Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Lounge: “Transatlantic,” by Colum McCann
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Colum McCann by Seamus Kearney
[Author disclaimer: During portions of my reading of the following novel I was in a bit of a narcotic haze after hip replacement surgery–BL]
There are authors we read for the deeply satisfying and exquisite sensual pleasure to be found in their words. These writers may demur, claiming the story to be the thing, stepping into the pages of their novels is to enter a different, sharper, more immediate reality, a place of heightened senses and the lurking expectation that something important about existence might be revealed at any moment: think Ondaatjie, Harrison, Didion, Toibin… Colum McCann’s most recent work, Transatlantic reaffirms his inclusion in this company. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Writing the First Draft
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I just finished spending a couple of months writing a draft of a new book and I thought I’d focus today’s bad advice on the routines of writing that I tried to put in place during that time. The draft I just finished, technically a first draft but not really (I’ll explain), is the most tense, scariest, most exciting and pleasurable and life-sucking. The reason for all this is it is the part where you make something from nothing. For me this means there has usually been a long period of gestation before I begin—of reading, travelling, brooding, journal-writing, osprey-watching, note-taking, outline-making, file-putting in, tape-recording during walks, anxiety attack-having—but when I do begin, I usually really blast off.
This time around my daily schedule during the draft went like this:
4:30/5:00: Get up/feed dog and cat/boil water for tea/make coffee for later/stretch back/eat banana
5:00/5:30: Write Continue reading →
The Big Primal and the small primal
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Here my latest post from my Wild Life blog at OnEarth.com Please check out the OnEarth site for the best in environmental reporting.
Last Friday, as Tropical Storm Andrea bore down on the Carolina coast, I sat out in the writing shack I’ve built behind my house and watched as the storm moved in. The shack is sited on the edge of a salt marsh; soon after I entered, the marsh grasses started thrashing about wildly. Then the wind picked up even more, until it began shaking the red cedar outside my door as if it didn’t like that tree one bit. There was a sticky expectancy in the air: something you could probably say, in general, about this part of the country at this time of the year. It wasn’t just that Andrea was coming. It was that Andrea, the first major tropical storm of 2013, was effectively announcing the arrival of another hurricane season—which is always an anxious time for us here on the Carolina coast.
It’s an anxiousness that everyone in the mid-Atlantic and Northeast had probably better get used to feeling as well. At first, the National Weather Service had been predicting that Andrea could cause flooding as far north as Philadelphia. New York City activated its flash-flood plan, sending out alerts via cell phone. Though most of the damage Andrea caused was limited to Florida, where it had been at its strongest, it played hopscotch up the East Coast all the way to Maine as it tapered off into a mere major rainstorm.
Guest contributor: Monica Wood
Writing from Inside: “Best Friends,” by W. Wrighter
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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[This piece arrived from the following prompt: “Write about a person, an object, or a place over a period of years, landing briefly to examine it, then fast-forwarding a few years to see it afresh.” W. Wrighter chose to look at her changing “best friends” over the course of her life. It’s the story of a downward spiral that ends on a hopeful note, despite the final landing spot–MW.]
Best Friends, by W. Wrighter
She was younger by four years, my only playmate, the one who was spared from beatings by my back, shared secrets and whispers, the one I would die to protect, at age seven
…my sister Continue reading →
Happy Aquatic Father’s Day: A Photo-Essay
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I’m posting this one as a Father’s Day gift to myself. These pictures must be almost nine years old now, but they are still some of my favorite of Hadley as a baby. They are from a visit to the house of a friend who lives on a lake in Massachusetts. They were taken by another friend, Mark Honerkamp (see his recent post here). Hadley, by the way, has given me her permission to post these.
Guest contributor: Rosie Bates
Getting Outside Saturday: Why I Climb
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Rosie on the wall
I started dancing at age 4, first ballet, then tap and ballet, then just tap, then tap and climbing, and then just climbing. I know I stopped being a dancer and became a climber when I was 14. But I don’t know when I started feeling like a climber—that could’ve been earlier. My dad taught me how to climb (starting when I was seven) and his dad taught him how to navigate the mountains and in turn my grandfather’s dad taught him how to enjoy the outdoors, I suppose. My dad finds solace in the mountains along with his dad, hiking through the snow, ice and sometimes rock of the North Cascades in Washington. For me, well, I find solace there too, but prefer to be high up on the vertical spires of granite, sandstone, and limestone protruding from the spine of Mother Earth herself. We could be called the evolution of the vertical life, moving forever upward in our quest for freedom in nature. But this process hasn’t been generational in the sense that climbing on its own has been passed down to me over the years. Rather the need for adventure has been passed on to me, the unadulterated respect for the environment and the continued quest for freedom. Continue reading →
Edgerton on Fatherhood, Edgerton on Film
categories: Cocktail Hour
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A couple of days ago my colleague Clyde Edgerton charmed the world on the CBS morning show with his performance HERE.
The book Clyde was pimping for can be found here and still special ordered in time for Father’s Day (or maybe not at this point–but try).
What isn’t as well known is that Clyde’s television and film career has spanned decades. Some of his best work came in small, independent films like the one HERE in which he portrays Paris Review Founding Editor George Plimpton in an epic battle of one-on-one with Ecotone Founding Editor David Gessner.
Guest contributor: Dale Hill
Movie Night: Star Trek, Where Men Have Boldly Gone Before, Happily
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies
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Both are bold, neither are men!
A tribble makes a brief but important appearance in the new Star Trek adventure, Star Trek Into Darkness. Part of the importance of the role of this small ball of fluff is that it indicates a plot point without which the movie would shriek to a halt. The other part of its importance is that it shows us precisely the tone that the new movie is aiming for, so we can all quit worrying.
There have been plenty of hints already, a lot of them in the previous movie, 2009’s Star Trek, where we first met the current cast, portraying the familiar starship crew as babies. A lot of audience time was spent studying the young actors, asking how close they came to the old guys; fortunately the answer was, pretty darned close, and they did it in a relaxed and warm-hearted way that avoided any charge of gimmickyness, if that’s a word. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Tend Your Garden
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I’ve been in the garden a lot these last weeks, enjoying being able to, for one thing, but also getting beds ready and planting and even harvesting: greens galore, and asparagus, and spring garlic, and parsnips, Jerusalem artichokes, radishes, leaves of perennial herbs. The garlic I planted last October before book tour, the lettuce in late February: seeds on snow in a cold frame. The asparagus twenty years ago. Twenty years! I dug a ditch and filled it with composted cow manure from my generous neighbor, dropped the crowns in, buried them, covered the soil with straw. A year later, first shoots. I ate only one–you’ve got to let that plant develop. Second year, three or four spears. Third year a couple of meals. And as much as I could eat most years after that, a lot of it just sliced off below the soil line, brushed on my sleeve, and into my mouth, complex flavors you don’t taste after a day or two, or don’t get at all in less developed soil or with chemical as opposed to organic fertilizer (organic meaning decomposed plant matter, which is to say healthy soil). Continue reading →
Hollywood Hit List: A Few Things We Never Need to See in Any Movie Ever Again
categories: Cocktail Hour
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1. SLOW MOTION AVOIDANCE OF SLOW MOTION BULLETS
