I definitely understand that. This will be my first summer with a “project”, much less one I’m being paid to write. Definitely different than academic stress.

Thanks for the recommendations, definitely. Barthes outside of i/m/t is a big gap in my reading, and I’ll definitely look into the Marder.. the more recs I get from you the more I’m glad my uni has a great library..

The funny thing is, the Middlesex people are good people and obviously doing this for the right reason, but more widely there’s a big push on in the UK for all of us to do this as much as we can, as citation-count is going to become one of the big indexes of department rankings and thus funding in this meritocratically socialist (ahem) university system they’ve got over here.

summer is ok… except that I’m speed writing / editing a manuscript, which is a lil bit stressful and makes me miss the very but differently stressful weeks of teaching a little bit.

More narrative and politics texts, hmmmm… You know, the ones that have been most important to me have been the really obvious ones. Lukacs, Benjamin’s “The Storyteller” as well as by extrapolation and genre translation the Baudelaire stuff, Jameson’s The Political Unconscious, tons and tons of Barthes (think I’m gonna try to write a big piece on Barthes and China soon, btw). More specifically, one book that I really like and that more people should look at is Elissa Marder’s Dead Time about Flaubert and Baudelaire and, well, time. Oh and also the very end of the modernism chapter of Erich Auerbach’s Mimesis – the start of my second project is nowhere but there.