(Interestingly, it’s Thomas McGuane’s birthday too, who is one of the “other” writers who looms large.)

From the Writer’s Almanac site comes this little passage about Jim Harrison’s life::

He had a couple of major accidents that ended up changing his writing career. When he was seven years old, he was playing with a friend and she accidentally cut him across the face and he went blind in one eye. And he felt like that set him apart from other kids, and he started turning to nature, to the woods and creeks and fields. And then, when he was in his 30s, he hurt his back badly while he was hunting and he was confined to bed. He was an active person, loved to be outdoors, and he didn’t know what to do with so much time.

His good friend, the novelist Thomas McGuane, suggested he try working on a novel. In 1971, he published Wolf: A False Memoir, and he has gone on to write many more novels, novellas, and books of poems. But for a long time he thought of himself as a poet more than anything else, and said about his novels: “They sometimes strike me as extra, burly flesh on the true bones of my life though a few of them approach some of the conditions of poetry.”

Two monster writer birthdays on one day calls for a little “bad boy” literary celebration. In that spirit, we urge you to shoot your TV tonight!

See you loading the shotgun, Tom Chandler.

McGuane’s known among fly fishermen for his liberal application of fly fishing scenes in his novels, but also for The Longest Silence; his seminal collection of fly fishing essays that many feel define the sport better than any other single book (“book on tape” version here).

McGuane’s latest novel will no doubt find its way to the Underground’s bookshelf, but Charles McGrath’s insightful profile included this rather charged McGuane quote:

“Like everyone, I have that general sense that we’ve been cast adrift. It’s almost banal to say it, it’s so obvious. But at the same time, living out here I have sense that I’m living in a world that hasn’t quite changed. I see it in some of the kids who work here — they’re still so in touch with natural world.”

These days there are plenty of good writers practicing the art, and yet McGuane continues to deliver single-sentence insights that rock me back on my heels.

A year ago I suggested our lives changed when a brick got tossed through the plate glass windows that contain our existence, and that nowadays, the bricks were coming with increasing regularity.

It’s a theme that apparently plays out in Driving on the Rim:

But like much of Mr. McGuane’s recent writing, it’s also partly about the collision of the Old West and the New. Dr. Pickett finds himself involved in a very contemporary malpractice prosecution but also spends a lot of time hunting and fishing and thinking about the old days.

Fly fishermen have long described their sport as an escape from everyday life; should we add the concept of fly fishing as an anchor against the changes washing over us with increasing frequency?

See you in the bookshelves, Tom Chandler.

With so many of McGuane’s novels and screenplays set against fly fishing locations – and populated by fly fishermen – it seems only right that McGuane would receive this honor on that basis alone.

To do so would be to overlook his publication of the best fly fishing essay book ever written: The Longest Silence.

That book – which solidified many of my observations about fly fishing – opens with a startling passage about fish counters robbing the trout (and the sport) of its soul:

The fisherman now is one who defies society, who rips lips, who drains the pool, who takes no prisoners, who is not to be confused with the sissy with the creel and bamboo rod. Granted, he releases what he catches, but in some cases, he strips the quarry of its perilous soul before tossing it back in the water. What was once a trout – cold, hard, spotted and beautiful – becomes “number seven.”

I could strip mine McGuane’s book for enough material to fill a hundred blog posts, but I’ll leave the discovery (or rediscovery) of those gems to my readers.

Instead, I’ll reprint part of what fly fishing publishing legend Nick Lyons has to say about McGuane on the FR&R site:

In Tom McGuane we have a different species of writer. He has loved fly-fishing for more than five decades, since he fished the rivers and small creeks of Michigan as a boy; he has pursued trout, false albacore, steelhead, bonefish, striped bass, permit and salmon with great passion and success; he has fished from Tierra del Fuego to Russia, Iceland, New Zealand, Ireland, Canada, Florida and throughout his now-native Montana, and widely elsewhere; and along with his great novels and stories and films has written, with dazzling skill, much about what he calls his “life in fishing.” He is Fly Rod & Reel’s Angler of the Year and my Angler for the Last Hundred Years.

