Mcguane, Jim Harrison, Brautigan film

[foxtrapper1972]

Movie called-Tarpon. Been out for a while looks interesting. This is what the old days looked like. Three great authors.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=d0psoyXNrhc

 

[riverdance]

loved this film and images of Key West in pre Cruise ship era. For a taste of this time and the angling culture I suggest McGuanes' novel "92 in the shade". I'll bet you've read it already.

 

[raftman]

Jimmy Buffet did the soundtrack, long before cheeseburgers in paradise and other pop hits -

http://www.aquariumdrunkard.com/2016/05/05/tarpon-a-soundtrack-1973/

 

[foxtrapper1972]

Have not read that Mcguane book but will look for it.

Would like to see the whole movie. It is available somewhere.

To see them at that early stage you would not have guessed they would go on to be so productive.They all took different paths but amazingly all had some success making art... Brautigan is the most obscure of the bunch.

 

[rrt]

At the risk of sounding negative, I did not like 92 in the Shade. I recently read Harrison's The Big Seven and found it to be a rambling mess, though it contained some good one-liners. However, many years ago I read Brautigan's "Trout Fishing in America," and I found it both humorous and disturbing. I should have bought a copy to re-read in my dotage.

I guess in my declining years here, I don't fit into the modern version of a fly-fisherman. But, the couple of young fanatics in my area seem to share my views, so that's something, I guess.

Anyhow, I found McGuane and Harrison overrated as writers, though they may have been fine fly-fishermen.

 

[raftman]

I tend to agree with you, RRT, especially about McGuane. I think he's a bit overrated. I tend to read Harrison's poetry more than his fiction, for what it's worth. I find his fiction to be great at times (when exploring place and how we're affected by it) and at others, a bit redundant (booze, women, old age, booze, women, old age). His poem, Barking, and the collection it's from, In Search of Small Gods, are absolutely incredible and well worth reading.

 

[riverdance]

Foxxtrapper. I found a copy of Tarpon online a year or two ago so hopefully its still out there. McGuanes "92 in the Shade" was a National Book Award Finalist--so there was some traction anyway. I don't think your assessment is at all negative RRT its just a question of taste. Spending some formative years in Texas made me appreciate dry western humor and McGuane delivers. Thank God for Jim Harrison and his text book on the lotic freshwater environment "The Theory and Practice of Rivers" but I may have liked him best when he advised that garlic is a vegetable and not an herb.

 

[foxtrapper1972]

I was commissioned in a dream by Imanja,
also the Black Pope of Brazil, Tancred,
to design a seven-tiered necklace
of seven thousand skulls for the Statue of Liberty.
Of course from a distance they'll look
like pearls, but in November
when the strongest winds blow, the skulls
will rattle wildly, bone against metal,
a crack and chatter of bone against metal,
the true sound of history, this metal striking bone.
I'm not going to get heavy-handed --
a job is a job and I've leased a football
field for the summer, gathered a group of ladies
who are art lovers, leased in advance
a bull Sikorsky freight helicopter
to drop on the necklace: funding comes
from Ford Foundation, Rockefeller, the NEA.
There is one Jewish skull from Atlanta, two
from Mississippi, but this is basically
an indigenous cast except skulls from tribes
of blacks who got a free ride over from Africa,
representative skulls from all the Indian
tribes, an assortment of grizzly, wolf,
coyote and buffalo skulls. But what beauty
when the morning summer sun glances
off these bony pates! And her great
iron lips quivering in a smile, almost a smirk
so that she'll drop the torch to fondle the jewels.