Notes on The New Yorker solicitation card

Nothing is to be gained by looking in the mirror this morning.

I have some time but I keep it at arm's length where there's just enough time to be critical.

According to notes made on the subscription card that fell out of the current issue (June 25, 2012) of The New Yorker, the Miami Heat is the new NBA champion.

Deciphering the many scribbles there, I learn of my decision late last night to boycott the first 66 games of the 2012-13 NBA season, if not beyond, having lost for the foreseeable future my love for the game and the way it's now played. The sport is unrecognizable to me now, a video game played by cartoon characters who play for cities in which I'd never hope to visit much less live.

I've noted also the poetry in the current issue of The New Yorker, which is sent to me as a subscriber Ms. Brooks Roddan, one each by poets' W.S. Merwin and Linda Pastan, and know that both poems would be savaged or at least taken to task by the poet's in the poetry workshop I now attend. I remember a petition I signed in the 1980's as a member of the west coast poetry community, accusing The New Yorker poetry editor then, Alice Quinn, of a bias against west coast writers, remembering also my first poetry workshop yeain the early 1970's in Los Angeles with Jean Burden, a fine poet, who never had a poem accepted by The New Yorker but kept trying to the end of her life. Though in danger of becoming Joe Brainard, I remember that Paul Muldoon is now the poetry editor of The New Yorker and that things are supposed to be better there now, more open to poets, but these particular poems of Merwin and Pastan-- "Lear's Wife" (Merwin) and "Fireflies" (Pastan)--are so sleight as to be almost non-existent.

       here come 

       the fireflies

As Pastan writes in the first two lines of her poem. Yes, here come the fireflies.

The New Yorker is still useful in some ways. Once in awhile there's a good investigative piece by Seymour Hersh or George Packer, and Anthony Lane is hilarious, but it's mostly a bathtub read or to be used as a coaster for the ice cold martini I sometimes enjoy in the late evening so as not to pockmark the marble-top endtable.

Lastly, my notes remember dear Jean Burden saying that she really only looked at the cartoons in The New Yorker but never read anything else thing.  Yes, the cartoons are still very good.