STL #130.2: Analysis and Reconsiderations, Pt. II

 To re-orient: a list is a self-portrait disguised as a map.

50. Cleo from 5 to 7. It's not a lie that this is one film that comes to light when you notice all your favorite movies are directed by men. (Is Jeanne Dielman anywhere here? It really should be.) But it's true that this is a fantastic film in the way it handles the surface of the screen and the passing of time. Confident this belongs. 49. I Am a Fugitive From a Chain Gang. I haven't seen it in decades, but the ending is indelible. 48. Hoop Dreams I really need to see this again. 47. Freaks Like with a lot of these, the initial impact is important. The worm-man, "one of us," etc. 
46. Psycho. Pretty obvious pick. Lots of other choices: Rope, Rear Window, Strangers on a Train, 39 Steps, Lady Vanishes. 45. Philadelphia Story. With two f's? Maybe doesn't retain the standing. 44. Out of Sight. For so many reasons. Could go higher. 43. Almost Famous. Could go way higher. Reminds me of Dazed and Confused, which I recently saw again and might fit in here. 42. Third Man. Imperfect as a film, perfect couple. Maybe a bit high. 41. Eternal Sunshine of the Spotless Mind. Time for a rewatch.

Of this set, I feel like I should rewatch Hoop Dreams  and ESofSM. The latter and Psycho may be in trouble. 

40. Elevator to the Gallows. The epitome of cool, really only as a New Wave film could be. 39. Alice, Sweet Alice. A perfect giallo, apparently created in ignorance of the existence of giallo. 38. Dumbo. The one great tear-jerker, perhaps. 37. Citizen Kane. I remember walking around campus, looking at things as if framed for the camera. 36. Big Sleep. A bit on the nose, but my choice for favorite noir. 35. The Big Lebowski. And my favorite pseudo-noir 34. Rear Window. Ok, there it is. Maybe Psycho should go? 33. My Dinner with Andre. The charm of a an enrapturing conversation. Too high? 32. It's a Wonderful Life A sentimental favorite 31. Shogun Assassin. It was a bad time for the empire. Seems low.

Is IaWL a "sentimental favorite"? It's sentimental and I like, it, but other movies (including a certain Jean Arthur feature we'll see below) would be better fits.

30. Jaws. A perfect movie. 29. Jules and Jim. I'd like to see it again, but no doubt still charming. 28. Days of Heaven. Visually beautiful. 27. Eyes Wide Shut. Utterly compelling. 26. The Long Goodbye. That's alright with me. 25. McCabe and Mrs. Miller. Beautiful in its own way, but the world is hard and ugly despite it. A bit high.
24. Annie Hall I watched it again recently, and am wondering if maybe it just doesn't have the eggs anymore. 23. My Best Friend's Wedding. This stands up. 22. Royal Tennenbaums. Perfection of Anderson aesthetic. 21. Mr. Smith Goes to Washington. Because of Jean Arthur.

I think AH needs to go. I'm not sure it would be a top five Allen movie, if I were to do a systematic rewatch (hmm...)

20. Mandy. The audaciousness of this movie is epitomized by the "Mandy" logo at approximately halfway through. 19. Godfather II. I could include this with part one. I'd like to watch it again. 18. Gimme Shelter. The scene where Mick is listening, but can't make out what it is. 17. Don't Look Now. Lovely ghost story (of sorts), but perhaps a little high. 16. Double Indemnity. There's a speed limit in this two, Mr. Neff. 15. Hard Boiled. It's been a long time, but the canonic HK heroic bloodshed film for putting the human body in extremis. 14. Battle Royal. The moment where the deranged girl killer becomes sympathetic. 13. Deep Red. Emblematic of horror's devotion to formalism. 12. Carrie. So much so, that it's why DePalma went into the field. 11. Texas Chainsaw Massacre. Not to mention Tobe Hooper, who launched so many gore-laden ships. But this should be top 10.

Not sure about that horror run, though they're all great movies.

