Couldn't sleep last night so read the New Yorker for a few hours. I have told myself that at end of June I have to switch from working on this critical paper to doing more creative/essay work. This will also change my reading.

This weekend...

Vincent Cheng's Joyce, Race, and Empire. A series of very detailed close readings. Not much of the big picture.

Also Jena Osman's An Essay in Asterisks which has wonderfully diverse language styles in it. Lots of little stories embedded in larger questions about memory, war, how we talk about things/tell stories. Read like a series of boxes, each with its own story, on some large grid that is interestingly uneven. It wasn't like Russian dolls, wasn't all neat with each story inside each other. But the stories seem parallel to each other and yet connected. Very much loved reading it. A complicated book and I'm looking forward to spending more time with it. Might make sense to graph it out. I don't think I've read anything like it before.

While fixing dinner, which required time and occasional stirring, i read in Denver Quarterly... Stacey Levine's "The Cat," Scott Bradfield's "Why I Hate Toni Morrison's Beloved," and Marc Herman's "The Year of Living Awkwardly" (about writing about Indonesia for U.S. audience).

Came to my office and Ida had sent me in the mail "Sentimentalism, Authenticity, and Hawai'i Literature" by Wendy Motooka (from Bamboo Ridge in 1998). Read this quickly. First read it and thought it came out this year and found it a very strange article. But once I realized it came out in 1998 it made more sense. Not sure it is the fairest article in the world. It argues that the split about how to read Yamanaka and the resulting fight about race has to do with differences between reading methods of literary studies and ethnic studies. Which might be somewhat true. The two fields do read differently. But then she summarizes Candace's argument in the most reductive way possible. Candace has been clear in her discussion of the Pahala Theatre poems that she is talking about how that poem is read in the culture, not how one might read it as a literary critic. I've always read Candace's argument as saying, well we need to maybe listen to these people who read this poem and have a problem with it. Maybe they too have something to say about how literature gets used in our culture that is worth listening to.

Last two days, Franco Moretti's Modern Epic: The World System from Goethe to Garcia Marquez. I started reading it when I was tired and thought I would read it in preparation for a nap but was awake 100 pages later. Great conversational style that I want to learn how to also. One hears a clear voice, sense of improvisation (which I assume is crafted), of someone having fun with argument. Which surprised me because I had expected more a voice of power (some days I'm convinced no one gets a job without Moretti having something to do with it). So big learning here on style.

The book is all men, all the time. I don't think there is one reference to anything written by a woman, critical or literary. Which usually drives me nuts in any book written after the 1980s (why should I read anything where the author has used something like gender (or race or nation) to limit their ideas, especially in a book about world literature?) But somehow the conversational style made me forgive it. It felt like listening to annoying but smart uncle who is out of date but still has much to say and you just see the narrow vision as something that is from another generation and thus not at all threatening. Plus there are things to be learned from this uncle, so you listen.

And at moments the book present a lot of major assumptions as fact. i.e. the canonical status of Joyce goes unquestioned. Or this sentence about Garcia Marquez: "For the first time in modern history, the centre of gravity of formal creation leaves Europe, and a truly worldwide literary system . . . replaces the narrower European circuit." Seems true only if you are standing in Europe. And I think it is done with the idea of being provocative, of straight talk about literature. This performance is less interesting to me finally. And yet, interesting observation about how One Hundred Years of Solitude might be the novel of 68. Or how the banning of the novel in Central and South America by missionaries led to the health of that literary scene because the novel is a sort of invasive plant that soaks up all the nutrients of the other genres.

I've also been mesmerized by the Moretti installments in New Left Review on literary graphs, etc. Great fun.

Today "No More Play" and "The Originality of the Avant-Garde," two classic essays by Rosalind Krauss. Interesting to revisit the "The Originality..." many years later and for sure no longer convinced of the orginality of the avant garde. Seems a more mundane, almost cute essay. It annoyed me in graduate school. I felt it was missing the point. That the use of a grid over and over does not mean the avant garde is not original. Now I feel the avant garde is not original, but not sure the repeated use of a grid is the best example that proves it. "No More Play" useful for a little more depth on the primitivism issue than most of the writing on this issue.

Also, Walter Ong's Orality and Literacy the last two days. Another classic that I have never read. Makes me realize I need to read more sprawling histories of poetry. I am not that good on the longer view.

