Back from soggy VT

THERE GOES another construction weekend. We found roads up and down the mountain washed out by Vermont’s destructive rain emergency of recent weeks. Wherever the asphalt went downstream they’ve laid in wheeler loads of coarse, rocky gravel. In the six miles up from town to the turnoff we lost count of how many sections had been temporarily made passable. A little ways beyond the turnoff the road remains closed.

The rain’s still coming, off and on. Friday we sat out a downpour all afternoon and late into the evening, then on Saturday we got too much sun exposure nailing siding onto the building.

I hadn’t seen ghost pipes on the property before. There are plenty now. They must like super-saturated leaf litter.

This guy walked through Ellen and Kirk’s driveway one recent day, next house up.

And this word from Wheatland County, Montana, where it’s dry enough to cut hay on the Lode Ranch. My friend Robyn sent this pic a few days ago. She’s behind the wheel of the swather. That’s her dad in the other machine way out there.

The rain was far off and not moving their way.

A herd of elk Robyn saw yesterday on a neighbor’s land.

The Criterion Channel’s been running a collection of British noir from the 40s and 50s. I love the noir aesthetic, how the shadows themselves become characters. Here’s an image from Odd Man Out, Carol Reed’s 1947 take on what would later come to be called The Troubles.

That’s the young James Mason as Johnny McQueen.

The Third Man is usually regarded as Reed’s masterpiece. I’m not so sure. Odd Man Out is awfully good.

Reed worked quite a lot of religious imagery into the film. Here’s his Madonna della Pietà

R.C. Sherriff wrote the film adaptation. He’s best known for the stage play Journey’s End, based on his experience as a British officer in World War I. That story’s been made into movies several times. The latest, released in 2017, is well done and no easy watch. It strips away the baloney of the organized mass-murder movies of the John Wayne sort.

Gotta love this marching song. We’re here because we’re here because we’re here because… Sounds like a forerunner of the Vietnam psychological hack Don’t mean nothing.

This alcoholic company commander is keeping it together as he leads his lads to their doom.

On a brighter note, DailyMotion has this little feature on a friend of CCjon’s, a fun three minutes on Tom from Spokane and Archie the sidecar dog. This is a screenshot, not the video itself.

I tried embedding the video here but couldn’t figure out how to disable it from autoplaying at the end. Let’s try a link instead: if you click the highlighted words above or here it’ll open a new window at DailyMotion. Three minutes in you can X out of it. That’ll work.

Oh, and the clip may start on mute, depending on your browser. You’d have to unmute it manually.

In 2018, I rode out to Wyoming to meet up with CCjon and iron man Nestor, then en route to Prudhoe Bay. We rode together a few days before they went north and I went west. We met up again a few weeks later in Washington state, rode down to New Mexico for a while.

When we stopped to see Tom in Spokane, Nestor snapped this pic of me by the sidecar rig you see in the video. Notice good old iron piggy in the background…

Then came 2019, I was out west again, rode north to Tuktoyaktuk, then Prudhoe Bay. Good guys here. I kept crossing paths with them in the Yukon and the Northwest Territories.

I hadn’t seen this photo before a week ago. Robert Freeman (down back on the right, farthest from the camera) sent it to me. This summer he rode all around the U.S. and Canada with his wife, Candis.

He thinks the shot was taken at the Triple J Hotel in Dawson City. The first guy on the left is unidentified, he was riding around the Arctic on a bicycle. Continuing around the table clockwise, that’s Dennis, Doug, Robert, Mitch, Steve and Ed.

Robert and Candis on their CanAm about a month ago, getting back on the road after stopping to see family in North Carolina. We were hoping to see them up here in Rhode Island but they had a change of plans due to wildfires in Canada. They made a turn and rode west to get ahead of the smoke instead of riding into it.

They made it home a few days ago to Camano Island, a little north of Seattle.

About books, of which I usually blather something…

In the wee hours yesterday, in my tent in Vermont, I finished up a volume of essays by the late Charles Simic. He shuffled off to Buffalo earlier this year.

I was on a weird sleep schedule. Down at 10, up at 3, read till 5, back down until 6, then the day begins.

Jim Harrison, I read a couple of his books the week before last.

