Light reading

Better late than never

2012-01-31T21:46:00.000-05:00

Colleen Mondor's blog Chasing Ray has been a pleasure of mine for many years now, and Colleen herself a wonderful correspondent and internet friend. Her book The Map of My Dead Pilots, about the years she spent working in the aviation business in Alaska, came out several months ago, but I'm only just catching up with it here. In the end I asked Colleen a single question, and she was kind enough to give a very rich and full answer....

JMD: I read The Map of My Dead Pilots in a few sittings at the end of December, and it’s stayed very much with me in subsequent weeks. I loved the piece you wrote for John Scalzi's Big Idea column about what it means to write a story about real things that happened to real people;I’ve been interested in this question for a long time, and I think your discussion there would be of particular interest to a writer in the early stages of a project where it hadn’t yet emerged whether the book was going to be written as fiction or nonfiction (the sort of question one might ask in a creative writing class where one read Tim O’Brien, Mary Karr, etc.). I wanted to ask you a quite different question, though. I was struck and moved, as I read the book, by how much it turns out to be a book about your father. Did you know, when you started writing about flying in Alaska, that this would be such an important component of the book in its final version? Or was it largely a surprise?

CM: Honestly, when I started writing I never intended to write anything other than Alaska stories. The first one I wrote was about the pilot who crashed on the ice off the coast of Nome. I had interviewed him when I was in grad school and that accident impressed me a great deal - it was so close to being a national tragedy. That was what I thought the book would be about though, the guys I knew, the accidents and incidents I was familiar with and what day to day life at the Company was like.

The turning point came when I wrote about the summer of 1999. Several of my friends were aware I was writing the book and over the years they had asked why I still thought about it all so very much. We have all moved on in many ways (if not physically from AK then professionally and personally with new jobs and children, etc.) and yet for me there is much about the Company that remains very close. I couldn't explain why though until I sat down to write about the day at the bar when I interviewed the pilot who had known my friend "Luke" and was there when he crashed into the mountain while chasing wolves. I wanted to write about our conversation because it was so surreal and it tied directly into my ongoing struggle to absolve Luke of all blame in that accident. But I couldn't write honestly about that summer without explaining what I was going through and that meant writing also about Bryce, the Company pilot who died in the Yukon River in June of '99. And writing about Bryce's death meant writing about where I was when I heard and that was in Florida where I was preparing for my own father's funeral.

Just like that, in careful precise steps, my father entered the story. The chapter radically changed from what I had planned although Luke remained a big part of it. Ultimately though, in writing about that summer I came to understand just how my father, who never visited Alaska, was nevertheless critical to my Alaska experiences. The summer of 1999 is always, and always will be, all about losing him and because of that everyone else who was part of it - Bryce and Luke and all the interviews with all the pilots I did that summer for my thesis - are part of his death as well. And the grief that my brother and I felt so strongly then has not diminished over the years. Thus it will always be the summer of just five minutes ago and all of those young men will be with me in a way that I never expected nor could ever have imagined.

MAP was supposed to be about flying in Alaska but it became a book about why stories matter and how, in that particular place and time, stories took on an unexpected power. My brother and I tell our children stories about our father all the time; they are the only way we have now to make him real for them. We are trying to make a man they never had the chance to know still be unforgettable. It is, we believe, nothing less than what he deserves. I really and truly did not want to write about my father - I thought it would hurt too much - but in a lot of unexpected ways, writing about him in MAP was the best thing I could have done. And thus when I went back to the Company and stood on the now empty ramp, I understood why all of it meant so much. When I was at the Company - when we were all there - my father was alive and well in Florida. It's a snapshot in time I would give anything to have back, for obvious reasons. Just like that, a book on Alaska flying becomes just as much a book about mourning a parent. Writers, I learned, do not write (or live) in a vacuum nor are Alaska and Florida really that far apart.

I set out to write only about Alaska flying and ended up writing also about the beach in Florida. The connection is obvious to me now but it wasn't until I wrote it that I knew it existed. Isn't that crazy?

End-of-week update

2012-01-27T11:45:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-25T08:39:00.000-05:00

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

Commitment strategies

2012-01-22T12:06:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-22T09:51:00.005-05:00

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."

2012-01-22T09:45:00.001-05:00

Angela Carter's luxury.

Air chrysalis

2012-01-20T22:27:00.003-05:00

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

Pap

2012-01-20T22:05:00.000-05:00

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

The folder of acclaim

2012-01-19T15:45:00.000-05:00

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

Wintersonic

2012-01-19T13:31:00.001-05:00

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

2012-01-19T11:06:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-17T13:40:00.000-05:00

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

2012-01-13T16:20:00.005-05:00

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

2012-01-12T16:29:00.001-05:00

Effective pedagogy or embarrassing misstep? (Via GeekPress.)

How to Keep Rabbits for Profit and Pleasure

2012-01-11T15:40:00.000-05:00

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"

2012-01-07T21:38:00.002-05:00

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

Endurance

2012-01-06T22:39:00.000-05:00

Replicating the Shackleton spirit.

I had a good moment in the stacks today: I'd gone in to get this so that I could check a couple of quotations in the proofs of my Shakespeare adaptation essay. My eye wandered (it is the argument for open stacks) down the shelf and I spotted a book I have often heard about but never read, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines. It is too fragile to pack to take with me, but I am very curious to read some of it. (Also: disambiguation!)

I've been working steadily albeit in a small way every day on novel revisions, and it's interesting to see how it's coming together. Confession: desperate situations call for desperate remedies, and I did have to break out the device one day to liberate myself from the internet...

My alarm's set for 5:30am, and my flight to Cayman leaves at 8:45 from JFK. Apartment is clean and tidy for the catsitter. Only pity is that it is currently such nice running weather here!

Serendipity, research

2012-01-04T12:33:00.004-05:00

Exploring underground NYC.

Morningside redux

2012-01-02T14:06:00.002-05:00

Had a good couple of hours of work just now; have been revising steadily every day, and the first new take on the first section of the novel is starting to come together pretty well. New stuff still to write, especially re: the 'missing game' whose real importance seems to have taken a long time to dawn on me.

I remain optimistic that if I can really sort things out properly for the long opening section (which represents about a third of the book as it now stands), all my other revision choices will be pretty clear and easy...

Still can't believe the library's not open till Wednesday! Fortunately I have been able to download nearly-free versions of Aristotle's Poetics and The Birth of Tragedy for my Kindle, with intention of rereading both this evening. (One resolution for this revision is to make more obvious things that might have been clear to me as I was writing but won't necessarily have been clear to the reader; more generally, I'm just trying to pull at the threads of different thematic connections and make things feel more like a really suspenseful culminating sensible whole.)

I am also meaning to reread Madeleine L'Engle's two quite different novels of Morningside Heights; A Severed Wasp is waiting for me at the Butler circulation desk, even if I can't get it quite yet, and I've just Amazoned myself a copy of The Young Unicorns as it doesn't seem to exist in the BorrowDirect consortium's collections (young-adult collecting is more spotty than adult fiction).

Still feeling pretty off-kilter because of my college friend's death. Desperate situations call for desperate remedies: I have finally embarked upon the official George R. R. Martin reread! When the latest installment came out this summer, I thought that it was long enough since I'd read the previous four that I might want to start over again at the beginning. Put the first one on my Kindle (having long since given away the mass-market paperbacks I read years ago) and have been saving it for a rainy day. I'm now about three quarters of the way through the first volume, A Game of Thrones, and finding it truly immersive. The writing is often slightly embarrassing, but it's amazing storytelling, especially in the opening sequence; it is a good way for me to make sure that this week will pass by in a flash!

(Also still grumpy due to lingering cold. Had to cancel a 5-6-mile run scheduled with a friend for this afternoon, it seemed too strenuous, but I might try for an easy half an hour on my own instead, with commitment to turn around and go home if lungs don't feel adequate to the task.)

"The fungibility of animal stars"

2011-12-31T18:35:00.003-05:00

Was Cheeta the real Cheeta?

RIP

2011-12-31T17:08:00.003-05:00

A nice interview from this summer with Carey Monserrat, the friend who died this week. (Via.)

Shelves, plucking

2011-12-30T21:20:00.001-05:00

Supriya Nair interviews Teju Cole:

I privately think to myself of Open City as a response to 8 1/2, which is weird. But it is episodic, it is concerned with structures of consciousness and I think it is immaculately curated. That is what I was going for: the curation of incident that to a careless observer seems like randomness.

On a more personal note, I am alarmed by the revelation that Butler Library won't be open again till Wednesday. That's just wrong!

Closing tabs

2011-12-30T12:11:00.004-05:00

The year is ending for me on an unexpectedly somber note. I got a call late yesterday afternoon to let me know that a college friend had killed himself the day before. It was more sad than surprising news, as he had spent many years fighting the legacy of a childhood and adolescence marred by deeply neglectful parents and a terrible stint in foster care and then coping with a diagnosis in adulthood of bipolar disorder, but it is such a loss. In adulthood it is often too late to remedy this sort of damage, and I think the only takeaway is that if you know a child or teenager in need of help, reach out and give whatever help you can! Spent the evening at a sort of unofficial wake at a mutual friend's apartment in Brooklyn; combination of emotional distress and alcohol consumption have now exacerbated my cold, which has moved from lungs to sinuses and which clearly mandates another day of no exercise...

