End-of-week update

These Seven Sicknesses, a.k.a. the Sophocles marathon at the Flea, was highly worthwhile: the treatment of the Oedipus plays seems a bit unstable on the farce-tragedy axis (and I thought the actor playing Oedipus was perhaps the weakest in the show, or at any rate his performance was too campy to be at all moving), but the middle segment of Philoctetes-Ajax is excellent (the Ajax staging is just superb, particularly the handling of the sheep scene) and the concluding pair of Electra-Antigone works very well also.

I finished reading A Dance with Dragons and all I can say is that I really do not see that George R. R. Martin will be able to wrap up the rest of the story in only one more volume, however long!  He is temperamentally averse to leaving anything out, and it leads to some frustrating choices in volumes four and five; my heart sank when I realized that the last volume was literally going to go back to the temporal starting point of the previous one and cover exactly the same time period, not to show a markedly divergent view but just to fill out some things that didn't fit in.  You then see a character you care about, who grew and changed over the previous installment, back in his pre-change version, and for no good reason; this strikes me as a fundamental breach of the compact with the reader, just as I dislike the playing-fast-and-loose-with-alternate-timestream thing that a certain television series I love has been indulging in: the sense of reality you have in television drama is thin enough that you cannot afford to erode it too far by, say, bringing back to life a character you have killed off in the alternate timestream by letting the space-time continuum shift and reconfigure everything. . . .

(You can get the first four installments of George R. R. Martin in a box or a bundle, but really what I recommend instead is Wolf Hall on the one end or Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy on the other.)

The due date is rapidly approaching for my ratings on second-round reading for the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, so I won't be writing much here about what I'm reading over next few weeks (confidentiality!), and I'm also teaching Clarissa again this semester, which eats up quite a bit of reading time.  However there is always room for a little light reading round the edges...

Miscellaneous links:

Neil Gaiman on growing up reading C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton.

And I'm giving a talk today at 4pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; I am just hoping it will stop raining to the extent that people will actually be willing to leave their dwellings and venture out into the world to come to it!

Signs of wear and tear

Kathy Acker's clothes.  (Via Ken Wark.)

Commitment strategies

I'm now full of regret that I didn't push harder on novel revisions over the winter break, as it is indeed very difficult to get work done steadily once the semester starts and with the additional commitment to a demanding fitness regimen!  I am trying to remember that I was working as hard as I could manage through a spell of rather low spirits and the accumulated tiredness of the fall semester, but still - this is now exactly the sort of work overload situation that I am trying to avoid in order not to find myself so wiped out in the first place!...

I think I have to be done with this revision before the week of Feb. 13 (that week I've got a book review due, a guest lecture at the New School and a dissertation defense, and I'm giving a talk out of town the following week, so it's pretty much a guarantee of no mental or practical space for my own writing for the whole middle stretch of the month).  I want to be able to get one more round of editorial feedback and also let the new draft sit and gel for a few weeks before I come back to it for a good final round of revision over my spring break in March.  If I say here that I intend this, it will help make it happen....

I've got a few interesting books to read for additional fillips of research and thinking.  Ken Wark kindly sent me a copy of his book Gamer Theory, and I plucked the classic Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational from a shelf in Butler the other evening (it was nearly adjacent to this volume which I could not resist checking out as well, though I am not sure when I'll get around to reading it).

Simulacron-3

World of Wires was great (comic and innovative use of cans of Pringles!), and we had a very good dinner afterwards too at La Lunchonette, which I walk by all the time (it's on my route home from Chelsea Piers to the subway) but which I ate at for the first time only recently when Liz and I needed a place to repair the nutritional inroads of a long workout.  I had mentally noted that it would likely appeal to theater companion G., and indeed it was just the right place to go on a snowy January night; we both started with French onion soup, then I had sauteed scallops (at a certain sort of restaurant, this is an entree likely to leave you still hungry, but here it was a copious portion with green beans and a large helping of nutritionally unsound scalloped potatoes) and tarte tatin.  G. had the cassoulet, a dish I am not enthusiastic about but that I think so much sums up the virtues of the winter version of this sort of French country cooking that I was very glad someone ordered it!

"Oliver. North. Reagan."

Angela Carter's luxury.

Air chrysalis

Dennis Lim's Bookforum piece on Haruki Murakami gives a good sense of why 1Q84 was my favorite novel of 2011....

Pap

Will Self's review of the Tierney-Baumeister willpower book made me laugh.

The folder of acclaim

Can book publicity be taken too far?  (Via Nicola G.)

