Big Wind
categories: Cocktail Hour / Don't Talk About Politics / Getting Outside
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Some of the Towers on Kibby Ridge
I’m writing this column and you’re reading it on a computer powered by coal smoldering somewhere. There may be some diesel fuel thrown in, and some waterpower, and no doubt a little biomass, a spot of nuclear, a few turns of wind. But it’s only been ten years or so that my writing required any power at all beyond breakfast—I went from a Hermes portable typer straight to an old MS-DOS PC by Zenith, enormous learning curve, hours of study, all those arcane pathways, nothing I need to know anymore, six generations of computers later. Continue reading →
Why Thoreau Wouldn’t Drive a Prius
categories: Cocktail Hour
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I guess what I’m about to do qualifies as cross-blogging. The below originally appeared in Wild Life, my blog at the Natural Resources Defense Council, and then got picked up by Andrew Sullivan at the Daily Beast and the Wall Street Journal. Now, more impressively, it has been picked up by Bill and Dave’s Cocktail Hour.
WHY THOREAU WOULDN’T DRIVE A PRIUS
The short answer: he couldn’t afford it.
The long answer: he wouldn’t afford it.
Let me explain:
Last weekend I spoke at the house where Thoreau was born, a talk sponsored by the Thoreau Farm Trust. I got out to Concord early and took a walk around Walden. The place was crowded on a fall Sunday, and what was once a one-man show was now a crowd of more than a hundred. The last time I had visited, during summer, SUVs crammed the parking lot and an ice cream truck played its seductive tinkling song.
Learning to Surf
categories: Cocktail Hour / Our Best American Essays
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We are in the process of converting and re-stocking are other categories, including “Our Best American Essays,” which this is a part of. To read this essay in its original form as it appeared in Orion magazine (beautiful painting and all), click here.
LEARNING TO SURF
by David Gessner
Out just beyond the breaking waves, they sit there bobbing, two groups of animals, avian and human, pelicans and surfers. As they rise and fall on the humps of water, the pelicans look entirely unperturbed, their foot-long bills pulled like blades into scabbards, fitting like species-wide puzzle pieces into the curves of their throats. The surfers, mostly kids, look equally casual. In fact one girl takes this to an almost ostentatious extreme: she lies on her back on the surfboard, looking up at the sky, with one leg crossed over the other in an exaggerated attitude of relaxation. For the most part the birds and surfers ignore each other, rising up and dropping down together as the whole ocean heaves and then sighs.
Pelicans are particularly buoyant birds and they bob high on the water as the surfers paddle and shift in anticipation. There is no mistaking that this is the relatively tense calm of before, rest before exertion. Soon the waves pick up and the surfers paddle furiously, gaining enough speed to pop up and ride the crests of breaking surf. They glide in toward the beach where I stand, the better ones carving the water and ducking under and cutting back up through the waves.
We only moved to this island town a month ago, but I have been here long enough to know that those who pursue this sport are guided by a kind of laid-back monomania. Each morning I bring my four-month old daughter down to the local coffee shop, and each morning the talk is of one thing. It isn’t only the southern lilt that is new to me, but the surfing lingo. The ocean, I’ve learned, is always referred to as “it.”
Guest contributor: Nina de Gramont
Bad Advice Wednesday: Be Your Own Willy! Give Yourself a Minimum Word Count
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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The self-discipline required for writing has always been at odds with my nature, which is fundamentally lazy. Right now, for example, I’m switching back and forth between this blank screen and Facebook Scrabble, and I’m also contemplating the guilty pleasure book that arrived from Amazon yesterday, A Year and Six Seconds by Isabel Gillies. It’s just warm enough that with a sweater I could read in the hammock.
But in addition to this Bad Advice Wednesday that David asked me to do, I’ve got a novel to write, and it’s not going to write itself. Not unless I do some typing. You might say that the novel won’t write itself no matter what. But I’ve found that’s not entirely true. When writing in the long form, it seems to me that my subconscious ends up doing most of the heavy lifting – as long as I give it a little kickstart, which I can manage no matter how unmotivated or uninspired I feel.
