Actually, I got the free copy because Richard Kostelanetz was preparing a second edition of his Dictionary of the Avant Gardes (for Schirmer's, believe it or not) and had invited me to do some entries for it, one of them to be on Beining. So I wrote to Guy for some information about himself and what he's most recently done to add to the much I already knew about both. He sent me some great photographs of full-color works I have to return, alas, plus the review copy of Spheres, and lots of other nice stuff. And I made the entry at the start of this column. I did entries on ten or twelve other people, too, but feel bad because I didn't do ten or twelve--or fifty--more, mainly for lack of time, and insufficient data (mostly having to do with such trivial matters day, month and year of birth). So, apologies to all I ought to have written into Richard's book but failed to.

So far this column doesn't seem that different from my previous ones to me but here's where everything changes, for I'm jumping into my next subject without one of my wonderfully professional transitions! It's a novel called Valley about which I wrote its author, "It reminded me somewhat of Bukowski (as novelist) but a Buk of a different generation/slant/style . . . mostly because usually so to the point, understated--a sort of bumming around into minor epiphanies. . . . I liked the collage-effect" (Warp Magazine accurately spoke of it as jumping "from genre to genre . . . (by using) a pastiche of journal entries, newspaper clippings, poetry and screenplay scenes"--graphics, too, I would add. Oh, the valley it's about is the San Fernando Valley and its characters are mostly twenty-somethings--sort of Hemingwayesquely feeling their way into literature and life as in The Sun Also Rises, it now strikes me--but it's been a long time since I read that (without the enjoyment that I read Valley), so who knows.

My poetry website, Comprepoetica, is in the list at the head of my column because I was going to get into a millenniatical spiel about all that's happened this century and all that will be happening next century which I expected to deposit me into some Serious Reminiscing about things like my SMR column, which first appeared in June 1993 and, with this, has now reappeared 36 times, and started to appear early this year at Comprepoetica, too. I was a little leery of rereading them, as I had to, to get the website editing right, but after I did, I felt okay about them. Enough to say more about them in my next installment of this series of columns.

Because I thought I ought to list some magazine above, too, and had a bunch mine editor, LF, had sent me lying around, Chiron Review made this column--even though it's not at all out of the experioddica universe. It's half contra-genteel, half mainstream poetry and prose--Marge Piercy, for instance, and an essay on Sharon Olds by Ron McFarland, some neo-Bukowski (very funny) lineated prose by Joan Jobe Smith about Bukowski, and several short reviews of books and magazines, including a good-heartedly supportive one of Lee Thorn's Fuck, which is out of the experioddica universe--at least to the degree of having poems in it by John M. Bennett. For that alone Chiron Review deserves this mention.