Charcut. Vol. 27
February this year
Hello, hello! February was nice and good. My year of no new books continues apace (at the pace of any other year). This month I read Little Lazarus by Michal Bible, Sonnets form the Portuguese and Other Love Poems by Elizabeth Barrett Browning, Housekeeping by Marilynne Robinson, and Krakatoa: The Day the World Exploded: August 27, 1883 by Simon Winchester. Thanks to recent incapacitation due to a harrowing and truly undeserved cold, I’m now also halfway through The Charterhouse of Parma by Stendhal.
In shorter form, I perused a copy of The Los Angeles Review of Books that someone left in the hallway of my apartment building, and actually flipped through the copies of Poetry Magazine, The New York Review of Books AND The Sewanee Review that showed up on my doorstep. These things are always a mixed bag, but when you come across a real gem it makes the other less gem-like material worth it. I liked “The Gull McCabe” by Robyn Gill out of the Sewanee Review, but it doesn’t appear to be up on their website yet, so I can’t link to it, which is not terribly helpful in this context. If you also subscribe to The Sewanee Review, you can find it on page 47 of the Winter 2026 volume. There was a piece in the NYRB about Gisèle Pelicot’s memoir worth reading, and also one about the writing of Margaret Kennedy which I got bored of in the middle, but served its purpose in making me want to read the recent McNally reissues of one of her books.
In The New Yorker, I read “Sentimental Education” by Harold (originally published in 1957). It’s a lovely, funny, deadly serious short story about a campus romance. It’s also why I decided to pick up The Charterhouse of Parma.
In The Atlantic, I read this illuminating essay by Tyler Austin Harper that details the current landscape of humanities funding. Highly, highly recommend if you care about that kind of thing.
Like the hoarder I am, both my refrigerator and my metal front door are covered with magnetted photos, cards, tickets, scraps of paper, etc. Unlike a true hoarder, I typically take some time at the beginning of the year to clear space in both locations. Like a hoarder again, I file the things I remove from the fridge/door in bins that I keep under my bed. Anyway…last year I stumbled upon this poem, “Things I Didn’t Know I Loved” by Nâzim Hikmet. I loved it and knew I loved it, so I stuck it up on my door where I forgot about it since it’s three and a half pages long when printed (thus much too long to read in passing when walking in and out of my apartment). This month, I brought it down and read it again to myself aloud (important!!!), and I still love it. I think you should read it, which you can do here.
I also read a review of a new biography of Dennis Johnson. The new biography is by Ted Geltner, and it sounds good, though I probably won’t read it. What I will read is Tree of Smoke, because I already own it. I am nervous because I loved Train Dreams and Tree of Smoke looks to be about 500 pages longer than Train Dreams, so is presumably a somewhat different kind of book. I’m sure it will be good though. Has anyone seen the Train Dreams movie? I want to see that.
I didn’t realllly want to see “Wuthering Heights,” but I also had to see “Wuthering Heights.” I have now additionally been subjected to 10000 reviews of “Wuthering Heights,” which, for whatever reason, I can’t stop clicking on even though I literally do not care. My thoughts on the music video, I mean film, summed up below:
