ABSTRACT
My day begins with the newspaper. I open it on the dining table and read the metro section front to back. On the drive to work, I listen to a book on tape. At the university, I check my mailbox, read the memos, answer the surveys, then switch on the computer to check my electronic mail. Later, in class with my undergraduates, I discuss a poem by Siegfried Sassoon. After school, at home, I make a few phone calls to organize the PTA Dr. Seuss Read-In for my daughters’ elementary school. At 7:00, I read a chapter of The Wind in the Door to the girls. By the time the moon turns the corner to shine in my bedroom window, I am tired and I relax with a novel or an article from the New York Review of Books. I turn off the light at 10:00, closing a day fully circumscribed by reading. Roland Barthes calls an intertext, “the impossibility of living outside the infinite text” (36). Intertext neatly describes my day.
