Summary of Jim Harrison's Off to the Side

Everest Media

Description

Please note: This is a companion version & not the original book.
Sample Book Insights:
#1 The author’s childhood friend David Kilmer would heroically pursue the quest of sex with women, but he was not fixated. The author quit looking at the photos of women in his father’s medical books, as they were only included if something had gone haywire.
#2 My grandmother, Hulda, and grandfather, John, emigrated from Sweden to the United States in 1890. They met in Chicago and married, with modest savings, to buy a small farm in northern Michigan.
#3 I can return at will to a summer dawn in an upstairs room where I was confined. I hear the screen door of the pump shed slam and see my grandfather heading to the barn with two pails of milk skimmed for the calves.
#4 I remember my father and sister reading books in silence, or the smell of the aunts doing each other’s hair with Toni Home Permanents. The heaviness of the rye bread eaten with herring.

Sujets

• Autobiography
• Biography
• Lettres et linguistique
• Literary Figures

Informations

• Publié par: Everest Media LLC
• Date de parution: 31 juillet 2022
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9798822560086
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 1 Mo

Extrait

Insights on Jim Harrison's Off to the Side
Contents Insights from Chapter 1 Insights from Chapter 2 Insights from Chapter 3
Insights from Chapter 1

#1

The author’s childhood friend David Kilmer would heroically pursue the quest of sex with women, but he was not fixated. The author quit looking at the photos of women in his father’s medical books, as they were only included if something had gone haywire.

#2

My grandmother, Hulda, and grandfather, John, emigrated from Sweden to the United States in 1890. They met in Chicago and married, with modest savings, to buy a small farm in northern Michigan.

#3

I can return at will to a summer dawn in an upstairs room where I was confined. I hear the screen door of the pump shed slam and see my grandfather heading to the barn with two pails of milk skimmed for the calves.

#4

I remember my father and sister reading books in silence, or the smell of the aunts doing each other’s hair with Toni Home Permanents. The heaviness of the rye bread eaten with herring.

#5

My father’s family were farmers, and they had five children. They were extremely even-tempered, and their family life was dominated by moods between morose Sundays and wild card games the night before.

#6

The golden years I had in Reed City from the ages of five to twelve were not really golden at all. I was lucky to have parents who took me fishing and hunting, and I was very grateful for it. However, I understand that people who watch a lot of TV never again seem to be able to adjust to the actual pace of life.

#7

The invention of diversions and the change in cultural behavior are part of an economic system that is beyond my understanding. I simply think of it as a matter of swimming in an anemic, sterile, and crowded swimming pool compared to swimming in a lake back in the woods.

#8

What we think of our hometown is our first substantial map of the world. In a city, it’s the neighborhood. Reed City was containable with clear borders of fields and woods two blocks from our five-bedroom house.

#9

The effects of the accident were long-term, and I lost the vision in my left eye. The consequences of her simple, violent gesture were long-range, and I was 4-F and unable to fight for my country in Vietnam.

#10

The author’s left eye was injured in a accident, and he was forced to cover it with a bandage for a month. The compensatory joys were his uncles coming home from the war, and the gradual joy he and his brother experienced when they got a baby sister.

#11

My father and his brothers built me a cabin on a remote lake fifteen miles from town. It was one thing to live in a town with a small river going through it, but it was another thing to live in a cabin without electricity or plumbing. I enjoyed spending my summers there.

#12

I walked back towards Well’s Lake, through sumac and blackberry brambles, onto the lake road, feet sliding in the gravel. I floated over the bushy crests of hardwoods and pine tips.

#13

The life you lived as a child was very innocent and pleasant, but it created huge problems for you beginning at the age of twelve. You were in love with this life, and it imprinted itself on your brain and heart.

#14

I have seen this in the small village near my cabin in Michigan's Upper Peninsula. People who used to live in the village, were children there, come up for holidays from what is called down below, the cities far to the south of the Mackinaw Bridge that connects Michigan's two sections.

#15

I wrote letters to the West that held mountains I’d never seen. I took the Greyhound and while I was waiting to transfer in Chicago, a burly homosexual tracked me here and there. I arrived at the Stanley Hotel in Estes Park, Colorado, as a future busboy.

#16

I had become a general pain in the ass at the Stanley, and was fired for throwing an egg in the kitchen which hit the cashier, and for ordering prime rib which I ate in the laundry room. I despondently hitchhiked to a cheap lodge.

#17

I had been planning to go to New York City with a friend, but when I got there, I was swept away by the sophistication of the place. I bought an expensive bottle of cognac, and we waited for love to arrive in our rather dismal room.

#18

I had begun reading a lot of French novels and poetry in my junior and senior years of high school, and I had become obsessed with art and literature. I had no one to share my obsession with art and literature except my sister, Judith.

#19

The core of this lugubrious masochism is the fact that you are waiting impatiently for something wonderful to happen, which you believe is undeserved. You are also hard on others who don’t have your devotion to the relentless clock.

#20

The artist’s arrogance is often a permanent resident in the artist’s mind. It is a good cautionary note for the kind of arrogance that is a permanent resident in the artist’s mind. Every morning, my beloved English setter, Rose, heads for the myrtle bed with its violet-colored flowers. While she does her necessary function, she gazes off to the songbirds fluttering in the young cottonwoods.

#21

My father told me that curiosity will get you through hard times when nothing else will. I had experienced this when I was thinking about my first love who had recently abandoned me because I was unwilling to marry right after high school. The air became warmer and moister, and it began to rain.

#22

I have seven depressions in my life, beginning at the age of fourteen. The most consistent feeling is suffocation, lack of oxygen, and an atrophication of the strange breathing apparatus of the soul life. I have never thought very deeply about the idea of family until a recent Sunday morning.

#23

I always took my mother wildflowers when she was irritated with me, and I never had any sibling rivalry. The house in Haslett was small compared to the one in Reed City, but it was the size my parents could afford.

#24

I grew up in a close and loving family, but I was always curious about the lives of artists. When I was sixteen, my father bought me a twenty-dollar used typewriter rather than giving me a lecture on practicality and the doom and shame of artists.

#25

The five children were extremely different from one another in character. John was the eldest son, and he was responsible, reliable, and a leader. Judy was irascible and quarrelsome, but she had a Swedish obtrusive intelligence. Mary was the most gentle and graceful member of the family.

#26

The past can be extremely difficult to remember. It is a nonspecific sexuality that you feel even in your elbows, your nose against the wet hair of her neck, and your feet as if you were walking up warm, oily planks.

#27

The author’s 4-H club went on a trip to Milwaukee, which took six hours each way. The ground beneath his feet became unstable when he was on a ship in mildly rocking seas with Felicia, a new girl who had brought him an early-morning bottle of Coca-Cola.