Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Astral,” by Kate Christensen
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Kate Christensen, author of The Astral
Among the wealth of pleasures of working in a bookstore like Longfellow Books, with its family of literate customers and colleagues, is learning about treasures that might, in another lifetime, have passed unnoticed. A recent serendipitous connection led me to Kate Christensen’s The Astral and the acquaintance of her protagonist Harry Quirk, one of the more finely drawn and winsome characters to be found in recent fiction.
Guest contributor: Hones
21 Blocks: A Firsthand Account of April 19th in Watertown
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Greetings all Bill and Dave’s readers.Dave has been trying to get me to write this since the night the 2nd Marathon bomber was captured,but alas,I’m not a writer and have none of the discipline that true writers possess. I do,however,possess tremendous discipline to put fishing above almost everything else I do. So that’s my excuse.I’ve been busy fishing.
21 Blocks
I have lived in Watertown,Massachusetts for 21 years. I love Watertown. Even though it’s only 5 miles from downtown Boston it has a decidedly non-urban feel to it. Quiet neighborhoods are home to people of all ethnicities where at no time have I ever felt threatened or concerned for my safety.
On Monday April 15th I left my apartment at 1 pm and drove 30 miles west to meet a good friend of mine who was up in the area on business and go fishing at Wachusett Reservoir. Not only is Wachusett my favorite place to fish, the reservoir also supplies the city of Boston and my town as well with our drinking water. We fished all afternoon and into the evening oblivious to what had happened at 2:50pm in Boston. Only after getting to the hotel at 9 pm did we find out about the bombings at the Boston Marathon. Shocked and horrified we sat glued to the tv screen while being brought up to date about the events of that tragic afternoon. All we could do was shake our heads in disbelief and feel bad for those who were killed or injured. Not a great night.
The next 2 days, the 16th and 17th, we also went fishing because that was our original plan and we weren’t going to change it. While I was concerned, appalled and angry about the bombings I was at that time far enough away not to feel threatened. All that changed beginning the night of the 18th when I was back home in Watertown.
I remember being half asleep the phone ringing and on the answering machine hearing an automated message from the Watertown Police saying that there was an “active incident” and for all residents to remain in their homes. I thought to myself “great, I’m already in my home” and fell back to sleep. It never dawned on me that they might be talking about the search for the bombing suspects.
On Friday the 19th I woke up at 6:30 AM fired up to go fishing out at Wachusett. I made coffee and sat down to check out the weather report on the local news. The first thing I saw on the screen were the words NO ONE ALLOWED IN OR OUT OF WATERTOWN. That was Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Jen Sincero
Bad Advice Wednesday: Beam Me Up,Scotty!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Jen Sincero is famous for many things, though in our house most of all for being a collge friend of Nina’s.
What follows is from her book, You Are a Badass, published by Running Press.
BEAM ME UP, SCOTTY!
Nothing is impossible, the word itself says “I’m possible.”—Audrey Hepburn; actress, icon, fabulist
My grandmother on my mother’s side lived to be one hundred years old. Nana was as WASPy as they make ’em: prissy, reserved, able to avoid confrontation with the skilled precision of an F-16 pilot. For as long as I can remember, she always looked exactly the same. She was eternally adorned in a cardigan, pinned together at the top by an antique broach, her pink lipstick and sparkly brown eyes shining through a face-full of wrinkles that erupted in a series of “oh dears” every time she laughed.
In her long lifetime, Nana witnessed the birthing of such pivotal human achievements as the phone, the car, the TV, human flight, the computer, the internet and rock and roll.
The two things that blew her mind the most, however, were putting a man on the moon and the soda dispensers at McDonalds. She’d stand there watching, gripped by disbelief, as an employee placed a cup, small, medium or large, beneath a spout, pushed a button and walked away, leaving the machine to fill it up the perfect, proper amount. “How does it know where to stop?” Nana would shake her head, mortified, “How does it know ?!” Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Nina de Gramont
Want to be a Badass? Read This Book!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Listen! I bring glad tidings of good cheer! Because if you’re reading this blog, you’ve already had the great fortune to be born a human, here on planet earth. Which means that from the moment you first opened your eyes, however many years ago, you woke up in a world as Technicolor and full of magical possibility as Oz. And guess what else? You, nobody else but YOU, are the man behind the curtain! Which means that however unassuming or even inept you may sometimes feel, you in fact have the power to bestow heart, brains, courage, and a one-way ticket home to the life of your dreams. And if you’re capable of bestowing such wonders, hey! Why not start with yourself?
Yes, my dears, I am feeling energized today. More to the point, I am feeling like a BADASS, because I just finished reading Jen Sincero’s fantastic book, You are a Badass: How to Stop Doubting Your Greatness and Start Living an Awesome Life. It is a self-help book, that’s true, but one as cheese-free and inspiration-full as only Sincero — the lead singer of a band called Crotch and the author of The Straight Girls Guide to Sleeping with Chicks — could write. Think Tony Robbins meets Tom Robbins meets the coolest, funniest, most on-your-side friend you could ever want.
