I haven’t figured out the dates, but I am definitely going somewhere when I hand in my final paper. I also haven’t figured out the place. In fact, nothing is figured, but that I have itchy feet, and want to throw myself into someplace different before I come back to Georgetown for the teaching I’ll be doing in July. I won’t have all the time up til July free, because I’ll need to be in DC to develop the syllabus and I should be working in the writing center in the summer too (assuming it does open again this summer… it all feels a little un-pinned down.) Also, my friend Helen needs to leave the US to come back in on a tourist visa now when her studies at Georgetown finish, in order do a Melbourne University art history class in New York, which may mean a joint trip. Though I think, after a particular place in Mexico’s San Luis Potosi that she wants to go to, she’s more interested in desert islands than deserts.

Candidates? Well:

-Fly into Costa Rica and then go down to Panama.

-Fly in Mexico or Guatemala (a cheaper flight) and then go in search of a surrealist park that Helen wants to see.

-Fly into El Paso and then enter Mexico via Ciudad Juarez, and maybe head down to the Copper Canyon region.

-Live the dream I dreamt for Spring Break—a bit of Texas (desert-y Texas), New Mexico, Utah, and maybe some Arizona and Colorado too.

Going up to areas of Canada I don’t already know is also a cheap-ish possibility.

They’re my primary interests right now. I’ll probably have about three weeks I can afford to be away. How strange! Tomorrow I should stop by the health service and find out what shots cost, in case Panama wins the day. (Yellow Fever shot… also precautionary anti-Malarial medication.)

In the mean time: studies. It all continues.

I’ll find time later to write a few words about a poetry reading I attended Sunday night, but at the moment my mind is firmly ensconced in: Anne Carson, Carolyn Forché, George Eliot and Milton. I read Book X of Paradise Lost earlier today and I’m thinking my way through the short paper I’ll write on it for tomorrow, about the sounds associated with the punishment both of the denizens of hell (I just like the word denizens) and of Adam and Eve.

I spoke to Professor Ragussis yesterday, and he’s very happy for me to work on the epigraphs in George Eliot’s Daniel Deronda—I’m so glad. I remember being fascinated by the epigraphs in Middlemarch—and the opening epigraph of Daniel Deronda is a doozy—and Eliot-authored. (It reminds me in its quite sweeping address of the opening paragraph of Middlemarch, and due to its length it almost seems like more of a first paragraph and an epigraph.) So, I have to read Bakhtin and some other bits and pieces, find embedded quotations within chapters, and see how the dialogue between these and the epigraphs works. As Cher in Clueless would say with a squeak, “Ooh! Project!” Yes, I realise that I really do know how to bring the tone down again. It’s not all lofty heights in my mind…

I’m excited by a new anthology from Graywolf Press, New European Poets. (Also, incidentally, the press publishing Monica Youn, who I saw read at the Library of Congress a while ago.) The book has an amazing array of poets, and covers (I think) all the countries of Europe except those tiny enclaves San Marino, Andorra and Monaco. (I don’t entirely know what’s going to happen when I get to these places in the Independence Day Project. I don’t want to admit defeat!) The only thing that I do find a little depressing is its design. The cover looks like a green “European Poetry for Dummies” or a computer manual. I’m going to solve this for my own copy by covering it in plain brown paper and then decorating. (I wonder if I have tape in this apartment?)

I’m in love, recently, with the art project 20 x 200. Limited edition prints (beautiful quality) of arts of work for $20. Well, $28.50 once you add in the postage etc. Which, though it increases the price by almost 50 percent, doesn’t make it less of a bargain.

Early this afternoon, along with Paradise Lost, I read a book about deserts—another desolate landscape, so I suppose I could connect the two by more than their happening to dovetail in my reading. Terry Tempest Williams. I’ve long wanted to read more of her work. Perhaps in the summer. Though I was thinking, when I go away, I may just take something ancient with me. I’m thinking of following Kapuściński’s example and going with Herodotus. How very English Patient of me.

Oh, and some good news from home. I’ll have a couple of poems coming out in ALR soon. Lovely.