Atem

Thu, 6 Nov 2008 15:17:08 -0800

I suppose you don't know very Spanish

Fri, 3 Oct 2008 11:50:51 -0800

...

My Bloody Valentine, The Concourse, San Francisco, 30.09.08

Thu, 2 Oct 2008 17:25:57 -0800

Everyone always jumps to the guitars, but let’s have a moment for My Bloody Valentine’s rhythm section. Used as I am to records where Kevin Shields assembled all the drum and bass parts himself and then buried them in the mix, I would never have expected such prowess. Granted that Shields is not only the man but the man behind the man; granted also that Bilinda Butcher has earned her place as America’s sweetheart and mine by strumming and crooning and looking at her shoes; it was Debbie Googe and Celtic warrior Colm Ó Cíosóig at the back of the stage who carried forward the flame of rock. ...

Thu, 25 Sep 2008 13:16:56 -0800

“My fellow Americans, our entire economy is in danger. This part of it is in danger, and the part over there too, and even those funny parts with the long names—yes, all in grave danger. For a long time now my good buddies at Merrill Lynch have been working their hardest with all parts of our economy, trying to do the right thing for America, but this is crisis time, and I’ll be frank—if my good buddies at Merrill Lynch do not receive $700 billion in small bills by midnight tomorrow, they’re going to kill this kitten. Now nobody wants to kill the kitten. It would be too bad to kill the kitten. But that’s where America is at present, with the danger. And the kitten doesn’t seem like a happy kitten. Seems like it might know what’s coming.” ...

David Foster Wallace (II)

Mon, 15 Sep 2008 14:46:30 -0800

The other day I didn’t get at the thing I really wanted to write about Wallace, which is what an ethical writer he was. Strictly I ought to say “meta-ethical”; he was interested in the conditions of possibility for ethics, an interest that I tried to describe as “seriousness” the other day. A compact example is the short piece “The Devil Is a Busy Man,” which is just a little too long to quote in full but ought to work in snippets:

...

History Moves Toward One Great Goal

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 20:19:36 -0800

But there’s no teleology even with dinosaurs, man—

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

Sun, 14 Sep 2008 02:15:16 -0800

One wants to think that, should you live one of these lives that are full of suicidal ideation in the teens and early twenties, as long as you later find a stable point from which to reflect back on those years—to reflect in fiction, even—then they won’t come back. If suicide is a door that you can open at fifteen, you should be able to close it at twenty-five. One wants to think that. ...

30

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 14:21:56 -0800

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A Brief and Arbitrary Encyclopedia of Literature in Spanish (3)

Wed, 10 Sep 2008 01:58:52 -0800

Guillén, Jorge. Obra Poética . Let’s bring it home. One more from the Generation of ‘27. They may be soulful Spaniards, but they all can be very funny when they feel like it. ...

A Brief and Arbitrary Encyclopedia of Literature in Spanish (2)

Sun, 31 Aug 2008 23:01:24 -0800

Cortázar, Julio. Bestiario. It’s Cortázar. His first collection, eight assured stories—they’re always assured—which seem simple—they always seem simple—but open onto the void. “Casa Tomada” is the justly famous showpiece. ...

Joseph Conrad, Victory

Fri, 29 Aug 2008 12:26:14 -0800

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Reacquaintance with the Attic Verb

Mon, 25 Aug 2008 11:39:36 -0800

Sphinx has become somewhat more useful by generating color-coded verb paradigms in addition to the drill function. There are probably still accent problems to weed out and I need to work something up for alternate endings, verbs that have both first and second aorists and so forth, but it works better than anything else of the sort I’ve seen on the web.

Athens

Sun, 24 Aug 2008 11:49:26 -0800

Also J. decided to give me the thirtieth-birthday gift of a three-night trip to Greece, because I am an embarrassing philhellene like the nineteenth-century Germans, and I kept doing embarrassing things in Athens like pointing to street signs and saying, “Look! It’s named after Sophocles!” I know just enough ancient Greek to reliably mispronounce modern Greek, but all the Athenians can speak English, whether they’re talking to Americans or Germans or Israelis—the city gives a very strong sense of English as an international lingua franca, which hadn’t been so apparent in other cities we know, like Barcelona or Berlin, where we understand more of the local language and spend more time out of the tourist spots. ...

A Brief and Arbitrary Encyclopedia of Literature in Spanish (1)

Sat, 23 Aug 2008 14:04:46 -0800

Back in the States. The milk tastes so much better here; I’ve been guzzling it. We had to buy an extra suitcase to carry all the books we bought in Spain—most of my days I spent reading them. ...

Merce Rodoreda (1908-1983)

Sun, 17 Aug 2008 07:58:31 -0800

Rodoreda, Mercè. La plaza del diamante (La Plaça del diamant). Barcelona: Edhasa, 1982 (1960). ...

Volver

Sat, 16 Aug 2008 07:16:47 -0800
J. and I make a good team, but because absence makes the heart grow saner she took the initiative and went to Rome for a couple of nights. So I took the train back from Girona by myself, through the Catalan countryside at sunset with the weird broccoli-trees I can’t identify waving in the wind and the Pyrenees turning blue and purple out the window. Sometimes you are in a low place and everything falls on top of you and it takes all your time just to figure out what the things are; but the last couple of days I’ve been in a high place, looking down at everything from above. ...

Juan Goytisolo, La Chanca

Mon, 11 Aug 2008 08:37:04 -0800
Goytisolo, Juan. La Chanca. Barcelona: Seix Barral, 1983 (1962). ...

Juan Carlos Onetti, Juntacadaveres

Wed, 6 Aug 2008 08:49:30 -0800
Onetti, Juan Carlos. Juntacadáveres. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2001 (1964). ...

That Everything is Going to the Dogs

Sun, 27 Jul 2008 19:52:15 -0800

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Ostranenie

Mon, 14 Jul 2008 10:16:13 -0800
A Bastille Day revision note: the novel won’t have to go to the guillotine, it can still be reformed for the good of the Republic, I just came close to forgetting an essential bit of aesthetic theory from John R. Cash:
...

La Busca de Averroes

Fri, 11 Jul 2008 04:25:41 -0800
Anyone still thinking about the Sapir-Whorf hypothesis, or just wondering what kind of metaphysics play a role in Spanish daily life, should consider the following: ...

Assembling the Fridge

Thu, 3 Jul 2008 06:41:47 -0800
...

Wed, 2 Jul 2008 06:42:47 -0800
“It’ll be awesome, guys. We’ll do the guillotines, and the Jacobins, and the Terror all over again—only this time, in space!!!”

Jo Soc un Os

Tue, 1 Jul 2008 16:54:09 -0800
We like Cafè de les Delicies on the Rambla del Raval (a wide local street which was a slum block until 2000, when they demolished it in order to make way for the Universe of Cheap Turkish Food). Usually there are only a few people inside, talking about computers, and a sassy Catalan barista who is not too sassy to bring you your tasty drinks (for me, espresso before six and wine after) with alacrity. This is on the men’s room door: ...

