Reading Under the Influence: Joan Didion
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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No
A critic on a radio show not long ago asked how Joan Didion could write about the death of her husband, the death of her daughter, two books, implying something that went unsaid, maybe that Ms. Didion was exploiting her tragedies. But, Radio Guy, she’s a writer. That’s who she is. She writes about her life. Was she supposed to not write about this? Her husband, the writer John Gregory Dunne, died suddenly at their dinner table. Not long after, their adoptive daughter, Quintana, died as well, a little more slowly. Strangely, Didion doesn’t mention Quintana’s death in the first book. But I agree: that’s a different story. In these books, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights, Didion explores what we go through in the face of such loss. I say we, because while she is recounting her own experience (and very bluntly) she is speaking universally. She does this by never using a single bromide. Nothing like “Everything happens for a reason,” or “Whatever Continue reading →
SUMMERS WITH JULIET is Twenty
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays / Reading Under the Influence
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Summers with Juliet, published February, 1992
Summers With Juliet started as an idea for a personal essay, one of my first ever (before that I’d only written formal essays and fiction), nothing more than this: My not-yet wife and I had seen an enormous fish in Menemsha Pond, Martha’s Vineyard, a sea sunfish, Mola Mola. One January day I started to write that story, and by late March, I finished it. After a year of revising and Continue reading →
Henry Miller’s Commandments
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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A photo of a page from a yellowed book has been going around Facebook: it’s Henry Miller’s commandments, just a note he jotted to himself while living and working in Paris, c. 1932. It’s collected in a New Directions paperback called Henry Miller on Writing. And he was a guy who had a lot to say on the subject. [here’s a great interview with him in The Paris Review] Continue reading →
Visual Haiku
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Reading Under the Influence
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wild cucumbers
Herewith, a couple of visual haiku. Three lines invoking a season, denoting a shift or change. Silence.
Furthur in Portland, Maine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Friday night, Juliet and I and a lot of other people from Farmington (we saw friends and familiar faces on the highway, we saw them in line, we saw them at the concert, we saw them in the parking garage after) drove down to Portland (our Portland, the one in Maine) to see the remnants of the Grateful Dead perform in their latest incarnation. Juliet’s been following Furthur for a few years now. She collects tour posters, downloads concert recordings, buys t-shirts and tie-dyed trousers, travels all over the country making the “shows,” as they’re universally called, the focal point and excuse, really, for visits with friends and family.
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I’d never been. My worry was that I’d miss Jerry too much. I’ve been told (by Juliet) to get over it. This is a new band. But they play the old songs! Is my argument. I was never quite a deadhead, though I liked them a lot. I was, though, and remain, a Jerry head. He was a true genius in several guises, and whatever he touched turned to genius, too, including the Dead. He was also very funny and lighthearted and a drug addict who died young of exhaustion and diabetes. Continue reading →
What Bloody Man is That? (a review of “Sleep no More”)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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We were a little late, leapt out of the cab on 10th Avenue, nothing to see on West 27th street toward the river but a couple of closed galleries north and a wall of blank warehouse faces south, pair of huge men hanging out a little ominously under a bare bulb down there. But that doorway—there was a ten-foot star above it, nothing flashy, flat-black as the building in fact, was clearly a clue, the first in an evening of clues and little resolution. We asked the men where the MacBeth performance was, if they knew where it might be. They looked at one another long. The huger one brightened very slightly. “You mean the Hotel?” he intoned. “The Hotel McKittrick?” Behind him the doors opened. A nattily dressed and fake-ish hotelman eyed us, said, “You’re not Continue reading →
Wuthering
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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So I spent some time in the last month on Cape Cod and I also spent some time re-reading Emily Bronte’s Wuthering Heights. These two facts conspired to get me thinking about a novel I’ve been trying to write for the last 26 years, a novel that is a family melodrama set on the bluff on a fictional neck on Cape Cod. I’d love to start it right now, to take the advice I’ve been giving you, dear readers, on Bad Advice Wednesdays, and plunge right in. But in this case it is other writing that is getting in the way of writing, and the likelihood is that my novel will have to slumber again, at least until December when school ends for the term……
In the meantime I’ve been immersed in Bronte’s miserable, beautiful book. It really is horrible in a way, specifically the way that Heathcliff, regarded as a grand romantic character by those who have not actually opened the pages, sets about systematically destroying the two families who have wronged him. Despite his sadism, I’ve always been a sucker for a good primal character, and he certainly is that. He is described by his lover Cathy herself as “an unreclaimed creature, without refinement, without cultivation….a fierce pitiless wolfish Continue reading →
Reviewing The New Yorker’s Summer Reading Issue: Two Thumbs Up, both Mine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Lauren Groff
The New Yorker’s summer reading issue is here, and I thought it might bear a close reading, here in the brave new world post Bill and Dave’s crash, which around here we’re referring to as 6/24. Our innocence lost, can we still read late into the night?
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The lead “Talk of the Town” piece is by Elizabeth Kolbert, the author of a New Yorker piece turned terrific book: Field Notes from a Catastrophe: Man, Nature, and Climate Change (Bloomsbury, 2006), which I taught in a nature writing course when I was at Holy Cross. Students greeted all the facts and figures and warnings of imminent disaster with a Ho-hum on the one hand, and a What-am-I-supposed-to-do on the other. They were also seriously bummed out with what their world is shaping up to be. And they didn’t like the formulaic way Kolbert introduces a scientist, describes whatever shock of whatever color hair, a crooked smile, some clothing, and then lets him or her talk. I didn’t Continue reading →
A Few Pictures from my visit to Henry Beston’s beach with John Hay
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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Henry Beston's beach
A visit to Beston's with John
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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Sam Tanenhaus reviews Harold Bloom in the NYTBR. Here is my take in Ecotone on Bloom and Walter Jackson Bate. Also two former students who done good: Patricia Bjorklund has an excerpt of her funny and moving memoir in The Missouri Review. And Darren Dean, who works for the University of Missouri Press, is blogging brilliantly at Pale Blogger.
