FYI...

For some reason I've been getting an absolute spam blizzard in the comments section lately, so in response I activated the word verification thingamabob for comments. Personally, I hate those pains-in-the-ass, but I also hate spam. If for any reason you can't leave comments, just shoot me an e-mail and I'll try to figure it out.

Time For a Makeover...

But not for me...

A limit of South Dakota pheasants taken earlier this season with my old, tired, in-desperate-need-of-a-freshening 1968-vintage Beretta BL-5 12-gauge.

Funny how certain guns grow on you. I've had this gun for over a decade now, and even with the tacky white-line spacer, the too-short 26-inch barrels, the too-heavy seven-pound weight and the rather plain wood, it's become my favorite gun.

It wasn't always so. When I first traded for it, I thought it was heavy, unbalanced, and handled like a pig. I much preferred my little BL-4 twenty. But then I started hunting with it, and discovered to my dismay that I shot it pretty well. And regardless of aesthetics, a gun you shoot well can't help but grow on you, and this one did.

It's been one of my main bird-hunting guns for the past nine years or so, and, well, it shows. It occasionally doubles with heavy loads (which is as good a reason as any to not shoot unnecessarily heavy loads...) and I suspect dirty innards are probably to blame. It's in serious need of a complete tear-down and cleaning, and it's in even more serious need of a new finish.

So it has become my 2013 project gun. In addition to a tear-down, adjustment, and cleaning, the old Beretta's getting a stock refinish and a new pad. A few years back I picked up an extra set of 28-inch in-the-white barrels for it, because they were uber-cheap, so my plan also includes getting that set of barrels tubed, blued, and fitted to the action. Hopefully I'll have it all finished by next season, so I can keep plugging along with the old girl.

New guns never did interest me much, and they interest me even less as I grow older. Old Berettas like this one aren't worth much, you can pick up BL and S-series Berettas all the time on the auction sites for considerably less than what you'd pay for a new base-model 686 Silver Pigeon, but I think the old guns just have a higher cool factor.

Interestingly enough, when I took the old pad off recently in preparation of stripping the stock, I discovered that someone had installed an Edwards recoil reducer (in September of 1968, according to the date) in the stock. Losing that, and the old solid rubber Pachmayr pad, shaved twelve ounces off the weight of the gun. No wonder it always felt a bit butt-heavy...

It'll be interesting to see how longer barrels and a lighter butt may affect how well I shoot it. Messing with a gun that works for you is not always a good idea, and I'm keeping the recoil reducer and that ugly old Pachmayr pad, just in case...

Self-Promotion.

 Just a quick note to let all tens of you who faithfully read my blog know that I have an article in the current issue of Covey Rise magazine. It's an interview with Don McKenzie, the director of the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative and I mention it not to bring attention to myself (small lie), but to bring attention to the NBCI and the work that organization is doing on behalf of my favorite, and the coolest, bird in the world.

Plus, Covey Rise is a very sweet publication dedicated to all things quail, and you should go out immediately and buy a newsstand copy. And then subscribe. And then write a letter to the editor demanding more stories from that Chad Love guy.

And I'd like to mention that I'm also still blogging for the fine folks at Quail Forever, an organization you should most definitely be a member of if you love birds, bird dogs and everything upland. Really, you need to join. Then read the blog and magazine. Then write letters to the editors, both print and online, demanding more stories from that Chad Love guy.

And oh, yeah, I'm still churning out the hook-and-bullet version of The Weekly World News for Field & Stream, as well as the F&S website's gundogs blog.  You should read it. Then send e-mails to the editors demanding more stories from that Chad Love guy.

And finally, I've been contributing to a curious and interesting new magazine called Living Ready, which is the kind of publication that might arise from a flophouse threesome between Mother Earth News, Gun Digest and The Backwoodsman. It's a pretty cool little magazine. You should subscribe. Then write letters to the editor demanding more stories from that Chad Love guy.

Thus endeth my self-promotion for the day...

Stanley Karnow and Slow Journalism

 Back when I was young(er) and a voracious reader of military history (What's the difference between youth and age? As as youngster I read military history as a grand adventure. Now older, and with sons of my own, I read it as a cautionary tale...) Stanley Karnow's "Vietnam: A History" was the first and remains the best journalistic history of that war I've ever read.

Last year, at a book sale, I found a copy of Karnow's "Paris in the Fifties" which chronicles his time as a correspondent for Time magazine in post-war Paris. Again, it quickly became my favorite book on that wonderful city, and I've read a few.

Karnow, of course, died last week at the age of 87, and I'd say it was a life well-spent. This morning on the New Yorker website I was reading this most excellent piece by Evan Osnos on the art of "slow journalism" in which Karnow was mentioned and praised.

