Nabucco in HD: Opera Too Close for Illusion
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Nabucco set at the Roman Quarry of St. Margarethen
Last night at Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, Maine, for a mere fifteen bucks, I saw a great performance of Verdi’s Nabucco, a confusing opera about Nebuchadnezzar conquering Jerusalem. He goes mad, his daughters fall in love with the same guy, a lot of singing ensues. The evening was filmed in Austria at the 2007 Festspiele at the truly amazing and ancient Roman quarry of St. Margarethen, which has been converted into a concert venue, high cliffs of stone carved into various staircases and theater wings. It’s a gonzo performance, with actors being hung by the neck and stuntmen leaping off the walls like so many college drunks at whichever reservoir or football game, and Continue reading →
Can Anderson Come out and Play?
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I am reading at Octavia Books in New Orleans at 6 on this coming Tuesday, and I’ll be very disappointed if my close personal friend Anderson Cooper doesn’t show up. Is it possible that he doesn’t know that he has a bit part in The Tarball Chronicles? Or maybe he does know, and thinks he may have been treated a tad too harshly. Some of you may remember my Anderson encounter from last summer’s blog. Here is how it came out in the book:
Kristian Sonnier joins me around drink two. An outgoing and generous man, Kristian is a regular here and is therefore a pal of French 75’s renowned bartender, Chris, a bald man with thick black-framed glasses who struts about the place in a white suit coat and black bow tie. Chris seems a little full of himself, but I like him because he feeds me my Daisies and then a delicious Cornish game hen and perfect little fries thatlook like their middles have been inflated with a tiny bicycle pump. I probably weigh about fifty pounds more than Kristian, but I notice that when we shift to beer I start slowing down and he begins to pick up the drinking pace. I have never been to this city before but maybe in New Orleans I’ve found my lost tribe of eaters and drinkers. We take our legal “walking beers” through the French Quarter and head down to the river. Continue reading →
From Blog to Book
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Next Monday The Tarball Chronicles comes out. The book represents my personal landspeed record from inception to publication. I went down to the Gulf to report, but also with an eye toward a book, in July of 2010, and now it is being published in September of 2011, about fourteen months later. As well as being written fast, there was something else unique for me about it. This was a book born of a blog. This blog specifically. That’s why I thank each and every one of you (true, I do this as a group) in the book’s acknowledgements. Unlike my earlier books, which were created in solitude, this one was the product of a community. And I hope the readers of this blog feel some ownership for the resulting book. Not so you run out and buy it, but because it’s true. This is the soil the thing grew out of.
At first, a few years back, I had the usual tssk-tssk fuddy-duddy reaction to “blogging.” What changed this for me? I think seeing my former students, many of them my most talented students, find in blogging an outlet for their abilities. Speed of publication was appealing and also there was this: it looked kind of neat. Anyway, Bill and I started this one up in April 2010, around the time millions of gallons of oil started gushing into the Gulf. One reason I went to the Gulf was because I was pissed off about what was happening there, but there were other factors involved too. I had just had a book proposal rejected by the douchebags in New York, one I had been Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take Your Work to the Movies
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour / Movies
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Sometimes when I’m done with a scene or a section in a story or chapter or essay, I like to test it by thinking about how it would look as a movie. One way to help envision this is to write the script. No, really. Turn a section of your story or chapter or essay into a movie script. Nothing fancy: just take the scene or section (something short—you don’t need to kill yourself) and imagine what the first image in its movie would be, what the first words would be and who would say them, where the action would be, how the drama would fall. If you’ve been working too much in the mode of the writer sitting at her desk and talking, you’ll find that all you’ve really got is voiceover. If you’ve been sitting and thinking, ruminating in writing, you won’t even have that. Continue reading →
Big Reed Forest Reserve
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Ktaadn from the Abol Bridge--still 2 hours north to go!
Thanks to my friend Drew Barton, the forest ecologist immortalized in my my book Temple Stream, I got to go on a trip this past weekend to the Big Reed Forest Reserve, which protects the largest remnant of old-growth forest in New England (and likely well beyond). Our guides and hosts were Nancy Sferra and Dan Grenier, who are, respectively, the Director of Science and Stewardship and the Maine Preserves Manager for the Maine chapter of the Nature Conservancy. When I hear the words old growth my mind tends to conjure up enormous trees and pinecones the size of Volkwagens, but this isn’t the Pacific Northwest, it’s Maine, tough territory for forests and people alike. Instead what we found in the reserve were more than 4500 acres of undisturbed habitats, Continue reading →
The Author Photo
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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October, 2004: unbeatable
Dave and I are practically supermodels, all the camera time we log. But leggy beauty aside, for me it’s still a painful exercise trying to get the right author photo. I knew it was coming–it’s a standard request when you have a new book in the pipeline, but Algonquin’s letter threw me into a panic, a perfectly workaday letter from the very kind publicity assistant down there in North Carolina, one Sarah Rose Nordgren. “Your author photo,” Sarah wrote (and I know she’s never said this before–this missive was for me alone), “along with a copy of the attached photo contract, should be sent to me no later than August 3rd, 2011. It’s important that we receive your photo by that date so that we can use it for all promotional materials, including our catalog and advance reader’s copies of your book. Your photo should be in color. We prefer a high-resolution digital file (it must be 300 dpi, 5×7 inches or bigger, and approximately 10 megabytes), but you can send a hard copy instead. Dress for your photo can be casual, but we prefer that you Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Kill Your Internet, or, Writing in the Time of Harrison Bergeron
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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This was going to be a short essay about distraction. It was—excuse me, what was I saying? Wait I lost my train of thought….let me take this call first…and answer this e-mail….
