Here are some good books I've read lately:

Theresa Hak Kyung Cha - Dictee
Anthony Flint - Wrestling with Moses
Robert Creeley - For Love
Jean de Berg - The Image
Charles Bukowski - Love Is a Dog From Hell
John Taggart - There Are Birds
Camille de Toledo - The Coming of Age at the End of History
Dominic Fox - Cold World
Frank Bidart - Golden State
John Ashbery - The Double Dream of Spring
H.P. Lovecraft - Supernatural Horror in Literature
Fanny Howe - The Winter Sun
J.M. Coetzee - Summertime

The captain reached for something to hold on to,
"Help me," he whispered, as he rose slowly to his feet
The boy's face went pale, he recognized the sound
Silently, he pulled down the shade against the shadow
Lost in the doorstep of the empty house
I'm trying to find my way home,
And I'm sorry...
but I miss you. I miss you.
I swear I'll make it up to you,
I MISS YOU!

"In order to accommodate Nickelback’s state of the art production"

The other night was a poetry reading - Kathryn Pringle - at Living Arts downtown. Her poetry was good: I liked the sense of divided consciousness she put across at almost every turn. There was an odd projection on either wall of the room, a fellow splitting rocks, looped.

After that we went to Kilkenny's and later to Danielle's. The career fair, earlier in the day, was a bust, but I still have some prospects. Need to settle on a final version of my résumé, something once and for all!

The new Bill Callahan album I enjoyed, though in a way it was in one ear and out the other.

Getting back into reading, too! Some Bazin, Kodwo Eshun's More Brilliant Than the Sun and soon I'll have finally finished Mark Taylor's Journeys to Selfhood. There's also a critical work on Delany I've been enjoying in tandem with re-reading The Mad Man.

tonight: Girls' Nite III!

"the nets were overflowing in the Gulf of Mexico"

- watching Grosse Point Blank right now because there was not much else on. I have a couple unseen Hong Sang-Soo flicks to watch also, though. I didn't know John Cusack had two sisters.

- it is WEIRD having my friends leave town even for spring break. This summer is gonna be quite something - at least I'll be able to read outside and so on, something I couldn't do all winter.

- this Delany paper, cripes, where do I begin to write a 20-page paper? Wait, I did this last semester on Milton, a topic even more arid...But I wasn't depressed and anxious then! I exaggerate my current condition.

- the new Kevin Drumm isn't quite what I'd hoped, but then not much could live up to Purge, Imperial Distortion or Sheer Hellish Miasma for that matter.

"Poor thing." "Who?" "The mother."

I'm getting pretty curious about Heaven's Gate (the movie, not the cult).

Tonight, though, I have Blue to watch (Kieslowski, not Jarman). And Woman in the Dunes! Also I got my research proposal back, approved, so I can finally get started on this one. I think this will happen Sunday if not tomorrow.

I didn't get nearly as tan as I'd hoped during the break, but my spring/summer metabolism is definitely kicking in!

I've been listening to some stuff today that blends oddly with the ambient noise in the apartment (the palpable feel of snow on the window as in "The Dead," air conditioning softly blasting from corners, electric fans to keep Kyle's computers from overheating).

earlier, Keith Berry - The Ear That Was Sold to a Fish


this afternoon, Evan Parker's Electro-Acoustic Ensemble's Memory/Vision. one of the overlooked - by me anyway - classics of '04!


Now Kevin Parks and Joe Foster's Ipsi Sibi Somnia Fingunt. This one's so much better than I'd thought on a first listen!


When this is over, should I go read in the tub? (began Joan Didion's Book of Common Prayer today) Should I finish watching Memories of Murder? The choices of a calming evening, done with school for now!

A note or two on my recent reading:

• an anthology, Being Catholic Now, which I enjoyed a lot
  
• George Steiner's memoir, Errata - also good, incredibly eloquent if a little cerebral
  
• for class last month, Will Alexander's Exobiology as Goddess. Dude came to class and those were quite some hours!
  
• last night, I finished Thorsten Botz-Bornstein's Films and Dreams. I picked it up to read about Sokurov, but he only gets a few pages. More interesting chapters on Eyes Wide Shut, and Wong Kar-Wai and kawaii (which doesn't mean what I thought exactly), ending with a sort of Benjaminian interpretation of Tarkovsky's poetics.
  
• also reading Richard Ford's Lay of the Land (since Thanksgiving) and Kierkegaard's Concluding Unscientific Postscript (since around the new year), and I've been dipping into Pascal's Pensees.
  
• Today I began Robert Hullot-Kentor's collected essays on Adorno, Things Beyond Resemblance - had to go through the weird spaces of the new library to check it out. This one's great so far: Hullot-Kentor translated Aesthetic Theory and obviously has a fine sense of humor. Also timely after I read most of Dialectic of Enlightenment last month.
  
• This morning I woke up about five and felt pretty gross for that, so I went to recline in the bathtub a while - there (where I do most of my reading anyway) I got through most of Iris Murdoch's Time of the Angels and Sartre's Existentialism is a Humanism. Intense flashbacks to junior year on seeing "existence precedes essence." Murdoch novels don't carry quite the same thrill as they did in high school, but this one's good as they go.
  
