What to Read This Summer

Terrible are the rose names ... Stakeholders in a tradition of “Grande Amore” and “True Love” (one carmine, the other blush ... ), their aims are, for the most part, scattershot. “Mothersday” and “Playboy,” “Senior Prom” and “Let’s Enjoy” vie with a lyrical “Lady of Shalott,” while a flyweight “Pink Knockout” comes “Outta the Blue” to mock “Honey Perfume,” “Pillow Talk” — jock Cupid wielding clout. Then maybe a puckish curator pairs “Las Vegas” with “Nearly Wild,” “Buttercream” with “Julia Child,” “Aloha” with “Hello, Neighbor ... ” • Misenus, son of Aeolus, god of the wind, don’t you think it’s bad form to practice trumpet on this platform, what with the dentistry squeal at construction site decibel levels of braking blade shaving molar steel, dropped-in blare of delays and arrivals squelched against granite, at close intervals, while you riff on “Over the Rainbow” — ? You received some negative attention from Triton, after blowing his conch so loud you inadvertently entered yourself in an unwinnable contest; now, stuck in a twenty-first-century translation of hell, you press the stops, and for an obol prepare our burial in an infinite axial scroll with a tinier and tinier turning radius, as if we were those hordes, the unsanctified, who shoved one another along the Cocytus, none led on to the golden bough by Venus’s semaphore, the unloved rock doves, whom Virgil treats so gently in the Aeneid.