The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy

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Topical Guide 116

peterleroy.substack.com
A Topical Guide to the Personal History

Topical Guide 116

Mark Dorset

Eric Kraft
Oct 22, 2021
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Topical Guide 116

peterleroy.substack.com
pershistitlesmall.jpg

Fragility, Vulnerability

THE COPY OF The Amazing Randy the Unbreakable Record that Matthew gave me was badly worn. Matthew must have played it often. I had to strain to hear Randy through the hissing and popping on the first side. The second side was marked with deep gouges that looked to me as if they had been deliberately made, perhaps with the point of a compass. I couldn’t play that side at all.

Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam”

How can you tell if a record is a 78 rpm LP?: vinyl
From NESPRS, the New England Society for the Preservation of Recorded Sound


Euthanasia

     When I had recovered from the chicken pox and was allowed to go outside, I smashed Randy with a brick and buried him in the back yard. It seemed the decent thing to do.

Little Follies, “The Fox and the Clam”

Immortality

I have revelled in my littleness and irresponsibility. … To me the honour is sufficient of belonging to the universe—such a great universe, so grand a scheme of things. Not even Death can rob me of that honour. For nothing can alter the fact that I have lived; I have been I, if for ever so short a time. And when I am dead, the matter which composes my body is indestructible—and eternal, so that come what may to my “Soul,” my dust will always be going on, each separate atom of me playing its separate part—I shall still have some sort of a finger in the Pie. When I am dead, you can boil me, burn me, drown me, scatter me—but you cannot destroy me: my little atoms would merely deride such heavy vengeance. Death can do no more than kill you.

Wilhelm Nero Pilate Barbellion (Bruce Frederick Cummings), The Journal of a Disappointed Man

[more to come on Monday, October 25, 2021]

Have you missed an episode or two or several?

  • You can catch up by visiting the archive or consulting the index to the Topical Guide.

  • You can listen to the episodes on the Personal History podcast. Begin at the beginning or scroll through the episodes to find what you’ve missed.

  • At Apple Books you can download free eBooks of “My Mother Takes a Tumble,” “Do Clams Bite?,” “Life on the Bolotomy,” and “The Static of the Spheres,” the first four novellas in Little Follies.

  • You’ll find an overview of the entire work in  An Introduction to The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy. It’s a pdf document.

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The serialization of The Personal History, Adventures, Experiences & Observations of Peter Leroy is supported by its readers. I sometimes earn affiliate fees when you click through the affiliate links in a post. EK
The illustration in the banner that opens each episode is from an illustration by Stewart Rouse that first appeared on the cover of the August 1931 issue of Modern Mechanics and Inventions.
www.erickraft.com
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Topical Guide 116

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