From Jacob Russell’s Barking Dog

Already in our little wooded park I see, here and there, signs of autumn: a single fallen leaf painted in October colors among all the lush green. At night, the first crickets have begun to sound their love songs. It looks increasingly doubtful that I will finish this novel before classes begin, but I’ve made good progress and see no reason why I shouldn’t be be able to writeit to a close before the year is out.

Been a good summer for reading. I try to alternate: fiction-philosophy, fiction-history, fiction-criticism and theory, and to begin each day with poetry, but I seldom stick to schedule.

Here’s my list for the Summer of 07, with a few brief notes:

Jacque Ellul: The Technological Society. A book that offers a disturbingly accurate overview of what has become of us in the half century since he wrote this book. I think Ellul deserves our renewed interest.

Ken Kalfus: A Disorder Peculiar to the Country. I, for one, loved the ending. There is something about the compression, the restraint of his prose, that make me think of Coetzee.

Percy Walker: The Second Coming. Any time you’re at a loss for a good read, there’s always a few untapped treasures from great writers of the American South.

Cormac McCarthy: The Road. The prose is as lean, spare and compressed as that of Suttre and Blood Meridian is lush and overripe.

Chomski/Faucault: On Human Nature

D. H. Lawrence: The Plumed Serpent

Cezskaw Milosz: The Land of Ulro. I was disappointed with this one.

Witold Gombrowicz: Cosmos This deserves more than I can condense into a line

Phyllis Rose: A Year of Reading Proust. I enjoyed the little that was actually on Proust, but ultimately grew bored with the biographical digressions.

Herman Bloch: Geist and Zeitgeist

Elizabeth Young-Bruehl: Why Arendt Matters. This is an excellent condensation of the range of Arendt’s thought--another thinker who begs for a new reading in our descent into authoritarian politics

Jean Seznec: Survival of the pagan Gods. A promising beginning, but have not had the time to finish this richly documented study.

Helen Vendler: Poets Thinking. Four essays on poetic thought in Pope, Whitman, Dickenson, and Yeats. Got me to seriously reread Pope, a poet I’ve never much liked.

Douglas Messerli: From the Other Side of the Century, A New American Poetry, 1960-1990. Brings Donald Allen’s 1960 New American Poetry up to date. Have fallen in love with George Oppen… At close to 1200 pages, I’ll be working on this one for some time.

Roberto Bolaño: The Savage Detectives. Semi-autobiographical adventures of the mythical Mexican Visceral Realists. You think he’s playing until his near namesake protagonist, Roberto Bolano, arrives in Africa.

Hermann Broch: The Death of Virgil. A meditation on poetry and power--a sustained interior monolog on the last days of Virgil… still reading this one.

László Krasznahorkai: War & War. If you hate spoilers, whatever you do, don’t look up warandwar.com! I hope to post a review of this in the next few days.

Jack Zipes translations of Arabian Nights. An on-going reading project

Maurice Blanchot: A voice from Elsewhere. My first encounter with Blanchot

Joe Bageant: Dear Hunting with Jesus

I have to add two pieces by Milan Kundera that appeared in The New Yorker (I sometimes let them pile up for months, then gorge… ): From October 9, 2006 (I told you… ) What is a Novelist? How great writers are made, and Die Weltliterature, from January 8, 2007… especially the latter.