Table for Two: An Interview with Michael Martone
categories: Cocktail Hour / Table For Two: Interviews
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Michael Martone
Recently I got a postcard from Michael Martone announcing his newest book, Four for a Quarter. Beneath several vintage-looking photo strips, the postcard and book cover show an old photo booth tucked into a tattered post-no-bills wall somewhere in post-industrial America. The booth sports a sign that says PHOTOS, of course, but it took a little staring to notice that the designer (Lou Robinson) has inserted the word FICTIONS in a font so much the same size as PHOTOS that at first (and then for several weeks) I didn’t notice it. It’s as if the booth sold PHOTOS FICTIONS. But the fictions referred to are Mr. Martone’s. The book is nicely made, beautifully printed and presented, kudos to the The University of Alabama Press (and a notation that much of the great literary work being produced these days is being picked up by university and other small presses).
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Four for a Quarter is a delightful book on the page, as well, a stream of meditations, of stories, of collectibles, of comedy, of tragedy, of every possible thing grouped in four. Or it seems every possible thing until you walk away and find the world falling into infinite fours, yet another organizing principle and OCD tic to contend with. Continue reading →
On the Netting and Tagging of Babies
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I net and tag Hadley. She is 4 weeks here, the optimum age for radio collaring.
I understand why some people are against netting and tagging babies. But the crucial issue here, I hope you understand, is control. We simply can’t have babies running wild over the marsh and through the woods, going hither and yon, completely unmanaged. In the end the goal is to protect babies and to protect them, ultimately, we need them to be tagged and tracked. I would think this would be obvious, even to the lay person.
If I seem insensitive, please understand, that I know of what I speak. We first trapped and tagged my daughter Hadley in the salt Continue reading →
Oscar Degrees of Separation
categories: Cocktail Hour
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Siedah Sings To Hadley
As far back as the cave humans no doubt took satisfaction in what Samuel Johnson called “imagined connections to celebrity.” (“By the way, I know the chief’s brother.”) I am not above this guilty pleasure myself and can tell a “I did cocaine with Tim Robbins at the Howard the Duck cast party and talked about our future writing lives while the two midgets who wore the duck suits ran around and before hitting on Lea Thompson and yelling at her when she turned her nose up on me” story with the best of them. (True story by the way–for another post.)
And so now, at Oscar time, I will not focus on dull categories like “Best Picture,” but on the much more interesting “People We Want to Win Because They Have a Connection to Dave.”
Obviously Clooney and I go way back and have both faced the burden of being dashing 50 year olds, but George has gotten enough press this week.
Let’s instead start–and why not–with Siedah Garret, who is up for Best Song for “Real in Rio” in the film Rio. Here are some Bill and Dave reasons we want Siedah to win:
Trouble in Happy Valley: Penn State, Joe Paterno, and the Art of Fracking
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I spoke at Penn State on Monday. My hosts couldn’t have been more generous and engaging, but my thoughts weren’t always peaceful ones. First, there was all the fracking going on up north in central PA, which seemed to call for a cartoon. Here it is…..I call it….
THE FUTURE OF GROUNDWATER
What follows are some random observations (and pictures of me with Paterno’s statue….) Continue reading →
Guest contributor: Kyle Minor
Bad Advice Wednesday: Beginnings
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Today’s guest post is by Kyle Minor, author of In the Devil’s Territory (Stories). He’s at work on The Sexual Lives of Missionaries (a novel). And he’s an all-around good guy. Like Bill, he works all night.
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Beginnings
I. Bad Advice
At Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour, when someone offers “bad advice,” the advice that follows is usually pretty good advice. The phrase “bad advice” is armor, because you know how it goes. First, you offer good and useful advice, and then somebody gives you the one example of why the greatest story anyone has ever read would be a terrible story if the writer followed your good and useful advice. And then somebody else puts on a black beret and lights a cigarette and talks about how all true art is boundary-breaking, and all true artists would never accede to the tyranny of conformity. Then the open mic night begins, and somebody starts beating the bongos, and somebody else yells abstractions into a microphone and uses the word “poetry” a lot. Three friends in the front row say, “This performance really flows,” and the four drunk guys at the bar watch the basketball game, which is, let’s face it, the better of the two shows. Continue reading →
Rare Mystery Bird Identified
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Bohemian Waxwings: Easy I.D., But a Rarer Bird Awaits
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This morning on my daily rounds a flock of about two dozen Bohemian Waxwings followed me for more than a mile, flying in various factions from tree to tree, for a while stopping to sip at a break in the ice, Temple Stream. The sky was very, very blue. The birds are almost blue, but gray, with beautiful yellow tail tips and yellow in their wings (the sealing wax of their name, I guess). Baila the dog took a drink in the freshly exposed current, and by all signs you’d guess the date was March 20, not February 20. We walked on the ice, like breaking glass, all these layers and shelves and store windows, noisy. In the alders ahead I spotted a bird. I looked the other way so as to misdirect Baila, who obliged, tearing around the corner smashing chalices. And put the binooculars to my eyes. Small movements. A lot of black . Some yellow. Large, a little bigger than a Robin. I flipped through the indexes in my head–nothing. If I’d been in Montana, in summer, maybe a yellow-headed blackbird, but no, no. Casually I crept closer. And closer yet. The bird paid no mind, but kept up its subtle swinging movements. Closer. Still impossible to identify. Closer, Baila returning with a great crashing. Brave bird didn’t move. Closer. And if you click READ THE REST, you’ll see what it was. Amazing, rare, and clearly a wayward denizen of the upstream backyards. Continue reading →
A Letter to a Neighbor
categories: Our Best American Essays
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You will be moving into your new home soon and, as ours is a small community, the neighborly thing for me to do would be to bring by a tin of cookies or fudge. Instead I send this letter. Cowardly by nature, I’ll probably slip it under your door. It’s not the sort of thing likely to elicit the smile brought on by a note from an old friend, or even the irritated glance aimed at junk mail, and you’ll surely toss it aside at some point. If I had the courage to stick around while you read my words, you’d no doubt turn to me and counter my own flimsy, idealistic arguments with more solid and practical ones. “What right do you have to tell me what to do with my land?” you’d ask. “I bought it with my own hard-earned money. Furthermore, if I hadn’t built my house here, the place would be checkered with subdivisions.”
You’d be right of course. And I should be grateful the land wasn’t further developed. But I’m an ingrate, and ingrates, by nature, complain.
“It’s a goddamn desecration of place,” another of your new neighbors said recently. That’s the word–desecration–that keeps coming up when I think of what you’ve done to your land. I don’t use the word lightly; in fact, I use it just as it was meant to be used.
Our Best American Essays: Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside / Our Best American Essays
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Shitdiggers, Mudflats, and the Worm Men of Maine
by Bill Roorbach
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“Hard work,” says Dicky Butts, and we haven’t even started yet.
. “Get wet today,” says Truman Lock. He pulls his greying beard, squints out over the bay. The blast of an offshore wind (strong enough to blow the boat and its no-lights trailer halfway into the oncoming lane as we made the drive over) is piling whitecaps, spraying their tops, Continue reading →
Getting Outside Saturday: It’s All About Ice
categories: Cocktail Hour / Getting Outside
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Rain, freeze, drain, sag, leaf.
We’ve had little snow, a certain amount of melting, cold nights. The stream is an ice-way, strange beauty abounding. Continue reading →
