• 30 essays (29/30):
  • Looking Good: The Lesbian Gaze and Fashion Imagery, by Reina Lewis (I didn't like this although it sounded like it would be great - I don't personally vibe w/ the idea of the lesbian gaze the author describes)
  • Conceptualisation, History, and Future of the Paraphilias (Moser and Kleinplatz) (This brought up some interesting questions about the point of the DSM, the point of psychopathology, etc, but other than that it wasn't revelatory)
  • Nietzsche, Genealogy, History (Foucault) - Waaay easier to understand than I was expecting and made lots of sense, idk why all academics who like Foucault are so annoying because this was pretty good.
  • 'They Wonder to Which Sex I Belong' - The Historical Roots of Modern Lesbian Identity (M Vicinus) - Omg soooo good, added like 5 books to my reading list, a nice place to start re. research on lesbianism from the Victorian times to now. And some worrying background re. MiU lol
  • Entertainment: Contemporary Art's Cure for Boredom (F Colpitt) - Lukewarm and sort of mostly obvious, but some interesting history
  • The Culture Industry: Enlightenment as Mass Deception (Adorno and Horkheimer) - OK great criticism of society under capitalist monopoly, but I KNOW the 'hair over eyes' and 'deep voice' jabs were aimed at, if not Lauren Bacall, some other actress I have loved at some point. Absolutely off limits. You have offended me.
  • Art of Song Lyric (Paglia) - marry me
  • Theater of Gender: David Bowie at the Climax of the Sexual Revolution (Paglia) - I should get into Bowie properly now. Also: marry me
  • Homer on Film: A Voyage Through The Odyssey, Ulysses, Helen of Troy, and Contempt (Paglia) I really love and admire Paglia's weakness for 50s Cinemascope lol, Contempt was the first nouvelle vague film I watched and I didn't really ~get it~ back then so it was nice seeing it contextualised with this historical and cinematic background. I like it as a parody of midcentury epics
  • Women and Law (Paglia) This was pretty basic
  • Portrayals of Middle Eastern Women in Western Culture (Paglia) nice historical overview
  • Teaching Shakespeare to Actors (Paglia)
  • The Decay of Lying (Wilde) my hero
  • The Painted Word (Tom Wolfe) very readable and actually a good overview of American abstract art
  • Introduction to the Classical Hollywood Reader (Neale)
  • Emotional Curves and Linear Narratives (Keating)
  • Dance of the Senses: Natural Vision and Psychic Mysticism in Theodore Roethke (Paglia)
  • Final Cut: The Selection Process for Break, Blow, Burn (Paglia)
  • Western Love Poetry (Paglia)
  • 'Stay, Illusion': Ambiguity in Shakespeare's Hamlet (Paglia)
  • Dispatches from the New Frontier: Writing for the Internet (Paglia)
  • The Magic of Images: Words and Picture in a Media Age (Paglia)
  • Free Speech and the Modern Campus (Paglia)
  • Intolerance and Diversity in Three Cities (Paglia)
  • The Mighty River of Classics (Paglia)
  • The North American Intellectual Tradition (Paglia)
  • Erich Neumann: Theorist of the Great Mother (Paglia)
  • No to the Invasion of Iraq (Paglia)
  • Cults and Cosmic Consciousness: Religious Vision in the American 1960s (Paglia)
  • Religion and the Arts in America (Paglia)
• 3 physical books:
• 3 hollywood (auto)biographies:
• (authors i'd like to read essays by: sontag, adorno, paglia, oscar wilde, parker tyler, harold bloom, jane harrison, c.m bowra, rhys carpenter, nabokov)

recommended to me

• adorno
• the californian ideology
• the rhetoric of reaction
• nabokov on dr jekyll
• fredric jameson on postmodernism