Wednesday, April 30, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt twelve)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

He was thirty-one years old and enrolled in the history doctoral program at Volchansk State University. On the day of Mirza’s wedding, he barricaded himself in the university library. He had considered kidnapping her, as Chechen grooms had done since time immemorial when failing to receive the approval of a bride’s parents. But he didn’t want to earn a reputation as a bride kidnapper, particularly not among his professors, and besides, it was too late. That afternoon she would marry the botanist she’d been betrothed to since her ninth birthday, and if botany wasn’t bad enough, the man also had a clubfoot and a collection of pressed flowers. All through the day Khassan read thick philosophical tomes, but not one explained the injustice of a world in which he would lose Mirza to a clubfooted botanist with a passion for pressed flowers. The botanist was a decent man, but Khassan was in love, and thus capable of infinite hate.



Tuesday, April 29, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt eleven)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

“I think you’ll be disappointed.”

“I almost always am.”

“He’s a clown.”

“A clown?”

“A clown who sells hamburgers.”

“Does he cook the hamburgers?”

“Does it matter?”

“I may be an idiot,” he said gravely, “but I would never eat a hamburger cooked by a clown. Anyway, you were telling me about your sister. When she returned from Italy.”



Monday, April 28, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt ten)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

“Has Ula shown any signs of improvement?” her mother asked.

“No. She hasn’t left the bed for over eight months now.”

“Are you any closer to a diagnosis?”

Again, Akhmed shook his head. “Her vitals are fine. Whatever she has exceeds my ability to detect, let alone treat. I make sure she rolls over every couple hours to prevent bedsores. What else can I do?”

“You don’t think there is anything wrong with her, do you?” The question was a queen driven eight squares forward.

“I think the human mind isn’t built to sustain trauma after trauma.”

“Perhaps she needs to learn to care for herself. Perhaps your care is her paralysis.”



Sunday, April 27, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt nine)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

“You think I’m wonderful, don’t you? You think I’m the kindest, bravest, most generous man ever given a pair of feet to step into the world,” he said, and the dog kept licking his hair in reply. “That’s because you’re a stupid dog.”By evening the village still lay under an awning of smoke. Twenty-three had died. Fourteen from gunfire, three from collapsed houses, two from mortar fire, and one from suicide: a ninety-year-old man who had survived two world wars, three heart attacks, and, most debilitating of all, the shame of his firstborn son, a boy who could have been anything but chose to be a puppeteer. The Feds forced three into a cellar and lobbed in a live grenade before shutting the door. Another eighteen were taken to the Landfill, which meant forty-one villagers disappeared that day, to return only by the grace of Akhmed’s pencil. Shortly after Havaa followed her parents home, Akhmed appeared in the doorframe and knelt to knock on the kicked-in door. He needed Havaa’s fingers. In his clinic the wounded lay on every surface flat enough to hold a body. The butt of a Kalashnikov had forever shut a woman’s left eye. The arm of a man who would go on to summit Elbrus bent as if it had three elbow joints. Akhmed’s hand, flaccid on her shoulder, guided Havaa through the waiting room. His office was an operating theater. Mountainous tarpaulin topography spread across his desk, streams flowing into lakes of blood. A lamp sat on the floor, its light pinning the silhouette of Akhmed’s head to the ceiling where it would blankly observe the scene. He spoke as if accountable to her, explaining that this wasn’t a hospital and he wasn’t a surgeon, that he could draw lovely sketches of the wounded but couldn’t save their lives, that the doctors at Hospital No. 6 were unquestionably superior and had the zachistka cordon not blocked all traffic to the city, he would carry each to the hospital on his back to avoid the responsibility of their care.



Saturday, April 26, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt eight)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

Feral and matted, whittled by deprivation, the dogs loped toward the back steps. They had belonged to the neighbors his son had disappeared, and even in this state he knew them by name. They trotted through the hole he’d clipped in the fence and gathered before him in a tight semicircle, jostling and snapping at the thin slivers of apple falling from the kinzhal blade. He held out his hands and they licked the juice from his fingers. Like them, he was unwelcome at the homes of his neighbors and avoided on the street. Like them, he was a pariah. He nuzzled the snout of a brown mutt, reaching from the dog’s muzzle to her ears, and before he knew what was happening, he was holding her as he hadn’t held a human in years. The mutt—which had been a husband’s tenth-anniversary gift to his wife, who had been expecting something smaller, inanimate, and in a box—licked the grease from his hair.

