September '24 Reading

Hopefully I do better than last month!

1. The Jules Verne Steam Balloon: The title vehicle, crewed by three spritely lads named Buckeye, Tumble, and Quark, crop up over and again, and apparently steal away with scoutmaster/divinity student Hugo at the end.
2. NYer of 8/12/24   Archival issue on comedy. Als on Pryor and Kael on Funny Girl. I think I finally get Kael. 
3. Wiseguy by Nicholas Pileggi. The best parts of this books are the best parts of Goodfellas. This isn't dig against Pileggi or Scorsese--they both know a narrative beat when they see it. 
4. NYer of 9/9/24. Epochal, Prufrockian poem "A Sunset" by Robert Hass: "And the sunset--peach to dull gold which faded/To what felt, for just a second, for less/Than a second, a blessed and arriving silence,/And then a pale green at the skyline,/And then dark. And it was Monday night."
5. The Nation of Sept. 2024. Books issue. Kohei Saito's Slow Down [is] a disarmingly good-natured summons to 'degrowth communism' as the political program that will save the world. 
6. NYer of 9/2/24: "A political party," according to the political scientist E.E. Schattschneider, " is an organized attempt to get control of the government."
7. King of Elfland's Daughter by Lord Dunsany. Some nice little lyrical moments--the king and his band wandering through "the fields we know" looking for Elfland, glimpsed occasionally in your backyard; the teeny troll Lurulu in the henhouse finds a cobweb, which they don't have in Elfland but 'he admired the construction. May not have really cohered, but will try Dunsany shorts. 
8. Twenty-One Stories by Graham Greene. 
9. NYer of 1/7/22. Stanislav Lem thought sf "comes from a whorehouuse but it wants to break into the place where the most sublime thoughts of human history are stored"
10. NYer of 9/23/24. Jackson Arn says that John Berger said of Monet, "You cannot enter into one of Monet's impressions as you enter into another painting--'instead... it extracts you memories... what you recieve is taken from what happens between you and it.'"
11. NYer of 8/26/24. Not sold on Justin Chang as a film guru, but believe his recommendation of "Close Your Eyes" an the rest of Victor Erice's small body of work past his debut"The Spirit of the Beehive."
12. NYer of 12/5/22. Feature on Mick Herron. Turns out J. Lamb was the name of a cabbie in Smiley's People. 
13. Believe Them by Mary Robison. Top stories= "Again, Again, Again"; "Seizing Control"; "Culpability"; "Trying"
14. Zen and the Art of Writing by Ray Bradbury. Really just a collection of odds and sods--occasional essays, introductions to reissues, even a pretentious interview about screenwriting. Some good bits though, like "'Drunk, and in charge of a bicycle' as an Irish police report once put it."

August 24 Reading

 Back to work this month.

1. NYer of 8/8/22. Poem by Simon Armitage consisting of anagrams of "Simon Armitage": "I am a Song Timer. /I am Sir Megaton./ Against Memoir I am."
2. NYer of 6/27/22.  There's a half-million dollar hand-made mattress hand-stitched in Sweden. Drake has one.
3. The Weird of the White Wolf by Michael Moorcock. Mostly earlier tales rounded out with a couple new ones. 
4. NYer of 8/5/2024. Long true-crime story on murders at Whitehouse Farm in U.K.
5. X-Men/Fantastic Four: 4X by Chip Zdarsky and Dodsons. I really enjoyed this despite the lazy interior art. But they nailed family faces; kids really do look like different combos of Reed and Sue. 
6. Search and Destroy by Atsushi Kaneko. Fine set up (cyborg looking to recover 48 different human parts) but not enough to keep going. 
7. NYer of 2/7/22. Read while traveling
8. Bad Dreams by Tessa Hadley. Set of exiquisite Munro-esque stories about either British girls growing up in the 60s ("The Abduction," "Bad Dreams") or contemporary British women of a certain age ("Flight," Under the Sign of the Moon"). 
9. NYer of 8/12/24.Teen RFK, Jr., tripping on acid, runs into picture of father uncle and Jesus praying. Bad trip ensues. 
10. The Illustrated Man by Ray Bradbury. Best stories= 1)The Veldt 2)The Long Rain 3)Kaliedescope 4)Rocket Man. Worst= title story; Marionettes, Inc.; The Rocket.
11. The Nation of August 2024. Rae Armantrout's "Witch": "Cousin Rust,/with your look of blood| and sunset,//In almost in love/with the lace you've made/of metal"

July 24 Reading

 Geared up for one-a-day this month. 

