The Demo Site

In the middle of his Sunday breakfast, or so it seemed from my voicemail box, Larry Littlebird called to thank me for some eggs I’d gifted him. A dozen distinct shades somewhere between turquoise and latte, "They were SO delicious and SO beautiful," he quaked. "I almost couldn't let go of the cracked shells!" Yesterday, when we had a chance to chat, he’d read my post about art and hunting. “If they know how to bless, hunters ARE artists,” he explained, “and artists ARE hunters as long as they don’t bow to the pressures of the market. Markets cloud perceptions.” This made sense from a man who often smells his prey before seeing it, who asks you to listen with your feet, and who suggests that we all can hear quite clearly with our hearts.

And it made extra-special sense in the wake of J. D. Salinger’s death. Underscoring this theme of “artist as in-tune observer” Adam Gopnik this week in “The New Yorker” rightly concludes, “It was Salinger’s readiness to be touched, and to be touching, his hypersensitivity to the smallest sounds and graces of life. . . .Writing, real writing, is done not from some seat of fussy moral judgment but with the eye and ear and heart.”