Some links, in no particular order:

Language Log on the twitter hashtag.

Wage slavery in its natural habitat.

George Pringle's new blog.

Greg Zinman on Bravo's Work of Art.

It seems likely that I will post again between now and the official end of 2011, but just in case not, I hope that you all have a very happy and healthy New Year!

Swingers

2011-12-28T09:40:00.001-05:00

RIP Cheeta.

Lung grumbling

2011-12-28T07:42:00.000-05:00

Feeling quite glum as this minor cold has now settled into the lungs: they are so raw and itchy that I would stick a pencil down there to scratch them were it compatible with the human gag reflex! Clearly another day with no exercise in the cards, though I am hoping I'll be well enough for yoga tomorrow morning with out-of-town friend B. (and am seeing out-of-town friend A. and her husband K. for tea late this afternoon). I don't otherwise feel sick at all - strong arms, strong legs, clear head - just this annoying lung vulnerability.

Novel revisions are underway as of yesterday, thank goodness, so I can't really complain otherwise. I need to get as much of this work under my belt as I can: three weeks from today I'm in the classroom again, and I can't afford to let any of this uninterrupted time escape me!

Light reading around the edges: Sara Henry's Learning to Swim (clear why I bought that one! not bad, but not really the kind of crime fiction I like most); Val McDermid, Trick of the Dark (highly readable despite huge huge impossible implausibilities at center of the story); Erin Kelly, The Poison Tree (hmmm, very Barbara Vine in mood, not so much what I like either as I didn't care about the characters and the twists can be seen coming a mile away); Lene Kaaberbol and Agnete Friis, The Boy in the Suitcase (I loved this one, it was great: it has all the qualities lacking in the others, despite the fact that they all fall under a crime fiction rubric); and Nicholas Royle's strange and haunting Regicide. I am not so crazy about dream landscapes, I prefer my fiction to have more rational narrative logic, but I do think this was an unusually interesting novel of its kind (and I am interested to see fiction still being written under the sign of Robbe-Grillet!).

Tiny Brontës

2011-12-27T13:31:00.000-05:00

Tiny books at Houghton Library.

Looking back

2011-12-23T23:11:00.001-05:00

Really this is the "books I read that stuck with me this year" post (I make it by quickly skimming back through blog posts, so I'm sure I've missed things), but I do feel the need to note one painful failure for 2011 - I didn't get to the start of my projected Ironman race, due to bronchial illness stemming from ongoing lack of mastery of exercise-induced asthma, training loads and life stress.

I am on a higher dose of asthma controller medication now, and I think I have a better handle on how to manage that particular aspect of bronchial vulnerability, but I am still overextended in a more general sense and I am not going to attempt an iron-distance triathlon in 2012, as I think I need to do more work on various building-blocks first. If plans go as I hope, though, I'll volunteer for the inaugural NYC Ironman next August and get some kind of preferential status re: registering for a slot for the 2013 race.

On a brighter note, it is also the case that in 2011 I finished drafting the novel formerly known as The Bacchae on Morningside Heights, revised it and found a publisher; I am just now undertaking an extensive further revision/reimagining (this will make no sense to those who have not read it, but I can see now that a whole game is missing!). I also revised the style book, and it is as of a month or so ago out with publishers again, but I have no news yet as to its fate and fortunes: books can take a long time from start to finish, a fact that horrified and appalled me when it first dawned on me many years ago but that I've had to reconcile myself to in the meantime.

I feel that I had a very good year of teaching: I was eager to be back in the classroom after an overly quiet sabbatical year in 2010, and the charms of teaching have been particularly alive to me. The surprise for me this fall was how much I loved teaching the required MA seminar to entering graduate students in our department; I had undertaken it as a 'service' class, but it was truly as much of a pleasure as any class I have ever taught.

I have just finished reading what I think is my favorite novel of the year, Murakami's 1Q84. Haunting, immersive, lovely!

My other single favorite novel in the loose category of 'literary fiction,' a term I hate but that does serve to differentiate it from thrillers and young-adult dystopias and so forth, was probably Teju Cole's amazing Open City. Others I particularly enjoyed in this sort of broad category (all newish though not all from 2011): Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child; Lydia Millet's How the Dead Dream; Vanessa Veselka's Zazen; Cody James's The Dead Beat; Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding; Emma Donogue's Room; Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad; Tayari Jones's The Silver Sparrow; Barbara Trapido's Sex and Stravinsky. Neal Stephenson's Anathem was as immersive as 1Q84 and probably belongs in this group rather than with science fiction and fantasy below (Reamde, on the other hand, was enjoyable but forgettable).

Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods deserves a category all its own! Another uncategorizable but excellent book: Misha Glouberman and Sheila Heti's collaboration The Chairs Are Where the People Go.

Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead is definitely in my top ten favorites for the year. I also loved Lauren Beukes's Zoo City, that's another strong recommendation.

Megan Abbott's novels Bury Me Deep and The End of Everything were among the most interesting crime fiction I read all year, but there was a lot of other exceptional stuff too. Tom Franklin's Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter; Taylor Stevens's The Informationist; Deon Meyer's Thirteen Hours and Trackers; Lawrence Block's A Drop of the Hard Stuff (which also prompted a reread of the amazing When the Sacred Ginmill Closes)

Nonfiction: John Jeremiah Sullivan's Pulphead; Siddhartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned; Anna Goldsworthy's Piano Lessons; Priscilla Gilman's The Anti-Romantic Child; Sarah Bakewell's Montaigne biography; Peter Terzian's interesting little anthology Bound to Last; and (I am late to the party) Michael Lewis's Moneyball. It was a reread, but Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built remains one of the few books I can think of that it pains me not to have written myself.

Most prized addition to book collection, courtesy of my mother: Green's Dictionary of Slang.

Didn't read a ton of YA this year, but can definitely recommend Patrick Ness's Chaos Walking books and Catherine Fisher's Incarceron series. Tow Ubukata's Mardock Scramble was a surprise and a delight; also very delightful was Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone.

Much enjoyed new installments in ongoing stories by Lev Grossman, Charlie Williams, Kate Atkinson. Also: LEE CHILD!

Most perfect light reading: Doris Egan/Jane Emerson's Ivory omnibus and City of Diamond. But I was lucky in my light reading this year, I'd have to say: I loved Mira Grant's zombie trilogy, and found the first two installments of Patrick Rothfuss's fantasy series utterly addictive. Best zombie book was Max Brooks's World War Z, though: I couldn't get it out of my head after I read it, and kept on telling people about it at parties even when it was not suitable.

A small selection of books I reread that still speak to me very loudly (really I'm always rereading a lot for teaching- and research-related purposes): Roland Barthes's The Neutral; Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow; Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew; Markson's Reader's Block; Conrad's The Secret Agent; Dostoevsky's Demons.

A few performances that especially astonished me: Stravinsky's Nightingale and other fables at BAM (and the ombromanie of Philippe Beau!); Philip Glass's Satyagraha, at the Met; and Krapp's Last Tape, with John Hurt and also at BAM. Music from Nico Muhly and Thomas Bartlett has been an ongoing delight.

The film that most preoccupied me: Helen Hill's The Florestine Collection, completed after her death by Paul Gailiunas.

The TV series that I want to live in, thus recent preoccupation with fictions of alternate realities: Fringe.

I don't listen to enough new music to make good recommendations in a broad sense, but new albums from P. J. Harvey and Gillian Welch are both remarkable.

Books to look out for in 2012: Sarah Manguso's The Guardians: An Elegy; Marco Roth's Transmission; and Heidi Julavits's The Vanishers.

I probably read a better range of books in 2010, but that is because I was on sabbatical. In 2011 my thoughts were much engaged with books I was writing and books I was teaching, most of which are not really prominently represented here. I continue to have a deep-seated obsession, though, with Swift's Tale of a Tub...

"Perfectly good at it"

2011-12-22T23:25:00.000-05:00

How much does it cost to make a hit song?

(NB not sure how much marketing had to do with it, but this Rihanna song has been played at something near to 100% of all spin classes I've attended in the last year!)

A plan

2011-12-22T14:21:00.000-05:00

I made my chart...

I bought my supplies...

(I don't know why Blogger will only import these pictures in sideways rotation! That is irksome.)

Let the wild revision begin!