1. NYer of 3/11/24. Arn on Haring's reputation: "The dust never settles--consensus seems perpetually just around the corner, but, since it would be better if it didn't arrive, it doesn't." 
2. NYer of 6/24/24. Gopnik reviews Charles Taylor's book on enchantment vs. enlightenment dialectic.
3. The Nation of June 2024. Long depressing series on Project 2025. 
4. Good Girls Don't Die by Christina Henry. Stir together Truman Show, Stepford Wives,  Cabin in the Woods, Hunger Games, and voila, feminista! Worst book I've read in a minute
5. NYer of 7/1/24. John Fetterman's strange mix of progressivism and populism means he's one of the few sincere senators. 
6. Invincible Volume 13: Growing Pains. Eve is preggers. 
7. Invincible Volume 14: The Viltrimite War. Cool effect of blood splatter going out of panels. 
8. She-Hulk v2: Jen of Hearts by Rainbow Rowell. Fight club + wear fancy dresses and eat cake club.
9. Eclogues by Guy Davenport. I recently saw an observation that Davenport writes a world where paganism and Xtianity evolved side-by-side. That can be seen from the first story ("The Trees at Lystra") set in the ancient world to the last one ("On Some Lines in Virgil") set in the roughly contemporary late 60s but saturated by history trailing back to the paleolithic. 
10. She-Hulk v3: Girl Can't Help It. The standout story was the book-club satire (with Patsy, Sue Storm Richards, Volcana, Misty and Colleen). 
11. Tales from the Vulgar Unicorn, ed. Asprin. Brings some god-encounters to the table. 
12. Life and Times of Scrooge McDuck by Don Rosa. Took a long time, but finally got back to this detailed tribute to Duckworld. 
13. Do a Powerbomb by Daniel Warren Johnson. He only deals with things he loves--in this case pro wrestling, inter-dimensional fight tournaments, and... family. 
14. Wonder Twins v. 1:Activate! by Marc Russell and Stephen Byrne. The best bit is the scene with Jayna in the form of an ant with the stinky "hero" Repulsor. 
15. Wonder Twins v. 2: The Fall and Rise of the Wonder Twins. Gen Z--no real prospects (unpaid interships) but unwilling to accept the status quo (sheltering Philo Math) or respect the old ways (freeing him from Phantom Zone). Boys are either inept (Zan) or toxic (Red Flag). 
16. Night Fever by Brubaker and Phillips. Standard issue post-Criminal product. 
17. Where the Body Was by Brubaker and Phillips. Slightly better. I like the map.
18. NYer of July 8&15. Fiction issue.
19. Wonder Woman: Dead Earth. Daniel Warren Johnson gives Princess Dianna the Mad Max meets Dune meets Kingdom Come treatment. Not the best thing ever. 
20. 100 Years of the Best American Short Stories. ed. Lorrie Moore. Discoveries include Charles Baxter, Mary Gaitskilll, ZZ Packer, Benjamin Percy. And for first time, appreciation of Sherman Alexie. 
21. Susceptible by genevieve castree. Comics memoir of first 18 years. Troubled homelife with mother and her boyfriend, Amere and Amer. Occasional escape to her English-speaking father, Oeuf de tete. 
22. The Eternaut by Hecter German Oesterheld and Francisco Solanao Lopez. 300+ pages, but strangely like an EC comics Weird Science 8 pager. 
23. NYer of June 3, 2024. Hannah Goldfield on Hawaiian food in Las Vegas. 
24. City of Laughter by Temim Fruchter. Ersatz Fine Writing. Insufferably narcissistic main character. Notable lack of humor. 
25. Foster. This novella has the quiet gravity of a timeless classic. 
26. Artists Authors Thinkers Directors by Paul Hornschemeier
27. Paris Review Spring 2023. Fun poem called "John Wick Is So Tired." Good story by MarieNDiaye called "Irreproachable. 
28. Big Guy and Rusty the Boy Robot by Frank Miller and Geof Darrow. 
29. NYer of 7/22/24. Blade Runner, The Thing, Conan the Barbarian, Tron, The Road Warrior, Wrath of Khan, Poltergeist, and E.T. all came out within an 8 week period during the summer of 1982. 
30. The Michael Moorcock Library: Elric of Melnibone. Read side-by-side with the original. Nearly every scene is present--some dialogue trimmed along with exposition, but only a tavern scene about the mirror of forgetting is (I think) absent. 
31. NYer of 7/29/24. "The moon, the ocean--some things never change." Campbell McGrath, "Hummingbirds."
32. Elric of Melnibone by Michael Moorcock. It literally says Yrykoon could "make Melibone great again.)

