You Could Hear a Pnin Drop. . .

it's been so quiet around here. I know. Work has been particularly stressful, I was at a [really fantastic] wedding last weekend, The Critical Flame came out, it was my birthday this week, my grandmother's basement flooded, etc. I'm beat. On top of that, I honestly just haven't felt compelled to write here. What else is there? If I were gagging to write, I would do so regardless of life.

I just finished Empire of the Word: a Language History of the World, which was full of data on languages about which I previously knew nothing — but with such piecemeal evidence at hand for the living existence of so many ancient languages, the analysis / narrative history of those languages remains mostly speculative. That was a bit disappointing. The section on nahuatl (the language of the Aztec) was enlightening tho. Since then, I've moved on to a selected edition of Celan's poetry and prose. At the bookstore today I picked up used copies of Pnin, the Viking critical edition of White Noise, and a selection of Anna Akhmatova's poetry that has an introduction by Brodsky.