From the New Yorker

I once asked my friend Paul Salopek for some thoughts on a writing project. He was a logical source of expertise, having won a couple of Pulitzers for his work around the world, though in this case my interest was more specific to his skills. I was going to spend a few weeks on foot, walking through rural Sichuan Province, and Paul was something of an expert on hoofing it, having walked two hundred and thirty days down the Sierra Madre, and having traipsed large swathes of Africa, Afghanistan, and the Amazon, among other places.

“So, any tips?” I asked. He took the question seriously, and said finally, “If you’re going to take a mule, give yourself enough time to learn how to handle it. It’s more difficult than flying a plane.”

Then he told the story of a humbling moment when just such a beast broke his nose on the first day of his long walk in Mexico (a journey chronicled in “The Mule Diaries,” coming out this year from Random House). A few years ago, he started talking to me about another project, and now it has begun: a seven-year walk around the world.

He set off a week or so ago from Herto Bouri, Ethiopia, bound, first, for the Red Sea. The Out of Eden Walk is being chronicled in real time—blogging, publishing, tweeting—and then, of course, there will be the longer pieces. But all the technical accommodations can make it easy to overlook that the essential project is something we don’t see much of anymore, a kind of reporting Paul calls “slow journalism”—the process of reporting at “a human pace of three miles an hour.”

The start of Paul’s journey just happened to overlap with a reason to nod to another great practitioner of snail-paced journalism: Stanley Karnow, the historian and journalist who wrote so meticulously about Vietnam and Philippines, died on Sunday at the age of eighty-seven. I never knew Karnow, but for a kid growing up in America, interested in writing about Asia, the world he evoked—in “Vietnam: A History,” and “In Our Image: America’s Empire in the Philippines,” among other door-stop-sized volumes—was a good advertisement for the business. His friend Bernard Kalb, a former CBS reporter, once said that Karnow believed that “being a journalist is like being an adolescent all your life.” (Indeed, it wasn’t all heavy-lifting; Karnow’s book about his days of writing in Paris in the fifties made you resent your date of birth.)

There was another sentiment of Karnow’s that stayed with me: when covering Asia, he said, “you can be a specialist, but not an expert.” Humility, of one kind or another, is a quality we don’t universally celebrate in our business. For all of the effective skewering done by Stephen Colbert and The Onion, we still suffer from an industrial predisposition toward feigned, instant expertise. Something about Asia is especially attractive to charlatans. In Beijing, the joke among hacks is that, after the drive in from the airport, you are ready to write a column; after a month, you feel the stirrings of an idea-book; but after a year, you struggle to write anything at all, because you’ve finally discovered just how much you don’t know.

In a sea of ephemera, the sturdiest work is only more noticeable. My colleague Katherine Boo won the National Book Award last year for “Behind the Beautiful Forevers,” her chronicle of a Mumbai slum, which was based on three years of laborious interviews and documents. We binge on instant knowledge, but we are learning the hazards, and readers are warier than they used to be of nanosecond-interpretations of Supreme Court decisions. The economics of the business have not suddenly improved, but in the midst of all the opining with authority and speed, it’s nice to be reminded that the alternative doesn’t make you a luddite.

Journalism offers far fewer chances these days to roam the globe for a paycheck. But adventurers like Karnow and Salopek should give some solace to the aspiring vagabonds out there who wonder if foreign correspondence isn’t still one hell of a way of life. Somewhere in Ethiopia this week, Paul thumbed out a tweet: “No wells. Bummed murky water off nomads in this enormity. Electric blue moonlight the color of pure thought.”

Slow food. Slow living. Slow journalism. I'm starting to notice a pattern here...

Longform Isn't Dead, It's Binary...

 An interesting article on Adweek.com about the transition of longform sports writing from print to digital...

As any literary-minded technophile will tell you, the Internet has become a haven for lengthy, high-quality prose, with sites from the Awl to BuzzFeed regularly churning out 4,000-word stories. But it’s not just rambling book reviews and art-world treatises. The art of longform sportswriting has also found new life on the Web.

This sportswriting renaissance includes relative newcomers like Bill Simmons’ Grantland, sports blog network SB Nation and Deadspin (Manti Te’o, anyone?) and established players like USA Today (a backer of Sports on Earth) and Sports Illustrated, which has been pulling archived stories for its tablet editions. "A number of sports entities are seeing that the future of sports journalism lays in longform, as people become more accustomed to reading on phones and tablets," said Glenn Stout, who has edited The Best American Sports Writing book series since its inception in 1991 and also oversees SB Nation’s new longform section.

