Tag: Books

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Love Story

Looking for Oregon books, I ran across David James Duncan’s The River Why. It’s an improbable love story set against the backdrop of an improbable fly-fishing story, or maybe an improbable  fly-fishing story set against the backdrop of an improbable love story, or a long didactic philosophical and spiritual journey. Or all of the above.

The novel’s hero, Augustine Orviston (get it? get it?), is described at birth as caught from the womb of Ma Orviston. He is as much trout as boy, a bait- and fly-fishing prodigy, an idiot savant, balanced between his parents, Henning Hale-Orviston (H2O) and Carolina Carper (the above-mentioned Ma). H2O is a British accented, tweed-wearing, pipe smoking fly fisherman and fly-fishing writer, author of the Summa Anglia, while Ma is a Camel-smoking blue-jeaned eastern Oregon cowgirl defiling the holy water of the Deschutes with a Sears Roebuck bait caster. Ma and H2O are forever joined and (apparently) forever in conflict.  Ma kills fish. ‘Nuff said.

While fishing Gus (Gus is short for Augustine) finds his love, a water nymph who disrobes to swim steelhead down in the river. They romance over fish and fly rods and fishing. She sends Gus on his final quest with three pound tippet by hooking Gus’s spirit animal, an egg-laden hen Chinook moving upriver to spawn and die, and then handing the rod to Gus.  For the next night and day, day and night, Gus moves upriver with the fish by holding it on the too-light leader with a soliloquy on the power of love.

It ain’t no brief soliloquy either. 

Not much in the novel is brief.  It’s a long, rambling narration by Gus, and sometimes I wished Duncan would just skip a few of the sideshows and get on with things. It was rejected by major publishers because it needed more editing. They were right, and it shares it’s anti-structure of disconnected misadventure (and an other-worldly misfit hero) with A Confederacy of Dunces, which was also rejected by major publishers and finally published by LSU two years before in 1980.  The River Why was published by the Sierra Club. The Sierra Club? Okey-dokey. At least Gus, unlike Ignatius J. Reilly, is likable, if not as amusing. The River Why finally ends gratuitously with a long baffling tag about the Vietnam draft, which even in 1982 was a bit dated.

All that said, it’s a fun book, which I think is what Duncan wanted. One (that’s me) just wishes he wasn’t quite so entranced with his own story. There’s a nice movie version of the novel, though Duncan spent three years suing to get his name taken off the credits. I liked the movie too, but Duncan, for all his Oregonian secularism, seems to have a Puritanical streak.

When I recently wrote about another great fly fishing romance, Shelley and Mark, I got an email from Shelley setting some things I got wrong. The photo, she says, was not taken in Houston but Iceland.

Those are not bluebonnets behind him—they are Lupine which are kind of like giant bluebonnets. When we landed in Iceland, they carpeted the fields leading from the airport.  We thought it was such a nice welcome for Texans.

Icelanders, being descendants of taciturn Norwegian Viking raiders, aren’t the first people who come to mind for their thoughtful friendliness, but there you are. They spread out the lupine.

More important, Shelley explained to me that Kris and I, however large my ego, weren’t responsible for her and Mark’s romance. I kind of suspected that, since we didn’t find out about it until after it was pretty far along and then only by accident, but I’ll never admit it to Shelley.

I had one of those newspaper articles about Mark on my nightstand (plans for flycasting instruction) before I met him. There were lots of other common threads as it turned out—his sister and my brother were on double dates in college, she was the sweetheart of his fraternity; Mark was at a party thrown by my childhood friend, Nancy, that I also attended (there are disputes about whether we actually met there—I say “no”); my friend Ellis was standing in the living room of Mark’s best friend, Herman, the night Mark introduced me to all of his music friends.  I could go on and on.

Shelley said she had the newspaper article on her nightstand so that she could track Mark down for casting lessons.  Between you and me I think she was already learning to sight cast. Or maybe the clipping got there because Mark was practicing his blind casting.  Shelley also said that early on she thought that Mark surely could talk a lot. I guess just like Gus Orviston, literary or real, talking is a necessary talent of anglers.

