River Music
A Fly Fisher’s Four Seasons
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- $7.99
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- $7.99
Publisher Description
James Babb imbues his devastating wit, ornery perspective, and musical language within each of the ribald tales in River Music. This is exemplified in the “Prelude,” his opus about “the occasional laugh, the occasional thought, a bit about fly fishing and a bit about Life, and all of it underpinned by the music of rivers.” The pieces are arranged in a harmonious current that carries us through the seasons, and life itself.He recounts a disastrous--and hilarious--spring canoeing trip with a friend in “The Darling Buds of May,” where the snow accumulated so quickly on their hats that they “looked like Conehead voyageurs from Remulak.” In “The Coriolis Effect,” Babb rhapsodizes about the sights, smells, and culture of what he considers to be the last great place on Earth, where pristine Chilean waters and a native way of life relieve him of an obsession about which direction the water flushes. And in “Little Jewels,” he weaves an exquisite, deeply humorous, and haunting nocturne with peccadillo accompaniment that considers the mating habits of trout and men, mortality, and a thirty-nine-year-long unrequited love. Babb is a maverick whose latest offering is a true departure from conventional essays on fly fishing, or on any subject, and will be relished by the growing circle of Babb fanatics everywhere.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Babb has successfully carved out a niche, alongside Norman Maclean, as a superior fly-fishing writer, and moreover as a keen observer of human comedy. This sequel to his successful Crosscurrents expands (and organizes by season) essays from Gray's Sporting Journal and positions Babb as fly fishing's tastefully restrained counterpart to Dave Barry. Babb's wit surfaces at every turn: he observes a psychological battle between two fellow fishermen he nicknames Phlegm and Spleen, a "loudmouthed highliner" and a "quivering bundle of silent intensity," respectively; he muses that due to the sport's anal and passive-aggressive nature, it's "small wonder" that "the invasion of Normandy, one of the best-planned and most devious military assaults of all time, was masterminded by a fly fisherman"; and he points out that Vienna sausages, the "cornerstone" of Southern fishing lunches, taste like "an initial burst of garbage-disposal grease followed by a salty metallic aftertaste that leaves your mouth puckered and sour, as though you'd upchucked chunks of green persimmon then fellated a rusty exhaust pipe." Discussing his midlife crises, he never gets maudlin: for example, describing an object of his flirtations, he writes: "modernize Veronica Lake with a big stir of Gwyneth Paltrow and weird things up with Dorothy Parker playing I Love Lucy." Throughout, Babb calmly discerns connections between life and the sport, distinguishing his writing from typically obsessive, self-indulgent sports writing: "having acquired the habit before the onset of sentience, fly fishing is for me more an involuntary act of everyday living, like sleeping or eating or watching reruns of The Simpsons."