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.

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.

the inner life

"To focus on the inner life today—to read books, to imagine with no ulterior agenda, to reflect on painful or confusing experiences—is to defy the clamoring edicts of our age, the buy messages, the endless pleas for followers and likes.

"Writers have to find a different way of being in the world. The making of literature is the manner by which we come to understand our inner lives, by which we travel in difficult truth toward elusive mercy, and thereby reaffirm the bonds of human kindness."

~~ from Truth is the Arrow, Mercy is the Bow by Steve Almond

#fridayreads

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Whatever happened to that black "poem" tee-shirt?