Time to Read, Part Two
Forever alive, forever forward,
Stately, solemn, sad, withdrawn, baffled, mad, turbulent, feeble, dissatisfied,
Desperate, proud, fond, sick, accepted by men, rejected by men,
They go! they go! I know that they go, but I know not where they go;
But I know that they go toward the best—toward something great.
-Walt Whitman
I regularly scan two or three newspapers per day. This pastime eats up much of my book reading time, but directs me to more great reading to add to The Stack. I crave stories about the people who make the stories. I am as much interested in the craft of writing as in the adventures of the people who engage in the craft. Or whatever. Often, their lives aren’t worth reading about or don’t live up to the expectations set by the myths they set down on paper, but years of reading interviews and profiles of writers in the daily papers have led to a restless devotion to nonfiction, biography and memoir. Jim Harrison’s Off to the Side jumped off our own shelves on a hot July afternoon, followed me home, poured me a thick belt of bourbon and stayed with me until the brown bats began circling the yard. I was hooked after the author’s statement that, “I have no area of expertise outside of my imagination but that has to be enough because that’s what I have.” The cool kids were and are still reading the Beats and Bukowski but aren’t digging deep enough to find Jim Harrison. A mere seventy pages of introduction and “early life” passages drive home Harrison’s belief that the “overexamined life is also not worth living.” Then we are off to Seven Obsessions, including The Road, alcohol, private religion, hunting, fishing and dogs. How many are we up to? The hidden chapter covers food, or more accurately, eating. Eating the foods we grow, kill and catch.
“Sometimes my father would take an iron skillet, a baby-food jar of bacon fat, salt and pepper, and a loaf of my mother’s salt-rising bread along to the river so we could fry some trout for lunch. This was simple enough, far better than a sandwich, and an integral part of what you were doing. Catching fish, then eating them goes back a long way. Years later while deer hunting we usually ate the liver and heart right after the first kill.”
I’ve selfish reasons for loving this book. Michigan. Rilke. Dogs. But I enjoyed it mostly because when Jim Harrison talks about writing he is talking about reading. When he talks about cooking he celebrates eating. When he describes the road, it isn’t his road it is your road and my road.
