A few of my favorite things

Ukulele + Wodehouse in one article!

At one point during my visit he pulled down a baritone ukulele from the rack of stringed instruments behind him and strummed it with abandon as he sang a forceful little ditty about pitching woo....

He admired Edgar Rice Burroughs’s tales of John Carter of Mars and, he said, “I waited at the mailbox every month with my tongue hanging out for the latest issue of Weird Tales,” the pulp magazine that featured seminal fantasy writers like Lovecraft, Robert E. Howard, C. L. Moore and Clark Ashton Smith. Vance attended the University of California, Berkeley, but his practical education as a writer came from reading the pulps and other entertainments: L. Frank Baum’s Oz books, the mannered yarns of Jeffery Farnol, the light comedy of P. G. Wodehouse, his literary hero.

—Carlo Rotella, "The Genre Artist," NYT Magazine