Wintersonic

At the LRB, Adam Mars-Jones has a fascinating - a devastating - piece about Jeanette Winterson.

At the TLS, Phil Baker on three Soho period pieces. 

Mid-week update

The music is nothing to write home about, but I will link to it anyway because the best word I learned in fourth grade was dendrochronology... (Via BoingBoing.)  This reminds me of my friend Beth Lyman's work on unorthodox play scripts and indeterminacy in scripts and scores.

In other news, I am struck but not really surprised at how many piles of books and papers can accumulate after only one day's teaching....

The view from the trenches

Undoubted air of faculty glumness in Philosophy Hall today, the first day of classes! 

Those of you who are my 'friends' on Facebook will have already heard me bemoan the fact that Village Copier does not seem to have kept the original master for my History of the Novel I course reader, and as I seem to have had call to say frequently in recent weeks, desperate situations call for desperate remedies: the only thing to do was clean out my office....

(I got tenure two and a half years ago, and it was thus in the nature of life timelines that I was given a new office and a new apartment within a matter of weeks.  I devoted all my attention to packing and settling in at the new apartment, which is underfurnished but tidy; the new office, on the other hand, pretty much stayed in boxes, so this massive unpacking and cleaning is overdue by at least two years.)

I haven't found the missing master - I think they really must have thrown it away as they said - but I have found the marked-up old lecture notes and two copies of the bound course reader, one with teaching notes in it and one clean one that I can disassemble and use to scan a new master.  I think I may experiment for the first time this semester with providing critical readings online rather than in xeroxed form: for a seminar, I hold to the old-school method, because I want students to have a physical copy of the readings in class to look at while we discuss them and because student print quotas and notions of ecological soundness do not encourage generous use of paper, but I think in the lecture course I can afford to try it the other way.

(Have thrown away three or four contractor's bags of paper, mostly printouts of PDFs from ECCO and clean and marked-up drafts of my last academic book.  NB I am in need of another massive project like that one: something that will make me scan and engulf a huge new body of material that I'm not already acquainted with.  My most recent two book projects - style, BOMH - are both relatively small-scale, something that has disadvantages as well as benefits.  Also NB if you leave papers in boxes for a pretty long time, they become very easy to throw away once they are opened back up again....)

Not much to report otherwise.  Still ploughing through the novels of George R. R. Martin, which really are not enough to my taste (too much lopping and cropping, stylistic infelicities, switching back and forth between multiple viewpoint characters frustrating - I would rather have a whole novel following one character, then a whole novel following the other) but which are making the time pass.

Update

Have stopped work this afternoon just short of the long final scene, which needs significant revamping (it's not just that I'm moving it from Central Park to Morningside Park, but it's all going to go quite differently this time round).  So: one more editing session with pen and paper, and then I have a messy marked-up pile of manuscript that needs to be transferred to the computer.  I will do one further very thorough going-through, with some bits and pieces of new writing still to be interpolated here and there and hope to send a new version of the novel to my editor before the end of the month.

School starts next week, which is a mixed blessing (really in January I am often in low spirits and ready by now for the distraction of classroom time); I've got one big other work thing due at the end of next week, so I think that I'm going to have to put this aside for some days and organize myself for the beginning of classes before coming back to the novel revision.  However I should be able to make my way to the end first and force myself to undertake the slightly horrible job of typing it all up between now and Tuesday: that's the idea, anyway.

(NB The Young Unicorns stands up pretty well to rereading, and it is interesting for me to see now what I would not have noticed as a child, the fact of its being published in 1968 and written specifically in the shadow of the social transformations of the late 1960s; but A Severed Wasp is dreadful in ways I would not at all have been able to understand when I first read it at age twelve or thirteen, though I still find it grippingly readable in its embarrassing fashion!  Very interesting and appealing, of course, to read two novels set in the neighborhood I've lived in for more than ten years now.)

The degree of tumescence

Effective pedagogy or embarrassing misstep? (Via GeekPress.)

How to Keep Rabbits for Profit and Pleasure

A nice piece on the London Library.  (My grandfather had a lifetime membership, obtained in the early 1950s; he must have gotten more than fifty years of use out of it, but my frugal grandmother still sometimes expressed a wish that it could be transferable to me after his death...)

A medical study of the Haitian zombie.  (Via Hari Kunzru.)

The curse of the trochee?

"Winter is coming"

One sort of reason why we should be suspicious of the claim that people don't have time to read.  (Courtesy of Al.)