I will now take advantage of the fact that it's 58F and sunny to go and scout a few of the three or four neighborhood locations that I intend to make more use of in the next draft. My plan for the next three weeks is pretty clear. I will go to Philadelphia this weekend for a couple of days, arriving home Monday evening. I then have three full weeks of writing time before school starts: week of Dec. 26, week of Jan. 2, week of Jan. 9 (I'll be in Cayman for a spell, Jan. 7-15). I should be able to eke out a couple more weeks of decent writing time once school starts, but a practice of morning writing during the semester can only be sustained for so long, and I know it will collapse a couple weeks in. So the next 2 weeks are designed to generate as much new material as possible, then the week in Cayman I'll take the whole thing apart and put it back together again with new pieces, doing blow-by-blow start-to-finish revisions over the rest of January. Get a good new version to my editor by Monday, Jan. 30, and let it sit for 1.5 months so that I can do my final tough pass through over spring break in March.

I do think the book needs a new title: The Magic Circle is fine, but a little too bland. (The Bacchae on Morningside Heights was abstruse and unpronounceable, but is still of course how I think of the book in my head.) I will see if some obvious name emerges as I work on the next round.

Ptydepe

2011-12-22T12:03:00.000-05:00

Sarah Weinman's favorite crime novels of 2011. I have just downloaded all the ones I haven't read already, it's a great selection; I think the one I am most impatiently awaiting of her list of forthcoming ones is the Carol O'Connell.

Also: Adam Thirlwell's bootleg Havel.

Kipple

2011-12-22T00:04:00.000-05:00

Is Jonathan Ames a stunted Grey Gardens bachelor drowning in kipple?

Two moons

2011-12-21T13:45:00.002-05:00

I think it is now really and truly the end of the semester: I was still finishing up little leftover bits of business this morning, but the way now seems to be clear towards novel revisions...

Read a lovely book the other night, Anna Goldsworthy's Piano Lessons: A Memoir. It is fantastic, and this copy is now destined for my mother, who will love it at least as much as I did. It makes me think now that sometime I should teach a seminar on pedagogy that would be constructed around this and other books that shed light on great teaching? At any rate I will start trying to collect readings around that theme, and suggestions are welcome in comments or by email.

Main fact of last few days is that I have fallen hard into the amazing stream of words that is Haruki Murakami's 1Q84. It is the perfect novel that I most want to read of all things in the world! I bought a real copy of the book when it came out, as I figured it was the sort of thing I like to keep on the shelf after I've read it, but the physical book seemed so cumbersome (it is beautifully designed but hard to hold) that it went unread. So I bought a second copy for Kindle (and IMO this is what publishers should be trying to do, i.e. sell bundled copies in multiple formats) and am completely and passionately smitten by it. Alternate-universe fiction at its very best: I think it probably gets my vote for favorite novel of the year.

(Oh, yes, I think I read one other novel as well, a good recommendation from Maxine: Jussi Adler-Olson's Mercy a.k.a. - same book - The Keeper of Lost Causes.)

The Girl Barber

2011-12-19T09:52:00.003-05:00

Ed Park on Kim Jong-il's film criticism.

"xxxx and xxxxx---"

2011-12-17T23:48:00.000-05:00

Have spent the rest of the evening since my previous post reading Joan Didion's two books of grieving, The Year of Magical Thinking and Blue Nights. Sideways research, as it were, for the review I'm writing for Monday (I had speculated that the relationship between the book I'm reviewing there and its author's previous work of nonfiction might be akin to the asymmetrical pairing of these two books of Didion's, and I think it is probably the case).

I have not over the course of my life been a great admirer of Didion's writing, but here is a sequence I found entirely arresting (these should be regular indented sentence/paragraphs, with no space in between):

"What we need here is a montage, music over. How she: talked to her father and xxxx and xxxxx---

"xx," he said.

"xxx," she said.

"How she:

"How she did this and why she did that and what the music was when they did x and x and xxx---

"How he, and also she---"

The above are notes I made in 1995 for a novel I published in 1996, The Last Thing He Wanted. I offer them as a representation of how comfortable I used to be when I wrote, how easily I did it, how little thought I gave to what I was saying until I had already said it. In fact, in any real sense, what I was doing then was never writing at all: I was doing no more than sketching in a rhythm and letting that rhythm tell me what it was I was saying. Many of the marks I set down on that page were no more than "xxx," or "xxxx," symbols that meant "copy tk," or "copy to come," but do notice: such symbols were arranged in specific groupings. A single "x" different from a double "xx," "xxx" from "xxxx." The number of such symbols had a meaning. The arrangement was the meaning.

Retributional geology

2011-12-17T20:03:00.002-05:00

So tired I can't do anything! And have made no progress today on the couple of work things that stand between me and book revision. But I just finished reading an amazingly good novel, Vanessa Veselka's Zazen: Richard Nash sent it to me some months ago, but somehow I never opened up the file on my Kindle. Can't find the link now, but I must have seen it mentioned this past week on some indie-best-of-end-of-year list that described it as being set in a parallel universe; since I am still in a painful condition of wanting nothing more than to submerge myself in infinite as yet unaired and in some cases unmade episodes of Fringe, this seemed like a godsend. I loved it.

π

2011-12-17T18:59:00.004-05:00

Frank Felstenstein's talk the other day on "Smollett Then and Now" was exceptionally interesting: he summarized some insights that emerged from his editing Smollett's Travels Through France and Italy for Clarendon (published in 1979, and composed of course primarily on a manual and then on an electric typewriter), and then reediting it over the past few years for a new Broadview edition. All sorts of fascinating reflections on how things have changed in terms of research tools, but I was captivated by the detail that when Frank edited the volume for the Oxford World's Classics edition, Oxford was just transitioning from type to digital, but had only an italic digital font for Greek: which posed a problem because Smollett at one point describes a building he sees as being much like the Greek character π - and an italic font produced an entirely unfounded Leaning-Tower-of-Pisa effect! They tried using II instead, and in the end had to substitute a handdrawn figure prior to photoprinting, which is a bit of an eyesore on the page....

(Frank has also recently been involved with an amazing project that originated with his discovery of a remarkably complete set of records concerning library borrowers and the items they read in Muncie, Indiana from 1891 to 1902.)

"LACK occasional tables"

2011-12-17T00:13:00.001-05:00

Via Carolyn, what Lisbeth Salander bought at Ikea!

Spool...

2011-12-16T23:39:00.000-05:00

Perfect play, perfect performance. (Only I wish people would not cough so much in the quiet parts!) Afterwards we took the subway from BAM to Chambers St. and had a beautiful dinner at Odeon. (I had a pan-roasted cod special, with nicoise olives and tomatoes and soft-baked baby onions, then macerated berries with mascarpone for dessert - delicious. The dessert list there is amazing: there are two lists, and I was mighty tempted to get a root-beer float in honor of a recent episode of Fringe although really that is the sort of sweet that is better on an empty stomach as a full-on snack. I was hemming and hawing over whether to get the berries or the warm doughnuts with jam dipping sauce - I asked the waiter for his advice, he looked stymied and said he would eat both - dining companion G., with a wicked twinkle in his eye, said "Get both!" Of course really it would be both unseemly and nutritionally unsound, but it is a beautiful idea that one could actually do that in a restaurant!)

Decemberism

2011-12-15T11:29:00.001-05:00

Just taking a short breather for a quick blog post! My student's dissertation defense went very well yesterday, I think, and I am hugely happy to see her clear the final obstacle before receiving the degree (minor revisions will be made to the manuscript before it is deposited about a month from now, but this was the last institutional hurdle).

Chipping away at huge pile of end-of-semester tasks, but the end is in sight. Will see Krapp's Last Tape on Friday evening at BAM, family lunch on Sunday, but otherwise pretty much just meeting end-of-semester obligations and looking forward to next week and my schedule being very much more clear and full of time for novel revision.

Finished Stephen King (I think Connie Willis's vision of time travel in the Blackout-All Clear volumes is more emotionally resonant for me, but I did enjoy King's book quite a bit, and he remains an exceptional storyteller). Read Jeffrey Eugenides's The Marriage Plot, which I enjoyed a good deal but didn't quite see the larger point of: it is not dissimilar to The Art of Fielding, but I guess I would say that I thought Harbach's was the more appealing book of the two. (For a different take, see Sharon Marcus's excellent review of The Marriage Plot.) For my last student independent study meeting tomorrow, I need to try and finish Jonathan Lethem's Chronic City, although I'm not sure I'll have time as I have to go to a seminar this evening...

E.D.

2011-12-13T08:50:00.002-05:00

Good interviews with Lutz and Lethem.

"A 'lobster trick' rewriteman"

2011-12-11T12:42:00.001-05:00

This article has just introduced me to the phrase "the lobster shift." Green's Dictionary of Slang gives a first usage from 1927 (of the variant "lobster trick") and suggests it derives from "the slow pace of the crustacean; i.e. such a shift, usu. between 2:00a.m. and 9:00a.m. is rarely busy." It would make a great title for a novel...