• got my Nabokov/Robinson paper back yesterday - one basically reading Robinsonian humanism in the light of Nabokovian poshlust. The professor says I should think about turning it into a journal article! I'm excited.
  
• also need to think about my African American Literature paper - I'm writing on Delany and Butler but, I'm afraid, not quite certain where I want to take it. Times Square Red, Times Square Blue and The Mad Man are elemental, but specifically African American-related?
  
• Soon I'm thinking of looking into Jules Renard's Journal, Stendhal's Henri Brulard, and I want a good meaty enjoyable book for Spring Break. Maybe Arthur Schlesinger's Journals? or Unbearable Lightness of Being? And I have to read some Gide soon too, I think.
  
• tomorrow in class we're to discuss - with me presenting - Joan Didion's Democracy, one I've read before, not a favorite, but pretty good.
  
• Verso is reissuing Benjamin's Origin of German Tragic Drama - this time in an edition whose pages won't fall out the second you open the book and turn them! So finally I'll be able to buy this one in about two months.

now I'm looking at Carla Gugino on Ellen. she's pretty!

So Touch and Go Records are apparently shutting down distribution and quitting signing new acts. Depressing! when the economy gets to this point, that a label which has always been there just can't go on.

Girls' Night was pretty fantastic though! Last night - after being kinda sick all day - I watched Barton Fink and Thin Red Line, and started out Blast of Silence but only got a bit into it. Now I'm listening to Lionel Marchetti's 62 Stars and this is grand. Today we're seeing Coraline, and then the Academy Awards!

he had a Colt .45 and a deck of cards

These captchas are getting pretty audacious - I mean, really now:



Today I've got class at 2.00. I think we're discussing Beloved for what, the fourth time in my academic career. I've been in school much too long.

Tonight, then, Top Chef! Also to watch La Ronde or Some Came Running. Also Noriko's Dinner Table and Crazy Love which have both lingered near the top of my Netflix queue for a while...Honestly I'd been meaning to check out Ikiru forever - maybe I'll rent that tonight!

I just found out that they're increasing postage rates from 42¢ to 44¢ (I like using the "¢" symbol). This makes me pretty happy - always troubling to get back 58¢ in change (since 5 + 8...).

I just finished listening to the latest Mitsuhiro Yoshimura release, which finds him with Toshiya Tsunoda and Taku Sugimoto. It's wonderful, of course, but anyone could have guessed I'd say that.

The confidence of this recording! There's something so tentative about Sachiko M's sine waves, but here it's one plateau mounting another: a crucial, thrilling passage a little after halfway in where the pure tones of (I assume) the three different musicians intertwine at intervals and then drop out, leaving the wavering buzz of (again assuming) Yoshimura's headphones alone - then a pure sine wave enters the mix again, receding and gaining ground. Accustomed as I am to this kind of music, I was nervous of playing it at full volume.


Over the last two nights I realized I really can't sleep to music. Thursday I made it to sleep while listening to Echospace, but drifted unpleasantly in and out of a doze until I turned it off. Last night Brian Eno's Apollo wouldn't let me sleep at all - such a beautiful album that I kept waiting for the next sound, and those steel guitars.

A beautiful day outside too! I thought of going out and reading, but nah. I have A Wedding and The Third Mother to watch later - the latter I've been anticipating literally for years.

This has been a pretty fine weekend! The other night Raquel and I watched Heathers, Trainspotting and Femme Fatale. Seeing Trainspotting again makes me think Danny Boyle could well have been somebody.

Saturday - most of the day I spent reading, did some homework, a WebCT posting, then we went out to dinner at the Texas Roadhouse - this, around six. After that to the mall, then we dashed out to Vintage Stock (to buy Saw IV) then to Gardner's Books which was closed. Rachel and I watched Saw IV, then we finished off the night with Smooth Talk. I really can't breathe for the last half-hour of that movie.

Today, then, half-watched a ton of Battlestar Galactica with Raquel, Matt and Kyle. (We started off with Assassination of Jesse James which was a disappointment somewhat in the vein I'd expected - sub-Malickian lyricism consisting of clouds drifting, fields wavering, overstated mythic mumbling. Turned it off about half an hour in - maybe I'll catch it on TV soon.)

In the afternoon we went to the library for more BSG and I checked out Contempt and started watching it - oh, it's quite good so far, but feels actively hostile toward itself. A certain sense of conscious smothering from the Delerue soundtrack weeping over every scene, and yet moments like the intertwining interior monologues from Paul and Camille - yes, gorgeous. I really want to watch that Four Short Films DVD again.

In the evening Raquel and Amy and Matt and I went out for dinner. First couple places we showed up at were closed so we finally went for pizza, something tasty. Now I just got out of a calming bath and I've been reading Girls Like Us - a biography of the musical lives of Carole King, Joni Mitchell and Carly Simon. This is pretty good. I also have Book of Disquiet to start soon but I'm kinda dragging my heels, certain it's gonna be depressing. For tomorrow's class, Harriet Jacobs and Frederick Douglass. I ate a ton of ice cream earlier, but I'm still hungry, this is weird!

- I don't think they ended up seeing it after all.
- last night I made a paper lantern! Maybe I can use it to light the house once we lose power, which will doubtless happen tomorrow.

- I'm gonna watch Woman on the Beach again soon! exciting. And today I watched about half of The Godfather (first time ever) then turned it off - boring.