Being a graduate student is great.

It just is. When you're constantly reading challenging things and making connections and feeling, wow, it's really starting to come together, intellectually--it's just fucking exhilarating. What more can be said? I only wish for more time--because, reading for exams, you really can't afford to read more than you need to do in order to get a handle on the authors in question. There isn't a whole lot of depth. Which, I suppose is appropriate when we're talking about postmodernism. But what I'd love to do is just hit a big ol' pause button and devote however long it takes to reading the entire corpora of John Barth, Donald Barthelme, and William Gass. But not William Gaddis. I liked The Recognitions, and I want to read JR just because it's supposed to be hard and I like challenges, but he honestly strikes me as kind of a dick, and I hear that dickishness is accentuated in his later work. I also want to finish Delany's Nevèrÿon series. And some more Vollmann. And what the hell--I'm in an expansive enough mood that I'll even cram some more DeLillo down my gullet, even though it'll just irritate me. Am I a great guy, or what?