Beautiful & Pointless {a guide to modern poetry} - David Orr.

Still working my way through- fascinating.

S

I just finished reading Lawrence Krauser's "Lemon" last night, which was awesome...the book that is. Last night itself was merely so-so.

I'm about 3/4's of the way through "Today I Wrote Nothing: The Selected Writings of Daniil Kharms" written by...written by...I forget who wrote it. I'm fairly sure it wasn't Pushkin or Gogol. But whoever wrote the selected writings of Daniil Kharms is right up there with Daniil Kharms as one of my favorite writers of all time.

I'm about 12/23's of the way through "Lunch Poems" by Frank O'Hara and 4/15's of the way through "Veil" by Rae Armantrout.

Next up on the non-fiction reading list is "The Marginalization of Poetry: Language Writing an Literary History" by Bob Perelman - language poet, distinguished Penn professor and a man who I once sat in a room with during a lecture by Majorie Perloff at Penn's Kelly Writer's House. That last factotum probably is not very important in describing and/or gauging his legacy. Whether or not he noticed me that evening getting Charles Bernstein to sign his book "Attack of the Difficult Poems" is a factotum perhaps even less important than the aforementioned unimportant factotum. The fact that Charles Bernstein signed his name as "Char" raised to the "L" power raised to the "i" power has absolutely no business in this paragraph whatsoever and either this pointless sentence better vamoose out of this paragraph or I'm leaving.

And I'm just reading the delightful response by Busillo which is, no doubt, of more delight to me than it may be to some others because I am a fan of pointless sentences.  Always have been, always will be.  (Other reading includes By The Open Sea, August Strindberg (I think), and Zinsser's On Writing Well.  [Have probably misspelled all names mentioned in the previous useless informaton.)

 
Arthur & George, Julian Barnes' novel based around the true story of Arthur Conan Doyle's campaign to a have solicitor, George Edalji, declared innocent of maliciously wounding a pony in 1903 during the 'Great Wyrley Outrages'.  Superb character observation right through from their childhoods to the crossing of their paths.  I'm three-quarters of the way through it and very much looking forward to the denouement.