Last few weeks, no reading. I've been running around advising and meeting classes. And trying to get writing done. Also went away for the weekend to look into tide pools down near Half Moon Bay. Lots of hermit crabs. Also kelp. Which mesmerizes me. Highlight was seeing sea otter with collection of urchins for eating on his/her chest and s/he floated on his/her back. Got bad sunburn on nose and arm despite being out in fog. I guess it is because of the antibiotic that I'm on for the probable lyme disease. The sunburn will not go away. A week later my nose is still red and is developing some weird thick skin on it, which I assume will eventually peel away.

But have had to finish two books because they came in via interlibrary loan.

Post-Structuralist Joyce, ed by Attridge and Ferrer. It is a blast from the past.

Modernism and Mass Politics, Michael Tratner. Good on crowds. I actually enjoyed reading the book. It reads like a barely rewritten dissertation. But a really good dissertation. It has that introductory overview chapter followed by a series of textual based close readings. I think I'm noticing this because I'm trying to write myself away from this mode. But this mode feels so easy and comforting, so much training went into acquiring that mode, that it is hard for me to move away from it. I keep slipping back into it. There is something comforting about reading a book in that mode that is also good and fairly pleasant to read.

I forgot but I just realized that I also read half of Vincent Crapanzano's Imaginative Horizons: An Essay in Literary-Philosophical Anthropology. Then it got recalled from Berkeley so I had to take it back, never to see it again because I can't recall books there. Not sure what I thought. It is one of those books that dances from culture to culture and reference to reference and the connections are fascinating but feel very superficial. I wish it had backed up a little more. But who knows, maybe it does in the end. I'm not the best judge having only read half of it.