Fresh air

For the time being, I have put aside Knausgaard, with about 400 of 1200 pages of Volume 6 in the rearview. It is still on my bedside table.  It was fucking killing me. He just needed to get on with it.

And so, I am breathing the oxygen of other writers. First I knocked off Pistol, a biography of Pete Maravich by Mark Kriegel (I just had to Google the author's name, it wasn't really sticking to me). This is a good, if not great book about a pretty fascinating figure. Maravich would be more interesting as a figure if he had lived longer, and if he was more multi-dimensional as a character. Or maybe he was, and Kriegel's just not a great writer. His other book is about Joe Namath, so that tells us something about him.

At the conference in Asheville somebody mentioned the autobiography of John Hope Franklin, Mirror to America. I found that it was available on Audible, so I quickly downloaded it and started listening to it on the drive back (I had been listening to a book by Eric Posner and somebody else on using auction mechanisms broadly throughout society to reconfigure everything, which was kind of interesting, but also rather stultifying).

Franklin's book is great. I will say this, if only it were truly a mirror to America, we would all be living in a much better place. For, although Franklin catalogs a number of indignities to which he was subject throughout his life, he transcended every one of them through a herculean work ethic, an unshakable sense of right and wrong, and astounding grace. And his language! If he had a British accent, it is true, I might want to shoot him. But he doesn't. He writes with a formality and erudition which seems to have long since vanished from these shores.

Franklin is someone I will be reading more of, most likely his biography of George Washington Williams, whoever the hell that is. Franklin considered it his crowning achievement, so I will get it.

Right now I am quickly going through John McPhee's The Headmaster, a slim tome (as all of his are) about Frank Boyden, who had run Deerfield Academy for 60 years when McPhee wrote it. It is also lovely, and was already nostalgic 50 years ago.

Soon, I suppose, it will be time to snap out of the past and get back to reality

Graham and I are watching The Wire, which is pretty real. Perhaps more naturalist than realist, but more on that later.