Hopefully I do better than last month!
- 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.
- NYer of 8/12/24 Archival issue on comedy. Als on Pryor and Kael on Funny Girl. I think I finally get Kael.
- 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- 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."
- 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.
- Twenty-One Stories by Graham Greene.
- 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"
- 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.'"
- 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."
- NYer of 12/5/22. Feature on Mick Herron. Turns out J. Lamb was the name of a cabbie in Smiley's People.
- Believe Them by Mary Robison. Top stories= "Again, Again, Again"; "Seizing Control"; "Culpability"; "Trying"
- 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."