10. Manhattan. Likely still my favorite Allen, for the beauty and the self-knowledge (as a shit). 9. Jackie Brown. Need to rewatch, but several scenes stay in my memory. 8. Halloween. I mean, what can be said about the Laurie/Michael dynamic than can be seen in the film? 7. Lost in Translation. I'd love to rewatch, but that scene where he whispers in her ear. 6. All That Jazz. The pinnacle of 70s auteur cinema? Deeply felt and self-indulgent. 5. In the Mood for Love. For sheer beauty, must be the peak. 4. Kill Bill. For sheer kineticism, must be the peak. I think I'm thinking of parts one and two together here. 3. Goodfellas. And I'll live the rest of my life like a schnook. 2. His Girl Friday. Feminine strength, rapid fire banter, and that touching and beautiful interview with the prisoner. 1. The Godfather. Also a perfect movie.

I'm pretty satisfied with the top 10, though it's been so long since I've seen LiT and I feel funny about two QT's (and also by the fact that I consider JB my favorite QT, but rank KB higher). 

So where does that leave us? Find out in STL #130.3!!! Coming later this year!!! Probably?!?

December '25 Reading

 After two months of sloppy record keeping (and few books finished), I aim to do better this month. 

1. Claudius the God. "[T]he God who inflicted the vengeance on him was not one of the urbane Olympian community: he was perhaps the oddest deity that you could find anywhere in my extensive dominions, or out of them, for that matter, a God of whom no image is in existence, whose name his devout worshippers are forbidden to pronounce (though in his honour they clip their foreskins and practise many other curious and barbarous rites) and who is said to live alone, at Jerusalem, in an ancient cedar chest lined with badger-skins dyed blue and to refuse to have anything to do with any other deities in the world or even to acknowledge the existence of such."
2. Mythago Wood by Robert Holdstock. Great God Pan redux. 
3. I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman. Why that? Narrator calls herself "I who" many things, including "I who never speakbecause there is no one to hear me."
4. Clown Town  by Mick Herron. Extended action scene in which all agents,  including those doomed to meet their end, converge on the action. Cuts from person to person, each taking a different route. Louisa Guy's route follows continuing ellipses, each passage trailing off and picking back up, until she is shot and after much hand-wringing, revives. 
5. Heavy Metal Movies:Guitar Barbarians, Mutant Bimbos, and Cult Zombies Amok in the 666 Most Ear- and Eye-Ripping Big Scream Films Ever by Mike "McBreardo" McPadden. 
6. Why Bob Dylan Matters by Richard F. Thomas. Is the fact that late period BD songs interpolate ancient Roman texts the reason he matters? Or even that he was broadly intertextual all along, going so far as to quote (without attribution, of course) the same yakuza novel twice in every song on Modern Times? I don't think so, but still an interesting read focusing on lesser covered work of an artist who definitely does matter. 
7. NYer of 12/22/25. Puzzle issue. Most NYer article of the year was a review of Stephen Sondheim's work as a puzzle-master (he solved crosswords in his head and was rumored to do solid white jigsaw puzzles). 
8. NYer of 10/20/25. Internet millionaire goes all in to discover to discover brother's killer in Australia. Did his millions drum up a conviction of a mentally ill man?

November '25 Reading

 This is an after-the-fact attempt at capture. 

1. I, Claudius by Robert Graves. "I, Tiberius Claudius Drusus Nero Germanicus This-that-and-the-other (for I shall not trouble you yet with all my titles), who was once, and not so long ago either, known to my friends and relatives and associates as 'Claudius the Idiot', or 'That Claudius', or 'Claudius the Stammerer', or 'Clau-Clau-Claudius', or at best as 'Poor Uncle Claudius', am now about to write this strange history of my life; starting from my earliest childhood and continuing year by year until I reach the fateful point of change where, some eight years ago, at the age of fifty-one, I suddenly found myself caught in what I may call the 'golden predicament' from which I have never since become disentangled. "
2. October Country by Ray Bradbury. Standouts: "The Emissary," "Homecoming," The Cistern," "Next in Line," "The Wind."
3. A Haunting on the Hill by Elizabeth Hand. An adequate haunted house story set in Hill House which I rather regret reading.   
4. Good Dog by Graham Chaffee. Good dog drawings. 
5. Picture This: The Near Sighted Monkey Book by Lynda Barry. I think the monkey is Lynda!
6. The Coming Wave by Mustapha Suleyman. Could have been written by AI. 
7. NYer of 8/11/25. "Breeze,/blow for one/I love, stretch/his muscles as/he needs and wants." (James Schuyler). 