Sounds of Spain

Sun, 29 Jun 2008 13:53:12 -0800
The new powerful fan in our bedroom, in concert with whatever other appliances make noise around here, brought some very faint ambient music into the apartment as I was dropping off last night; it sounded like a major chord with a prominent third and fifth, cycling around every few seconds. ...

Gerardo Diego (1896-1987)

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 19:07:41 -0800
Diego, Gerardo. Antología poética. Ed. Francisco Javier Doez de Revenga. Madrid: Alianza Editorial, 2007. ...

Rain in Spain

Mon, 23 Jun 2008 05:40:39 -0800
Taking a walk last night through Barcelona’s old town, we stopped outside a bar and, along with a small crowd, watched through the window as Spain beat Italy on penalty kicks in the Euro 2000 quarterfinals. Exciting! No one had scored in the standard time, so they settled it by taking turns on five sudden-death goals each (I note this for readers who, like me, are ignorant of the fútbol), in which the Spanish goalie came out as the hero. Then there was a lot of shouting “¡ESPAÑA!”, honking horns, running around in the street, fireworks going off, people hanging from the backs of scooting Vespas with enormous Spanish flags in their spread arms. Why did it make me so happy? Something about the fiction of community—or maybe the real community, how do I know—that you get with sports, the sense of being part of the thing you’re looking at. We’ve been here about four days and are just starting to figure out how things work. Today I finally intuited that our little stovetop coffee machine is an espresso machine that employs the upward pressure of steam rather than the downward pressure of water. I don’t even want to tell you the contortions I’ve been going through to make it work the wrong way.

Wed, 11 Jun 2008 01:21:40 -0800

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Sun, 8 Jun 2008 13:50:28 -0800

...

Fri, 6 Jun 2008 22:14:05 -0800
The last sentence of this article implies volumes about how fucked things are.

A New Career in a New Town

Sun, 11 May 2008 13:52:32 -0800
There are arcane ins and outs to the present budget crisis at the university with which I’m associated, but the short version is that the administration has responded to massive state funding cuts with at least two boneheaded decisions, axing a large portion of a) language courses in Chinese, Japanese and Korean, and b) the required two-semester undergrad composition sequence. Both a) and b) are routinely overenrolled as is; they’re about to get much more so. The consequence of a) may well be to restrict Asian language courses to people who are majoring in those languages; thus our proud leading 21st-century Pacific Rim university which is charged to provide its students with Competitive Skills in the Global Arena will not be able, for example, to teach its business students any Chinese. As for people who might want to study Chinese at a university out of intellectual curiosity—that pays no dividends, buster. ...

Mon, 5 May 2008 18:28:00 -0800
The novel is near completion, but I was suspecting that I might need to put all the writing projects away for a brief while; and this morning God confirmed it by sending me some momentous gastric upset to keep me moaning in bed all morning. (If you think you are likely to vomit in the near future, do not swallow those bright red strawberry Tums, because they will terrify you coming back up.) J. took care of me until I was well enough to come downtown and get some carrot juice and open up Aristotle’s Physics, which is where I’m at now and will not be tempted elsewhere from. He always cheers me up:
...

Fri, 2 May 2008 23:56:19 -0800
I’ve had very little contact with my department this semester and have been neglecting my academic duties to finish this novel; I feel like I’m taking off one suit of clothes after another, scattering them around me until they are completely shed and I leap into the sun. To land in Spain. ...

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 15:42:23 -0800
We’re reaching the point in the spring where the enormous juvenile sparrows, molted into adult plumage and quite obviously able to forage for themselves, still hop after their parents making plaintive noises and the “feed me” wing-flapping gestures which are perfectly ludicrous on birds of their size. Presumably their excuse is also that they’re writing dissertations.

Fri, 25 Apr 2008 03:09:45 -0800
This is what goes on; J. and I are minding our business at the café when in walks our local famous gender theorist, followed by a respected philosopher in the Continental tradition who must be visiting from New York. They get coffee and salads and whatever and come sit next to us. The philosopher is speaking very slowly and carefully about his current work on embodiment, and the dignity of embodiment, and the passive body which cannot be controlled; the gender theorist listens attentively and asks if he’s taken Merleau-Ponty into account. Apparently sex is also a part of this, because the philosopher then starts trying to theorize rape, and what does it mean for rape to be an ultimate trauma, still in the slow and careful and sententious voice, and the whole thing was so hideously grating that I had to pack up my computer and go off to the bookstore next door. I suppose in a year or two the completed monograph on dignity and rape and embodiment will appear in that bookstore with an appropriate graphic on the front and some appropriate blurbs on the back, along with a $75 list price. ...

Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

Sat, 19 Apr 2008 20:21:35 -0800
Kawabata, Yasunari. Snow Country (Yukiguni, 雪国). Trans. Edward G. Seidensticker. New York: Knopf, 1956 (1947). ...

Frequently Asked Questions About Blogging

Wed, 16 Apr 2008 13:35:05 -0800
To take on a task
you must put on a mask.
When the task is done
the mask stays on.
It whispers the themes
you embroider in dreams.

Saul Bellow

Tue, 15 Apr 2008 13:59:59 -0800
Bellow, Saul. The Adventures of Augie March. New York: Fawcett Premier, 1967 (1953).
Bellow, Saul. Seize the Day. New York: Penguin, 1977 (1956). ...

Robert Graves, No More Ghosts

Sun, 13 Apr 2008 13:17:54 -0800
Graves, Robert. No More Ghosts: Selected Poems. London: Faber and Faber, 1940. ...

Sat, 12 Apr 2008 13:19:30 -0800
The young people of Stanford are still doing good work; scrawled in one of the library cubicles, next to the W.A.S.T.E. muted trumpet, is
...

Salvador Espriu, La Pell de Brau (The Bull-Hide)

Thu, 10 Apr 2008 01:55:10 -0800
Espriu, Salvador. La pell de brau. Trans. Burton Raffel. Marlboro, VT: The Marlboro Press, 1977 (1960).
...

Sat, 5 Apr 2008 18:52:19 -0800
While the meaning machine continues its interim rumbling, you will want to know that my alternate career as a piano technician is moving apace. The piano’s 88 hammers are made of felt layers wrapped around a wood core, and if you happen to own a spinet from the 1950s that has been serviced rarely if ever during the intervening decades, you will discover that the felt has become grooved and compacted from the pressure of the strings, and that striking certain keys now produces a sound like Beethoven dropping his beer stein. The solution, we learn from the internet, is to grip a needle right proper in a pair of pliers and poke some infinitesimal holes in the felt just above and below the striking surface. I am dumbfounded at the change produced by a mere four holes per hammer—I have not turned the spinet into a baby grand, and it is still not the easiest instrument to play pianissimo, but the bass half of the scale is no longer attempting a hostile takeover of the treble. Anyway, once I get the vegetable garden back in action I will roll back the division of labor entirely and never need one of your damn jobs again.

