BusterStronghart@Gmail.com

I have obtained the Peter Watson book from the library. The Modern Mind

It is a weighty volume which I have looked through and it seems to me (at this point) that it is almost a quick, light,very long, bring-me-up-to-date-Charlie-about-what-happened-while-I- was-asleep-during-the-twentieth-century gossip column. Most of what I have skipped through was stuff that I already knew from general conversation and magazine articles.
Noting what I thought was another coincidence, I skipped over to the paragraphs on TH Lawrence, mistaking it, at first, for DH Lawrence who, as you probably remember, was the current subject of Dubin, the adulterous-lost-soul-biographer.

Of course, I excuse my mistake as it was three-thirty in the morning and I had woken myself from a disturbing dream involving Katz Drug Store, a fire, and an aged geriatric doctor whom I knew in Brooklyn when it was me that was a lost soul, among other things.

But then that wasn't really the Watson book that I was reading; rather, it was another heavy tome, by William T. Vollmann, called RISING UP and RISING DOWN, which I recommend to you, even though it is lengthy, although abridged from a seven volume essay on violence.

Even more than Vollmanns' essays I recommend his fiction some of which I previously recommened to you and which you may have read, namely, The Rifles.

Volllman: 730 pp (abridged from 3500 pp)
Watson: 850 pp.
Malamud 361 pp
............. 1941 pp

I will finish the Malamud, but I have little hope for the Vollmann and Watson.