Read around in Serpents In The Garden: Liaisons With Culture & Sex, edited by Alexander Cockburn and Jeffrey St. Clair. Funny essay by Bruce Jackson on how audio tapes prove that the audience was not booing Dylan when he played electric that first time. Also funny essay by Cockburn on Angelina Jolie and the French Revolution. Charles brought this book home from AK. I keep trying to get him to buy me a copy of the Derrida video but he keeps refusing to do it saying it will be boring. I also keep asking for a copy of Ethical Sluts, in my continued attempt to read around in the literature of u.s. polygamy.

Spent $75 on photocopies at the Bancroft today. Selections from the journal Transition. While I was there I also quickly read through a first edition of The Path on the Rainbow: The Book of Indian Poems, ed George Cronyn from 1918. Was hoping to find a quote I could use. But instead took some notes for this poem on streams that I'm working on. And skimmed Wilson Harris's Tradition, The Writer, and Society hoping to find something on art and political education for this possible anthology. But it didn't seem that useful and it also seemed that all the essays in this book appear in a collection of his essays that I have in my office.

There is always this reading that I do on the side that never gets into here. Usually the stuff that I read late at night before going to bed or when unable to sleep. Also unmentioned for the most part is my compulsive reading of the NYTimes on the web every morning, sometimes of the SF Chronicle, and various magazines like the New Yorker and Harpers.

Among them, Sam Kashner's When I Was Cool, a somewhat poignant memoir of being the first graduate from Naropa. A very easy read. The joke is that by the time he shows up all the beats are old and they've got bowel problems and they still are more cool than he is. A few interesting facts that I didn't know. I knew that story about Merwin and a woman being made to undress by Trungpa and refusing and leaving the retreat in protest. But I didn't know that the woman was Dana Naone (now Dana Naone Hall), a well known Hawaiian poet (who I never met and I haven't seen any new work by her but she edited Malama, Hawaiian Land and Water, an important anthology, in the 80s and her work was often in Hawai'i journals in the 70s and 80s; now I believe she does a lot of environmental activism).

Patrick Durgin printed a section of Hannah Weiner's journals, Country Girl. Reading this made me profoundly sad. Although in the past I've loved reading her journals. I just couldn't deal with the insight into someone who is obviously suffering from problems negotiating the world.

Then read some of Diane di Prima's Recollections of My Life as a Woman. I remember loving her first memoir years ago. This one I couldn't stand and had to give up on. Too purple.

Still feeling lost and wandering from book to book unable to decide what to read.

This weekend, though, did finish Judith Butler's Precarious Life which suffered some from the public intellectual trap (the trap that happens when you get a big name and suddenly people want you/let you write on current issues in which you really don't have that much background and your usually rich and insightful writing starts to feel like an expanded version of the opinion page of a major paper). The best part of it is the prose, which had that wonderful round aboutness that seems to sometimes drive people to distraction but I love because it seems so musical. But in general, felt that most of it had been hashed through before and better by people with backgrounds in the Middle East and/or international policy. The twist, I guess, is the theory that Butler adds. There is a chapter on Levinas and the face, for instance. But in general, a lot of the book already feels somewhat out of date--although its complaints and critiques are still very resonant--just because Guantanamo Bay abuse seems like child's play next to the Abu Ghraib abuse. Whatever one can say about the Abu Ghraib photographs, they seem like they require a whole new level of theorizing in order to say it. The best chapter is "Violence, Mourning, Politics" which I had heard as a talk at CUNY a few years ago. At least I think this is the chapter that is the talk I heard. It is very good on issues of public mourning and those obituaries that were in the Times after 9/11 of all the dead. I remember though the talk at CUNY ending in this sort and now queer theory will save us note and finding that so very strange (queer theory feeling of so little help with current political issues because it has been so western and done so little in investigating the responses that people have to different sorts of economic inequalities and also because it has done so little theorizing about western/non-western sexualities in the contemporary moment). But this sort of rah-rah-ism is gone from this version, leaving a fairly tight essay.

Also read Wendy-o Matik's Redefining Our Relationships which is sadly thin and reads at moments like an advice column from Cosmopolitan. I wanted to like it. I feel like a pinhead academic complaining about it. But no Foucault? No Reich?

Another week of more running around than reading, writing, etc.

Spent monday at the library in Berkeley going through Transition again and this time trying to figure out how many times Stein and Joyce appear in it. Spent a small fortune on photocopies. I have to go back and pick them up.