October '25 Reading

A busy month in general, and filling in a lot of free time with pickleball and horror movies. 

1. Meditations Marcus Aurelius. I can't get beyond this text as a illustration of the massive privilege (a word I avoid as much as possible). 
2. Harvest Home by Thomas Tryon. Trope of the petit patriarch assuming superiority over everyone only to fall hard
3. Greengage Summer by Rumer Godden. "On and off, all that hot French August, we made ourselves ill from eating the greengages."
4. Horror Movie by Paul Tremblay. A mid riff on the "cursed film" trope. Kind of ok in parts, like the method acting=descent into psychosis idea. 

September '25 Reading

 Back to work full-time, so who knows.

1. Letters from a Stoic by Seneca. Quotes Epicurus, his rival, frequently: "I...make a practice of going over the the enemy's camp--by way of reconnaissance, not as a deserter!"
2. NYer of 7/21/25. "[S]tories of family trauma are not communicated directly to children but mentioned in passing and half forgotten, ore overheard out of context. The information lodges somewhere in our unconscious. Children...  absorb their parents' history subliminally, “before there are words, and thus before a narrative can be told."
3. The Bog Wife by Kay Chronister. Could be good, if everything about it was different. Pointless references to Jessie Weston (coded) and Grail myth (explicit) throughout. 
4. The Amateur by Robert Littell. "I'm Colonel Henderson. Henderson isn't my real name, Colonel isn't my real rank. My friends call me Hank. You will call me Colonel Henderson."
5. GI Joe: Real American Hero by Larry Hama and others. Major Bludd such a bad poet, he thinks Proust rhymes with Faust!
6. City of Illusions by U.K.LeG. Cool story of alien who loses memory, develops identity on Earth, then restored to original memories while secretly maintaining others. 

August '25 Reading

 

1. The Last Good Kiss by James Crumely. "When I finally caught up with Abraham Trahearne, he was drinking beer with an alcoholic bulldog named Fireball Roberts in a ramshackle joint just outside of Sonoma, California, drinking the heart right out of a fine spring afternoon."
2. The NYer of July 7&14 "Cake sounds good,/and after cake, being older/and missing cake. If the dead/could speak, they'd tell us to start/with the dessert menu. The best thing/about my mother's apple pie:/she was here to make it." ("The Eulogy I Didn't Give (XXXVII)" by Bob Hicok)
3. The Wrong Case by James Crumley. First Milo, and my favorite.
4. Dancing Bear by James Crumley. Second Milo. "We had been blessed with a long, easy fall for western Montana. The two light snowfalls had melted before noon, and in November we had three weeks of Indian Summer so warm and seductive that even we natives seemed to forget about winter." 
5. The Mexican Tree Duck Second Sughrue. ("Sugh as in sugar and rue as in rue the day.") "When the 3:12 through freight to Spokane hit the East Meriwether crossing, the engineer touched his horm and released a long, mournful wail into the wet, snowy air of our second early fall storm in western Montana. It sounded a hell of a lot like the first note of a Hank Snow ballad."
6. Bordersnakes by James Crumley. Where Milo and Sughrue work together (Milo showed up at the end of Tree Duck.) "Maybe it was the goddamned suit. Tailor-made Italian silk, as light and flimsy as shed snakeskin."
7. Eat, Drink, and Be Healthy by Walter C. Willet. So... avoid unsaturated fat. 
8. Silver Surfer: Requiem by JMS & Esad Ribic. There is no definitive SS story because he is by definition peripheral. 
9. LSH: Teenage Revolution by Waid and Kitson. The premise, of intergalactic teens who are obsessed with mid-20th century pop culture and band together to stick it to the man, is delightfully absurd. 
10. Secret Wars by Shooter et. al. Doom in this is just great.
11. The NYer of 8/4/25. The black/white wealth gap in was 6:1 at the dawn of the Civil Rights era. It is now 6:1, meaning... what exactly?
12. NYer of 7/28/25. Head of CIA's office on Soviet analysis, on looming fall of the USSR: "There are not many homes for old wizards of Armageddon."

