Goodbye to Sundance
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The full moon over the marsh in North Carolina this morning takes a little of the sting away, but I expect the withdrawal to last for some time. On our last day at Sundance I couldn’t stop skiing. I had the back mountain practically to myself, and I kept going down, telling myself it was my last run, trying to take my skis off and then saying screw it and heading back up. The day before had been a stronger ski day (Black Diamonds after midday Hops Risings in the Bearclaw lodge up top, though no double Black Diamonds because I want to live).
My last afternoon really wasn’t about skiing, however. What was it about? I was trying to not forget. Trying to memorize the face of Mount Timpanogos like a lover you won’t see for a long, long time. The avalanche chutes and the dark slashes of the Douglas firs. The clouds streaming overhead, crossing with other, slower batches of clouds. The wind coming from the west, pushing in the storm and blowing over the top as if trying to shoo the rest of us off the mountain. The raptor that was riding that wind (which was definitely not a turkey vulture and which I first thought a baldy but whose white underbelly said hawk). The slashes of sunlight cutting through the storm clouds.
A few times I skied the easiest runs so I could ski
Beer break at Bearclaw
backward and look up at the mountain face. I know it’s strange to feel so emotional about a place you just met. A part of this is the building desire I have had, over the last few years, to get back out West. But it’s more than that. I was at Sundance to talk about Ed Abbey and Wallace Stegner who, in very different ways, spent their lives fighting for wild places. In both of their cases what ended as activism started as love. It’s a simple formula: fall hard for a place and you are more likely to fight for it. That’s the history of Sundance, too. Remember, I can hear my more radical friends cautioning me, you are talking about a ski resort. Point taken. But it is also thousands of acres that have been preserved beyond the resort and a place that has pushed back against the prevailing ethos of more and bigger.
That was what struck me most. For a place of such vast and sublime surroundings it is surprisingly intimate. In less than a week I felt on friendly terms not just with the face of Timpanogos or the view of Cascade as you got off the chairlift, but with the ski school staff who took Hadley in their hands and transformed a frightened North Carolinian who had seen snow 6 times into a skier. And with the generous and amazingly well-read (especially in the Gessner oeuvre) rental guys, including Patrick and Matt 1. Of course if I get started with thank-yous I won’t be able to stop. From Paul who drove us from the Continue reading →
Let’s Go On Strike on January 20th!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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So I know there are a lot of marches and protests happening and I’m all for those. But what about a huge, well-organized general strike? There needs to be some real way to protest both the asinine appointments/nominations and the growing foreign policy horror show that threatens all of our safety. Trump and his biz cronies love productivity so let’s just shut it all down. Maybe it is exactly what social media evolved to do….Let’s declare that the country, or at least the vast majority of the country that didn’t vote for this clown, will go on strike starting on Friday, January 20, inauguration day.
Wait, you can’t DO that!!!
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Avid Reader,” by Robert Gottlieb
categories: Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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Sometimes I feel like my life-long devotion to the act of reading marks me as a member of a cabal, furtive and unnoticed, moving around the edges of contemporary culture. And by reading I mean reading books… bound, tangible artifacts symbolic of the perhaps quaint notion that we can be enlightened and entertained by the words on a page. Continue reading →
Final Four Follow Up: Gessner vs. Plimpton, The Lost Footage
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Not long ago we staged a final four tournament of the best literary magazines in the country. The Paris Review and the upstart Ecotone both made the final four, but what we had forgotten was that some years ago there had already been a historic hoops battle between the two renowned magazines. Now, after many hours of work on the part of the Bill and Dave research assistants, we have uncovered and retouched this lost footage of Paris Review Founding Editor George Plimpton playing Ecotone Founding Editor David Gessner in one-on-one.
Here it is:
http://youtu.be/jNjm5puz7rA?hd=1
Things You Never Hear Writing Teachers Say
categories: Cocktail Hour
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“Just write what comes into your head!”
“Too many specifics.”
“To hell with commas!”
“This piece needs more dialect.”
Bad Advice Wednesday: Wally Stegner Chimes In
categories: bad advice / Cocktail Hour
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I don’t know of any better bad advice for writers, and humans, than what follows, from an interview in the middle of On Teaching and Writing Fiction by WS (edited by Lynn Stegner):
Most artists are flawed; but they probably ought to make the effort not to be. But how do you teach people to enlarge themselves in order to enlarge their writing? It is a little like asking them to “commit experience” for literary purposes.
Largeness is a lifelong matter–sometimes a conscious goal, sometimes not. You enlarge yourself because that is the kind of individual you are. You grow because you are not content not to. You are like a beaver that chews constantly because if it doesn’t, its teeth grow long and lock. You grow because you are a grower; you’re large because you can’t stand to be small.
If you are a grower and writer as well, your writing should get better and larger and wiser. But how you teach that, the Lord knows.
I guess you can suggest the ideal of it, the notion that is is a good thing to be large and magnanimous and wise, that it is a better aim in life than pleasure or money or fame. By comparison, it seems to me, pleasure and money, and probably fame as well, are contemptible goals.
I would go so far as to say that to a class. but not all the class would believe me.
Maybe we Shouldn’t Have Used Those Russian Voting Machines
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Everybody’s Fool” by Richard Russo
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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Over the course of a rich and varied reading life, I find myself returning to the pleasures of an engaging story, well-told, again and again. Excursions to the academic and literary fringes (and too often, the fiction pages of the New Yorker) reveals a miasma of intellectual postmodern tomfoolery that leads this reader, unfulfilled, back to the power of a simple story, offered up by the hands of a master story-teller. Everybody’s Fool, a sequel to the much loved Nobody’s Fool, by Richard Russo, is the quintessential example of just such a story and just such a writer.
