Opua: Jim Harrison; Christchurch; Pirate Days illustrated
Opua: Jim Harrison; Christchurch; Pirate Days illustrated
Last week I finished reading THE GREAT LEADER, Jim Harrison’s latest novel, brought to my attention by Stephen, who recalled that I used a quotation from an earlier Jim Harrison novel at the beginning of one of my books.
Jim Harrison is a bit older than I, also blind in one eye, and writes often about Michigan’s Upper Peninsula, where he lived, and the wild places of the West.
THE GREAT LEADER is an interesting book in which an Upper Peninsula police officer, three years divorced and with an unusual relationship with the teen-age girl next door, continues after his retirement at age 65 to track a cult leader with a predilection for very young girls. The theme is explicitly spelled out as the “relationship between money, sex and religion.”
‘Retirement’ is an alien concept to me, but I can understand how someone whose time has been structured by a job for decades will be at a loss when it isn’t.
The book also caused me to note the relativity of age.
Two men I know here in Opua are about five years older than I and consider me young. I found myself thinking the same of the 65 year old detective.
For no specific reason I did not watch any DVDs on HAWKE this time until Carol’s arrival. The evening after I finished THE GREAT LEADER, we rewatched LEGENDS OF THE FALL, based on one of the three novellas in Jim Harrison’s early book of that title.
The film, starring Brad Pitt, Anthony Hopkins, and a beautiful young woman, Julia Ormond, is set mostly in Montana at the time of WWI and Prohibition and won an Oscar for cinematography; but has some inexplicable twists of plot and behavior. I expect scenes ended up on the cutting room floor.
So the next day I reread LEGENDS OF THE FALL which I like so much that it has found a permanent place on THE HAWKE OF TUONELA’s bookshelves.
Of the three stories, related only in that the main character in each acts in ways that might be legendary, I remembered the first, ‘Revenge’, in which a Mexican drug king learns that his trophy wife is having an affair with a man he considers a friend; and the last, the eponymous ‘Legends of the Fall’; but the second, ‘The Man Who Gave Up His Name,‘ had vanished from my memory completely. The man of the title is a successful business man who gives up not only his name but his wealth.
‘Legends of the Fall‘ begins with three brothers riding north in late 1914 to enlist in the Canadian army long before the U.S. entered The Great War. One of them is killed. Another feels responsible for his death and goes to sea, which makes sense in the book but not the movie. There is a love interest and a suicide, which also makes sense in the book but not the movie.
LEGENDS OF THE FALL, the movie, is worth watching. LEGENDS OF THE FALL, the book, is even more worth reading.
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I doubt that much, if any, of the rest of the world remembers, but today is the first anniversary of the Christchurch earthquake, which New Zealand’s Prime Minister quantified as “the fourth largest insurance event in the world.” Now there is soul for you.
It is difficult, if not impossible, to make a comparison with any American natural disaster. Hurricane Katrina and New Orleans come to mind; but Christchurch is New Zealand’s second largest city with 10% of the nation’s population, and in this small country almost every New Zealander has close ties to someone whose life was affected by this disaster.
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Carol had one assignment for her vacation: to take photographs of me wearing my eye patch to illustrate the “Pirate Days” article. Above is my favorite.
Tuesday, February 21, 2012