July '25 Reading

 Goals for this month: more Vinge, Roman history, and finally 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)

Didn't get to Vinge, but some progress on magazines. 

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.

STL #130.1: Analysis and Reconsiderations, Pt. I

I started this post almost two years ago. I had just finished the multi-part STL #129, and the top 100 list that it resulted in. 

My framing question is, does this belong on this list where it is, why or why not? The underlying question is, "What does it mean to have favorites?" in regard to art. The idea of loyalty/allegiance has come up already, and we'll see what to add to that

Let's go through the list, starting at the end.

100. Princess Bride: This is an utterly charming fairy tale marred by the execrable performance of Billy Crystal. It is metadiscursive, with the Falk/Savage framework, but still a ripping good adventure yarn. There are also kissing parts. This is one of a handful of movies I'll watch every time they come on, along with The Warriors and the much less good Hammett. If I were to replace it, and Rob Reiner is represented by Spinal Tap a bit further down so it might be warranted, I might either go with The Thin Man (charming, though differently so) or Raiders of the Lost Ark (as an adventure). But this is feeling pretty safe; there's no other film quite like it. 99. Ms. 45. Abel Ferrara needs to have a spot here, as a big, brawling, broken visionary. I'm sure his body of work has as many misses as hits, but this combines his gutter aestheticism with his Catholic mysticism. Bad Lieutenant does the same, but it's been so long since I've seen that I don't have as much confidence in it.
98. Aguirre, Wrath of God: As I said, it wouldn't feel right if I didn't have Herzog on here. This carries his philosophical stamp but still maintains a life of its own. Unlike Reiner but like Ferrara, he has a distinct vision so I don't think it would be fair to include more than one.
97. Snake Eyes: The story is nothing great, but who cares about that when you have a typically deranged Nic Cage performance and DePalma's camera zooming all around. I will address the DePalma issue later; I haven't counted the number but I'm clearly violating the Ferrera/Herzog principle I just stated. So maybe not a secure slot.
96. Clueless. Working theory: Amy Henkerling directed both the great teen movie of the 80s (Fast Times) and the great post-teen movie of the 90s (this). "Post-teen" hear doesn't mean college as opposed to high school, but an awareness of the previously established tropes. Other movies in this category might include Mean Girls, Lady Bird, Easy A, Book Smart, and Election. But this feels superior to all those, so is secure on the list. 95. Bride of Frankenstein. While I've been more of an auterist in my approach so far, this is all about the performance by Elsa Lanchester as Mary Shelley and the Bride. People like to talk about how this is a sequel that surpasses the original, which I agree with. 94. Yes, Madam! Not to be confused with "Yes Madam" (1995) or "Yes Madam" (2003), this film would, in literal translation, be known as "Royal Elder Sister." While I confuse some Hong Kong actioners in my head, this has Cynthia Rothrock and that really tall white guy who can't act, plus the best fall I can think of. The ending is crazy and not in a good way; highly flawed, but that's ok with me. 93. 2001: A Space Odyssey. There are two other Kubriks I can think of coming up, but this is such an epic achievement I have have trouble letting it go. The music and editing, the disjunction between the opening and the main story, the Star Child. The movie is virtually flawless, which might be a problem. 92. WALL-E. Both this and Up stand out for distinct set pieces: the silent movie opening and the life story segment in the latter. As I think about it, I prefer Up so I could swap them. But I don't really like the trend in animation Pixar exemplifies, so I'm a little torn. 91. House of the Devil. There's a movie-ness to this horror gem, and an adorable final girl performance by Jocelin Donahue. Maybe not the best movie apart from its movieness, but safe on this list.

