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. . .