While Stout once relied on newspapers to fill The Best American Sports Writing volumes, he is increasingly pulling articles from digital-only outlets. Notwithstanding recent high-profile sports pieces by The New York Times and The Atlantic, Stout said print outlets are finding it harder to do these big stories."Twenty or 25 years ago, there were 50 or 60 of these Sunday newspaper supplements nationwide, and they were a great source [for longform sportswriting]," he said. “Those don’t exist anymore.”

Similar thinking inspired sports startup The Classical. Its dozen founders, including writers like Bethlehem Shoals and Tim Marchman, pitched the idea on Kickstarter, promising "just brainy sports journalism, every day." In less than two months, they raised more than $55,000. Now, the site’s offbeat sports stories (titles “Rabbit Remembered” and “A Portrait of Kenny as a Young Hooper” belie their authors’ literary backgrounds) are getting picked up by the likes of Deadspin and Salon.

"In the past, if I had written the kind of stuff I’ve written for The Classical, no magazine would be able to run it," said one of the site’s co-founders, Pete Beatty, who also works as a book editor. "It costs us the same amount [of money] to run 3,000 or 300 words," said co-founder David Roth, who writes for The Wall Street Journal’s blog The Daily Fix. “We have some freedom in that regard that the Journal doesn’t although they do have a lot of advantages over us—like an office, for starters.”

The Classical also doesn’t have the funds to pay writers although its founders hope that will change in the coming year; the site is in talks with 29th Street Publishing to sell content in the form of iPad magazines.

For now, the exposure is enough for longform proponents like Stout. "There might not be a whole lot of money in it yet," he said. “But you can not only find a place to show your work—you can find an audience for it.”

Just wondering out loud here, but could the same model work for literary, long-form sporting prose? The historical parallels and market forces affecting the two genres are essentially the same, and in fact I'd argue the current prospects for print-based long-form sporting journalism are even worse than they are for traditional sports writing.

Kickstarter or some other form of crowd-sourcing for such a venture is intriguing, but the question would be: are there enough fans out there to support something like a hook-and-bullet Grantland? If the current state of the hook-and-bullet press is any indication, I have my doubts, given the rather miniscule circulations of literary sporting books like Gray's and Sporting Classics

Or are their small circulations more a function of their - for lack of a better term - "sad, nostalgic old bastard*" style of prose that appeals to an ever-shrinking pool of readers, and that something like my "Rolling Stream" idea from a few months ago might appeal to a larger body of potential readers?

Eh, who knows? But maybe I finally need to invest in a tablet/iPad/Kindle/Nook to see for myself what it's like to read a piece of longform journalism on such a device...

Just for the record, I wasn't being pejorative there. I happen to like sad, nostalgic old bastard prose very much. Because I'm quickly becoming one...

One More Season Under the Collar...

Tess, with one of the few actual limits we shot during this weird, screwed up, drought-stricken, disappointing duck season, which for me ended last weekend. She turned nine this year, and although she's becoming a bit creaky, arthritic and is slowing down noticeably, I think she's got one, maybe two good seasons left in her. She's going to have to, because I don't think I'll be getting a new chessie pup this year. Maybe next year.

She's never been my best retriever, and I must admit, she's never been my best dog, personality-wise, either. My first chessie, Holly, was the toughest, most determined retriever I ever owned, while my male chessie, Lewey, while almost as tough and athletic as Holly, (and a better marker) was also the absolute sweetest, goofiest, most loveable and comical dog personality I've ever seen. My current male setter pup Ozzy reminds me greatly of him, and indeed, sometimes I slip up and call him Lewey.

Tess, on the other hand, has always been right smack in the middle of the bell curve. If you've ever seen the movie "Idiocracy" Tess is the canine version of Luke Wilson's character. Utterly average in every way. Decent but not great retriever. Sort of a plodder. Not particularly flashy or athletic. Vanilla personality. Average, but consistently average. She's always there, she's loyal, loves me, is good with our kids (not so good with strangers, though) and on balance has never given me any reason to regret having her. I could do lots worse, and have.

Dogs are individuals, just like us, and not every dog you own through the course of a lifetime is going to just absolutely knock you over with their greatness. Some of them are going to be special, some of them are going to be duds, some of them are going to be nightmares, and some of them are simply going to be good dogs. And sometimes, that's all you need. She's been a good one.  

Cool Places: Nebraska Sandhills

Garmin's Ted Gartner, giving his dog LuLu a quick water break while hunting the Nebraska National Forest (national forest?) outside the alleged town of Thedford, Nebraska, earlier this season. What a lonely, quiet, forgotten, gorgeous place the sandhills are. I fell instantly in love with them.

