Posted by El Spaniard on Fri, Jan 22, 2010 @ 11:17 AM
Blog Post by SLAYER - Montana-based SCORP and all around tough guy
Being a true Scorp is somewhat like being a true Fu-Schnick; you may not know what it is but you definitely know it when you see it. Not too long ago I was having dinner at a little restaurant in Livingston, Montana when I noticed a picture on the wall of author Jim Harrison. Now, Harrison is a local and well-known eater so it wasn't that the picture was on the wall that caught my attention. No, it was the visage staring at me from the wall. There is no ignoring that unkempt mane, his weathered face and the stare that juxtaposes one piercing eye and one blind one. All of it reads Scorp.
Obviously you can't judge a book, or an author, by its cover, so that there has to be something more, a story behind that lived-in face. Am I right? I mean that bad eye. Harrison lost sight in it when a girl shoved a broken bottle in his face when he was seven-years-old. SEVEN! From there he, like all good Scorps, melded a blue collar upbringing in rural Michigan with the cerebral undertakings of being an English professor and writing poetry. With his 1978 publication of Legends of the Fall, a collection of three novellas including the title piece, Harrison came into his own. Not only did it bring him to the attention of the literary world at-large, but it also brought him a boat load of cash, thanks to the film rights of all three stories being snapped up by Hollywood . From there Harrison did what any self-respecting starving artist, or Scorp, would do - he blew his windfall on booze, coke and strippers. Can I get an Amen from the Congregation! After carousing with the likes Jack Nicholson and writing the severely disappointing screenplay for the Jack's film Wolf, Harrison thankfully ditched L.A. before his heart exploded. He headed back to Michigan and then to his current home in Montana 's Paradise Valley, where he hunts and fishes and eats that which he catches and kills. Somehow he fits in time to write.
And it is Harrison 's writing that defines him as a Scorpion par excellence. If you only know him from the movie adaption of Legends of the Fall, don't be dismayed. His characters are no pretty-boy Brad Pitts. They are rough and tough guys who have, in the words of author Barry Hannah (Geronimo Rex; High Lonesome), "savage grace." Because he comes from the Midwest and writes about guys that fish, hunt, fight, eat, drink, screw, wander, love nature and generally live on the edge of society, Harrison often gets compared to Hemingway, but the real men in Harrison's books are the characters who you always wish would who show up to beat up the wanna-be, Ivy League tough guys that Papa always wrote about.
More importantly, Harrison,unlike Ernie, loves women. I mean llllllllaaaaaaahhhhhhhhvvvvvvvvssssssss ‘em. I haven't read anything this side of Penthouse Forum that celebrates the female ass like Harrison 's work. For instance, in his recent novel The English Major, even the 60-year-old Cliff gets some from a younger woman ("...her panties drawn up fetchingly in her butt crack. This was a fanny that could start a war and I was felt blessed that I had use of it.") And the chicks aren't only there for fun. Harrison best novel, Dalva, has a woman title character that is every bit as tough as any of Harrison 's male character but still maintains a likability and femininity that Hemingway never developed in any of female leads. Women, men, dogs, birds. It doesn't matter. Whatever Harrison writes about comes to life.
So Harrison covers all the bases - looks, life, literary legacy - needed to give him the Scorp seal of approval. And if all this doesn't make you want to go out and read one of his books then, unlike Jim, maybe you aren't Scorp material.
(Harrison 's most recent collection of novellas The Farmer's Daughter was published in December.)