Reading went well last night. David Gruber's poetry is tops. He has the knack for getting the intellectual and the everyday into his verse without intellectualizing the everyday. I read "Cul-de-sac" (posted below), a critical prose piece and a poem. It is nice to read--like getting it off your chest.

Books in my bag:

• Fanny Howe. Tis of Thee
• Emerson. "Self-Reliance" & "Experience" (reading with my philosophy students, but I must admit that I love both essays dearly)
• William and Alice James. Everything: William is so unbelievably influential; Alice is unfortunately ignored.
• Augustine. City of God & St Paul and St Peter. The implied conversation Augustine creates is a powerful display of rhetoric. Why we don't consider City of God a chronicle is beyond me. The majority is simply a revisionist history for the supremacy of Christian religion over Judaism and Islam. Augustine is supremely anti-Semitic. His City is a kind of crusade, but is taught like a philosophy, even in secular schools. If I were teaching a class in ideological formations of colonial thought, this might be the text to begin with.
• I am still enjoying Nick Piombino's Theoretical Objects --automatic manifestos, right on.