Parker Bauer

Tuesday

Parker Bauer

Inside Jim Harrison’s life of excess

Todd Goddard opens his biography of Jim Harrison, the first since the poet’s death in 2016, with an account of a 37-course meal Harrison once consumed in France, over the course of 11 hours. Harrison composed a comic recital of the event, “A Really Big Lunch” for the New Yorker. He loved gourmet dining to the point of gout and revered alcohol as well, guzzling potent vintages in quantity. “Eat the world” was the phrase Harrison lived by, Goddard tells us, which alludes to an appetite for all existence. The cumulative effect of such global consumption is evident on the cover of Devouring Time: Jim Harrison, a Writer’s Life.

jim harrison

Monday

Parker Bauer

The American Ornithological Society’s war on the past

Say you’re easing along a meadow stream, upslope but not steep, somewhere in the Rockies. It’s a morning in spring, the mountains ahead still mostly snowy against a blue sky. A bird sings, giving itself away in a clump of alder. New to birding, you’re naive but full of hope, and through the binoculars you find a thing with feathers, small and olive with yellow breast and black cap. A Wilson’s warbler, says the field guide with its nifty pictures, and you feel the satisfaction of putting a name to a part of the profusion of nature. You’re out there — need it be said? — for the peace, and the bird, deftly identified, is a totem of tranquility.

ornithological