Post-Shandyism

2011-12-10T20:14:00.001-05:00

Had a very good session yesterday with the eighteenth-century reading group on Fielding's Tom Thumb. During a lull late in the conversation, I was able to pick everyone's brains about a class I have proposed to teach next year, a graduate seminar with the rubric "eighteenth-century modernities." I had imagined it built around Swift's Tale of a Tub, Pope's Dunciads and Tristram Shandy, and I wanted to hear other obvious suggestions from consciousnesses not my own, including critical and theoretical readings. It may be that Bacon and Descartes and Locke and Shaftesbury and Addison and Adam Smith have to be in there, along of course with Johnson's Dictionary; but I am also persuaded that I should teach a sequel semester on Post-Shandyism! Boswell's Life of Johnson, Burney's Cecilia, Godwin (perhaps the Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication), Peacock's satirical meta-fictions, Don Juan...

(This is the first time I've used my new printer to scan anything, but I am hoping it is possible to click and enlarge for a better view of my utterly illegible notes to self!)

School year blues

2011-12-10T19:49:00.001-05:00

I have nothing interesting to say when I see colleagues and students except for the ever-present observation that it is a bad time of the school year! This coming week will again be very busy. I have managed to finish all my reading for Monday today (for the final undergraduate seminar, Swift's "Verses on the Death of Dr. Swift," Pope's "Epistle to Arbuthnot" and several pieces of criticism including a very lovely essay by David Womersley with the suggestive title "'now deaf 1740'" from this volume, and for my graduate class David Markson's haunting novel Reader's Block). A long list of tasks to get done tomorrow before the whirlwind final end-of-semester week, which includes a department meeting, two committee meetings, a dissertation defense, one final independent study meeting (better remember to read that book this week!) and a host of other student meetings. If I do my grading promptly, though, I could submit grades on Monday the 19th (I also have a review due that day) and transition shortly thereafter to novel revision...

Not much time for light reading this past week, but I have read a few books here and there around the edges of the vast mounds of paper that have demanded my more immediate attention (dissertations, writing samples, job letters, etc.) Finished Moneyball, which I enjoyed a great deal despite knowing virtually nothing about baseball. Read Michael Connelly's latest, The Drop - Connelly's novels are a very consistent pleasure, and he never just seems to be going through the motions even in these installments of long-running series. Read a very unusual mystery novel by Alice LaPlante, called Turn of Mind, after reading about it here: it has some flaws as a crime novel, but as a portrait of a narrator/protagonist with Alzheimer's it is mesmerizing. About halfway through Stephen King's 11/22/63, as I knew I would need something long and narrative and relatively undemanding to get me through the week.

"Crazed with contumely and overwork"

2011-12-07T22:42:00.001-05:00

“I met Murder on the way – / He had a mask like Castlereagh”: amazing TLS piece by Ferdinand Mount on the true history of Lord Castlereagh.

Sleeping with one eye open

2011-12-06T11:05:00.001-05:00

Is a weak dollar the best thing for American rock'n'roll? (Via Tyler Cowen.)

"Language is a poison"

2011-12-05T07:51:00.001-05:00

Jacob Gross interviews Ben Marcus at Harper's (via Blue) on his new book:

... I was exhausted by, or just done with, certain techniques. I kept using the same shovel, digging up the exact same shit. I wanted to change my shovel. Maybe use my hands. Maybe dig up into the air instead of down into the soil. I wondered if my endless return to the same ideas and concepts could maybe be blamed on my regular reliance on the same techniques — the syntax, the tones, the rhetoric. I felt that if I changed those I might be able to uncover a different part of my imagination, maybe some little untouched place the other tools weren’t reaching. A different kind of surgery on whatever place I look to for fiction.

Took the plunge

2011-12-04T13:47:00.001-05:00

and ordered tickets for Cycle 3 of the Ring Cycle at the Met - found a good friend who would do it with me, that was the clincher. Who knows when I will have the chance again? In a best-case scenario, it is a truly magical and transporting experience; in the worst-case scenario, parts of it are somewhat boring and it adds an onerous number of hours to a busy week, but I think there is no huge downside, it will be worthwhile whether or not I absolutely love it.

(Have uncharacteristically watched some hours of television this weekend - usually I only watch seasons of television on DVD with B. in Cayman, but we were very near the end of the third season of Fringe when we parted ways at the end of the Thanksgiving odyssey, it is a program which is very perfectly suited to my tastes, and my new laptop makes it very easy to watch videos from Amazon anywhere in my apartment - I watched the last three episodes of season 3 and then, regrettably, the first seven of season 4, which is as far as it now goes - am in horrible desiring limbo now of wanting all the rest of the season in one fell swoop, when really it will only be doled out WEEK BY UNREASONABLE WEEK over the rest of this year. Anybody who has secret early access, tell me and get me in on it too! Though I do observe, as always with this series, that they play overly fast and loose with the alternate universes: I feel that though high-quality television does a good job creating investment in characters over a season and its successors, the provision of too many alternates in this sort of a plot erodes general belief in and concern with the characters, to a sometimes problematic degree.)

"That rain-forest experience"

2011-12-04T09:45:00.001-05:00

I enjoyed this profile of a choirmaster who lives in the Cathedral Close at St. John the Divine. I need to go and prowl around the cathedral sometime in the next couple weeks; I have a list of local spots of interest (Grant's Tomb, Sakura Park, Morningside Park) that I need to do some more footwork on so that I can make more of them in the revision of BOMH that I'll be working on over the winter break. I am most anxious for the semester to be really and truly over so that I can clear the mental space for experiencing places and thinking those revisions through! Two more very busy weeks, but if I am diligent and not overly dilatory about paper-marking I am mentally and logistically free from the 19th...

Determination and a towel

2011-12-04T08:58:00.001-05:00

At the Observer Review, Kate Kellaway recommends Susie Parr's new book about wild swimming.

Swan songs

2011-12-02T19:39:00.001-05:00

It is tempting to introduce this piece by John Banville about Harold Bloom's latest book under a rubric something like "Banville reads Bloom so you don't have to," but really it is a sympathetic and effective summary of some high points, and reminds me of what a great impression Bloom made on me when I took his Shakespeare seminar many years ago at Yale:

At a fundamental level, all of Bloom's work constitutes a sustained superlative for the Bard. "As a secularist with Gnostic proclivities," he writes, "and above all as a literary aesthete, I preach Bardolatry as the most benign of all religions." For him, simply, "Shakespeare is God".

Also: Diana Nyad, marathon swimmer.

Closing tabs

2011-12-01T16:10:00.001-05:00

Very glad to be home again, but so tired that I really do not know what to do with myself! (But probably it would be a good idea to get off the computer!) Assignments to mark and letters of recommendation to write, but cannot face them quite yet...

Closing tabs:

Caroline Dworin's lovely and poignant piece about growing up inside of a stage set.

An interesting piece by Colleen Mondor about her book The Map of My Dead Pilots.

Requiem for the dragon lady

2011-11-30T13:52:00.001-05:00

The other set of tabs I've had open on my computer for many days now: obituaries for Anne McCaffrey. Oh, how I loved her books at age eleven and twelve - especially the Harper Hall trilogy, but really the Pern books more generally, and I think I must have read everything she published, at least if I could get my hands on a copy. I still think I should have a clutch of fire lizards as pets! It is the end of an era for me now, with Anne McCaffrey and Dick Francis representing the two pillars of my early adolescent light reading...

Hugger-mugger

2011-11-30T13:42:00.001-05:00

Contrary to the impression that may be created here, I usually enjoy an extremely quiet and solitary life! Am slightly cracking under the pressure of so much human contact over the last week: each individual piece of Thanksgiving was nice, but cumulatively overwhelming, and having only got home Sunday night from Virginia via Amtrak, I was horrified and appalled to have to leave for the airport again less than 24 hours later!

Yesterday's BU lecture was very enjoyable (special thanks to the Light Reading fan, a BU Core alum, who came up afterwards to say hello!), and I've had the chance to catch up with various friends, but I am now completely behind on my normal end-of-semester school responsibilities and will collapse into my desk chair at home with a sigh of relief late this evening...

(Thursday and Friday this week are very busy, as are the next two weeks more generally, but I should be able to hole up this weekend and read the first of the two dissertations I need to get through this month. I am desperate for (a) some down time and (b) clear mental space to revise my novel!)

Have had virtually no time to read, but I did enjoy Jacqueline Carey's Santa Olivia sequel Saints Astray and Marcus Sakey's At the City's Edge. Halfway through Michael Lewis's Moneyball and enjoying it a good deal (it's free through the Kindle Lending Library if you have Amazon Prime): I saw the movie with B. last week, and it struck me then as ideal Hollywood fare, but the book is inevitably considerably better due to its having much greater quantities of information and analysis!

Books for the twenty-first century

2011-11-21T10:41:00.001-05:00

Lee Konstantinou interviews Helen DeWitt for the Los Angeles Review of Books.

Other minuscules

2011-11-21T09:35:00.001-05:00

A point of considerable curiosity to my students, especially as we looked at amazing books at the Berg Collection at the NYPL on Thursday evening: the long "s"...

