Sporting Classics reprints an old-time account by the great Archibald Rutledge of a plantation Christmas deer hunt, South Carolina-style… with hounds.
On the plantations that I know, deer hunting on Christmas Day is as natural as a Christmas tree, or kissing one’s sweetheart under the mistletoe.
After breakfast we gather on the plantation porch, and I smell the yellow jasmine that is tossing her saffron showers up the tall white columns. In the flower garden two red roses are blooming. In the wild orange trees beside the house myriads of robins, cedar waxwings, and a few wood-thrushes are having their Christmas breakfast. A hale, dewy wind breathes from the mighty pine forest.
The whole landscape, though bathed in sunshine, is still fresh with the beauty of the morning. Now the negro hunters come ’round the side of the house, leading our horses, and followed by a pack of hounds. A rather motley crew they are, I think, for few plantations can boast of full-blooded stag-hounds; but they know their business. What they lack in appearance they supply in sagacity.
There is, I suppose, no grander sport in the whole world than riding to hounds after deer; and this is a sport typical of a plantation Christmas. It is almost a religious rite, and it never fails to supply the most thrilling entertainment for visitors. Indeed, I do not know exactly what the rural South would do without deer hunting as a diversion. Even in the cities, when distinguished guests arrive, the primary entertainment always provided is a stag hunt.
Maya Singer has penned for Vogue the sixth of a twelve-part series celebrating the legacy of Barack Obama. This installment focuses on the hermeneutics of Obama’s “mom jeans.”
Picture Barack Obama and what comes to mind is an elegant man, immaculate in a suit, or Old Hollywood suave swanning into a gala in a tuxedo with Michelle on his arm. He’s a guy who comprehends the fit and flair of clothes. But he’s also a guy who wears mom jeans. What I’m trying to say is: The genius of Barack Obama is that he contains multitudes.
I’ve always liked listening to Obama’s press conferences. In that setting, taking questions on the fly, you can observe his mind working. He turns the queries over, inspecting each one for opportunities and traps, and then, crafting his replies, carefully considers every word. Each one. Words you hear a lot from Obama are “process†and “systematic†and “methodicalâ€â€”and no matter what he’s talking about, those words have generally brought me comfort, for they reassure me that the ship of state is in a rigorous man’s hands. But Obama’s rigor has occasionally brought me frustration, too. There have been times I’ve wanted him to let loose, lose his cool, shout back at those people who have made it their mission to delegitimize and stymie him. And on policy grounds, too, I have wished at times that he’d chart a more radical course. But wishing isn’t the same as knowing what that would look like, or how or whether it would work. And that’s stuff I have no doubt Obama has thought through.
And not just thought through, but thought through in a particular way. Obama’s is a sympathetic rigor—warm and encompassing, rather than clinical. In a recent interview, Zadie Smith reportedly spoke about relating to Barack Obama not as a politician, but as a writer, and that statement clarified for me what I like about how he thinks. Obama governs the way the great humanist novelists of the 19th century wrote, drawing back to see the whole large canvas and the historical and structural forces converging on it at a particular time, then zooming in for close-ups on the people buffeted by those forces as they try, the best way each of them knows how, to lead meaningful, honorable lives. I imagine that Obama’s pragmatism is born out of his desire to soften the world’s blows for as many of those people as possible, knowing all the while that there are things even he, the most powerful man in the world, can’t in an instant change.
He sees big and he sees small. He sees compassionately, and in order to do that—in order to think like a novelist—you have to contain multitudes.
My own view is that nobody over 30 who is not engaged in real manual labor ought ever to be seen wearing blue jeans, the Mom variety or otherwise.
It is also, I think, alarming evidence of the dominanting influence of the LGBT subculture on the thinking of the community of fashion that the ironical appreciation of the dear leader’s transgressively unappealing denim trousers can be spun out into a grand encomium for his philosophy of governance. The sexually perverse have a penchant for irony and for the facile promotion of the insignificant and trivial to the plane of high cultural discourse.
We’ve long been fans of Olympia, Washington-based artist Chris Maynard (previously) who assembles shadowboxes of cut feathers depicting the silhouettes of birds as they sing, perch, and swoop across the canvas. With a background in both biology and ecology the artist recalls working with feathers as early as the age of 12, utilizing heirloom forceps, eye surgery scissors, and magnifying glasses passed down through his family. Maynard acquires feathers for his artwork from zoos and private aviaries.
Back in the 1950s, smoking a pipe was as much the fashion at Yale as button-down Gant shirts and scuffed white bucks. The pipe smoker set in New Haven was big enough to support two local purveyors: Johnny’s Pipe Shop at College and Chapel streets, and the older and more upscale Owl Shop, around the corner on College. Johnny’s is gone now, but the Owl Shop is still smoking.
