My blog is still taking a working vacation (meaning I’m so busy writing comments on student manuscripts that I don’t have time to post right now). BUT check out the following upcoming event, organized by the Lambda Literary Foundation.

BETTER READ THAN DEAD
Today’s hottest and most talented queer writers celebrate the work of their favorite literary forebears. From the erotic to the poetic to the political, these readings chart our rich heritage and the road to today’s vibrant LGBT literary scene. Hosted by the Lambda Literary Foundation, featuring Samuel Delany, Minnie Bruce Pratt, Rachel Kramer Bussel, Wayne Hoffman, Blair Mastbaum, Joan Nestle, Naomi Replansky, and Lauren Sanders–reading writers like Audre Lorde, Djuna Barnes, Paul Bowles, and David Feinberg. Tuesday, March 20th, at the LGBT Community Center.
208 West 13th Street, Manhattan.
1,2,3 to 14th Street; L to 6th Avenue. Five bucks. Reception at 6 PM, Reading starts at 7PM. For additional information contact Sam J. Miller at [email protected]

Also, pick up a copy of Hettie Jones’s vivacious and deeply human Doing Seventy, her new poetry collection from Hanging Loose Press. Hettie makes me want to stop marking papers and start writing poems immediately.

Finally, here’s a thought for the day from Marcel Proust (as translated by Terence Kilmartin):

“The idea of death took up permanent residence within me in the way that love sometimes does. Not that I loved death, I abhorred it. But after a preliminary stage in which, no doubt, I thought about it from time to time as one does about a woman with whom one is not yet in love, its image adhered now to the most profound layer of my mind, so completely that I could not give my attention to anything without that thing first traversing the idea of death, and even if no object occupied my attention and I remained in a state of complete repose, the idea of death still kept me company as faithfully as the idea of my self….Yet still I did not see how from my present ailments one could pass, without warning of what was to come, to total death. Then, however, I thought of other people, of the countless people who die every day without the gap between their illness and their death seeming to us extraordinary….No doubt my books too, like my fleshly being, would in the end one day die….Eternal duration is promised no more to men’s works than to men. In my awareness of the approach of death I resembled a dying soldier, and like him too, before I died, I had something to write. But my task was longer than his, my words had to reach more than a single person.” (from Time Regained)