Wallace Stegner on Largeness
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I’ve spent a lot of time over the last few years in the company, or at least with the mind and words, of Wallace Stegner. It has been a bracing experience. One thing I’ve noticed about his thinking is that there is always a movement toward the general, an imperative to think more broadly and openly, a preference for the long view over the short, the large over the small. This was not just an intellectual commitment, but a spiritual, or at least a personal, one. “Largeness is a lifelong matter,” he once said. The goal was (and is) magnanimity.
The “largeness” quote is contained and given context below by Stegner’s answer to this interview question: Should the teacher, in the process of instruction, consciously try to shape a student’s personality or enlarge him or her as a human being?
Here’s his reply:
Well, I have some fairly strong feelings about that. I do not believe I can teach anybody to be a bigger or better or more humane person. But I do subscribe to the notion that, in order to write a great poem one should be, in some sense or another, a great poet. This suggests that any writer had better be concerned with the development of his personality and his character. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday Expands to Bigger Markets
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Our new column!
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Preparation for the Next Life,” by Atticus Lish
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Atticus Lish
The Great American Novel has always been a story about outsiders, people peering in through the gates at a uniquely American dream that seems maddeningly just beyond their reach… from Huck (where it all began), to the Joads and Gatsby and Bigger Thomas and on to McMurphy and Seymour (Swede) Levov, Ignatius J. Reilly and Sethe… these are all characters in pursuit of a mirage shimmering on an ever-receding horizon. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: A Few More From the Gulf
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Birds and rig on Elmer’s Island, LA.
This photo and one below by Erik Johnson. All the rest by Mark Honerkamp.
Ed Abbey’s FBI File
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I have a new essay in Orion, adapted from my forthcoming book, ALL THE WILD THAT REMAINS. (April 2015.)
It includes these sentences:
“As acting editor of the University of New Mexico’s literary magazine, The Thunderbird, Ed Abbey decides to print an issue with a cover emblazoned with the words: ‘Man will not be free until the last king is strangled with the entrails of the last priest!’ The quote is from Diderot, but Abbey thinks it funnier to attribute the words to Louisa May Alcott.”
Funny guy, that Abbey.
You can read the whole piece in Orion HERE.
Getting Outside Saturday: Southern Louisiana Edition
categories: Cocktail Hour
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We have made our way down to Venice in southern Louisiana. Yesterday hooked up with Dave Muth for a Christmas bird count. Amazing amount of birds, several of which Hones and I had never seen before. Spectacular abundance in the shadow of the oil plants, right off of Halliburton Road. In this place the future seems to be fighting it out. A fragile spit of land, destined to be underwater by the end of the century, full of wildlife and beauty (this morning we watched an otter slink across the road), while also the virtual front lines of our relentless attempts to extract fuel out of earth and sea. (All photos by Mark Honerkamp.)
Guest contributor: Jim Lang
The Emotional Trajectory of Publishing a Nonfiction Book
categories: Cocktail Hour
7 comments
1. Hey, I wonder what that’s all about. How come I’ve never heard of this?
2. This seems more interesting than it first appears. More people should know about this.
3.OH MY GOD I HAVE AN IDEA FOR A BOOK THAT IS GOING TO CHANGE THE WORLD.
4. I will go ahead and accept your publication offer, but you should count yourself lucky that you are getting this book so cheaply. I’ll remember this when I’m famous.
5. All right, let’s settle in and nail this thing.
6. Humming along so far; at this rate I’ll come in ahead of deadline.
Goodbye, Joe
categories: Cocktail Hour / Jukebox
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Joe Cocker is one of those artists that surprise you when you stop to look: thirty albums over forty years, many of them live. The last one to make a big impression on me was Organic, which came out in 1996, possibly the last new LP I ever bought. It has “You Are So Beautiful to Me” on it, and Van Morrison’s “Into the Mystic,” among many others, a guy who made hits out of covers repeatedly by revealing the soul beneath the most familiar of lyrics, that hoarse, tuneful tenor, the struttingly spastic performances, the consummate weird. He just got better as he got older, and maintained a big career dotted with comebacks, something heartbreaking about the guy, but maybe only from the outside. He died of cancer, age seventy, married to the same woman 27 years, big sense of humor, something dark there, too… Continue reading →
