the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt four)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

Friday evening after work, the young men go to the baseball games, in their suits and ties and sunglasses, having plain American fun. It touches my heart, because they don’t have plain American fun where I come from, it is too exotic and remote for that, it is the dark side. They don’t have baseball in New Orleans. It’s not normal enough to have baseball.

In New York I learned quite a bit about baseball as to many a Northerner it is his great love. But what interested me about it was not perhaps the same thing that interested them. I like how all the ball players have marital problems and personality problems and need sports psychiatrists, and especially in baseball where you don’t have to be that athletic or it’s not as strenuous in a way the players are all dissipated wrecks with drug problems, chain-smoking. That would maybe work in New Orleans. Baseball would maybe work in New Orleans because all the players are dissipated wrecks with troubled relationships with their fathers, chain-smoking. But they are tough guys. Except for when they retire, then they cry. The whole thing is an emotional roller coaster, at least for me, trying to keep up with their problems. That’s what I like about it.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt three)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

There were ancient unpainted houses crumbling on the Gulf beside huge palms, and plaques on the houses designating their old age with French heraldry—it being a French town, near to Mobile. Mardi Gras was begun there one midnight by some drunk young men who later brought it to New Orleans.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt two)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

It was hurricane season. There was the ceaseless news of hurricanes coming up from the Gulf Coast. Born-again Christians raved on the radio. There was a hint of disaster. The palm trees were slightly awry in the storm, leaning dangerously toward the old hotel, in the black night.

But the news of the hurricanes only made it more exciting, adding a certain dark gaiety, while the storm lashed against the palms.

the last book I ever read (Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann, excerpt one)

from Sportsman's Paradise: A Novel by Nancy Lemann:

“Guess what?” he said shyly. “There’s a continent called Nuttin and they make nuts there.”

“Oh really? Well, there’s a certain continent I know of called Europe, with a certain country called France, and a certain person that I know of forgot the whole entire thing.”

“Do you like cole slaw?” Al said urgently. “I don’t.”

Conversation with a three-year-old involves wide leaps among a disparate variety of subjects.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt sixteen)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

When the light of day had faded and he could no longer see the paper to write, Gauguin would get up to sit at his harmonium, playing into the dark. Ky Dong was sad to see his friend Gauguin depressed, spending long days peering through his spectacles to write down obsessive thoughts and seeming to have given up on making pictures. Ky Dong was no artist, but one day he took up a position at the easel and started, or pretended to start, to make a portrait of Gauguin.

This had the desired provocative effect of launching him from his bed to grab the brush from Ky Dong, take up a mirror and finish the portrait himself. It was his last self-portrait. Innovative as ever, Self-Portrait, 1903 looks forward, as well as back. Forward to his own death, back to the Graeco-Roman mummy portraits from Roman Egypt that he had seen decades ago in the Louvre, and that now he was referencing while he forged another link in the chain. He portrayed himself to the funerary formula: full face, limited colour palette, short Roman haircut, antique tunic, exaggerated highlights on forehead, cheek and throat. His temples are grizzled; his eyes behind the wire-rimmed spectacles are thoughtful and calm, as though fixed on another world. He gave the picture to Ky Dong.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt fifteen)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

Nothing gave Gauguin greater pleasure than de Monfreid’s report of a running duel in the salesroom between Degas and the collector Stanislas-Henri Rouart bidding against each other for Gauguin’s pictures. De Monfreid further reported that Degas had requested to be alerted in good time when shipments of Gauguin’s paintings were expected in Paris. ‘Write to him,’ said Gauguin. ‘I have always been afraid to do so, and with good cause. He would only think I was doing it for a purpose, and I know him. If he can, and wants to help me, he will do it more easily and more gladly of his own volition than if I were to ask him.’

Gauguin was starting to feel secure that a market in his paintings, though small, was steady. So it came as a shock when, in 1899, after receiving 1,000 francs from de Monfreid in January (half of which came from the sale of Nevermore to the composer Frederick Delius, a great devotee of Edgar Allan Poe), no money arrived throughout the rest of the year. By June, he was getting desperate.

the last book I ever read (Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux, excerpt thirteen)

from Wild Thing: A Life of Paul Gauguin by Sue Prideaux:

But his heart had not killed him. He must take matters into his own hands.

‘I went into the mountains where my body would be devoured by ants. I had no revolver, but I had arsenic which I had saved up while I was so ill with eczema. Whether the dose was too strong or whether the vomiting counteracted the action of the poison, I don’t know; but after a night of terrible suffering, I returned home.’

It was the ultimate failure: he could not even manage to kill himself. Before the suicide attempt, when he had been lying in bed writing his religious testament, he had not had the strength or the will to paint, but now he felt an urgent need. Words were not enough to leave behind; he would paint his spiritual creed and confession. He gave it the title: Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?