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.