Guest contributor: Nina de Gramont
Bad Advice Wednesday All-Star Guest Post: Whistle While You Wait
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
3 comments
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To be a writer is to be a waiter, and I’m not talking about tables. Waiting. It can be the most excruciating part of the whole process. You spend years working on a book, pounding out a first draft, sweating over the revisions, doing everything you can to bleed your heart out onto the page. When you finally declare yourself done – or at least done enough to hand the manuscript over for a verdict — that’s when it begins. Even if your first reader is just a friend whose opinion you value, it can be brutal. One day ticks by, then two, then a week. Has she started reading yet? Was it so boring that she couldn’t get past the first page? Does she hate it so much that she needs Continue reading →
Is It Safe to Eat the Fish? And Other Questions Two Years After the Spill
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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What We Know Two Years Later
by David Gessner and Bethany Kraft, deputy director of the Gulf Restoration Program at the Ocean Conservancy.
David Gessner: Last Friday was the two-year anniversary of the BP disaster. For many of us, the spill is spoken of in the past tense, but for those who live on the Gulf, it is not. What strikes you the most after two years?
Bethany Kraft: Looking back, there is one moment very early on in the summer of 2010 that really stands out to me as a harbinger of the chaos to come. It was late April and the government response was being mobilized in Alabama. I got on the phone with several officials who were in charge of coordinating the placement of the boom that would ostensibly protect our most environmentally sensitive areas from the onslaught of oil. My questions were simple: where had the boom been placed and where would it go in the coming days? The answer I got was both hilarious and terrifying: “We can’t tell you where the boom is or where it is going in because no one has given us a printer.”
We weren’t prepared for a disaster on the scale of the Deepwater Horizon — we didn’t know how to adequately protect our natural resources or our economies or our most vulnerable coastal communities. We didn’t know how a massive volume of oil would impact the Gulf ecosystem. We didn’t have the technology to respond to a deepwater drilling incident. We couldn’t even find a printer to make the maps to tell us where to put boom.
Two years out, I worry that the lessons we swore we would learn in those early months haven’t been given more than the most cursory consideration. I’m concerned that we still have so much to learn about the impacts of the disaster, and I fear that we aren’t any better prepared to address technological disasters than we were two years ago. Continue reading →
The Hunger Games, Movie and Book. Is this for kids?
categories: Cocktail Hour / Movies / Reading Under the Influence
11 comments
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It’s been a long time since I read a book and saw the movie in the same day. Last time was “To Have and Have Not,” the Hemingway potboiler, not bad page for page, and I read it in an afternoon. The movie happened to be on TV that night, and I remember watching in my parents’ basement (I would have been home from college), really surprised: aside from the title and the names of the characters, it had nothing to do with the book. Turned out that William Faulkner (“Out of work and broke”) had re-written the screenplay under contract with Warner Bros, putting together what amounted to a parody of his rival’s work. Starring Bogart and Bacall.
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My daughter is eleven and read The Hunger Games before either her mother or I had heard of it. Of course, the kid loved it, and downplayed the violence we’d begun hearing about. To me it sounded like an allegory for life in high school, which is in turn an allegory for corporate life, if Continue reading →
Music from Big Pink
categories: Cocktail Hour
7 comments
Iconic
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Jimmy and Peter fox had attic rooms in their house on South Avenue, New Canaan, CT, and up there under the eaves we listened to music and told stories and smoked various substances, ate elaborate snacks. One afternoon after I’d turned 16–this would have been in 1968– Jim showed me a new album he’d gotten and put it on his turntable ready to play. First, though, we had to work his hash pipe a while–temple balls from Thailand (very popular, coming back with the kids who’d been fighting in Vietnam). You didn’t just listen to a new album without preparation. I studied the album cover. The painting, Jim told me, a pleasing Gauguinesque watercolor, was painted by Bob Dylan. Whoa. And The Band had been Dylan’s band. Holy shit. On the back side Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: A (Little) Nature Essay in Film
categories: Cocktail Hour
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So here’s a little Youtube film I made last week to go with the essay I wrote about the wrens in the shack and not putting up screens. Six people have seen it so far. You can be the seventh!
It’s called………An Uncertain Place
Happy Anniversary BP! The Oil Spill Two Years Later
categories: Cocktail Hour
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BP recently got an anniversary present: close to $24 billion in net profits for 2011. Happy to know that all is well in the corporate ecosystem.
Today, at my NRDC blog, “Wild Life,” I talk with Bethany Kraft, deputy director of the Gulf Restoration Program at the Ocean Conservancy about the current state of the Gulf. It’s a fairly comprehensive piece on the most recent scientific results on dolphin deaths, seafood, and damaged ecosystems.
