Status Updates From The Seven Mountains of Thom...

Well, it has been quite a journey with Father Louis/Thomas Merton and on the homestretch now.

Coretta Scott King confirms meeting with Martin Luther King with Merton sometime after his visit to Memphis. Alas... Can you imagine? Fuck it all.

"The quiet of the hermitage is good. The sound of the jazz was good. In between -- a vast morass of nonsense..."
Bless you Thomas Merton for this, you fucking boss.

Resumed reading after a week of distraction. Merton's latter years much more interesting to me than the rest. Only 80 more pages in this edition to go. This guy traipsed all over my neck of the woods; even had a doctor located a mile from me.

Tommy has his ill-fated bad boy episode of lovesick cringe. We are almost done here.

Crazy that I worked for two decades just a few yards from the university art library and went there on some occasions, and now come to find from this book that Merton once visited and studied there. I had no idea.

Gonna get this done pretty soon ... weather permitting.

Blazing now. As Merton has found his jam, this bio has found its.

Description of Merton's middle of the night trek on his first visit to Gesthemani Monastery; the most beautiful writing in the book so far. It has gotten really good now.

The later quarter of the book is actually a big bulk of footnotes, so I'm closer to one-third done.

The Shakespeare professor at Columbia is the most interesting character in the book so far, apart from Merton. Had one or two things differed I think Merton would have been just as effective a pimp as he was a monk. He certainly had a magnetism.

Mott's style is slightly odd to me but I think I have the rhythm, and there's a certain incision to it, given the similarly enigmatic nature of his subject. Mott has to decipher the code of a contradictory record, and he's succeeding.

Man, did this thing pick up the pace once Merton's dad died. Sounds cold af but the book is more interesting now that it's focusing wholly on Merton.

Not a religious guy here, but Merton's a fascinating local character I've heard about constantly all my life through media, his presence in bookstores, radio programs, public TV and so forth. This bio is pretty well written so far but longish, so let's see how it goes.

No thanks to Goodreads "support" I find out on a reddit or other user forum that the way to make new books show up is to eliminate any list of currently reading exceeding 10 books -- a limitation of functionality that did not exist prior to the present site clusterfuckery. These users had to figure this out cuz at GR the right hand doesn't know what the left hand is doing, or the right or left nuts for that matter.