Jim Harrison

Briefly shared a publisher, Grove/Atlantic, with Jim Harrison, which made me feel cool.  Some gems in his New York Times obituary:

There was the eating. Mr. Harrison once faced down 144 oysters, just to see if he could finish them. (He could.)

“If you’ve known a lot of actresses and models,” he once confided with characteristic plain-spokenness to a rapt audience at a literary gathering, “you return to waitresses because at least they smell like food.”

Mr. Harrison had his detractors. With its boozing and brawling and bedding, his fiction was often called misogynistic. He did himself no favors with a 1983 Esquire essay in which he called his feminist critics “brie brains” and added, in gleeful self-parody, “Even now, far up in the wilderness in my cabin, where I just shot a lamprey passing upstream with my Magnum, I wouldn’t have the heart to turn down a platter of hot buttered cheerleaders.”