I read last night with Kate Pringle in the mixtape reading series, where folks read work by folks other than themselves. Kate and i each did several alternating chunks, which worked out well because it allowed us to go long in the most unobtrusive manner. Kate's setlist is on her and Maggie's blog, and here's my setlist:

There's a Monster at the End of This Book, starring furry, lovable Grover

MetaMagical Themas, Douglas Hofstadter. I read parts of the first chapter on self-referential sentences.

I Have Not Been Able to Get Through to Everyone, Anna Moschovakis. I read the first 3 poems from "Blue Book."


The second chunk of reading was a long part from The Third Policeman by Flann O'Brien where Officer MacCruiskeen displays his sharp spear and intussuscepting chests.


The last chunk I read opened with the Mei-Mei Berssenbrugge poem "Dressing Up Our Pets" from her book Nest. I have lately taken to calling Kate "Kei-Kei," actually.

And I finished with three bits of short prose ("Rehabilitation", "Fedya Davidovich", and "The Fate of the Professor's Wife") from Daniil Kharms, from Today I Wrote Nothing.


If we had had an infinite amount of time, here's what I had at the ready all bookmarked:
-- selections from Emmanuel Hocquard's A Test of Solitude. I'd chosen a really good group of 7 poems which would have gone perfectly after the last thing that Kate read to end the reading. But I'm a little wary of how reverent I am of this book, and his Theory of Tables too. When he read here I wrote a big intro for him that's on Ken Rumble's blog.
-- the short story "Lorraine" by James Lewelling that I published in issue2 of Proliferation when I was in grad school. Jay Schwartz met Lewelling somehow, he was at UDenver and he has books out on Spuyten Duyvil and Calamari Press.
-- several non-consecutive sections from Robert Walser's Jakob von Gunten, which is pretty much my favorite novel. It's on project gutenberg. I had considered actually reading only Walser, no other writers.
-- the first two pages from Beverly Dahlen's A Reading (11-17), mainly because it pisses me off that more people haven't read her work. Section 14 is here.
-- the first 6 pages or so from the Richard Foreman play "My Head Was a Sledgehammer" from the Art+Performance anthology on him that Gerald Rabkin edited.
-- from English Synonyms, Antonyms, and Prepositions by James Fernald (copyright 1896) I selected the entry that explicates and differentiates the keyword "previous" from its synonyms (antecedent, anterior, earlier, foregoing, former, forward, front, introductory, precedent, preceding, preliminary, prior)
-- a section of Annie Dillard's For the Time Being that mulls the unearthing of Emperor Qin's terra cotta army, John Constable's descriptions of clouds, several approaches to "the mystery of human numbers," and Talmudic blessings considered at the Sea of Galilee. It actually gives me pain that I did not get around to reading from this book, I'm ashamed.
-- the opening 40% of Mary Burger's Bleeding Optimist. I would have liked to have read from her recent Sonny but I have not read it in a while and didn't get the chance to reacquaint myself with it. Here's a good interview with Mary.
-- some from Laura Moriarty's L'Archiviste.
-- two bits from interviews with Merce Cunningham, from the book The Dancer and the Dance. He addresses intention and vision.
-- the poem "A sequence" from Leslie Scalapino's that they were at the beach
-- various notes and jottings from two typotranslations of Marcel Duchamp's notes for the Large Glass and on the infrathin.