Books Read:
note: from now on I will list books I'm in the process of reading or rereading. For example, re-reading Blake and Qunney's study on Blake. I started Kitcher's book earlier this year and am still working through it.
William Blake; "Milton"
Laura Quinney, William Blake on Self and Soul
Stephen Saperstein Frug, Happenstance
David B., The Littlest Pirate King
George O'Connor, The Olympians (vol. 1-6)
Philip Kitcher, Joyce's Kaleidoscope
Project Update:
Inked section 1 (of 4). Finishing fine pencils on section 2.
Future Reading and Writing Plans:
I've committed myself to writing two book reviews. I still plan on writing an essay on Economics and Utopia. I've also picked up Plato and plan to do a careful reading of all the dialogues. I'm currently re-reading The Republic, but will continue from there to a more standard order of reading the dialogues. I have the Hackett edition of the complete works and planned on reading that in order. I may adjust the order though if I find reason to do so.
Reading Plato and Finnegans Wake simultaneously will undoubtedly set my reading plans back. I don't expect to finish either by the end of the year. I had the convenient idea yesterday that I might be able to accomplish a few goals at once (as a pacifist I won't say "kill two birds with one stone.) I had been laboring over a book to center my essay on economics and utopia. I had been using as a framework Brandeis professor William Flesch's course I followed last year, "Imagining Money." The course books were interesting, but I didn't feel overly compelled to choose any of them to write a paper on. Not that they were inappropriate to the course, but mostly because I couldn't find a clear link to ideas I was already working on. My recent flash of insight was to consider economics as "household management" and what better book to consider this topic with than the family drama, Finnegans Wake. FW, I think, provides an interesting bridge between economics and utopia. It contains both the particular family drama and the universal drama of humanity. Anyways, I think it will be a fun and challenging essay to write. One angle of approach could be the link between the Irish famine and the use of feasts in Joyce's work as suggest by Charles Mudede:
https://www.thestranger.com/slog/2017/12/22/25652094/why-the-dead-by-james-joyce-is-the-greatest-christmas-story