Harrison’s not bad. He wouldn’t be my first choice in writers but I was interested enough to read more than 800 pages by and about him in a week’s time.

He thought of himself as a poet who somehow drifted into novellas, then screenplays, then novels. He writes beautiful sentences that barely need to be punctuated. The rhythm of the language itself carries you along. That would be the poet in him.

He had Hollywood access; powerful friends and monied benefactors on the A-list. He learned the craft and wrote two dozen screenplays, two of which saw the light of day. Two out of 24. That has to say something about the crapshoot nature of the business; crapshoot in the usual sense, and then one that requires a little imagination.

I’ve seen one of the movies he wrote based on his novella, Legends of the Fall. He was one of three writers on it. It was pretty bad.

Harrison’s love of the natural world comes through in his characters, I like that about him. In the stories I read, whenever his characters were doing something in a real place on the map, it happened to be, oddly enough, a place where I had rolled out my bedroll on the ground at some point: the sand hills of Nebraska, the shore of Lake Superior at Grand Marais, Michigan, a bunch of towns in Montana: Butte, Choteau, Cut Bank…

His stories held my interest but I wouldn’t call them literature. They’re not plot driven enough to be dismissed as genre lit but they feel thematically familiar in a genre-adjacent way.

Of the stories I read, they basically seem to boil down to Cain and Abel ride horses around on the Niobrara River. The warring spirits may be brothers, they may be father and son; they may reside in the same breast, there to struggle not between good and evil, or conformity and rebellion—or not simply that—but an artistic sensibility trying to evolve beyond the artless brutality of a certain post-frontier mindscape.

I don’t think there’s any profound exegesis of the Harrison text to be done; or maybe I should read more of him before I say that. Given what I have read, unless my eye and ear are completely unattuned to what he’s doing, his stories say what they say and are about what they’re about.

From what I’ve read of interviews he gave, Harrison would shrug at readers not drawn to his prose. He had that everyman-scribbler thing going on, a journalist’s perspective. He wrote for Esquire and Sports Illustrated and cared not at all for what he saw as the pretensions of literary scholarship. He tried teaching college for a year and hated it. He saw the human condition weighted far more in sentiment than irony, so there you see how unsuited his temperament would be to supporting his fiction with a day job in academe, getting on with the latest fashion in literary theory, what Barthelme mocked as “the new newness.”

Yeah, so Harrison, you know, a regular guy who felt fortunate to make a living making sentences. This while working through personal difficulties. He was manic depressive, a heavy drinker.

After The Road Home, I read his three novellas collected under Legends of the Fall. I take the novella by that title for well-written pulp. It’s a melodrama.

The movie version was a thing where Brad Pitt tosses his Fabio locks while riding around on a horse. When I saw it almost 30 years ago I thought, How did Anthony Hopkins and Aidan Quinn ever agree to appear in this thing. How did Pitt, for that matter.

Harrison said he wished the movie had looked dirtier, grittier. It was “too pretty.”

The other two novellas in the Legends volume are Revenge and The Man Who Gave Up His Name. They’re interesting if you take them for what they are: storybook stories for adults. They’re fables, basically. Fables of disconcerting violence.

He said he wrote Revenge in a week and changed nothing on a second draft. He said he wrote Legends of the Fall in nine days and changed just one word. If that’s true, it’s all the evidence you need of an intention to not write literary fiction.

I’ll wager it’s not true. Writers who claim this superpower—they think it all onto the page, they spool out finished narrative—they’re busy curating their own mythologies.

That’s about it. Nothing much going on. On Phantom matters, I’m engaging the Chronicle Chamber blokes in a subtext discussion on Dungeons Undone. If that gets interesting I’ll post something about it here.

I’ll close with 2 minutes of Zen from last week, a clip I shot here in rainy Little Rhody; where all the rivers are up, if not as destructively as those in Vermont.

It’s a northern flicker hunting for a dry spot where it can wait out a downpour. As it rains harder, then harder again, the bird gives up on where it is and hunts for a new spot.

I was under the porch roof but it didn’t seem to want to join me there.

Tony DePaul, July 25, 2023, Cranston, Rhode Island, USA