In my earlier draft, I commented that I had recently seen Beau Travail, "which is better than any of these movies and I like it more." That raises the question of what other movies I could add, but I'll table that for now. It's going to be hard to find openings for new movies, given this start. In this short start, I see themes of allegiance, uniqueness, the sheen of perfection as a detriment, and a certain aesthetic craziness as a plus.

90. Hud. Again, it's a performance that stands out--Patricia Neal as Alma. Yet another I'd like to watch again to see how I feel about it currently. 89. The Shining. Probably fallen in my estimation over the years, as I've rewatched it and watched more horror films. It should stay at least for the Room 237 reasons. 88. Team America: World Police. "Gary, you can't blame yourself for something that bears did." The pinnacle of irreverence? I also love Borat, but they can't both be on here. 87. Rosemary's Baby: Lean forward to see around the door. Rewatched recently--it holds up. 86. Strangers on a Train: The glasses of Patricia Hitchcock are what this is all about. One of my favorite Alfred Hitchcock's but could be replace. 85. Phantasm. Pure independent inspiration. Essential. 84. Glengarry Glen Ross: Are we speaking? Or talking? Not the greatest movie qua movie though. 83. Down By Law. Beautiful opening pan. "It is a sad and beautiful night." 82. Amour. Maybe the scariest movie Isabel Adjani has been in, as her mother washes herself down the drain. Much scarier than the tentacle porn of Possession, which is apparently undergoing a resurgence. 81. This Is Spinal Tap: We're not saying she has to smell the glove. But she should at least sniff it. And this should stay. Weirdly this seems like a weaker set of films than 91-100. I might scratch Hud, Glengarry, Strangers, and DBL. I've also watched Possession two more times since my snide remark regarding Amour, and feel bad about what I said. Another theme I've seen regarding favorites is performance, even though I tend to belittle it. I've alluded to seven performances in an evaluative way: 5 women (all approvingly) and 2 men (not so much).

80. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia is my favorite Sam Peckinpah movie. It's also probably the best title of any movie ever. I haven't seen it for years, but feel a sense of connection with Warren Oates. 79. Starship Troopers. Seems low for one of the best satires of all time. Could shoot up at least 20 places. 78. Night of the Living Dead. Well, then, this could shoot up 30 places 77. The 36th Chamber of Shaolin. I originally wrote "Kind of a general placeholder for the Shaw Brothers production style" but watched it again since. This is a lock. 76. Taxi Driver. There's a lot of NY grit out there, and a lot on this list? If I could keep either this or Ms. 45 superfluous, which would it be? 75. Children of Men. All this exercise is doing is to make me want to see these movies again, to see if they're as great as I remember. The set piece we all remember (wait, there are two of them) is (are) what stand out in my memory. 74. Chinatown. Case in point, I saw this again in the last six months. If I hadn't, I might have set it aside. 73. Barry Lyndon. I'm slightly annoyed with myself with this choice, which strikes me as precious and self-congratulatory. But it's certainly a great movie. 72. Wicker Man. One of the touchstones of filmed folk horror, and my personal entree into the genre. I watch it most Octobers, and this placement is a little high. 71. A Woman Under the Influence. In exploring my poetic aesthetic, I've said that I value "complicated surfaces, luminous detail, competing systems, slight shifts, sonic design, and reserved mystery." This is a complicated surface and there are sure to be luminous detail in the performances of Falk and Rowlands. "Reserved mystery" means it resists the intelligence almost successfully. The proxy for sonic design would be something like visual beauty, which you might not find here. The application of "competing systems" is a bit trickier, but it might have to do with the dialogue with movie-ness I mentioned above (an interesting concept in relations to Cassavettes.)

