Newsletter #15 - Laughing at Ourselves
Updates
Quick one up top: The Wild Gentleman Book Club meets again this week.
We're discussing Cormac McCarthy's All the Pretty Horses — the first of his Border Trilogy, and the book that got him on the radar of the literary establishment for the first time.
New to the group? Come anyway. Didn't finish (or even pick up) the book? No problem, there are always a few guys who don't get to it each month.
You can also listen to All the Pretty Horses on both Audible and Spotify.
The Wild Gentleman Book Club
Wednesday, September 23rd at 6:00 PM
Paddy's Public House in West Newton
RSVP here: https://luma.com/zbxvr884
Questions? Reach me at dennis@thewildgentleman.com.
Read on.
The Wild Gentleman in August
In August, we met to discuss True Grit — a novel none of us had ever picked up before.
We all caught on to some of the same sentiments: we need to find more time outdoors, we're becoming disconnected from the world around us, and toughness comes in various forms and sizes.
More than anything, we were enchanted by how good a story Charles Portis had written.
You can check out the True Grit Reader's Guide here for more.
This Same Old Story
I got back from New Hampshire Saturday night from an annual guys golf trip — crisp September air, cold IPAs, ever-present college football games, lots of hugs. It was a great few days with a crew I've known most of my life: friends' dads, guys my father coached or taught over his 30- or 40-year career, kids I've known since before I can remember and grew up alongside.
Everyone knows each other so well, there's no need to perform and not much of an agenda beyond showing up.
Did we grow? Become better versions of ourselves? What we did was sit around and talk — nonsense, mostly. A lot of the same stories we've all heard dozens of times, mixed in with a few quiet moments when real life breaks in, and we say out loud some of the things we can't say to anyone but each other. Marriage, work, divorce, parenting, aging, responsibility. All the hits.
There's also a lot of laughing, mostly at ourselves.
(I'd love to tell you one of the tales I told in which I ended up as the fumbling, hapless protagonist — but those stay north.)
I noticed, not for the first time, that I lean hard on the past with these guys. I go back to the well. It's something I actually worry about a little — am I the guy who can't let go, who needs everyone to keep confirming who he used to be? But sitting there this weekend, I think I had it backward. The past isn't where I go because I'm stuck. It's the richest storytelling vein I've got for laughing at myself, at us, at who we were before any of us knew what we were doing.
It's a reminder that we don't know what we'll do next, but we now have some experience of what not to do again — we hope.
John Grady Cole and Lacey Rawlins do this too, for a good stretch of All the Pretty Horses. They ride south into Mexico together, and along the way, they trade stories. They talk about girls, family, and the shared remembrances of home, even as they head away from it.
They share half-truths, and neither doubts the other. Memories that don't matter to anyone outside the two of them, retold anyway, because the retelling is the thing itself. The acknowledgment of a shared experience. A shared life, spoken into being through the story of the adventure they're in the midst of.
John Grady becomes the man he aspires to be next to Rawlins — in the talking, in the version of the story Rawlins lets him tell and the version he pushes back on.
That's the part a guys' weekend gets right that almost nothing else in a grown man's life does. Not the yard games, not the competition, not the sunset beers overlooking the mountains. The unhurried, deeply unproductive act of sitting around retelling stories everyone at the table has already heard — because rehashing old tales isn't the point; being together is.
The real takeaway isn't "What was the best part of the weekend?" It's this: why do we love sitting around a fire, telling each other stories we've already heard?
Why do I love telling stories to connect with other men? Because in the retelling, we can say out loud things that are harder to put into actual, present language. Nobody standing around the kitchen island covered in various grilled meats was going to say "I need you" or "I still see you as the guy you were at twenty-two, and I love that guy." So instead, someone tells a story again — one of our shared myths — and everyone laughs in the same places, and we know we love and appreciate each other more than we did when we were the main characters in our overtold stories, even if those truths sit there amongst us, unsaid.
The Gentleman Shares - Recent Thought-Provoking Reading and More
A few things worth your time this month:
"Golf Dawn Saved My Summer" - Billy Baker, The Boston Globe
Billy Baker just drops the most read-worthy bits in The Globe time after time. This is a recent essay on a pre-sunlight golf habit that sounds like the perfect way to start any day.
"Cormac McCarthy's Midlife Crisis" - Michael O’Donnell, The Atlantic
McCarthy had a far more interesting life prior to publishing Blood Meridian and The Border Trilogy than I knew. This article digs into his life in Knoxville, which ended when he grabbed a typewriter and headed southwest to the desert to find the inspiration for some of the best literature published in America in the twentieth century.
"The Art of Leaping Out of Planes to Fight Wildfires" - M. R. O’Connor, The New Yorker
The online version of this story is filled with images of people who spend their lives training and preparing to fight wildfires in the hardest-to-reach areas by jumping out of planes. I couldn't put down the more text-heavy version from the print New Yorker. As soon as I finished it, I handed it to my son to read.
Support The Wild Gentleman
There are several ways to support The Wild Gentleman. First, there are multiple membership tiers for becoming a patron of this project.
The simplest way to support The Wild Gentleman is to become a paid member, which gives you access to the full archive of printable reader's guides, comments on every post, and more in the future.
For all of you who already support The Wild Gentleman, I appreciate you so much.
Wild at Heart. Refined in Mind.
Dennis
