Meditating with Labs

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I have been meditating in the mornings recently. After years of mocking those who claim to want to “be in the present moment”–“Cows, for instance, are good at being in the present,” I wrote in one book–and agreeing with Ed Abbey that I liked Gary Snyder’s work “except for all the Zen bullshit,” I have embraced my inner monk. It’s really more of a return than a new beginning, however, since past versions of me have spent a good deal of time with my eyes closed and legs crossed. The first time was after seeing a psychiatrist as a twelve year old when an obsession with the idea that “everything is nothing” ballooned out of control.  The second was after my bout with cancer at thirty when none other than Mr. Mindfulness, Jon Cabot Zinn, led my post-operation meditation sessions in the hospital with a voice that was meant to be soothing but that I found annoyingly adenoidal.  My reaction to his commands to calm myself was an urge to strike him, though how much that had to do with my shock over my sudden turn of medical fate I am not sure. On neither occasion did the practice take. Unlike napping in the afternoon, a staple of mine, it did not fit my day’s rhythms. Sitting never quite fit my constitution the way the more active meditations of biking and running did.

Until now. Now, older and grayer, I find I can suddenly put in 40 morning minutes on the yoga mat, and head to my desk feeling as if I’ve popped half a Xanax. True, I have adapted the practice to fit to my personality by making it more active and athletic, adding in some sessions of Wim Hof breath holding.  And it’s also true that there are still challenges. One is the persistence of our two yellow labs, who seem equally amused and attracted by the fact that I, after feeding them and letting them out to pee, choose not to retreat to my writing desk, as I have since they have known me, but instead sit down on the floor and lounge with them, part of the pack. The issue is compounded by the fact that they, being labs, like to stay close. And while I try to focus on my breathing I hear not just my own inhalations and exhalations, but two others sets of the same echoing mine. And so my attempts at oneness start with three-ness. Luckily the sounds they make don’t spark the Pavlovian response that Zinn’s did. Together, sometimes in rhythm and sometimes not, we pant our way toward Nirvana.

Father Throws Best

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One of the fun things about having Ultimate Glory come out has been the unearthing of pictures of events from the book. Yesterday I learned that there was this documentation of the incident from the book (described below):

HAPPY TRUMPIVERSARY

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My Summer of Ultimate–a Wrap-Up

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I have moved on to a new book (a novel about Cape Cod) but I wanted  to take a moment to do a wrap up of my summer of ultimate.  Also maybe to remind you what a nice present Ultimate Glory would make as the holidays approach. Give it to any and all of those relatives who never understood what the hell ultimate was. As the Washington Post put it: “An exploration of the questing desires of the young heart, “Ultimate Glory” should be recommended reading for every college student. A 20-something, unsure whether to listen to the yearnings of the soul, might find answers in Gessner’s chase of a flying plastic disc.”

Here’s the  full Washington Post Review. It’s title is “NEW HARVARD GRAD TELLS DAD: “NOW I’M GOING TO PLAY ULTIMATE FRISBEE.”

Here is No Disc-Respect, my article in Outside magazine about Ultimate and Beau Kittredge.

Here is the Slate podcast of Hang Up and Listen where I talk Ultimate.

Here is the great Wall Street Journal Review.

Sin the Fields is a wild, fun podcast from Ultiworld.

This is my Longform interview, where we touched on a lot of non-ultimate topics, including “immortality.”

Here’s a brief but fine review from Harvard magazine.

Here is the website I created, but honestly never visited much. But it has a very cool connection to Stu Beringer’s vintage photos, which you can also go to through UltiPhotos….

Here’s our Old and In the Way squad. We got a silver at old-guy Nationals in July and (hopefully) will be reuniting for Worlds.

Here is what the Rude Boys did to my book:

And here, once again, is the book trailer, edited by daughter Hadley.

This website, Big-Hearted Boy, asked me to create a playlist of the music that goes with my book.

And speaking of beautiful music, here are some pics of our post-game singalong (and book signing):

One with Dancin’ Dave Smith….

A Bunch of old guys…

From my reading in Maplewood:

“If Springsteen were an ultimate player he would have played for the ‘Boro.” Timba

Boulder:

Brookline:

My pardon. I can play in D.C. again!