June 24 Reading

 I'm dedicating to a reading blitz for June: complete one book (or magazine) every day. We'll see how it goes. 

1. Jame Bond: VARGR by Warren Ellis and Jason Masters. Excellent management of space and action. Action (the genre) is really about moving through space: setting and props. 
2. She Hulk by Rainbow Rowell. Favorite parts: Thundra and Shulkie's fight club; all the super clients stuffed into her cupboard office, and Jack of Heart's legal pad ("What I know: 1) [blank]; Who I trust to find out what happened to me: 1)Jennifer 2) Reference librarians")
3. James Bond: Eidolon. Bond is uncomfortably violent. A device of isolating the inside of a blow (karate chop, bullet, whatever) both distances the violence and highlights Bond's analytical sociopathy. 
4. NYer of 5/20/24. Alex Ross on neglected Jewish composers of Central Europe: Alexander Zemlinsky (Der Zwert); Erwin Schulhoff (Sonata Erotica, Funf Pittorsken, The Communist Manifesto); Erich Korngold (Sympony in F Sharp)
5. DaVinci's Bicycle by Guy Davenport. "Islanders study the newspaper carefuller than most.” Faves: "Au Tombeau Charles Fourier," "Invention of Photography in Toledo," "Ithaka."
6. NYer of May 27, 2024. Apparently 85-year old FF Copolla's Megalopolis has a scene that requires a live actor to deliver a monologue. 
7. Questioning Minds: The Letters of Guy Davenport and Hugh Kenner
8. Starter Villain by John Scalzi. Breezy, quippy, light. As Space Opera is to Eurovision, so is this novel to Bond villainy. But shorter, and I am conversant in Bond villainy. 
9. The Nation of May 2024. GG Marquez's last work of fiction was written under the burden of dementia. 
10. NYer of June 10 2024. Galchen article on a course on existential risk. Student majoring in "How do we agreeably disagree?"
11. Vintage Munro by Alice Munro. All hits no misses: "Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Marriage"; "In Sight of the Lake"; "Differently";|  "Carried Away"; | "Progress of Love"; "The Moons of Jupiter"
12. NYer of Feb 12 & 19"the stoner-adjacent cadence of someone who grew up in the Pacific Northwest" (Hannah Goldfield on vinegar maker Chris Crawford)
13. How High We Go In the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu. A set of linked stories about a pandemic-struck world that takes an odd turn. And then an even odder turn. 
14. NYer of June 17, 2024. Ye's crazy expensive obsession with modernist architecture. 
15. Sixty Stories by Donald Barthelme. 
16. Green Mars by Kim Stanley Robinson. 

It did not go as planned. But I finished two very long books. 

May 24 Reading

 Maybe some more time this month with school ending, though I start back up 5/20.

