Or, rather than commit contest fraud, have your actual kids enter the ongoing Fishy Kid Writing Contest. You have to be 17 or under to participate. John Kennedy Toole wrote his first novel at 16, so get on it. The contest runs through May 31st.
Lit
...now browsing by category
Pretend You're Six, Win NuCanoe
Monday, April 26th, 2010
McPhee On Pickerel
Tuesday, February 23rd, 2010
I stopped subscribing to the New Yorker a few years ago, mostly as a time saving measure. My Dad still gets it. He cuts out articles from newspapers and magazines that I might like and mails them to me, and this week he clipped a New Yorker essay by John McPhee about fly fishing for pickerel.
I could read anything by McPhee, even his 700-page opus about geology, but particularly his essays on fishing. Here’s a bit of his description of pickerel:
This family–Esocidae–is not popular with aesthetes, with people who torture trout. Put a pickerel in a pond full of trout, and before long all that’s in there is a larger pickerel. There are people who hunt pickerel with shotguns. In Vermont, that is legal…
A pickerel’s body is sixty percent muscle. Undulations move along the body in propulsive waves that culminate, like oar sculling, in straight-line forward thrust.”
Subversive Elements in Children's Literature
Monday, January 4th, 2010
Read a book 6,372 times in a year and minor details creep into your subconscious, fostering questions. How come you don’t say goodnight to the fly fishing rabbit? Why is the rabbit holding the net in mid cast? Why is he fishing for another rabbit? Is the illustrator promoting cannibalism?
Pointless research reveals it is shameless self promotion. The fly fishing rabbit painting in Goodnight Moon is from a scene in another book by the author and illustrator, Runaway Bunny.
Either way, I need to get out more.
Fly Fish Journal
Saturday, October 31st, 2009I wasn’t going to pay for it. I found the only copy in my local Barnes & Noble, barely visable in the “Sports” section of the news stand behind a misplaced rap magazine.
I flipped open to an article called “Eden’s Tarpon” and couldn’t put the mag down after that. I read almost the whole thing just standing there. It has great photography, interesting writing, no top ten lists, no “look at me Ma, I’m fly fishing” articles, and even a solid Head reference.
I was going to shelve it but then decided these guys need to get paid so they can keep doing it. $15. And thanks for the bluefish love.
This is a Democracy
Monday, August 3rd, 2009[youtube=http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ftWooK0Yg50&hl=en&fs=1&rel=0]
“I’m not a scientist and I’m not going to be one. It takes all the brains I’ve got to figure out where game fish keep themselves.” Tom Skelton, 92 In The Shade, by Thomas McGuane
BOOK REVIEW: The Alaska Chronicles
Monday, April 20th, 2009
A lot has already been said about this title, so I’ll just add this: The Alaska Chronicles is the best fly fishing book I’ve read in a long time.
Miles Nolte’s efficiency of prose is top notch. He has a good story to tell and doesn’t let useless words, thoughts, exclamatory hyperbole, or cliche bog it down. The result is a book that’s hard to set aside, one of those reads that make chunks of time–like the morning train commute or the fly time between take-off and touchdown–disappear.
If you don’t know the story, Nolte spent two-plus seasons guiding at a remote lodge in Alaska, and documented his second on The Drake message board. His daily journal provided a gateway into the guiding life and all that comes with it. Props to Departure Publishing for transcribing it into book form.
Every punk-ass guide wannabe should read this book. Every civilian fly fisherman with midlife-crisis dreams of getting away from it all should read this book. If the closest you’ll ever come to fishing in Alaska is via the pages of a book, this is an excellent choice to get there.
BOOK REVIEW: The Big One
Friday, April 17th, 2009
Score one for participatory journalism.
In 2007 David Kinney, a career newspaperman, dove headfirst into the collective insanity that is the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby. The result is The Big One, an exhaustively researched window into the people and culture that fuel the derby, and the mania that fuels them.
It would be tempting to think this was an easy book to write; go fishing and then type it all out. That would be incorrect. Kinney deserves credit for gaining access to a group so paranoid and insular that getting any of them to talk and take him fishing is remarkable. (In fact, reading some passages, you’re left to wonder if the source is on the level or passing along blatant misinformation.)
Kinney weaves the narrative around a local angler named Lev Wlodyka, who during the tournament catches the fish of a lifetime and sparks a flurry of controversy that still reverbates in striper cirlces today. (Yo-yoing for stripers is a divisive fishing technique.) But Kinney fishes with just about everybody in the tournament; from shore, by boat, at night, at sunrise, on the jetty, in public spots and secret spots, with blue collar wharf rats and charter hiring blue bloods. He documents what the tourney means to them against the backdrop of evolving Vineyard life.
The book is not for everyone. Some may be turned off by what competitive fishing does to people. Others will blanch at the glorification of an all-kill tournament, a practice even a lot of hardcore anglers find outdated. If you’re comfortable with either notion, and have delved into northeast salt, you will enjoy this read.
Even if you’ve never been to the Vineyard or fished for striped bass, bluefish, albies, or bonito, there is one central theme you can take away from this book. And that is that the best fishermen are insane.
TRAIN BEERS: Good Friday
Friday, April 10th, 2009
BOOKS: The Big One
Tuesday, March 24th, 2009
“Open up that good book let it revelate to you.” –The Dexateens
Just got in a review copy of The Big One, a book by David Kinney about the Martha’s Vineyard Striped Bass and Bluefish Derby, which is kind of a big deal around here (meaning the general northeast saltwater “here”). Some would call it a religious experience, and I can’t wait to find out if this book captures that. Reading commences tonight with a train beer.
Back Country
Monday, March 2nd, 2009
The skilful use of the pole is an absolute necessity in work in the Everglades. The Seminole hardly knows the use of a paddle; even on salt water he poles or sails around the coast. In the Everglades the paddle is useless, and if you break a pole and have not a second one with you, you are in a very bad plight indeed…
–Hugh Laussat Willoughby, Across The Everglades, 1898
Pete McDonald