Shelley also pointed out one last thing I got wrong:

Houston is really a very small city when it comes to lawyers and flyfishermen. And some other things.

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The Monteleone and Oysterology

I remember the first time I saw Kris. She walked past and I couldn’t believe how pretty and bright and lively she was. It worked out well, too.

I also remember the first time I saw the Hotel Monteleone.  I was at a tax and securities law conference at the Marriott on Canal, and walking down Royal I saw the prettiest, brightest, liveliest hotel I’d ever seen. I wondered why I wasn’t staying there. Every time I’ve been to New Orleans since I’ve tried to book the Monteleone, but it’s always full. I thought maybe this would be a final trip to New Orleans, we have so many places to go to get 50 fish, so I made a special effort to get the right restaurants and a reservation at the Monteleone.

The restaurants were great. The Monteleone not so much.

Like I said, the restaurants were great. We had Beignet Friday morning at Morning Call in City Park, which has altogether better beignet than Cafe du Monde. That didn’t stop us though from buying beignet at the Cafe du Monde early the next two mornings, because their beignet is pretty good too.  Morning Call put us near the New Orleans Museum of Art, which has a good early Italian art collection, a good collection of moderns, and an El Greco. It was time well spent.

We ate lunch late, around 3, at Willie Mae’s Scotch House in the Treme. I may never go to New Orleans again, but if I do it will include Willie Mae’s Scotch House.  That’s some great fried chicken, and we were smart enough to order extra for the next day’s fishing. Fried chicken is even better cold. Dinner Friday night was at Commander’s Palace, old school. I had pecan-crusted black drum and the turtle soup–exactly what I’d have had at Brennan’s in Houston, so it felt very homey. I have to say, the service is even better in New Orleans. I wore a jacket because, well, that’s what one does at Commander’s Palace.

Dinner Saturday was at La Petite Grocery.  I had the triple tail.  I’m still working on my 50 fish dinners, but I’m collecting them faster than my 50 fish. Mostly the rest of the time we fished, except of course for the dozen raw at Felix Oyster Bar.

We have a friend who is a bona fide oysterologist, complete with PhD, and anticipating this trip I asked him about oysters in August. He said that the problem with oysters in summer wasn’t that they were more dangerous, eating raw oysters is always risky, but that I would probably be ok if I was otherwise reasonably healthy. Oysters aren’t particularly safer at  60° than they are at 80°  (though I guess the danger of spoilage is less). The problem with summer oysters is that oysters spawn in the summer.

Oysters broadcast spawn, like tarpon, except that they have neither fins nor feet, so they aren’t traveling to spawning grounds. They’re either in bed together or they ain’t. When summer comes around and the oysters are fat and lusty they broadcast their boy stuff and their girl stuff to make baby oysters, and oyster sex leaves them flat and limp and altogether less satisfying than the cool-weather, non-spawned, pre-orgasmic oysters. But flat and limp or fat and lusty I still had a dozen at Felix, and so far I’m not dead yet. They were also pretty great, and at Felix I didn’t have to stand in line at Acme Oyster House across the street. Pro tip from my daughter.

I also had a shopping spree at Faulkner House Books which isn’t a restaurant, but I had to prepare for my future trip to Mississippi, and where else does one buy Faulkner? I also bought some Eudora Welty who I’ve never read.  Mississippi here I come.

But first the Monteleone.  Some things just don’t work out the way you plan.  The Monteleone is in the center of the quarter, a block off Bourbon Street, and for at least a half-dozen blocks the traffic is as bad as midtown Manhattan at rush hour. Then I had to circle the block because there was no place to park at the entrance. Toss in plenty of pedestrians, many with to-go cups and on the wet side of sober, and a brass band and my nerves were fried. The rooms are nice but small, and the Monteleone didn’t have coffee made at 5 am, which is unforgiveable.  The Carousel Bar is famous, and big, but it’s hard to find a vacant chair at either bar or table. There are people everywhere.

