Yeah, well. Big deal. Last post, I was all excited about Negri's release from prison. Yes, Negri's the ultimate bad boyfriend: in prison, well read, Spinozistic Marxist, totally unavailable, remote, ungiving. (Bad, as in unsatisfactory, unhelpful, not "bad boys.") But, jeez, his books. If he didn't write with Michael Hardt once in a while, would I ever understand him? Would I ever read him? "Kairos, Alma Venus, Multitudes:" about the only part I can follow is the "Multitudes" section, and even there, I wonder, about the apotheosis of the poor.

Even now, a certain piety, hangover from my deconstruction days, dogs me. "they do not read." It was the worst thing you could say about anybody, back then.

Lately, I do read. These are the books on my bed, starting at the head end on the left side, trailing down toward the lower third of the bed:

• Barbara Einzig, Distance Without Distance.


• Alexander Kluge, Case Histories (which I read in Germany as Lebenslaeufe/Anwesenhetsliste fuer eine Beerdigung. There always seems to be some story missing in English, though I could be wrong.)


• Kluge, again, Learning Processes with a Deadly Outcome (I can't believe I waited until now to read this.)


• Samuel Delaney, Times Square Red, Times Square Blue


• Lynn Crawford, Solow


• Lynn Crawford, Simply Separate People (this book frightens me. The artlessness of it, the apparent artlessness. Am I John Updike, in comparison to what is really happening now in writing?)


• Camille Roy, The Swarm (see above)


• Charles Wright, The Wig (I think at one time this was a necessary maybe scandalous book. But now, after Ishmael Reed, after Danny Laferriere, ...? I stopped 2/3 of the way through.)


• Matthew Derby, Super Flat Times (he takes Ben Marcus' Kluge-ean futurism and restores some of its mournful political fantasy. Whereas as in Marcus that's all shunted into the sorrows of the family.)


• Victor Shklovsky, The Third Factory