It’s beginning to look a lot like C--------.
What begins with C, has ten letters and means festive and very accomplished? Creativity. Freddie’s boundless Creativity. In her “spare time,” she sketches and makes museum-quality silver and precious stone jewelry, takes beautiful pictures of the Wise Acres owl, sunsets, plants, and makes stuff. Other than jewelry. She has astounded me since the first day I met her.
These Freddie-made Christmas stockings appear as if by magic, ready for stuffing. Thick, good yarn. One or two a day, lately. They are crocheted, is all I know. How she does it is a mystery to me as I’m usually asleep—I just see them in the morning. Looks like a great side hustle, but she gives them to family, full of gifts. Sometimes they even contain Freddie-made jewelry.
It’s a gift, this making of beauty. But I’m going to try and convince her to share them with a wider public. Any takers out there? Let me know at g@wisesculpture.com or in the comments below.
Books, the good, the bad and the meh.
In a world beset by hyperbole and excessive over-blurb at every turn, the publishing business and its breathless assurances that this book, whatever it is, is the pinnacular, blue ribbon, kickass ONE to read, well…caveat frigging emptor. The metaverse has turned into clickbait and BS, so here’s a Reader Beware: “Didion and Babbler” by Lili Anolik.
Why? It’s Moronic, cap M. I can only guess she put Didion in the title to sell books. Oprah said it “…reads like a propulsive novel.” Well, my copy was propulsive; it sailed through the air like a clumsy rocket, half read. I want my money back. You can read my review in the Amazon one-stars.
Then comes a breath of fresher air; “We Tell Ourselves Stories: Joan Didion and the American Dream Machine” by Alissa Wilkinson. (Link)
Megan Abbot says it’s “A vital new take on Joan Didion’s work, exploring the ways Didion traced the gradual, and increasingly dangerous, merging of Hollywood and its gorgeous fictions with politics, with the uppermost ranks of power, and, perhaps most sweepingly, with the way we understand the world and ourselves.”
A fitting description for a very good book.
I read it in a couple of sittings, and recommend it five stars worth with honors. You know the feeling you get when you’ve read a book that made you think? This one does that.
I’ll leave the meh for next time. But it’s not Graydon Carter’s book; “When the Going Was Good” (Link) is a revealing, and, yes, rollicking, look at publishing in the golden age. I’m enjoying it.
Poetry month; two books and an anecdote.
R.I.P. Val Kilmer. Both books are favorites and one of the authors is an old friend…
For the tail end of April (Poetry Month) two books of note; “Some Of This Is True” by Jim Carns, (Link) and “Cowboy Poet Outlaw Madman” by Val Kilmer. (Link) Both are memorable shelf-worthy keepers and well-designed, full of deeply felt poems that illuminate each author’s essence.
Carns’s collection includes lovely illustrations by Maureen Kenny and a triptych by Evan Lindquist, owned by the author. These two books exemplify why there is a month set aside for poetry.
The anecdote. About 70 years ago I went to Rockhurst College to see and hear Robert Frost. (I wasn’t all hot rods, beer, lukewarm grades and girls) It was a thrilling evening. At the end, the college spokesman, a Catholic dignitary, perhaps a cardinal, said, before the last poem, “When the program is over, I will pass out first, Mr. Frost will pass out after me, and the rest of you are to pass out in orderly fashion, after.”
Robert Frost leaned over to the mic and said, “It must be all that communion wine; I usually pass out first.” Rim shot please. The crowd loved it.
We thought Edsel was a dud. Then came Cybertruck.
The 24-hour news cycle looks like The Onion makes it up. RFK as the health guy. Hegseth. Trump tariffs. But Musk takes a special cake. A really rich guy should probably be anonymous, a what’s-his-face in the shadows. Certainly not alienating 50% of the country by choosing up sides on either end of the playground. Elon is so rich he could stand to shelve Cybertruck and sort of let it fade. He is far from alone in auto industry misfires. But, no, he plants his flag and lightning rods firmly where they can’t be missed and DOGEs off to work each day to shut down another widows and orphans fund. Wow. I mean it does seem that way.
Yep, it’s a Tesla. Re-badged.