You know what I want in a hotel? I want a quiet place. I want to go into the hotel bar and sit down and be welcomed from the moment I arrive. I want coffee at 5 am that I don’t have to make myself. I don’t want French Quarter tourist craziness in the hotel lobby, in the parking garage, or at the hotel entrance while I’m waiting on an Uber. I’m not cut out for the Monteleone. Next time the Columns.

And then of course I screwed up.  I apparently made our reservation for Friday, not Friday and Saturday. When we got back to the hotel late Saturday afternoon we were locked out of our room.

Thank God.

We got on Hotels.com and got a room at the Roosevelt, Huey P. Long’s favorite hotel and a place we’d stayed before. It’s in downtown, on the edge of the Quarter, so outside the craziness. It’s got a good bar, the Sazerac, where I shouldn’t have stopped but did. It’s got bigger rooms. It’s got one of the great lobbies in hoteldom.

These were important life lessons.  If you’re older than 30, don’t stay in the Quarter, no matter how bright and shiny that face. And don’t think you won’t ever return to New Orleans. And go ahead with the dozen raw.

 

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The Ten Best Summer Steelhead Flies!!!

Disclaimer: I wrote this as a joke, because I have no idea what the ten best steelhead flies might be, winter or summer, and I feel guilty every time somebody ends up here. It’s actually a long shaggy dog story about a fly I tied with an ostrich feather that a drag queen gave me at a pride day parade. I did, in fact, catch a summer steelhead on that fly, so if you want to know the very best steelhead fly, it’s one you tie with a feather given to you by a drag queen at a pride parade.

I’m sure someone knows what the ten best summer steelhead flies are, but I haven’t a clue. In September We  go to Oregon, but before, in less than a week, we go to Louisiana. The jumble has me thinking about redfish and steelhead flies at the same time, and I’m no good at multitasking.

I like simple flies. A few years ago the rage in redfish flies was redfish crack, the hardest part of which was using a magic marker.  Tie some EP fiber to the hook for a tail, wrap some EP brush for a head, use a sharpie to bar the tail, brush out the head, done. I greatly admire that fly.

My current favorite redfish fly is this unnamed thing, or at least unnamed to me. It’s my favorite because I made it up after fishing an Avalon for permit, and because the first fly I ever fished in saltwater, a rattler, had rattles. I later caught 50-odd crappie in a single day with a rattler, and later still caught a four-pound bass. I like flies that make noise. I would name the fly I made up, but I figure lots of people have made up the same fly, and one of these days I’ll stumble across its name.  Meantime it’s easy to tie and catches all sorts of stuff. Plus it’s kinda weedless, or as much as any fly is ever weedless.

Rattler. Ok, maybe it was only 30 crappie. CRAH-pee. Puh-CAHN.

Sac-au-lait.

Steelhead flies though are a different matter. It doesn’t seem like anybody ever thought about making them simple, and I don’t know why.  Are steelhead peculiarly complex? Do they never hit a Clouser? Steelhead flies look like somebody wanted to tie classic salmon flies, smoked a joint, and came up with Modern Steelhead Flies. That’s the book I bought to teach me all about steelhead flies, Modern Steelhead Flies.

It’s hard, by the way, not to make jokes about marijuana and Oregon.

Kris and I finally paraded with my firm in this year’s LGBT Pride Parade, and I learned that sometimes Texas parade routes smell like marijuana. Colleagues ask every year if I’ll march and I say sure but then something happens. I put off joining the parade for two years, and they finally shamed me into it. Personally I think it’s a better world when LGBT folk can do some shaming.

The Pride Parade in Houston is no small affair.  There are thousands of paraders, and tens of thousands of paradees. Our daughter dropped us off on Allen Parkway and we walked a bit to the staging point. I really dressed for the parade too: a pair of running shoes, khaki shorts, blue linen shirt, and the crowning glory, my straw fedora. I was a little worried I might stand out too much, but believe it or not, some participants were even less restrained than me. Really. Kris said there was a topless lady, but I didn’t see her. Ogling the topless lady would have probably been wrong anyway, but Kris thought she might be topless at a parade with some expectation of being ogled. Could be.

There were groups from churches and big oil. There was the mayor and the parents of transgender children. There were Democratic candidates, though I think I must have missed the Republican float. We were the only big law firm, but there were lots of banks, and some smaller firms.

