I'm thinking this New Year's Eve Day of a lot of people, especially those friends with whom I regularly fail to correspond. And people I don't know at all, especially the people of Palestine, suffering from decades of slower and faster murder, and now a declared war for which the turning of the year will make little difference.

I wish you all the best, and hope for the transformation of the old Chinese curse--that we live in interesting times--into a blessing.

Lists

Just for fun, I've been trying to list the books I read this year (counting only those I've finished, or come so close to finishing that it might as well count). Comparing it to 2007's year-end list, it seems kind of paltry. A number of factors are to blame, not the least of which has been my editing of Cannot Exist, which has taken up a great deal of reading time. It's been a great year for poetry publications, though; the stack of various writers' Collecteds is a great thing to have around. 2009 will be a serious reading year.

Eileen Myles, Sorry, Tree
Bob Dylan, The Essential Interviews
Hart Crane, White Buildings and The Bridge
Anne Boyer, The Romance of Happy Workers and Art is War
Bob Perelman, Primer* and To the Reader*
Barrett Watten, Opera--Works*
Ludwig Wittgenstein, Tractatus Logico-Philosophicus (finally, after a decade of rereading half of it)
Ron Silliman, The Alphabet (letters A-O, most of them rereads) and Ketjak*
Cesar Vallejo, Trilce (in Clayton Eshleman's heartbreakingly wonderful translation)
Michael Palmer, Active Boundaries
Robin Blaser, Charms, Image Nations 5-14, Streams I, Syntax, and Pell Mell (all in The Holy Forest)
Robert Duncan, Roots and Branches
Lyn Hejinian, Saga/Circus
William Faulkner, The Hamlet, The Town, The Mansion, Sanctuary, and, Absalom, Absalom!
Kent Johnson, Homage to the Last Avant-Garde and Epigrammititis
Kevin Killian, Action Kylie and Wow Wow Wow Wow
Michael Slosek, A Sequence for Cinematic History
James Elkins, Pictures and Tears and The Object Stares Back
Rod Smith, Deed
Benjamin Friedlander, A Knot is Not a Tangle
Laura Moxley, Often Capital
Lisa Jarnot, Night Scenes and The Iliad Book XXII
The Grand Piano, vols. 4-7 (collective autobiography)
Chimed in Freddie (unattributed chapbook)
Robert Gluck, Reader
Graham Foust, Necessary Stranger
Susan Howe, Souls of the Labadie Tract
Eula Biss, The Balloonists
Alan Davies, Book 6
Rainer Werner Fassbinder, The Anarchy of the Imagination
Charles Olson, The Distances*
Chuck Stebelton, Flags and Banners
Virgil, Eclogues and Georgics

[note: * indicates "not for the first time"]