Sat, 5 Apr 2008 18:51:02 -0800
While the meaning machine continues its interim rumbling, you will want to know that my alternate career as a piano technician is moving apace. The piano’s 88 hammers are made of felt layers wrapped around a wood core, and if you happen to own a spinnet from the 1950s that has been serviced rarely if ever during the intervening decades, you will discover that the felt has become badly grooved and compacted from the pressure of the piano strings, and that striking certain keys now produces a sound like Beethoven dropping his beer stein. The solution, we learn from the internet, is to grip a needle right proper in a pair of pliers and poke some infinitesimal holes in the felt just above and below the striking surface. I am dumbfounded at the change produced by a mere four holes per hammer—I have not turned the spinnet into a baby grand, and it is still not the easiest instrument to play pianissimo, but the bass half of the scale is no longer attempting a hostile takeover of the treble. Anyway, once I get the vegetable garden back in action I will roll back the division of labor entirely and never need one of your damn jobs again.

Charlotte Brontë, Villette

Sun, 30 Mar 2008 16:24:56 -0800
Brontë, Charlotte. Villette. New York: Modern Library, 2001 (1853). ...

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:45:45 -0800
Why do we keep driving across Nevada? I don’t know, but on Wednesday epic winds were blowing across the plains, kicking up dust and darkening half the sky. What is up with this, I asked, and J. said, “A complex emergent phenomenon”: egghead. Armies of tumbleweeds came bouncing across the road; when cars hit them, our own included, they puffed out into evanescent clouds of twigs, like bad guys in a video game. Those that survived the passage would get caught on the miles of barbed wire fence that run along the highway to screen off the range lands. When we drove back the next day they had piled ten deep along the fences, on both sides of the road, for mile after mile. We made out a column of smoke, a glint of red flame, and as we got closer we saw about fifteen people from the highway department standing around the fence in their orange overalls, watching a pile of weeds burn down. But is that what they’re planning along the entire highway? It will take months to burn them all.

Fri, 28 Mar 2008 20:44:13 -0800
Why do we keep driving across Nevada? I don’t know, but on Wednesday epic winds were blowing across the plains, kicking up dust and darkening half the sky. What is up with this, I asked, and J. said, “A complex emergent phenomenon”: egghead. Armies of tumbleweeds came bouncing across the road; when cars hit them, our own included, they puffed out into evanescent clouds of twigs, like bad guys in a video game. Those that survived the passage would get caught on the miles of barbed wire fence that run along the highway to screen off the range lands. When we drove back the next day they had piled ten deep along the fences, on both sides of the road, for mile after mile. We made out a column of smoke, a glint of red flame, and as we got closer we saw about fifteen people from the highway department standing around the fence in their orange overalls, watching a pile of weeds burn down. But is that what they’re planning along the entire highway? It will take months to burn them all.

Andr� Gide, L'Immoraliste

Tue, 25 Mar 2008 22:38:52 -0800
Gide, Andr�. L’Immoraliste. Paris: Gallimard, 1972 (1902). ...

Sun, 23 Mar 2008 14:02:12 -0800
I do well in the quiet, high, bright places. When I was in better shape I would climb mountains; now I have to settle for walking to campus and perching on a wall above the current construction site, which blessedly sleeps weekends. Cool bay air, sparrows. A towhee scratching for morsels under the leaf carpet. The occasional well-groomed undergraduate walking by with sandals on his lily-white feet. ...

Meilleur

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 23:43:08 -0800
UPDATE ...

Sat, 22 Mar 2008 16:21:51 -0800
I am trying to read Gide in French, and it is all right except that I don’t understand the function of all the farms and horses in the middle. J. is at work on her winter quarter papers, and it is a slow haul up a rocky slope but it is getting done: go J. I am in my department building on the weekend because I am lightly rooted and go with the prevailing winds; and when I climb up the unswept stairs I ask myself, “Is this a home? In what sense has this been a home?” Dumb question to ask a building. I never like the talks that are advertised on the bulletin boards, and right here next to the computer is a copy of the 1603 quarto edition of Hamlet, and damned if I know what to do with it, if I could make a life of doing things to it, or of encouraging others to do the same. ...

Jean Racine, Andromaque

Mon, 10 Mar 2008 02:05:10 -0800
Racine, Jean. Andromaque. En Th�atre Complet I. Paris: Garnier-Flammarion, 1964 (1668). ...

Thu, 6 Mar 2008 19:52:39 -0800

...

Jean Racine, Ph�dre

Thu, 6 Mar 2008 01:36:44 -0800
Racine, Jean. Ph�dre. Translated by Margaret Rawlings. New York: E.P. Dutton, 1962 (1677). ...

J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year

Tue, 4 Mar 2008 22:10:35 -0800
Coetzee, J.M. Diary of a Bad Year. New York: Viking Penguin, 2007. ...

Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

Tue, 4 Mar 2008 01:49:12 -0800
Woolf, Virginia. Jacob’s Room. New York: Norton, 2007 (1922). ...

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:42:55 -0800
Fifty years in the future: climate change has wrecked agriculture and my mother is trying to feed me an earthworm casserole because that’s the only protein source left. I am taking it with bad grace. Pouting in the bathroom. ...

Tue, 19 Feb 2008 23:42:33 -0800
Fifty years in the future: climate change has wrecked agriculture and my mother is trying to feed me an earthworm casserole because that’s the only protein source left. I am taking it with bad grace. Pouting in the bathroom. ...

Tue, 12 Feb 2008 20:49:30 -0800
Free WiFi in the Reno airport. Nice job on that, fellas. Earlier today I had a nice walk to a Starbucks in that sharp, slanted light that lets you know you’re in an arid land—and the concrete goes on and on and on. ...

Mon, 28 Jan 2008 23:44:59 -0800
I am a useless heap of formless content, but here’s something: I was telling J. about how I always associate Schubert and Schumann with Schelling and Schlegel and Schiller and those guys, because of contemporaneity and my inability to tell all the damn kraut names apart, and all at once we realized that a lot of German philosophers pair up pretty intuitively with German composers (construing “German” a bit broadly). These were the obvious ones: ...

Wed, 16 Jan 2008 12:16:58 -0800

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Tue, 15 Jan 2008 16:20:56 -0800

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Lost in the Snow

Thu, 10 Jan 2008 15:23:48 -0800
Driving at night with a misted windscreen behind a utility truck that strobes orange flashes over the hills, every flash an object flying at us. ...

Every Man His Own Boswell

Tue, 8 Jan 2008 00:31:48 -0800
Blizzards off and on for the last few days. Earth and sky the same color, cut off from California. On the higher slopes of Reno, where my family lives, around a foot of snow has come down and humped itself over the sage like a spread of creamy yogurt. It fills in the hollows of the traffic signals and the red and green lights shine past in crescents, like eclipsed moons. In the vacant lot behind the Wal-Mart snow ploughs have raised great pyramids. ...

