On Wednesday I have to get on the plane to Brisbane and before then?....finish up the 'interesting' article for CI and, if possible, the one on Milton's illustrations for the visual culture conference website...sending both off....the Milton one is basically not capable of being made presentable, but I dont want to do the work it would require for it really to work....so fuck it...and then I need to prepare for the theory orals on Tuesday: this seems as hard on me as on the students since I haven't read most of this stuff for what must it be? 15 yrs?...and in most cases my sympathy for it has long since gone gone gone...Paul de Man?...there's a grotesque discrepancy between the ambition of his arguments and his capacity to make his case stick...there are occasional glimmers I guess but for the most part the essays I am reading are embarrassing: the famous essay on the 'rhetoric of temporality' finally rests on a piece of (someone else's) influence scholarship which declares that Julie's garden in La Nouvelle Heloise is a version of an allegorised medieval garden ...what??...and Deleuze and Guattari on Kafka arent much better: this isnt Kafka, its an exemplification of where D&G had got to theoretically circa 1980 or whenever they wrote it, though I have more sympathy for them politically than for de Man...whose real enemy over and over again is Rousseau as it has been for counter-revolutionary thinkers since about 1792....I really dont know why we ask students to read this stuff; at best it's symptomatic of its historical moment;

that's work: at home, pay the xmas bonuses to the doormen, not as easy as it sounds since there are nine or so of them, and I have to hand each his envelope (doorwomen dont seem to exist, not in this building anyway); get dad's autobiographical ms copied to take back to my mother and the girls; figure out if and what to pay Lisa's dentist, since we're in dispute with him; print out the ms of cultural studies book so I can work at it over Xmas; begin to figure out a paper to give in Dunedin (I have forgotten about that one, and its urgentest of all I guess); get John organised so he can stay here and cat sit...etc, etc...

reading: late at night (ie. about 10 pm) instead of watching tv, which I can no longer do (really: have never been able to do, it's too boring): Joe La Sueur on Frank O'Hara...a form of literary criticism I really like: these poems spark off these memories in me (i.e. Joe La Sueur) of the times they were written, this against the backdrop of my (ie Joe's) going to live with O'Hara and then being kicked out....it seems a very open and unegotistical book, with only a few moments of (rather self-conscious) bitchiness....you get to think the reason Frank liked Joe so much was not because he was so fucking gorgeous which he so obviously was (and which of course he knows and lets us know) but because he was so nice... not stupid either...if that's not the case, Joe's an exceedingly clever self-publicist....Frank's particular presence in the world doesnt really come out in the book though: it's clear by the end that in his social circle he's a kind of star, but is that because of his work (and his fame) or because of his personal charm?...about this, the photos are ambiguous: they look like photos of a charismatic person, but not necessarily so...there's an element of feyness or something there which hints at something else...and then the poems themselves dont seem written by a real social presence: they're too inward and self-involved for that...for all their bright exteriority...
reading other than that: issues of the Believer which I really like...an new idea for a periodical (and new ideas in that world are rare), which mightnt wear well but while it's fresh it's great...it's a new kind of middlebrown literary magazine, or rather here the middlebrow has become another specialised market, taste-culture niche....I will have to settle into some more solid reading soon, when I get a moment...but when?...not over xmas I think...but I am looking forward to the sun, and to Melbourne coffee shops, and my old haunts...readings, joe's pizza shop, smith st, even the university campus, site of dread and failure though it basically is....and to Otago and its great pinots..and what I imagine to be beautiful open spaces