I've been back around Eclipse Records lately, and I have basically no self control when faced with a bunch of music I want to buy, so over the past few days I've picked up a few things that I may talk about in the relatively near future.

• Leonard Cohen, Songs of Love and Hate
• Bonnie Prince Billy, I See a Darkness
• Tom Waits, Swordfishtrombones
• Jawbox, Novelty
• Some kind of Nuggets II promo CD
• M.I.A., Kala
• Lauryn Hill, The Miseducation of Lauryn Hill, to revisit my 6th grade self
• Staring at the Sea, a compilation of singles by the Cure that was mysteriously abandoned at the store, so I gave it a good home.
• Nick Cave, From Her to Eternity

In 100% different news, I'm still thinking about Moby-Dick almost constantly. It's weird--I started reading it almost a year ago, and since then it's never really left my mind. I'm still amazed that something I had such low expectations for ended up kind of changing my life (at least in a literary sort of way). I'm getting a little hung up on the idea of re-reading it soon, but I can't be distracted from my goal of reading Ulysses before the summer is over. A goal that, unfortunately, keeps getting more complicated and lengthy.
I was able to talk to my adviser about this plan the other day, and he was kind enough to tell me all the things I'll need to do/read before I even start the book as well as a few things I should be reading while reading Ulysses. Obviously it was very cool of him to help me out, but blaaaaah that just added like, 6 books to my reading list, and those 6 books are only extensions of the Ulysses project! I am going to be so pissed off if this book turns out to suck.

My landscape, somehow

WOW. Earlier today my parents insisted that I come up with a list of places I would like to go over the course of our trip West, so that we can determine our routes there and back and spend our time accordingly. So for the past half hour I've been looking through all the different national parks out in Arizona, Utah, and Colorado. I'm looking at Alaska, Wyoming and Montana too, not for this trip but for my possible road trip next summer. I don't come by "proud to be an American" moments often, but right now I feel incredibly lucky to live in a country with so many vastly different, beautiful and strange landscapes somehow all packed together between one ocean and another. I want to go everywhere! It's so overwhelming.
My list so far is:

• Bryce Canyon
• Arches National Park
• Grand Canyon
• Capitol Reef
• Mesa Verde
• Petrified Forest
• Zion Nation Park

I don't expect to get to all of them on this one trip (though that would be so, SO great!), but they're all so amazing I don't know how I'll ever choose. I'm a little startled by how desperately I want to go to these places and how deeply connected to them I feel; I don't know if it's just because I spent time there as a little kid or if it's something else, but I know that there is nowhere else in the world that I find as beautiful or as compelling as the desert and I can hardly wait another day to get there.

List

Some semblance of a reading list for this summer. I don't expect to get all of this in (an almost superhuman feat, surely), but I definitely need to finish the first five before school starts again.

- Ulysses by James Joyce
- Leviathan, or the Whale by Philip Hoare
I just have to say I'm so, SO excited to read this book. I nearly lost my damn mind when Joe (thank heavens for Joe!) pointed it out to me in Oxford. I keep feeling like I should check the dedication page to make sure my name isn't on it. It's like this person got inside my brain, picked up everything I'd been stirring around in there since September and turned it into an amazing book.

- Passion of the Western Mind by Richard Tarnas
- The Monkey Wrench Gang by Edward Abbey
- Short fiction by Jorge Luis Borges
- My big fat collection of 17th-19th century American Lit that I snatched up at Shakespeare & Co. for ten euro
- Realism by Linda Nochlin
- The Sound and the Fury by William Faulkner
- Any good poetry I come across

A list

My brilliant and beautiful writer-friend Chloe made her list-of-things-to-do-before-she-dies list a few months ago, and hers is so good and perfect for her that I've decided to follow suite (in a less interesting way, probably).

1) Speak French fluently
2) Get my English PhD
3) Be an honest, hard to please, receptive, careful, and sensitive editor
4) Spend at least one year living back out West
5) Get the canopy bed I've wanted since the 3rd grade
6) Be able to cook/bake anything I want, without a recipe
7) Learn to garden
8) Become an expert on something (see #2)
9) Get an article published/publish articles regularly in the NY Times Book Review or The New Yorker
10) I'm sticking with Chloe's best friend/lover suggestion
11) Adopt a pit bull puppy
12) Revisit my natural hair color
13) Continue coffee shop dates with my mom, always
14) Live different places all across the U.S.; Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Utah, Oakland, Chicago, Vermont...and maybe back to the Twin Cities
15) Own an apartment in France