Secrets of style

2011-11-20T09:40:00.001-05:00

D. A. Miller, on theperverse relation of style to the marriage plot in Austen's fiction (today I am teaching Jane Austen, or The Secrets of Style): "Though the heroine’s adoptionof style may induce the courtship plot, what brings this plot to fruition—what getsher desire to quicken, too—is amoment of mortification when, the better to acquire the selfhood she had neverbefore wanted, the heroine forsakesstyle; or rather, what is much more demeaning, she flattens it into a merelydecorative reminiscence of itself, like a flower pressed into a wedding album."

Also:

A trove of unpublished works by Anthony Burgess.

Phil Hogan interviews Gillian Welch and David Rawlings for the Observer.

Closing tabs

2011-11-17T15:40:00.001-05:00

It has been an unproductive day thus far in the sense that I have neither exercised nor done any 'real' work, but it was hugely beneficial in terms of mental health and tidying and organizing just to have a day at home sorting things out. B. is arriving in an hour or so from the airport, and the apartment is ready for a visitor; the kitchen table (a.k.a. desk: it is actually an old drawing table bestowed on me by a neighbor in Cambridge c. 1993) is covered with neat piles of work and manuscripts; I have my Boston hotel reservation for the week immediately after Thanksgiving and have called in prescription refills and done a host of other minor errands of that sort.

I'm about halfway through John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection Pulphead, and finding it completely mesmerizing. His essay on Michael Jackson sent me last night to this uncanny clip.

Life vicissitudes of A Very Young Dancer.

The uncanny red landscapes of Kodak Aerochrome.

Bret McKenzie of Conchords fame has written three songs for the new Muppets movie (the piece is by Adam Sternbergh). Writing for Disney has its constraints:

For example: At one point, McKenzie wrote a lyrical joke for Kermit, in which he would sing, “I remember when I was just a little piece of felt.” That didn’t fly. “I was told: ‘You’re not allowed to do that. The Muppets have always existed. You can’t break down their world.’ ” Another rule: Frogs and bears and pigs can talk, but penguins and chickens can’t. They can cluck or squawk musically, but they can’t say words. “So I was like, ‘Can we get the penguins to sing?’ And they’d say: ‘No. Penguins don’t sing.’ ”

Last night I saw the slight but charming She Kills Monsters at the Flea; afterwards, the place we usually eat at after a show at the Flea was closed for a private party, so we checked out White & Church. The menu is quite limited and the space and set-up give the feel more of a bar than a restaurant as such, but the food is superb.

Paper moon

2011-11-16T01:09:00.001-05:00

Satyagraha was utterly magical. That's the Times review, click through and watch the video if you have some spare minutes - I don't know that it conveys how lovely the music is, but it does give some approximate sense of the beauty of the mise-en-scene, especially the puppetry and the use of paper and other inexpensive props (I do not know that I have ever seen a better use of paper in a stage production). It is later in Gandhi's life than his South African career that he would become strongly associated with the handloom, but there is a particularly beautiful scene that involves something like tape being wound back and forth across the stage like the warp on a simple mechanical loom - it is beautiful!

(I often think during a good masters swim workout that the pool exudes an industrious vibe much like a loom - this opera, too, gave me the feeling of structure and variation that is part of what I particularly enjoy about a very good swim workout. Expansive, opening, industrious!)

"Tickling, Vociferating, Diving"

2011-11-14T19:25:00.001-05:00

Post title from The Dunciad, selected early this morning - only I got too busy to actually write a post! It is a good sequence of words, though....

Light reading from the end of last week: Richard Kadrey's latest Sandman Slim novel, Aloha From Hell (great voice, but feels a bit undermotivated in terms of plot and purpose); and Amy Waldman's The Submission. I could criticize many things about this one, but that would be to ignore the fact that I started reading it as the plane taxied to takeoff (it was my non-Kindle book, and I expected to put it aside once the pilot gave the OK on electronic devices - the trick with these things is to choose something not so gripping that one can't have it for the landing also, i.e. that can be read in 15-minute stints over a couple of flights!) and couldn't put it down. I finished reading pretty much exactly as the plane touched down at JFK (it's about a 3.5hr flight). Highly immersive, despite some shallowness in the portraiture and occasional awkwardness in the writing.

Tabbage

2011-11-11T17:40:00.001-05:00

Beautiful FT piece by Leah Price with interviews of writers and photographs of their libraries (FT site registration required). It is a small sampler of what sounds like a book I must acquire as soon as possible: Unpacking My Library: Writers and their Books, published by Yale University Press later this month.

Also, Alan Garner, Alan Turing. (Via Sarang.) It would have to be said that few books I've ever read have stayed with me as strongly as Andrew Hodges's Alan Turing: The Enigma (read when I was 21 or so) and Alan Garner's The Owl Service (read when I was 8 or 9). In short, a slightly uncanny nexus for me.

(NYRB Classics has just reissued Garner's novel Red Shift.)

End-of-week update

2011-11-11T14:43:00.001-05:00

By dint of a fairly ferocious week-long effort I have now crossed off every single item but one on the list of work I brought with me (the exception is a small piece I said I'd write for Frequencies, and I can definitely write that later this evening or tomorrow before I have to go to the airport mid-afternoon). Phew - contemplating the next three weeks is no longer inducing a minor nervous breakdown...

Cult pork

2011-11-09T14:43:00.001-05:00

McRib as arbitrage strategy?

(Via Tyler Cowen.)

Blissful news

2011-11-09T11:04:00.003-05:00

I've been sitting on this since the end of last week. Now it is official, I can announce it publicly!

In general it always makes me happy to have positive arrangements sorted out for moving forward, but I'm particularly thrilled to be working with Ed Park, longtime friend and literary co-conspirator: the conversation I had with him a couple weeks ago about what I might do to make the novel even better (book-writing is never done, and I am afraid I am an inveterate draft-writer!) was one of the most inspiring I've ever had. Let the revisions begin - once this semester is through!

Guggenheim recipient and Columbia professor Jenny Davidson's THE MAGIC CIRCLE, revolving around three women friends in their thirties who all share a passion for gaming, with shocking results, to Ed Park at Amazon Publishing, for publication in Winter 2013, by Kathleen Anderson at Anderson Literary Management (World English).

"Germany becomes Greek!"

2011-11-09T10:29:00.000-05:00

At the LRB blog, Tom McCarthy on Kittler's gramophones.

Timetable woes

2011-11-08T21:56:00.003-05:00

Had a minor but total freakout late this afternoon when I realized that I had mentally inserted an imaginary week into my schedule between now and Thanksgiving. When am I going to get all that work done?!?

(The realization came to me as I corresponded with the curators at the Berg Collection at the NYPL, who are generously doing a session for my undergraduate class at a time they persistently referred to as 'next week' - I almost wrote back to correct them and tell them it is scheduled for the 17th, then had my horrifying revelation!)

Hmmm....

(The problem is that on top of normal school stuff, I have overscheduled a bunch of optional but non-opt-outable things of value for next week: Monday heavy teaching load and a set of assignments coming in, then I have opera tickets for Tuesday, seeing a play with G. on Wednesday, NYPL session Thursday evening and also B. is arriving from the airport, another opera on Saturday, then Monday seminars, then the evils of Thanksgiving which is the worst-timed holiday in the academic year; the real problem is that I won't be home till Sunday night on the 27th, then teach both classes Monday and fly to Boston Monday evening to give an as-yet-unwritten lecture on Gulliver's Travels on Tuesday to the students in the core curriculum at BU! I thought I was going to get all of the post-Thanksgiving week's work done before B. got to NYC, only now I realize that I am only home for 4 days before he comes, so that it is not at all a realistic plan! I do have a five-hour train ride on Sunday the 27th from Manassas to NYC, so I will hope to get substantive work done then also, but Amtrak is always very crowded that weekend and it's not always an environment conducive to work.)

(In retrospect there is one other major piece of work - 6-7 novels I need to read for a prize committee - that I should have brought with me to Cayman, only now it is too late to do anything about it...)

The long and the short: the next six weeks are going to be extremely demanding, I'd better pace myself?

Holiday edition

2011-11-07T21:48:00.000-05:00

The sad truth about Columbia's election holiday is that I mostly use it to catch up on work! Just finishing a tenure letter for a scholar at another university (these are time-consuming) and will spend Tuesday and Wednesday working on a similar letter for an untenured but prolific colleague at my home institution as well as writing several other letters of recommendation and an overdue reader's report on a journal article.

On the bright side, though, I'm in an environment full of lizards and chickens; I got to do an Olympic-distance triathlon yesterday; I intend to go to yoga every day this week unless the minor sinus infection that has been teasing me since Friday escalates; and I read two very enjoyable books, quite different from each other, during Friday travels: Jacqueline Carey's Santa Olivia, which was so thoroughly immersive that I gnashed my teeth when I finished it and realized I couldn't get the next installment for my Kindle until November 22; and Siddartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, which is so fascinating and so well-written that I gnashed my teeth at the thought that I am not capable of writing such a book myself. It was a satisfactory day of reading that took away the pains of a long layover in the Miami airport!

Another thing

2011-11-03T22:28:00.000-04:00

The aesthetics of love and hate in cultural criticism.

