When we were young

Who remembers this? ( HT Jonathan) It is an honest-to- God SEARS ad, from the early sixties!

Past blasts

In honor of her move from her almost- natal Newton MA to North Carolina, I thought I would post these photos of Bron Fullington. I may also post later on some linguistic weirdness Jackson sent on her old neighborhood, and her thoughts. TOMORRROW!

 Last spring...

Yes, that is Betsy Huntington about to shoot a Retrieve- R- Trainer dummy off Bron's Newton porch-- 1978?- and get us in trouble with the cops. July 4th with no firecrackers.

Ataika and her mother in Almaty; Almaty life

Could it be ten years ago? More?

Ataika at 6 weeks, in Almaty, Kazakhstan, in Konstantin and Anna Plakhov's back yard, the day we met her, with mother Oska.

A month in our apartment, with days riding around in Askar Raybaev's (Mitsubishi!) stretch limo; visiting museums and supermarkets and restaurants and archaeologists; then to New Mexico on KLM. What a strange postmodern dog's life! Scenes of that month following...

   

Photoblog: China, early 20th C.

A collage of sorts. Explain, improvise, interpret, or even deconstruct.

UPDATE. Everyone in comments had the idea. The elements: books on China by the American Museum's Roy Chapman Andrews, "Indiana Jones", before he ever got to "outer" Mongolia and its fossils, and his China host, missionary, ornithologist and big game hunter Harry Caldwell. Caldwell hunted almost entirely with Savage 99's in .250 Savage ("250- 3000" for its hitherto unmatched velocity) and .22 Hi- Power, the obsolete cartridge shown here-- he used the 250 on the local elk and shot many tigers, at least one a maneater, with it. Perhaps only the easy confidence of a man of God let him get away with that.

Other objects include Mongolian snuff bottles-- snuff is still popular there, as it was back then, and a little animalier bronze of a tiger by Tiffany. Photo of me with eaglers including the late R Suleiman in Olgii on first Mongolia  trip, 1997.

Old Photo

From Tim Gallagher.

Caption from Lane Batot: "Upon opening an insurance office in Kyrghistan, agent Smith visited a local village in hopes of raising payment rates in regard to the residents keeping exotic and dangerous animals on the premises. Agent Smith has not been heard from since...."

Soliloquy

Matthew Makarewicz tipped me to the best barbecue in Kansas City last year, and I really wanted to revisit Nicholas Payne's soliloquy from Thomas McGuane's 1971 Bushwhacked Piano ,  even before he requested it. Now imagine two guys shouting it out in unison in Harvard Square in about 72, laughing so hard they are falling down, each trying to one- up the other-- see a few posts below. Here you go, Matthew!

Payne has just been asked by his girlfriend's odious parents, the Fitzgeralds, what he believes in. They have already condescended to him about "fun" and dismissed his recommendation to read Samuel Butler ("We have"; Payne: "Do it again.")

"The mother told Payne that they had had enough of him. "We merely asked what you believed in, " she said. "We had no idea it would precipitate nastiness."

"What I believe in? I believe in happiness, birth control, generosity, fast cars, environmental sanity, Coors beer, Merle Haggard, upland game birds, expensive optics, helmets for prizefighters, canoes, skiffs, and sloops, horses that will not allow themselves to be ridden, speeches made under duress; I believe in metal fatigue and the immortality of the bristlecone pine. I believe in the Virgin Mary and others of that ilk. Even her son whom civilization accuses of sleeping at the switch...

"I believe that I am a molecular swerve not to be put off by the zippy diversions of the cheap- minded. I believe in the ultimate rule of men who are sleeping. I believe in the cargo of torpor which is the historically registered bequest of politics. I believe in Kate Smith and  Hammond Home Organs.  I believe in ramps and drop offs...