So meantime I haven’t actually read much of Modern Steelhead Flies, but it’s got good pictures. Of course I had absolutely none of the fly tying materials for steelhead flies. This is always a given for any new fly, one never has the stuff. This though was particularly brutal. Hooks? Nope. Hot pinks and purples and blues? Nope? Ice dubbing? Not a bit of it. I didn’t own a single ostrich feather.  The first fly I tried, something called a Fifth Element because of all the blue feathers (none of which I owned), had 72 different layers of materials. I spent an hour ordering from FeatherCraft, and when they didn’t have everything I ordered some more from J. Stockard. None of my local shops were going to carry this stuff. I finally found blue Gamakatsu octopus hooks on Amazon. The Feather Thief got nothing on me.

Then I tied the fly, got to the end and realized I’d  forgotten to order the last five layers of stuff.  I tied in some black marabou and called it a day. It looked pretty good, too, as long as you didn’t pay attention to the big gaps on the back side where I didn’t get the materials all the way around the hook.

The third fly in the book, which was also on the list of flies the Oregon outfitter sent, was Jeff Hickman’s fish taco.

Now Mr. Hickman’s fish taco really appealed to me. It was on the outfitter’s list. It was relatively simple compared to the other stuff, only 67 layers or so. Most of all I could look at the fly and think, that looks fishy. That’s the highest praise for any random fly sitting in a box: It looks fishy. Plus it was a taco. I might prefer an enchilada, or even a chalupa, but I’m a Texan and if what you can get is a taco you take a taco. I know and like people who’ve written admirable books about queso and salsa, and I’ll throw in a gratuitous plug for them here. I have also gone miles out of my way to get barbacoa and lengua tacos with just a brush of onion and cilantro, and this was a taco.

I was sitting in my office one day and got distracted and watched a video of Jeff Hickman tying Jeff Hickman’s fish taco. He seemed like a genuinely reasonable guy. He drank unpretentious beer. He took it in stride when he forgot to tie in the 33rd layer of rainbow black flashabou.  I figured this was a guy who wouldn’t mind if I had to use a hot pink hot spot instead of red because I only ordered hot pink ice dubbing.

I also had no ostrich feathers, and 90% of the fish taco is ostrich feathers.

So Kris and I are walking to the staging point for our LGBT Pride parade group and I’m dressed in my gaudy outfit and I feel a hand on my shoulder. A big hand.

Now I’m 6 feet, or I was 40 years ago, but I turn and look up, way up, into the face of either a transgender lady or a drag queen–the taxonomy confuses me some but you can be one without being the other, or vice versa–in a long black satin sheath gown and enough dyed black ostrich feathers to festoon, well, an ostrich. We were of a certain age together, but she’d spent a bit more time in tanning beds, and I was dressed more like a law firm partner taking his grandkids to the zoo. I had no ostrich feathers.

“Darlin’, we gotta spruce you up.” Ok, maybe that wasn’t precisely what she said, but that’s what it sounded like to me.  She plucked an ostrich feather and stuck it in my hat and declared me more festive. I now have a spirit animal for this trip to Oregon, but I haven’t decided whether it’s an ostrich or a 6-foot-4 drag queen in the LGBT Pride parade. I’m leaning towards the latter.

So meantimes.

Kris and I are driving from Galveston and talking about what we need to take to Oregon and she says she’s been looking at the email from Jeff Hickman and I say who? She says Jeff Hickman and I say the fish taco guy? She says what? Jeff Hickman it turns out is our outfitter. I guess I knew that, we’d exchanged emails and all, but it hadn’t registered that the guy I was watching on YouTube tying fish tacos was the guy I was e-mailing. I’m slow like that.

But I catch up sooner or later and this is all coming together. I might even catch a fish. I’ll tie up some hot pink redfish crack with lavender hot spots. If nothing else I’ll learn to tie a fish taco, and I’ll use ostrich herl scavenged from the wild.

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The Ten Best Novels About New Orleans!!!!

