The delightful Ruth Franklin just gave us in the Women Writing Women's Lives séminar a sketch of the kind of thing we should and could put on twitter and Facebook, neither of which I have been doing ANYTHING with, but was convinced it was a good idea, for the books we are about to publish and for getting in touch with those who might be able to help us with the ones we are now working on

I was convinced! So I think I sent out a tweet about my forthcoming Blaise Pascal: miracles and reason, and about my présent work on artist colonies, and also went on Facebook, because so many of my friends do seem to be using them both

I LOVED my class on Film Arts giving me a Golden Bowl the last day, and loved showing Derek Jarman's grand and moving Caravaggio on the next to last day, and now will be speaking about the Golden Bowl at a club next year or, I hope, the next

now off to sim, boring but probably a good idea

In Japan now, gave talk on violence out and in: the explosive erotics of Dada and  Surrealism, mostly showing images from both, including Japanese, and wonderful audience and group
about eroticism veiled and the dance of the surrealist encounter and all that, today am being taken to Kyoto, which I loved before, and tomorrow to Hamammatsu to talk in a professor's class, whose thesis I directed
then back to ny to teach my film class the next day
spoke in New London, Ct., on Robert Motherwell, on panel with the Dedalus Foundation representative and a master printmaker, with both of whom we had panels before
then at Penn, with friends I had known, like Eric Sellin, and the brilliant and beautiful and alltogether delightful Wendy Steiner
and this week I teach, well, share about Jean Cocteau and next week also, then Derek Jarman, and Caravaggio via Glenn Gould and Bernhard's The Loser
so they are both dessert
off to Kyoto now

singularities

And I am SO enjoying my seminar in Modernist Singularities! We lingered over Beckett and Borges, and last time, D.H. Lawrence (why do we have to say D.H., not a lot of other Lawrences I would be likely to teach, it's not like T.J. Clark, or T.S. Eliot, because there are after all Kenneth and George)
anyway, we have coming up Thomas Bernhard (speaking of difficult people, and I LOVE the Loser, about Glenn Gould, well, I love anything about Glenn Gould), and Wittgenstein (as in his Zettel)  -- will I show, as I sometimes do, Derek Jarman's Wittgenstein? -- AND Marjorie Perloff together, thinking of this and that, and her Vienna Paradox, and then everyone talks, instead of an exam, about what they all wrote their long paper on and if I can remember it, I bring some wine and crackers
and we are growing, Boyce and myself, basil and tomatoes, on our indoor ledge and it looks like a Blooming Forest of green!

trying sebald again

and now retrying to read Vertigo by Sebald because I assigned it to my seminar and can't seem to be involved in it -- Gerhard gave me a copy long ago, and i assigned it to my Anxieties  in Modernist Representations seminar, thinking it must be anxiety-provoking, like the film, but I don't like looking at Kim Novak so didn't resee the film and am now stuck -- this is after reading Dali (amazing rewriting of his original and funnily-misspelled French texts, all neatened up by Gala) and after a mixture of Artaud and  Unica Zurn, and it is fascinating reading these and those on our way to Derek Jarman -- so baroque is all this, so wonderfully thought-provokingly baroque

Bernard came to have tea today, writing about Motherwell, do I have anything else to say about him, ah yes probably but I long to write on Jon Schueler, and will I ever get around to making my wouldbe book about my grandmother the painter into a long essay about my relation to her,as my agent suggests? how, I wonder, would that make it more interesting? But I will of course try...

and the mile-high thesis on Max Ernst I have to read and report on and question the knowledgeable writer of the thesis about in a thesis defensein paris in January.. I see it looming up on the piano...

new semester

after a year sabbatical -- spent mostlly on my Modern Art Cookbook, now appearing on the first of  next month, and I hope very beautiful, as it seems in the proofs - i am restarting my seminars right now. This semester, Anxieties of Modernist Representation, and what a great group of students, from French, Comparative Literature English, and Philosophy... We are plunging in on the Uncanny and going up to Derek Jarman, Chroma and his films such as Blue, meandering through some De Chirico (Hebdomeros) and the written Dali and Escher,  some Sebald and Thomas Bernhard, and so on. Whoof.