"I believe in spare tires and emergency repairs. I believe in  the final possum. I believe in little eggs of light falling from outer space and the bombardment of the poles by free electrons. I believe in tintypes, rotogravures and parked cars, all in their places. I believe in roast spring lamb with boiled potatoes. I believe in spinach with bacon and onion. I believe in canyons lost under the feet of waterskiers. I believe that we are necessary and will rise again. I  believe in words on paper, pictures on rock, intergalactic hellos. I believe in fraud. I believe that in pretending to be something you aren't you have your only crack at release from the bondage of time. I believe in my own dead more than I do in yours. What's more, credo in unum Deum, I believe in one God. He's up there. He's mine. And he's as smart as a whip.

"Anyway, you get the drift. I hate to flop the old philosophy on the table like so much pig's guts. And I left out a lot. But, well, there she is."

Soon, perhaps, "The Shining City."

Old Portrait

... by Jay Dusard, Libby's place in Bozeman (Montana) in the 90's, with Bart and Bo, long gone. JP says: "I love the photo of Steve at age twelve with his dogs (good looking little Aussie!). I love photos of people with their pets or working partners, meaning horses, (And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim*) because it always seems to reveal the best of them." As always double click to embiggen; the depth & detail of Jay's photos is amazing.

*That's a quote. I bet Tom McIntyre knows who...

Friends & Family, Music & Words, Past & Present

Everything seems to come around again. Last week, Tom Russell and his sideman Thad Beckmann played at Passim, a cellar room in Harvard square where I heard the likes of Ian Tyson as far back as 1966, when it was the legendary Club 47.

My sister Karen Graham, here with Tom, her husband George, and Tom's wife Nadine, remembers my going there when she was a child, and the little printed ad sheets I used to keep under the glass of my desktop when I was still in high school.

Bronwen Fullington, a friend since '68 or so,  saw the other pic and said "It hasn't  changed a bit since then!" Looks like the same old tiny cellar...

Tom may be as good a writer of words as songs. Buy his book, with all the lyrics and tons of anecdote and history.

Musical Memories

I found this wonderful "paleolithic" video to one of my favorite Leonard Cohen songs. Though I doubt it was what he had in mind, it works for me...

The 'Net never ceases to amaze me. Looking at this, I said to Libby "First time I saw him was his first US gig, I think. The Newport Folk Festival, 1967. He looked like a rabbinical student, in a black suit-- sat and sung "Suzanne" into his guitar. And it was magical. Joni Mitchell brought him out-- she was wearing a horizontal striped mini- dress..."

I was wrong. The stripes were diagonal.

Rifle quiz

Pure fun for scholars of guns and readers of travel and adventure tales: how many things can you find in common on these little carbines? Oh, I will add one invisible addition for the bolt:

The first question is for tecchies; the second for readers and travelers: how many books and writers and scientists and... whatever-- can you list that mention or who used either?

Becasse, Becassine

We had our first cold snap last night and it somehow has me thinking of the family of snipe, mysterious and delicious migrants. Got them on the wall, pictures of hunts past, and memories, but sure would like to hunt either. Snipe are in the state at least; Tom Daly shot these in Colorado before they arrived in the library.

These more famous ones aren't bad either.

But a bird in the hand is even better, in any year-- this woodcock was back east in '76, and my last were in 1987. The gun is a Parker 16, long gone...

Quote of the day #1: The way things were

"Until August 1914 a sensible, law-abiding Englishman could pass through life and hardly notice the existence of the state, beyond the post office and the policeman. He could live where he liked and as he liked. He had no official number or identity card. He could travel abroad or leave his country for ever without a passport or any sort of official permission … For that matter, a foreigner could spend his life in this country without permit and without informing the police... " (A. J. P. Taylor, English History, 1914-1945; HT Derb

Historical Huntingtonia

Since Jane died last week the Weiners, Huntingtons and I have been unearthing some seriously old stuff. I am replacing my useless scanner soon so take this as a preview; the pic of the family Huntington in China in the thirties is really of decent quality, for instance.

