Larry’s Comments (group member since Nov 23, 2020)

Larry’s comments from the Nonfiction Reading - Only the Best group.

Carol wrote: "Re: The Atlantic. I give it as a subscription to my son every year and because of that, I think, many of its articles pop up on my computer. Always find them very interesting. The latest was a few ...The latest was a few days ago- 'Why the West needs to end the war in the Ukraine soon' by Charles A. Kupchan.
"

I thought that that particular article was not just good but very important.

I so think of tales and novels when I think of Kipling ... I'm glad to have read this poem, Carol.

John wrote: "I may give the New York Review of Books more time, but with every issue I find only one article I actually read.

Perhaps I have too many periodicals on my plate. That could be part of the problem.
.."

John, with the change in editors after Robert Silvers, the NYRB has become much less essential for me. Silvers edited it from 1963 until 2017 and it was better than great. Every article had his fingerprints on it ... for the better.

I definitely have too many periodicals that I scan ... although for most, it truly is just scanning their table of contents. If you can get to it, and I think that Scribd has it, take a look at THE LISTENER (out of New Zealand). It's a weekly and many weeks there are one or two articles that I find very interesting ... especially when they review books.

And John, look for OUR STATE on Scribd magazines. It's a monthly devoted to North Carolina.

Also, as of now, you can read THE ATLANTIC on Scribd. Magazines do come and go on Scribd, however.

John, I susbscribe to the digital version of Harper's and I'm not sure that recommend it. (I think it's a lot worse than it was a few decades ago.) I got a great offer ... and the access to the deep archives going back 170 (?) years persuaded me.

I'm not sure what periodicals will be around 20 years from now. I guess I would bet on THE NEW YORKER and THE ECONOMIST ... and after that, I just don't know.

I have access to thousands of periodicals for free through Libby, and I pay for Zinio Unlimited which gives me thousands more ... and I pay for Apple New+ which gives me hundreds more. And I read a handful each week/month.

John, I also can strongly recommend Angell's Let Me Finish, which is a memoir about growing up and living in New York City. And, yes, there is baseball in it also.

Wow! I read it twice immediately. So good, Carol!

John wrote: "I saw today that Roger Angell passed away. Aged 101. I always enjoyed his essays in the New Yorker and his baseball writing was as good as it gets. His step-father was E.B. White. His mother was an..."

You are so right about the quality of his baseball writing. I bet you know that he was the stepson of E.B. White, essayist and the author of Charlotte's Web.

John, I'm reading one of the best baseball books I've ever read right now. It consists of essays on who the author thinks are the 100 best baseball players of all time. It's The Baseball 100 by Joe Posnanski.

Carol wrote: "A Super Flower Blood Moon tonight (unless I have the wrong night!). Here is a poem by Thomas Hardy: At a Lunar Eclipse.

Thy shadow, Earth, from Pole to Central Sea,
Now steals along upon the moon'..."


Tonight is wright ... and a good choice of poems.

"My other effort — hopefully — is to study southern writing. I am all ears if anyone has recommendations."

John, I like Clyde Edgerton a lot. Most of his novels have been humorous, but even the most funny ones have serious elements in them. He has maintained his quality over the years but I still like his first two novels the most. They are Raney and Walking Across Egypt. And his memoir about flying, including his time in Vietnam, is my favorite book. It's Solo: My Adventures in the Air,

And I also like Pat Conroy. I think I've read everything he's written. My favorite ones are not his longer novels, but I've enjoyed those also. I especially liked his memoirs, My Reading Life and A Lowcountry Heart: Reflections on a Writing Life, And even his cookbook, The Pat Conroy Cookbook: Recipes of My Life ... which is much more than a cookbook,

John wrote: "A stanza from Le Monocle D’Oncle by Wallace Stevens. He’s working primarily in sounds and colors. The entire poem is, in a way, a batch of poems.

The fops of fancy in their poems leave
Memorabili..."

I like that very aspect of it ... that is, that it is a batch of poems.

John wrote: "As with my travel book interest not long ago, I seem to have an interest lately in how the really good spooky books work..."

John, I really like those words ... good artists really know the rules of their genre ... great artists know those rules and also know exactly when to break them.

On the subject of horror fiction, this extended review (really a set of essays) by the jazz critic Ted Gioia is just brilliant. You still may not want to read any horror novels, but you'll understand the attraction of them a lot better.

http://conceptualfiction.com/yearofho...

Just try the essay on Richard Matheson's I Am Legend

http://conceptualfiction.com/i_am_leg...

John, I read all those from cover to cover ... except for Vanity Fair, which I read selected articles from. Add in The Economist, The Week, New Scientist, American Scholar, Scientific American, and The Listener (from New Zealand) and that's what I read religiously. I have access to thousands of magazines through Libby (from our library) and Apple News+ but just don't have the time for much more beyond the titles I mentioned.

John wrote: "Right now, my magazine subscriptions are The New Yorker, Vanity Fair, The Atlantic, and the New York Review of Books...."

