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.