Every year, Johnny sponsored a pipe-smoking contest in association with WYBC, the college radio station. The top prize, which usually was an expensive pipe, went to the smoker who could keep his pipe going the longest.â€
“I set off for the WYBC studio. By the time I got there, the room was filled with hopeful contestants and a variety of smoking devices. Every imaginable size and shape of pipe was on display, from corncobs and classic clay pipes, to a variety of traditional briars, to a Sherlock Holmes–style calabash and a yellowed meerschaum pipe so delicate the smoker wore gloves so as not to stain the exterior with the oils from his fingers. There even were a few Turkish water pipes!â€
“An hour into the match (no pun intended), several green-faced competitors backed out in search of fresh air and a place to chuck.
[Johnny’s] best advice had to do with avoiding nausea, which was sure to well up after an hour or so of puffing. He advised me to take a sip of Coke every now and then to settle my stomach.
So far, I was holding my own. I had used only one match. My pipe was still smoking and the Coke quieted my stomach. More competitors gave up the fight, either from nausea or because their pipes burned out. The field was shrinking.
The guy with the Turkish water pipe was still gurgling away. The last matches were being struck all around me. We were all getting to the bottom of the bowl. Could I hang on? Did I really want to hang on?â€
I was getting a bit dizzy. I used my last pipe cleaner and was sickened by what it cleaned out of the stem of my pipe! I was swallowing this gook! I looked around and saw that the room was emptying fast. I was among the last five or six contestants when Johnny showed up, knowing from experience that the contest end was near.
A WYBC reporter returned prepared to interview the grand winner. I was now suffering from a severe headache and a rancid taste in my mouth. My tobacco’s glow was dimming. I tried to restore it with a few deep puffs, only to suck in a mouthful of licorice-flavored tars.
That did it. I got up from my chair and indicated to the proctors that I was finished. They took my name and noted my finishing time, which I don’t remember. All I know is that I was happy to leave the smoke-filled room and get out into the damp New Haven night. I got back to my room, drank another Coke and rushed into the bathroom to barf.
I preferred Johnny’s to the Owl Shop, better tobacco, better priced pipes. I bought my first pipe, a GBD, from Johnny, and my all-time favorite blend was his Aromatic Cavendish. I still have an ancient humidor smelling of the stuff.
Smoking is, of course, in today’s namy-pamby era streng verboten. In my day, we had ash trays in every classroom. I had one Nietszche professor who routinely bummed Luckies from me. I took a graduate seminar on “Structuralist Approaches to a Theory of Architectural Form” one year in which eleven of the twelve males participating had beards (only I was beardless) and everyone smoked a pipe.
In the New York Times, Tatiana Schlossberg (Caroline Kennedy’s daughter, Y’ 12) explains that if the weather’s getting cooler, that doesn’t mean there isn’t Global Warming. Why, well-educated members of the community of fashion elect can even explain to you that Global Warming actually can cause colder weather!
On Thursday, temperatures on the East Coast are expected to plummet, and some people — fellow journalists and weather broadcasters, we’re looking at you — may start talking about a “polar vortex.â€
We thought you might want to know what the polar vortex is, and what it’s not.
(And we wanted to pre-empt the inevitable chatter about climate change that usually crops up when the thermometer drops — “It’s bone-shakingly cold, how could the Earth be warming?†We’ll tell you how.) …
When these cold snaps come, you may hear other people asking,†If global warming is supposed to be warming the globe, then why is it so cold?â€
Well, for starters, there is a difference between weather and climate. Climate refers to the long-term averages and trends in atmospheric conditions over large areas, while weather deals with short-term variations, which is what happens when the polar vortex visits your hometown.
And of course, an Arctic blast can still occur in a warmer world. The air that comes down from the North Pole might not be as cold, Ms. Barthold said, but it would still be the product of the same phenomenon.
Some studies suggest that climate change could actually make these frigid waves of Arctic air more common, a result of shrinking sea ice. However, other scientists remain skeptical of this theory.
And the earth is definitely warming: Temperature records show that, by the end of last year, the earth’s surface had warmed by about 1.8 degrees Fahrenheit since the 19th century. But even though the earth’s surface is warming, scientists say that winter will still exist.
And even if parts of the United States are experiencing unusually cold temperatures, it represents such a small portion of the earth’s surface — about 2 percent — that it does not mean much in terms of average global temperatures.
So, if, for instance, a senator (perhaps James M. Inhofe, Republican of Oklahoma) brandishes a snowball on the floor of the Senate to dispute the validity of climate science when a chill wind blows through Washington, you will know that the unseasonably cold temperatures he is talking about do not mean that global warming is not happening.
It is.