My fish-catching skills have been a bit off.  I’ve been to five states and I’ve caught fish in three, which means I’m batting .600: Great for baseball, not so much for fishing.  On the other hand my state visiting skills are coming right along.  I’ve definitely improved my reading.  Preparing for a state I read new stuff and re-read very good stuff I sometimes don’t remember I’ve read before. And I have an excuse to read trash too. Reading in anticipation of a visit may be the best way to read.

The internet helps, and I’ve taken to searching for books on lists like Ten Best Books about Louisiana!, and 100 Books You Need to Read About the South! Some of the lists are good. I especially like this one.  Some of the lists are  peculiar.  They start well enough with The Awakening and Confederacy of Dunces, plus a Dave Robicheaux novel, but then veer off track into bodice rippers. There are a lot of lurid covers for Louisiana novels.

And Interview with the Vampire is on every list. I just don’t get it.

I hadn’t read Kate Chopin’s The Awakening (1899). The novel is set among well-to-do Creoles, with the protagonist, Edna Pontellier, as the interloper from the old Kentucky bluegrass country. She’s beautiful,  throws the best dinner parties, and every man in New Orleans worships at her feet, but domestic duty keeps Edna from full self-realization so she drowns herself. It’s a pretty short novel.

In some ways it’s a bit like Madame Bovary (eats rat poison) and Anna Karenina (throws herself under a train), but with a big difference: both Madame Bovary and Anna Karenina follow their inclinations, are abandoned by their lovers, and off themselves out of shame and despair. While Edna follows some inclinations and finally  despairs, the two aren’t particularly connected and she’s not ashamed. She just refuses to put up with her lot. Readers often see The Awakening as feminist, and maybe oppression of a sort is the source of Edna’s dissatisfaction, but it could also be because of her unsatisfied passion for Robert, or maybe she’s just nuts.  There’s some ambiguity, and nuts is certainly possible. It’s not uncommon after all for folk to live lives of quiet desperation without drowning themselves.

If you’re looking for novels to label as feminist The Awakening might strike your fancy, but I’m not convinced it would be my first choice.  There are too many problems with Edna’s suicide.  Does a woman fail in some important way because she  abandons her children? Yes, of course, and the same is true for a man. That men do so more often is no excuse. Edna is troubling because in part she is wrong, and because of the novel’s late 19th century Naturalism any certain answer about Edna is unsatisfactory. The author’s neutrality makes the book both better and more difficult, but I suspect that Ms. Chopin would be surprised by the notion that Edna’s suicide is explained by some broader context.

I hadn’t read Robert Penn Warren’s  All the King’s Men (1947) either, and it seems to have fallen off of a lot of the lists. Strictly speaking, it’s as much about Louisiana generally as New Orleans. It’s set against the backdrop of Huey P. Long, Governor Willie Stark in the novel, but it’s really about Stark’s right-hand-man, Jack Burden, a Louisiana aristocrat who  has decamped from his birthright to work for the dark side. Maybe it’s fallen off the lists because within the first few pages you get the N-word from the protagonist, but its notions are what they are, and are certainly true for 1930s Louisiana.  Maybe it’s fallen off the lists because it’s a big rambling book with a few too many Luke-I-Am-Your-Father moments: it depends on surprises, so it’s  uneven and contrived from time to time.

It’s good though, and some critics declare it as our best political novel, which seems a bit like declaring a reliever our best left-handed set-up man. I suppose it’s because they feel a need to justify their fondness for it.

Louisiana divides culturally into Creole New Orleans,  the wealthy planters along the Mississippi, the Baptist Appalachian north, and the Catholic Cajun coastline.  Overlay that with African Americans who themselves are divided among downtown and uptown: Creole mixed race descendants of free people of color and the descendants of rural slaves. Nobody ever played those divisions better than Huey P. Long, and that manipulation of the herd, herds rather, for political ends is what Willie Stark is all about. And Willie Stark’s ends, unlike say Huey P. Long’s ends, are mostly good (even if the means are pretty rough and tumble). Of course both Long and Stark ultimately come to a violent end. Luke-I-Am-Your-Father.

