"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!