Philly

"I knew the meek [ain't] inherit shit."

~~ from "Ganny: Truer Words at a Funeral" by Joseph Earl Thomas

nyrb, 05/29/25

The few I've read so far have been engrossing.

 

Memorial Day

"But to me, he didn’t seem like a threatening monster or lunatic who’d fought in both world wars—volunteering to 'kill the Krauts' both times, first as a teenage runaway, the second as a volunteer nearing forty, out too late with his drinking buddies and willing to serve abroad despite three children already and one on the way. I was just a 7-year-old kid excited to see Grandpa, and he seemed like a nice old man. To win us over, he bought gifts, and I can’t remember what mine was, but for my sister, he bought a two-foot-long, plastic baby doll. It was for an age range years below my sister’s, and nothing at all she’d play with, but you could tell he was trying to play the good grandparent despite any talent for the role."

Pirates of Peru

L.U.S.K. enjoyed the South American adventures of talented and ever ebullient Sarah Miller as she traveled to South America in search of a better mood.

McMurtry on Hemingway

"Hemingway's reputation is now so encrusted with a seventy-five-year accumulation of biographical lore--most of it unfavorable to him--that it is easy to forget how well he wrote at the beginning of his career. Picasso said somewhere that no one had looked at Matisse as hard as he had. Hemingway, as a young man, had the same ability to look hard, as hard as a painter, at a place and at the often destructive human emotions operating within a place that was seemingly as lovely as northern Michigan."

~~ from Roads by Larry McMurtry

"Behold My Suit!"

Although Gary Shteyngart interrupts the narrative to brag about the elephants he's slaughtered with his bare hands as well as his Herschel-esque 40-yard-dash time and subtle mastication of both Iron Mike's ears (no double entendre), Hong-Kong Gary manages nevertheless to produce a humane and humble narrative that illuminates a world neither the author nor much of the audience has had access to in any detail. I highly recommend an hour or three away from it all to read the March Atlantic Monthly's "Behold My Suit!"

Saturday Night Substack

I'm not active on Substack, but now I have a post that originated there.

popped right over

"I had feared and despised the [Vietnam] war, but I would have pooped in my pants and popped right over had someone told me to do so—"

~~ from Across My Big Brass Bed by Gary Amdahl

"Sayaka Murata’s Alien Eye"

Elif Batuman's transnational adventure meeting Sayaka Murata several times on various continents ends with Murata's conclusive "People are out of their minds."

Happy Mother's Day

"I can tell she is judging the other mother for being weak, for breaking. She gives me that smile that says she can’t believe I chose to wear these shoes in public and cracks her knuckles."

classic literature and rookie cards

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

Across My Big Brass Bed by Gary Amdahl

I set this one down for a week, but now I'm back into it and almost finished. It's good.

champion of books