Below: Virginia Haist Huntington at high school graduation, 1907, and with her kids about 1977. (The old one courtesy of David Weiner). Then Bishop D T Huntington in his Episcopal robes in China, and with the whole family.

You think Virginia was old? She married an older guy. "Trum" died almost exactly when I was born, and was born in 1865. He was in then- Peking for the Boxer Rebellion.

Old Anglo Indian Books

For bibliophiles mainly.

Conversations with Walter Hingley prompted me to bring out my favorite old fishing book: a copy of Thomas's The Rod in India that I got from fishing writer Datus Proper, with its gold embossed figure of an Indian angler and a mahseer on the cover.* (Click all to enlarge).

The mahseer was sometimes called "The salmon of the Raj" but it is more like a tarpon (though known for strength more than aerial acrobatics). Walter found the photo; the other from Thomas.


I wrote to Walter, who had told me of another book with "Circumventing the mahseer" in the title: "My copy of Rod In India is pretty remarkable -- I haven't looked at it in a long time. It apparently belonged to someone named Woods who was a member of the Rangers in Meerut and signed the flyleaf in March 1899; he also has some tackle opinions with which he has annotated the text. The illustrations are fabulous and there is a chapter on fishing with otters which compares, perhaps, with the one on cormorant training in Salvin's falconry book of the same era. The chapter "Circumventing the mahseer" seems to be his own writing; perhaps it was an irresistible phrase."

They also have a version of my favorite, if never chic, fish, the monster cat.

Today they still fish for several species of the mahseer, these days mostly catch & release. I am piscivorous, but the magnificent and threatened (and allegedly inedible) mahseer needs help...

Books like this transcend fishing and evoke a lost world. They sit on my shelves with contemporaries & friends like Kipling & his father and "EHA"'s whimsical natural history (last a gift from David Zincavage).


* Notice BTW the swastika- like pattern on the Navajo rug in the background, a common motif in both American Indian and Indian design-- both Kiplings used it-- before the Nazis perverted it.

Link: PLF

We have a good link at the Patrick Leigh Fermor blog, on Geoffrey Household. Follow it to more details on the letter below and more...

One more irresitible quote

This one is a blast from the past, in a note from an old friend back east recalling a party in the Seventies:

"I remember bringing Margot & Jim to a party you had in Newton.

The next day Margot was saying that it was a lot calmer than she expected.

I remembered it as being quite lively so I asked her "What were you expecting?"

Jim answered, "You know... people discharging firearms and siccin' hawks on one another!"

A fishy coat of arms

A month or two ago David Zincavage, who is both an old friend and a sort of dog relative (his Uhlan is Ataika's nephew) emailed me asking if I knew anything about my mother's family, the McCabes.

In fact I did, but mostly family folklore; that though they came to the New World (the Canadian Maritimes) through Ireland, and though many had been involved with the rebellions of the 1770's, they were in fact a military family of Scots mercenaries, "gallowglasses", in service to various Irish kings and nobles. That in addition to being a seriously combative clan-- in the words of the Ezra Pound poem on Bertrans de Born, great "stirrers up of strife"-- they conspired with other such English- Irish troublemakers such like the Duanes and the Loveless (Lovelace, Lawless) family, and intermarried with them (often in France, fleeing English pursuit); or, after 1800, in Canada. One Duane was also expelled from Calcutta, was probably born in Newfoundland whence other ancestors came but lied about it, and was a friend of Thomas Paine's. My maternal great grandmother was a Lawless.

All oral folklore. All, I have found, true. For years I never thought about it or looked into it (difficult pre- Internet anyway), but David hooked me*. A serious salmon fisherman, he said: "Do you know why they have three salmon on their coat of arms?"

As you can see, they do, and I have no idea why. Suggestions encouraged.

The other things I have found is that they originally hail from one of the Western Isles (Aran?), and that their combativeness is probably real. Their motto is "Aut Vincere Aut Mori": "Conquer or die!"

* I don't see why Reid has any monopoly on bad puns.