“You think I’m wonderful, don’t you? You think I’m the kindest, bravest, most generous man ever given a pair of feet to step into the world,” he said, and the dog kept licking his hair in reply. “That’s because you’re a stupid dog.”



Friday, April 25, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt seven)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

No longer did he write in his son’s company. Ramzan had learned to speak, though Khassan wished he hadn’t. The boy used his voice like a rubber mallet; can I was the only question that escaped his mouth, never what or how or why. Ramzan wasn’t clever or kind or imaginative, or even overly obedient or cruel or dull, and Khassan built his aversion upon the empty cellar of what his son was not. In the historical sources there were kings and princes whose distaste for their progeny took more sadistic forms than Khassan’s indifference; compared to Ivan the Terrible, he was a paradigm of good parenting. You can choose your son no more than you can choose your father, but you can choose how you will treat him, and Khassan chose to treat his as if he wasn’t there. He chose to write when he should have spoken, to speak when he should have listened. He chose to read his books when he should have watched his son, to watch when he should have approached. One day when Ramzan was eight he entered Khassan’s office and asked his father to teach him to ride a bicycle. “You’ll fall,” Khassan said, without looking up from the page. The moment would haunt him later. What if he had looked up?



Thursday, April 24, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt six)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

“For eight and a half months he cared for her with paternal devotion. But each morning as he set the teacup on the nightstand, he wondered if physical depravation might revive her ailing mind, and so, ten days before Dokka lost his fingers, Akhmed left her teacup in the kitchen. As the day wore on she called his name in cries more confused and desperate with each iteration, until his name was no longer his but a word of absolute anguish. Unable to stand the call of his name, he stayed with Dokka’s wife and daughter for three nights. On the fourth morning he returned and found her on the bedroom floor. The beginnings of bedsores reddened her shoulder blades. In that moment he came to understand that he would spend the rest of his life atoning for the past three days, and that the rest of his life wouldn’t be long enough. He lifted her from the floor and set her beneath the sheets. He took her glass of water from the kitchen, then five more. “You never have to get up again,” he promised her. He laid his head on her chest and her heart pattered against his temple. “Akhmed,” she said. “Akhmed.” His name was now a lullaby.



Wednesday, April 23, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt five)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

“Ramzan hasn’t heard my voice in the one year, eleven months and three days since he began informing. I’ve counted every day of silence. It’s stupid, I know, but silence is the only authority I have left.”



Tuesday, April 22, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt four)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

As a child and an adult, Akhmed had been captivated by stories of Khassan’s sixteen-year odyssey. To a man who had never even been to Grozny, Khassan’s travels rose to the realm of legend. In 1941, the Red Army gave him five bullets and an order to find a gun among the dead. With a rifle pried from frozen fingers in Stalingrad, he shot a path through Ukraine, Poland, and Germany. He pulled two bullets from his left thigh, lost three friends to hypothermia, killed twenty-seven Nazis by bullet, four by knife, three by hand, fought under five generals, liberated two concentration camps, heard the voices of innumerable angels in the ringing of an exploded mortar, and took a sh*t in one Reichstag commode, a moment that would forever commemorate the war’s victorious conclusion. After his years of service he returned to a Chechnya without Chechens. While he had fought and killed and sh*t for the U.S.S.R., the entire Chechen population had been deported to Kazakhstan and Siberia under Stalin’s accusations of ethnic collaboration with the fascist enemy. His commanding officer, a man whose life Khassan had twice saved, was to spend the next thirty-eight years working as a train porter in Liski, where the sight of train rails skewering the sun to the horizon served as a daily reminder of the disgraceful morning he shipped Khassan, the single greatest soldier he’d ever had the pleasure of spitting orders at, to Kazakhstan on a train packed with Russian physicians, German POWs, Polish Home Army soldiers, and Jews. Khassan’s parents hadn’t survived the resettlement, and in 1956, when—after the death of Stalin three years earlier—Khruschev allowed Chechen repatriation, Khassan disinterred their remains and carried them home in their brown suitcase.



