Tag: Books

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Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, Rita Mae Brown

To get ready to fly fish Florida, I need to do some reading.  I’ve been preparing.

Possibly the best known authors from Florida are three women: Zora Neale Hurston, Marjorie Kinnan Rawlings, and Rita Mae Brown. I’ve read one novel by each (though I may long ago have also read a collection of folklore by Hurston).  Hurston of course was an African American author whose most famous work,Their Eyes Were Watching God, was published in 1937. Rawlings was a white carpetbagger-author from Washington, D.C. who published The Yearling in 1938. Both novels were about rural hard-scrabble Florida and were published at the end of the Great Depression. Brown wrote a lot of mystery novels that involve a cat which I don’t think I’ve read, but is famous for Rubyfruit Jungle, a lesbian coming-of-age novel published in 1973.  I probably read it in 1978 or so.  I haven’t re-read it.

Their Eyes Were Watching God begins early in the 1900s in Eatonville, a black community north of Orlando.  I guess it’s a coming-of-age novel, though the heroine Janey shoots right through the coming-of and lands on independent womanhood. It does take three husbands, one of whom she marries as a child and then abandons, one of whom she is happy to see die, and one of whom she shoots with a rifle when he gets rabies and tries to shoot her with a pistol.  She liked the last one. There are a paucity of white folk, and a lot of rural black dialogue, but it’s an immensely likable novel, and important. I’m not really sure I remember how God comes into it, but being omnipresent he’s probably in the center of things.

The Yearling, published a year later, is set earlier, after the Civil War, but again a bit north of Orlando. It is also a coming of age novel, a dark coming of age novel about a boy who is forced to choose between his greatest friend, a yearling deer, and his family’s survival.  The deer decides the corn crop is ready to hand and tasty. The Yearling probably qualifies as young adult fiction. There are the bad guys who burn houses but are always there to lend a hand,  likable Pa who in the book is remarkably small but in the movie is miscast as Gregory Peck, the world-weary and no-nonsense Ma who is large and ugly but in the movie is miscast as Jane Wyman, and Jody the boy who almost kills himself getting to manhood.  As young adult fiction it is extremely important, as adult fiction maybe not so much.  It did win a Pulitzer, and it was my mother’s favorite novel–she was 21 the year it was published–and I suspect her childhood on a Texas dryland farm was closer to the childhood in The Yearling than it was to my childhood. I love the book.

In Finding Florida T.D. Allman lambasts Rawlings because there are no blacks in The Yearling, when a significant portion of Florida’s population was and is black, but it doesn’t seem that strange to me.  InTheir Eyes Were Watching God, other than Janey’s birth story, there’s no significant white presence (though like God there may be some omnipresence).  Among the rural Southern poor, there wasn’t always much cross-racial exchange.  You might as well criticize Rawlings and Hurston for failing to include lesbians.  I’m sure there were some lesbians in Florida, I don’t think lesbians were invented in 1973, but they wouldn’t have been particularly central to the lives of the characters in these novels. It is easy to forget how complete segregation was, and among poor whites there were no servants from which to wring a Driving Miss Daisy or The Help.  It is perfectly likely that The Yearling’s Baxters on their  isolated farm had as much interaction with African Americans as Rawlings portrayed. Maybe some more, but not so much as to be worth noticing, and the Baxter’s attitudes probably wouldn’t have made them more likable; maybe taught us something, but only as a sideshow.

As for Rubyfruit Jungle, I don’t remember much about it.  The heroine was a young woman who always knew she was a lesbian and grew into it and out into the world. It was the novel of the age when it was published, rich with feminist principal and sexual liberation, but for me at least its age has probably come and gone.  Maybe not, but I suspect it’s past its shelf life. When I read it originally I’m not sure I got the reference in the title, I was far more familiar with ruby red grapefruit, Texas’ finest, than other forms of ruby fruit, but I’ve always been a bit slow.  It is more parochial than the other two novels.  I suspect that many lesbians would say it’s more personal than the other two novels.

