HELLO

 

THREE FAVORITE MEMES FROM 2022

 

FOR THOSE OF US WHO

 

DON'T KNOW WHO GETS CREDIT FOR THIS BUT GOOD POINT

 

SOME OF THE BOOKS FROM 2020 THAT I LOVED

I know I'm missing some but here's a quick list of some books from friends that came out in 2020 and I loved:

SEEING-EYE BOY by Terence Winch (a totally entertaining and enlightening young adult novel set in a pre-expressway 1950s mostly Irish Bronx neighborhood that anybody can enjoy)

MAIN STREET: How A City's Heart Connects Us All by Mindy Thompson Fullilove M.D. (the subtitle says it all about this personal and professional take on reclaiming Main Streets by a brilliant psychiatrist and social historian—with some quotes from me)

AFTERSHOCKS: A Memoir by Nadia Owusu (A knockout must read multi-cultural story of and by one of our best living writers)

LOVE POEM TO MPTF by Harry E. Northup (a collection of poems chronicling a poet/actor's loss of his and his poet wife Holly Prado's LA apartment in a fire ending up at The Motion Picture Television Fund home where Harry then suffered the loss of Holly, a profound and moving poetic and spiritual document of endurance, resilience, and transcendence)

GREAT BALLS OF DOUBT: Poems And Prose Poems by Mark Terrill (terrific new collection by a favorite poet of mine who has written some of the greatest prose poems of my, or any, generation) 

IT WASN'T SUPPOSED TO BE LIKE THIS by Greg Masters (lots of great poetic takes on a poet's life mostly in downtown East Village Manhattan in the last decades of the 20th century)

PIVOT and ASIDES by Geoffrey Young (two of the poet/artist's limited edition short books of poems that are marvels of construction and insight and humor)

and among the dozens of poetry books I was sent this year that I'm still reading and digging:

SOMETHING SOMETHING MORNING by Chris MASON

NONE OF US by Ted Greenwald and Kyle Schlesinger

THE COURSE by Ted Greenwald & Charles North

A THOUSAND WORDS AND OTHERS by George Tysh

DERRIDA'S IN/VOICE by Chris Tysh

[please forgive my leaving out any I'm forgetting, just an exercise in old guy's spontaneous list making] 

 I make a couple of cameo appearances in this terrific book and will be reading two short poems of mine that are in it at this event, please join me for this zoom event:

ANOTHER GOOD QUOTE

SHEROES

I just was inspired to write a list of 100 public figures identified as women, who impacted me and my life with their ideas and activism and art and lives, so here it is:

1. Helen Keller
2. Eleanor Roosevelt
3. Josephine Baker
4. Ethel Waters
5. Veronica Lake
6. Jane Greer
7. Linda Darnell
8. Billie Holiday
9. Jo Stafford
10. Ella Fitzgerald
11. Marilyn Monroe
12. Peggy Lee
13. Della Resse
14. Dinah Washington
15. Edith Piaf
16. Lillian Smith
17. Dorothy Dandridge
18. Dorothy Day
19. Ida Lupino
20. Simone Signoret
21. Sarah Vaughan
22. Patsy Kline
23. Nina Simone
24. Annie Ross
25. Abbey Lincoln
26. Etta James
27. Diane di Prima
28. Muriel Rukeyser
29. Jean Rhys
30. Gertrude Stein
31. Barbara Guest
32. Sojourner Truth
33. Harriet Tubman
34. Mary Wollstonecraft
35. Mary Shelley
36. Fannie Lou Hamer
37. Joan Baez
38. Dolores Huerta
39. Angela Davis
40. Aretha Franklin
41. Janis Joplin
42. Bernadette Dohrn
43. Bernadette Devlin
44. Jean Seberg
45. Katherine Johnson
46. Robin Morgan
47. Carla Bley
48. Betty Carter
49. Barbra Streisand
50. Marian McPartland
51. Dolly Parton
52. Buffy Sainte-Marie
53. Winona LaDuke
54. Gloria Steinem
55. Margaret Randall
56. Agnes Varda
57. Martha Gelhorn
58. Audre Lorde
59. Maya Angelou
60. Virginia Wolfe
61. Zora Neale Hurston
62. Frida Kahlo
63. Laura Nyro
64. Adrienne Rich
65. Joanne Kyger
66. Eva Hesse
67. Alice Notley
68. Maureen Owen
69. Patti Smith
70. Bernadette Mayer
71. Carolee Schneeman
72. Carole King
73. Ada Katz
74. Joni Mitchell
75. Sinead O'Connor
76. Temple Grandin
77. Bjork
78. Beyonce
79. Alicia Keys
80. Erykah Badu
81. Lauryn Hill
82. Jennifer Lopez
83. Eileen Myles
84. Michelle Obama
85. Elizabeth Warren
86. Janet Mock
87. Laverne Cox
88. Indya Moore
89. Ruth Bader Ginsberg
90. Sonia Sotomayor
92. Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez
93. Malala Yousafzai
95. Greta Thunberg
96. Carol Dysinger
97. Toni Morrison
98. Kate Bush
99. Wanda Coleman
100. Elaine Equi

I'm already thinking of more I realize I forgot, especially friends I left off, but I have to stop somewhere.

ALWAYS GOOD ADVICE

PS

Another highlight of The Golden Globes was Awkwafina, who is the highlight in anything she's a part of. But the fact that they had to keep saying she's the first Asian-American actor to win a Globe for Best Actress in a Motion Picture —Musical or Comedy (we won't even get into what/how movies get into this category) just compounded my deep disappointment that in 2020 we're still dealing with "firsts" in any category (in the GGs "first solo woman" to win for best score, in this season's The Nutcracker ballet "first African-American" in the lead girl role etc.)!

A RECENT FAVORITE QUOTE FROM AN EVANGELICAL CHRISTIAN

THIS

HAPPY SPRING

I came to this conclusion in 1953.

TOO SAD QUOTE

MID-DAY MINI-RANT

The good going on and going to, and coming out of, Southeast Texas after Harvey elevates us all with the truth that there's a lot of love in most humans, especially manifested in caring about others, including and most importantly, strangers.

The bad going on and going to, and coming out of, Southeast Texas, is the direct result of corporate greed and the actions of those who serve it, like the deliberate ignoring of and deregulation of safety standards in the construction of oil refineries and chemical plants and pipelines and urban planing and flood control, etc.

Human need versus corporate greed.

WHERE HAVE ALL THE FIREFLIES GONE

When I first moved into my apartment in this old house and my youngest, Flynn, was still a boy, we'd sometimes spend evenings on the front lawn watching what we called when I was a boy "lightning bugs"—there were always what seemed like hundreds of them. But in recent years there seem to be fewer and fewer. I only saw two this year.

Instead, there seems to be more dragonflies—this summer more than ever—zooming around the lawn like miniature helicopters. Is there a connection? Then I saw this on the Internet and thought that maybe that's a positive sign:

YOUTUBE VIDEO WORTH WATCHING

even though I knew all this from reading about everything mentioned in it, it's still worth watching to the end as a great synthesis of what we know about what we know...

FAVORITE EARTH DAY SIGN

ANOTHER GREAT QUOTE

GOOD POINT