That’s my new phrase—“blog-gone”—for the infliction of unintended blog posting absence. It’s certainly not caused by a lack of discipline, as I shall describe below, but rather, perhaps in my case, due to a fear that what one has to say just may not be all that interesting. Nevertheless, I do intend to improve my blog timeliness, and I have more than enough topics to discuss from within the arts. What follows is a list of all the literary and performing arts works I’ve experienced since my August 1012 post (ignoring the couple sporadic ones since).

The following represents five months of inspiration——too bad I couldn’t find a few moments to comment on any of it (except for The Who concert, that one did warrant a few words—What a show!).

Books:

Catch 22 (Joseph Heller)
Angle of Repose (Wallace Stegner)
At Last (Edward St. Aubyn)
The Remains of the Day (Kazuo Ishiguro)
Canada (Richard Ford)
Pym (Mat Johnson)
Shadow of the Wind (Carlos Ruiz Zafon)
Casino Royale (Ian Fleming)
Arthur & George (Julian Barnes)
Rules of Civility (Amor Towles)
The Wapshot Chronicle (John Cheever)
Elsewhere (Richard Russo)
Interventions (Richard Russo)
The Fault in our Stars (John Green)
The Fallen Angel (Dan Silva)
Doublecross (Ben MacIntyre)
The Orchid Thief (Susan Orlean)
Our Man in Havana (Graham Greene)
Who I Am (Peter Townsend)
Christine Falls (Benjamin Black)
The Silver swan (Benjamin Black)

And right now I’m in the middle of Michael Chabon’s Telegraph Avenue (it’ll be pathetic if I don’t have something to say about that one…)

Concerts & Comedy:

Lewis Black
Andy Borowitz
JB Smooth
The Who
The Rolling Stones
The Fab Faux
Billy Cobham

Theater & Ballet:

Grace
Glengarry Glen Ross
Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolfe
Cat on a Hot Tin Roof
Jersey Boys
The Nutcracker
Swan Lake

Movies:

The Dark Knight Rises
Total Recall
Arbitrage
Moonrise Kingdom
Argo
Amour
Looper
The Sessions
Skyfall
Lincoln
Silver Linings Playbook
Life of Pi
The Hobbit
Zero Dark Thirty
Les Miserables
Beasts of the Southern Wild
Django Unchained
This is 40

Phew! And the list doesn’t include the dozens of short stories read in The New Yorker, One-Story, All-Story, Narrative, The Sun, The Missouri Review…

Hard to believe I couldn’t post a few items about some of this stuff. But I guess my excuse is that I’ve remained focused on revising my novel——and who needs distraction when a project begins inching toward despair? Right? Of course, then why did I take so much time to read, go to the theater, movies?

To be continued…
(Wait, didn’t I use that already?)