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Tag: Richard Yates

2013

Sunday, June 16th

father and son

Brian Blade (drums) & The Fellowship Band, with Brady L. Blade Sr. (vocals), “Amazing Grace,” live, Savannah, Ga. (2012)


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lagniappe

reading table

Some things endure. When my sons, Alex and Luke, were in grade school, I started a two-person “reading group” with each of them. We would read novels together, maybe one a month, alternating choices, and go out and talk about them over a meal. Alex is now twenty-five. This morning we’re going out for breakfast, where we’ll be talking about a short story by Richard Yates, “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired.” Of stories there is no end.

When Franklin D. Roosevelt was President-elect there must have been sculptors all over America who wanted a chance to model his head from life, but my mother had connections.

—Richard Yates (1926-1992), “Oh, Joseph, I’m So Tired” (first sentence)

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2011

Monday, 11/21/11

You can’t write a song like this, you can’t play it like this, unless your ears are open to all kinds of music.

Allen Toussaint, “Southern Nights,” live

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lagniappe

reading table

If they find a copy of Richard Yates’s Eleven Kinds of Loneliness, they buy it. It is as if they’ve found a baby on the front step. They peek inside, examine the dog-earing, the marginal scribbles. Or perhaps it’s a clean copy, which carries its own kind of sadness. In either case, they embrace it, though they already have multiple copies. Those are irrelevant to the one they would be abandoning if they left the book behind. This is a hostess gift you can give any fiction writer, guaranteed to delight her even though she already has it. Regifting becomes an act of spreading civilization.

—Ann Beattie, Mrs. Nixon: A Novelist Imagines a Life (2011), “7 Truths About Writers” (#2)

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