Tarpon

Mostly what's held me back is that my mind has been too preoccupied to wander through these realms the last week or so, even with this place sitting here as a reminder to me.

Fortunately chance intervenes.  Got some positive response yesterday to my Brautigan post and as a result spent a little more time trawling around looking for more about him.  I plan on reading Jubilee Hitchhiker, the biography of him, but I'm not sure I was ready this morning.  It starts at the end, you see, and I'm not going to tell you about it today because I'm tired of putting content warnings on every single one of my posts.

Instead I went browsing to see what an Amazon search for "richard brautigan" would turn up.  And one of the things it turned up was this obscure 1973 film called Tarpon.

Tarpon is a Jimmy Buffett film.  I never in my life thought I would actively be seeking out a goddamn Jimmy Buffett film.  That's history I guess, the more you look at it the more it defies your preconceptions.  Buffett isn't in the film, not really.  He liked the sea, he liked Key West, he made a film of a couple of people who liked fishing out there... fishing.

Two of those people I don't know.  One of those people was Richard Brautigan, who liked fishing so much he wrote a book about it once.

Here is a clip from Tarpon from a French TV show that had Jim Harrison, who is in this film, as a guest.  I had to look up Jim Harrison.  Wikipedia says that Jim Harrison is considered "America's foremost master" of the novella, and has a citation to back up that claim, which I guess is why he appeared on French television in 2006.

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=385zMGvi-L4

I got a clip or two more of Brautigan.  Him in '82 reading from his work somewhere in Europe.  Tarpon itself is a deeply obscure film, to the extent that even though I've been a fan of Brautigan's for decades I never ran across before today, by chance.  It's not right now commercially available.  It looks like it was released on DVD in 2007 and I guess that's part of why I didn't hear about it.  I'm interested in a lot of different things and that means I miss a lot.  I'll hear about something great five years or so after it happens and will kick myself, why didn't I know about this?  But It's a big world and a lot of things happen in it.