July '25 Reading

 Goals for this month: more Vinge, Roman history, and final catch up with magazine backlog. 

1. NYer of 6/16/25. Gertrude Berg, "Mother of the Sitcom."
2. The Nation of July/August 2025. Your pain, "She has nothing to eat but story" (from "Nothing Survives Without Food," a poem by Leah Naomi Green)
3. NYer of 5/30/22. “There are some who claim the automobile will replace the bicycle, but this is rank nonsense,” a Maine magazine reported in 1899. “Those who have become attached to their bicycles—there are several millions of bicycle riders—will not easily give up the pleasure of skimming along the country like a bird...  for the more doubtful delight of riding in the cumbersome, ill-smelling automobile.”
4. The Annals of Imperial Rome by Tacitus. "The enemies lined the shore in a dense armed mass. Among them were black-robed women with dishevelled hair like Furies, brandishing torches. Close by stood Druids, raising their hands to heaven and screaming dreadful curses." 
5. NYer of 6/9/25. Fascinating piece on Nutella's Algerian competitor, El Mordjene. 
6. NYer of 4/3/23. One fifth of respondents who want the U.S. to be a "Christian nation" identify as secular. 
7. The Two Towers by JRRT.  But which towers? I suppose it's Saruman's and Sauron's, but the only direct reference is the gate into Mordor that the hobbits don't take.
8. First Dawn by Mike Moscoe. Absurd premise (the U.S. government orders a mission to go back in time and stop the first instance of militarized violence, thus preserving the matriarchy), but a real page-turner. 
9. My Death by Lisa Tuttle. A quick, captivating read. 
10. Queen of Air and Darkness by T.H. White. Magic is a mixture of feminine allure and animal abuse, it seems. 
11. NYer of 5/26/25. "Her mother had misread something about the Property Brothers on the internet and was insisting that they were being persecuted for being Christian" (Fairy Pools by Patricia Lockwood)

June '25 Reading

Starting off with some Roman history then some hard sf. May finally finish NYer backlog as well. We'll see how it goes. 

1. NYer of 3/28/22. Paumgarten on Jimmy Buffet: "A poor man's Gordon Lightfoot grows into a drinking man's Martha Stewart, hardly having to change his tune."
2. NYer of 6/2/25. Sonaran style flour tortillas. Carmello brand out of Kansas (Hannah Goldfield)
3. SPQR by Mary Beard. Lots of good ancient trivia. Did you know that the Emperor usually adopted his successor, often as an adult?
4. A Deepness in the Sky. Something about a big fat space opera in the summer. This one didn't really have a hero--one sadistic torturer, one would-be galactic emperor, one spider-planet disrupting inventor. Lots of cool weird stuff, from the On-Off star to the Focused. Oh, and all along the bad guys are like "once they develop the internet we can take them over." But it's from hacking missile command, not media manipulation.
   
5. The Nation of June 2025. From a review of Guillory's On Close Reading: "But if we embrace a broader definition of close reading, if we take a closer look at how it works and what is required of it when it succeeds, we can teach it better. We can specify the steps of close reading, even if no close reading succeeds by performing the steps alone but requires beauty and grace. We can note that one should delimit the context for the text and one’s reading of it. One should quote a detail worth noticing and construct an argument to persuade one’s reader how to understand that detail, why it matters, and how it changes what we know about the text. Each of these steps entails skills that we can teach and that can sometimes blossom—with, yes, practice and imitation—into beautiful performances. We can, in other words, democratize close reading."
6. Sex Criminals v. 3 It's still good.
7. Sex Criminals v. 4 Robert Rainbow. 
8. NYer of 6/30/25. Mutter Museum of medical oddities in Philadelphia comes to terms with consent and exploitation. 
9. NYer of 6/xx/25. Merve Emre on history of advice columns, including Reddit's AITA

April '25 Reading

 Starting out with Catullus for National Poetry Month, then on to Ovid. 