McGuane says that “what fishing ought to be about” is to use “the ceremony of our sport and passion to arouse greater reverberations within ourselves.” Reverberations: a richer response to all aspects of the natural world, perhaps—and our responsibilities to it; something telling about ourselves, surely; more about our subtle connections to all the texture and detail of fly-fishing; and a lot about our understanding of leisure and friendship and expertness and the enduring value of ritual, and so much more. Mostly, what we know about these matters comes from those with words—words that shock us into some new awareness, that, long after we’ve read them, echo in our brains.

This is, of course, what we call “literature” which is not something fancy dan or pretentious or irrelevant to any other matter in the universe, not sentimental (which is exaggerating sniffles), not trading ever in clichés (which is like claiming fish you haven’t caught). McGuane does these things in a major body of nearly a dozen novels, from The Sporting Club in 1968 to one he just finished, in time for a trip this past summer to Iceland and his annual fall trip to the Dean for steelhead, around which week he says he designs his year, “for these pools, these beautiful fish.” And he does it in what has become a major body of work about fly fishing—parts of An Outside Chance, all of Live Water and The Longest Silence. He is, as all of the best writers must be, a man on whom nothing is lost.

He knows that “the best angling is always a respite from burden,” not part of a competition or PR jaunt or a chance to transact business with those you fish with or a banquet for your ego. He knows we need to be stewards and riverkeepers, lest “there will be less than nothing, remnant populations, put-and-take, dim bulbs following the tank truck.” He knows how to make memorable and precise observations about our emotions and affections: “Young anglers love new rivers the way they love the rest of their lives.”

Speaking as a writer, I revere McGuane for his ability to deftly peel back the unsightly layers that obscure what should be a beautiful sport. As a fly fisherman, I never tire of his obvious love for the sport itself.

See you with a good book, Tom Chandler.

In a rare newspaper article (is the Wall Street Journal now courting the outdoor crowd?), he talks bird hunting and bird dogs – poleaxing the gun craziness, anti-hunting effluent, and political posturing that burdens so many conversations about the sport.

As is typical, McGuane reels off one head-nodding passage after another, and fair use only allows me to whet your appetites with a couple short passages, incenting (nay, forcing) you to read the whole thing from start to finish on the WSJ site.

McGuane’s lead accurately describes a scene every dog owner knows by heart:

On a bright and cold October morning in Montana, my dogs Abby and Daisy, The Pointer Sisters, are in my closet helping me select my clothes. On the left end of the rack are everyday clothes; on the far right are coats and ties for the occasional urban jaunt; and in the middle, clothes for sport, especially hunting. Here sit the two girls, tails whisking the floor between the shoes. They moan, grumble and pant wishfully while my hand hovers over the coat hangers. I shouldn’t do this as dogs don’t enjoy being trifled with.

They know where the thorn-proof pants hang, since the red suspenders dangle to eye level for them, but they watch my hand. I don’t move; Abby turns to stare at my boots with such longing she must think they can scoop me up and take me into the hills. Finally, Daisy can’t stand it and barks at me: I pull the hunting pants from their hanger and with a cry of triumph they scramble out of the closet to watch me dress.

After beautifully describing the hunting experience (which is not too far removed from the fishing experience), McGuane eviscerates a couple sacred cows:

There is so much in the air suggesting that hunting is an anachronism that it’s easy for a hunter to feel he is an anachronism too. An old fishing friend of mine said, as we headed home from an agreeable outing, “I thank God I’m not a day under 80.” I’m a meat eater and have the teeth to prove it, but greatly pity the creatures in the domestic meat businesses. An industrial chicken factory gives me heartburn and Thanksgiving is a tragedy for turkeys. I don’t wear camo, don’t belong to the NRA and haven’t been to a gun show since the jovial grandmother sitting behind the pile of machine guns said to me, “Goblins get in your house you’ll love having one of these.”

Then he once again perfectly sums up the dog experience:

The dogs are everything, and they want to hunt, too. Bird dogs plead with you to imagine the great things you could be doing together. Their delight is a lesson in the bliss of living. As Bob Dylan says, “You’ve got to serve somebody.” I serve my dogs and in return, they glom the sofa.

Go. Read. Enjoy.