Yesterday I flew from North Carolina over the Rockies and my new favorite city, Salt Lake. The snow cover in the mountains was weak, which might spell bad news for next summer’s fires, but visually it was stunning as we crossed from Colorado into Utah. I stared down at alternating streaks of white snow and red sandstone—that red which always does something to me inside, something good—with rivers, first the White and then the Green, carving snake-like through the landscape. A three hour drive east from Salt Lake and here I am back in Vernal, the town where I spent some time this summer and where I flew the path marked on the map to your right. (Thanks to Ecoflight for the flight and Steve and Ray of SUWA for the map.)
This summer I charged into town, hit the Dinosaur Brew Haus, met a few river rafters and frackers and anti-frackers all in one night. Part of my working method is essentially this: A man walked into a bar. The young whippersnapper over at Terrain.org might have criticized me for drinking too much in my pages but, be that as it may, I find drinking beer with the locals an essential part of taking the temperature of a place. Coffee helps, too, and the next morning I talked to everybody I could at my hotel, at the diner where I ate, and at the Chamber of Commerce. My plan is usually to have no plan. As with writing, I make a lot of lists, and then I throw them out and just trust my instincts. Today’s bad advice is not to do as I do but to evolve your own method of going to a place and learning about it. These places, I keep telling my students, tend to be a lot more interesting, and certainly more surprising, than our own minds. You don’t need to use beer as your social lubricant: maybe sipping green tea and being a wallflower, eavesdropping, is what works for you. But get out there into the world.
This is a short essay, in part, about Titan Cement, which I should say right up front that I oppose. I don’t like the idea of this company coming to town and dumping poisons in our river while spewing them into our air. For regular readers this is not surprising. But if it’s statistics and facts you are after–the much-debated number of jobs gained, the impact of mercury on human health, the testimony of others from towns where cement has made its mark—you should look elsewhere. Today I am instead interested in talking about something bigger, and, to some, perhaps softer. Rather than cement, I want to talk about water–water and love. And even more I am interested in talking about identity. Both my own and our town’s.
My own relationship with Wilmington is complicated. I come from a tribe of nature writers, a tribe that, as a rule, spends a lot of time braying about the glories of wherever they happen to live. Back when Cape Cod was my home I celebrated it fiercely, with the sort of regional pride recognizable to Southerner and Yankee alike. In fact I wrote a book, a kind of love letter to the place, that ended with my proclamation that I would stay on Cape Cod forever.
Which is how, as I have been telling people for the last nine years, I ended up in Wilmington, the book helping land me a job in the creative writing department at UNCW. Which is all to say: I am an outsider here, a relative newcomer. I have no plans to climb up to the top of a live oak and holler out that I will stay here forever. Mine is a marriage of convenience. Continue reading →
I am most definitely a “nostalgiac.” I find myself looking back, quite fondly, on those days as a twenty-something when I changed jobs like I did outfits before a night out of barhopping. Okay, yes, it was years, an epoch my mother referred to (then and now) as “Floundering Up in Ithaca” her lips pursed in distaste, as if she’d just gotten a whiff of ripe flatfish. Continue reading →
#
[The ongoing saga, 500 words at a time, more or less. This week’s written on the plane from Boston Logan to Indianapolis this morning, and revised in a nicer hotel than Ted’s. Tune in next week for more, always more! To start at the beginning, scroll down to Episode 1]
The Weight of Light
Episode 9
“Tumbleweed”
#
Ted woke to bright sunlight, woke again to darkness, felt heavy as a Richard Serra wall, felt the pillow sinking and sinking under his head, groaned Quiet, he remembered. Be quiet. Cautiously he patted the bed around him, the remains of a plastic tie catching painfully at his wrist. A red light shone intermittently close. He reached for it, found he could touch it. A clock. 3:57. On a table. He sat up, made out the lines of a small room, a dresser, an old TV set. Lamps. A motel room. He stood and tried the door, which opened out to a parking lot, not a single car, orangey halogen lighting, unreal, also a stiff, chill breeze, stars above. Continue reading →
Describing a football, or maybe a dance lift. [photo Stan Groner]
Roth Enjoying His Idyll
That notorious slacker, Philip Roth, decided to take a day off from work recently. Actually he decided to take them all off. At seventy nine, with thirty one books under his belt, he claims to be calling it quits.
My money says he can’t do it. My money says the habits of imagination are too ingrained. My money says that his quitting, described here to Charles McGrath in a piece in the New York Times, sounds a whole lot like another person’s writing: “Mr. Roth hasn’t given up writing entirely. He is collaborating on a novella, via e-mail, with the 8-year-old daughter of a former girlfriend, and he has been writing lengthy notes and memos for his biographer.”
Roth goes on to say that these notes and memos have begun to fill up boxes. Hmmm… Collecting elaborate notes on one’s biography so that they can later be integrated into a book. Sounds kind of familiar. But if he thinks that is quitting, then good for him.
So what else has he been doing during this downtime?
“I sat around for a month or two trying to think of something else and I thought, ‘Maybe it’s over, maybe it’s over,’ ” he said. “I gave myself a dose of fictional juice by rereading writers I hadn’t read in 50 years and who had meant quite a lot when I read them. I read Dostoevsky, I read Conrad — two or three books by each. I read Turgenev, two of the greatest short stories ever written, ‘First Love’ and ‘The Torrents of Spring.’ ” He also reread Faulkner and Hemingway. Continue reading →
Those who have seen the trailer for my book, My Green Manifesto, might have assumed that the film, to use that word loosely, developed in a natural and spontaneous manner. Not so. It was actually the result of hours, or at least minutes, of thought. As proof I present the original script, something I just discovered as I began the long, possibly endless, process of cleaning up my office at school…..
So yesterday was a pretty good day for Life Among Giants, Bill’s new book. And he topped it off with a reading at the KGB bar in NYC, with his daughter Elysia (and her friend Pearl) selling books.
Gloating is not something we want to teach our children but sometimes it’s okay to gloat a little. So let’s take a moment out here at Bill and Dave’s to gloat along with Bill.
Some review highlights from yesterday:
From Bloomberg:
David “Lizard” Hochmeyer is a former Miami Dolphins quarterback who’s now a successful chef. At almost 7 feet tall, he towers above most mortals, yet he is far from the only colossus in Bill Roorbach’s eventful, elegiac novel of sports and murder, food and finance.