1. The Nation of April 2025. Elie Mystal on airline regulation--fixing prices on flights is like stamps. "The CAB [Civil Aeronautics Board] would give popular, well-travelled routes to airlines if the airlines agreed to serve less popular routes as well, for a fixed fee. It was a way to make air travel from NY to Akron affordable, because that route was subsidized by the fares for NY to Chicago."
2. Poems of Catullus translated by Peter Whigham. Catullus is a rapper with erudite vocab, an arsenal of different flows, private references, and nasty sex rhymes. 
3. The NYer of 4/7/25. Daniel Mendelsohn on Catullus: " Much of the poem [Attis] takes the form of an anguished monologue the young man delivers after he wakes up the next day, short on body parts and long on regrets."
4. Dylan Goes Electric by Elijah Wald. Out-of-context on a live mic ("Leave it alone Pete" and "He's going to get an ax," which is a guitar) created an urban myth. OR DID IT!?!
5. NYer of 4/14/25. Another reason for de-extincting dire wolves (sort of) and "this is really important" says the startup CEO, is their prominence in recent pop culture. Huh?
6. NYer of 3/31/25. Crazy investigation by Ronan Farrow of corrupt Johnson City, TN police who were paid off by serial rapist for years.
7. The Art of Love by Ovid. How to find 'em, woo 'em, and keep 'em. 
8. The Last Unicorn by Peter S. Beagle. The unicorn described as Venus emerging from sea-foam at beginning. 
9. The NYer of 1/24/22(!). Reread a lovely lyrical story-essay, "What's the Deal, Hummingbird?" by Arthur Krystal. "Why isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?" vs. "Why, isn't that enough for a whole lifetime?"
10. The Nation of May 2025. "In the dialogues, philosophical conversation involves a sort of role-play, with one person acting as the 'theory builder,' who tries to establish the truth of some idea, and the other acting as the 'refuter,' who tries to tear the idea down. This resolves an apparent paradox between the dueling commitments of good inquiry: seeking out truth (and thus being somewhat confident that you’ve found it) and avoiding falsehood (and thus being skeptical that you’re in possession of the truth after all)." Olufemi O. Taiwo reviewing Agnes Callard.
11. If On a Winter's Night a Traveller by Italo Calvino. Created with Gremais squares: Reader--Book/Not-Reader--Not-Book. 

May '25 Reading

 Maybe get some serious reading done between classes ending and starting?

1. The New Yorker 100th Anniversary Issue. Seth's tribute to first NYer art editor, Rhea Irvin. 
2. NYer of 4/28/25. Gopnik:"Slavery had a cursed past, and a present to be tolerated, but no future."
3. The Confessions of St. Augustine. 
4. NYer of 4/21/25. Phish played 13 donut themed shows in a row. One was "Boston Cream," featuring medleys of songs by Boston and by Cream. 
5. NYer of 5/5/25. Mark Twain proposed a return of Tom and Huck when they were both 60, failures, miserable. They die.
6. Ubik by PKD. I didn't get the end, where the other guy is on the coin. Was Dick just ready to move on? 
7. Small Town Talk by Barney Hoskins. Woodstock was an artists' colony taken up by hippies. One night, Santana (the only touring act), Jimi Hendrix, and a jam session with some of the Band was all going on the same night. 
8. NYer of 6/5/23. Burkhard Bilger article on old Stax songwriters reunited to listen to lost demos and identify the performers. 
9. NYER OF 5/16/22. Profile of Matthew Wong, deceased Canadian artist. Sort of an outsider, an outsider who learned and lived online. 
10. NYer of 4/11/22. Lauren Collins profile of Stephane Bourgoin, French expert on serial killers whose lies and exaggerations were exposed online. 
11. NYer of 5/29/23. James Wood on Mozart: "Don Giovanni closes with the seducer's six survivors--the castoffs, the cuckolded, the bereaved--sweetly singing their way back to normality, as they rejoice that the wicked always get their deserts, while 'we, good people, will now gaily sing to you the old, old refrain.'"
12. NYer of 5/12&19/25. A. Lane on NYer memoirs and histories: "Every night and every morning, [William] Shawn and [Lillian] Ross spoke on the phone, and only once did Cecile [Shawn] answer when Ross called. Shawn had just died. 'He's gone,' Cecile said."
13. NYer of 2/6/23. "Public opinion" and the idea of objective journalism invented by Walter Lippman in the 1920s. 
14. The Neverending Story by Michael Ende. In the "ende" it wasn't as good as The Princess Bride because the lesson was too serious and on the nose. 

