Two Society Photos…

Really! I think of myself as a sort of an amused amateur taxonomist of class, as I am of biology. You don’t have to be a snob to be interested in class; despite Americans’ common nervousness about the subject, it exists, like evolution, whether you deny it or not. Someone who stands a little outside …

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Quote

From the Medieval French poet Francois Villon: Ce monde n’est perpetuel Quoy que pense riche pillart; Tous sommes soubz mortel coustel…” (The world is not everlasting/ despite what rich robbers think/ We are all beneath a mortal blade…)

McIntyre’s Snow Leopard’s Tale

At VERY long last Thomas McIntyre’s Snow Leopard novel is out. I have waited longer for it than I have ever for any other book. Long story… First, let me quote my own recommendation– I pared it down to say exactly what I wanted to: “McIntyre’s tale may have predecessors, but it is unique. I …

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Flyover Country?

Thesis: talk is as good in Magdalena, or the Spur, as anywhere. It was Sissy Olney, fourth generation rancher and lion hunter, who on seeing me reading Sybille Bedford in that bar, asked me if she were the one who had written “that big fat book about Aldous Huxley”. Joel Becktell is a world- class …

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Jesuit “Final Exam”

This was sent by the biographer of the late legendary Jesuit adventurer, mountaineer, hunter, and my sometime mentor Father Anderson Bakewell, S J, who found it in an 80’s Jesuit newsletter among his effects. It has been around in various iterations, but I wonder, given the rifle , if he were also involved in its creation. …

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Crab Diaries

A new one for the blogroll: Crab Diaries, the serious, scary, witty, and laugh- out- loud funny journals of… well, she prefers to remain anonymous for now; let us just call her “My friend the Oncologist” and add, since she reveals this in a particularly funny post, that she is a (we met because she …

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Altai Roads

Or Central Asian roads in general, are not like western roads. The highway from Ulan Bataaar to Olgii is over six hundred miles long, but it is not paved. It is studded with old car parts and camel bones; sometimes, when the land is flat, its ruts seem to stretch a quarter mile wide and …

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