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Adventures in Reading 2022
PART ONE: DISTRACTION AND ENCHANTMENT 2022 was unkind to my habit of reading lots of books. Partly my paid work was to blame: growing pains (which I am too old for) of the professional kind. Then there was the several weeks I wasted on Thomas Mann‘s Doctor Faustus, which I had to abandon. What drudgery! What a distraction! I’d read and admired a number of Mann’s short stories, but Doctor Faustus struck me as all posturing, a ponderous performance with no point in sight, almost every moment of it arriving via second- or third-hand reports about Mann’s fictional, Schoenbergian composer, Adrian Leverkühn.Read More
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Poetry of Stanley Moss (a 199-word review + samples)
There is no pleasure like a hot-spring bath. Ideally naked we slip into the steam and mineral cooking-egg smell of it, sliding bare buttocks down the slickly gnarled sloping rock until our chin rests on the amber surface of the water. If we pray, we pray to the forces of sacred nature, laughing and arguing as we might across the Thanksgiving table. We are part of their family. I lied in that first sentence. Reading Stanley Moss is a hot-spring pleasure—an escape into healing intensities, words kneading the aches from intellect, feeling, and spirit.Read More