Monday, April 21, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt three)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

Dark plumes drifted from distant smokestacks, a chain of wind-rounded mountains, the taste of post-Soviet air like a dirty rag in her mouth. When they reached the bus terminal, she waited until her roller suitcase was safely on the ground before paying the driver. The Samsonite, a final gift from Brendan, might as well have been a neon-lit billboard advertising her foreignness as she rolled it past the imperial-era steamer trunks of other travelers. The nationalized bus line no longer ran routes into Chechnya, but after she had waited for an hour in a three-person line, a clerk directed her to a kiosk that sold lesbian porn, Ukrainian cigarettes, Air Supply cassettes, and tickets on a privately owned bus that made a weekly journey from North Ossetia to Chechnya. The next departure wasn’t until the following morning. Though tired from travel, she knew she wouldn’t sleep. She sat through the night on a wooden bench with one of her shoelaces tied around the suitcase handle to discourage gypsy children from rolling off with it.



Sunday, April 20, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt two)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

“You’re the nurse,” Akhmed said, curtly. “We met earlier.”

“He speaks out of turn, without being addressed,” Deshi observed.

“I just want to say hello.”

“He continues to speak without being spoken to. And he has an ugly nose.”

“I’m standing right here,” Akhmed said, frowning.



Saturday, April 19, 2014

the last book I ever read (Anthony Marra's A Constellation of Vital Phenomena, excerpt one)

from A Constellation of Vital Phenomena by Anthony Marra:

“Are you a bearded one?” she asked.

He reached for his whiskers in embarrassment. “No, no. Absolutely not. I just haven’t shaved recently.”

“What do you want?”

He nodded to the girl. She wore an orange scarf, an oversized pink coat, and a sweatshirt advertising Manchester United, likely, Sonja imagined, from the glut of Manchester apparel that had flooded clothing-drive donations after Beckham was traded to Madrid. She had the pale, waxen skin of an unripe pear. When Sonja approached, the girl had raised the lid of the suitcase, slipped her hand inside, and held an object hidden from Sonja’s view.



Friday, April 18, 2014

the last book I ever read (Post Office by Charles Bukowski, excerpt eight)

from Post Office: A Novel by Charles Bukowski:

“May I ask you why you are resigning? Is it because of disciplinary procedures against you?”

“No.”

“Then what is the reason for your resignation?”

“To pursue a career.”

“To pursue a career?”

He looked at me. I was less than eight months from my 50th birthday. I knew what he was thinking.

“May I ask you what your ‘career’ will be?”

“Well, sir, I’ll tell you. The trapping season in the bayou only lasts from December through February. I’ve already lost a month.”

“A month? But you’ve been here 11 years.”

“All right, then, I’ve wasted 11 years. I can pick up 10 to 20 grand for three months trapping at Bayou La Fourche.”



Thursday, April 17, 2014

the last book I ever read (Post Office by Charles Bukowski, excerpt seven)

from Post Office: A Novel by Charles Bukowski:

But, there were still bits of action. One guy was caught on the same stairway that I had been trapped on. He was caught there with his head under some girl’s skirt. Then one of the girls who worked in the cafeteria complained that she hadn’t been paid, as promised, for a bit of oral copulation she had supplied to a general foreman and three mailhandlers. They fired the girl and the three mailhandlers and busted the general foreman down to supervisor.

Then, I set the post office on fire.



Wednesday, April 16, 2014

the last book I ever read (Post Office by Charles Bukowski, excerpt six)

from Post Office: A Novel by Charles Bukowski:

She stopped, then came on over. “Hi, Hank. How are you?”

I knew her from the central post office. She worked another station, the one near the water fountain, but she seemed more friendly than most.

“I’ve got the low blues. Third funeral in two years. First my mother, then my father. Today, an old girl friend.”

She ordered something. I opened the Form.

“Let’s catch this second race.”

She came over and leaned a lot of leg and breast against me. There was something under that raincoat. I always look for the non-public horse who could beat the favorite. If I found nobody could beat the favorite, I bet the favorite.

I had come to the racetrack after the other two funerals and had won. There was something about funerals. It made you see things better. A funeral a day and I’d be rich.



