Many books in my mail today:
The Transformation, Juliana Spahr
Recyclopedia: Trimmings, S*PeRM**K*T, and Muse and Drudge, Harryette Mullen
The Body: An Essay, Jenny Boully

I'm also reading Shalimar the Clown by Salman Rushdie, which is intense, sprawling, profound as all Rushdie books, but it's making me restless. I'm not sure I have the patience for fiction anymore. I don't want to get lost in narratives as much as I used to; I just want to know things. I've started reading history recently, which I'd never read before. 1215: The Year of Magna Carta was fascinating, but I have a law-dork obsession with the Magna Carta. Last summer I read H.G. Wells' The Outline of History, almost a thousand pages of everything from the beginning of the universe to just after the Second World War. Some of his views are cringingly outdated and often racist, but it's a brilliant whirlwind tour through, well, everything. If nothing else, it provides context. It also makes me wonder how I got this far knowing so little about history. Then I remember that the only history I ever learned in high school was in French. If there's anything French Immersion teaches, it's how to avoid having to speak or read or write or learn anything in French.