Plus Chris Murray has a report on the Burger/Silliman reading from Stephen Vincent, who I think I did actually meet but totally did not register who he was until he'd already left, which is a shame. He suspects re Burger that "the work will become more engaging as she relaxes the semiotic critical hinges." Silliman he sees as a member of "The Eye Club," "a farmer at harvest, a man obsessively bent on plucking images from primarily urban and now more suburban terrain within which the text provides a smart stock/harvest analysis." But he wonders if Silliman isn't ultimately a pessimist trying to shrore up the ruins (my sense: Silliman wants to be an optimistic satirist, a tough job), asking: "Is there the ghost of a Lowell under Silliman?"