Am reading a lot: Zizek's new one, Living in the End Times, Vollmann's Kissing the Mask, Foucault's lecture Manet and the Object of Painting, Schuyler's Uncollected Poems, Bernstein's Selected, and a bunch of Emerson stuff, etc.

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Submitted a performance proposal for the Avant Writing Symposium at Ohio State in August. Am trying not to invest too much hope in any sort of idea of acceptance.

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Last night I watched EXAMINED LIFE, a film by Astra Taylor. The film spends time with Cornel West, Avital Ronnell, Peter Singer, Kwame Anthony Appiah, Martha Nussbaum, Michael Hardt, Slavoj Zizek, Judith Butler and Sunaura Taylor. It is a gem.

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All sorts of tightly braided desires beginning to fray. I can never think about erosion without thinking that it is mostly eros (to employ for the umpteenth time one of my favorite Bromige devices).

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Listening to Anais Mitchell's Hadestown. It's making me want to go back and watch some of those old Cocteau movies.

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Recently spent a few days in Connecticut visiting family. My parents, three siblings, some but not all spouses, and various nieces and nephews gathered to celebrate my brother John's 50th birthday. A family tradition, in recent years, has been to assemble scrapbooks celebrating significant events like 50th birthdays. I assembled and edited one for John. It included anecdotes, photos, news clippings, collages, letters and stories from numerous parties. During his party at a restaurant many of these items were read aloud and passed about, often by the people that created them. It was a memorable and emotionally rich occasion. Especially since I don't very often see my extended family.

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Families are petri dishes.

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The idea of the examined life as the precondition of serious thought, for philosophy, goes back to Plato. To love wisdom, one must take oneself apart.

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Is safety
an accident?