A poem by Allen Ginsberg, Braniff Air, Denver—Dallas, December 3, 1974
Oil brown smog over Denver
Oil red dung colored smoke
level to level across the horizon
blue tainted sky above
Oil car smog gasoline
hazing red Denver's day
December bare trees
sticking up from housetop streets
Plane lands rumbling, planes rise over
radar wheels, black smoke
drifts wobbly from tailfins
Oil millions of cars speeding the cracked plains
Oil from Texas, Bahrain, Venezuela Mexico
Oil that turns General Motors
revs up Ford
lights up General Electric, oil that crackles
thru International Business Machine computers
charges dynamos for ITT
sparks Western Electric
runs thru Amer Telephone & Telegraph wires
Oil that flows thru Exxon New Jersey hoses,
rings in Mobile gas tank cranks, rumbles
Chrysler engines
shoots thru Texaco pipelines,
blackens ocean from broken Gulf tankers
spills onto Santa Barbara beaches from
Stand of California derricks offshore.
Despite a recent significant hiatus in my reading, I am about half-way through The Aeneid and enjoying it far more than even the greatest Science Fiction novel. However, I am reading the Fagles edition and definitely feel it is too modern and popularized for my taste. I did study classical literature at university and developed a preference for the more classical translations. Thus I naturally lean towards Richard Lattimore than John Fagles.
Many years ago I found myself scribbling loose notes whenever I ran across a book title that interested me. New title sources were all around me from literary reviews in periodicals I subscribed to, like NYRB and TLS, down to word on the street from both reliable and unreliable sources. I remember my sister jaw-boning me on the value of books by Glenn Beck. There they were, prominently displayed on her bookshelves (I didn’t have the heart to deny her love of the truth and I wondered how she had time to read them when she and her husband watched Fox News practically every waking minute of the day).
February being shorter might be assumed to be a lesser reading month, but historically it has often been a strong breakout month letting the longer months vie for the title of least books read. I guess it’s not the month but rather my mood.