Christopher Small, Musicking: The Meanings of Performing and Listening
Gerard Koeppel, City on a Grid: How New York Became New York
Karen E. Fields and Barbara J. Fields, Racecraft: The Soul of Inequality in American Life.
Chantal Akerman, My Mother Laughs, trans. Corinna Copp
Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility
Norman Fischer, Success
John Ashbery, Your Name Here
Ann Powers, Good Booty
Oscar Wilde, The Critic as Artist
June 2020 reading
Jan Mieszkowski, Crises of the Sentence
Sean Bonney, Our Death
Peter Wollen, Paris Manhattan: Writings About Art
Alex Vitale, The End of Policing
Terrence Hayes, American Sonnets To My Future Assassin
Julien Phillips, Stars of the Ziegfeld Follies
C.L.R. James, The Black Jacobins: Toussaint L’Overture and the Haitian Revolution
Charles North, Everything and Other Poems
Jean Day, A Young Recruit
May 2020 reading
Andrew Solomon, The Noonday Demon
The Anchor Book of New American Short Stories, ed. Ben Marcus
Nick Tosches, Unsung Heroes of Rock ’n’ Roll
Vivencias; Dialogues Between the Works of Brazilian Artists from 1960s-2002 (catalog/essays)
Roberto Manganelli, All The Errors, trans. Henry Martin
Alain Robbe-Grillet, For a New Novel, trans. Richard Howard
Clark Coolidge, Selected Poems 1962-1985
Katherine Anne Porter, Pale Horse, Pale Rider
T. D. Rice, Jim Crow, American: Selected Songs and Plays, ed. W. T. Lhamon, Jr.
April 2020 reading
Anna Maskovachis, Eleanor, or the Rejection of the Progress of Love
Barbara Herrnstein Smith, Poetic Closure; A Study of How Poems End
Lisa Robertson, The Baudelaire Fractal
Wendy Trevino, Cruel Fiction
Jonathan Lethem, The Fortress of Solitude
Ben Ratliff, John Coltrane: The Story of a Sound
Frances Ponge, The Nature of Things, trans. Lee Fahlenstock.
Wesley Brown, Darktown Strutters
Lisa Russ Spaar, Orexia
Willie the Lion Smith (with George Hoefer), Music on My Mind: The Memoirs of an American Pianist
Louky Bersianik, Nicole Brossard, France Théoret, Gail Scott, Louis Cotnoir, and Louise Dupré, Theory, A Sunday
4.30.20
Up 7. Watched Colbert/Meyers. This is one of the lamest things I do routinely, and I wish I could cut it out — but, according to the book on depression, watching “talking heads” has even been used a prescribed therapy.
Read 10 pages or so, on depressed Inuits.
Usual morning after that. Didn’t get further w/ reading. Also cooked some sausage for lunch and dealt w/ a couple online items w/ Bree.
Walk.
Worked 10:30-1. Hung up on first graf of new revision! Having trouble letting it go and tried to return to it a couple times in the afternoon. Other than that, had lunch and read quota of Solomon by about 4:30.
Visited w/ Bree 5-6, filed CDs and killed some more email.
Read Coolidge around 9:30 - to p. 100, b/c about 30 pages are taken up by “Suite V,” w/ 2 words to a page.
Some computer cleanup tasks, before a restart. Sort of a new broom principle for May.
In the same vein — I’ll continue to post my monthly reading, and think about other ways to use this space, but I’m going to stop these daily entries for now. They’re more for my sake than anyone else’s, but my days, including my writing schedule, are so routinized this far into lockdown that it seems redundant. This is pretty much what I’ve arrived at:
6:30. up
7-8 read
8-9 breakfast
9-10 song notes/exercise
10-11 walk
11-1 prose
1-2 read
2-3 lunch
3-4 songwriting
4-5 email
5-6 time w/ bree
6-7 walk
7-8 dinner
8-10 poetry/music
10-11 online/movie
11:30 lights out/podcast
This looks unworkably rigid, but it’s an ideal I’m shooting for most days, and not skipping the writing block is crucial to my well-being. I have intentionally taken a day off twice in the last 5 weeks. I’m following this schedule fairly strictly until about 4, but even that represents what I’m trying to complete w/in that hour - often there’s time for other tasks between 8-11 range, unless I get up late and am behind on a reading quota. The “walks” are not an hour long either. And of course, Bree and I spend more than an hour together, even in the unglamorous form of meals or home projects — though she goes to bed earlier than I do, so after 9 is a good time to concentrate on things that don’t interest her.