I don’t believe there’s a mandate that Florida authoresses have three-part names.

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I’m Going to Disney World

Actually I’m not.  I’m going to West Palm Beach in 23 days, where the Astros will play the Nationals in the first spring training game of the season.  Maybe somewhere between Mickey Mouse and 331  lynchings of African Americans, between Where the Boys Are and Scarface, there may be some there there in the Sunshine State.

I like to travel, and I’m old enough to know that at best when you travel you get some passing notion of a place, and you get some interesting tales with which to bore your friends.  There’s not much method in how I choose where I go:  I go places for business, or family, or to watch the Astros play.  Sometimes I go to fish.  But how I approach the place is usually similar. I try to get ready for travel by reading some books about the place I’m going.  If nothing else I at least read a mystery novel or two. I try to put together a music soundtrack of the place. I try to stay at a hotel with some history. I find it easiest to visit cities: there are civic buildings, there are museums, there are restaurants and baseball stadiums and public transportation.  Recently I’ve made it a point to go fishing because it gets me into the landscape.

We’ve booked a guide in Florida, found a place to stay, and bought our baseball tickets.  It’s a quick trip in and out to a place I went once, many years ago.  I didn’t fish then.  I saw no museums.  I drove around, went to the beach once, and saw nick-knack shops.

Getting ready to go to Florida I’ve been listening to Finding Florida by T.D. Allman. In many ways it’s a good book.  Did you know that Florida has no metals and no igneous rock? That makes it hard to advance to the paleolithic if you’re not already there, but apparently the aboriginal Foridians did quite well with what was to hand. I gather they ate a lot of oysters and made arrowheads out of fish bones. The pre-Columbians did not do so well with disease or the Spanish, and disappeared.  The Seminoles were not natives but refugees from Georgia, and would have to wait for the Americans to be mistreated.

Ponce de Leon never searched for the Fountain of Youth, and that favorite story of my childhood was made up out of whole cloth by Washington Irving.  Andrew Jackson was a bastard, but I had suspected as much. Allman criticizes the economic and racial reality of The Yearling, my mother’s favorite coming of age YA novel about a boy and his deer.  It was published in 1938 when she was 21.

Which is the problem with Allman: his unrelenting moral outrage.  Everybody was a bastard, at least among the Europeans and their descendants. No doubt the only things ever produced out of Florida were racism, cupidity, and film-flam, though being a Texan I don’t know why that makes them so special.  But truly, I really doubt that every Floridian woke up every day thinking I’m going to go out today and do something evil, or at least really stupid. Allman can even get indignant about Stephen F. Foster’s “Old Folks Back Home” for what seems like acres of print.  It just hardly seems worth the effort about a fake sweet song about longing.  All that righteousness does get wearisome, and honestly, I don’t know what he wants me to do? Not go to Florida? Tell all Floridians whose ancestors weren’t either Seminoles or slaves that they are deeply flawed?  Of course there is Florida Man.  Maybe they are deeply flawed.

Which gets back to how hiring a guide to go fishing for four hours is just a bit like going to Disney World, but then all travel is. At worst I’ll have a thrill ride courtesy of some poor fish, at best I’ll understand just a bit more of the world. I do need to watch Where the Boys Are.  I haven’t read Allman’s criticism of Spring Break yet.

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Dynamic Nymphing

Bayou City Anglers had speakers Thursday on fishing the Guadalupe River from Go Outside Expeditions. It was a great presentation, and they touted Dynamic Nymphing by George Daniel.  BCA was out of the book, but it was available to download on Kindle–which is probably good anyway.  We are drowning in books.

It is the first fly fishing book I’ve bought in years. I guess mostly in these late years I fish some kind of streamer: saltwater, bass, even trout as often as not.  Streamers make sense to me.  You throw the fly out there and bring it home.

