I've been on a reading tear for the past few weeks. Aside from material for the new crop of Winter Term courses, I've read:

1) Stephen King's new short story collection, Everything's Eventual. It was like meeting up with an old friend I hadn't seen in years, going out for coffee with him, and realizing in the process how much I'd missed him.

2) The Day of the Locust, by Nathanael West. The essential Hollywood satire. A little bleak for some tastes, but perfect for mine. Features a bitch-goddess as well-rendered as anything in Hemingway or film noir. Not to mention that final indelible image of the roiling, violent crowd of disaffected, glitter-blind zombies.

3) Pretty much all the extant poetry attributed authoritatively to John Wilmot, the Earl of Rochester. Rochester was the bawdy embodiment of the Restoration, a prototypical rock star who lived fast and died young (he managed to drink and fuck himself to death at 33). His poetry is witty as hell, at times wildly vulgar (see "The Imperfect Enjoyment"), very often full of those highly specific allusions you find in Restoration stuff, but always brimming with vivacity.

Next up is Virginia Woolf, which means I'll have to postpone my date with Wilkie Collins's woman in white yet again.