Beth and I spent some money at Barnes and Noble yestreen. I don't even look at poetry there. I've got the kind f classics they are loaded with, and am not interested in the popular contemporary stuff offered. I'll bet the last poetry book I got there was Melvin Tolson. Beth likes to look at everything. I don't want to be distracted by biographies and history, which I'll read from the library. the funny thing, then, is that the only section I really look at is philosophy. how did that occur? I've been looking to read Peirce and Husserl but neither of them were available at B&N. I almost got Aristotle's Politics, but that wasn't special enough: I could fetch it online. or I could read the Metaphysics, which I own. I was pleased to see Baudrillard, who I've never read. both Beth and I got interested, so we got a couple of his works, and that's what I'm reading. I also got Locke's Essay on Human Understanding (B&N offers a cheap edition of their own). I plan just to read and sleep for the week we are at Beth's mother's for Thanksgiving.philosophy is so WEIRD. bigod, I don't get it hardly, and would never argue it with anyone. it is language in a funny place, self-referential yet floating off somewhere. that's poetry, so far as my poor machine can make it. I'm a shallow person, as my millions of fans realize, so philosophy is by no means arcana that I swim in while explaining god to my toes. philosophy is words sripped of lots of the in the way stuff, so that other barriers can form. what??? Tim Peterson asaked about people's guilty reading pleasures. I read (not recently actually) Fu Manchu novels and don't feel guilty. what the hell, they are loaded with wound up energy. racist, yes, and that's the tinge of guilt. but I don't feel guilty at the spectacle, plus remembering Berrigan's reading voracity, which I admire. really, my guilty pleasure would be philosophy, for its pretense of serious explication.