very odd: not having written anything on my blog for (what? months?) because life and work and friends and all that which is wonderful go on and you say" oh, i must absolutely remember to write down this... and that..." and then you don't or I don't , anyway, so since tomorrow at the 92nd street Y  I have to give my first of what feels like MANY talks about my new book: the Modern Art Cookbook, which I loved doing and love contemplating, and is very beautiful, I am eager to put off thinking what I might say and instead speak of less pressing matters -- have to speak at the 192 bookstore on nov 5, and the National Arts Club on Nov 21, and the Modern Language Association in Chicago in January and the Mid-Manhattan Library here on the 13 of January and then go over to Paris to be on a thesis defense about Max Ernst, which looks miles high and on which, of course, I will have to report in French, written and spoken

whatever these "lesser matters" might be

like teaching, well, no, really, just meeting with my phd students and their differing points of view about anxieties, which we are dealing with in "modernist representations" -- that is, what do you represent visually or verbally after the rite of spring and Kafka and all of those and the Munch Scream, that is, what do you next do? so we are reading and seeing de Chirico and Unica Zurn and Artaud and Thomas Bernhard and Sebald and lots of surrealist types

and I suppose I should try to think sleepy thought as opposed to my beloved Modern Art Cookbook, which is not about cooking so much as looking, and a few poems and recipes and how very very beautiful it is

I also just brought out a Pierre Reverdy with 14 different translators, just beautiful and very very small and blue-green, but not giving a lot of talks about that, more is perhaps the pity

perhaps some day