Written previously: "I've just recently seen a A Matter of Life and Death (aka Stairway to Heaven), and like Beau Travail it seems a candidate for this list. They both seem, at the moment, more deserving of Alfredo Garcia, Children of Men, and Barry Lyndon." The first two movies mentioned are certainly great, but I feel like I've come around on the others as well. Currently, it's Wicker Man and Taxi Driver (of all films) that feel over-rated. An aspect of any list like this is posturing: some in the movies I would leave out even though I like and remember them, and some in the ones I include, even though I barely recall them.

70. Blow Out. Kind of a nexus of art films of the 60s, paranoia films of the 7os, and uniquely 80s sleaze. While Snake Eyes, mentioned above, is a sentimental favorite, this is better while also formative. In a face-off, Nic would go and John would stay. 69. Yojimbo. Now, and forever the epitome of cool. 68. Night of the Hunter. See above. While I haven't watched it in years (a recurring theme), nothing quite looks like it in my memory. 67. The Conversation. Similar to Blow Out, but I don't feel as attached. A candidate for deletion. On rewatch, I still like it, though end seems a little off now. Leaving it in. 66. It Follows. Early in my eventual embrace of horror. A unique world. 65. Heathers. Sharp satire, but see under Clueless. 64. Who's Afraid of Virginia Wolff. Strong performances, but also remarkable visual flair considering it's essentially four people in a room. 63. King Kong. I often bring this up as the pinnacle of special effects. I mean, why would it need to be 'more realistic' than this? 62. Heat. I like it a lot, but is it that good? Update: On re-watch, I liked it by not that much. 61. Female Convict Scorpion: Jailhouse 41. Now and forever. 60.Love Witch* I don't remember what the star means. If it was for deletion, I reject it now. A vivid aesthetic. The director might see it differently than I do, which I like.

The Conversation, Heathers, and possibly Heat could be in trouble. [Update: Strike Heat in next revision.] 59. Fast Times and Ridgemont High: Not high art, but encapsulates an era. Stellar performance by young Jennifer Jason Leigh. 58. 8 ½ It's cute but unintentional that this comes in at an eighth spot. Needs a rewatch to by sure. This or another Fellini? 57 Goodbye Dragon Inn. As a posture, I like that I like this, and the next movie. 56. Enter the Dragon* More cute positioning. My operating theory is that martial arts cinema is really about the body in extremis, for whatever good that does. 55. American Movie Ok, so there's a "personal pantheon" effect of movies that at one point in my life evoked something special for me. For American Movie, which I'm thinking I've written about before, 54. Audition This is another "pp" in that it was the scariest movie I'd ever seen. 53. Warriors. The fact it wasn't ruined by Lin Manuel Miranda's execrable concept album is testimony to this. 52. Meet Me in St. Louis. The greatest musical of the classic period, at least that I can recall. 51. Singing in the Rain. It was great when I saw it, everyone says it's great, the way it's described makes me think I'd still think it's great, but I really need to see this again. Really, I have no recourse but to remove it and start a subsidiary list of movies needing a more recent viewing:

1. Singing in the Rain
2. 8 ½
3. It Follows
4. Night of the Hunter
5. Children of Men
6. A Woman Under the Influence
7. Bring Me the Head of Alfredo Garcia

But of these six, I feel that all but SitR, 8 1/2, possibly It Follows should remain. Films in some degree of trouble include the two Dragon films, The Conversation, Heathers, Wicker Man, Hud, The Shining, and Taxi Driver. Movement would open up space for previously rejected (Black Christmas, Clueless) and/or more recently watched (Gator Bait, Beau Travail) films.

Onward to the end.

STL #131: The Year(s) in Reading, 2023 and 2024

Note: STL #130 is still in process. 

It is early 2025, so time to compile my year in reading list. I seem to have put off making the 2023 list, so that took some notebook archaeology but I came up with some material for that year as well. 

The focus of the year was engaging with series, so I'll split it in two parts. First up, series that I started and finished, had started and finished, or restarted and refinished. 

