The Sunday Supplement: #44
A new online word game, a great new memoir, an invitation to my favorite (gated) online community, plus favorite music, reads, and movies from the week
Currently loving the memoir Also a Poet by Ada Calhoun. From the publisher: “When Ada Calhoun stumbled upon old cassette tapes of interviews her father, celebrated art critic Peter Schjeldahl, had conducted for his never-completed biography of poet Frank O'Hara, she set out to finish the book her father had started forty years earlier.”
Seeing how this newsletter is named after a Frank O’Hara poem, it’s a pretty easy bet I’d like this book, and it’s paying out. From Joan Frank’s review in the Washington Post:
Quickly, we grasp that Calhoun (the happily married mother of two sons) has staggered lifelong under a three-headed albatross: her father’s renown, his looming self-regard and, most sadly, his indifference to her. “My father has been considered the real writer, the tortured artist. … I’ve been the hard worker, meeting deadlines.” Though certain her father “has always loved me … he’s never seemed particularly interested in me.”
If you’re not a Frank O’Hara fan it may not be for you. But neglectful fathers, beware!
Also paying out, this 2003 Schubert recording with Christiane Iven that I discovered recently:
Also, for any fans of The Breeders/Pixies/Juliana Hatfield, did you hear the latest Momma record?
A friend’s teenage daughter played it for me months ago, but I was dumb, I forgot to listen again, then I remembered last week. Here’s “Speeding 72” and “Medicine.”
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