Wed, 2 Jan 2008 19:15:26 -0800

This year I got freaked out about the brevity of human life too. It’s so frustrating to spend so much of your life in flight from cliche, or not even bothering to run because you are so convinced that cliche exists in a completely separate universe from your own original self, and then run like Oedipus straight into the arms of your terrible destiny. Of contemplating your thirtieth birthday with trepidation, and realizing your parents - yea, and your own self! - are going to die. I looked down at my sleeve just now and found a fallen grey hair. Good grief. ...

Tue, 1 Jan 2008 01:47:53 -0800
This year I got freaked out about the brevity of human life, and apparently my response was to become extremely slow. I looked back at this year’s archives and there didn’t seem to be anything, but I always get disappointed when I look at my own archives. What did I need to remind myself of? Middle-to-late October was terrible, after that things evened out. Otherwise I just remember a lot of idle time I can’t account for, or couldn’t account for until I looked at metameat.vox.com and remembered that the whole damn year has been a second-order bookish year, with only a couple of breaks for extreme melodrama in the shrubbery. I guess more and more of my years are going to be like that. That all is OK but I would like to find a non-trivial way to document more of it. ...

Thu, 20 Dec 2007 20:35:31 -0800
I finished a record and it is up here.

Mon, 17 Dec 2007 00:10:50 -0800
When I have to get things done, it is always very late in the day that they are done. Sunset and lassitude. I finished my class, insanely, with a long list of things to do differently next time, and now it is like a railroad car rounding a bend and disclosing a whole new world of tasks, a delightful gemütlich little Swiss village of tasks to last a year, wafting smoke from their chimneys in answer to the train’s errant whistle.... I earned the wine tonight and I brook no reproach.

Tue, 4 Dec 2007 14:26:25 -0800
I was gone this weekend at a memorial service for an uncle. It was tastefully done, hard to watch my family grieving. To lose your son when you are seventy-six, eighty years old. ...

In Memoriam H.S.

Mon, 26 Nov 2007 13:54:51 -0800
Here? A stone
blocks the airway.
I will not name it
granite or turquoise,
sapphire or coal.
It has stopped your breath.
Your children touch it
with their fingers, weeping
for the kindness in your broken body,
as if in this late age stones
still held audience for tears.

Tue, 20 Nov 2007 00:13:03 -0800
If there were anyone
Whose thoughts entailed anyone
Then I declare that someone
Would have to be you ...

Wed, 14 Nov 2007 14:28:58 -0800
THAT GUY AT METAMEAT MADE US ALL FOLLOW HIM TO A NEW SUBDOMAIN AND HE DOESN’T EVEN DO ANYTHING WITH IT ...

Sun, 11 Nov 2007 22:02:32 -0800
blank island
unmoored from the sea floor

blind drift

Mon, 5 Nov 2007 16:45:09 -0800
& if being a lit student in these times makes you want to holler like Marvin Gaye, where can you go that is not a reminder? There is the life sciences building with its TRICERATOPS SKULL and the public library which is really a nice library SUPPORT INTELLECTUAL CULTURE OUTSIDE THE UNIVERSITY
* * * * * * * * * * * * * * 8 * * tx__xtxtx___txttttxtt ######~ 68H- ---- &^^^ lm ... .... \.|||| -(((((( (00 r\..; | .......*........./ r \.; ..... ....../

Mon, 5 Nov 2007 11:29:03 -0800
Chapati Mystery and his blogroll are of course your best guide to Ongoing Pakistan.

Sun, 4 Nov 2007 15:51:53 -0800
The world is trying to get to 50,000 words by December 1. I will try the same thing. rrrrrrrrrrrrrrr
. .. rrrrxx_(rrr ..\rr ...\ rrrrrrr~~~2341x|||||||| =||.\~ =================================

Sat, 3 Nov 2007 13:03:12 -0800
O for a jaunt
On the Tyrrhenian Sea
To play the rebec
On a xebec
With a tenrec and thee

Fri, 2 Nov 2007 16:17:04 -0800
Hey shouldn you be doin somethin
shouldn you be doin somethin
isn the Novemmaber
time fr you to doin somethin ...

Thu, 25 Oct 2007 01:45:17 -0800

Beckett hated lecturing, feeling that he had no knack for it: “I did not enjoy all those women, mooning about. They were a great problem and I was sorely tempted to ask them all to get our, to leave the room.” He used his repugnance at the thought of standing in front of a room filled with giggling young women, which he likened to exhibiting himself, as an excuse to drink heavily the night before each class in an effort to blot the coming ordeal from his mind.
His teaching technique was highly unorthodox. Instructors were required to take roll at the beginning of each class, but Beckett stopped doing it after the second lecture. He did nothing to encourage his students to pay attention or to take his lectures seriously. It didn’t matter to him if they talked, read something else or stares out the window. He was always present in the classroom before the students, staring out the window, with his back turned. When they had stopped bustling and were silent, he usually continued to stare out the window for a very long time. Finally, he would turn to face them and deliver a sentence perfectly crafted but puzzling. He spoke without notes and never seemed to have anything but the work to be discussed in front of him. Most of his students found they were able to take verbatim notes of his lectures, because when he was finished with the delivery of one sentences, he would turn again to the window, wait another long time, almost as if he had forgotten they were there, and then suddenly turn and speak again. It went on like this in every lecture. ...

Tue, 23 Oct 2007 00:42:45 -0800
My cup runs over with California,
and I can make no recompense
for its wealth against my poverty
but to throw my life into the sea,
where none shall offer a defense.
My cup runs over with California.
The airplanes piloted by God
that roost upon these hills at night
are caked in blood. And I have gnawed
their bones with fiendish appetite:
none shall contract such a debt and live.
What surety have I to give
but stones, all-grasping California?
My heart is clothed in borrowed skin.
I cannot pay for the air I breathe,
and so long as I move my pen
for the well-fed children of wealthy men,
not you nor I shall know reprieve.
Set me to shrivel in the sun,
and I will persist as a skeleton
to season your dinner with my curse.
Then keep strong charms inside your purse
and guard your fat heart, California.
Old fantasies go west to die.
None was deluded more than I.
My cup runs over with California.
Winter harvests the fruit of lies.

Sat, 20 Oct 2007 16:45:52 -0800
The prescience of Kobo Abe!
...

Wed, 17 Oct 2007 17:52:30 -0800
Continuance! My class and my work are organisms whose autonomic processes have to keep moving somehow, with or without direction from upstairs; and another such organism am I. We’ve been eating a lot of nice food, saw a string quartet make hash of Beethoven. I have either infinite time or no time, depending on which side of the loop you hold up—I know! Don’t hold up either side! You can walk on water if you don’t think about it.

