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This is the ninth post in a ten-part series for Spectrum’s 2015 Summer Reading Group. Each post will be drawn from chapters of the book Unclean by Richard Beck. You can view the tentative reading/posting schedule here.
At the start of Unclean, Beck quotes from a Walt Whitman poem:
This is the meal pleasantly set…this is the meal
and drink for natural hunger,
It is for the wicked just the same as for the righteous
I make appointments with all.
I will not have a single person slighted or left away,
The kept woman and sponger and thief are hereby invited…
the heavy-lipped slave is invited… the venerealee is invited,
There shall be no difference between them and the rest.