March '25 Reading

 New month

1. City Poet: A Life of Frank O'Hara by Brad Gooch. His ironic nickname in the Navy was "Butch."
2. Also a Poet by Ada Calhoun. Frank O'Hara's sister didn't want Calhoun to write this book for reasons that were actually borne out by the book. It was really about her relationship with her father.
3. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. Stye=conversations embedded in paragraphs, present tense, narration of main character observing herself. 
4. Elephants Can Remember by Agatha Christie. Great first chapter with Ariadne Oliver choosing a hat for a literary party. 
5. Rocannan's World by U.K.LeG. The beginning, originally a short story, is a complete melding of fantasy and science fiction. 
6. The Nation of March 2025:  "In other social systems, oppression is directly enacted and therefore obvious: When a feudal lord forces his serfs to give up a certain quantity of grain, for instance, or a pharaoh forces his subjects to perform a certain amount of labor, the structure of power is clear. In capitalist societies, on the other hand, the gaps between rich and poor may be just as stark, but the mechanisms of exploitation and the methods of domination are far murkier. Everyone appears to be acting of their own free will: Wage workers enter into contracts of their choosing, and the overall social order seems to emerge from a mass of individual choices. Countless workplaces operate independently, under the private direction of whoever owns them—and yet they are all connected to one another through the globe-spanning networks of trade and commerce that send prices shooting up or crashing down. To understand this system, one cannot simply take it at face value, as economists typically do. One must instead examine its hidden depths, the relationships and forms of power that constitute its inner workings. This, Reitter and North’s edition insists, is the crucial point of Capital: Both essence and appearance, both the material world and its abstract representation, are critical to understanding capitalism." Review by Alyssa Battistoni.
7. NYer of 3/10/25. Lane quotes Ross Macdonald: "'This is practically a slum,' George said. 'I thought that Malibu was a famous resort.' / 'Part of it is. This is the other part.'" (The Barbarous Coast)
8. Planet of Exile by U.K.LeG.
9. The Golden Ass by Apuleius. 
10. Highway 61 Revisited by Mark Polizzotti. Several phrases "Desolation Row" are from Jack Kerouac's Desolation Angels: "a perfect image of a priest, "her sin is her lifelessness"
11. NYer of 3/24/25. Things by Perec sounds good and was model for Perfection by Vincenzo Latronio's Perfection.
12. NYer of 3/3/25. Cartoon of man wearing hat in apparent self-satisfaction: "Rakish angles don't work for you."
13. Nyer of 3/17/25. Movie Eephus sounds perfect for me. 
14. Sex Criminals V. 3:Three the Hard Way. That title... and the character range broadens (anime demon)

Feb '25 Reading

 Here goes...