Thu, 11 Oct 2007 23:58:10 -0800
No liquor in the house but absinthe. J. is gone back to Stanford and will be gone many more nights before all this is through. There was some wine at the Finnegans Wake group; now I’m reading Keats and listening over and over to ”Reckoner”—I can’t figure out most of the words and don’t really want to. It’s all our sins being reckoned. I can’t believe how sad it is. ...

Mon, 8 Oct 2007 22:41:01 -0800

...

Mon, 8 Oct 2007 00:10:25 -0800
Snippet from Keats:
...

Wed, 3 Oct 2007 21:00:17 -0800
Well, I’m still here. Twice a week I go into the classroom and spend an entertaining eighty minutes flopping around outside my element, like a freshwater fish dumped in a tub of vinegar. ...

Wed, 19 Sep 2007 20:07:14 -0800
I just found a fragment from Hecataeus, a Greek historian preceding Herodotus, most of whose work is sadly not extant:
...

Sun, 16 Sep 2007 12:09:57 -0800
J. recently picked up a small Farsi phrasebook with useful sections on dealing with the Iranian police and declining to participate in unspecified local customs. Also, the Farsi word for snow turns out to be “barf.” After running through the “barf leopard,” the “barfy owl,” and “Dashing through the barf,” true hilarity was achieved with: ...

Thu, 13 Sep 2007 14:49:29 -0800
More Songs About Buildings and Food gets me to the classroom on time. ...

Wed, 12 Sep 2007 14:25:15 -0800
My working hypothesis about my class was that I was slowly running it into the ground, but yesterday a faculty observer came in and apparently he has falsified that hypothesis at least. Teaching comp in a lit program is weird. It’s sort of like having physics researchers teach the first year of college math—obviously there’s a lot of overlap in the skill sets, and just as obviously they are not the same field. I do get to break up the paragraph assignments with the book about the big bug. ...

On This Day

Mon, 10 Sep 2007 17:52:41 -0800
There’s a new election in Guatemala; Álvaro Colóm, the genial center-left candidate, was also a front-runner when I was there for the last election—ack—four years ago. ...

Fri, 7 Sep 2007 12:04:23 -0800
—Who actually wrote that “Midnight Ride of Paul Revere” poem? Was it Longfellow?
—I don’t know. I sort of thought it was just some crap that had bubbled out of America’s collective unconscious.
—Yeah, but it’s surprising how often you think that and it turns out to be Longfellow. ...

Sat, 1 Sep 2007 23:36:24 -0800
Old friends have been passing through and I started teaching this week; no sleep, all conviviality and coffee, so this is the first evening back in my quiet corner of the living room visiting this quiet corner of the internet. I finally wiped it off the Google map for good, so now I can once again smear my bleeding heart all over the screen without worrying about exposure to the people I’m supposed to be mentoring. ...

Wed, 22 Aug 2007 19:37:36 -0800
This is a particular favorite of mine.

Fri, 17 Aug 2007 17:40:36 -0800
It’s a bit like the old days: long stretches of unallocated time and the vague seeping fear of impending limits. The long-feared Deathly Job never came to permanently pluck the flower of my budding artistry, but I’m good enough at manufacturing impediments on my own. I have to sit down and finish a comp syllabus this week, and it’s been like the dream of a hill that you can’t climb, not even in a lucid dream, because your mind has knots to unravel elsewhere. I don’t know what the knot is. I haven’t been working on the book—I worry that there’s Thalidomide in the air, that it would lose its fingers. So I cleaned the bathroom. And the difference between then and now—without which I don’t know where I’d be—is that now there’s someone to come home and notice that the bathroom has been cleaned.

Codes

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 23:36:50 -0800
The comment box sent me a news story linking to a PDF on a cryptographic mystery in San Jose; for the surprise factor, I would recommend first reading the PDF on its own. ...

Thu, 16 Aug 2007 12:16:30 -0800
”The Steak Place” by The Fall caused me to dream of a steak substitute brand-named Pleasant Pleak. It was indeed pleasant; I think it was breaded. ...

Mon, 6 Aug 2007 13:26:07 -0800
I was in the library looking for some critical articles to assign my class this fall and ran across this passage:
...

Wed, 1 Aug 2007 02:07:27 -0800
So that was July. I couldn’t concentrate on anything and J. said, it’s because you do the same things all the time. The same things I do all the time: ...

Sat, 28 Jul 2007 12:55:26 -0800
There’s a passage in Henry James’s notebooks where he faces up to the awful fact that he’s about to turn forty, and declares that if he does not write something truly great in the next few years, he will have been substantially a failure. (This is after he’s already written Portrait of a Lady.) Future perfect, that worst of tenses. ...

Mon, 23 Jul 2007 14:39:55 -0800
Because I was so anhedonic J. convinced me to put down the novel for a few days. And all at once the days are open! It is summer! This is gloriously unearned and I feel I should be apologizing to someone, but it’s only that I spent the first part of the summer trying to be four things at once, and the shades of those obligations are still whispering in my ears.

Fri, 20 Jul 2007 14:11:16 -0800
When the cat sits in the window, attention angled downward, and tries to push her head through the screen into the outer world, I always wonder what she sees out there: another cat? A bird? If I get too close to her she'll squall. Last night she was behaving oddly, rocketing off the bed and darting around the house and sleeping most of the night in an undisclosed location; then at four in the morning we had an earthquake. My framed Ulysses poster fell off the wall and shattered, but I’m the kind of guy who keeps a spare framed Ulysses poster in the basement. ...

Sun, 15 Jul 2007 13:10:39 -0800
Try again. I keep forgetting whether I’ve taken my meds or not. Yesterday I’m pretty sure I forgot to take them and it left me helpless in the evening, trying to read and wondering why the half-recorded songs didn’t make sense. A couple days ago we were driving through some hills in Eureka County and saw a half-grown foal lying in a field with the rest of the herd, six or seven adults, standing in a circle around it with their tails swishing. Three hours later we drove back the other way and it hadn’t moved; they hadn’t moved.

Wed, 4 Jul 2007 15:56:25 -0800
My low E string was going sharp whenever I hit it hard; I spent a good while yesterday messing with the saddle and the truss rod and the nut and nothing helped, then today I went back and listened to the recordings and they sounded fine, so is this just something that guitars do. ...

Mon, 2 Jul 2007 13:29:27 -0800
Well, wasn't I feeling like the cock of the walk yesterday; and then we went to Moe’s and I found a crap Cormac McCarthy photocopy novel represented by one of the agents that declined me; and then I couldn’t even enjoy the classics shelf properly. It’s terrible how much I sometimes want to be the center against which everything is plotted. Sorry about that. (One can easily imagine a notation, said Wittgenstein, in which pain [as opposed to pain-behavior] can be correctly ascribed to one person only, so that of others one must say: “He is behaving as P.K. behaves when there is pain!”) ...

