Look what I got in the mail

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Actually a couple of weeks ago where it went to my bookshelf and I forgot about it until this morning. It's the copy of Junk Food I ordered last month after finding this quote from a Harry Crews article contained therein. Just finished it, and it's as great as you'd expect.

That's the thing about Crews. His essays are as good as any ever written, and they're just criminally overlooked. I don't want to start a fight about, say, David Foster Wallace, but when I read the kind of accolades he gets for his and I think about Crews, I get a feeling like I've been kicked in the stomach. Not because I don't like DFW's essays, though I don't, but try reading Florida Frenzy or Blook and Grits and not coming away just a little different. Whether the subject is Charles Bronson or the hidden wonders of dog-fighting, they're never easy, they're never cheap, they're always what I think Crews meant when he wrote:

It takes great courage to look where you have to look, which is in yourself, in your experience, in your relationship with fellow beings, your relationship to the earth, to the spirit or to the first cause — to look at them and make something of them.

The obit's up at The New York Times. It's good to see him getting the full treatment, I guess.