not necessarily the safest place to be

"I was having a lot of problems with my dad. . . We had an argument, and [my dad] says, 'You didn't suffer. He says what you are you whining about? You had easy duty.' Which was true."

"Right. But. . . it's still the military. You're still away from home. It's still not necessarily the safest place to be . . . that's where I struggle with the hierarchy of service. . . [E]veryone served. We just served in different capacities."

The Life and Times of a Korean Veteran Renaissance Man

Once he gets going, this artist-writer-veteran-polio-survivor-German-translator-mime-masseuse-soldier-on-the-Korean-wall-during-Vietnam is good. Have a listen.

 

Mencken's Joyce

"[H.L. Mencken's] the Smart Set published two stories by James Joyce, 'A Little Cloud' and 'The Boarding-House,' in the May issue, the first time that any of any of Joyce's work had appeared in an American publication. (It would also be the last time he appeared in the Smart Set, since Mencken had no use for his later work, dismissing Ulysses as 'deliberately mystifying and mainly puerile. . . . I have never been able to get over a suspicion that Joyce concocted it as a kind of vengeful hoax.)"

~~ from The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout

satsuma

"She hands me a tiny, perfect segment of satsuma, like a sunset."

~~ from "iPad Baby" by Devika Kaul

Mencken's Nietzsche

"[H.L.] Mencken was too commonsensical, too solidly grounded in the reporter's world of things as they are, to readily grasp the essence of so tortured a soul. His Nietzsche is an all-American type, a world-improving, can-do go-getter delighted to have through the fraud of Christianity and gone beyond good and evil: 'He applied the acid of critical analysis to a hundred and one specific ideas, and his general conclusion, to put it briefly, was that no human being had a right, in any way or form, to judge or direct the actions of any other being. Herein we have, in a few words, that gospel of individualism which all our sages preach today.'"

~~ from The Skeptic: A Life of H.L. Mencken by Terry Teachout

pay a little

Why pay a little when you can pay a lot? Right. Sincerely, if anyone is interested in a $10 shipped paperback copy of Auggie's Revenge or slightly more for Fight for Your Long Day, I may well be able to deliver.