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Millhauser's best stories are often about community and it's complications. In "The Little People," a series of vignettes and encyclopedic entries about Greenhaven, a city within "our city" whose inhabitants are an average two inches tall, he addresses the joys and challenges, the loves and the prejudicial hates that arise between "our" culture and those of Greenhaven's residents. It's a fascinating reflection.

Just contacted and heard back from a bookstore up in Sturgeon Bay that I am obsessed with visiting, Within Things. I'll be taking Labor Day (they're open!) to go up there and see the place. I am jazzed to see this place!

"Late" is what you'd expect from a story that appeared in Harpers magzine: Highly neurotic entitled city dweller obsesses about the arrival of his date to the point of insanity. Not my favorite Millhauser piece. Clever, but more than a little tedious.

Back on the Latin again. Having a break (to refresh my German for our trip to Europe last month) actually gave my brain some breathing room to absorb Latin. While I've had to relearn a few words, the "cadence" has come back quickly. Now to get my vocabulary back up to snuff. It likes I might be going back to Europe again next year for work, in which case, I'll toggle back to German again when it's closer.

Having taken a couple of guided tours in Europe last month, Millhauser's "Guided Tour," about a highly accurate historical tour of the town of Hamelin hit close to home. To quote from this macabre tale, "Stories have teeth . . .", and this one will take a chunk out of you. Fabulous, frightening stuff. Here Millhauser leaps from the merely strange into the truly horrific.

No, "After the Beheading" is not some kind of literary click bait. It is one of Millhauser's most morbid tales to date. But the shock doesn't come from the act of the beheading itself. It comes in the slow cessation of outrage and spectacle. The true horror here - and it is truly horrific - arises quietly, long after the execution. It is the slow swelling and expansion of indifferent acceptance.

"One Summer Night" reminds me of the elements I love in Millhauser's fiction: the crystal clear, yet evocative prose, a sense that people are much more or less than they seem, and a liminal state of mind where a certain sinister or magical something is just around the corner, in the shadows, out of reach and that, depending on which side of the razor's edge you fall off of, you might find heaven or hell.

The entanglement between Solnit and Benjamin continues, Baudelaire watching again from the periphery, sometimes circling one, then the other, then weaving between them like a child at play. How strange that I should be reading these two books, with seemingly no connection between them, on the surface, at the same time. This might be a sign to reread Flowers of Evil.

Benjamin's analysis and critique of film in "The Work of Art in the Age of Mechanical Reproduction" is not so interesting when addressing the work itself as it is fascinating when one looks at the audience and the change it engenders in them vis-a-vis their appreciation of static art.

After reading this, I definitely need to read Flowers of Evil yet again. In fact, I should make that a regular practice. I can't stand French as a language (everything is an exception, sorry, but give me German and Latin rules all day long), but if I were ever to attempt to learn it again, it would be for this sole purpose: Reading Baudelaire.

What an amazing synchronicity! I'm reading Walter Benjamin's essay on Baudelaire in Illuminations, I turn the page in Solnit's work and what is there? A beautiful paragraph about Benjamin in Paris and his work on an unwritten book "on the linked subjects of Baudelaire, Paris, the Parisian arcades, and the figure of the flâneur". My reading has created a pocket universe!

I find Benjamin's Marxist analysis of Baudelaire much more convincing than his Freudian analysis of the poet.

The Freudian analysis of Proust and Baudelaire feel flimsy, at best. I get the analysis of memory, but the Freudian dream-connection just hangs by a weak thread.

Sadly, I know very little about Brecht's work, though I know something about the man himself. I had a professor in college who was a Brecht expert. I don't have space here, but I'll try to remember his Brecht as Communist/Nazi in my review. It's a pretty funny story.

Absolutely one of the best summations of the spirit of Kafka's work.

Three pages in a half hour! Man, I'm cruising through this! Good thing I took four months off of studying Latin to refresh my German!

As much as I love Kafka, it's apparent that I need to read more of him. I guess The Collected Stories (all of his short stories) and The Trial aren't quite enough. I feel like such a poser . . . Maybe I should read him in German to feed my ego a little.

Back on the trail with this book. The irony is that while I was on vacation in Europe, I walked further in a week than I would walking seven or eight weeks here in the US.

My recent trip to Germany is done. Time to pick up Latin again'!