My blog, which is what you’re now reading, has many of the virtues of convenience—it’s easy to hold, relatively infrequent. It contains no pixels, no punditry. It’s linked to my most recent finds, and to some advertisers, whose pitches you can scroll past, though I hope you patronize them.

Of course, I let you know what I’ve been reading, trying hard not to be oppressive, but babbling on, nonetheless: Chernow’s Rockefeller (what a philanthropist!!!); Thomas Babington Macaulay (another treasure come upon at long last; I’m reminded of the great Harvard classicist who had never been to Greece—when he retired, his grateful students gave him a trip to Athens; he arrived at the base of the Acropolis, turned around, and went home: “What if it were not as beautiful as I had imagined.” Actually, there’s never been any danger of that. I wept when I walked through the Propylae—of course that was long ago, in a January, before the tourist-hordes had been invented); Churchill’s History of the English-Speaking People (to rev up for Macaulay’s From the Accession of James the Second);

Nathan Englander (whatever happened to him?); Amos Oz (his recent memoir, very moving, a capsule history of Israel); Yeats’s Autobiography (mucho autoerotico); Freud (that dude could write); Barbarians at the Gate—ancient tale of the leveraged buyout of a cookie&cigarette company now reads like a noir thriller; F.X. Toole’s posthumous novel, Pound for Pound, a TKO; Tony Judt’s Postwar: A History of Europe Since 1945 (the geopolitical story of my life—I didn’t get to China until last year); Andrew Holleran’s Grief (the sixth stage: surviving); Helen Vendler’s Invisible Listeners: Lyric Intimacy in Herbert, Whitman, and Ashbery; Lisa Randall’s Warped Passages (I’m short string theory); Virgil Thomson’s The Art of Music (should be required in every M.F.A. program); and so on.

And I mention what’s been shaking domestically: Over the summer, Rozanne took her father to see his grandfather’s farm in Norway; Madison volunteered at an orphanage in Nairobi; I stayed home to feed the bunny and read books (see above). For a complete list of books read, skimmed, or glimpsed, click here.

I also make several pleas for philanthropic support. Yadda yadda.

And an entreaty for word of mouth, by which I mean: If you can’t send a few bucks, at least, please, plug ZYZZYVA in your own blog.