Where is Every Body

Where are you all? In Winnetka? In Iowa? In Houston? In Pilsen? in Cognito? In Frames like a Flaming Telepath's visions of other people's memories? In the violence of representations?

I went to see Allen Grossman give a talk on Hart Crane's "The Broken Tower" last night as U of C. it was actually pretty interesting and reminded me a lot of Pound's method of criticism - he didn't read the poem in terms of the poem at all really - he read the poem in terms of the history of towers (Babel, Tor Ballylee, the tower upon which Oppenheimer placed his first bomb) and also, mostly, God. It was that kind of exhilirating generality that could be really annoying as a scholar but which I kind of love because you feel the full force of a reader bearing down on a little poem - what I liked so much about it was that it was read in terms of the reader, not in terms of the poem - I mean, the text was central, but it was more of a locus rather than an object like WCW talks about it. it was 'free-range' reading.

i was there with nate and m. savitz, and also a couple of old friends from berkeley. it was kind of nice, and grossman has that hilarious harold bloom academic eastern accent, which, to me, is more funny than bugs bunny.

anyway, catherine, thanks for the love poem. "what the world...needs now..."
so, when will i hear from you, my friends? one feels the lonely vacuum of the world when one's beliefs are completely invalidated by fear, as this week's political show demon-strated.

love,
jared