A Scenic World

To go from watching “13 Tzameti” to reading Philip Roth.

My headache is gone, but so too is my ability to switch gears so quickly.

#160: I’ve Been Framed!

This photo has quite a backstory, one I can’t really go into right now. Suffice it to say that I work in retail, and sometimes things happen when there’s money involved, and the repercussions aren’t good for anyone involved.

While reading Harry Crews’ excellent A Childhood: A Biography of a Place, I ran across this extraordinary passage:

The night after the day my daddy was buried, somebody went in the smokehouse and stole all the meat that had been cured and hung there before he died. There were nine middlings of meat hanging, and sausage in boxes, and headcheese in muslin cloth, and somebody took it all, everything but one little piece about as big as a man’s hand hanging in the back of the smokehouse.

Mama knows who got the meat, not because she has any hard proof, but because in her heart she knows, and I know, too, but the one who got it is himself lying in the same graveyard daddy’s in and I see no reason to name him.

He was one of my daddy’s friends. I do not say he was supposedly or apparently a friend. He was a friend, and a close one, but he stole the meat anyway. Not many people may be able to understand that or sympathize with it, but I think I do. It was a hard time in that land, and a lot of men did things for which they were ashamed and suffered for the rest of their lives. But they did them because of hunger and sickness and because they could not bear the sorry spectacle of their children dying from lack of a doctor and their wives growing old before they were thirty.

  Back in June, the New York Times printed an article called “Read Any Good Books Lately?” They took a survey of what books notable authors had read and enjoyed recently. My interest was immediately piqued by one of Kathryn Harrison’s choices: “I reread ‘Gordon,’ by Edith Templeton, yet again, and pressed it on a friend, telling her it was my favorite love story. She read it and said, ‘That’s the sickest thing I’ve ever heard you say.’ But it’s true, it is.” How could I not be tempted?

edit: When I posted this on September 17th, the original article cost $4.95 to read. One day later, the NY Times made all its material free! So now you get a link :)