That said, it’s told through the framework of Steven Rinella — who also hosts “The Wild Within” on the Travel Channel, a hunt-to-table show that’s fascinating — getting one of very few tags to hunt a buffalo in Alaska, a 1-in-50 chance. From rafting down the Chetaslina River and camping along its banks, to brushes with hypothermia, Rinella is a true outdoorsman who, as shown on “The Wild Within,” feeds his family only on meat that he hunts and honors by treating with respect and cooking well. It’s very much worth following him on Twitter, if only for the recipes.

It seems that I’ve been reading about the outdoors lately, probably because of the rainy weather in Chicago, not to mention all the pavement; also in my stack to read next is Bill Bryson’s A Walk in the Woods and, in honor of Tim Hetherington and Chris Hondros, the photojournalists killed in Misrata, Libya, recently, Greg Marinovich and Joao Silva’s The Bang Bang Club. It seems like I’m slamming through some nonfiction while working on submitting fiction to various literary journals.

That said, though hunting season seems awfully far away — I just cooked my last pheasant from last season — it’s getting to be fishing weather. I hope to get out tonight and catch some catfish, some of the best-eating fish, especially when seared in butter with some Cajun seasoning. For anyone in Chicagoland wanting to try it out,  head to Fishtech in Morton Grove. They got me set up with some (horrible smelling) catfish bait that makes for an exciting evening afield.

I read it first in Dave Kajganich’s Intermediate Fiction class at Miami University, and we broke down the plot into a graph. The push and pull of Isaac Babel’s narrator created a jagged line up to the point where he skewers the goose on his sabre and orders an old woman to cook it for him.

But that’s when translated literature began to suffer. The stories of Red Cavalry amazed me, and I read a collection I got from the library. When Babel’s narrator walks up to the old woman and tells him he needs to eat, she said, “Comrade, I want to hang myself.” I remember it being horrendously out of place, bumping me out of the story.

When I presented Red Cavalry for a Critical Reading and Writing: Novel-in-Stories class taught by Antonia Logue, I went out and bought The Complete Works of Isaac Babel, which is edited by his daughter and translated by Peter Constantine. The woman’s reaction to Babel’s narrator demanding food—and trying to impress the soldiers with whom he was embedded—was completely different.

“Mistress,” I said, “I need some grub.”
The old woman raised the dripping whites of her half-blind eyes and lowered them again.
“Comrade,” she said after a short silence. “All of this makes me want to hang myself.”

And there it is. Character motivation. An old Polish woman, imposed upon by the Sixth Division of the Red Army, has a reason for her utterance of suicide. Of course, Babel the character—let’s not confuse the writer with the storyteller—must, above all, become one of the men to whom he was assigned. “‘Goddammit!’ I muttered in frustration, shoving her back with my hand. ‘I’m in no mood to start debating with you!’”

I thought of this story much over the past few months. Last fall, while in Ohio for the holidays, I took a couple short trips out to public land to hunt geese. I had no idea what I was doing, and I didn’t bag any, probably because I had no calls, no blind, no decoys, and, well, the water was already frozen—they’d already moved south. I fired one shot at some flying over, but they were plenty out of range. And so is Babel’s storytelling ability. He’s a true master; when the Soviet Union disappears you, you’re doing something right with your writing.

So take a minute, check out her page at http://patriciaannmcnair.com and, if you’re feeling adventurous, take a look at the interview I did with her for the reader’s guide. That one’s at http://bit.ly/errgTK.

Janelle’s a great reporter for The Roanoke Times, so it comes as no surprise that she’s writing about the adventure into fiction. Check out her site at http://myjournie.com. It’s well worth the read.

As for my resolution, I’m going to be better about updating this site.

But I just finished devouring John McNally‘s latest novel, After the Workshop. Somehow, it was the right book at the right time. I’ve got some writing that I need to do—I’m reading a story I’ve yet to write at a wedding in Iowa in two months—but I’ve felt like without writing through what my dad did, I couldn’t get to it. I needed a bit of a kick in the pants.

So I finished this book—a gorgeously rendered novel about a stalled writer who takes a gig as a media escort, carting writers from the airport to book signings in his mufflerless car, his unfinished manuscript taunting him from under a pile of phone books. And it occurred to me that I’ve got to set my issues with my dad aside and start something fresh. I’m itching to sit down at the keyboard again. I know what I’m going to write for the wedding.

John’s short stories from the award-winning collections Troublemakers and Ghosts of Chicago have always gotten me unstuck when I didn’t know what happened next in my thesis/novel, which is finally DONE done and ready to send out. McNally’s one of those writers who should be hugely famous. And to me, he is. Besides being a hell of a guy, and making my mom cry with his heartfelt inscription in her copy of After the Workshop, somehow, he’s the one whose work always gets me unstuck. And with this book, he’s done it in a huge way.

For Buzz, it was the bottle— combined with crushing depression and his mother and grandfather committing suicide—that easily could have led him to taking his own life. It did for my father.

But Buzz took the hard road. Especially in the ’70s, seeking treatment for mental illness killed careers, more so in the military/NASA than any other industry, where astronauts were supposed to be supermen. It’s a page-turner, sad and light-hearted at once. But once Buzz the character dried out, so did the narrative.

The last third of Magnificent Desolation turned into a 100-page pitch for Buzz’s entrepreneurial endeavors. I slammed through it, but wish it had ended earlier. Still, a damn worthy read for anybody who’s had close contact with depression or alcoholism—and anymore, that’s everybody.

Some footprints last for thousands of years. Some only a few minutes.

]]> http://danielprazer.com/2009/08/18/buzz-aldrins-magnificent-desolation/feed/ 0 daniel.prazer Aldrin on the moon http://danielprazer.com/2009/02/07/knockemstiff/ http://danielprazer.com/2009/02/07/knockemstiff/#comments Sat, 07 Feb 2009 18:07:06 +0000 Daniel Prazer http://danielprazer.com/?p=84 ]]> Knockemstiff
by Donald Ray Pollock. Doubleday, $22.95. In paperback March 10.
**** out of *****

Sometimes it’s hard to feel sorry for people who end up living awful existences when they repeatedly make awful choices. But there’s no hemming and hawing among the characters in Knockemstiff, Donald Ray Pollock’s debut collection of stories.

A fictional representation of Pollock’s real-life hometown (named for a nasty fight outside the church), the easy out would be to call it a gritty, redneck Winesburg, Ohio.

But there is no easy out in a town like Knockemstiff.

Most everybody has designs to leave, but they all end up back in the holler. Over and over, Pollock puts their backs up against the wall. It’s eighteen stories span thirty years of the town, who’s characters are seldom, if ever, upstanding people. In “Real Life,” a father pummels a man in a drive-in restroom so viciously his teeth punch through his cheek, then makes his 7-year-old son beat the hell out of his victim’s boy. In “Blessed,” the narrator falls off a roof during a burglary and can’t feel his legs, and his partner kicks him onto the hospital parking lot, where his painkiller addiction starts. In “Lard,” teenagers give the fattest kid in Knockemstiff bong hits in exchange for letting them throw darts at his stomach.

The characters may not be upstanding, but they certainly are people, and Pollock puts us in their shoes; reading story after story involving drug use and violence and abject poverty leaves you with a visceral feeling of being trapped. That’s no small feat. You may not like the characters in the book, and you may not want to spend time with them, but among the depravity, they become real. Pollock writes with prose so authentic, so tight and engaging that you root for them even when they’re despicable, and that’s what keeps the pages turning.