I’m pressing refresh over and over again, waiting for news of Larry Craig’s resignation to come through. Iowa just took back gay marriages, but we got the kids who were the first ones to get hitched on the phone, and they were on their way to their honeymoon. I want to talk about something else. Larry Craig has dominated my entire week with his gross mug shot and with the pity I feel for him.
I am reading this book right now, The Mysteries of Pittsburgh, and I’m not even finished with it yet and it’s my favorite. It’s by Michael Chabon, who wrote The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay, which is still on my fave novels list, and I finally got around to picking up my tattered copy this other work.
There are so many amazing passages and quotes that I feel I need to recount them for my reference, and hopefully to convince someone else to read it.
“There had been a time in high school, see, when I wrestled with the possibility that I might be gay, a torturous six-month culmination of years of unpopularity and girllessness. At night I lay in bed and coolly informed myself that I was gay and that I had better get used to it.”
“It was as though she had studied American notions of beauty from some great distance and had come all the way only to find she had overdone the details: a debutante from another planet.”
“… listened for accents of friendship: the banality, relaxation, and lack of style that characterize a conversation between two friends.”
“‘Let’s drink something cool and refeshing,’ Phlox said, bobbing her head, widening and then narrowing her eyes like some lustful and wily biblical queen. ‘Beer,’ said Arthur and I.”
“‘Hey, every woman, pal, is a volume of stories, a catalogue of movements, a spectacular array of images.’”
“A gin and tonic under its tiny canopy of lime elevates character and makes for enlightened conversation.”
“That evening I rode downtown on an unaccountably empty bus, sitting in the last row. At the front I saw a thin cloud of smoke rising around the driver’s head. ‘Hey, bus driver,’ I said. ‘Can I smoke?’ ‘May I,’ said the bus driver. ‘I love you,’ I said.”
“An unfamiliar restaurant can be a very disorienting thing.”
LOVE. THIS. BOOK.
