"Benito Vergara" <bvergara@sfsu.edu> wrote:

Summer's almost done and there's no summer reading list thread yet? =) What are you Zornlisters reading?

Maybe summer's "almost done" for some of you folks with .edu e-addresses, but I count about 8 more weeks of summer looking at the calendar. And here in Texas, every day of those weeks will be pushing 100 degrees F (that's almost 38 degrees for those of you who use Centigrade). In the last couple of weeks, I've had a little too much time to read and not quite enough work, unfortunately. I've recently finished: Eunoia by Christian Bok (there's an umlaut over the o in his last name) - (this is a stylistic tour de force that's also very funny and charming a long narrative poem in five sections, each of which uses ONLY one of the five vowels in the English language, plus some other related writings); Gilligan's Wake by Tom Carson (an odd collection of episodes filtering recent American history through a wide array of cultural characters, some real and some fictional, including most of the characters of Gilligan's Island); Agape' Agape by William Gaddis (a very short monologue in the voice of a dying man about, well, sort of about why he never finished writing a book about the player piano as an image for all that went wrong with culture in the last hundred years); The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon (funny book written from the point of view of an autistic teenager); Vietnam Shadows by Arnold Isaacs ( very good, with a more complex analysis than I'd expected from the recommendation I'd received)); & I also had to/got to read Cold Mountain by Frazier (well written, but boring (I'm not FROM the South) historical novel about the AmericanCivil War) for a book group we're in. I'm taking Joseph McElroy's Actress in the House (from the first couple of chapters it may be the most clearly written in a convention sense of all his books); Lyn Hejinian's Border Comedy ( along non-narrative poem in many sections all of which seem to all of the vowels all the time. For anyone who care, Hejinian is married to ROVA's Larry Ochs, she co-edits a series of books for a press named Atelos with support from Hips Road (the non-profit that also supports Tzadik), & Border Comedy is dedicated to Zorn.); & Lavish Absence by Rosmarie Waldrop (a memoir about her translations of and collaboration with Edmond Jabes) with me on vacation this weekend. When I'm back home in mid-August, I hope to spend some time with Immemory by the French film maker Chris Marker, which is a CD-ROM published by Exact Change, a mainly literary press that also published Morton Feldman's collected writings, which I'd recommend to anyone on this list, even Skip. Zachary Steiner <zsteiner@butler.edu> wrote:

I just finished "If on a Winter's Night a Traveler" by Italo Calvino. Experimental, but very fun to read; not a common combination. It is also the only book written in second person, that I have read.

That book IS fun. There are some other uses of the 2nd person, most that I know of are from the late 20th century, though there could well be earlier works too. Every third chapter of Carlos Fuentes' Death of Artemio Cruz is in the 2nd person. Several other books by Latin American authors from the 1960s-80s may also be written at least in part in the 2nd person. Several novels by Gilbert Sorrentino use the 2nd person as well. In a very different mode, Ron Silliman's Sunset Debris (a long section of his longer work Age of Huts, which in turn is in some way or another part of a longer work that's a prelude to his still unfinished Alphabet) is functionally written in the 2nd person. (It's a long series of questions that accumulate as a kind of interrogation of the reader.) -- Herb Levy P O Box 9369 Fort Worth, TX 76147 herb@eskimo.com