The New Yorker is such a magazine of serious thought. Articles on the great and mysterious mathematician Grothendieck and the great and even more mysterious philosopher Wittgenstein over the past week. Both are difficult articles but which are comprehensible if taken slowly. And they are both important. I wonder if they are articles that will form the basis of books.

Carol wrote: "I never read anything by Stephen King- too frightening for me, so I can imagine your grandmother's view of Salem's Lot would probably also be mine!
Re: vampires. The film of Abraham Lincoln and the..."

Carol,

'Salem's Lot is scary in the brightest daylight! I did enjoy it, however. I bet I've read fewer than ten horror novels in my life. It's just not a genre that I really like. I do recommend the four novellas in the Stephen King book, Different Seasons: Four Novellas. This is from the Wiki: "Different Seasons (1982) is a collection of four Stephen King novellas with a more dramatic bend, rather than the horror fiction for which King is famous.[1] The four novellas are tied together via subtleties that relate to each of the four seasons. The collection is notable for having nearly all of its novellas turned into Hollywood films, one of which, The Shawshank Redemption, was nominated for the 1994 Academy Award for Best Picture. "

Carol wrote: "Good Heavens! Three times across the Pacific before you were five. I have been watching a lot of HMS PInafore and noticed that the little cabin boy was described as a midshipmite. I think you were also a midshipmite!.."

I was too young to remember the ceremony, but somewhere in the basement I have a certificate that indicates that I was inducted into "The Court of King Neptune" ... maybe on the basis of crossing the International Date Line (I don't think it was the equator) on the first of those three ships. My mother also told me how sicksick I was as a baby ... that wasn't the case for the latter two trips. I do remember a bit of that last voyage. Movies every night ... canned milk with our meals that I hated the taste of ... lifeboat drills ... flying fish. The memories start with leaving Yokohama with streamers being thrown to send us off on our way. My father was with us on that voyage and we landed in Seattle and took a train to Flint, Michigan, where we picked up a new car that he had ordered. We picked it up at the Oldsmobile factory (that was probably some special thing for returning servicemen) ... and then drove to Oklahoma and Tennessee to visit family.

Carol wrote: "I grew up in a small coastal town and so this hymn, written in 1860 by William Whiting, very much resonated with everyone. The volunteer members of the Lifeboat could often be seen at the harbour p..."

Carol, by the time I was five years old I had crossed the Pacific three times in U.S. Merchant Marine transport ships. I remember the last time, leaving from the dock at Yokohama bound for Seattle. But I also remember the story that my mother told me about the first crossing. We left from Naha, Okinawa in 1949 after a massive typhoon had destroyed most of the quonset huts used for housing on the base and all the dependents were sent back to the United States. She told me a number of times through the years how the ship we were on--with our destination being Seattle--was diverted to search for survivors in the Aleutians when their ship had broken up. No survivors were found. The ocean can be a very dangerous place.

I remembered all that after I posted what I did Carol. But I am so glad that you reminded us of this. I also have quite a few favorites. I think that the first time I heard this hymn was actually not in church but on a Windham Hill CD of New Age Christmas music.

John, I like it. But I bet you know her poem in the form of a song/hymn that has become ever more popular in recent years. I bet that it is sung in our church about three times every year.

In the bleak midwinter
By Christina Rossetti

In the bleak midwinter, frosty wind made moan,
Earth stood hard as iron, water like a stone;
Snow had fallen, snow on snow, snow on snow,
In the bleak midwinter, long ago.

Our God, Heaven cannot hold Him, nor earth sustain;
Heaven and earth shall flee away when He comes to reign.
In the bleak midwinter a stable place sufficed
The Lord God Almighty, Jesus Christ.

Enough for Him, whom cherubim, worship night and day,
Breastful of milk, and a mangerful of hay;
Enough for Him, whom angels fall before,
The ox and ass and camel which adore.

Angels and archangels may have gathered there,
Cherubim and seraphim thronged the air;
But His mother only, in her maiden bliss,
Worshipped the beloved with a kiss.

What can I give Him, poor as I am?
If I were a shepherd, I would bring a lamb;
If I were a Wise Man, I would do my part;
Yet what I can I give Him: give my heart.

John,

I bought his Selected Poems when you mentioned it earlier. Please post more poems from it!

I love what J.D. McClatchy says in the introduction to this book:

"If Keats’s urn is to be believed, and beauty is the whole truth, then the ravishingly beautiful stanzas of a Hecht poem—so intricately plotted, so lavishly detailed, their rhythms such that form and speech are a single pulse—would be truth enough. But a Hecht poem has always been something more. His is a responsible art, an art that responds to history, to political and domestic tragedies, with an awareness of personal accountability. The beauty of a Hecht poem, the very skill by which its material is revealed, often throws into an even stronger, more pathetic light the desolation of the human condition that is his subject."

Hecht, Anthony. Selected Poems of Anthony Hecht (Borzoi Poetry) . Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group. Kindle Edition. "