Lazy Literary Musings™

I liked that Levi appreciated The Dog of the South last year, but felt that...well, his appreciation of Charles Portis was a touch restrained. So it's fun watching him rave over Portis's Masters of Atlantis—in two posts (and counting?)!

And it's also great to see him enjoying Frederick Exley's A Fan's Notes.

I will just say that I finished Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart last night. What a book! I was reading a few other things and suddenly Wild at Heart overtook them. (I'm hoping Levi will read it and write something about it.) It's the first in the single-volume Sailor and Lula: The Complete Novels, which Seven Stories put out last year.

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I like this fake book cover by Scott at Erasing:

Unexpected Allusions™

I.

Johnnie walked down Iberville Street toward the river. He was eager to get back to his hotel room and read more of Robert Burton's The Anatomy of Melancholy. Burton's book, the first treatise on the subject written by a layman, had been published originally in 1621 and was still relevant today. As Johnnie turned the corner and headed north on Decatur, he repeated to himself Burton's definition of melancholy: "A kind of dotage without a fever, having for his ordinary companions fear and sadness, without any apparent occasion.

—from Barry Gifford's Wild at Heart (from Sailor & Lula: The Complete Novels—it's great)

II.

"It's called Playworld," she said. It's loosely based on this Piers Anthony book I read as a kid called Split Infinity. In this world, all anybody does all day long is play games. [...]" —from Adam Ross's Mr. Peanut