Another Election Season Concludes

With the election season wrapping up, I finally will once again have time enough to devote to more interesting pursuits.

1. 50 Books A Year.
I wanted to read 50 books this year, or one book a week with two weeks to spare. Week 43 is beginning to wrap up, and I've only read about 35 books so far. Either I need to pick up the pace, or start reading shorter books.

2. MacAllen Quarterly
I've been working on a few short stories and putting together the fourth volume of MacAllen Quarterly; hopefully this will be released in November.

3. Blogging
I'm also hoping to make an effort to blog more regularly. I've also been looking to improve the quality of my posts. Quality and quantity are so often mutually exclusive, we'll have to see where all this goes.

Summer Class

I just finished up Foundations of Literary Study, an undergraduate summer class I enrolled in at Rutgers Newark, and the first time I've been back in a classroom since graduating five years ago.

The class focused on three books and accompanying criticism and literary theory. We read Frankenstein, Heart of Darkness, and Labyrinths. I wrote two papers for the class, the first a short analysis looking at Victor Frankenstein's narcissistic obsession with science as an attack on religious traditions.

The second paper considered Chinua Achebe's criticism of the text of Heart of Darkness. Achebe contends that dehumanization of Africans in Conrad's text indicates a fundamental racism that invalidates any commentary made of European imperialism. I took issue with the argument. Instead I suggested that the dehumanization of the Africans, as well as the Europeans, demonstrated an inherent evil in colonialism and without that dehumanization, there would be no critique made.

100,000 Miles

My 2002 Honda Civic passed the 100,000 mile mark this afternoon while commuting home from Hackensack.