canadian headhunter

Sometimes innocent, sometimes not
US Hero Canadian born

I couldn't resist posting a few lines from the NYT obit for Saul Bellow.

I am an American, Chicago born... and go at things as I have taught myself, free-style, and will make the record in my own way: first to knock, first admitted; sometimes an innocent knock, sometimes a not so innocent." -- Augie March

He was a wonderful talker... a champion detractor. To be loused up by Humboldt was really a kind of privilege. It was like being the subject of a two-nosed portrait by Picasso, or an eviscerated chicken by Soutine.
-- Humboldt's Gift

In contrast with some other winners, who were wary of the albatross of the Nobel [Prize], Mr. Bellow accepted it matter-of-factly. "The child in me is delighted," he said. "The adult in me is skeptical." He took the award, he said, "on an even keel," aware of "the secret humiliation" that "some of the very great writers of the century didn't get it."

In 1994, while on a Caribbean vacation with his wife in St. Martin, Mr. Bellow became sick after eating a toxic fish, and almost died...

NYT April 6, 2005
Saul Bellow, Who Breathed Life Into American Novel, Dies at 89
By Mel Gussow and Chuck McGrath