Many years ago, when I was a smart but disaffected teenager, I read as much Kurt Vonnegut as I could get my hands on. Even after devouring all those life-changing novels, the work of his that still pops into my mind regularly is one I never actually read because he never finished writing it: a short story called “Asleep at the Switch,” which Vonnegut describes in his preface to the novel Jailbird. Continue reading →
A Memorial Flight Mystery (a photo haiku)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I heard these choppers coming and didn’t know what to think, just all those jokes about black helicopters and rural areas. So I posted a shot on Facebook along with
Guest contributor: Crash Barry
Serial Sunday: Tough Island: True Stories from Matinicus, Maine, by Crash Barry (episode 4)
categories: Cocktail Hour
4 comments
Episode Four
[to read Episode 3, please click here][To read Episode 2, please click here][To start at the beginning with Episode One, please click here]
We took Captain Donald’s truck down to the shore so I could move into my new pad. We parked by the post office and I followed Donald on the foot path that wound around the edge of the harbor, through the village of fishhouses. I thought we were headed to the apartment that overlooked Donald’s wharf, the one I painted the autumn before, a nice one-bedroom with a sawdust toilet and a full kitchen, sans running water. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Rosie Bates
Getting Outside Saturday: Climbing with Rosie Bates
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Rosie Bates on Mt. Lemmon, Coranado National Forest, AZ
For some reason I find it easier to write about “failures” versus accomplishments, just as many tend toward serious life events versus day-to-day experience when they have to think of a topic to write on. If I were to have “succeeded” in the ranking sense, this would’ve been a completely different piece of work. I would’ve probably talked about how hard I trained, spoken to the years I had put into my quest and finally thanking those who had been there along the way. In the excitement of succeeding I would’ve forgotten how nervous I got, the mistakes I made, and the spontaneity of the ticket I had purchased just three weeks before. I would’ve written about this event a few weeks post competition, after the joy had worn off and the adrenaline had cooled down. I would’ve basked in the congratulations of friends, and knowing looks from strangers, not having to reflect on what I had accomplished, only being continually reminded of it by others. This is not how my trip turned out. Rather, I am coming home a day earlier, beaten, exhausted and humbled. But as I write this in the terminal of Denver International Airport less than 24 hours since I competed at Adult Sport Climbing Series Nationals in Boulder, Colorado I have never felt more motivated in my life. Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Bill Lundgren
Lundgren’s Book Lounge: “The Flamethrowers” by Rachel Kushner
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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In a recent review I shared E.L. Doctorow’s description of the novel as “the presiding art–in it’s intentions, if only occasionally in its realization, a major act of the culture.” And when that very occasional, serendipitous ‘realization’ occurs, it is important because of its power to impact both the worldview of individual readers and the very cultural petri dish from which it arose. The Flamethrowers by Rachel Kushner is one of these rare books.
Author Kushner arrived on the literary scene in 2008 with Telex From Cuba, a National Book Award nominee that told the story of Castro’s revolution and the Americans forced to give up their tropical paradise and the riches it had afforded them. The Flamethrowers continues to explore the impacts of imperialism and the revolution that the inequities of imperialism inevitably spawn. Yet while politics may lie at the heart of much of Kushner’s work, the politics are often background, obscured by the sheer, dazzling beauty of her storytelling gifts. Kushner transcends questions of form because as James Woods points out in his scintillating review of The Flamethrowers in The New Yorker, Kushner has “… a natural, vivacious talent for telling stories and these stories… seem fictively real, cunningly alive. Novelistic vivacity, the great unteachable, the unschooled enigma, has a way of making questions of form appear scholastic.”
Luis and Me
categories: Cocktail Hour
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You probably know Luis Urrea’s work, but if you don’t you should. He’s a great and prolific writer. (Here’s a place to start getting acquainted: http://www.luisurrea.com/)
I was lucky enough to get to know Luis in Boulder, Colorado. Now I’m doubly lucky to have my drawing of Thoreau appear with his essay on going to Walden in the latest issue of Orion.
To read the rest simply click here.
Guest contributor: Richard Gilbert
Bad Advice Wednesday: Three Lessons on the Path to Publication of My Memoir
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Freckles and Lambs, 2006
I was fifty and the marketing manager of a university press when one day I decided I wanted to—had to—write a book. My own book. The story I needed to tell. There I was, bent over a drawer in the press’s endless row of gray-green filing cabinets, and from the radio perched somewhere overhead I heard a writer, a man my age, talking about his latest book. What am I waiting for? I wondered. I’d noticed that one of our recent authors had attended something called a low-residency program for her MFA. We were publishing what had begun as her thesis. Continue reading →