My Dad  (Telluride):

San Francisco:

Thanks for everyone for coming out this summer. It was a blast.

Here is/was the tour, more or less:

Lundgren’s Lounge: “My Absolute Darling,” by Gabriel Tallent

categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence

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With the arrival of summer comes the inevitable onslaught of summer titles, those books you all MUST read, for your own edification, or for cocktail party chatter or for the simple pleasures of this increasingly arcane act that we call reading. These books arrive on the scene to great trumpet blasts and ubiquitous and rapturous front page reviews… and by the next year they have been largely forgotten, relegated to the remainder shelves or the used book section of the bookstore or most ignominiously, serving duty as a doorstop. Continue reading →

Soldiers in Boots, Girls in Lakes: Bill Talks with David Abrams

categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews

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David at his launch party. Wouldn’t a cake be a good idea?

David Abrams and Bill Roorbach first met at PNBA, Pacific Northwest Booksellers Association conference, which took place in Tacoma, Washington back in 2012, when David’s book Fobbit was new and Bill’s book Life Among Giants had just been released. These friendships on the road with new books bloom quickly, and are reinforced by chance meetings across years to come. On the occasion of the publication of their newest books, Bill and David (Not that Bill and Dave!) thought they better have a virtual conversation, as the road wasn’t going to bring them close this time around. Continue reading →

categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Short Stories

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Today is publication day, accompanied by the usual excitement and dread.  Have I got a story for you!

Audio, Audio!

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Nina, my wife, didn’t read my last book, All the Wild That Remains. She listened to it as an audio book instead. That means she got to hear a strange man say things like this about my then-eight year old daughter: “I got in the car with Hadley and drove seven hours up to Wyoming…..”

I liked the narration for the book a lot but the narrator’s voice was distinctly unlike mine. It had a hint of Englishness to it, not effete exactly but slightly fancy, and the word “bullshit” did sound right when he said it.

When I told a friend of ours, Bekki Lee, about Nina listening to the not-me narrator, her story-making mind came up with this: what if a wife listened to a husband’s book and fell in love with the narrator’s voice, then left the husband for him?

That can’t happen this time since I will be reading my own book. I’ll be very happy to have narrated Ultimate Glory myself, and to have it. But I was surprised by how brutal a process the recording has been. Six days of 6 hour days of reading. Who knew I had so much saliva in my mouth or then, the next minute, so little? Who knew the letter L makes a clicking sound? Who knew I couldn’t pronounce half the words I thought I knew in my head?

Barring any unforeseen circumstances, that will be the last time in my life where I read anything out loud for six hours.

For the next book I’ll just let my wife’s lover do it.

* * *

You can hear all my thoughts on the recording sessions at Penguin-Random House’s “This is the Author.”

Lundgren’s Lounge: “Augustown,” by Kei Miller

categories: Cocktail Hour / Guest Columns / Reading Under the Influence

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Into every reading life an occasional slump will occur, a period marked by encounters with a surfeit of desultory and uninspiring work.  But then the world rights itself and one encounters a marvelous, luminous and exquisite work of art like Augustown by Zei Miller. While it is impossible to read Miller’s novel without hearing echoes of Garcia Marquez’s Macondo and Toni Morrison’s Song of Solomon, Miller insists his is not a metaphorical tale given wings by ‘magical realism.’ He writes, “Listen, this isn’t magical realism. This is not another story about superstitious island people and their primitive beliefs. No, you don’t get off that easy. This is a story about people as real as you are… You may as well stop to consider a more urgent question; not whether you believe in this story or not, but whether this story is about the kinds of people you have never taken the time to believe in.” Continue reading →

New Book Tour Coming: Sartorial Advice Appreciated

categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence

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From time to time invaluable advice arrives in my email inbox.  And while I pride myself on my excellent shampooing skills and first-class Banana Republic and Reny’s (A Maine Adventure!) closet, I’m not exactly a GQ model.  So this anonymous note that came via my website, really made my day.  I’ll take it to heart as I go out on tour with The Girl of the Lake.  Very lightly redacted to protect the sender’s privacy:

#

Dear Bill, Can I call you Bill. I was at your reading in B______ and I have some ideas for you. Now if you happen to take this personally, oh well. Continue reading →