Re/started reading You Never Know Ron Padgett, La Pensée Sauvage Claude Lévi-Strauss, Always Astonished: Selected Prose Fernando Pessoa, As in T as in Tether David Bromige, Smudging Diane Wakoski, Enough Said: Poems 1974-1979 Philip Whalen, Dark Decade Johanna Drucker, La Jeune Née Hélène Cixous et Catherine Clément

--I guess it was about six or seven days before New Year’s Eve when our mutual friend Thad Pletcher arrived out of nowhere. You must have been out of town or something. We tried calling a couple times. His bright idea was dragging me to Florida, driving, since we had no money for airline tickets. I-95 all the way to Amelia Island with various stops along the way. Thad has a relative or two in Fernandina Beach, or so he said. Half the island is a rich man’s paradise, another chunk is a state park that surrounds Fort Clinch, a brick and concrete behemoth that protects the beach. Most of the trip isn’t worth the words, and the rest I can’t really repeat. Let’s just say Thad hasn’t kicked his crystal meth habit. He’s as paranoid as ever and his heart beats faster than a jackrabbit. The big news, he got married in the South of France last September to some girl he impregnated with craziness. The one sane moment was our stop at The Book Loft near the heart of the island where I bought Joyce Carol Oates’ Solstice and Philip Roth’s The Professor of Desire. There wasn’t a poetry section. The drive back was terrible. We spent an hour stuck at the mouth of the Lincoln Tunnel talking about death. Susan Sontag, more anonymous Iraqis and Americans. And now Guy Davenport is gone. Screw the living, I’ve resolved to start listening to the dead, Blake and Donne, Ovid and Sappho. Anyway, that’s why I’ve been incommunicado.

--John

Re/started reading A Thousand Plateaus Gilles Deleuze and Félix Guattari, The Sophist Charles Bernstein, Collected Works Lorine Niedecker (Ed. Jenny Penberthy), The Collected Poems of Frank O'Hara (Ed. Donald Allen), Personae Ezra Pound, "Sonst nemlich, Vater Zevs. . ." Friedrich Hölderlin