". . to love, it turned out, also meant to to ridicule, to exploit, to hurt, to violate. . ." from a wonderful review of Lee Server's "Ava Gardner" by Peter Bogdanovich. Read here.

Glorious summer days and the joy that the sun brings and the way it makes me feel that nothing is really so far out of reach, but maybe I live in a fool's paradise. Cherry blossoms and all. . .

Next semester should be exciting: a literature seminar with professor Edward Mendelson, intro to Hebrew Lit with (the super-intelligent) Dan Miron, and advanced writing workshops in fiction and poetry with, respectively, Sam Lipsyte and Paul Violi.

I don't know a whole lot about poetry but I do really like Czeslaw Milosz, the Polish poet who died just about a year ago.

Here's a poem of his that I like a lot:

Not Mine

All my life to pretend this world of theirs is mine
And to know such pretending is disgraceful.
But what can I do? Suppose I suddenly screamed
And started to prophesy. No one would hear me.
Their screens and microphones are not for that.
Others like me wander the streets
And talk to themselves. Sleep on benches in parks,
Or on pavements in alleys. For there aren't enough prisons
To lock up all the poor. I smile and keep quiet.
They won't get me now.
To feast with the chosen—that I do well.

on Flaubert, hate-Matzah packets, and the semester closing in

Read James Wood's excellent review of Flaubert: A Biography by Frederick Brown, here. Flaubert, says Wood, was a master of style over substance--or style as substance--who created the modern realist novel by combining the important and unimportant in a smooth, seamless narrative that imitates life, "where things have been both noticed and not noticed, as if out of the corner of the eye, because this is no more than how life goes on."


Making slow but steady progress with Dostoevsky's BK. Realized when I came upon the references to Job that I have in fact never read the Book of Job. And so that is what I intend to do next.

A hate/bias (I don't know quite how these things are classified) incident on campus recently--several paper plates with matzahs (though they look more like your standard cracker) found on campus with swastikas and signed BM, which (according to comments on bwog) stands for British Movement, a British Neo-Nazi group.

Hoping to take a seminar course on Realism next semester with Nicholas Dames (my favorite professor yet).

Paper deadlines fast approaching as the weather makes me want to kill time outside. . .

update

too much to do, too little time. . .

writing a paper on Ahad Ha'am (Asher Ginzburg)'s Slavery in Freedom, an essay that critiques French Jewry at the turn of the 20th century, and questions the value of emancipation when it comes at the cost of what Ahad Ha'am calls "spiritual slavery," or "moral and intellectual slavery." There's a lot to work with and a lot of great food for thought. . . . His writing is very clever and really compelling, which makes it difficult to read him critically--and that, essentially, is the assignment: a critical reading of the essay.

Dostoevskys' Brothers Karmazov is coming along nicely, though it's too soon to tell how I'll like it. .

Writing a 15-20 page feature article, kinda scary. And short stories. Signed up for a fiction workshop and a class on imaginative writing for next semester.

Can't really work up the energy for a more interesting, thoughtful post. . . will try later.