Maybe some more time this month with school ending, though I start back up 5/20.
- 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.
- 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."
- NYer of 4/1/24. Mickey Mantle to the catcher, after facing Sandy Koufax: "How does anyone hit that shit?"
- The Nation April 2024. Bad people work for Tesla. Shocker. Evangelicals think Trump is a prophet. Inconceivable.
- 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.
- 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.
- Red Paint: The Ancestral Biography of a Coast Salish Punk by Sasha [Tock-Sha-Blu] La Pointe.
- 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.)
- 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.
- 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.
- 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.
- 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...
- NYer of 5/6/24. First native Sec of Interior: "The should be one Native before two Udalls."
- 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.