As for BP, the below is adapted from The Tarball Chronicles:
After another fifteen minutes we reach the rig itself. The Deepwater Horizon Rig and the boats around it look like Tonka Toys. The rig platform is lit up by the green nimbus of the sunny and flowering BP logo. Dozens of boats, tiny from up here, gather around the rig, as if trying to protect and comfort it. To us the rig may look like a toy but it is in fact a great metal island, capable of housing over a hundred people. Still with its green logo it appears almost cheery, as it is no doubt supposed to look, and of course the scene looks not just sunny but industrious, with no hint of despair.
In broad daylight it is hard to picture the fiery hell of April 20th, the night when the methane bubble blew up through the well and exploded at the platform, killing eleven, injuring seventeen more, and sending dozens leaping off the platform into the flaming water. What was it like to take that ten-story plunge? The chief Engineer said later that he thought of his wife and his little girl before closing his eyes and making the leap. Those, I am sure, would have been exactly my thoughts. Continue reading →
A Night at the Movies: “The Island President”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics / Getting Outside / Movies
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President Mohamed "Anni" Nasheed
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Another trip over to Railroad Square Cinema in Waterville, Maine, to see Jon Shenk’s The Island President, a brand-new documentary featuring the incredibly charming and very courageous (and sadly now former, after threats of violence and a coup d’etat) president of the Maldives, a 400-mile chain of 2000 inexpressibly beautiful (as the film shows) islands off the southwestern tip of India. The movie, though, is sad: the Maldives are in imminent danger of sinking under rising sea levels as global warming proceeds unchecked. The happy part is that a man like Anni Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wednesday: Give Yourself the Gift of a Writing Week
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Doe Branch Ink is a writers’ retreat located on 50 acres nestled in the Blue Ridge Mountains of North Carolina. Just 30 miles north of Asheville in lovely Madison County — “The Jewel of the Blue Ridge” — the retreat takes its name from a spring fed stream that flows from high in Pisgah National Forest into the French Broad River, a protected National Scenic Waterway. This June, from the 17th to the 23rd, Bill Roorbach and David Gessner will be at Doe Branch.
Recently Bill and I talked about the week.
Dave: The whole idea behind Doe Branch is to have a week where you put your writing first. A gift to yourself I guess. It’s a gift that sounds very appealing to me at the moment, caught in the swirl of schoolwork and blogging and fresh from filing taxes. The fact that you get to focus on your writing while living in a great setting, deep in the mountains, is a big part of it too.
Bill: The timing’s perfect—end of the school year, beginning of the summer. In fact, we’ll be celebrating solstice together, always a time of new beginnings.
Dave: In our blog we talk a lot about ways to protect your writing time. Usually that means a couple of hours a day, squeezed in between the pressures of daily life. This is different. Not little nibbles. A feast.
Bill: I still date a real turn in my life my writing and even my career to a week at a writer’s retreat. I’d been looking for a break from real life, and I certainly got that. But I got so much more, too, something I hadn’t expected. Suddenly, time Continue reading →
My Kindle Nook
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
10 comments
Lifetime supply
A year ago I wrote here about my big push to organize and clean out my library, such as it was. And is. You can see the results above–the main bookcase is jammed, still, even with nearly 900 books carted off to various rescue shelters. I posted this photo on Facebook a while back and it seemed to strike a chord. On the right, I achieved a certain order. Poetry, biography, psychology (those are Juliet’s, primarily), gardening. On the left, chaos continues to reign: fiction. Some of these books have been with me from high school–40 years, that is–a few from childhood (Aesop’s fables in a box with my mother’s lovely handwriting). Large numbers are from college and the years after, which is odd, since those were peripatetic years and books incredibly cumbersome. Larger numbers were lost, of course, or given away. But never fear, I was a bibliomaniac, and Continue reading →
“A Prize I Won By Not Doing Something”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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The Hunger Game (And How to Win It)
With all due respect to resource depletion, global warming, and over-population, I have come to believe that the greatest environmental threat on the planet is our own minds. They are hungry little fuckers, these brains of ours. “We humans are an elsewhere,” wrote my friend Reg Saner, and boy are we ever. Walk across a college campus these days, as I do every day, and it’s a good bet you won’t make eye contact with a single one of the hundreds of students you pass. They are elsewhere, staring down into their machines, absorbed in urgent phone conversations, ears plugged and eyes glazed. “The hunger of the imagination,” Samuel Johnson called this insatiable desire for more, a desire that springs from a dissatisfaction with what is and from the hope that what comes next will fulfill us in ways it never has before. Continue reading →