1. More Pricks Than Prizes by Tom Pickard. A small memoire that starts with Basil Bunting's recollections as a young man (he castigated Pound for his fascism) and ends with ex-Wing Commander Bunting as character witness at Pickard's drug trial.
2. NYer of 4/15/24. Armantrout: "You can't think a thought/and judge it/all at once//so we invented juggling/and the caesura,//the heartbeats' stitch/ in the ocean of time."
3. NYer of 4/1/24. Mickey Mantle to the catcher, after facing Sandy Koufax: "How does anyone hit that shit?"
4. The Nation April 2024. Bad people work for Tesla. Shocker. Evangelicals think Trump is a prophet. Inconceivable. 
5. Black Mask Audio Magazine v. 1. Actually radio theatre adaptations of short stories, but I'll count it as first person narrative and dialogue are staples of the genre. Standouts include the two Paul Cain stories and "The Missing Mr. Lee" by Hugh B. Cave.
6. NYer of 4/8/24. Lauren Collins on French buffet. Mention of "trou normand" or Norman hole. Calvados on apple sorbet counteracts the sensation of a full stomach. 
7. Red Paint: The Ancestral Biography of a Coast Salish Punk by Sasha [Tock-Sha-Blu] La Pointe.
8. Rigor of Angels:Borges, Heisenberg, Kant and the Ultimate Nature of Reality by William Egginton. Not sure there's much of a synthesis aside from 'it's all relative,' but there's surely a set of entangled  similarities.  Spooky motions at distances. (Reminder that Einstein proved things so outlandish he personally couldn't quite accept them.)
9. NYer of 4/22&29.  Jackson Arn on Anni Albers: "You dream of painting but are sent off, with a sexist shove, to be a weaver instead. You spend the next forty-odd years proving you're as good at making art as anybody in the world, and , almost as improbably, the world admits that you are right. ... [A}nd then, at the end of the sixties, with more than a quarter century left to live, you give up weaving for printmaking. 
10. NYer of 5/13. Funny short story by Simon Rich ("We're Not So Different, You and I") about Ultra Man's foe Death Skull trying to make friends with Doug. 
11. Thieves' World ed. R. Asprin. The idea works better than the execution, but the execution is ok. The audiobook reader is terrible, but I'm trying to get to the handful of later volumes I picked up on the cheap. 
12. The Great Train Robbery by Michael Crichton. Okay, I'm not likely to ever read another M. Crichton book, but this was pretty good infotainment. The real star is the criminal argot, like "daffy" for a drink, "barker" for pistol, or "nose" for informant. Also, every variety of criminal conceivable has a name: screwsman, magsman, bug hunter...
13. NYer of 5/6/24. First native Sec of Interior: "The should be one Native before two Udalls."
14. The Lone Ranger: The Devil's Rope by Mark Russell and "Bob Q." It's barbed wire of course. There nothing wrong with this update of the LR myth--the Ranger is kind of a goober, Tonto is of course a difficult character but not embarassing. The visual story-telling is kind of problematic though--I'm often wondering 'where did Silver come from' and other pragmatic issues. 
    
    

April '24 Reading

 Continuing with the short story project and also taking on a daily poetry fix. By way of saying, another low number is predicted.

