Getting Outside Saturday: Remembering a Couple of Fine Ol’ Dogs
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Prince Desmond and new puppy Wally, c. 1993
One of the great pleasures of writing is the way incidentals are captured. In my collection Into Woodsthere are glimpses throughout the essays of my late great dogs Desi and Wally, who were mutts, no better than that, though Desi had pretensions. We’d take them to the city and because they were both black and white people would ask the breed. We invented one: Muzzman Terriers. Because one of Desi’s thousand nicknames was Muzzman. One woman, hearing that, exclaimed, “Oh, I ADORE Muzzman Terriers!” Anyway, poking through Into Woods I found this Continue reading →
Gusto (and Schlitz)
categories: Cocktail Hour
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My Father and His Schlitz (Almost Hidden)
RE-CLAIMING GUSTO
We have grown used to the power of advertising to strip words of their meaning, beauty, and power. But of all the words that have been denuded in the long history of that insidious industry, none may have been so completely and thoroughly gutted as “gusto.”
Celebrated in 1816 by the essayist William Hazlitt as one of the highest qualities of art, it remains in most of our minds thanks to an almost extinct brand of beer called Schlitz. “Gusto in art is power or passion defining any object,” wrote Hazlitt. Memorable words, but how can they compare with these: “You only go around once in life, so you have to grab for all the gusto you can get!” Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Wesley McNair
A Poet Addresses the Graduates: Guest Post by Wesley McNair
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Wesley McNair, Poet
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President Kalikow, Members of the Faculty, Parents and other relatives and friends of the graduates, and most importantly, Graduates of the University of Maine at Farmington class of 2012:
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I am proud that Theo Kalikow invited me to give this address at the last graduation ceremony she will officiate as president, because she is my friend, and one of the most effective presidents this college has ever had. As I’ve told her more than once, I believe she has presided over a kind of renaissance at the University of Maine at Farmington, and I’m glad to have the opportunity now to say so publicly, even though I know that will embarrass her, since she hates talk like this. Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Luck and Pluck and WTF (Revisited)
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Bill at his desk, October 1959
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I’m still thinking about how much of any career is luck and accident, especially a career in the arts. You get an idea or you don’t. You meet the helpful person or you don’t. You listen to good advice or fail to. You ignore bad advice (or Bad Advice) or don’t. You connect with a mentor or you don’t. You move here, you move there. You’re hired, you’re not. You get a little affirmation, you get a little discouragement, or a lot of one or the other, despite simply being who you are all along. Slowly you learn what you’re good at, but always you insist on trying things you’re not good at, on doing the thing you can’t do, on reaching higher. It’s the Peter Principal applied to the arts, though it’s entirely self-imposed. Call it the Bill-and-Dave’s-Cocktail-Hour Principal: we grow and grow till we get to a place we can’t grow out of. Continue reading →
NEVER HIT SEND, and Other Commandments for the Computer Age
categories: Cocktail Hour
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On the day after Rapture,
stone tablets I did find.
That spoke some deep truths
For the modern mind:
* * *
I. Don’t drink and Facebook.
(It should be somewhere posted.)
Remember that note
You wrote when you were toasted?
Movie Night: Marley. Bob, not the Dog.
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies
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Marley and Me
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Up and to Waterville the other night to see Marley, the new documentary of Bob Marley by filmmaker Kevin McDonald. It’s great. If you adore Bob Marley, go see it. If you don’t love him, go see it. If you think you hate him, go see it. If you don’t know him, go see it. It’s not a concert film though there is a lot of tantalizing footage of shows from across the Marley years and around the word. But at heart, this movie is a biography, maybe a bit of a hagiography, even, but still great. How pleasing to see Bob Marley’s mother in her colorful home, like a queen holding forth from her throne. How fascinating to learn she left him on his own in Trenchtown and moved to Continue reading →
Me and Bobby McGee: Happy Mother’s Day
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Reba Burkhardt about age 16, with pearls.
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A couple of years ago I called my dad to ask if he knew the whereabouts of any family photos or other memorabilia of my time playing in bands. I particularly wanted a photo of equipment set up in the big room over our garage, which we called the Hideaway, and where my friends and I rocked out. He said, Oh, I’ve got photos all right. The older of my two younger sisters, Carol, had boxed them all when Poppy moved down to Atlanta to live with my younger brother, Doug, and his family. And, well, they were still in the boxes.
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Which arrived three days later via Fedex ground–seven large U-Haul cartons taped shut at the end of 2006, beginning of 2007. These I put in the barn, but today cleaning up a little I spied them (very close to blending in to the permanent warp and woof of barn stuff). And for no particular reason dragged one inside and slit the tape and inside a bursting cornucopia of forgotten faces and beloved ones, mostly my mother’s side of the family, and mostly the Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Haiku with Wild Violets
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Johnny Jump-ups
Life in the Hate State
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The following is from Daniel Nathan Terry, a poet and Wilmington, NC resident:
On April 17th, I wrote an open letter, a plea for equality, asking North Carolinians to vote Against Amendment One. I was heartened by the response; the letter was posted on blogs and translated into other languages, including Italian, Finnish, and Spanish. My fiancé and I voted early, and On May 7th, we were married in the District of Columbia. On that day, I believed in us, our home, and our nation.
The next day, we returned home to church signs commanding their congregations to vote for the amendment, to yard signs asking neighbors to deny rights to their neighbors.
Still, I believed in us, in our home state, and in our nation. Continue reading →
The Writer Games: An Interview with Dinty W. Moore
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Dinty W. Moore
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BR: As always, Dinty, my first question is this: Where do you want to have our pretend meal?
DM: I would like to have our pretend meal at the base of the Kachemak Bay glacier.
BR: Very near to where we last actually sat down to eat together, in Salmon Bay, at that cool restaurant over the otter-filled waters of Kachemak Bay. But that was then, and involved a boat ride and wine. This of course, will be different. The glacier is a wild place. May require helicopters.
DM: I had my heart set on a tandem kayak.
BR: Okay, a plus-size tandem and the food comes in by helicopter…
DM: No, no. We hunt for our food, or fight to the death and one of us eats the other. That’s the natural way. Continue reading →
