So Now II Find That I Paid for Mark Rubio's Back Wax

And here I had grousing still about John Edwards's $400 haircut, which he probably paid for.

A Pleasant Surprise in Lee Patterson's 2006 book on Chaucer, TEMPORAL CIRCUMSTANCES

To understand my delight you would have to know how FLAWED TEXTS AND VERBAL ICONS was trashed after its publication in 1984 by old New Critics and their followers and by the New Bibliographers alike. In the early 90s its reputation began to grow.

A Kind Review by David Seed Discovered Ten Years Late!

 I stumbled across this review today in COMPARATIVE AMERICAN STUDIES 2.1 (March 2004)--just a decade late. Thank you, David Seed. The American reviewers were scathing. Richard Brodhead, Andrew Delbanco, and Elizabeth Schultz all said or implied that I made up two lost books that Melville wrote, THE ISLE OF THE CROSS and POEMS, and Delbanco said I could not be trusted anywhere in any volume because I made these books up. Brenda Wineapple said I wrote fantasy biography like Edmund Morris's DUTCH. How nice to see the review by David Seed.

It is impossible to over­state Parker's skill at organizing an enormous mass of data, much of it available for the first time, into a coherent and engrossing narrative. The documentation for this volume, like its predecessor, is impeccably schol­arly and thorough, and is given in concluding pages without the distrac­tion of footnotes to disrupt the flow of reading. Among the many bodies of information which Parker draws on, the books which Melville knew deserve mention as a special resource. Every chapter carries as its epigraph a quotation which Melville had marked in his copy and these excerpts are just one textual signal that we are being given the life of a mind. This is important to bear in mind because one of Parker's main purposes in the present volume has been to fill in the gap which many accounts of Melville's life have left, thereby implying that he did nothing in the four decades before his death in 1891. . . .

In his last years Melville lived very much within his family and Parker excels at giving a 'thick description' of his life-style, whether at home, staying with relatives, or going on his travels. What astonishes in this narrative is the sheer density of detail- everyone based on contemporary documents - which gives a unique texture to this account of the last phase to Melville's career. Parker's biography represents the ultimate achievement in Melville scholarship and offers the reader a mine of information on one of the formative American writers of the 19th century.

David Seed

Liverpool University, UK

A Battle of New Orleans item: My Uncle John Pyle's brother Nick--Back when Men Could be Ashamed

My Aunt Sarah Brashear was the wife of the younger Dr. John Pyle, who lost an eye in his father's Hacking Match at the hands of the men of Light Horse Harry Lee. The family thinks that the Nicholas as a quite old man rushed to join in the War of 1812 and served through the Battle of New Orleans. My Uncle John, like Nicholas, also ended up in Illinois, first going to western South Carolina after the War with many formerly Loyalist Brashears and his brother-in-law, my Grandfather Ezekiel Henderson, a patriot to survived to enjoy his 1832 pension, and who married Sarah's younger sister Elizabeth.

18. NICHOLAS⁶ PYLE (JOHN⁵, SAMUEL⁴, NICHOLAS³, NICHOLAS², JOHN¹) was born 1748 in Pennsylvania, and died 1829 in Sangamon, Illinois. He married ANN BLACK, daughter of HANS BLACK and AGNES. She was born 1750 in South Carolina, and died 1834 in Sangamon Co, Illinois.

Notes for NICHOLAS PYLE:
NOTES ON NICHOLAS, b. 1748
Moved to Christian Com KY, then in 1817 to Ill. "History of Sangamon Co,
Ill, p.747 & 1059, came w/ sons Alfred & Thompson. He was shunned by his 
neighbors because he was the son of a TORY. On the out break of the War of
1812, he was one of the first to volunteer in the defense of that county
against which his father had fought. He was with Andrew Jackson at the Battle
of New Orleans, and deported himself so gallantly as to compel the admiration
of all who knew him.

Braving 75 degree weather to get an MRI today in SLO

Braving 75 degree weather to get an MRI today in SLO

Any metal in your body?
Oh, yes.

Braving 75 degree weather to get an MRI today in SLO

Any metal in your body?
Oh, yes.

Bruce Townsend Memorial Run--A Tradition Since 1988.

            Today I had my solitary Bruce Townsend Memorial Run on a beach unusually crowded with Boomers and their descendants visiting grandparents and great grandparents who make up the population of Morro Bay. The beach was split halfway to the dunes by a series of lagoons, as it has been for several days, and near the water there were little rivulets to jump. The beach should have been ashamed of itself, with all guests there.

            In 1987 on New Year's Day in Wilmington I started on a run about the time Bruce Townsend, a muscular young man (25? 30?) who rented an apartment near us, was leaving on his run, so we went on together. Diary: “Ran 5 miles—Bruce Townsend (out of shape) with me, very slow, to Old Salem Church.” I did not really know him but I had often seen him out with his bicycle, and in the summer he had helped me carry in a new toilet when I was renovating a little washroom myself. In the fall I had seen him at a meeting but diffidently had not spoken to him.  Outside the Old Salem Church we talked a bit before heading back. He said he was not sure he could live without alcohol and I said I was grimly holding on after just surviving a sodden Modern Language Meeting. Grim is the word: Michael M. had stopped me on a street in Manhattan and asked me whom I had just murdered. I did not see Bruce right away after the run, but it was terribly cold and I was working night and day on the LOG. I was becoming less grim because I was learning to ask “What do you do when?” questions of the old-timers. I kept not seeing Bruce but not thinking to ask about him. Finally in June I asked where Bruce was, and was told. On Tuesday 3 February he dressed in a suit and trench coat and walked three blocks north to the Brandywine River into one of the excrement-dotted brick huts in the trees and shot himself to death. So every New Year's Day I do a Bruce Townsend Memorial Run to remind me what addiction is and how many people, even handsome athletic-looking young men, decide to die grimly for alcohol instead of learning to live joyously without it.