Hello! With all apologies for my continued absence (I’ve been hard at work on my projects….), I am back, I hope, for real, though promises are dangerous.
First, a brief update: last year, after my poetry class, I undertook an ambitious summer plan that worked tolerably well, and finally worked a lot on Evernost, which underwent a few more metamorphoses, which I won’t discuss just yet. But I hope to have something that I really, actually, for real like by the end of the year: something (as I had hoped) that combines narrative, poetry, memoir, and artwork.
For now, though, I’m taking a break (perhaps till the end of the month, unless the itch gets too strong) and reading. I haven’t read as much as I used to for a long time, and I want to spend most of my free time this January with a book in my hands, or (perhaps) blogging about said book. I’ve even drawn up an aspirational reading list from which to pick and choose in 2020:
- On Beauty and Being Just, by Elaine Scarry
- The Four Zoas, by William Blake (I want to get through it this time!)
- The Final Harvest, a collection of Emily Dickinson’s poetry
- On Moral Fiction, by John Gardner
- “Adagia” and one book from Wallace Stevens’ collected works
- Teaching Community by bell hooks
- Elizabeth Bishop’s complete poems
- some selection of Borges short stories
- Symbol and Truth in Blake’s Myth by Leo Damrosch
- some selection of Coleridge’s work
- Satya Mohanty’s Literary Theory and the Claims of History
- Cloud and Ashes by Greer Gilman
- Spenser’s The Faerie Queene
- the Gospels
- The World Treasury of Modern Religious Thought, edited by Jaroslav Pelikan
- Charles Williams’ collected plays
- Jack Vance’s Dying Earth books
- Godel, Escher, and Bach
- Langland’s Piers Plowman
- Dante’s Paradiso
- Leonora Carrington short stories
- The Essential Writings of Christian Mysticism, edited by Bernard McGinn
- Bonhoeffer’s The Cost of Discipleship
- Joy, a biography of C.S. Lewis’s wife
- Teresa of Avila’s Interior Castle
- The Souls of Black Folk by DuBois
- a bunch of Tennyson
- Powys’ Maiden Castle
- Isaac Asimov’s Foundation series or at least its beginning
- Piranesi, forthcoming from Susanna Clarke
- more of one or both theory anthologies
- Gilchrist’s biography of William Blake
- Ackroyd’s biography of Blake
- The Man Who Was Thursday by Chesterton
- Ark by Ronald Johnson
- Something from Emerson’s collected works
- Fleurs du Mal by Baudelaire
- more Dostoevsky
- Foucault
- Derrida
- Mark Helprin’s A Winter’s Tale
…and there are others, but I’ll stop there for now. I hope to blog about all of this more faithfully, though perhaps when I finish books rather than on a set schedule.
In the meantime, I’ve already finished On Beauty and Being Just, and found it (appropriately) beautiful as well as interesting, though I disagree with much of it. I will return shortly to explain why.
Of Elsewhere 