Got up; went to work; went to a meeting to confirm that I'll be teaching next spring; came home; read the papers; did laundry. Such is the quotidian routine of a Monday (also a Tuesday, a Thursday, and a Friday; I'm off on Wednesdays).
I started rereading "The Aspern Papers" by Henry James yesterday and I really am not loving it the way I have in the past. The narrator is so grasping and monomaniacal that I WANT him to fail in his quest. Perhaps I have more of a taste for the late novels now (which suggests that if I reread The Wings of the Dove I'll be really happy!).
No one seems to have written anything particularly new on "The Aspern Papers" in the last year or so; perhaps it's old ground abandoned by the seekers after post-colonialism and other post-whatevers. "Was James a (post)modernist?" What about space and place indeed? I am not moving very fast on my summer reading, and July Fourth is historically the day on which I despair that the summer is over and I've achieved nothing.
Sigh. If the glass onlyWERE half-full. But it just isn't.
Posted by otto0114 at June 28, 2004 08:21 PM