Sun, 1 Jul 2007 19:04:07 -0800
500 words today. It’s a better practice than 333 a day, if only I can make the effort; not only because it requires me to concentrate for a longer period but because it moves infinitesimally closer to the speed at which a reader actually takes it; my immediate memory extends back over more pages, my immediate intentions can cover a greater area, the compositional unit becomes the paragraph rather than the sentence and sometimes—in the best case—I can even see a bit of motion. If I can keep it up through July and August I should have most of this done before my class starts.

Sat, 30 Jun 2007 18:36:21 -0800
Every year I run a race with June and I lose. Actually this seems to happen to most of the people I know. This year it wasn't creepy balance problems but employment, sickness, the scattering of my brain into its component spectrum of brain-rays. ...

Thu, 28 Jun 2007 13:38:35 -0800
So there's a blockheaded article in today’s NYTimes on the new English translation of Beim Hauten der Zwiebel by Günter Grass. Aside from missing the point of Grass’s constant equivocations, the article notes:
...

The Paper and the Content of the Paper

Wed, 27 Jun 2007 18:20:08 -0800
It's a little over a month since the reins of my world seemed to slip out of my hands, and since then all my movements have been buffets and jounces. In the trunk of a car on a long gravel road. Made a lot of money, entertained and was entertained, went to see the redwoods. Now the cold I've had coming since April is finally arrived and I can't tell if I'm hungry or thirsty or tired; it's all the same headache, the same nasty scratched-out feeling in the body. ...

Tired

Fri, 1 Jun 2007 22:24:36 -0800
Exhaustion is banal. So banal I can't get outside of it to see its banality, and get deluded into thinking there's something important going on. ...

Wed, 30 May 2007 01:22:58 -0800
Since we have to follow the biographical record, I defended my prospectus a couple of weeks ago and am now ABD. Not that my ten pages of flimsy generalizations about Henry James and Gertrude Stein needed much defending from my dissertation committee; mostly the English professors just wanted to ask the philosophy professor about his perception research. (”Wow! So, say if you took someone and plugged his ears, and put him in a suit where he couldn’t feel anything, would his vision change? Would he fall over?”) ...

Sun, 6 May 2007 11:59:31 -0800
I just learned that the reason I found nothing online about the Judith Butler book (April 18 below) is cuz the sign was incorrect and the book is "Nevada Belle and the Forgotten Women of the West.” So: ...

Mstislav Rostropovich, 1927-2007

Sat, 28 Apr 2007 14:58:48 -0800

Checkpoint Charlie, Nov ‘89

I Really Wish I Had Brought My Camera

Wed, 18 Apr 2007 22:32:56 -0800

...

Mon, 16 Apr 2007 23:17:19 -0800
They didn’t have any remotely reasonable cars at the rental place, so I have this preposterous golden minivan to take to Tonopah. This week I’ve been squandering my youth on scratchy old microfilms of mineral patents, all about a hundred years old and signed by Roosevelt and Taft; when I go out into the territory I should watch for bears, I guess, and sing something rousing about the charge up San Juan Hill.

Sat, 14 Apr 2007 23:03:52 -0800
I'm really grateful to everyone who sent friendly messages before and after the exam, but a week later and the only thing I still think about it is that even with the best intentions of everyone involved, there is no way that one brief interview behind a closed door can discharge the year of tension that preceded it. I keep seeing newspaper headlines or whatever and thinking, "That's right, don't forget about Eleanor of Aquitaine in Canto VI," and then I remember I don't have to do that any more. I have a sheet of paper to give to the administration so that I can become a doctoral candidate. The sheet of paper is called "Plan B," which because it is true is painful and therefore funny. ...

Activity and Habituation in the Brain of the Polyclad Flatworm

Fri, 6 Apr 2007 13:11:39 -0800
J. thinks I’ll get to the oral exam and it will turn out to be the sort of oral exam where they’ll want to know how often I’ve been flossing. Anyway, almost done.

The Hellenistic Period in California: A Survey

Tue, 3 Apr 2007 22:39:32 -0800
1) The inscription in the lobby of Wheeler Hall honoring Benjamin Ide Wheeler, professor of Greek philology, president of the University of California, and author of volumes including Der griechische Nominalaccent (1885), Dionysos and Immortality (1899), and The Whence and Whither of the Modern Science of Language (1905). ...

Mon, 2 Apr 2007 00:40:59 -0800
Paul J. Cohen, the set theoretician who showed that the Continuum Hypothesis is not provable under Zermelo-Fraenkel set theory and who, without knowing it, played a minor role in my novel, is dead at 72. His book on set theory is not to be found anywhere for sale—I spent a long time looking, in those days when I had no university to claim me.

Thu, 29 Mar 2007 15:10:42 -0800
Lack of information will not be a problem in this exam; the problem will be digging down through all the encrusted trivia, like finding the one sweater in the cramped closet that you actually wear. For almost a year this thing has been a constant dull pressure on my basilar artery, and as soon as it's over I might need go to Reno, because my loans remain in Loan Space, where all motion tends to increase the amount of the loan. Take the rate at which the canoe is leaking, plot it against the rate at which I can bail it out— ...

Wed, 28 Mar 2007 11:13:00 -0800
I had to go to campus anyway to get my psych meds refilled, so I took a sandwich and Los Ríos Profundos up into the hills, which are of course inhabited by the rich but surprisingly accessible; between the enormous garages and private tennis courts are a number of public paths and stairways, including some lovely old stonework that must have started out as part of someone’s Xanadu, leading into the open space preserve. From time to time I entertain ideas of getting back in shape; glance at those hills and you will understand what happens when a sloth like me tries to climb them. But I got up to a quiet roadside patch with the whole bay (I mean the whole damn bay, north and south) spread out below like liquid carpet; and there was downtown San Francisco poking gamely at the clouds. When I had regained homeostasis I took out my book and my lunch, at which point ten large and presumptous dogs charged around the bend and relieved me of my sandwich. They were followed by a yuppie woman in jogging pants....

Thu, 22 Mar 2007 10:51:30 -0800
Aaron blogs from Tanzania!
...

Tue, 20 Mar 2007 13:17:22 -0800
<>I didn’t know what to do with the Vox blog, so I turned it into a reading diary. Not orals reading (that’s over here and I am almost quit of it, thank Christ), but general reading with an eye to the state of my soul. ...

Fri, 16 Mar 2007 14:55:34 -0800

...

Tue, 13 Mar 2007 11:49:01 -0800
Stepped onto the back porch at nine this morning (would have been eight without the surprise time shift) just long enough to check the good tidings of the air, the promise of the slanted sun that today would be another excellent day to spend in a park. Or a "grove"—I just discovered a fine grove, with a sign identifying it as a grove, on campus behind the humanities center. ...

