Last week I pulled this Iowa alumni magazine from a recycling bin at the mother ship. It was face down, but I have a good eye as well as a soft spot for the state of Iowa.
Numerous alumni magazines from colleges and universities all over the country make their way through our sorting area. I get my hands on a lot of them and many of them don’t reach their intended audience because their addresses are insufficient.
The Tufts University magazine gets my attention because I happen to know a Tufts Jumbo named Catarina.
The Lawrence University magazine will always bring to mind Professor David Gerard.
The Bush School magazine gets a little puke in my mouth.
On the spectrum of quality, production and design this issue of the Iowa magazine scores very well. It's better than the UW magazine. But maybe I’m biased because I have to schlepp metric shittons of the UW magazine around campus 4 times a year.
The cover art Kurt Vonnegut painting and the story that explains it are both top notch. Really great stuff. You can read it yourself. When I finished the article I decided to add Slaughterhouse-Five to my reading list. The very next day I opened the little free library and front & center was this dainty little paperback edition of Slaughterhouse-Five. No joke. The universe smiled at me.
This book is now at the top of my list and all my other books are standing by.
So it goes.
A few days ago while reading this NewYorker article about Bella Freud I decided I needed to add Hideous Kinky to my reading list. It’s an autobiographical novel by Esther Freud, Bella’s sister.
Bella and Esther are both daughters of artist Lucien Freud, who was the grandson of Sigmund Freud. That’s Sigmund’s disembodied bobble head in the photo. I pulled it off its stick in the garden bed for this occasion.
Lucien acknowledged having 14 children with 5 different women. He didn’t acknowledge the possibility he may have fathered even more kids.
I’d like to say I went to the little free library yesterday and there in the stacks was a first edition hardback Hideous Kinky. But that was not the case so I got myself a cheap cheap copy on eBay.
There’s a story I heard about a guy who moves into a house and discovers that every morning an old guy shows up on his stoop and lites up a cigarette to enjoy. The new homeowner is not a smoker but lets it slide for a few mornings. Then one morning he decides he’s had enough of this old guy smoking on his stoop so he steps out to talk to him. The old man smoking on his stoop every morning is Kurt Vonnegut.
That YouTube video that you linked to, showing Red Danielson painting the Vonnegut portrait, is quite remarkable. For a guy who is such a good writer, he's also a very good painter.
