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Day 29 of the government shutdown.
I finished Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs. It's a book I've seen referenced in countless Civil War books. I never intended to read it because for every riveting autobiography that gives you a deeper appreciation of its subject, there are twenty snoozefests that paint them as irredeemable wankbags and tempt you to take up the more pleasurable pastime of filing your teeth with a belt sander, but I saw it in the stacks at the library one day and grabbed it on a whim.
What a delight. After millions of pages of ponderous bafflegab on the Civil War, it was so refreshing to read a clear and concise account of what happened from someone who was there. No puffery, no self-aggrandizement, just a matter-of-fact explanation of the campaigns as he saw them. The language was simple yet possessed of a spare elegance that spoke of a keen intelligence, which is not, I am ashamed to say, what I expected. My image of Grant was as a tough, shrewd country bumpkin who tramped about in rumpled clothes and chainsmoked cigars and had no use for schooling if it didn't relate to the military. More fool me.
Much of the appeal comes from Grant. His narrative voice hints at a plain-spoken, humane man with a deep sense of fairness and honor, and the more I read, the more I imagined sitting on the front porch in Galena, Ohio, listening to the runners of his rocker squeak and mutter against the wood and the rumble of his voice as he recounted his experiences between puffs on a cigar. I was sad to leave him with the turning of the last page, and I will forever regret that he did not live to recount the years of his presidency in similar fashion.
I watched five minutes of an episode of Hawaii 5-0 last night because Eddie Cahill was in it. Eddie is still a snack, but man, Alex O'Loughlin is looking rough. He looks like the last potato in a ten-pound sack, the one that may or may not be a garden gnome's sex toy gone incognito.
I finished Ulysses S. Grant's Personal Memoirs. It's a book I've seen referenced in countless Civil War books. I never intended to read it because for every riveting autobiography that gives you a deeper appreciation of its subject, there are twenty snoozefests that paint them as irredeemable wankbags and tempt you to take up the more pleasurable pastime of filing your teeth with a belt sander, but I saw it in the stacks at the library one day and grabbed it on a whim.
What a delight. After millions of pages of ponderous bafflegab on the Civil War, it was so refreshing to read a clear and concise account of what happened from someone who was there. No puffery, no self-aggrandizement, just a matter-of-fact explanation of the campaigns as he saw them. The language was simple yet possessed of a spare elegance that spoke of a keen intelligence, which is not, I am ashamed to say, what I expected. My image of Grant was as a tough, shrewd country bumpkin who tramped about in rumpled clothes and chainsmoked cigars and had no use for schooling if it didn't relate to the military. More fool me.
Much of the appeal comes from Grant. His narrative voice hints at a plain-spoken, humane man with a deep sense of fairness and honor, and the more I read, the more I imagined sitting on the front porch in Galena, Ohio, listening to the runners of his rocker squeak and mutter against the wood and the rumble of his voice as he recounted his experiences between puffs on a cigar. I was sad to leave him with the turning of the last page, and I will forever regret that he did not live to recount the years of his presidency in similar fashion.
I watched five minutes of an episode of Hawaii 5-0 last night because Eddie Cahill was in it. Eddie is still a snack, but man, Alex O'Loughlin is looking rough. He looks like the last potato in a ten-pound sack, the one that may or may not be a garden gnome's sex toy gone incognito.
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