Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Lounge: “The Painter,” by Peter Heller
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Here’s a book to add to the summer reading list: The Painter by Peter Heller. Though highly recommended, I began this story with guarded expectations and then was slowly and inexorably seduced by the voice and ethos of the novel’s narrator, Jim Stegner. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Try This Little Exercise in Empathy
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The other day I was re-reading Robert Richardson’s Splendor of Heart, a short and wonderful memoir of his (and my) teacher, Walter Jackson Bate. The second half of the book consists of an interview with Bate, conducted by John Paul Russo, in which Bate compares the temperaments of Samuel Johnson and John Keats, both of whom he had written biographies of.
“Johnson is so psychologically snarled up in ways and had a much rougher life than Keats,” Bate said. “Keats had a tragic, early death, but Johnson was by far the unhappier person.”
Of course I loved the phrase “psychologically snarled up” and underlined it. But later I got to thinking about the idea of comparing what it felt like to be in two different writer’s, two different people’s, minds—that is what it felt like to inhabit their inner worlds. And I started to play a little game. I thought of five of my friends and began to kind of rank them from whose mind would be least pleasant to inhabit, on a minute by minute level, to whose would be more pleasant, or healthier.
Obviously this sort of listing is superficial. But what came along with it was less so. I found I was actually imagining how one of my friends dealt with anxiety, how she sometimes gave into it and sometimes kept it at bay, the courage required as well as the failures of nerve. In other words what started as a game led to a deeper imagining of what it felt to be inside someone’s skin, something that, I think you’ll agree, is good for a writer (and human). Continue reading →
The Downstream Dog
categories: Cocktail Hour
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When Nina and I first met, over twenty years ago, she had a dog named Zeke. Zeke was part collie, part Saint Bernard, and while fiercely loyal to Nina (and eventually me), he tended to be pretty ornery to others. In those days Nina and Zeke were always together, and it was only natural that when she set out to write a children’s book her subject was Zeke. I just cleaned out the garbage and found that old book, though she won’t let me re-print it here. But I will re-print the drawings I did to accompany the story of the day Zeke floated downstream.
Backwoods Jack!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I have never been a fan of writing exercises. Back in school, I would immediately freeze up when asked to do one in class. I couldn’t write on demand, after all, I was a young genius and so I wrote when inspired or when alone in my study. Well, the other day I had the opportunity to sit in on a class where an exercise was given and I went ahead and did it. I won’t tell you what the exact prompt was, since that is the intellectual property of the teacher, but the prompt worked–it prompted. And I found myself beginning a short essay on a subject I have never written about: the history of my troubling teeth. Here is how it starts:
I stare at the hard, green apple and I think of my teeth. More accurately, of the history of my teeth. It is not a pretty history. Were I to bite into the apple’s shining surface, a full chomping bite, I would surely leave one of those teeth–likely my fake right front–in the fruit’s hard flesh.
Just the way I, by the way, left it many years ago in the skull of an ultimate Frisbee player who was guarding me. It was freshman year of college and we both went up for the disc. I went higher and when I landed came down right on top of him. We both found ourselves writhing on the ground. I, suddenly toothless, and he with a piece of tooth jutting out of the top of his skull.
Guest contributor: John Lane
Bad Advice Wednesday: Embrace the Dread!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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From Dave: On Monday I wrote a couple of sentences on Facebook: “The weather is beautiful and fall-like. And I full of dread.” (I forgot the “am” before dread by mistake, then decided I liked it.) John Lane, today’s guest poster, suggested I “embrace the dread.” I liked that, both catchier and more moral than “spread the dread.” All humans deal with that unspecified feeling that something unpleasant is looming, but maybe writers, sitting alone with their brains, deal with it a tiny bit more than most.
Here is John’s not-so-bad advice to me:
Dear David, you write to say you are full of dread. You say dread clings vaguely to the coming publication of your book on Ed Abbey and Wallace Stegner, for which you have recently turned in a final manuscript. Though the weather is pure and fall-like in Wilmington, you sense something looming, something darker than the mere passing of the task of preparing a manuscript for its final submission. I imagine you feel a little like coyote feels with that anvil hanging over the head.
Getting Outside Saturday: 5K!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Hadley and I ran a 5k this morning. The good news is that I’m still alive. She couldn’t match her amazing time of the fall but still managed a very respectable 28: 18. I came stumbling in fifteen seconds later.
Nice rooster hair….
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “Euphoria,” by Lily King
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Lily’s King’s newest novel Euphoria, is an instance of a writer at the height of her creative powers. Based loosely on an imagined episode in the live of anthropologist Margaret Mead, what the artistry of King conjures up for her readers in Euphoria is a work of historical fiction that soars far beyond the limiting strictures of historical details to enter into the luminous interior life of an extraordinary individual. Continue reading →
Feeling Low
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Good old Cape Cod. Take a look at this picture and then take a look at this, Monday’s NYT piece on the scientific study of the melting of the West Antarctica ice sheet. (Then draw your own conclusions.)
Getting Outside Saturday: Where’s Bildo?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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