It's been a busy time, speaking as a cultural consumer. First we watched (as a netflix dvd) the Aussie movie Praise. It's set in Brisbane, about an aimless slacker guy who gets involved with an extraordinarily energetic and demanding (most of all sexually) good time girl, Cynthia, who ends up by completely exhausting him before he manages to extricate himself. Sacha Horler who plays Cynthia gives an amazing performance of a kind of Aussie femininity which is both deeply familiar and unfamiliar: no babe, no bourgeois subject; unaffected and unselfconscious, without an ounce of introspection; she's utterly direct, into pleasure and at home with her body and appetites and yet for all that not quite at ease in the world. She's crippled most of all because she can't actually a form a relationship with the man whom she's dependent on: she doesn't have enough deliberation and reflection for that. At one level the movie's another representation of the Aussie grotesque (the grotesque is a Australian film genre all of its own whose brightest light is probably Jane Campion's Sweetie) but at another level it really does have something to say about a particular generation and class (the lower middle class who haven't gone into tertiary education) and their particular form of what would once have been called their social 'lostness' in the gap between school and 'settling down'.
And then we watched Lars von Trier's Dogville, about which more later.

Some books that ought to be published:
a history of british reception of american jazz 1920-1970
a history of 'the shakespeare really was x' craze
a history of sports clothing
a biography of elizabeth smart
a work in praise of 'assimilation' focussing on german jewish assimilation

Trying to use blogthis: some new labour saving device...apparently. Not sure if it is working. After a hard day reading Keats's Letters I'm feeling about as practical as a princess.

Six months later. Summer in Baltimore, steamy, dull, undemanding, trying to write two papers, one on charlatanism and 18th C literature, another on cultural studies as a discipline. The first is not going well: I dont feel I kinow enough to do it properly (though I am getting into Oliver Goldsmith and Christopher Smart) and the second I haven't started. But at least I sent off a manuscript for my cs textbook, which in th end I was less unhappy with than looked likely earlier on. It will be interesting to see how it will do: it is out of genre. But this note is just a taste, to get me back into the whole blogging thing. If I knew why I blog maybe I'd write more. I have been on my own which strangely makes me less likely to write, now Lisa's back I feel more communicative, have a a more concrete sense of the strange, empty blogging public: attractive because it doesnt exist except as possibility.