The introduction to Dynamic Nymphing was by Charles Jardine, which was interesting for two reasons.  The first was content.  He wrote something obvious, but nothing is ever obvious to me.  Jardine says that trout don’t know where he’s from, and wherever he fishes they don’t really know where they are.   They’re trout.  You fish trout essentially the same in Italy as in Argentina as on the Guadalupe River.  Productive techniques are good wherever they may be.

The second reason was because Jardine’s son, Alex, was guiding the one time I can remember getting angry, really angry, about fly fishing.  We had booked a trip with Aardvark McCleod on the Hampshire chalk streams, and Alex, who was charming and tried to explain cricket to me, made a suggestion about my casting. It was probably a great suggestion that I didn’t understand, and I ended up whacking the rod with the fly for the next hour trying to put it into practice.  Alex told me to stop, but I kept going until I finally screamed goddammit, which still embarrasses me, and almost certainly embarrassed him.  Then I went back to my old stupid cast.  The Hampshires, by the way, aren’t one of the 50 states.  They do look exactly like a Constable painting though.

As to Dynamic Nymphing, it is a how-to on both of the European styles of straight-line nymphing, and indicator nymphing.  The three things I’ve taken away so far are get rid of the split shot and use weighted nymphs, let the water move the fly most times, and stop hanging up on the rocks.  I like particularly getting rid of the split shot. I spend at least a half-hour every trip undoing the leader tangle around the split shot.  Good riddance.

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Trout Fishing in America

I just re-read Trout Fishing in America by Richard Brautigan.  I read it last circa 1971, when I was 15 and it was all the rage.  I haven’t thought about it much since, but I started to name this site Trout Fishing in America, as though it were a child in a 60s commune, but thought better of it.  I’m not just fishing for trout.

There’s a surprising amount of internet traffic on Brautigan.  He committed suicide in 1984, apparently because along with the Summer of Love he had fallen out of favor.   His running buddy Thomas McGuane  said that ”when the 1960s ended, he was the baby thrown out with the bath water.”  But he must not be that much out of favor, because there sure is a lot written about him.

There’s a 2012 biography of Brautigan, Jubilee by William Hjortsberg.  I haven’t read the book, but the NY Times reviewed it.

I fly fish because as a kid I fished for crappie with minnows and catfish with blood bait and I read about fly fishing, which seemed altogether more serious. There was “Big Two-Hearted River,” there was an Orvis catalog I was sent because Field & Stream told me I could order it, and there was Trout Fishing in America.  The Hemingway I could fathom, the Orvis catalog was glamorous, and I don’t know what I thought about Brautigan.  I remember liking the cover photo, probably because Brautigan looked like Mark Twain and the girl looked like what the 60s were supposed to look like.

I think there’s a lot written about Trout Fishing in America because it’s a bit of an empty canvas.  If you look for grand themes, you can impose them, and maybe Brautigan’s themes were in fact grand.  I suspect though that it’s simpler than that.  It’s messy and episodic because Brautigan was messy and episodic.  It’s wry and amusing because Brautigan was wry and amusing.  It’s a bit plotless because Brautigan was plotless.  Brautigan writes about trout fishing because he liked trout fishing.  He writes about hanging out and drinking port wine with the street life in Washington Square because that’s what he did.  He writes about sex because he liked sex, and was apparently a pretty promiscuous guy–I learned from the internet that Brautigan suffered from rampant herpes and was into bondage.  At 15 it’s better I didn’t know that, and at 61 I’d rather I didn’t.  He is decidedly pre-feminist.  He is also a very clear writer, his chapters are short, and there’s enough whimsy to keep me surprised and engaged.

I like that Trout Fishing in America is each of the book, the book in the book, and the book’s other main character.  I doubt that I recognized that when I was 15.

Since I last read the book I’ve been to a lot of Brautigan’s places, San Francisco, the Big Wood River, the Redfish Lakes.  They’re real places to me now, not a mythical landscape, and I can recognize that Brautigan was talking about San Francisco and  a real trip to Idaho.  Maybe it’s just a book about trout fishing.