Sure, Nature, But Not Too Much Nature, Please: On Snakes, Toads, Birds and Poets
categories: Cocktail Hour
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It was a wild weekend here. The tides have been strangely high all week, flooding through our fence, and I paddled the kayak from our yard to Masonboro Island, where the yucca are blooming with yellow-white leaves that look strangely edible.
On Saturday morning I went for a walk with my wife Nina and daughter Hadley in Carolina Beach State Park. Last year, around this time of year, I would walk there every day and more than once saw big fat copperheads lying across the trail. Our yellow lab would jog obliviously over them, and I would tip-toe carefully around. But now we had Hadley, who had just turned eight, with us, and all spring she had been pretending to be a dog when we hiked these tails, which meant running far ahead of us, out of sight (though we could hear her barking.) I hadn’t wanted to tell Hadley that she shared her favorite trails with giant snakes, but now it was that time of year when they would be sunning on the paths again and there was no getting around it. Continue reading →
“Just Kids” by Patti Smith
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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Patti Smith and Robert Mapplethorpe
As she gained prominence in the mid and late seventies, Patti Smith was on my radar, but only barely. I was graduated from college in 1976, and my tastes and enthusiasms were largely in place. Plus, I was a musician, which took a certain amount of knowing where you were coming from. Not a musician who was going anyplace, but. I moved to SoHo in 1979 and spent a little time at CBGB’s, often going to see friends perform, even getting onstage myself a couple of times, but I found the whole punk scene kind of sloppy and overly anarchic, also androgynous, though sloppy and anarchic and androgynous was what a lot of rock had always been about. But not like the punk scene. I’d adopted the long-hair hippie style and valued a studied musicianship. One band I saw did a great thing one night where one by one they handed off their instruments to people in the crowd, people who couldn’t play a note. The hard-driving song held together for a few seconds even after the drummer departed, amazing, then just came apart into noise, Continue reading →
Caution: End of the World
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Best place to be for End of Days!
Harold Camping, who says he has crunched the numbers in the Bible, has revealed May 21 to be the date of the rapture. That’s coming right up, so I wanted to write a post to say goodbye to my believing acquaintances. Goodbye!
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In related news:
Living out towards Temple, as I do, I cross Middle Bridge over the Sandy River to downtown, just about daily, often multiple times daily. And I always look up at the huge letter sign high on Joel Bridges’s house (which is also headquarters of his Thoughtbridge Ministry), that controversial community bulletin board, free speech in eight-inch letters: lately a paean and exhortation to organic gardening; occasionally a paid ad from a political candidate or a reminder to register to vote; the odd quotation from the likes of Abraham Heschel (the Rabbi and Selma freedom marcher); a heartwarming WELCOME Continue reading →
Shack Reading
categories: Reading Under the Influence
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I have never been much of a linear reader. My wife Nina, a novelist and short story writer, starts a book at the beginning and reads straight through to the end. She sensibly has one book on her bedroom table, addresses it with purpose, and then takes it down page by page. Meanwhile I jump from book to book, sentence to sentence, seemingly by whim. I used to feel bad about this, but I don’t anymore, my conscience eased over the years by two of the ghosts I talk to regularly, Montaigne, whose own jumpy mind makes mine look systematic, and, Samuel Johnson, who while considered by some the best read man of his time, claimed to have only rarely finished a book. He read, as he putting it, “by inclination,” putting one volume aside when he got bored and dipping into another.
If I’ve always been a whim reader, the building of my writing shack a couple of months ago has exacerbated this tendency. Writing shack, it turns out, is a misnomer. Though I occasionally write out here in the morning–my main writing time by the way—I still do most of my writing in my study in the house. What I have done out here is read a lot, sip beer, birdwatch and think. The place is built for short bursts not long dives. Yesterday, for instance, while I was Continue reading →
The Self-Promotion Blues, or, Me and Jessica Lange
categories: Cocktail Hour
5 comments
There was a fine essay the other week in the back of the New York Times Book Review, a piece called “Building the Brand” by Tony Perrottet. The beginning of the piece was particularly good, where Perrottet writes about the uneasiness that most of us feel about self-promotion: “In this era when most writers are expected to do everything but run the printing presses, self-promotion is so accepted that we hardly give it a second thought. And yet, whenever I have a new book come out, I have to shake the unpleasant sensation that there is something unseemly about my own clamor for attention.”
Unseemly. That’s it exactly. As I head into my summer of promoting two books, anxious that they will sell 30 and 34 copies respectively, I feel both the near-desperate desire to get attention for them and a deep-seated ambivalence about that desire. Continue reading →
Wednesday is Bad Advice Day: this week, The Secret of Getting Published (and your letters answered)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Would you take advice from this man?
I get emails often with a few vague words of praise for my work and then the big question: I’m writing this article, this story, this poem, this essay, this screenplay, this book, and I’d like to know how to go about getting an agent. Agent, usually, because the correspondent has already done some investigating and has heard that you need one. I have sympathy, because I’ve been through it myself, the feeling that there’s some secret to getting published and that no one’s telling what it is. Well, that’s all changed. Because I now know the secret to getting published, and I’m ready to spill it. The same secret works for getting an agent: Continue reading →
Whose Woods These Are: A Public Letter to Our New Chancellor
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Dear Chancellor-Elect Miller,
We have not met yet, but I look forward to shaking your hand. You have arrived at a fascinating place, a place that is growing fast in ways it is not always sure of. Like you, I had no plans to move to Wilmington, North Carolina, until fate decided that that was where I would move. This is my eighth year here and not long ago I almost left and moved my family West. The decision to stay marked a change in my relationship with this town and school: being thrown randomly into a place I had never heard of before was one thing, but deciding to stay, to commit, and to raise my daughter here was another. For many reasons I have felt confirmed in my decision to stay, including the passion of my students and the friendship of my colleagues on the creative writing hallway. But I also reaped an unexpected reward in the years since my decision: I discovered our woods. It was a little more than a year ago that I started taking Continue reading →
Bill and Dave’s Kochtail Hour
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics
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Taxpayers, just like you and me.
Like most of my fellow Americans, I recently got a piece of mail from my state congressional representative, a survey he claims will help him determine what his priorities should be since he is, after all, representing me. It’s a push-poll, of course, with origins in a national “conservative” vision, several local twists added to add authenticity, the most toxic proposals attributed to the weakest local links, these dumb local reps desperate for favor. I put conservative in quotes because the vision is anything but—it’s a radical corporatist agenda, the one that operatives Continue reading →
Writing About Real People (and their Houses)
categories: Cocktail Hour
17 comments
One of my favorite grad students recently had a book come out. It is a triumph of course—a first book, what could be more exciting?—but also, ultimately, a cause for pain. He had written about his family, specifically his dead father, and his mother and grandmother were angry and upset to have the family “exposed” in print. The student is a stable and mature sort and did his best to keep his equilibrium, but it was clearly deeply confusing and hurtful to have his words, which, objectively could only be considered loving and sympathetic toward his deceased father and family, be taken in the way they were. Usually when students come to me with fears about how their Continue reading →
Farewell, My Lovely
categories: Cocktail Hour
19 comments
way before
Okay, today I’m in the garden planting peas, and I hear a roar and a bang up by the road. Pickup truck. So of course I go to see who. Young man with a terrible limp, no smile, no threat either. Familiar, I realize, then rejoice: the truck’s familiar too! It’s my old trusty F-150, and he’s fixed the body and painted it candy-apple red and got all kinds of chrome on the thing, and huge tires, stainless mag wheels, half the revised engine sticking up out of the hood, chrome running boards and racing stickers and exhaust and web tailgate Continue reading →
