December 14, 2010
Why Worry?
The Why Worry foxhounds
Charles Sainsbury-Plaice photo
Charles Sainsbury-Plaice photo
"Would you like to ride up with me?" asked George Thomas, MFH and huntsman of the Why Worry Hounds. Thomas is a direct descendant of the Bywaters family of Virginia—renowned foxhound breeders of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries—and he hunts a pack of Crossbred hounds, most of which carry the old Bywaters bloodlines. The meet was at Basset Hill in Aiken, South Carolina, home of Ward and Mary Lou Welsh. I was being offered a chance to watch a lovely pack of hounds work their country.
Horsey Book Wins National Book Award
Lord of Misrule by Jaimy Gordon won the National Book Award for Fiction last month. The book’s title is taken from the name of a horse at a seedy, fictional racetrack in West Virginia. As a novelist, Jaimy Gordon has been championed by a few during her years of obscurity, and was, as the New York Times acknowleges in their review, barely noticed by that august publication at all. The Times admits, however, that “this novel is so assured, exotic and uncategorizable, with such an unlikely provenance, that it arrives as an incontrovertible winner, a bona fide bolt from the blue. The story emerges from that hidden world—the backstretch of the racetrack—unknown to even most horse enthusiasts. It is authoritatively drawn by the author with imaginative characters and inspired dialog. The book is divided into four horseraces, the intrigue deriving not so much from the question of which horse will win but from murkier issues such as the rules of claiming races and the archane culture of the backstretch. Read more in Janet Maslin’s column in the New York Times.December 14, 2010
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Sporting Art with Punch
Coming In for a Landing, oil on canvas panel, 20 x 16
When I look at Susan Smolensky’s oil paintings I hear horses splattering brush, I feel the jocks’ precariousness as they go airborne. Grass flies and a horse grimaces momentarily as it's snagged in the mouth. There’s not a strip horse in the lot, but the artist’s exaggerations add to the dynamics of the instant.
