Basic Books 2023
daydreaming w/ Bob Arnold
This is a supreme cider donut
melt in your mouth donut
the clincher of a September day
after picking blueberries at
Green Mountain Orchards in
Putney, Vermont ~
No promo — they don't
know us and we don't
know them — even if
we have been scrambling
their bountiful hillsides
picking there for decades,
the best cider donut
we have ever had —
thank you!
______________________
1977
…
I'll read a ton of poets before I sit down again with Anthony Hecht's poems,
but I have read him, and this biography performs a miracle raising the ante
on a somewhat dragged through the dust poet. Give me Stevens, of course,
and all by Berryman, Delmore Schwartz, Marianne Moore, Elizabeth Bishop
before Hecht, but read this biography — Hecht's literal writing
and continuing and finally surviving is his poem.
St. Martin's 2023
Los Lobos, founded in 1973
Two great music sets we love — one is quite recent, informal, a miniature powerhouse. The longer concert is beautifully shot: exquisite pan shots of the full stage, clear as a bell right up on the stage with the performers, back-shots, side-shots, the instruments are in your hands.
Imagine (you can) this group hasn't been inducted into the Rock and Roll Hall of Fame
They are the Americas (south and north) Songbook
Today is our 50th wedding anniversary — Bob & Susan
We've played these guys throughout all the years, and Susan is from L.A.
Oh, the one-of-kind film Texas Chain Saw Massacre is also
50 years old this year. Here is film director Eli Roth's
smart cookie contemporary eye to the film classic:
"Texas Chain Saw Massacre” unnerved me in ways I didn’t expect. I didn’t know it was going to start with those solar flares, and the strange music that blurs the line between score and sound design. The actors didn’t feel like actors. I wasn’t scared by it. I wanted to live in it. It was a movie just dripping with mood and atmosphere, and it felt like it had been made by serial killers."