1. In Search of Lost Time: A reread, but really came so much more came alive. I also reread Beckett's trilogy; also better on rereading. 
2. Per Wahloo and Maj Showall's Martin Beck novels, also collectively known as The Story of a Crime. 
3. The Mars Trilogy of Kim Stanley Robinson. Despite enjoying Red Mars, I would not typically have proceeded to Green and Blue under normal conditions. 
4. Agatha Christie's Poirot books. Ok, I didn't "finish" in the sense of reading all 39 of the novels. But I read many more, including the series end Final Curtain. However, I did finish Chesterton's Father Brown stories by finally getting my hands on the late Scandal of Father Brown (1935)
5. The Slough House books by Mick Herron. Which I didn't "finish" because it's ongoing. 

Other favorite books from 2023 (sans commentary, because I've a ways to go)

1. The Violent Bear It Away by Flannery O'Connor
2. Human Target by Tom King and Greg Smallwood
3. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata.
4. Cold Millions by Jess Walters
5. Poems 1962-2012 by Louise Gluck

December '24 Reading

 Dumb idea, but I'm going to try to finish a New Yorker every day. I have a lot that are partially read stored up, and obviously this will help with the story project too. 

1. Invincible: Get Smart. In which we meet Fat Eve. I am conflicted about it, she's portrayed humanely but it mostly seems to be done so that we can see what a good guy Mark is.
2. She-Hulk by Rainbow v4:Jen-Sational. Nice guest spots from Carol and Patsy. 
3. NYer of 11/18/24. Jackson Arn's streak continues with a visit to the NYC tattoo convention. 
4. NYer of 9/16/24. Photo-essay on "The World's Longest Yard Sale," stretching along Highway 147 from Michigan to Alabama. 
5. Stormbringer by Michael Moorcock. Oddly, I found the audio version easier to follow. 
6. NYer of 9/30/24. Madison defined a "faction" as "a number of citizens, whether amounting to a minority or majority of the whole, who are united and actuated by some common impulse of passion, or of interest, adverse to the the rights of other citizens, or to the permanent and aggregate interests of the community."
7. NYer o f 12/2/24. Jackson Arn on John Singer Sargent: He "seemed to be at ease anywhere, as long as there was a butler."
8. NYer of 7/25/22. Big tribes disenfranchised black descendents of their slaves.
9. NYer of 11/25/24."Minimum Payment Due" by Saïd Sayrafiezadeh.
10. NYer of 3/27/2023. Mary Gaitskill updates "Secretary" by telling the story from an older woman's viewpoint in the #MeToo era. 
11. Green Arrow: Hunter's Moon written by Mike Grell. This is what "grim and gritty" was like in the 80s, post Dark Knight. It makes me wince now, though there's this cool gauntlet scene. 
12. The Nation of November 2024.  "Rimbaud's Beach is only a mile from the 'Elephant Trunk'/ where dolphins leap up laughing and Russian women twirl,/ where Goldmore Road stretches, and beer like water flows, / where sailors drown among the nymphs." Saadi Youssef
13. The NYer of 3/7/22. Dickens directed two charities: one for struggling writers, the other for former prostitutes. 
14. Invincible: Family Ties. Teen Ollie doesn't care if all Earthlings are killed as by-product of scourge virus. 
15. She-Hulk by Rainbow Rowell v5: All In. Last scene with Patsy Walker, with the Eat Cake and Wear Dresses Wednesday meeting. 
16. The Shrieking Skull and Other Victorian Ghost Stories by James Skipp Borlase. The stand out is "Bored To Death," about an unsuccessful writer who literally bores to death the editor he thinks is blocking his genius.
17. NYer of July 11&18, 2022. Fiction issue. Profile of Emmanuel Carrere, good stories by Rachel Kushner and Ling Ma.  
18. The Nation  of Dec 24. Michel Houllebecq had a hard right turn. 
19. Invincible: What's Happening He actually found the pathos in Eve. 
20. Paris Review Summer 2024. "Blue" by K. Patrick, behind the scenes at "Teletubbies."
21. NYer 0f10/14/24. Crypto targets any all unfriendly or perceived unfriendly legislators.
22. NYer of 12/16/24. Good story by Goff about the later days of controversially mismatched couple. 
23. NYer of 10/7/24. Poetry of Mosab Abu Toha. 
24. Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell. Similar to Pullman, with an ecological angle.
25. Lolly Willowes by Sylvia Townsend Warner. Starts as a comedy of manners and ends as Satanic conversion story, without changing tone! There are several moments that serve as evidence of the occult, and the reader explains them away until at the end we realize we've been viewing Lolly the same as everyone else. 
26. NYer of 12/23/24. Puzzle and cartoon issue. The struggle to contain stuff escalated as the typical American house increased from 1500 sq ft to 2200, 1973-2023. 