Worked on Chain stuff on Tuesday. Finally got the next draft of it sent off to Jena to proofread.

And I read around a lot and didn't finish much.

I did finally finish Yunte's Transpacific Displacements. It was funny reading a book by someone who has been through the same graduate school. I felt like I could recognize all the arguments and what seminar what books he brought in came from. I was like oh that is a Tedlock moment and then that is a Bernstein moment and that is a . . . It was helpful to be reading like that, with some sort of other vision. A reminder of the arbitrary nature of the quotation. I felt I could see how he constructed his argument out of a sort of field of reference that we shared at one moment.

Then Brent Hayes Edwards' "The Ethnics of Surrealism." Another great article by him. He is doing such stunning work and I'm very jealous of it and I'm trying like mad to imitate it.

Also, last night, reading around in new issue of Representations.

Ann Banfield, "Beckett's Tattered Syntax," reads like the author drank a lot of coffee and just wrote like mad. Which I enjoyed. I had to keep telling myself to slow down because I kept getting so caught up in whatever drug the article is on. It has a million quotes in it. Maybe that is why it feels like it is on some sort of speed.

Tyler Stovall's "National Identity and Shifting Imperial Frontiers: Whiteness and the Exclusion of Colonial Labor after World War I" was super helpful for #s on who is in France when.

Made it through half of Colleen Lye's "American Naturalism and Asiatic Racial Form" which is on Frank Norris but I haven't yet read Norris (a sign of not growing up in California I think) and I plan to soon, he is on my list, but I felt like I was wasting my time reading commentary on something I didn't yet know so I put it down with a mental note to pick it up again later.

Greil Marcus, "Crank Prophet Bestride America, Grinning: The Case of David Thomas" is great fun. As usual with Marcus. About Pere Ubu, the Cleveland band, not the play. Has a few great lines in it.

Read half of the new Judith Butler book. Read half of Michael Brownstein's World on Fire. Read half of a book about open relationships by a cute young anarchist chick. Read Harpers and the New Yorker (fiction issue=yuck). Did a lot of reading on the web about streams in Ohio for a poem I'm working on. Lots of documentation about the Ohio watershed. Shocked at how much was there. Still want to get back to Child's Transcommunality from a few weeks ago.

Didn't get much reading done the last week because I was working on Chain proofs and other things. Didn't get much writing done either. Although did begin at least to work on the prose piece.

Finished the Chakrabarty this weekend. The early chapters of it, the classic one on provisionalizing europe, especially good. It reads like a classic now, a few years later.

And I'm half way through Yunte Huang's Transpacific Displacement book. I originally called it Transpacific Alliances. I'm wondering if that might not also be an interesting book.

Went to the Fela exhibit at the Yerba Buena with Dan Bouchard who was in town. Amazing piece there by Kendell Geers who took a classic Mumuye ficture from E. Nigeria and wrapped it in Chevron tape. (The sort of tape that police use to make hazard areas here.)

I'm reading too much by interest and not enough by mandate. I need at least a four week plan...
week one: Chakrabarty, Provincializing Europe
week two: Dydo, Gertrude Stein: The Language that Rises
week three: Ong, Orality
week four: Primitivism and 20th Century Art

Finished today, Raymond Williams's The Politics of Modernism. Made it to the library but they didn't have what I needed available. Need to go back in a day or so.

from an email list i'm on...


went to the a's game the other day and took susan schultz's And Then Something Happened with me. bill told me it was rude to read at the game and then refused to answer any of my questions about the game if i wasn't going to pay attention. but i read some of it anyway and then finished it today. it opens with a beautiful poem. i'm having this moment where i go that is a beautiful poem sometimes. had it the other night also when walking down the street with walter and he showed me some translations he was doing of a korean woman poet whose name i have forgotten. i had lost that emotion for some reason. maybe too many poems in my life with the mfa program. but i'm glad to now read something and think what a beautiful poem again.

carol's book is out also. i had read it before but reread in it randomly the other day. still struck by the use of the proper name, a sort of calling out, in it. a trance induction?

in both something is happening that questions what sort of thinking can be done in the poem. susan's book asks this question directly:

And what if the poem actually is
the cause of our confusions, not outlet
or even inlay, the taut mosaic
of a million tiles that absorbs logic
like a sponge? Then to write the poem
is to participate in the problem
of expression raised to the nth degree,
and I become a conscious thief,
ransacking the hoard for words to fling
against a wall where syntax
and semantics fill their own
agenda.

kevin killian has that blurb of yedda's crop where he writes "In the future, historians will look back and wonder why the year 2003 marked a paradigm shift for poetry." i keep thinking about whether this is true or not. and i think that he has got something. is it 2003? 2002? 2001? i'm not sure. but there is something, maybe paradigm shift and maybe not, that seems to be switching where poetry keeps asking why poetry of its self. i seem to remember there being another killian blurb where he says something like so and so's work is like so much work of his/her contemporaries b/c it wants to say something. (sorry i can't remember it better.) and i wonder if there is something about wanting to say something in these books but also constant questioning of this desire. war shows up in both carol's and susan's work over and over.

ben's small pound book here also in my thoughts.

then got beth anderson's book Overboard today but haven't had a chance to read it yet
but looking forward to that.

i always get reading done when i have to get on airplanes. even during this trip to l.a. which is a quick flight still got reading done in airport, on airplane, in slow cab ride to hotel, after arrival, etc....

i finished lindqvist's exterminate the brutes and grew more and more fond of it. the ending has this discussion of darwin mixed in with his dreams. very strange space. and the more i read, the more i forgave him the desert which worried me at first.

and then the latest New Left Review. good article by peter hallward on the invasion of haiti. an interesting article by emilie bickerton on rouche which made me want to finally hook up the vcr on the television i have borrowed for the summer and watch his movies. and then a decent but very provisional article by benedict anderson on jose rizal and how he might have been influenced by french decadence.

read a few chapters of raymond williams's the politics of modernism which i've never read which is embarassing and it would have been completely and totally helpful at any point of my life. i might have absorbed most of it from other sources by now. but his work is so clear i'm annoyed i had to piece all the information together over the years rather than just getting it from this one source.

read carrie noland's "bataille looking" from modernism/modernity on the way back. she has an argument about bataille's interest in the cave paintings. i find her work helpful.

workshop on poetry, pedagogies, and politics in l.a. was fun. read several good papers. interesting conversation about a lot of issues. good food. the lunch was nepalese food. very buttery. good company also. a little less buttery but just as pleasant.

while i was in l.a. i saw raising helen which has strange christian theme. good clean fun one might say. but i didn't have many options for movies because i didn't have a car so i had to go to something close enough that i could walk home from it at midnight.

came home and got nothing done today but did see the a's beat the bluejays in the sun. now i've got sunburn on right arm.

plan to spend the morning collecting myself and doing one more week on this essay i've been working on. then i hope to switch to creative piece and do some reading for that.

Before I left for l.a., I read pasquale verdicchio's translation of pasolini's the savage father. It was required reading for the workshop that Walter has organized. Fascinating screenplay, or whatever it is. Interesting take on the complicated redemptive power of poetry. I haven't figured the whole thing out yet. How it does and does not fall into those patterns of how white people talk about Africa. Which is because it seems a lot more complicated than a lot of this work. It might work for this anthology I've been thinking about doing.

read nothing yesterday. spent the afternoon in the sun under a lemon tree in a friend's backyard. went to see mean girls in the evening.

today have been re-reading around in clifford's predicament of culture which is just as good/even better than i remember it.

yesterday in the a.m. read half of john brown childs's transcommunality. i keep waiting for the word anarchism to show up but it hasn't yet. however what he is writing about is classic anarchist theory, the decentralized yet connected social movement.

and then in the p.m. read lindqvist's exterminate the brutes. interesting. i'm enjoying it. it is an easy read. it mixes the personal (his visit to the desert; this part i'm the most up in the air about; not sure where it is going finally but will wait and see) with the history around conrad's heart of darkness. isn't as stunning, i think, as his history of bombing.

Read Rita Felski, "Modernist Studies and Cultural Studies: Reflections on Method" over lunch.

On sunday... Petrine Archer-Straw's Negrophilia: Avant-Garde Paris and Black Culture in the 1920s as if i had taken speed reading course. It was easy to do b/c the pages are shiny and there are lots of photos, most of them unmentioned in the written comment. The photos serve as some sort of accent, not actual content. Very reductive book. But it might just be that readings of photographs feel that way to me. But it also what makes the book somewhat useful.