Sat, 10 Mar 2007 15:44:54 -0800
Wole Soyinka's Bacchae is a marvel: I could call it utterly transparent or describe it as supersaturated with color; either way, it’s scrupulously faithful in its own manner. I’m surprised it hasn’t been more visible as a model for later work—it certainly gave me ideas. ...

Wed, 7 Mar 2007 15:27:24 -0800
Via an interview at Chapati Mystery: Boris Vladimirski, painter of Roses for Stalin and Black Ravens.

Wed, 28 Feb 2007 12:02:52 -0800
I dreamed that perseus.tufts.edu included George W. Bush in its list of Latin authors. Ha ha, I thought, that's cute, everyone thinks he's a Roman emperor. But no—it turned out that in his youth, Bush had found time to do a translation of Cicero, and it wasn't half bad. I was flummoxed. Had I misjudged everything?

I Am Home From an Academic Conference

Sun, 25 Feb 2007 13:49:33 -0800
Continental Airlines is not a very competent outfit and will be one of the first to fold when the airlines start going out of business. Also: do not eat the enchiladas in the Houston airport. When I finally staggered into the Oakland terminal at one in the morning they were playing a Muzak version of “Octopus’s Garden,” which was my cue to cackle maniacally and exclaim, “WE’RE ALL MAD HERE!” ...

I Am Still At an Academic Conference

Sat, 24 Feb 2007 10:12:46 -0800
Part two: after the Eliot panel, I went to the keynote presentation, where Laura Kipnis who wrote The Female Thing tried to make the Lee Siegel nonsense into a synecdoche for literary criticism; you will be glad to know she didn’t succeed. Then I went to the pizza reception, where I inhaled a Budwieser and 45 slices of Papa John’s and briefly listened to the jazz quartet whose leader had strewn flyers around the tables advertising his jazz workshops, in which anyone can learn to express himself or herself through improvisation.
...

I Am At an Academic Conference

Fri, 23 Feb 2007 17:36:50 -0800
Came into Kentucky from the air Thursday morning after a night of snatching sleep on planes, listening to Kaija Saariaho's beautiful grinding cello music, looking at myself in the dark window. The little melodramas we constantly stage. Reading Virgil. From the air flatness and haze, land cut into odd shapes along a grid, hills covered with the brown fuzz of leafless trees. The railroad depot swelling from a single track into a dozen parallel lines, like muscle fibers, then contracting again. Taxi to the university. Panels. A good one on cognitive poetics; then the sleepnessness caught up with me and I wandered into a T.S. Eliot panel. Six or seven people in the room. A bent man in his sixties walks up to the podium and announces that his interest is in onomastics, the study of naming. He passes out some heavily marked-up photocopies of a dot-matrix printout listing his name and address and the thirty or forty articles on names that he has published over the years. ...

Wed, 21 Feb 2007 11:44:18 -0800
J. came home and told me about a critical article on Absalom, Absalom! and the cinematic imagination of the South; I was skeptical cause that book don’t seem very cinematic to me; J. explained that the argument contained a lot of theory and the “concept of the suture.” ...

Giving Up Ground

Mon, 19 Feb 2007 20:09:36 -0800
I don't know to what extent one's intellectual habits are fixed at twenty-eight, but I've sedimented a great deal in the last couple of years, and it now seems a good forecast that I'll never be much of an essayist. Which is a shame, since I admire the form endlessly and so many of my favorite novelists have used it to fine effect; but I'm more and more reluctant to speak in my own voice. (Or to mark one of my constructed voices with an authorial imprimatur, if you prefer that phrasing.) I don't trust my own bald opinions any more, not even when I voice them privately. And this isn't just to reiterate what Musil says, that a good essay is always richer than the sum of its systematizable content; because even the subtlest and most carefully self-qualifying of Musil's performances always presupposes some definite knowledge of errors to be corrected, or at least exposed, and it's his magnificent bravado that I can't imitate. Five years ago I was pretty sure that I had seen through the surface of American life and letters into their essential form, and that I could explain this form to anyone committed enough to listen. Now I think that I have only physical objects, a vocabulary and varieties of human temperament—which items don't add up to an essay, however oblique. It's only when refracted through a prism, such as fiction, that they take on any form at all. For instance, to the extent that anything has worked on this website, it's worked because refracted through diarism, and the diarism itself has no value except as a vehicle for sentences, and the sentences themselves might as well be taken as nonsense, because their virtue never lies in their content; it's all euphony and the rigging of subordinate clauses. Translated into a Fregean logical notation they would sublime away entirely, like dry ice. ...

More on the Horse

Wed, 14 Feb 2007 12:03:00 -0800
It's hard to sustain enough interest in contemporary bad writing even to censure it; but bad writing of the past can still delight, since I don't see it nearly as often except in Joyce's and Orwell's parodies. My Valentine's Day gift to fans of "Eumaeus" and "Politics and the English Language" is these introductory paragraphs from Learning to Ride by Captain Piero Santini, published 1941. Note especially the bewildering heap of verbs in the final sentence, sucked bloodless and wan through noun constructions and the passive voice.
...

Fri, 9 Feb 2007 15:46:16 -0800
We ran out of book space again, so I improved the home by installing these shelves in back of my desk: ...

Mon, 5 Feb 2007 12:21:44 -0800

...

Happy Birthday James Joyce

Fri, 2 Feb 2007 12:45:44 -0800
On the couch. Writing has reached the compulsive point of repeatedly taking a word out and putting it back in. ...

January Was

Thu, 1 Feb 2007 16:22:16 -0800
I got a surprising and somehow excessive-seeming award from the department—it was like drawing the Monopoly card that announces you won a beauty contest—while J. got accepted to a Ph.D. program here at Berkeley. I finished the reading for my orals list, but won't be taking the exam until early April and don't even have to discuss it with anyone until March. So I have strange weeks. Following secondary sources into alleys that may be blind or sighted, reading more Henry James for pleasure, the hopeless but somehow unabandonable task of trying to sing. The gray sky. And if the sky were not gray, would it convince me that I was really on the earth—? ...

Mon, 22 Jan 2007 16:56:08 -0800

...

Thu, 18 Jan 2007 14:45:56 -0800

the writers must seize control of the means of book production!!
...

Sat, 13 Jan 2007 16:14:27 -0800

...

Sun, 7 Jan 2007 00:06:17 -0800

...

Sat, 6 Jan 2007 21:31:32 -0800
...

Sat, 6 Jan 2007 00:11:51 -0800
New Year's Day in a car across Wisconsin and Illinois: the fields that should have been buried in snow were bare yellow stubble. For a minute or two I managed to let go of them, to allow nature the same war and flux as the human world:
panta rhei kai ouden menei
polemos pantōn men patēr esti, pantōn de basileus
YOU HAVE NOT BEEN PAYING ATTENTION
PAYING ATTENTION
PAYING ATTENTION
PAYING ATTENTION
...