Furthur in Portland, Maine
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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Friday night, Juliet and I and a lot of other people from Farmington (we saw friends and familiar faces on the highway, we saw them in line, we saw them at the concert, we saw them in the parking garage after) drove down to Portland (our Portland, the one in Maine) to see the remnants of the Grateful Dead perform in their latest incarnation. Juliet’s been following Furthur for a few years now. She collects tour posters, downloads concert recordings, buys t-shirts and tie-dyed trousers, travels all over the country making the “shows,” as they’re universally called, the focal point and excuse, really, for visits with friends and family.
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I’d never been. My worry was that I’d miss Jerry too much. I’ve been told (by Juliet) to get over it. This is a new band. But they play the old songs! Is my argument. I was never quite a deadhead, though I liked them a lot. I was, though, and remain, a Jerry head. He was a true genius in several guises, and whatever he touched turned to genius, too, including the Dead. He was also very funny and lighthearted and a drug addict who died young of exhaustion and diabetes. Continue reading →
Random Doodle Day: Sketches From My Journal
categories: Cocktail Hour
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After some consultation with my blog-mate, I have decided to upgrade the drawing of Super Bill, aka Captain Memoir. I don’t feel the earlier drawings captured his true super-ness.
Bad Advice Wednesday: The Annotated Table of Contents
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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Table of Contents for "100 Famous Views of Edo"
Let’s say you have an idea for a nonfiction book, whether it’s a memoir, an extended personal essay, journalism, or something else. It’s hard to get started, isn’t it? Or if easy enough to get started, hard to keep going. Part of the problem is knowing where to start, and after that, where to go.
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Or you’ve finished a draft of a book and the chaptering came willy-nilly as you composed. There are holes in the narrative or in the stream of argument. The sections are of all sizes and methods and shapes. There’s no sense of progression, or if there is, the progression seems to stutter.
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Or say you’ve written four essays on a related theme. Growing up in Nigeria, for example. Or your life as a teacher and coach. Or in my case, more than 20 years ago, on my adventures in nature with my then girlfriend (now wife) Juliet.
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Or take it a little further–you’ve thought quite a bit on your subject and have some preliminary chapters put together and you want to go ahead and pitch your book idea to editors or agents. Continue reading →
Our Big Year
categories: Cocktail Hour
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ABOVE: JACK BLACK, OWEN WILSON, AND STEVE MARTIN IN THE BIG YEAR
I think the reason that I watch birds instead of birdwatch is that I’m reluctant to turn the woods into an arena. I’m already competitive enough in too many areas of my life. I don’t really mind if I’m a bad birder. Just as long as I get to see birds.
This was the problem I had with the book, The Big Year, though as you’ll see below from the review I wrote for the Christian Science Monitor, I liked it well enough.
The photo at the right is obviously a joke, reused from our Jonathan Franzen and the Great Swamp Warbler post. You will note that both Jack Black and Owen Wilson have aged considerably, while Steve Martin looks a lot younger.
What Bloody Man is That? (a review of “Sleep no More”)
categories: Cocktail Hour / Reading Under the Influence
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We were a little late, leapt out of the cab on 10th Avenue, nothing to see on West 27th street toward the river but a couple of closed galleries north and a wall of blank warehouse faces south, pair of huge men hanging out a little ominously under a bare bulb down there. But that doorway—there was a ten-foot star above it, nothing flashy, flat-black as the building in fact, was clearly a clue, the first in an evening of clues and little resolution. We asked the men where the MacBeth performance was, if they knew where it might be. They looked at one another long. The huger one brightened very slightly. “You mean the Hotel?” he intoned. “The Hotel McKittrick?” Behind him the doors opened. A nattily dressed and fake-ish hotelman eyed us, said, “You’re not Continue reading →
Bad Advice Wed: Accept Your Small Self; Strive to be Larger
categories: Bad Advice / Cocktail Hour
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I had every reason to be happy when I heard that Edith Pearlman had been nominated for the National Book Award. When my wife called to tell me the news she certainly expected to be happy. I am happy for Edith now, very happy, and I should have been happy for her then. After all, I had been lucky enough to be in the room when Emily Smith and Ben George, the founders of Lookout Books, had called to read Edith the glowing cover review of her book in The New York Times. That had been a thrilling moment, and we were on lifted up in its excitement, and news that she had now been nominated for the NBR should have provided me with a similar lift. Continue reading →