Tuesday, April 15, 2014

the last book I ever read (Post Office by Charles Bukowski, excerpt five)

from Post Office: A Novel by Charles Bukowski:

Then he went to the back of the lecture platform and pulled down a big map. And I mean big. It covered half the stage. A light was shone upon the map. And the big Italiano took a pointer with the little rubber nipple on the end of it like they used in grammar school and he pointed to the map:

“Now, you see all this GREEN? Well, there’s a hell of a lot of it. Look!”

He took the pointer and rubbed it back and forth along the green.

There was quite a bit more anti-Russian feeling then than there is now. China had not yet begun to flex her muscles. Vietnam was just a little firecracker party. But I still thought, I must be crazy! I can’t be hearing right? But nobody in the audience protested. They needed jobs. And according to Joyce, I needed a job.

Then he said, “Look here. That’s Alaska! And there they are! Looks almost as if they could jump across, doesn’t it?”



Monday, April 14, 2014

the last book I ever read (Post Office by Charles Bukowski, excerpt four)

from Post Office: A Novel by Charles Bukowski:

You had to keep one foot on the floor at all times. One notch up on the restbar. What they called a “restbar” was a little round cushion set up on a stilt. No talking allowed. Two 10 minute breaks in eight hours. They wrote down the time when you left and the time when you came back. If you stayed 12 or 13 minutes, you heard about it.

But the pay was better than at the art store. And, I thought, I might get used to it. I never got used to it.



Sunday, April 13, 2014

the last book I ever read (Post Office by Charles Bukowski, excerpt three)

from Post Office: A Novel by Charles Bukowski:

Then I started coming home unhappy.

“What’s the matter, Hank?”

I had to get drunk every night.

“It’s the manager, Freddy. He has started whistling this son. He’s whistling it when I come in in the morning and he never stops, and he’s whistling it when I go home at night. It’s been going on for two weeks!

“What’s the name of the song?”

Around the World In Eighty Days. I never did like that song.”



Saturday, April 12, 2014

the last book I ever read (Post Office by Charles Bukowski, excerpt two)

from Post Office: A Novel by Charles Bukowski:

There was death in that place on the hill. I knew it the first day I walked out the screen door and into the backyard. A zinging binging buzzing whining sound came right at me: 10,000 flies rose straight up into the air at once. All the backyards had these flies—there was this tall green grass and they nested in it, they loved it.

Oh Jesus Christ, I thought, and not a spider within five miles!

As I stood there, the 10,000 flies began to come back down out of the sky, settling down in the grass, along the fence, the ground, in my hair, on my arms, everywhere. One of the bolder ones bit me.

I cursed, ran out and bought the biggest fly sprayer you ever saw. I fought them for hours, raging we were, the flies and I, and hours later, coughing and sick from breathing the fly killer, I looked around and there was as many flies as ever. I think for each one I killed they got down in the grass and bred two. I gave it up.



Friday, April 11, 2014

the last book I ever read (Post Office by Charles Bukowski, excerpt one)

from Post Office: A Novel by Charles Bukowski:

“Mailman! Mailman!”

“Yes, ma’am?” I asked.

“YOUR MAIL IS GETTING WET!”

I looked down at my pouch and sure enough, I had left the leather flap open. A drop or two had fallen in from a hole in the porch roof.

I walked off. That does it, I thought, only an idiot would go through what I am going through. I am going to find a telephone and tell them to come get their mail and jam their job. Jonstone wins.

The moment I decided to quit, I felt much better. Through the rain I saw a building at the bottom of the hill that looked like it might have a telephone in it. I was halfway up the hill. When I got down I saw it was a small café. There was a heater going. Well, sh*t, I thought, I might as well get dry. I took off my raincoat and my cap, threw the mailpouch on the floor and ordered a cup of coffee.



Thursday, April 10, 2014

the last book I ever read (Gore Vidal's Burr, excerpt eighteen)

from Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal:

In August 1839, Samuel Swartwout, collector of the port of New York, sailed for England. A few weeks later it was discovered that he had stolen from public funds one and a quarter million dollars: the most money ever stolen by an American official if not, very simply, the most money ever stolen by an American. Sam Swartwout will no doubt become a folk hero once the first wave of indignation ceases. Meanwhile, he has damaged the reputation of former President Jackson who was responsible for putting Sam in the way of being a thief on the largest scale. Worse, the scandal of his theft helped the Whig candidate William Henry Harrison defeat President Van Buren in the election last month. The poignant result of all this history is that there will be a new American consul at Amalfi next spring. As much as I am impressed by the extravagance of Sam’s crime, I cannot say that I like losing my job because of it.



