In NYC this week. It would not stop raining.

Last week, in preparation for talk at Poets House on Brathwaite, read Kamau Brathwaite's newest, Born to Slow Horses. I'm huge fan of his work. "Kumina" stands out in this collection.

Finished Pascale Casanova's The World Republic of Letters. It is hard to read, whether that is the fault of the translation or the original or both I cannot tell. I found the book eye opening. So ended up taking lots of notes, which might have also slowed me down. One of the best books of lit crit that I've read in some time just for the analysis. Casanova basically looks at how writers accumulate literary capital (which as she keeps pointing out does not necessarily cluster in the same places where economic capital is clustered). Nice critique of nation art (which I want to distinguish from nationalist art). Wonderful readings of Joyce and Beckett and their engagements with French. I love her phrase "aesthetic innovations of the Greenwich Meridian." Plan to steal this.

And also Nicholas Howe's Across an Inland Sea: From Buffalo to Berlin which I bought some time ago because it had chapters on Buffalo and Columbus, both places that I have relation with. Smoothly written.

Caroline Bergvall, Body and Sign

Marjorie Perloff, The Oulipo Factor: The Procedural Poetics of Christian Bok and Caroline Bergvall.

Both pointed out to me by Stephanie for this talk we are writing.

Also...

Lindsay Waters, "Does Aesthete Rhyme with Effete?" and "Why Benjamin Now?"

Alice Notley, From the Beginning. Chapbook from the Owl Press. Written in 2000 but published last year. "I want to I the book." About loss, grief. Always struck by her work. Often by its messiness.

Buying a house seems to mean losing the ability to read anymore. Or perhaps buying a house with no kitchen and no working bathroom and no heating and bad electricity and leaking gas lines and leaking plumbing means one no longer has the time to read anything beyond endless websites on price pfister products. Spent most of last two weekends in hardware stores. When not on web looking at things to buy to get house into working order, I'm scrambling to get this prose thing finished. I was a peer reviewer on a couple of manuscripts also so that took up some time.

Finally finished Sianne Ngai's Ugly Feelings. Adore the chapter on "stuplimity." Could there be a better word?

And tonight, instead of going to the Constant Gardner, read Art and Feminism edited by Helena Reckitt and Peggy Phelan and felt optimistic and sad.