Appassionato

2011-11-03T14:16:00.001-04:00

Judith Thurman on Alfred Brendel's final US master class. (Via Blake Eskin.)

Treat!

2011-11-02T22:41:00.000-04:00

I am not much of a one for Halloween, but I got home on Monday just as large numbers of highly excited children were congregating in the building lobby for the annual Halloween party and maniacal subsequent hallway-and-stairwell trick-or-treating, and was swept up in the hospitality of some neighbors I like very much but don't see too often! Walked away from their place an hour or so later feeling the soothing effects of cheese, beer and candy but also with a real treat tucked under my arm: an advance copy of Heidi Julavits's The Vanishers, a novel I have been coveting ever since I first heard about it a few months ago.

I am very happy to report that it is divinely satisfactory, her best book yet (which is saying quite a lot). It is also curiously and perfectly suited to my own reading tastes: imagine faint shades of Ishiguro's The Unconsoled and Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead, a way with steeply pitched verbs that's slightly reminiscent of Gary Lutz or Sam Lipsyte ("magneted," "throttled up," "pay-per-viewing"), a quasi-Parkian reflection on disambiguation and an amazing new definition of override, an eclectic and idiosyncratic mix of occult and spiritualist references, the notions that the "oblique glimpses into the lives of cinema strangers" one gets from seeing foreign films might be the only thing that would partly compensate one for the cessation of "psychic forays" and that parapsychologists would never use social networks due to the fact that they're "'a boon for psychic attackers.'" In short, an unusual and memorable first-person narrator, a fantastic and compelling story - strongly recommended...

Two other things I also liked very much this week: N. K. Jemisin's novel The Kingdom of Gods, the final volume of her excellent Inheritance trilogy; and a gripping Kindle Single by Mishka Shubaly, The Long Run.

The alien kiss

2011-11-01T14:01:00.000-04:00

"I had always longed to meet an octopus. . . ." (Via I.H.D.)

The weekend edition

2011-10-30T20:36:00.002-04:00

Have finished all reading for tomorrow (a good chunk of Jonathan Arac's Critical Genealogies: Historical Situations for Postmodern Literary Studies, Gulliver's Travels and Terry Castle's essay "Why the Houyhnhnms Don't Write"); must write comments on at least a few assignments before I stop work for the evening, but really I am weary and will have to do the rest of them and prepare actual classes in the early morning tomorrow.

The Philadelphia trip today was tiring but worthwhile (fortunately my trains weren't seriously delayed - all sorts of other Amtrak and New Jersey transit trains were canceled or delayed by hours due to yesterday's storm). Bonus: the birthday party featured two different kinds of cake, both very delicious! One was daffodil cake, courtesy of E. and the Spring Mill Cafe (it is a very good light angel's food cake with whipped cream and lemon curd); the other (I think I have its provenance right) was the amazingly good red velvet cake from Golosa. My preferred cake of that ilk is carrot or pumpkin bread, not red velvet, as I am suspicious of the notion of ingesting large amounts of red food coloring (or on the other hand why not just have chocolate cake if you are moving in that direction?); but it is very good, the icing was perfect....

I have a lot to do this week, but on Friday morning I am leaving the country for a week at B.'s place! Will have to take a heap of work with me, it is true, but it will be good nonetheless: I am taking advantage of Columbia's oddly timed election holiday and a week with no actual teaching or office-hour obligations. It is fortuitous that I will be able to participate in the Cayman Islands Triathlon a week from today; also, there is an 800m swim race next Saturday, rescheduled from October due to weather, so there's no reason I shouldn't do that also. Due to a combination of insufficient training on my part and the fact that exclusively quite fast people do triathlons in Cayman, I will certainly be one of the last couple finishers, but it should be enjoyable nonetheless, though I will be cursing my lack of heat acclimation on the run...

I must say

2011-10-29T21:39:00.001-04:00

that I am mighty tempted to secure a seat for one of these Ring Cycle series in the spring. I don't know Wagner's music well at all, so it is more a program of self-education than of true self-lavishing pleasure, but it seems as though it might be worthwhile, and I do not know when I'll have such an easy chance again. I have a ticket (up in the very highest, farthest-away seats, through bargain CU ticket-purchasing!) to the Philip Glass Satyagraha for later this month, I might scope out which of the not-quite-cheapest-but-not-so-expensive seats would seem an improvement on the basics if I were to go to Wagner - there are operas I will see from the furthest distance and steepest and most vertiginous seating (namely, anything Mozart), whereas Verdi et al. I will only see from lavishly expensive seats paid for by someone other than myself. Wagner might fall somewhere between the two.... On the other hand, there are the HD simulcast performances also, where (as it has been observed) one can slip out to use the bathroom and get a drink of water...*

(It was this NYT review of Siegfried that made me think of it. It is a minor point, but Eric Owens was my Philadelphia contemporary and the star student of my oboe teacher Susan Simon: I didn't know him in those days other than in passing, i.e. at Settlement music recitals, but he was one of those incredibly talented multifaceted musicians who you are not at all surprised to hear years later praised in print in the most glowing terms...)

* (Actually I have looked up the text of the FT interview with Thomas Larcher that I had in mind, and it is more vivid than my paraphrase: “If a four-hour Morton Feldman quartet is performed in a concert hall, you start thinking after 90 minutes ‘Well, I really have to go to the loo’. And after two and a half hours it’s martyrdom. But if you’re listening to the recording at home, while lying in bed and smoking some dope, it can be great.")

Black velvet icing

2011-10-29T15:50:00.000-04:00

At the FT, Rebecca Rose on the Experimental Food Society (FT site registration required). Great pictures there: I want a sugarcraft eagle and an Eiffel Tower made of Curly Wurly bars! The Experimental Food Society website has more pictures...

Fright night

2011-10-28T05:58:00.000-04:00

Scary stories at The Second Pass; you will find my choice at the bottom. Courtesy of Levi Stahl.

A ticket to Buffalo

2011-10-27T22:22:00.000-04:00

I fear I am about to explode from stress at the amount of work I need to get done in the next four days in and around other commitments!

Finished Colson Whitehead's Zone One. The writing is incredibly sharp, and I loved the first third or so, but I found my enthusiasm slightly cooling due to relative lack of plot. I definitely still recommend it, but not as passionately as I might have on the basis of early passages like this one:

There were your standard-issue skels, and then there were the stragglers. Most skels, they moved. They came to eat you--not all of you, but a nice chomp here or there, enough to pass on the plague. Cut off their feet, chop off their legs, and they'd gnash the air as they heaved themselves forward by their splintered fingernails, looking for some ankle action. The marines had eliminated most of this variety before the sweepers arrived.

The stragglers, on the other hand, did not move, and that's what made them a suitable objective for civilian units. They were a succession of imponderable tableaux, the malfunctioning stragglers and the places they chose to haunt throughout the Zone and beyond. An army of mannequins, limbs adjusted by an inscrutable hand. The former shrink, plague-blind, sat in her requisite lounge chair, feet up on the ottoman, blank attentive face waiting for the patient who was late, ever late, and unpacking the reasons for this would consume a large portion of a session that would never occur. The patient failed to arrive, was quite tardy, was dead, was running through a swamp with a hatchet, pursued by monsters. The pock-faced assistant manager of the shoe store crouched before the foot-measuring instrument, frozen, sans customers, the left shoes of his bountiful stock on display along the walls of the shop on miniature plastic ledges. The vitamin-store clerk stalled out among the aisles, depleted among the plenty, the tiny bottles containing gel-capped ancient remedies and placebos. The owner of the plant store dipped her fingers into the soil of a pot earmarked for a city plant, one hearty in the way the shop's customers were hearty, for wasn't every citizen on the grand island a sort of sturdy indoor variety that didn't need much sunlight. . . .

Anyway, it is very lovely writing, in a hybrid satirical-elegiac vein.

Also, and this really was the perfect light reading, the first installment of Denise Mina's new series, Still Midnight, which really is pretty much exactly what I most enjoy in this vein. Unfortunately I purchased that and its sequel in haste without realizing that I had already read The End of the Wasp Season - I had it in the form of a 'real' book, and even the Amazon website is not capable of telling me that I bought a paper version of the book at a Chapters in Ottawa in June! (If memory serves...)

A digression in the modern kind

2011-10-24T21:51:00.002-04:00

An odd, almost eerily matched pair of readings for my two different independent studies meetings this week (fortunately I have read both very recently and will not need to do any particular preparation): Swift's Tale of a Tub and Pynchon's Gravity's Rainbow....

Weighty tomes

2011-10-24T19:43:00.000-04:00

How much do your e-books weigh?

"My panache"

2011-10-23T10:17:00.001-04:00

I saw this performance what was probably later the same year when it moved to New York (it was my Christmas present, my mother and I went up on Amtrak to NYC for the day - a sort of extravagance we never did in those days! - to see the pair of RSC productions, Derek Jacobi in Much Ado About Nothing and Cyrano de Bergerac). I've seen only a handful of things since that could claim to match it, I'd say...

