Cocktail Hour
Table For Two: Debora Black interviews Annette Berkovits
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Annette Berkovits
Debora: Annette, thanks so much for being here on Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour. Some day soon we must actually meet for a martini or two. But for now, a cyber setting. I thought, given the complex outcomes of the narrative you’ve written, tea and cookies by this warm fire at Three Peaks Grill would be fitting. We can watch the alpenglow spread over the ski mountain as we discuss the pages of your beautiful new book: In the Unlikeliest of Places, How Nachman Libeskind Survived the Nazis, Gulags, and Soviet Communism. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Tear Through That Second Half
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I’ve been talking to several friends who are in the same spot as me–a novel or other book maybe half finished, 150 or 200 pages under the bridge (and awaiting revision), and that feeling of slowing down, of weeks turning into months, and months starting to look like years. My big idea, which I’ve often done with shorter work, is this: I’m just going to bust out a very rough pile of pages, get myself to a (no doubt tentative) end, then go back and really write. Continue reading →
Most Excellent
categories: Cocktail Hour
comments: 1 comment
Amidst all the exciting news about Bill (Amazon, People, HBO), you may have missed the fact that we are making a new film. We may not look as good as we did when we were younger, but it turns out Hollywood wants us back. For more info on our forthcoming flick: http://time.com/3431163/bill-and-ted-3-excellent/
And here’s a shot from our first movie (Bill, beardless, on left):
Getting Outside Saturday: Autumn II, a photo haiku
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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sugar, red, striped maples, plus basswood
Bad Advice Wednesday: Call in Sick
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Every year I come in and guest teach in our big intro lecture class, CRW 201. But this year I was sick so I wrote this to Wendy Brenner, who is currently running the class:
Woke up still sweating. Better, but not great.
Doesn’t look like I can do it.
How about you ask a student to read this:
David Gessner really wanted to be here. He has grown to love talking to 201. This was not always the case. At first he thought there was no tougher audience in the world than 201. When he spoke he felt a little like Rodney Dangerfield (a comedian from long ago). {Note to reader of this page: when you speak of Rodney squirm uncomfortably and wiggle your tie, or where a tie would be if you had one}
One year David decided he was going to wow the 201 audience. He had just written about about following the osprey (better known to you as seahawk) migration. He had gone into Cuba illegally and into the jungles of Venezuela following the birds. He had great pictures and a power point presentation, which was cutting edge back then.
He threw his heart into his presentation. He felt good when he was done and continued to feel good until he walked out the door after class along with the students. There he overheard one gum-snapping girl say to another: “That was the most boring fucking hour of my whole fucking life.”
Disheartened but not defeated, Gessner vowed he would get his revenge. If they thought that was boring, they hadn’t seen anything yet. The next year he asked a film student to sneak into 201 and sit in the front row, filming the class. Then he did this:
http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=SuNjEs8mdrA
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Remedy For Love,” by Bill Roorbach
categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence
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Living in Maine or anywhere with a real winter, we’re all familiar with the hyperbolic ‘storm of the century’ and the panic that ensues as grocery store shelves are emptied, cars shuttled about, gas procured for the snowblower and emergency supplies (batteries, water etc.), restocked. And of course what usually follows is anticlimactic as the storm blows offshore or the storm track veers off to the west (or east or north or south).
Bad Advice Wednesday: Do Something For Someone Else (from the archives)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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How to get published, how to get an agent, how to be a better writer, these are all high on the list of common questions we get asked here at Bill and Dave’s. Where there’s not a bit of desperation in the question there is often anger, and where the anger has faded there’s sometimes sadness, maybe a whiff of self-pity. Or is that me, feeling all those things no matter where the writing takes me, often in equal measure with pleasure, even elation (but that comes most often in the making, sitting at my desk alone, lovely, soon to be dashed). What I’m proposing today is forgetting about our own careers (or lack) and thinking about what we can do for others, what we can do to make the world a more hospitable place for art, and for artists, which is to say for writing and writers. Doing for others may be your key to success, and is certainly the key to happiness. Herewith, 30 suggestions for writers, and an invitation to suggest more. Karma, anyone? Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Fall Berries (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Photo Haiku
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False Solomon’s Seal
Bad Advice Wednesday: Don’t Forget Suspense
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Back when they built the fence between literary and commercial fiction someone decided it was a good idea that Suspense should stay on the commercial side. Oh, an occasional stray would wander over into the literary hills, but for the most part we here in fancy town looked down our noses at creatures so craven, so obvious, so vulgar. You mean our readers are supposed to care about what happens next? But then how can they pause and admire our beautiful sentences?
These thoughts came to mind while I was laid up in bed with an infection over the last week. With my body ping-ponging between cold and hot, and my energy level barely allowing me to get to the bathroom, I watched a whole lot of TV. And I read. At first I tried to dip into the more language-oriented books that I’d assigned for a class, but after an attempt or two they remained on the shelf for the rest of the week. Instead I picked up Cloud Atlas by David Mitchell, a book that someone had put on one of those top ten lists on Facebook (and a movie that I had seen small parts of about a thousand times). I am not ready to put the book on any lists of mine, and I found it far from perfect, but Jesus Christ there were sections of that book where I was close to ripping the next page off, so excited was I to find out what was going to happen (even though I kind of knew due to the movie.) As my health got a little better, I would sit down for sessions of almost a hundred pages. And then I would just stop to close my eyes for a while, hungry for more. It brought back memories of the marathon reading sessions I had as a teenager—gobbling down Lord of the Rings, science fiction, Kurt Vonnegut. It was fun.
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “A Rough-Shooting Dog,” by Charles Fergus
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Charles Fergus
Complementing my love of books, I have always been drawn to the beauty of the natural world. It’s why I was a farmer and why following a springer spaniel filled with bird lust, shotgun in hand, makes me feel as alive as nearly anything I have ever experienced. Recently I came across a classic that combines these twin passions: A Rough-Shooting Dog: Reflections from Thick and Uncivil Sorts of Places by Charles Fergus. Fergus’ book transcends the limitations of the hunting genre: it is a memoir of a man and a bird dog’s education that qualifies as genuine literature. Continue reading →
