Still fighting my way back.

Hi, We’ve made a lot of progress, completed a few articles, and am working with my assistant Tess to finish my second Book of Books – but the blog is aloost defeating me. The changes in my voices’ pitch and volume throughout the day are simly too much for the dictation programs I’ve tried so …

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Maurice R. “Monty” Montgomery, 1938- 2017: RIP

My friend Monty was always a slightly elusive presence, even in his autobiographical sketch in Amazon, written by himself: “M. R. Montgomery, known to the various government record keepers as Maurice R. Montgomery Jr., and to all his acquaintances as Monty, was born in eastern Montana in 1938, raised partly in California, and now lives …

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Hemingway’s Guns– new edition

Silvio Calabi and Co. hav come out with a new ed of the already- good Hemingways’s Guns that adds the Cuban guns from the Finca Vigia (a uniformly ruined unshootable lot BTW) to the already good scholarship of the first volume. Two things are  particularly notable. First, most American rich folks back then shot good …

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“Great Unknown”?

John Muller’s fine piece on me in  NM magazine is out, graced by the photos of Hans Wachs, and soon to be online.  It is called “The Great Unknown”–  meaning me!– and uses this photo as a lead, which will have to do until I have a link. UPDATE: Here is the link, thanks to …

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William “Gatz” Hjortsberg, 1941- 2017

Chris Waddington, my old editor at the Minneapolis Star Tribune and now a happier man in his belovcd New Orleans (even though Katrina flooded his house) emailed to tell me that our mutual friend Gatz Hjortsberg died at his home in Livingston after a “short illness” i.e. pancreatic cancer (it’s a bad one; it’s the …

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Tom’s tour- and Book

A friend in Alberta snapped this photo of Tom Russell and Ian Tyson in fine form at a concert up there. My informant said that he told a story of bringing his Swiss Father-in-law over the Continental Divide at night to visit us and our hounds and hawks. It could have been a fraught scene …

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Recovering

Libby is doing well, although the broken rib really hurts when she she coughs, and she is going to a dentist today to plan tooth repair. To certain complainers: I did not publish unattractive pics of Lib without her permission; I did ask, before I took the photos, and she gave it gladly, in the …

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Why I may NEVER be rich…

What’s that? Oh, a Jack Unruh illo, for a piece I had published, that I sent in un- asked for, “over the transom”. In SI. In 1980. When Pat was still editor. And I didn’t follow up. Because I didn’t know how. Thank God Gray’s was only a subway stop away….

Tom McGuane on Raptors

Novelist Tom McGuane, while noted for his horses and pointing dogs, has always had a feel for birds of prey,  notices them, and on occasion writes lyrically about them. There is a vivid set piece in the novel Something to Be Desired, in which which the protagonist, LucienTaylor,  takes his young son, who does not …

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