But politics aside, Jack Burden, cynical and disengaged, is a peculiarly modern hero not much different than  the hero of The Moviegoer, Binx Bolling, cynical and disengaged, a peculiarly modern hero not much different than  Jack Burden. In broad strokes their stories are the same, Bolling is also an aristocrat (a Bolling no less), their plots are the same, they’re the same. Bolling goes to Chicago on his journey of discovery, not to California like Burden, and unlike Burden the girl goes with him. Pretty much the same girl though.

Oddly, I’d read The Moveigoer (1961) and didn’t remember a thing about it except for one line: “‘Jean-Paul ate some lungs.’” It was Bolling’s much younger half-sister’s line while the kids were eating crabs on a sawbuck picnic table at a fishing camp. I loved that line, and for years after I read it I would tell my kids about it every time we ate crabs because it is a very very funny line for anyone who ever cracked open crabs. I thought I’d read it in a James Lee Burke novel.

When I re-read The Moviegoer I read an appreciation of the novel in The Atlantic by Andrew Santella, in which he admitted to an unhealthy youthful obsession with Binx’s droll disconnected sophistication, which Santella now sees as pretty messed up. Truth is though that Binx never does anything particularly bad, and his movie-going is a metaphor for how he observes his own life. He’s not that disengaged. When it comes time for Binx to be the hero of his movie, if only in a fairly ordinary way, he steps up.

“I did my best for you, son. I gave you all I had.  More than anything I wanted to pass on to you the one heritage of the men of our family, a certain quality of spirit, a gaiety, a sense of duty, a nobility worn lightly, a sweetness, a gentleness with women–the only good things the South ever had and the only things that really matter in this life.”

It is Bolling’s Aunt Emily haranguing him for what she believes is his great failure, but that’s also a pretty good description of Binx Bolling. When it is time for him to prove his lightly worn nobility, he does it. He calls his secretary’s roommate, sure, and you think with horror that he’s going to blow it, but he calls her not about sex but about connection. He is a gentle man. He tells her he’d like to come over Saturday and bring his fiancé. Binx is all right. Binx will be all right.

Ignatius J. Reilly comes into the world with such a strange provenance. John Kennedy Toole had committed suicide after Confederacy of Dunces (1981) was rejected by publishers. Toole’s mother (and you can’t help but wonder at her connection to Ignatius’s mother, Irene), drops the manuscript off with Walker Percy, who was teaching writing at Tulane. Percy gets the novel published by LSU. It posthumously wins the Pulitzer Prize.

I read it first when it was all the rage back in the early 80s, and second ten years back on a trip to New Orleans. It’s a comic novel that holds up well, is often compared to Don Quixote, and since I’m a careless and inattentive reader I’ve found things new in it every time I’ve read it.  It can be ponderous,  heavy-handed, and sophomoric, but it can also be great fun. Part of the fun now is realizing how the world has changed in my lifetime. Where are these people’s cell phones? There’s a bakery in a department store? There’s a department store? There’s a pants factory in New Orleans? Lan Lee’s pornographic postcards seem so mild, and Burma Jones’ black dialect verges on the racially insensitive.  Ooo-wee.

But still, if you can’t imagine the interior of the Night of Joy bar you haven’t been to the French Quarter, and the plot, fantastic and mundane all at once, seems like a flimsy but funny excuse for the people and the places. No novel was ever tied so closely to a city, so that Ignatius’s one earlier attempt to leave New Orleans, an 80-mile bus trip, becomes Dante’s journey: “The only excursion of my life outside of New Orleans took me through the vortex to the whirlpool of despair: Baton Rouge. . . .”

And Ignatius. The book’s epigram is from Jonathan Swift: “When a true genius appears in the world, you may know him by this sign, that the dunces are all in confederacy against him.” Is Ignatius a genius? He’s more likely a fool, but then again maybe he’s a madly misdirected genius. He’s certainly not like the rest of us. He also certainly deserves more trouble than he gets–except I feel a bit bad when he’s threatened with the mental ward at Charity. But then again . . . .

What a weird, funny novel, and whatever its unevenness no one can doubt Toole’s appreciation of theology and geometry.