• Some Barthes, Foucault and Butler. Still working on finishing up the semester.
• A surprisingly interesting interview with a baseball player, way more intriguing than I would have predicted (I tend to glaze over when the topic of sports comes up).
• I am no longer struggling financially like I have in the past, but I am still in debt (from school), and damn, if I received one of these notices in the mail, I think that relief might be the most relieving kind of relief that could be given. More info here.
  

• More of Ten Little Indians

• Wolfgang Iser and Stanley Fish re-reads on the train, deciding on who to choose to focus on for the final.

• Started Edward Said's Out of Place over breakfast.

• Read Unorthodox: The Scandalous Rejection of My Hasidic Roots by Deborah Feldman and felt pretty conflicted about many aspects of it. After having just re-read Matilda, it felt reminiscent.

The last homework of the semester:

• Part of Ien Ang's "Dallas and the Ideology of Mass Culture"
• Laura Mulvey's "Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema"
• Stuart Hall, "Encoding/Decoding"
• This interview with Janice Radway: "I remember thinking, "This is a job, you can actually aspire to this as a job. You might think of yourself as a teacher, as a professor even." It sounds silly and naïve, but that really was the moment when I thought about a different future."
  

• Started Sherman Alexie's Ten Little Indians:
  "In the Washington State University library, her version of Sherwood Forest, Corliss walked the poetry stacks. She endured a contentious and passionate relationship with this library. This huge number of books confirmed how much magic she'd been denied for most of her life, and now she hungrily wanted to read every book on every shelf. An impossible task, to be sure, Herculean in its exaggeration, but Corliss wanted to read herself to death. She wanted to be buried in a coffin filled with used paperbacks." (5)
  
  

• Lots of Baudrillard's work, but mostly Simulacra and Simulation:
  “Our entire linear and accumulative culture collapses if we cannot stockpile the past in plain view." (10)

• Too many deadlines, I listened to program #479 from This American Life, which happened to be about Minnesota, which happens to be where I was born.

• Started Kaja Silverman's The Subject of Semiotics on the train, but stuck in between stations on the 5 I started to feel a bit overwhelmed.

• Baudrillard and Didion.
  From The Year of Magical Thinking:
  “Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until we reach it..."

• Read a bit more of Didion over breakfast (leftover pie) because the rest of today will be a non-stop Baudrillard fest.

• Some of the New Yorker on my commute. Victor Zapana's piece about his mother made me take the magazine with me on the train.
• Trying to get away from the telly. Started Joan Didion's The Year of Magical Thinking. Brilliant.
  

• A comic book summary of Baudrillard's ideas, part of this piece, and all of this one.

• Getting addicted to Sherman Alexie, plowed through half of War Dances while commuting
• I've been buying books lately. One because it was my very favorite as a child, another because I know of the author and happened to pick it up serendipitously in the local bookstore
• For class, reading excerpts from Said and Spivak and being inspired
  • Said: "The idea of the beginning, indeed the act of beginning, necessarily involves an act of delimitation by which something is cut out of a great mass of material, separated from the mass, and made to stand for, as well as be, a starting point, a beginning..."
• Also, I've read as many books this year already as I had in all of the last few past years, and there's still a month left of 2012!