Wednesday, April 9, 2014

the last book I ever read (Gore Vidal's Burr, excerpt seventeen)

from Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal:

As I entered the drawing-room, I was astonished to see that John Marshall was a member of the company. If he was startled to see me, he made no sign. Later Wickham told me that Marshall quite properly questioned the wisdom of a judge dining with a man who must soon appear before him on a grave charge; nevertheless, he had decided to attend the dinner.

We bowed to one another across the room, and I promptly sought the company of my various lawyers (I would have preferred the company of ladies but none ever attended Mr. Wickham’s legal dinners). That season, by the way, was a splendid one for the ladies; or perhaps I should say for their admirers. The so-called Empire fashion had swept America and even the most respectable of maidens (and, alas, the most mature of matrons) wore high bodices two-thirds bare. It is a moot point which issue most concerned the republic in the summer of 1807: my alleged treason or the brazen and ubiquitous baring of breasts that called forth from every pulpit warnings of the wrath of Jehovah. The lascivious press was in an ecstasy: teats and treason—could any other combination be more popular?



Tuesday, April 8, 2014

the last book I ever read (Gore Vidal's Burr, excerpt sixteen)

from Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal:

I have never in my life seen so much rain as fell that February in the endless Mississippi forest. Our clothes were never dry. Even when the rain for a moment stopped, we managed to get wet again as we forded swollen, muddy streams in which we soon grew accustomed to the snakes that swam alongside us like so many sticks of wood come slimily alive.



Monday, April 7, 2014

the last book I ever read (Gore Vidal's Burr, excerpt fifteen)

from Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal:

From St. Louis I moved east to Vincennes where I stayed with the governor of the Indiana Territory. William Henry Harrison was then a slight, horse-faced young Virginian in his early thirties. I delivered a letter to him from Wilkinson which he read, rather slowly, and said, as slowly, “Well, Colonel, he says the fate of the union depends upon your being returned to Congress as Indiana’s delegate.”

“General Wilkinson never exaggerates. I am sure he is right. But happily for your territory my fate takes me in another direction.” That was the end of that “promotion.”

Harrison is a most amiable man but his early rise in the world is as mysterious to me as his subsequent fall must appear to him. I am told that he is now a clerk of the court of common pleas at Cincinnati after a career which took him from the governorship of Indiana to the United States Senate. Along the way he engaged in a small skirmish with the Indians which was exaggerated by the press into a great victory, rather on the order of Monmouth Court House. But that seems to be the American pattern. Despite our numerous heroic generals and colonels and coon-skin Indian fighters, Americans are almost always defeated in battle whether it be by the British or by the Indians or even by the Spanish. Since 1775 we have had only three proper victories: Gates at Saratoga, Lee at Charleston, and Jackson at New Orleans (a battle fought after we had already lost that particular war to the British). Yet so formidable is the national conceit that any man who has ever heard so much as a bullet’s hiss is acclaimed a hero, no matter how fast he might have run from the enemy.



Sunday, April 6, 2014

the last book I ever read (Gore Vidal's Burr, excerpt fourteen)

from Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal:

From Frankfort I rode through green jungle to Nashville in Tennessee, arriving May 29. I sent a message to Major-General Andrew Jackson of the Tennessee militia, asking if I might call on him. I then went to sleep in the best room of the new Nashville Inn. An hour later I was awakened by a crowd which had gathered outside my boarding-house. I showed myself, and was duly cheered. They rather liked the idea that I had killed Alexander Hamilton. They also knew that I had worked hard to admit their state to the union. Finally, they hated Spain and, like the Kentuckians, the Tennesseans were as greedy for loot as any Roman.

The next morning I was awakened at dawn by a great shouting below my window. I looked out and there was himself, General Jackson on a tall horse, swearing at a slave who had provoked his terrible temper.

