Some good things to read

Currently reading: "Whatever You Say I Am" About Eminem
will soon read: Salam Pax: The Clandestine Diary of an Ordinary Iraqi

Gardening: Golden Gate Gardening, Gaia's Garden

Pleasure reading that I recommend:

• I love Ken Kesey. He's like a god or something. It is very important to read him, but in order to do so properly, and situate him within his life and within US history and all that, you have to first read The Electric Cool-Aid Acid Test by Tom Wolfe. It's about him and his friends, the Merry Pranksters, and how they started the Psychedelic movement. Then read One Flew Over the Cuckoo's Nest, his famous masterpiece, and then Sometimes a Great Notion, and then Sailor Song. I read that last one, which is over 500 pages, in less than two months during the semester while working 20 hours per week! I recently read Caverns, a novel by O.U. Levon, Kesey's graduate writing class at the University of Oregon. The last book I read for pleasure was his Demon Box, which is a kind of an autobiographical novel. :) I forget the title of the one I'm reading now.
• Pablo Neruda is a really great poet from Chile. He was straight, and I think that his best stuff is Cien Sonetos de Amor, translated as 100 Love Sonnets.
• If you don't quite understand what being transgendered is, or you know about T* issues, but want to see what someone else has to say about it (everyone's experiences are different, after all), I recommend Gender Outlaw by Kate Bornstein. She is a post-op male to female to ? transsexual (I think she now considers herself to be transgendered). I also recommend Stone Butch Blues and
• Transgender Warriors, two excellent books by Leslie Feinberg. (She's an FTMTFT? writer and activist).
• Don't ever let me hear you dissing Anne Rice's Vampire Chronicles! I didn't enjoy the fifth one as much as the four previous ones, but she still rocks my world.\
• Right now, I'm reading some Alice Walker. She's amazing.

Academic Research

I read lots of really great stuff when I was in school. I wrote my senior essay for my Spanish major about En breve carcel (translated as Certificate of Absence) by Sylvia Molloy and La nave de los locos (translated as The Ship of Fools) by Cristina Peri Rossi. I talked about how they translate and "represent" their identity. I quoted from Le Desert Mauve (translated as Mauve Desert) by Nicole Brossard, a French-Canadian writer. It's about this lesbian from a lesbian family and her story and how another writer translates it. I also read Foucault's The History of Sexuality, Volume 1: An Introduction, some Judith Butler, and lots of short articles to try to help me figure all this stuff out.

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