My time has been severely limited since I returned from Houston; first because of the unexpected need for quarantine, and then because of the lack of childcare while the boys have a two week holiday from school. This pandemic has gotten pretty old, but I shouldn’t complain. The situation in Latin America is disastrous, but completely overshadowed by the even more horrifying situation in India. If humanity manages to vaccinate the world in time to stop the variants from overwhelming our best efforts, we’ll be incredibly lucky.
With the short and heavily distracted time I had last week, I prepped two work surfaces and managed some reading and writing. It’s a small accomplishment. I’ve also put together a loose plan of readings to complete over the next several months using the Lee Lozano book as a jumping off point. I read Susan Sontag’s “The Aesthetics of Silence,” and picked up a copy of Roland Barthes. Since last year, I’ve slowly worked my way through Yuval Hariri’s Sapiens and my goal is to finish it by the end of this month. I’ve been schlepping a book of critical essays (Theories of Modern Art) around since I found it on the street in Brooklyn years ago, and it’s finally a good time to read a few of them. I also need to learn more about the Anthropocene Epoch, which is a controversial idea, but seems to underscore my thinking well. Additionally, I have Hannah Arendt, Martin Heidegger, and Adrien Piper lined up for philosophical reference. I haven’t read in this way since college, and I’m enjoying it. Of course, to do it right means eventually putting the ideas together into a research paper, and surprisingly, I find that exciting.