"The Amphibian Soul" Saul Bellow, the Great, has passed. Nobody better made words living, breathing entities than this man. To read him is collapse into a world more alive than your own. So many images from his novels make up the favorite parts of my mind: Charlie Citrine staring at his destroyed Mercedes, Moses Herzog watching Valentine Gersbach wash Herzog's child, Eugene Henderson loopily traversing a tarmac in Newfoundland, Benn Crader and his sponsors engrossed in a Japanese sex club, and (as would be most fitting for today's news) Tommy Wilhelm weeping uncontrollably at a funeral of a man he never knew. I will miss wondering about what he was thinking somewhere.
When our professor Gerhard Bach taught a course on the man and his work, he mentioned an interview he had with Bellow on a book he had been working on since the early nineties tentatively titled All Marbles Accounted For. With a title like that it sounded like a masterpiece of masterpieces. If released posthumously (as I am sure will eventually be the case), I hope it comports with his wishes for the highest of standards.
It is time to mourn. We have lost another great. Not often are we blessed with one such as him.  ¶ 9:43 PM