Kate Chopin and Elton John...together at last

Right now, I'm trying to catch up on and update things. Here's an enumeration of some of those things....

1. I've updated my blogs on the sidebar to include my friend Ryan's new blog, as well as the resurrected Las Poetas Desesperadas. Check them out.

2. Periodically, I make mixes for myself that reflect my current state and whatever I've been listening to obsessively. Well now, thanks to the Internet, you can share in these creations. I'll have them at this site called muxtape. The current one is called "Don't let the sun..." The site only allows 12 songs per mix, so I had to leave off two songs ("Pitseleh" by Elliott Smith and "The Sun" by Mirah). But it's still a pretty good one, I think.

3. I'm trying to fill in what seem like unforgivable holes in my reading, and I'm starting with The Awakening by Kate Chopin - I'm about 75% through. I have mixed feelings about it, and maybe that's because I'm living in this quasi-post-third-wave of feminism. When I think about the novel in terms of a person who has been given no choices, deciding that she'll give them to herself, it is pretty powerful. The fact that Edna is so self-absorbed could be seen, I guess, as a product of that. It's hard not to like passages like this:

It sometimes entered Mr. Pontellier's mind to wonder if his wife were not growing a little unbalanced mentally. He could see plainly that she was not herself. That is, he could not see that she was becoming herself and daily casting aside that fictitious self which we assume like a garment with which to appear before the world.

I can also relate, having recently left one place for another, to this passage:

[T]he thought of him was like an obsession, ever pressing itself upon her. It was not that she dwelt upon details of their acquaintance, or recalled in any special or peculiar way his personality; it was his being, his existence, which dominated her thought, fading sometimes as if it would melt into the mist of the forgotten, reviving again with an intensity which filled her with an incomprehensible longing.

That's all for now. I may or may not write before the American Library Association conference at the end of June, but don't worry - you'll be hearing about it.