The English Major, Edited

In the last several years I've become an ardent fan of the novelist and poet Jim Harrison. For lack of a better description, he's a man's writer. And there are not many of those. But he also can be described as a nature writer and a philosophical explorer. His characters, and his prose, are down-to-earth inventions: accessible and reachable.

I find Jim Harrison's writing humorous, tragic, reflective, original, authentic.

You hear real voices.

I enjoyed his recent The English Major so much that I practically read it in one sitting.

I have a habit of dog-earing (dog-earring?) pages for later reference, mining for Laughorisms, aphorisms, maxims, and epigrams.

This work gave me these tidbits (neither endorsed nor opposed by The Laughorist):

-- "Time tricks us into thinking we're part of her and then leaves us behind."

-- "Weather-wise was it autumn or early winter in my life?"

-- ". . . I drove off with the unprofound thought of the hopelessness of sex to improve the human condition. Perhaps I should drive to New York City and announce this to the United Nations."

-- "I suddenly felt like I had as a boy on my first descending elevator down in Grand Rapids. Who and where was the driver?"

-- " 'Birds are holes in heaven through which a man may pass.' "

-- "Given the right tools men will always murder each other."

-- "What I missed was no longer there or on the verge of disappearing."

-- "Fuimus fumus, or something like that, said Thomas Wolfe, my hero when I was in senior high school. I think it meant that our life goes up in smoke." [actually "we were smoke"]

-- ". . . my frizzy-haired assistant professor would wear his bell-bottoms at a student cafe and say 'All power to the people.' I was never sure what people he meant."

-- ". . . no creature in nature jogs."

-- ". . . alcohol was the writer's black lung disease."

-- " . . . he told me that self-pity was a ruinous emotion. 'Look at the world, not up your ass.' It took me a while to figure this out."

-- "When you don't have much to do, why rush?"

-- " 'I won every argument and I was always wrong.' "

-- " 'Some men will climb the same mountain hundreds of times while other men need to climb hundreds of mountains.' "

-- ". . . I recalled James Joyce's motto 'Silence, exile, cunning,' . . . "

Being a persnickety wordsmith guy, though, I can't resist pointing out something that the author, his editor, or a copy editor should have caught, especially because the protagonist was, after all, an English major:

"Tragedy struck little Lothar a scant week after I brought she and her mother home from the dog pound."

She?

Shame!