Two Quick Links

Via Margory: Bill Buford’s excellent New Yorker review of the continuing dilemma we omnivores face is now on line. I have two of the cookbooks and recommend both, especially the Fearnley- Whittingstall. But why on earth does the third cost $130+?? A good Buford quote: “For all the disarray, there is a coherent ideology. It …

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Dog Novels for Kids

A curious phenomenon of the thirties, forties, and fifties was the proliferation of dog novels for kids or rather what would be called “young adults” these days. They may just have been a product of a more “country” time– they were utterly un- pc, generally very good in natural history, and dealt forthrightly with issues …

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Real Influences: Travel Writing

While reading Douglas Botting’s 2000 bio of Gerald Durrell I came upon these lines: “Young men woke up to find that the world was once again their oyster, and not just a place you went on a troopship. At almost the same time that the Durrell brothers’ two books werepublished [1953] a galaxy of talened …

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Links

A wonderful ancient sculpture. All- female lizard clone species. Several of these are common in the Magdalena area. Terrierman talks about veterinarian bill- padding, kickbacks etc. Luckily ours is an old- fashioned ranch woman– but I have seen both the demand for pre- op bloodwork and the referral kickback. Did a comet contribute to the …

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A Few More Thoughts on Cranes

I have eaten crane (not mine) and it was wonderful. They are grain eaters and don’t taste fishy as most of those others that Julie mentions, such as herons, are alleged to– more like fine roast beef. They are also wary and difficult. Actually few hunt them, and those that do know they are good …

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The New Bird

Believe it or not, he’s relaxing. But anything with eyes like these never looks relaxed. “God may fly a Peregrine, but the devil flies a Goshawk”.

Last word on Mailer, plus..

Phillip posted below on Mailer, and I agree. A last word, from an email I sent: Betsy once wrote, for the MIT paper, an announcement on him– something like “the overrated self- regarding egotist Norman Mailer will appear…” She assumed it would be caught in rewrite but it wasn’t. His Gary Gilmore book was a …

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Joe Brown

Chas has a link to an excellent piece on the fine and neglected western writer JPS (Joseph Paul Summers) Brown. I met Joe Brown when we were both signing books at a sadly defunct bookstore in Tucson. I had brought a copy of his Forests of the Night, which could give Cormac McCarthy a run …

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