May 27, 2004
today's reading:

Simon Gikandi "Picasso, Africa, and the Schemata of Difference" amazingly helpful. i plan to steal a lot of his gestures. still not sure that he has the problems with picasso all right. but i like a great deal how he demands that the connection b/t picasso and africa not be overwritten and also not be totally forgiven. nice combination.


May 26, 2004
i suspect as long as i am working on this paper i will be saying that i am still not getting any reading done or i am not working on my creative piece (which i sometimes call my novel sort of as a joke sort of not because it is in what renee calls Prose) or i am not working on the anthology i am working on with c. or whatever.

good news today: got proofs on my california book of poems. felt like this book might finally happen.

i also did get some reading done. i read three articles between yesterday and today.

one by michael north, "words in motion: the movies, the readies, and 'revolution of the word'" which was helpful but thankfully not too closely related to what i'm trying to do here. as always with his work i got some good hints on how to be smarter.

David Spurr's "Writing in the Wake of Empire" was good and dogmatic on FW. I made some notes from it. It feels a little out of date (not his fault b/c it is from 1996).

Leah Rosenberg's "Caribbean Models for Modernism in the Work of Claude McKay and Jean Rhys." Also very dogmatic. Has what I think might be a few errors on influence of African sculpture on Picasso. This piece was also very dogmatic but less forgivingly so than Spurr. Rosenberg keeps taking pot-shots at "radical modernism" but doesn't name names or discuss it with any depth so it is easy to think of exceptions.

Jean-Michel Rabate's "Joyce and Jolas: Late Modernism and Early Babelism" somewhat useful but nothing really all that new if you've looked at the archives of transition.


May 12, 2004

After dinner last night read Brent Hayes Edwards's introduction to Social Text 78 on postcolonialism and Rosinka Chaudhuri's "The Flute, Gerontion, and Subalternist Misreadings of Tagore." Niether all that helpful for my concerns. I've been reading some in Tagore and trying to figure out if any part of his work will fit into anthology I'm working on with C (not to be confused with the already edited anthology with J). Made a note to get Chakrabarty's Provincializing Europe and look at it again. But otherwise found the article by Chaudhuri hard to concentrate on. But it might have been the hour or the wine.


May 8, 2004

managed to finish Paco Igancaio Taibo's _'68_ which was about a general strike in mexico that i didn't know happened until i read the book. the book is a tight, short memoir. little analysis. lots of good poetic language. more personal than anything else. induced a feeling of hope as discussion about past moments of social hope in the form of protest do in me.

to read in future: Elena Poniatowska's Massacre in Mexico

in the evening couldn't get started on much. although i read Mike Davis's "Planet of Slums" in the most recent NLR and got all excited by it. Ran in to c's office to read a few paragraphs about pentecostalism to c who was working at his computer. Davis, in addition to spending some time summarizing a UN report on the growth of slums and their relation to IMF and neoliberal policies at the end turns to pentecostalism and its possibility as being the grounds for a new world wide labor movement.

reading for week of may 1
William Herrick, Jumping the Line
Not sure it counts; just fun. But got bogged down in the Michael Warner and so didn't get my reading done for this week.

may 7
Michael Warner, Publics and Counterpublics.
Beautifully typeset. The book feels a little disconnected. As if he collected all his essays of last few years and then put them together under a title and didn't bother to think about where they connect or not. So it lacked an overall discussion/exploration of a # of the issues. He keeps returning to queer theory issues. But there is no connection between the queer theories discussions either. Long essay on the nature of the public at the beginning. Both useful and way too long.