Harrison Bergeron
As I was saying, distraction, and the thousands of possible objects we call distractions, are an enemy of the writing life, or at least, an enemy of the effort of consistent concentration required for the creation of longer projects. To write a book of prose most of us need blocks of time where we focus on nothing but that book. These blocks of time, it seems to me, are not so different in duration than the four or five set matches going on right now at the U.S. Open. And they also require a similar focus and intensity. You don’t see Nadal checking his e-mail during changeovers. He has, as the expression goes, one thing on his mind.
It is 3:46 A.M. as I type this sentence. There are disadvantages to working at this time of day, the most obvious is that I will be tired and cranky later on, especially when I teach my two o’clock class. But there are advantages, too, the chief one being that for the next two hours no one is going to call me or interrupt me in any other way. I know that my early rising time makes me an extreme case, but we all face the same challenge of finding that block, that chunk, that slice of time when we, like Nadal, can have one thing on our minds.
It’s always been hard to find these blocks and, let’s be honest, it’s getting harder. “Death by a thousand cuts,” was how a colleague of mine described the academic life, but it’s not just the academic life, it’s every life. Leave your computer for a day or two, and despite that automatic out-of-the-office reply, you will come back to find 400 messages in your inbox. E-mails and phone calls sting and swarm like insects. And it isn’t just writing that these distractions interrupt, but anything else that requires a decent block of time—going for a hike, say, reading a book, having a conversation, eating a meal.
Profusion
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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ready for the 4-H sale
The garden’s a grocery store, this time of year. One of my great pleasures is to make meals that involve nothing but a trip down the hill, 100 feet or so and into the wild zone. I’m a chaos gardener—flowers and weeds and veggies and herbs and compost pile and big rocks and lots of sticks and a tall ribbon pole all coexisting with the million insects and a toad or two, plenty rodents, plenty slugs, a couple of snails and at least three snakes.
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Elysia is the garden girl, and if it’s not too hot she’ll spend hours with me, digging, planting, mulching, weeding, and at last harvesting.
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Hurricane Irene knocked the popcorn over, but we’ve propped it back up and it should recover—the ears are well in place, and well along. The Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Take a Workshop
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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The Haystack stair to the ocean...
I disdained all organized writer things when I was young (in my twenties, that is), regarding them as extraneous and foolish and vain. I thought the only proper apprenticeship for a writer was to make pages on my own under the unwatching eyes of various writing gods, not Shakespeare—I thought he was a jerk for all the puns—but more like Scott Fitzgerald and Bukowski. I worked in construction and as a bartender and on a farm and played music and all of these things were the experiences I was collecting for my writing fund, real stuff, life stuff. Anything I did was writing, as I saw it. I was on the wet path, as the Buddhists call it, partying and playing and working the sentences when I saw fit and writing in fits and starts, getting better, sure, but in a terrible vacuum—aside from reading, reading. Study and devotion to a mentor seemed too much the dry path for me. And why bother, since everyone knows both paths—wet, dry—lead to enlightenment. Continue reading →
Topsail Island: A Photo Essay
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Orrin Pilkey and Me on Topsail by Coke Whitworth
After Irene passed through on Saturday I went out to Topsail Island. I blogged about it in a piece called “Believe The (Long-Term) Hype” for the Natural Resources Defense Council (and you can read that blog here. )
In the meantime I thought I’d post a couple of pictures from Saturday’s adventure. As I wrote in the piece, some of Topsail’s homes are so close to the water that they seem like they are being offered up to Poseidon, but Irene did relatively little harm. There was the usual street flooding, and the fairly feeble north-end berm had been eaten away some more, but we were not treated to the floating houses that have made this island such a dramatic player in earlier hurricane narratives. In fact, the main damage we witnessed was to gas stations, specifically to the metal awnings of gas stations. Before we even got to Continue reading →