1. Lunch Poems by Frank O'Hara. From Personal Poem: "we go eat some fish and some ale it’s/cool but crowded we don’t like Lionel Trilling/we decide, we like Don Allen we don’t like/Henry James so much we like Herman Melville"
2. The Nation of January '25. Sam Adler-Bell compares Complete Unknown to a super-hero movie vis-a-vis Easter eggs: "Opinions may differ, but I don't enjoy being infantilized in this way. 'Fan service' is a sickening, adolescent ordeal. If a film aspires to be art, it cannot possibly succeed through flattery--ie. by showing us stuff we already know." 
3. NYer of 1/20/25. Lorne Michaels started writing for Laugh In, where they made the writers work out of a motel room. 
4. Speed-the-Plow. "You're an old whore. You think you're a ballerina because you work with your legs."
5. Sex Criminals v. 1, One Weird Trick. The book is rife with wordplay, puns, and, naturally, innuendo. The 'two page spread' starts the book 'with a bang.'
6. Sex Criminals v. 2, Two Worlds One Cop. The meta-narrated fight with Jon and Suzie is like the dark counterpart to the transcendent Fat Bottomed scene in v. 1. 
7. Metamorphoses of Ovid. This is really one of the best books I've ever read. 
8. NYer of 2/10/25. Arn on still-life, specifically Giorgio Morandi: "Be honest: you don't really comprehend the three dimensions you inhabit, you just got tired of trying"
9. In the Night Wood by Dale Bailey. Jackass thinks he needs to explain his allusions when all he did was call England a "green and pleasant land."
10. Words by Robert Creeley. Including "A Piece": "One and/one, two,/three.
11. The Use of Photography by Anne Ernaux and Marc Marie. Not so great. 
12. NYer of 1/27/25. Sheila Heti's "The St. Alwynn Girls at Sea."
13. NYer of 2/3/25. Arthur Krystal on John of Patmos: "Drawing inspiration from Hebrew texts and whatever shrooms grew on the island, John ramped up Daniel's' visions to include angels with feet of fire, the Whore of Babylon, the Four Horsemen of the Apocalypse, and a hundred and forty-four thousand virgins (or parthenoi), most likely male."

Jan. '25 Reading

 A new year, and a fresh start. 

1. The Aeneid by Virgil. Aeneas built walls and made laws. Roman Empire in a nutshell. 
2. The NYer of 12-30-24. English has high "codability" for sight and sound--i.e., it's easy to describe what you see and hear. Other languages do much better with smell. 
3. NYer of 12/9/24. Transformative experiences "provide new knowledge that previously would have been inaccessible to us, and with that knowledge our preferences, values and self-conception are fundamentally altered" Alice Gregory on I.A. Paul.
4. NYer of 3/14/22. Music and the Rothko Chapel. 
5. NYer of 4/18/22. Edward Gibbon was four-eight, obese, and his contemporaries called him 'Mssr Pomme de terre.'
6. NYer of 6/20/22. Robert King co-creator of "The Good Wife," broke in working for Roger Corman.
7. A Libertarian Walks Into a Bear. Libertarians are just dicks is the take away. A town in rural New Hampshire attracts both a lot of libertarians because they don't like to pay taxes and a lot of bears because they don't like to pay taxes for proper wildlife management or to obey rules that say don't feed the bears. Both humans and bears are infected with toxoplasmosis that causes poor impulse control. 
8. Creature From the Black Lagoon by two writers, one line artist, two colorists, and a letterer. How is it that Image, founded on the principle of creators' rights, is doing IP?
9. House of the Unholy by Brubaker and Phillips. I am starting to think they're phoning it in. I've thought that about Brubaker before and am seeing it in Phillips. 
10. Un Lun Dun. Highly inventive in many ways, including the naming of things ("the Hex" for a gang of six magicians, "Skool" for a character composed of a collective of sea life in a diving suit, etc). Turns out to start he sidekick, which is thematically appropriate. 
11. NYer of 6/6/22. There's a gang of LA County Sheriffs where they get tattoos of skeletons with bushy mustaches. They're called the banditos. 
12. Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson. People could make a difference, if they work together and do the right thing. So we are doomed. Cool things, like drilling glaciers, ships with photovoltaic sails, airships, wildlife corridors to re-wild half the plant, and carbon coins earned by carbon sequestration. 
13. NYer of 1/13/25. Czeslaw Milosz poem written in D.C. addressed to friend in Paris, describing a "Summer Movie.. In Central Park": "I see how the ambassador's limousine glides/Past the white masts on which various flags/Of fictitious color sway in a mild breeze."

Only 4 book-length works of prose, but made a good dent on magazine backlog.