Apparently the Great Big Brains have understood all this for years. Warmlist, the attempted complete list of all the things caused by Anthropogenic Global Warming, already has listed:
Chris Connors died, at age 67, after trying to box his bikini-clad hospice nurse just moments earlier. Ladies man, game slayer, and outlaw Connors told his last inappropriate joke on Friday, December 9, 2016, that which cannot be printed here. Anyone else fighting ALS and stage 4 pancreatic cancer would have gone quietly into the night, but Connors was stark naked drinking Veuve in a house full of friends and family as Al Green played from the speakers. The way he died is just like he lived: he wrote his own rules, he fought authority and he paved his own way. And if you said he couldn’t do it, he would make sure he could.
Most people thought he was crazy for swimming in the ocean in January; for being a skinny Irish Golden Gloves boxer from Quincy, Massachusetts; for dressing up as a priest and then proceeding to get into a fight at a Jewish deli. Many gawked at his start of a career on Wall Street without a financial background – but instead with an intelligent, impish smile, love for the spoken word, irreverent sense of humor, and stunning blue eyes that could make anyone fall in love with him.
As much as people knew hanging out with him would end in a night in jail or a killer screwdriver hangover, he was the type of man that people would drive 16 hours at the drop of a dime to come see. He lived 1000 years in the 67 calendar years we had with him because he attacked life; he grabbed it by the lapels, kissed it, and swung it back onto the dance floor. At the age of 26 he planned to circumnavigate the world – instead, he ended up spending 40 hours on a life raft off the coast of Panama. In 1974, he founded the Quincy Rugby Club. In his thirties, he sustained a knife wound after saving a woman from being mugged in New York City. He didn’t slow down: at age 64, he climbed to the base camp of Mount Everest. Throughout his life, he was an accomplished hunter and birth control device tester (with some failures, notably Caitlin Connors, 33; Chris Connors, 11; and Liam Connors, 8).
He was a rare combination of someone who had a love of life and a firm understanding of what was important – the simplicity of living a life with those you love. Although he threw some of the most memorable parties during the greater half of a century, he would trade it all for a night in front of the fire with his family in Maine. His acute awareness of the importance of a life lived with the ones you love over any material possession was only handicapped by his territorial attachment to the remote control of his Sonos music.
Chris enjoyed cross dressing, a well-made fire, and mashed potatoes with lots of butter. His regrets were few, but include eating a rotisserie hot dog from an unmemorable convenience store in the summer of 1986.
Of all the people he touched, both willing and unwilling, his most proud achievement in life was marrying his wife Emily Ayer Connors who supported him in all his glory during his heyday, and lovingly supported him physically during their last days together.
Absolut vodka and Simply Orange companies are devastated by the loss of Connors. A “Celebration of Life” will be held during Happy Hour (4 p.m.) at York Harbor Inn on Monday, December 19.
In lieu of flowers, please pay open bar tab or donate to Connors’ water safety fund at www.thechrisconnorsfund.com.
Paul Rahe discusses the basic existential problems facing NATO and the European Union.
Politics are generational, and there is next to no one left who remembers World War II. The manner in which things spun out of control in the 1920s and 1930s is no longer even a memory. It is all ancient history now. The new generation hardly even remembers the Cold War and does not appreciate how dangerous it once was. The crises that gave rise to NATO have faded into the past. Barack Obama treated our longtime allies with a measure of contempt. Donald Trump’s off-the-cuff remarks suggest that he may think that he can do without them altogether.
The one thing that NATO could not survive is repudiation by its hegemon. We may live to regret our forgetfulness. …
There is [a] defect to the European Union that cannot be remedied. It is made up of democracies. That is a requirement for membership. But it is not itself democratically governed, and it is difficult to see how it could be. The European elite may be able to bridge linguistic and cultural differences. The peoples of Europe whom they govern cannot. The European Parliament will never be a properly representative body.
In consequence, the EU is governed by a commission appointed by the governments of its members and dominated by its most economically efficient member, Germany. In practice, there is no provision for a redress of grievances and little room for a correction of course. The ordinary citizens of the countries within the union have next to no say about the regulations under which they live and work. In effect, they are subjects within an oligarchy; and, thanks to the crisis to which the common currency gave rise and to the refugee crisis produced by the war in Iraq and Syria, there is now seething discontent. There is no way to vent that frustration by throwing the rascals out.
In the long run, such discontent is inevitable. The citizens in the various countries in Europe are unlikely to be satisfied with a situation in which they are not masters in their own homes. The more intrusive and pervasive the EU becomes, the more it will be resented. And sooner or later, when a crisis presents itself, there will be an explosion.
If the EU is to survive, the European elite will have to acknowledge that the ambition to turn the old customs union into a proper federation was folly, the currency union will have to be dismantled or reduced in extent, and the welter of regulations will have to be cut back. Charles de Gaulle envisioned a Europe des patries. It is only in such a Europe that the distinct peoples of Europe can be self-governing. Sometimes, less is more. …