Ymir

Sat, 30 Dec 2006 22:59:47 -0800
In his last delirium my father began to confuse his hospital room with his own body. In some ways this was understandable—the respirator really had usurped the function of his lungs—but after months in bed he had come to think of the door as his mouth, and would protest if anything unclean passed through it; the fluorescent lights were a circulatory system diffusing light through the room, the bedside television an eye perceiving the outer world, while his own immobile form in the crisp sheets was a central brain or soul cut off from the extremities. But soon I came to see (he told me nothing, I had to figure this out myself) that for the analogy to hold, he must extend past the walls of the room. The television screen was only the inner terminus of the visual apparatus, which must stretch in its entirety through the broadcast signal into the distant transmission tower, through loops of cable into video footage and even backward in time into the very lenses of the cameras that had captured that footage. Or to generalize: the totality of my father was the totality of the universe. The hospital room was only the first of his outer bodies; the next would be the hospital building, then the organism of the city, and so on through the nation and planet and solar system out to those clusters of galaxies whose movements corresponding to respiration and digestion would be governed entirely by the force of gravity, and would take eons. Similarly, my father's body was only the outer habitation of his true self, which lay inside his heart, perhaps in the very heart of his heart, a single blood cell pulsing from atrium to ventricle as his body might walk from room to room, were it not trapped in the bed; or perhaps still deeper, in the nucleus or nucleolus of that cell, in the final invisible dance of molecules—but you see that nothing was small enough, nothing absolute enough, to ground his fundamental being. It was torment. Or I guess that he was tormented; because as I said, he did not speak to me. If the worlds around him were only extensions of his self, then nothing existed beyond that self, nothing that he might address. My movements, my parody of an independent will, could be explained only by equating me to one of his wandering spermatozoa, one which had never entered my mother�s womb but had spilled with its billion brothers onto the sterile earth, a half-creature generated in mockery of man, as man was created in mockery of God. ...

Tue, 19 Dec 2006 11:31:03 -0800
The usual aeasonal winds are blowing me to Arizona and Wisconsin. (They're idiosyncratic winds.) Vacation reading: Nostromo, Rayuela, The Principles of Psychology. I got a fellowship and am off from teaching next semester; I got stuck on the current novel and am taking a stab at a different one. When I’ve had more sleep I will make it all crystalline.

Wed, 13 Dec 2006 12:13:20 -0800
Three days earning money in Reno did me good; it was the happy part of those Balzac novels driven by the vagaries of the hero's bank account. Digging my way out of debt an hour at a time, looking out from the fourth floor at pigeons, idiocies of casinos, slanted light on the farther hills. Remembering me ten years ago looking to me ten years ahead, the books I was supposed to have written. ...

Sun, 10 Dec 2006 10:50:21 -0800

...

Sat, 2 Dec 2006 16:14:49 -0800
Crixa Cakes, Berkeley: Hungarian cake shop. Cukrászda. I had some really excellent coffee and a bite of a "fig walnut bar" (delicious bourgeois Fig Newton) and the people at the next table are very carefully and laboriously reading through and translating the Gospel of Matthew in Greek. Much much better than— ...

Sat, 2 Dec 2006 14:57:53 -0800
Yeah, I know Horace had his own shoals to navigate. And I’m no instructor of princes; I can’t even instruct the cat.

Wed, 29 Nov 2006 11:51:20 -0800
"Why does our society make artists into exiles? Horace wasn't an exile! He got along just fine!"
“Ovid was.”
“Oh yeah.”
[pause]
“But not Horace!”

Tue, 28 Nov 2006 15:55:52 -0800
This novel was supposed to be action packed. But I did not reckon on my ponderous prose. It’s too late to rectify; style is habit, and I am stuck with this ponderous prose that petrifies everything it touches.

Sun, 26 Nov 2006 16:06:11 -0800
I just drank some sour milk. ...

Sun, 19 Nov 2006 16:26:55 -0800

...

Wed, 15 Nov 2006 22:46:38 -0800

...

Armistice Day

Sat, 11 Nov 2006 16:53:08 -0800
crow flies east to the mountain stream
crow flies west can’t drink the salty water
dig the well into the rock one day you’re gonna drink it all ...

Fri, 10 Nov 2006 13:56:33 -0800
J. went to Belgium for a conference and I promptly started forgetting to take my pill and stopped doing the housework—and that gives you an unshaven Veteran’s Day on the couch with the dirty dishes and coffee mugs and sweaters and guitars all over the place staring at the novel you started and thinking, what a stupid novel, what a stupid fucking novel, this was a bad idea from the beginning and the execution has made it worse, its only merit is being short, or projected to be short; but first it has to be done, and then to discover you threw away a year’s writing on a terrible idea, the setup for a bad joke, a premise that would be excusable only in a comic book or rock opera—but if I ditched it then my self-respect would have to hinge on literary criticism or teaching, and those sure are bad bets. Or we must give up the notion of self-respect! Along with the analytic-synthetic distinction and the distinction between an organizing conceptual system and a neutral material to be organized! I suppose the consequence of that would be spending the day in the bathtub.

Atem

I suppose you don't know very Spanish

My Bloody Valentine, The Concourse, San Francisco, 30.09.08

David Foster Wallace (II)

History Moves Toward One Great Goal

David Foster Wallace (1962-2008)

30

A Brief and Arbitrary Encyclopedia of Literature in Spanish (3)

A Brief and Arbitrary Encyclopedia of Literature in Spanish (2)

Joseph Conrad, Victory

Reacquaintance with the Attic Verb

Athens

A Brief and Arbitrary Encyclopedia of Literature in Spanish (1)

Merce Rodoreda (1908-1983)

Volver

Juan Goytisolo, La Chanca

Juan Carlos Onetti, Juntacadaveres

That Everything is Going to the Dogs

Ostranenie

La Busca de Averroes

Assembling the Fridge

Jo Soc un Os

Sounds of Spain

Gerardo Diego (1896-1987)

Rain in Spain

A New Career in a New Town

Yasunari Kawabata, Snow Country

Frequently Asked Questions About Blogging

Saul Bellow

Robert Graves, No More Ghosts

Salvador Espriu, La Pell de Brau (The Bull-Hide)

Charlotte Brontë, Villette

Andr� Gide, L'Immoraliste

Meilleur

Jean Racine, Andromaque

Jean Racine, Ph�dre

J.M. Coetzee, Diary of a Bad Year

Virginia Woolf, Jacob's Room

Lost in the Snow

Every Man His Own Boswell

In Memoriam H.S.

On This Day

Codes

The Paper and the Content of the Paper

Tired

Mstislav Rostropovich, 1927-2007

I Really Wish I Had Brought My Camera

Activity and Habituation in the Brain of the Polyclad Flatworm

The Hellenistic Period in California: A Survey

I Am Home From an Academic Conference

I Am Still At an Academic Conference

I Am At an Academic Conference

Giving Up Ground

More on the Horse

Happy Birthday James Joyce

January Was

Ymir

Armistice Day