I put in a funding request for the speaker, and a room reservation request. As a result, I must now find and fill out five different forms (so far). I must also make parking and food/lunch arrangements, and make flyers and send them all around. There are numerous other bureaucratic tasks like this this week, … More A lovely new log

1/ Twice in graduate school, on papers where it wasn’t really I who had chosen the topic, and I had serious trouble making the topics I had work 2/ The same thing, with that book manuscript 3/ From trying to “manage time” when time management was not the issue (and note: “managing time” means not … More Times I have difficulty with schoolwork

The things I’m recycling are things for work from long ago, when I couldn’t work. I couldn’t look at them for a long time because they brought me face to face with what was happening then and because I so missed the person I had been before. Now that I am partly revived I can … More Signs of Love

In fact, this bedroom would be a pleasant office. I would turn the desk inward, to face the sunroom And I would not line the walls with books. Perhaps Turkish hangings I could use the red office chair And place a couch along the wall, perhaps. I. That wistfulness. I still wish for any one … More Red Wheelbarrow

Cha-ching! Unbelievably, our library gives us access to The Veil of Moses: Jewish Themes in Russian Literature of the Romantic Era. I was even going to check into the possibility of buying it (although I wouldn’t have, it’s 211 USD). The chapter on Russian Jews in the 1840s brought me to the book, but the … More The Veil of Moses

I read at Twenty Theses on Politics and Subjectivity because it has things on theory and praxis, and on the subject. I do not have full patience for philosophy, a fact that makes my life difficult. In it, however, I discovered the existence of Badiou’s Theory of the Subject, which originally came out in 1982. … More Bosteels, Badiou

Wednesday, Thursday, Friday: Derrida, Le monolinguisme de l’autre, deserves a revisit and it has to do with translation. This is what I learned, research-wise, and it does not have to do with the project at hand except obliquely. My commitment for this week is to reread my piece and Reviewer 2’s, and to do many … More Logging again

I liked Adam Gopnick’s essay on Pissarro quite a lot. The same issue of the New Yorker, which I guess I do like, has a poem after Lorca and an amusing piece on polyamory, pointing out that its mainstreaming isn’t at all countercultural–it’s been made to be about “family values” and so on. And there’s … More Camille Pissarro: Winter Sun

From reading Gruzinski on CDMX I realized that these Latvian artists who remind me of Mexican modernists may have been under direct influence of them. Eisenstein (¡Que viva México!) was of course captivated by it and was not just “Soviet” but Latvian, and many other Soviet artists congregated there in those days. How many brought … More Serge Gruzinski and Riga

I thought the most recent one was in 2019 but there’s a 2023 ebook that is really from a 2004 book, and there are many more. Sometimes I was asked for permission and sometimes I was not. I should really compile a whole list. Axé.