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As good a time as any to remember that Mr. Lynch has given us one of the most creative & intellectually stimulating oeuvres in the history of cinema (even when all we can do is scratch our heads), including a masterpiece: The Elephant Man. Few can reach that level of perfection.

Context Collapse reached my doorstep & my book wishlist grew by a foot after reading the poem’s razo (I often skip introductory texts & come back to them once finished, but not this time). How about sneaking a Franklin between the pages, Ryan Ruby (is off riding the Ringbahn)? A Jackson, at the very least.

Coming up in 2025… The Complete Fiction of Guy Davenport. Will savor it slowly: one short story each week. (The Death of Picasso is in the pile because it includes two previously uncollected stories: The Owl of Minerva and The Playing Field).

If you were a living and breathing human being during the first 70 years of the 20th century, then you probably received a letter from Ezra Pound. This is a fact.

There’s a passage in The Autobiography of Alice B. Toklas in which Gertrude Stein, upon seeing her portrait, the 1 Picasso painted, tells him that it doesn’t look like her. “It will,” replied Picasso (it did). According to Stein, the artist’s “rose period” ended with that canvas.

New book just dropped. The final “self portrait” of my triptych A Body Without Organs, the one that makes me stutter, scratch my head, look sideways, and change the subject of the conversation when asked “What is it about?” “You’ve lost it, m’hijo,” Mother would have said.

The last Oulipian giant is no more. It was Raymond Queneau who asked him to join the group as the first non-founding member. He gave us the incredibly playful Hortense trilogy and the seven “branches” of an autobiographical project of Proustian stature. RIP Jacques Roubaud.

My dear chap Solveig Güzel, independent scholar extraordinaire (and incorrigible hoaxer whose secret identity continues to baffle members of the literati), has delighted me with a most jocular, rambunctious and mischievous 15-page epistle (his best work yet). Sir: I’m honored.

Starting the year with a deafening bang… Today, in the mail: the Holy Grail of Henry Miller’s correspondence: the ever-elusive 2-vol., 857-page edition of the “Hamlet Letters” (with Michael Fraenkel), in which they set out to discuss Shakespeare’s famous play, but not really.

This one took me about 3 weeks. I struggled a bit with part I, but part II is as great as vol. I. Once the narrator (a.k.a. Marcel) sees Gilberte from the distance -or someone resembling her- accompanied by a man while strolling at a park, he unravels and Proust’s genius shines.

This year I plan to keep on reading authors’ complete works, like I’ve been doing since 2021. For many I’ll read 3 books at a time, switch to another and revisit them a few months later, but 3 writers will get special attention the entire year. Dostoevsky is one of them.

David Lynch (1946-2025). Sir, you will be terribly missed.

At the rate of one book/month, this year I’ll also tackle the complete works of Jane Austen. I’m just not sure if I should start with Sense and Sensibility, her first novel (The Watsons is unfinished), or her juvenilia (some of the material dates back to 1787, when she was 11!).

Arrived: all 9 novels of Henry Green, a “late modernist” admired by major figures of the literati (Updike, Isherwood, Welty, Auden). These are the British editions, but you can find 8 of his novels in NYRB’s catalog (a.k.a. the literary counterpart of the Criterion Collection).

A thing of beauty: the "animal novels" of Günter Grass.

I watched this last night. Andrei Tarkovsky’s first feature film reaches the level of perfection, cinematic artistry and rigorous composition most filmmakers dream of. Never have I seen a more attuned dialogue between foreground and background sustained through an entire film.

R.I.P. Pierre Joris. He was Paul Celan’s most prolific translator in the English language and the author of a body of poetry impervious to facile classification and lyrically asymmetrical, as if penned by a multitude of poets.

A reviewer once wrote that Barth’s Giles Goat-Boy was “a novel to offend everyone.” This can be said about Mano’s Take Five, which is brilliant & one of the best kept secrets in American literature. It transcends its own mean-spiritedness through lavish verbiage & caustic humor.

After receiving Michael Brodsky’s Invidicum (considered to be his magnum opus: 1,190 pages, 20 years in the making) and thoroughly sampling it, I had to ransack my public library bookshelves to figure out if I’ve just started reading the King of Maximalists… Seems like it.

R.I.P. Alice Notley (1945-2025).