>Not The Obituary Writer

>Someone (you know who you are) said I should post something about Hunter Thompson’s suicide. But I didn’t have anything to say about him, except that I started but didn’t finish Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas, and that my image of him is 90% Uncle Duke and maybe, at most, 10% Thompson himself. So how about Sandra Dee, this someone said. Please. I have less to say. (What I said, was: “What am I, The Obituary Writer?” because Porter Shreve, author of The Obituary Writer, is one of the people I’m looking forward to meeting at the Virginia Festival of the Book next month.)

Meanwhile, I’m reading the current issue of New Letters. There are some interesting pieces in it, including an excerpt from Mary Gordon’s new novel, Pearl, but the highlight for me is the interview with and two short stories by Robert Day, an author new to me. Here’s a paragraph from The Skull Collector:

She’s poking me. But just for fun this time. She knows I won’t take her on the river. Or to Denver. It’s a scab between us. I have this theory that a man’s got to have his own territory. Some place where he’s different from what he is when he’s not there. Not that I’m not who I am when I’m with my wife. I’m me wherever I am. It’s just that there is more than one me. Men are that way. Like my thinking about women, I haven’t got it all lined out, but I’m working on it. Thinking takes time if you do it right.

Good stuff.

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