Shameful end of the year post

This is usually the post in which I copy and paste the list of what I read for the past year. This is going to be the first year I have not done that for awhile.

Let me explain with a picture.



I subscribe to the New Yorker. The magazine on top is the one I'm working on. The rest of the pile is unread and in chronological order. The date on that issue is January 11th......2016.

So I am about a year behind in that magazine, alone. And if I'm a year behind in one magazine, imagine how many books I've read.

It's embarrassing. I do not read, what I write suffers. This year, it really has. Sure I had a couple of poems published earlier in the year. After that, zip. A few deserved rejections and here we are.

What's keeping me from writing is often the objects that are right in front of me, or in my hand, or in my pocket.

I have to do better in 2017. Have to.

Did see plenty of movies in the last year. Averaged a bit more than one a week, which is acceptable to me. I did watch 100 movies a couple of years ago, just to see if I could, and I did. Know what? All I did was watch 100 movies in a year.

So here's that list.

Brooklyn
Sleeper
David Bowie: Ziggy Stardust and the Spiders From Mars
Autism In Love
The Little Fugitive
Galaxy Quest
Stagecoach
Design For Living
Peter Pan (1953)
Much Ado About Nothing (2003)
Room
The Wolfpack
A New Leaf
Cabaret
Hail Caesar!
Where to Invade Next
The Odd Couple
Dirigible
Sense and Sensibility (1995)
The Story of Temple Drake
Viva Las Vegas
Finding Vivian Maier
The Wrecking Crew
The Art of Love (1965)
Who Framed Roger Rabbit?
Captain America: Civil War
Sounder
Louis C.K. Live at the Beacon
Purple Rain
All the Light in the Sky
After the Thin Man
Raiders of the Lost Ark
Min and Bill
Simply Irresistible
Blazing Saddles
Lost in America
Ghostbusters (2016)
A Hard Days Night
Sharknado 4
Treasure of the Sierra Madre
Glen Campbell: I’ll Be Me
Koch
A Fistful of Dollars
Ball of Fire
Golden Age of Comedy (1957)
Sons of the Desert
Under the Skin
Bananas
The Little Prince (2015)
Speedy (1928)
Rockabye (1932)
Blonde Crazy (1931)
Airplane!
Drunken Master 2
Moonlight
Where You’re Meant To Be
Meet Me in St. Louis
Shop Around the Corner (1940)
Rogue One
Krampus
After the Thin Man (yup, again)
Possession
Scrooge
The Omega Man
The World, the Flesh and the Devil

I do not go to the theater much these days. Most of what I watch is on Netflix or TCM. And I'm fine with that. So I will maintain my resolution to watch a movie a week, it's been doable. The reading though, oy.

Monday headache

If I insist my son eat, sleep, use the toilet and try to communicate with the world in a meaningful manner I have to be nothing less than a brute.

I saw too much criticism of the updated Cosmos last night that made me call into question why we do anything else. Yes, Neil DeGrasse Tyson is not Carl Sagan. Yes, Fox is not PBS. No matter how much people want it by worshiping their past or surrounding themselves with fetish items from their teenage years, childhood is not coming back. I guess that last segment of last night's program, in which DeGrasse Tyson spoke of meeting Sagan as a seventeen year did not get across. It's why we move forward, or at least try to.

And no, I'm not going back to watch the original at this time, because, this old post.