Monday, February 23, 2004

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.

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