Some Reading

I went to the library yesterday to collect a bunch of books. I just wanted some variety. This is what I came home with:

• 2 scifi, by Frederik  Pohl and Vernor Vinge. I’ve read books by both. I did not want to get any of that overextended stuff in 3, or 14, volumes. I like the commitment that goes into such series, but they tend to become extenuated. These 2 books seem to be discrete stories and built for speed.
• Plato and Platonism by Walter Pater. I have only read a little by Pater, plus a pretty good bio. I can imagine him at Oxford in a hashish haze (I mean figuratively, I don’t mean that he toked), with ideas of art and purity and what all.
• A bio of Larry Fine. Bios always interest me, and why not the middle Stooge?
• Powershift by Alvin Toffler. I’ve never read this sort of thing. Futurist? It was published in 1990. Let us see if he wasn’t a pastist.
• A bio of William Faulkner. I’ve read a lot of his novels and enjoy them, and still am not sure if I should like them.
• A collection of Whitman’s poetry. I wanted to read work by the guy who wrote the Levi commercials. Actually, my Whitman books are packed away, and I had a hankering. The commercials are the sort of predictable cool malarkey that some fast-paced New Yorker whupped up. Let’s be impressed together! Speaking of which, I wasn’t paying a lot of attention but Dolce e Gabbana has a commercial featuring a human featurette, male division, strutting handsomely to the conclusion of the commercial, at which point we realize that it is Matthew McConaughey. Really? The image I get of him is the lovable knucklehead, which does not seem to be quite the image for marketing Italian smelly stuff. I could be wrong.