When Jackson saw me at the window, he took off his hat, waved it around his head and bellowed, “By the Eternal, this is the greatest moment in the history of Tennessee! Now damnit, Colonel, get dressed and come on down and we’ll have breakfast at my house.” I did as I was instructed.



Saturday, April 5, 2014

the last book I ever read (Gore Vidal's Burr, excerpt thirteen)

from Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal:

I recall nothing of our excellent dinner except that the French wine was not only good to drink but promptly produced a lecture on the making of wine. I herewith note for history that this lecture had in no way changed its form from the last time I had been honoured with it. Jefferson played his mind rather the same way he played his fiddle, being especially fond of the old tunes.

There was also a miraculous dessert that I had not encountered before; it consisted of ice-cream served in a shell of hot pastry.



Friday, April 4, 2014

The Exotic One, Adrian Street



"They say you learn by your mistakes. I think that's why I'm so knowledgeable. If there's a mistake to be made in my life, I've made it. But there you go. That's the way you learn."

I was fortunate enough to interview Exotic Adrian Street, one of my favorite wrestlers of all-time, for Deadspin. It was truly an honor and a pleasure from start to finish. My sincere thanks to both Adrian and Miss Linda for making this happen.



the last book I ever read (Gore Vidal's Burr, excerpt twelve)

from Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal:

Today the Colonel was in a most curious and excited mood. “If it amuses you, Charlie, we shall go to the Heights of Weehawk and I shall act out for you the duel of the century, when the infamous Burr slew the noble Hamilton, from behind a thistle—obviously a disparaging allusion to my small stature. Yet Hamilton was less than an inch taller than I thought now he looms a giant of legend, with a statue to his divinity in the Merchants’ Exchange, his temple. While for me no statue, no laurel, only thistle!”

I was delighted and somewhat embarrassed. Burr almost never speaks of the duel; and most people, unlike Leggett, are much too nervous of the subject ever to bring it up in his presence even though it is the one thing everyone in the world knows about Aaron Burr, and the one thing it is impossible not to think of upon first meeting him.

He killed General Hamilton,” my mother whispered to me when the elegant little old man first came into our Greenwich Village tavern, after his return from Europe. “Take a good look at him. He was a famous man once.”



Thursday, April 3, 2014

the last book I ever read (Gore Vidal's Burr, excerpt eleven)

from Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal:

“A marvelous invention, in theory at least.” I was polite. I had already seen a similar invention in Jefferson’s town house. During the night the bed would rest on the floor; during the day it would be hauled up to the ceiling by ropes. I cannot think why.

For some time, Jefferson discoursed impressively on Newton’s theory of gravity and the inverse square which entirely accounted for the delicious fact that a heavy bed unless secured by strong ropes will always fall to the floor.

Dinner was served at three o’clock on the lawn where we were tolerably shaded by tall plane-trees. Despite the heat we did more than justice to the wonders from the Jefferson kitchen and cellar, served us by a French major-domo named Petit. One always dined royally at the great democrat’s table.



Wednesday, April 2, 2014

the last book I ever read (Gore Vidal's Burr, excerpt ten)

from Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal:

The President received me in his stately office. He had entirely redone the Morris House to make it resemble a royal palace. A diffident young secretary bowed me into the presence.

Washington stood before the fire, as though expecting to be painted. The altogether too famous sallow face was considerably aged. He was also in pain from carbuncles. He greeted me solemnly. Since he remained standing, we faced one another before the fire like ill-matched andirons.

I asked him questions about the Revolution; he made evasive answers. Both questions and answers are now lost. I do recall his cold benediction: “It is a most useful task, Senator Burr, that you are engaged upon.” Plainly he was not happy with my line of questioning which seemed to stress unduly his defeats.



Tuesday, April 1, 2014

the last book I ever read (Gore Vidal's Burr, excerpt nine)

from Burr: A Novel by Gore Vidal:

The Colonel gave a soft moan. “You know, Charlie, I made a great error—that is, of the many great errors I have made in my life, the worst was supposing that one could not be hurt by a lie. As a result, I never corrected a slander. I simply assumed that since there were so many honourable men in the world who knew my character, matters would be set straight in time. Well, I was wrong. Friends drop away, die. While the slanders never cease, never!” Burr spoke with stoic wonder. No bitterness that I could detect.