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!