The Finals are Set: Battle of the Reviews!
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The Finals are set: The Georgia Review vs. The Paris Review. The voting has been extended to midnight Monday April9th. Please vote for the finals in the comments section on this page. You don’t have to be as witty as last time. (We expect a much lower scoring game.)
Our scoring system is simple. Each vote equals 2 points. No 3-pointers.
Semis recaps:
Despite Ecotone’s overwhelming homecourt advantage, the Georgia Review proved unstoppable. After making it a game with a late rally, Ecotone’s Cinderella season came to an end, buried under a Continue reading →
Memories of the Lit Mag Sweet Sixteen
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Sweet Sixteen
Dave’s a be-here-now kind of guy, but I like looking back. And what a bracket this year. I’ve only got one team left in the running, and the office pool is shot. My bets are still on Ecotone, though, as they are friendly with the commissioner. But wasn’t last weekend great? Tinhouse was tough. And what about One Story? Amazing Cinderella tale–Hanna Tinti getting that far with only one player on the court at a time? And the genre purity, wow. Stomped by Georgia, of course. And the Crab Orchard Warriors, wow! Who knew Paris Review had designed a defense against the Tribble Dribble! Hard to believe Playboy got classed as a literary magazine–but Continue reading →
Final Four Lit Mag Update
categories: Cocktail Hour
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VOTING FOR THE SEMIS WILL END AT MIDNIGHT TONIGHT: SEMI RESULTS POSTED FRIDAY!
VOTING FOR FINALS WILL END SUNDAY MIDNIGHT: RESULTS POSTED MONDAY!
Bad Advice Wednesday:The Art of the Disclaimer
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The toxins from the snake bite from the Costa Rican jungle have briefly rendered Bill incapable of writing Bad Advice (and made him pronounce his Ss in a sibilant fashion.) So I, heroically, must step in at the last minute……I’ve already picked at the carcass of this essay for my cartoon piece on nonfiction and my Truth essay, but, meager as it is, it’s all I got……
The Art of the Disclaimer
Before I begin this short, insignificant essay (which I only dashed off this morning) I must first tell you that what follows is only partly true, and that though I have tried my best to make it interesting, my imagination is weak and my powers humble. Also, I tend to ramble.
The disclaimer or apologia or note to the reader, of which the above is an example, has a long, proud history in literary nonfiction, dating back to the cave no doubt, but best exemplified by Montaigne in the 1580s, whose rambling essays often read like one long disclaimer. Of course James Frey recently tried his hand at this sub-genre, and with the note to the reader that his publishers have attached to the front of A Million Little Pieces, has demonstrated that there is yet another way in which he seems entirely incapable of telling the truth. At best a disclaimer should be an eye-to-eye talk with the author before the story begins, an honest laying of cards on the table. Though historically some courtly bowing and scraping have intruded on the form, and some excessive humility have falsified it, the one thing the writer of a disclaimer can’t do, above all, is posture. Continue reading →
The Final Four Literary Magazines
categories: Cocktail Hour
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The Finals are set: The Georgia Review vs. The Paris Review. The voting has been extended to midnight Monday April9th. Please vote for the finals in the comments section on this page. You don’t have to be as witty as last time. (We expect a much lower scoring game.)
Our scoring system is simple. Each vote equals 2 points. No 3-pointers.
VOTING FOR THE SEMIS WILL END AT MIDNIGHT TONIGHT: SEMI RESULTS POSTED FRIDAY
VOTING FOR FINALS WILL END MONDAY MIDNIGHT.
Every year here at Bill and Dave’s we have our own version of March Madness. We take 64 of the best small literary magazines and let them play it out, no holds barred, determining unequivocally the best small magazine in the country. I don’t know if you’ve been following this year’s satellite video feed over at LSPN, but things can get ugly, and last week after their big win over The Believer, the fans down in Athens burned their copies of the Chicago Manuel of Style. Their passion can be forgiven; it truly is mad when literary journals go at it. For instance no one who witnessed it will ever forget the bloody war in the Southern Regionals, when the Oxford American hung on against their bitter rival Garden and Gun.
OA will now take on another program with a shining pedigree, The Paris Review, in what promises to be a battle of titans. The surprises this year are all on the other side of the bracket. Many thought that the Georgia program had grown too old and could never return to its glory days under coach Lindberg, but their execution has been flawless, and they play a measured style that has everyone buzzing about the old days. The real Cinderella story of the tourney, however, has been Ecotone, a tiny program that, thanks in part to the recruiting pull of recent grad (and power forward) Edith Pearlman, has made a surprising run, littering the courts with higher seeds. Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: Wren Cam–Day 5
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Here’s the latest from the lives of the young Carolina wrens. They are basically all mouth. Mom and Dad fly into the shack, brandishing insects in their bills, and feed the maw(s). Then, briefly, the squeeze toy squeaking subsides. Beginning again soon enough……
Click here for footage of young wrens: 010
Has Spring Sprung Early?
categories: Cocktail Hour
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This morning the newborn Carolina wrens are busy begging for food. A hundred feet in front of me a mute swan has built a much larger nest. Meanwhile last week I heard (but did not see) a painted bunting, a bird aflame with color that has come back from points south far too early.
“Phenology,” writes Jack Turner, “is the study of the mature naturalist.” And what is phenology? The discipline of watching phenomena change as the seasons turn. I remember my personal highlight as a phenologist. It was fall and we were living on the beach on Cape Cod, and after a walk I said to my wife, “The seals should be back soon.” Each summer “our” seals migrated to the cooler waters of the Gulf of Maine, and each fall they migrated back.
The next day, walking again, I saw that the seals were indeed back, loafing on the offshore rocks. I couldn’t have been more thrilled by a promotion at work — and in a way, that’s just what it was.
Wren Cam: Day 2
categories: Cocktail Hour
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You asked for it and we gave it to you…..live from the shack. A Bill and Dave production. Day 2 in the life of the Carolina Wrens….
Click here: 003
Nature Photographer: Nina de Gramont.
Getting Outside Saturday: “Scioto Blues”
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Our Best American Essays
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The Scioto and Downtown Columbus
[This essay is from my book Into Woods and originally appeared in The Missouri Review. Later, Harper’s picked up an excerpt for their “Readings” section. It was written in about 1998, and since then I’ve developed a much fonder feeling for Columbus.]
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Scioto Blues
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If you move to Columbus, Ohio, from Farmington, Maine, you will not be impressed by the landscape. It’s flat around Columbus and the pre-prairie rivers move sluggish and brown. In Maine you pick out the height of flood on, say, the Sandy River, by the damage to tree trunks and the spookily exact plane made by ice and roaring current tearing off the lowest branches of riverside trees. In Columbus you pick out the height of flood on the Olentangy or Scioto rivers Continue reading →
