rookie cards and weird books

We've found the eBay reseller of our dreams. Bid now.

"City College"

This week, I read Louis Menand's look back on America's desegregation of schools as well as Vivian Gornick's further considerations of City College in New York City. I'm working on the Larry McMurtry piece by Thomas Powers right now.

home

I think of the opening of The Joke by Milan Kundera whenever I return to Philadelphia.

new books

April 15 was publication day for Mia Kang's collection of poems, All Empires Must; Heather Christle's memoir, In the Rhododendrons; and Andrew Porter's novel, The Imagined Life.

Young Man Luther II

"She quoted liberally from two books by Erik H. Erikson, Young Man Luther and Gandhi's Truth, and then, in an incredible act of generosity spurred by her recognition of me as a genius . . ., gave me her copies [which] were underlined and annotated to the point where the pages were blackened and bloodied with her thoughts."

~~ from Across My Big Brass Bed by Gary Amdahl

Young Man Luther

It was only weeks ago that I'd retrieved my copy of Erik Erikson's Young Man Luther from my storage space; at that point, I'd been separated from the mass market paperback by seventeen years. This past week, thusly, when I ran across a sighting of it on page 173 of Across My Big Brass Bed by Gary Amdahl, I felt reunited again with Erikson's psychoanalytical portrait of a young man; it was one of my favorite assigned readings during my first year of college, one of the greatest reading years of my life. Other writers on that year's history list included Herodotus, Thucydides, Peter Laslett, Karl Marx, E. P. Thompson, and Edmund Wilson. Wilson's To the Finland Station remains one of the most gripping books I've ever read.

small obligations and petty worries

"Oh how I let things pass in those days. I was becoming well known as a hot-head and my instinct urged me unmistakably to never let them think they understood me or could predict my behavior. It did not occur to me then that I would consequently never be trusted. No. It was far more important that I never be trapped by small obligations and petty worries."

~~ from Across My Big Brass Bed by Gary Amdahl

tornado warnings and thunderstorms

There were thunderstorms, tornadoes, and flood warnings on the night I finished Roberto Arlt's The Seven Madmen and The Flamethrowers—a novel of the year 1929; even as I had completed this one long journey, I considered what I might read next.