Leigh Fermor’s one venture into movie writing was with my favorite (and most literary) director, John Huston, but apparently it was not a success (although there were still some good times enjoyed by the pre- PC group. As the only available version of the movie is in Spanish, in Euro format, and subtitled in English, …
Tag: Writing
Hal Herring on Colonel Cooper
As mentioned below. In his excellent Amazon review of To Ride, Shoot Straight, and Speak the Truth, Hal Herring writes: “…Cooper is an authentic American voice, and the rare man who has read and written as much as he has studied weaponry, ethics, and war. He is opinionated- I never agreed with him about the …
Fishing for words
I’m between book projects at the moment – something that only happens for a short time every few years. My next children’s book has been sent to the printer, and my next adult book is making its way through the review process of an academic press under the guidance of an acquisitions editor who is …
PLF 2: Letters from Geoffrey Household
Sadly, I never corresponded with Patrick Leigh Fermor, but I did for many years with the adventurous old “suspense” story writer Geoffrey Household (as so many perceptive critics wrote, he was so much more than that, including a naturalist, a regionalist, and a chronicler of the same old lost Europe that Leigh Fermor also celebrated). …
Patrick Leigh Fermor 1915- 2011 RIP
Too burnt on obit- writing to write a proper tribute to one of my (and Betsy Huntington’s; she left me all my early first editions; and Q’s) favorite writers and examples of a life well- lived. But readers and nomads everywhere should observe a silent moment: Patrick Leigh Fermor has died at 96 in England. …
“Zarzo”
…is what Tom Russell calls Montana poet, sometime cowboy, and hard- core writer Paul Zarzyski Recently Tom sent me Zarzyski’s 51–“30 poems, 20 lyrics, 1 Self- Interview”, and it is the best “Western” book and the best “Writing” book I have read in an age. Paul is often lumped with the Cowboy Poets and has …
Commonplace Book: I don’t want to kill a tiger but…
From a letter Peter Fleming, Ian’s older brother and the better writer (News From Tartary— all the other editions are insanely expensive and this gives you two good books in one volume), wrote to his four- year- old son in England while he was working in intelligence in Burma in WW II: “If you are …
Visitors
Tom Russell would be too modest to say so but he might just be the best and most lasting singer- songwriter of my generation; while some annoyingly typecast him as a western or cowboy or border balladeer he is in all ways an American bard, a living link between cowboys and the beats and all …
Neglected Book
Rebecca O’Connor’s Lift, her literary falconry memoir and one of the best falconer’s memoirs ever written, had such good press I thought it would automatically be come a success (this despite my having written to her about “… terrific reviews, indifferent agents, incompetent publishers, [and] few sales…”). But NOOO. She has sold only 411 copies. …
Commonplace Book: Old School
A conversation between the late Jack Mavrogordato, old school English falconer (he knew T H White, who described him as “a charming man, approximately five inches tall…”), and the more ancient Major Allen, about the still more ancient E B Michell, past master of the merlin, ca. 1976, as recorded in the English Falconer: M: …