except the occasional progress reports about fallout legacies.

But it’s not over ’till it’s over, the larger picture, like the Cold War, is yet to be revealed. Many narrative installments recount the dramas of the Cold War. But the end, per se, didn’t come until the fall of the Iron Curtain. Here twenty years on, the underlying personal meaning of the Cold War has yet to come to fruition. What does it personally, universally mean? I ask as one who did duck and cover drills at the Little Flower kindergarten in Key West during the Cuban Missile Crisis.

I’m imagining The Tarball Chronicles in some subtle ways seek the personal particular universal meaning of fossil fuel dependence. “”For myself, I always write about Dublin, because if I can get to the heart of Dublin I can get to the heart of all the cities of the world. In the particular is contained the universal.” Joyce on Ulysses.

Anyway, it’s official. I’ve been accepted into the freebooters’ graduate creative writing program. Classes begin in August.