excerpts

[Jacob]

Two passages that slay me:

“Then I bought a chair, trundling it in a wheelbarrow along 7th Avenue. I recalled how Crates insulted whores to discipline himself, and to reprove froward flesh, I passed out cards on which was written, ‘For the frog drinking-water, for the snail cabbage and thyme, but for a rebuke nobody’. A newsvendor considered me so droll I had diarrhoea three days.”

"One day, Ephraim Bedlam, the water-drinker and raw carrot and celery philosopher, who always smelled like musk or gymnasium sweat, tweaked me on the cheek, asking, 'Have you seen any human beings lately?' "