Dr. Metablog

Books I Read, 2024

Ernest Hemingway, For Whom the Bell Tolls; Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep; Felipe Alou, My Baseball Journey; Guy de la Bedoyere, Gladius, the World of the Roman Soldier; Gordon Dee Alcorn, Owls; Martin H. Levinson, Brooklyn Boomer; J.N. Adams, Bilingualism and the Latin Language; Sybille Haynes, Etruscan Civilization, a Cultural History; Philip Freeman, Julian, Rome's Last Pagan Emperor; G & L Bonfante, The Etruscan Language, An Introduction; Ernest Hemingway, The Snows of Kilimanjaro and Other Stories; Booth Tarkington, The Magnificent Ambersons; Ellen Gilchrist, In the Land of Dreamy Dreams; Kim Chernin, In My Mother's House; Ines Augrain Thomas, Memoirs of an 84 Year Old; Louise Penny, The Cruelest Month; Abramovitch and Galvin, Jews of Brooklyn; Helen Czerski, The Blue Machine, How the Ocean Works; Ian Buruma, Spinoza, Freedom's Messiah; Robert Leighton, Tarquinia, an Etruscan City; Joseph B. Solodow, Latin Alive; William Shakespeare, Coriolanus, Barry S Brown, La Signora Watson e I Segreti di Parkington Manor; Carlo Levi, Christ Stopped at Eboli; Patrick Joyce, Remembering peasants, a personal history of a vanished world; Charles Darwin, Origin of Species (parts); Sean Sayers, The Making of a Marxist Philosopher, Leo Tolstoi, Anna Karenina; David Gibbins, The History of the World in Twelve Shipwrecks; Lisa Kaltenegger, Alien Earths; Nicholas Kristof, Chasing Hope; William Shakespeare, Much Ado about Nothing; Abdulrazak Gurnah, Other Lives; Mollie Gillen, The Masseys; Hibl & Hibl, The Handel Lamps Book;  William Shakespeare, King Lear; Caroline Dodds Pennock, On Savage Shores; Andrew Lipman, Squanto, a Native Odyssey; Thomas Hardy, Far from the Madding Crowd; Lee Siegel, Groucho Marx; Ben Goldfarb, Eager, the Surprising Secret Life of Beavers; Robert Louis Stevenson, The Lantern Bearers and other Essays; Alice Munro, Too Much Happiness; Margarette Lincoln, London and the 17th Century; Julian Barnes, The Sense of an Ending; Mark Kurlansky, The Basque History of the World.

Deaths, 2024

The year got off to an early start when Brad Gombas died on December 16. Brad was the brother of my late brother-in-law Allen Gombas. I knew him in the 1970s, when he was a young man; he lived most of his life in New Mexico where he established a career as a builder and craftsman. I wasn't in touch except through the extended family communication chain. On December 26, my friend since  1965 Ray Pike died at age 90. Ray was an accomplished journalist. Nancy Pike and AGP were the young mothers in a playgroup that included the infants NGP and Nina Pike -- in an earlier life it now seems. We saw Ray and Nancy at least once a year for many decades. Then on the last day of the year Sue Palmer died (peacefully, I'm told), after many many years of illness and pain. She was a superbly talented artist and a friend, though not a close one, since 1969. In February, we lost Nancy Levitt. Not a close friend (wife of a colleague) but a long time acquaintance  -- a regular at the Takacs, seated just in front of us these past 30 years. Sheldon "Spike" Cohen, later Alan Mills, a friend from the PS 217 schoolyard, died in March. Esophogeal cancer that had metastasized. A long drawn out death, with many months of hospice care. In May. Bill Wood died. He was a world-famous scientist and a friend. It must be 20 years now since his wife, Renate Wood, a poet, left us. Bill had been in a relationship with another old acquaintance, Marilyn Krysl, for these many years. Marilyn died a couple of months after Bill; she had been in "memory care" for several months. During the summer, we lost two former English colleagues. The first to go was congenial Chuck Squier, at the age of 91, who had moved to Boise, Idaho to be near his children; he was a friend and also a long time neighbor on the Hill; the second: nice guy Doug Burger. In August I discovered that Anatol Anton had died earlier in the year. I knew Anatol when he was a member of the CU Department of Philosophy in the 70s or 80s, but hadn't been in touch since he left Boulder to return to San Francisco. Anatol was a cheerful bear of a man, far to  the political left, who grew up in Greenwich Village with a semi-famous painter for a father. Fred Litto, classmate from P S 217 and Erasmus, died in Brazil, where he had lived for 50 years; we always planned to get together, but it never happened. Another PS 217 friend, Tony Sogluizzo, died in the spring but I didn't find out about it until much later. He was a genuinely decent and gentle man who had a good career as a librarian. Late in December, we attended the dignified funeral of Bill Belew, husband of Lynn's friend Sharon Belew.  And so the year came to an end.