Feeling slightly under the weather today. Nonetheless, tomorrow I must rise very early and board a plane to Chicago, to spend two days hanging with my grandparents before AWP begins. What books should I take? I'm taking the Clark biography of Olson, though I'm expecting to get irritated with it; I've also got Peter Burger's Theory of the Avant Garde, which I never read all the way through. Some poetry? Jennifer Moxley—she continues to fascinate me because of how much of her thinking, even and especially her neurotic thinking, gets transmitted to me by the poetry. She is following Olson's imperative to get her energy all the way over to the reader in interesting ways. Either I'll keep working at The Sense Record or go back to her first book, Imagination Verses, which I picked up when I lived in the Bay Area but never got around to reading. I read a good essay about that book by Chris Stroffolino in an old Chicago Review in the library the other day, while reading up on Ronald Johnson—found a fascinating ancient issue of a magazine called Vort devoted to him and to Guy Davenport. There's so little written on Johnson that this felt like a treasure trove; I'll be going back to it if Johnson ends up in my dissertation. In the meantime, I've finished hacking out my little appreciation of him for Octopus. I'm very nervous about it; it's basically pure rhapsodic opinion, with none of the protective armor of either scholarship (i.e., footnotes) or the assumed casualness of blogging to protect it. Oh I am hoping for the best.

What else? I've been dipping into Deleuze and Guattari a fair bit lately, but either volume of Capitalism and Schizophrenia is a bit cumbersome—one big book is enough. Maybe. . . a novel? Hey, how about a novel? Who reads novels nowadays? Maybe I'll pick one up in the Pittsburgh airport, where I have a ghastly three-hour layover.

All right, this is an entirely inconsequential posting. If I get the chance to blog from the conference, I will; otherwise you'll have to content yourselves with a digest upon my return. Looking forward to some face time with Dan, Shanna, and any other members of our electronic posse who migth happen to show up.


PS: Did you see this in today's Times? Very cool.