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Fred Preston
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| Joined: | Tue Jan 4th, 2005 |
| Location: | Red Haw, Ohio USA |
| Posts: | 690 |
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Posted: Sat Mar 28th, 2009 11:55 pm |
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| There's a really nice hunting essay in today's WSJ by Thomas McGuane. A Parker, as such, wasn't mentioned; but, he did have a good time with the Pointer Sisters.
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Mike Poindexter
PGCA Member
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Posted: Sun Mar 29th, 2009 04:19 am |
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McGuane is one of the best. As a student of prose, here is one of my favorite passages of his:
A paragraph from Thomas McGuane, The Heart of the Game, published in The Greatest Hunting Stories Ever Told, Lamar Underwood, Ed., The Lyons Press, 2000. ( He is describing the culmination of a stalk above timberline of a mule deer grazing on the other side of a crest, as the author clears the crest ready to fire…….)
As I took that step, I knew that he was running. He wasn't in the browse at all, but angling into invisibility at the rock wall, racing straight into the elevation, bounding toward zero gravity, taking his longest arc into the bullet and the finality and terror of all you have made of the world, the finality you know that you share even with your babies with their inherited and ambiguous dentition, the finality that any minute now you will meet as well.
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Dean Romig
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| Joined: | Fri Jan 7th, 2005 |
| Location: | Andover, Ma |
| Posts: | 4887 |
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Posted: Sun Mar 29th, 2009 11:30 am |
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| I like McGuane's writing very much and I have that book too. The Heart of the Game is a really good story very well told but that paragraph, out of context as it is here, appears 'just so many words' and might even deter me from wanting to read the story at all. One really needs to have read the entire story up to the point of the occurance which lead Mcguane to pen this paragraph in order to appreciate the paragraph for what it says. Like I said, it is a very good story and well told as are just about all of McGuane's published writings.
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Mike Poindexter
PGCA Member
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Posted: Mon Mar 30th, 2009 02:03 am |
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Dean: It is run-on, but like Edward G. Robinson said in "The Cincinnati Kid", its about doing the wrong thing at the right time. I collected that sentence of McGuane's because in length and meter it reminded me of one of my favorite prose sentences of all time, Joseph Heller in Catch-22:
Catch 22 (Chapter 17, The Soldier in White) explaining that hospitals couldn’t prevent death from happening, but required it to behave in a civilized manner, unlike the world outside:
People didn't stick their heads into ovens with the gas on, jump in front of subway trains or come plummeting like dead weights out of hotel windows with a whoosh!, accelerating at the rate of sixteen feet per second per second to land with a hideous plop! on the sidewalk and die disgustingly there in public like an alpaca sack full of hairy strawberry ice cream, bleeding, pink toes awry.
Unfortunately, Heller was a better prose writer than he was a physicist. Not quite 9.8 M/sec2. Shot a few rounds of 16yd trap with my 11 yr old today. He broke 14 of 25 with my 28ga VH. He likes my 16ga 0 fr GH better. Cheers.
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Dean Romig
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| Joined: | Fri Jan 7th, 2005 |
| Location: | Andover, Ma |
| Posts: | 4887 |
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Posted: Mon Mar 30th, 2009 02:31 am |
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Very apropriate for the discussion Mike and I, myself, am guilty of the 'long sentence' (note I didn't say run-on because, in my mind, they are not but in the mind of the reader, depending on how attentive he or she may be, they may or may not be) and use them to my distinct advantage or dismal disadvantage, again, in the opinion of the reader.
I love the twenty-eight. The perfect load, ballistically. Trap with a twenty-eight, hmm? I used to shoot trap with my Ruger Red Label twenty and took my trap club's second place trophy two years running with it at wobble trap, regularly shooting 23s and a few 24s. That was a long time ago when my eyes and reflexes were a tad better.
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