Kevin Sun

It's been a couple inertial weeks since the end of the semester, but now that I'm relatively settled in Queens for the summer, I'll have no excuse not to be more productive with my time.  I posted my tentative summer reading plans earlier, and I managed to sneak in Robert Pirsig's Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance in between Dubliners and Murphy . First, a few words about Joyce's Dubliners : Slick drawing of James Joyce (1922) - Djuna Barnes Having read Joyce in reverse order ( Ulysses , Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man , but no Finnegan's Wake —at least not yet), I was pleased to find that Dubliners  was just as readable as his later works, if primarily different in style and form. The writing is noticeably more tame, i.e. , more conventional in its close-third person narrative style and without the same spatial and temporal flexibility of his later works, but, on the whole, the prose is distinctively Joycean. There were a couple moments ...

As I did  last year and the year before, I'll be trying to complete a self-addressed syllabus of summer readings for my own pleasure and edification. After a brief hiatus from the blog, I'll also be updating more frequently over the next few months as I did last summer. Expect to see fewer transcriptions and hopefully some more diversity in the content. Since I'll be doing thesis research (or planning to do so) in New York City as well, I might occasionally post some updates about how that's going.  Feel free to chime in with any suggestions! I'm also keeping an ad hoc "Film and Television" syllabus, which I've decided to keep to myself for the sake of keeping that from growing out of control (hint: David Lynch's Twin Peaks  is first up).