Of book readers and book writers

2011-10-23T10:02:00.000-04:00

My friend Rebecca Steinitz has written an interesting and moving column on what it feels like to go from being a lifelong reader to becoming the author of a published book, and how an academic career left behind may be more continuous with subsequent choices and experiences than it seems at the time.

Peek Freans redux

2011-10-21T18:37:00.001-04:00

It was clear from the general drift of reviews by James Wood at the New Yorker and Daniel Mendelsohn at the New York Review of Books that readers were not finding Alan Hollinghurst's The Stranger's Child an achievement on the order of The Line of Beauty, which is high on my own personal shortlist of novels at the perfect intersection of critical interestingness and passionate reader-love; now that I've read the new novel, I wouldn't say that I agree with all of the specifics of either critic's anatomizing of the book's flaws and failures (Wood is much too harsh on the Jamesian echoes, Mendelson emphasizes The Swimming Pool Library too much at the expense of The Folding Star which I am convinced is Hollinghurst's other masterpiece and the book I must soonest reread, I also don't at all see that it would have been a good idea for Hollinghurst to produce more of 'Cecil Valance''s poetry a-la-Possession), but there's no doubt that it doesn't add up to something especially substantial, as lovely as the bits may be. I enjoyed it a good deal, though, and I may give it a reread in six months or so to see if it shakes out differently for me at that point.

(I was fascinated by the way that in the section titled 'Steady, boys, steady!' the protagonist of Line of Beauty has here been split into two different characters, Peter and Paul; it's something like what Austen does, sequentially, as she rewrites pairs of heroines from Sense and Sensibility to Pride and Prejudice to Mansfield Park.)

Phrases that struck and pleased me:

- of a teacher, doing something at 9.35, "with the recurrent momentary dread and resolve that come with living by a timetable";

- of the same character's playing four-hand piano music with an older female character who is a much better pianist than he is (I love four-hands piano music as it was something my mother played now and again in my childhood, very well, an appealing mini-canon of early twentieth-century stuff):

There was an undeniable intimacy in the four-hand sessions with Corinna. Sharing her piano stool, he had a sense of the complete firmness of her person, her corseted side and hard bust, their hips rolling together as they reached and occasionally crossed on the keyboard. As the secondo player he did all the pedalling, but her legs sometimes jerked against his as if fighting the impulse to pedal herself. The contact was technical, of course, like that in sport, and not to be confused with other kinds of touching. None the less he felt she enjoyed it, she liked the businesslike rigour of its not being sexual as well as the unmentionable fraction by which it was.

- the pastiche bit of Dudley Valance's autobiography that describes his mother's "book tests," spiritualist exercises in the library

- of the callow young aspiring biographer, visiting an editor at the offices of the TLS as the "trolley stacked high with tightly bound bales of newsprint" arrives: "In a moment the plastic tape was snipped, and the top copy plucked up and turned and presented to Paul with a casual flourish: 'For you!' - the new TLS - Friday's TLS, ready two days early, 'hot off the press' someone said, enjoying his reactions, though in fact the paper was cool to the touch, even slightly damp" (and then the last sentences of the chapter, a few paragraphs later: "He kept his copy of the day-after-tomorrow's TLS under his arm, which he wanted very much to be seen with. He didn't think the people in the street here were getting the point of it - but back in the North Reading-Room of the British Library he felt it might stir a good deal of envy and conjecture" - the repetition of the letters TLS is almost like the barouche-landau in Emma)

And finally, because I have had a longstanding obsession with the Peek Freans 'fruit creme' biscuit, a childhood favorite that recently somewhat unfortunately reentered my current realm of preoccupation by way of the ruminations and biscuit-eating practices of Walter on Fringe (I almost bought exactly this box of biscuits in Ottawa a couple weeks ago, only it was not the moment - but I was certainly looking at them longingly! - the name itself is so mouth-alluring and peculiar to the eye, it's definitely part of the charm, though I am not underrating the appeal of the 'creme' and also the tug of the surprisingly chewy fruit jelly in the cookie that is the one I particularly like):

Next morning Paul sat in his hotel room, going over his notes, with a coffee tray beside him: the pitted metal pot with the untouchable handle, the lipsticked cup, the bowl of white sugar in soft paper tubes which he emptied serially into the three strong cupfuls he took, getting quickly excited and overheated. On a plate with a doily were five biscuits, and though he'd only just had breakfast he ate them all, the types so familiar - the Bourbon, the sugared Nice, the rebarbative ginger-nut, popped in whole - that he was touched for a moment by a sense of the inseparable poverty and consistency of English life, as crystallized in the Peek Frean assortment box.

Light reading around the edges: Nina Kiriki Hoffman's A Red Heart of Memories (a Jo Walton recommendation); Elizabeth Haynes's Into the Darkest Corner (very good, very scary) and Thomas Enger's Burned (also very good, I thought - showing slightly the signs of inexperience in the writing, but I will eagerly read subsequent installments in the series); and another crime novel I found somewhat silly, Colin Cotterill's Killed at the Whim of a Hat.

The flea's progress

2011-10-21T13:36:00.002-04:00

Fantastic piece by Will Self at the Guardian about the trouble with his blood. Warning: don't click through if you have trouble reading about needles and blood-related grotesquerie!...

Love letters

2011-10-20T11:22:00.001-04:00

The Florestine Collection in New Orleans.

Closing tabs

2011-10-20T08:41:00.001-04:00

Susan Shapiro on the perils of collaboration.

Colson Whitehead's zombies!

Lauren Myracle has handled what must be one of an author's worst nightmares with unusual grace and good temper.

APPROVED

2011-10-19T10:57:00.000-04:00

John Jeremiah Sullivan on what it's like to live in a house where a TV show is filmed.

Kindergarten

2011-10-18T11:09:00.001-04:00

The Montessori school I went to for kindergarten used composition books for children to keep track of their assignments. Young Jenny Davidson's handwriting improved a good deal over the course of that year...

(This book lets me say with certainty that I first read Charlotte's Web in April 1977 - I remember being very struck by the revelation that county was a different word from country!)

Delay, deferral

2011-10-17T13:53:00.000-04:00

From Johnson's "Life of Pope," on Pope's Iliad translation:

When we find him translating fifty lines a day, it is natural to suppose that he would have brought his work to a more speedy conclusion. The Iliad, containing less than sixteen thousand verses, might have been despatched in less than three hundred and twenty days by fifty verses in a day. The notes, compiled with the assistance of his mercenaries, could not be supposed to require more time than the text. According to this calculation, the progress of Pope may seem to have been slow; but the distance is commonly very great between actual performances and speculative possibility. It is natural to suppose, that as much as has been done to-day may be done to-morrow; but on the morrow some difficulty emerges, or some external impediment obstructs. Indolence, interruption, business, and pleasure, all take their turns of retardation; and every long work is lengthened by a thousand causes that can, and ten thousand that cannot, be recounted. Perhaps no extensive and multifarious performance was ever effected within the term originally fixed in the undertaker's mind. He that runs against Time, has an antagonist not subject to casualties.

The school year

2011-10-16T19:40:00.001-04:00

This is perhaps the moment at which I declare that the semester is officially getting the better of me! I have temporarily wrangled it back into submission - I've done all the reading for tomorrow's classes (Plato's "Phaedrus," Derrida's long essay "Plato's pharmacy," poems about women by Pope and Swift, Johnson's life of Pope), I've done the subsequent week's reading for the MA seminar so that I could write the assignment that's due in class next week and hand it out tomorrow, I've answered three of the five copy-editor's queries on my Shakespeare adaptation piece and am about to head out to the library to get the books I need to answer the other two. I've written comments on eight of the sixteen undergrad assignments I intend to give back in class tomorrow, and will perhaps find a quiet table in a cafe post-library visit where I can finish the other eight: if I do that, then I can stop for the evening and figure there's enough time in and around the cracks tomorrow to do the actual class prep....

(I was out too many evenings this week, especially given the fact that I didn't really have a weekend last week due to travels; I am already thumped by fatigue and it's not even Monday! I didn't make it out for a run this afternoon, either - too much work - which was a pity as it was the most perfect weather and I'm not very happy about how little I've been running this fall.)

The table in my living room has a huge and ominous pile of materials that I need to read and write important letters about (important to people other than myself, I mean!): I think I won't be able to tackle that until Wednesday. Ugh, ugh, ugh...

The beast

2011-10-16T07:47:00.002-04:00

Record-breaking chocolate bar! (Via I.H.D.)

"If I'm taking a walk and I see a cat, I'm happy"

2011-10-16T00:07:00.001-04:00

Emma Brockes profiles Haruki Murakami for the Guardian:

How, then, did he find the confidence to do what he wanted?

"Confidence; as a teenager? Because I knew what I loved. I loved to read; I loved to listen to music; and I love cats. Those three things. So, even though I was an only kid, I could be happy because I knew what I loved. Those three things haven't changed from my childhood. I know what I love, still, now. That's a confidence. If you don't know what you love, you are lost."

