Birthday Loot 2026.

The heat here has ramped up to the point where it’s hard to think coherently (we have A/C only in our bedroom), but I wanted to report on the unusually generous load of presents (I’m turning 75, so people have overdone it). My especially over-the-top brother not only gave me the two-ton Centennial King Oliver’s Creole Jazz Band set (includes 4 CDs, two vinyl albums, a hardcover book with annotations, and a poster), A Short History of Cahiers du Cinema by Emilie Bickerton, and I Deliver Parcels in Beijing by Anyan Hu but three Russian movies in classy Deaf Crocodile editions: In The Moscow Slums (Khitrovka. The Sign of Four; characters include Konstantin Stanislavsky, Vladimir Gilyarovsky, Vladimir Nemirovich-Danchenko, and Anton Chekhov!), the classic White Sun of the Desert (which I saw and loved many years ago), and Dead Mountaineer’s Hotel (the Estonian movie based on the Strugatsky novel — I read and enjoyed it but don’t seem to have reported on it here). My exceedingly generous…