Occupational Hazards
categories: Cocktail Hour
13 comments
Phew. I’m still here. I’m sore and at times very uncomfortable, but not really in pain ten days out. I won’t paragraph this because that’s the way the pain meds affect my thinking, just big, strong blocks of prose and then a nap. My sense is this all starts when I’m much younger. Maybe the car accident at sixteen–telephone pole at probably 40 miles an hour, no seat belt, the impression of the steering wheel across my chest as a bruise for weeks, no medical or other treatment, my mother mad at me for calling my girlfriend first rather than her. And I played piano and other instruments in bands, often violently, always bent to the task. And I worked various Continue reading →
The Making Of…(A Happy Story)
categories: Cocktail Hour
6 comments
Things are getting kind of exciting down here in sleepy old Wilmington. Lookout Books, sister press of Ecotone and the brainchild of my colleagues Emily Smith and Ben George, just released its very first book, Binocular Vision, a short story collection by Edith Pearlman. That would be exciting enough but the reception of the book has been kind of, well, crazy. If you don’t believe me consider yesterday, when the book got a rave on the cover of the New York Times Book Review and in the L.A. Times. (Not to mention this great piece in Publishers Weekly.) In one week the entire first printing has been distributed to bookstores, and today Lookout will go back for a second printing. To say that anyone down here expected this kind of response would be a big, fat lie. We weren’t quite ready for Edith Pearlmania.
One thing that seems to have caught everyone’s imagination, along with Edith’s stories, is Edith’s story. Both the L.A. and N.Y. Times reviews start with the same question: Why haven’t we heard of her? And as Roxana Robinson answers in the NYTBR: “Maybe from now on everyone will know of Edith Pearlman.”
GET WELL SOON, BILL
categories: Cocktail Hour
24 comments
Bill has been in the hospital for a couple of days for spinal fusion neck surgery so I send this note along for all of us (sort of):
Dear Bill,
Get well soon. We miss you down here at Bill and Dave’s Blogging Factory. Just yesterday, our secretary, Miss. Cashdime, made some dated, sexist comment about missing seeing your sexy behind around the shop. (I chastised her and docked her pay.) But I’m getting off my point here…..
My point is love, love, love. We are all sending it out to you. You were always the handsome and talented member of the B & D team (I never admitted until now that you ghost wrote all my posts.) We are lost without you (as the quality of this particular post attests.) Continue reading →
On the Road–Again
categories: Cocktail Hour
9 comments
Jack and friends
The Churchill Wit
categories: Cocktail Hour
11 comments
Well, now that Bill has taken the IQ level of the blog down a a few notches, I feel it is up to me to really drive us into the cellar.
For Christmas I gave my brother Drunk Stoned Brilliant Dead: The Writers and Artists Who Made the National Lampoon Insanely Great by Rick Meyerowitz.
The book is great, brilliant, and full of the high culture–crude joke variety of humor that I like to think of as the Socrates-steps-in dog-shit-school. But one thing is missing, and that’s Michael O’Donoghue’s The Churchill Wit. So after scrounging around on line for a while I found it and here it is. I’ve changed the order slightly, putting my two favorites first.
And, um, to you sensitive folk I’m sorry for the language. I hope we don’t lose subscribers….do we have subscribers? Continue reading →
100 Ways to Celebrate Amateur’s Night
categories: Cocktail Hour
5 comments
vocabulary quiz
Happy New Year from Bill and Dave’s! And now, without further ado, this year’s 100 top words for being drunk, in no particular order. Remember: Don’t drink and drive, but if you do, drive fast! This way you limit your time on the road. Example: If you drive 100 miles per hour you get there four times faster than the person who drives only 25, thus limiting the danger you pose to others! At 200 mph you are only on the road eight minutes for a 25-mile trip! That slowpoke takes a whole hour, a lot more exposure to danger! The police love this kind of logic–try it when you’re pulled over! And tell ’em you saw it on Bill and Dave’s. But say Dave told you. Continue reading →
Junger Envy: A Perfect, Rank Place
categories: Cocktail Hour
9 comments
Happy holidays!
I have had a one-sided rivalry with Sebastian Junger for about fifteen years now. I say it is “one-sided” because he likely doesn’t know it exists. The roots of this (imaginary) feud grow out of the fact that our first books came out at the same time and we did a couple of readings together. This was early in my writing career, back when I still fantasized that the publication of books could lead to earth-shaking fame and everlasting glory, and for one of us it would.
My book was called “A Wild, Rank Place.” His, you likely already know, was “The Perfect Storm.” I’m bringing them up again today, not out of sour grapes or indolence (re-hashing an old essay for today’s blog) but out of a building and grudging respect. Not for the book itself, which, honestly, I never read, but for the staying power of the book’s title. Over the last decade and a half it has wormed its way into the culture in a manner not rivaled since “Catch-22” and “1984.” And there’s a good reason for this. It’s great! How did we ever live, let alone talk to each other, in the centuries before we had a phrase that meant the exact confluence of many events to create the ultimate in any situation. What did we say before we said, “This election was a perfect storm of republican cynicism, economic circumstances, and voter discontent.”? The phrase is wonderful, really, to the extent that I sometimes hear myself using it when I lecture. Continue reading →
Southern Drivers
categories: Cocktail Hour
14 comments
My daughter learned the word “douchebag” recently. Since she is in first grade this is not a particularly good thing. Of course she learned it from me. And, of course, since I rarely use the word in normal conversations, she learned it from hearing me yell it at other cars and drivers while I was behind the wheel. “Douchebag,” if you really think about it, is a strange word to use in reference to other motorists, but it’s also one of my favorites. When I drive I am often surrounded by douchebags, and though it feels good to yell it out loud, I’m always left feeling a little bad afterward. My hope is that the word doesn’t take hold in Hadley’s mind, and that she won’t start using it when we visit my Mom’s for Christmas.
Lance Link, Secret Chimp
categories: Cocktail Hour
5 comments
I like this blogging thing, I really do, and think it is a true genre onto itself that, when I’m not buried in a book (as I have been the last couple of months), seems a good and valid way to pass one’s creative time. That said, I, like a lot of us, have a sometimes ambivalent relationship with new technology. Proof of this is in the piles of floppy disks all over my desk in my office at school, piles that students look at in wonder, laugh at, or stare at uncomprehendingly (depending on their age).
Likewise, I have been told by so-called young people, students mostly, that my weakness as a blogger is my “lack of links.” I write little essays, true, and the words are nice enough, but they have suggested that more of those words should be in color, so that the bored reader can, if she or he chooses, zip off to someplace else in the electronic world. Well, sorry about that. I don’t have an elaborate defense, as Wendell Berry did of his typewriter, and I vow that from here on I, and my writing, will be more linky.
The Adventures of Mr. Id–Part VI
categories: Cocktail Hour
3 comments
I’ve decided to serialize the first section of The Adventures of Mr. Id, which is the opening of a novel I wrote three summers ago. It may be the first novel to be based on a Youtube video, since I got the idea while filming my own little film, Transformation. I have always been obsessed with transformations, loving werewolves and Altered States and having re-read The Strange Case of Dr. Jekyll and Mr. Hyde not long before deciding to try my own hand at the form with this project.
Part 6
Later he tried to figure out why he had revealed his secrets to Pam, after being so stingy for so long when talking about his work. First what it wasn’t. It wasn’t drunken/drugged confession or pride in his discovery or the fact that he wanted to impress Continue reading →