There are chunks of land out there that have always intrigued me. That portion of Nebraska that lies roughly west of US 183 and north of I-80 is one of them. If you take your finger and trace that area on an atlas, you will see that there's just not a helluva lot out there. At all. Few roads. Few towns. And lots of blank, empty space between what is there. Which is why, of course, it is one of those beguiling places. Culture and civilization, I'm sorry to say, make any wild, lonely place less interesting. Thankfully, there's not much of either in western Nebraska.

We only hunted for one evening and one morning before heading on to Montana, but I was so smitten with the region that I'm trying to figure out a way to go back next fall, but with a kayak strapped to the truck so I can hunt the cool mornings, spend the hot afternoons fishing some of those innumerable, jewel-like sandhills lakes and then spend the evenings kicked back next to a campfire, sipping beverages, watching the stars and talking to the dogs, with nary a streetlight, car horn or other soul for miles around. It's that kind of place.

Horses Jumping Fences...

 Mark Vonnegut, in the introduction to the posthumous Kurt Vonnegut collection "Armageddon In Retrospect."

"When I was 16 he couldn't get a job teaching English at Cape Cod Community College. My mother claimed that she went into bookstores and ordered his books under a false name so the books would at least be in the stores and maybe someone would buy them. Five years later he published Slaughterhouse-5 and had a million-dollar multi-book contract. It took some getting used to. Now, for most people looking back, Kurt's being a successful, even famous, writer is an "of course" kind of thing. For me it looks like something that very easily might not have happened.

He often said he had to be a writer because he wasn't good at anything else. He was not good at being an employee. Back in the mid-1950s he was employed by Sports Illustrated, briefly. He reported to work, was asked to write a short piece on a racehorse that had jumped over a fence and tried to run away. Kurt stared at the blank piece of paper all morning and then typed, "The horse jumped over the fucking fence," and walked out, self-employed again."

Most of us writers never - for a variety of reasons -  reach sufficient escape velocity to break free from the gravitational pull of writing about horses jumping fences. We, of course, recognize this (or at least those of us who don't suffer from terminal self-delusion do) so we are forced to make our horses jumping fences stories as nice and pretty as we can. But in the end, and in whatever form they may take, they're all just stories about horses jumping over fucking fences.

And that's OK. We can't all be Vonneguts. Hell, were I thrust into the same situation, I'm quite sure I would have launched into a haughty, excruciatingly self-aggrandizing little bitch and moan about how demeaning, pointless and utterly banal the whole thing is for an artist such as myself...and then cranked out 12 inches of good, clean, useful, amazing, forgettable copy on how that horse jumped over the fence. And probably would have spent the rest of my working life right there at that SI desk, cranking out even more horses jumping fences stories. 

Because in the end, regardless of how hard we try to convince ourselves otherwise, most of us aren't Vonnegut. In fact, most of us, artistically speaking, are some variation of this guy...

And for those of you without children who don't get that joke, all I can say is you're doing yourselves a real disservice by not watching SpongeBob Squarepants...

When Words - And Lots of Them - Fail.

 Literally. And miserably...

From the March, 1996 History 3383 blue book exam of an, uh...unnamed student at the University of Oklahoma, found while sifting through the dusty, long-forgotten artifacts of a closet.

"My goodness, but you have a great deal of fine rhetoric here! But it has no chronological framework, it is short on data, and it seems to ignore organization altogether. Beyond that, I find no evidence of reading. Now, it is true that you reference to a great many things herein. You mention them in passing, so to speak. Thus, I'm sure you know something, but just how much do you know? I can't tell from your essay, because you don't go into detail on, well, anything. That leaves me up a tree, because I can't give you a grade based on what I think you know: I must be guided by what's in the examination booklet. Which isn't much. D minus."

Hmmm, a great deal of fine rhetoric that, taken as a whole, adds to up to not a helluva lot. Yep, pretty much sums up the freelance writing life.

That unnamed student, by the way, did manage to recover from that stinging - and wholly deserved - rebuke, and made damn sure he was sort of prepared for the next test. Or so I'm told.  

"We've Put Ourselves In A Cage"

Interesting clip from a 2005 interview with Richard Manning, one of my absolute favorite environmental journalists. If you haven't read any of his books, do yourself a favor and pick one up. Being a lifelong prairie rat, I've read and enjoyed all his books about that particular subject: "Grasslands", "Rewilding The West", "Against the Grain", etc.

One of my favorite Richard Manning quotes (paraphrasing from memory here): "A wheat field is nothing more than a clear-cut of the grass forest." Amen, brother...