Things to do (promises to keep, and miles to go before I sleep)

Constant:

- give thought to finding/fitting in more freelance work to meet our goal of Not Being Hungry this summer

Before Monday:

- email re: Greek
- blog books
- read Throne of the Crescent Moon and begin review

Tuesday:

[- visit Dept. of Foreign Affairs to acquire pointless nonsense for US tax paperwork
- jujutsu] Fail Tuesday

Before Saturday:

- finish major funding app biblo and picky bits [which you've been putting off]
- minor travel funding app [so can pay for Greek flights when bill comes due]
- progress on presentation for March 10
- Greek class and homework (ancient)
- Greek class and homework (modern)(written)(audio)
[- climbing] Fail climbing
- attempt to corner supervisor for feedback
- pitch review of Above
- continue the War Against Entropy

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Help. My sanity, it crumbles...

Books 2012: there is always the danger of remembering your name

Books 2012: 16-18

nonfiction

16. Adrienne Rich, Adrienne Rich's Poetry and Prose: A Norton Critical Edition. WW Norton, London & New York, 1993. Selected and edited by Barbara Charlesworth Gelpi and Albert Gelpi.

A selection of Rich's poetry and prose intended for use in a classroom setting. The poetry is interesting; the prose a fair sampling. But. I think Rich's work - her development, her scope - is diminished by being anthologised in such a limited fashion, and I'm deeply suspicious of the limitations imposed by "critical anthologies" themselves.

(Speaking as someone who has never sat through college English.)

There's also a selection of criticism of Rich, which makes me feel stabbity towards the 1960s and 1970s.


17. Norman Malcolm, Ludwig Wittgenstein: A Memoir: with a biographical sketch by G.H. von Wright. Second edition. Oxford University Press, Oxford, 1984.

A very short sketch of one professor of philosophy's experience of one of the most radical philosophical minds of the age. 134 pages long, including c. 50 pages of additional notes and the letters of Wittgenstein to Malcolm.


18. Tillie Olsen, Silences. Virago Press, London, 1980.

Reading Olsen's book alongside Malcolm's makes for an interesting juxtaposition. Olsen takes as her subject the silences of literature - writers whose circumstances constrained their work, who wrote and fell silent. Her examination of the writers and their reasons for their silences is illuminating: their social circumstances, their economic circumstances, in some cases their psychological circumstances. The constraints that all of these, most of all in the case of women off all classes and working class men, the first two, placed upon their art and their craft.

Wittgenstein was never silenced by social or economic considerations: the opposite. So it's an interesting exercise in comparison.

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I've been reading a great deal of not-my-research nonfiction lately. It has become more relaxing than many fictions. I wonder why this is?