Perhaps because I have been in a Class A Funk about grad school/Amherst/grad school in Amherst, the pile of Books to Read around my bed looks like a hilarious-grim mixture of books concerned with war or the aftermath of war.
To wit:
Slaughterhouse-Five, Kurt Vonnegut (apparently I've been committed to the 9th layer of Hell for English majors/conscious people under the age of 30 for not having read this already...oh, well.)
Catch-22, Joseph Heller (9th layer of Hell redux)
Falling Man, Don DeLillo
Suite Française, Irène Némirovsky
Tree of Smoke, Denis Johnson
and, on order, the new book about Artists Against Hitler, Red Orchestra, Anne Nelson.
I would add Thomas Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow, but I'm trying not to kill myself here. What with all the talk of Ulysses being thrown around, and trying to finish Infinite Jest after a three-year off-again on-again fling, Pynchon might just do me in.
{Edit 23 July: Just looked down and re-noticed my abandoned copy of Murakami's Wind-Up Bird Chronicles, which may be the culprit of this whole disturbing phenomenon.}
Do you want to engage in guerilla poetry? We could plaster every wall we find bland with a poem we wrote or ripped off Duchamp style from a toilet. It'd be a good way to undermine the Mean Reds of academia.
ReplyDeleteSeeing as I am now at the Bookmill, whose toilet is rife with stealing possibility, I might be able to start this war effective immediately.
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