Drawing on the Walls at Shakespeare & Company
Badaude is the bomb.  But you knew that; she's the one who designed the wonderful new banner for my blog this summer.  And apparently that task was quite inspiring to her, for when she met Sylvia Whitman in September at the Five Dials party (recounted here and here and

The eBook and the French reader
I know. You don't have to say it. I'm sorry. But I'm here now, aren't I? So I've been teaching. And working on my dissertation. And trying to keep myself sane in an apartment gone haywire. And last week I flew to Montreal to participate in a panel on Thirties Modernism and a seminar on Woolf and modernism. (I write to you now from my parents' kitchen on Long Island; back to Paris on Saturday.) So things have been busy. But I know, it's no excuse. One thing I did do a couple of weeks ago was attend a panel at the Centre national du Livre on digitalization. I was there because the panel was part of the study trip a

Charlotte Mandell reads from Zone
(I am two weeks behind on this one, but had to feature this here, as Charlotte is a friend and someone whose work I admire very much.) Charlotte Mandell was recently awarded an NEA Translation Fellowship for her work translating Mathias Enard's award-winning 2008 novel Zone from French to English. The novel has the neat trick of being composed of one long sentence stretched over 517 pages, but this doesn't only function as a gimmick, or as some wacky constraint: it actually serves the narrative, cradled as it is during one long t

undergrad, redux
When I was an undergrad I remember having difficulty scheduling time to shower, much less to do all of the reading and writing for all of my classes.  Then things calmed down and I forgot what that was like. Then when I started graduate school I remembered again. Then grad school calmed down and I forgot again.And now, because I took on extra teaching hours for a few weeks, I am teaching so many hours a week that I barely have time to prepare my lessons, much less eat/sleep/shower. I am not kidding. It's a good thing my man is all the way in Hong Kong! Like a PC perilously close to crashing, I am running in safety mode.  Last week I taught the Epic of Gilgamesh,

unfinished
Since I've been back in Paris I've all of a sudden become a shockingly lazy reader. I've spent more time planning my lessons and watching "Big Love" than doing anything else.  So Wolf Hall sits, halfway finished, next to my bed, joined by Sigrid Nunez's The Last of Her Kind (which I'm reading for a Thursday evening Barnard Alumnae book group), David Foenkinos's La Délicatesse, and Steve Toltz's A Fraction