Nov '24 Reading

 Here goes:

1. Selected Stories 1968-1994 by Alice Munro
2. Fieldwork by Mischa Berlinski
3. True Grit by Charles Portis. Read by Donna Tartt--maybe best narration I've heard. 
4. NYer of 10/21. "My Camp" by Joshua Cohen
5. NYer of 10/28. "In England, in the days before the Industrial Revolution ruined everything, there were two professions a gentleman could pursue: wine merchant and rare-book dealer.  Neither required undue exertion."
6. NYer of 11/11: Barry Blitt's cover is Lady Liberty walking a tightrope. 
7. NYer of 11/4: Profile of Mati Diop , director of Dahomey, a film about the repatriation of indigenous art. (Touki Bouki directed by her uncle). 
8. Legion of Super-Heroes Before the Great Darkness. Steven Ditko's fill in issues seem aggressively cartoonish
9. Ronia, the Robber's Daughter. Lovely, episodic story about growing up and forgining relationships.
10. The Science Fiction Hall of Fame Volume One, 1929-1964. Read all these short stories decades ago. Still remembered and like Asimov, Clarke, Keyes. New appreciation for James Blish, Fritz Leiber, Tom Godwin.  Something worthwhile in all of them. 

October 24 Reading

 Spookytimes+continuing short stories

1. North American Lake Monsters by Nathan Ballingrud. Been on my list for years and I'm glad to have finally gotten to in. Not every story is a winner, but ends with a strong trio of title story, in which and angry ex-con hacks up a lake monster, "The Way Station," in which doubly homeless main displaced by Katrina seeks out his daughter, and "The Good Husband," in which the titular character 
2. The Mysterious Mr. Quin. Actually a Mr. Satterwaite is the protagonist. Aging, alone idle, a connoisseur of art and Duchesses, he really needs Quin to lead him to old mysteries to solve. None of the stories are that great, but all together it's quite the vibe! 
3. Different Seasons. Actually, I like all four of these novellas, though all have flaws. My favorite is the last one, "Breathing Lessons," for its frame-tale setting of a secret New York story-tellers' club. Next I think I'd go with "Apt Pupil" because the antagonist and protagonist are both despicable, followed by "The Body" because the writer's voice is a bit too overbearing closely followed by "Rita Hayworth..." which was just a little too... Shawshank. 
4. NYer of 2/28/22. Claire Keegan's "So Late in the Day."
5. The Nation of Oct. 24. I am worried about Arab-American voters in Michigan. 
6. Ghost Summer by Tananarive Due. Divided into sections: "Gracetown" (Florida town haunted by racist past)  "The Knowing" (weird relationships); "Carriers" (post-virus American, with the same character), "Vanishings" (dealing with death). "Gracetown" and "Carriers" stood out--though I don't really like zombie apocali. 
7. The Beast You Are by Paul Tremblay. This short story collection is easily the worst thing I've read by Tremblay. 
8. Ghost Stories edited by Joseph Lewis French. Tbh, the best were the best remembered: M.R. James and Blackwood. 
9. Hack/Slash Omnibus vol. 1. Some good world building in bits and pieces. 

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"