1. Tatlin! Guy Davenport. I hold Davenport in high esteem, and as I'm working through the 2,000 pages of letters, I thought this would be a good time to revisit. In context of his letters (and essays, which I've also been dipping into), these 'assemblages' come alive with his interests--Heraklitos, bicycles, the archaic, an orderly life, Greek love (and an otherwise obscure interest in air travel comes to the fore).
2. New Yorker of 8/29/2022. An archival issue full of treats like K. Tynan's long profile of Louise Brooks. 
3. The Visionaries: Arendt, Beauvoir, Rand, Weil, and the Power of Philosophy in Dark Times. A group biography of four women philosophers (or 3 + 1 influential fraud) all displaced by politics and war. The greatest flaw is taking Ayn Rand seriously. 
4. Marvel Two-In-One: Project Pegasus. While breaking one rule of the classic super-hero team up (which are typically one-and-done), this relishes in the others (early fight based on misunderstanding, an approximately 6:1 ratio of A-list to B-list stars, brief origin stories of those lesser-knowns, etc.)
5. Void Rivals by Robert Kirkman. Engages in numerous sf tropes, including the star-crossed lovers, we're just the same, etc. It incorporates the Transformers and, if promo material is to be believed, will find its way to G.I. Joe. 
6. Sex Criminals v. 1: One Weird Trick. The narrator Betty Page look alike, probably Matt Fraction stand-in for "This Fucking Guy," the last gasp of information scarcity, the taste of first romance and it's fading, the medicated generation, and so on. 
7. Semiosis by Sue Burke. It was okay, with some clunky passages. Probably should have been rewritten, but the basic idea--first contact with a plant intelligence (rainbow bamboo, to be precise) told across generations in what is essentially a series of short stories--is promising. Unfortunately, the overall arc is 'species destroys one ecosystem and travels across the galaxy to teach a tree about life."
8. Pure by Carol Frost. A lot of these poems in a flexible 11-line structure. Her line is generally pretty long so it breaks many times across these pages. I like this passage that uses a short line to focus intensity. A fisher(wo)man decides to "give up, walk to the lighted house, and join the others at a table/ to talk of life, love, logic and the senes, memory, promise, betrayal, character/ and fate--the driving notion /that around the river bend a magnificent fish waits, prickling the black water." This sequence of lines starts with16 words,  continues with 13, snaps to a sharp 5, and concludes with 13.
9. The Nation for March 2024. Kate Wagner writes a book review that incorporates a bit of personal experience of her life in cities. A potential model for an assignment. 
10. The Magic Labyrinth  Book 4 of Riverworld, written as the finale and it will be for me. A lot of explaining and rebuttals of anticipated objections. A real let down. 
11. NYer of 3/25/24: "The art of Gustave Klimt makes me feel as though I am face to face with God, if God is a charming, faintly trashy type who leers more than he enlightens and seems oddly desperate for my approval." Jackson Arn
12. Traffic by Gil Ott. Short, imagistic poem at top of the page, prose excerpt at the bottom. Varying white space in the middle, lines of communication with facing page (except for first and last of the 80... poems?) 
13. Thasos and Ohio. Poems and Translations by Guy Davenport. While a lyrical writer, the poem is not his forte. But still, "The Cookham dead began to rise/When God with April in his eyes/Ended in O its midst the night." And it ends "Dominions, thrones, and powers shout/Hosanna! Adorenus O/The silver C sharp trumpets blow."
14. Hole in the Wall: New & Selected Poems by Tom Pickard. Sharp, chiseled language infused with working class history and sense of history in place. Favorites" "Cowboy Is King," "Birthplace Bronchitis," "Spring Tide" (for Basil Bunting), "First Poem This Century," "Stinkhorn," "Labyrinth," many others. 
15. The Hollow Places by T. Kingfisher. Written in a light and sarcastic tone that calls to mind smarmy discussion fora of the early oughts. Clearly written by seat of pants--the repetition of points that don't matter (the abandoned mental hospital) and continued rep of those that ultimately do (corpse-otter carving).  Quick read, and bad. 

March 24 Reading

 This month I'm focusing on completing (hopefully) the Vander Meers' mammoth anthology The Weird, so likely it will be another month with a small total. 

1. NYer 2/26/24. Pretty good story about Afghan community in Sacramento by Jamil Jan Kochai. 
2. The Nation Feb. 24. The Desi community may be big enough to swing the election. 
3. Empty Theater by Jac Jemc. More a speculative dual biography than anything else.
4. NYer 3/4/24. "Eat" by Joy Harjo. 
5. The Scandal of Father Brown. GKC. I don't have a great memory (ha ha) but these are not the best, nor are they the worst FB stories. I liked the last ("The Vampire of the Village") the best (
6. The Weird by VanderMeer and VanderMeer. About 500 pages too long.
7. Chesterton: Man and Mask by Garry Wills. Thorough survey of his career, best is stand-alone essay on Thursday.  Very little on Father Brown, but considers "The Fairy Tale of FB" to be the most significant (last one before conversion). 
8. EQQM Nov/Dec 22. 
9. NYer 10/3/22. Owner of EDM nightclub in Ibiza sez "The problem with this kind of music is you have to take drugs to listen to it."
10. NYer 3/18/24.  Liberal arts curricula coopted by the right wing. 
11. The Arab of the Future. Vol. 1.  Didn't like the visual style, found the pacing to be boring, and children torture a dog. Will not be continuing.