Clouds, water, paper

2011-10-15T22:38:00.001-04:00

"Water Stains on the Wall" was not quite what I expected: I had somehow (unrealistically!) imagined this Taiwanese dance piece that promised to mix up calligraphy and tai chi and ballet and all sorts of other things would capture exactly the magic of something else I saw at BAM in the spring, the ombromanie of Philippe Beau. At any rate, it was nothing like that: it was worthwhile, but I found it frustrating to have so little sense of the separate idioms that are being combined. I am really too much an academic, but I found myself with all sorts of questions I could not at all answer: most pressingly, were there specific postures or movements that would be known to the well-informed viewer as allusions to individual calligraphic characters or sequences? The dancers are interesting to watch (they are extraordinarily athletic), but no cumulative meanings emerge from the patterns on the stage; I think my favorite short sequence was one where the music went silent and the projections across the white sheet-of-paper stage suddenly went much more quickly and more really and truly like clouds across the sky - there were a few other moments that really captured my attention, and it was enjoyable to gaze upon throughout, but it withheld significance from the outside viewer. Also: why, oh why do these top-quality companies think it is OK to perform to recorded music? Really all you need is a couple of excellent people and some good equipment and a sense of what to do: Nico has of course spoiled me for this sort of thing, but the canned music is not convincing to me (it is mostly by this guy, it is not an idiom I know well either but it's the lack of a responsive live sound rather than the actual music as such that strikes me as irksome).

The ABCs of the novel

2011-10-15T08:02:00.000-04:00

I'm not sure whether this link will work for non-Columbia affiliates (it's an alumni event, but really it's open to the public), so I'll paste in the information just in case. They have a funny constraint: you are allowed to use a sheet of notes or an aide-memoire of some sort, but you're not supposed to lecture, they will prefer speakers to carry on off the tops of their heads! This is good, under the circumstances, as Monday is yet again my long teaching day: I've got a set of undergraduate assignments to comment on, Plato's "Phaedrus" and Derrida's essay "Plato's pharmacy" to read and prepare for the graduate class and a slew of poems about women by Swift and Pope (plus Johnson's "Life of Pope") for the afternoon class...

It would be nice to see a few familiar faces at the event, and if you are a regular reader here but don't know me in person and decide to attend, please make sure to introduce yourself!

Cafe Humanities: The ABCs of the Novel with Jenny Davidson
Date: Oct 17, 2011
Time: 6:00PM - 7:00PM ET
Location: PicNic Cafe
2665 Broadway (between 101st and 102nd), NYC
212-222-8222

Description:

Cafe Humanities is a series of informal discussions about the questions surrounding the humanities field today, led by Columbia University's foremost professors. The discussions are held at the Picnic Market Cafe at 2665 Broadway (between 101st and 102nd Street).

Professor of English and Comparative Literature Jenny Davidson will discuss The ABCs of the Novel

We often talk about the novel emerging in 17th-century Europe in response to all sorts of social, political and economic factors, in short as a historical phenomenon rooted in a particular time, place and set of intellectual conditions. A historical understanding is so integral to the discipline of English literary studies that we frequently don’t even question the premise that literature is best considered in groupings determined primarily by historical and geographical constraints. Davidson asks what happens when we banish historicism from the explanatory scheme and return to considering novels primarily in terms of their formal properties. Come listen to her share some thoughts about the risks and rewards of this sort of approach, as well as considering how it might let us revisit classics such as Don Quixote, Tom Jones and War and Peace with fresh eyes.

For more information, see www.columbia.edu/cu/english/fac_profiles.htm#jmd204.

Space is limited; $10 cover (cash only) includes one drink

"Let It Bleed"

2011-10-14T21:40:00.003-04:00

Ian Rankin prefers vinyl (FT site registration required).

A perfect evening

2011-10-14T18:40:00.000-04:00

My brother Michael and my adopted grandfather Gene joined me for the really lovely evening of music that was Nico's "conspiring" with Gotham Chamber Opera at (Le) Poisson Rouge. I really like going to stuff at that place: it is intelligently and comfortably cabaret-style, with lots of bathrooms and food and drink served at the table (the wait staff couldn't circulate so well in this configuration as in some others, so there were delays in table-clearing and follow-up, but nothing to mar the very substantial pleasures of the ear that were on offer). I had in the end bought tickets for all three of us, but the press agent had invited Gene to attend, and had reserved for us what were probably the best seats in the house: we were about ten feet away from the piano, with a very direct view of Nico or whoever else was sitting at the keyboard and performers standing close enough that you could see the amazing vibrations of the glottis (?) that characterize operatic singing.

A couple arias from the Dark Sisters opera (it is the most amazing music, I can hardly wait to hear the whole thing again in November), set into selections of all sorts that highlighted various aspects either of Nico's choral writing or of the singers' strengths: the first bit was Purcell's "Evening Hymn," the last was the evening song from Philip Glass's Satyagraha, a revelation to me (I had never heard it before!). One of the other highlights was a really extraordinary performance of Ravel's sonata for violin and cello by Yuki Lee Numata and Clarice Jensen. I am not a lover of the violin, really, but I was blown away by Numata's performance - she is incredible, definitely a performer to watch for...

(The opera company director Neal Goren accompanied many of the singers, which I think is rightly his prerogative but which caused me to reflect that he played the piano like someone to whom the modern instrument is wholly foreign, he must have trained as an organist rather than a pianist - definitely a thumper rather than a stroker of the ivories - the shortcomings were particularly clear in the aria from Mozart's Il Sogno di Scipione, with terrible approximate bashings-out of notes and wild thumping just behind tempo!... Really in NYC you can almost certainly find on every street corner a superb accompanist who could do a good job with this sort of thing on short notice, but I guess it would give a different character to the evening, so it seems a fair trade-off.)

"Not the neutral 'said'"

2011-10-13T13:10:00.000-04:00

At the Awl, my interview with Helen DeWitt about her new novel Lightning Rods.

"Chine that Salmon"

2011-10-11T18:47:00.001-04:00

Elizabethan terminology for carving (via Sarang).

Home again

2011-10-11T18:39:00.002-04:00

Really I do not have much of an urge to eat at Per Se: multi-hour multi-course meals are not my cup of tea, it is too much money in any case. But - "the stray ends of exquisite donuts"!

I survived Ottawa, I survived yesterday's long teaching day, I survived today's also long day of miscellaneous meetings: really I am about to collapse with exhaustion, but barring a couple of small but important tasks that are pressing, I can now afford to take it easy for a day or so. I have a curiously huge accumulation of work-related stuff that I've been slightly in denial about (internal reviews of colleagues, external tenure letter sorts of thing), but it can probably be done in a day and a half of extended effort if I can get myself back up to normal levels of fatigue first. Tomorrow morning I will go to boot camp and gentle yoga and read a novel, I think - it will be beneficial.

I had a funny and incongruous pair of texts to teach yesterday: Roland Barthes's The Neutral (I am enchanted by this book) and Pope's "The Rape of the Lock". The master's seminar is a good deal of fun: I am enjoying it perhaps even more than I expected to.

Saw Helen DeWitt and Dale Peck's very good joint reading last night at (Le) Poisson Rouge, and will be back there on Thursday for Nico's gig (I had already planned to go with adopted grandfather G., but my brother M. is going to come also, he is working in Brooklyn again!); and my dad is coming up from Philadelphia on Saturday for dinner and a BAM show I found intriguing enough to buy tickets for without knowing anything in particular about it.

Light reading around the edges: Marisa de los Santos's Falling Together.

Light reading catch-up

2011-10-09T22:50:00.002-04:00

A very tiring but also very productive week in Ottawa: several pieces of important business seem to have been well and truly accomplished. Collapsed into bed when I got home this afternoon, slept for some hours, then did my reading for tomorrow (Roland Barthes's The Neutral, Pope's The Rape of the Lock and a very good essay by Claude Rawson on mock-heroic and 'Pope's Waste Land') but will have to write my comments on last week's graduate student writing assignments in the morning: digging deeper to get them done now seems impossible. However I think I've done enough tonight that I can carve out the time for the Beast boot camp tomorrow morning: it knocks out everything from 5:45 rising all the way through to 9 or so, with a quick interlude for breakfast post-class before I get back on my bike to ride uptown, so I wasn't sure it really was going to be feasible, but it is a priority as I missed two classes last week.

I had hardly any time to read while I was away (mostly only in airports): an advance copy of Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel, Snuff, got me to Canada, and James Lee Burke's Rain Gods whiled away a few nighttime hours during the week and got me most of the way home. My copy of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, ordered from England via The Book Depository, finally arrived in Cayman in September, and B. brought it to give to me in Ottawa, but I haven't even had a chance to crack it open. Fairly busy this week till Tuesday late afternoon, and with one substantial chunk of reading (Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments!) to do for Wednesday afternoon also, but the week opens up as of Tuesday evening and I am very much hoping I will be able to lounge, recumbent, and devour it - I am feeling much in need of restoration and recovery!

Light reading catch-up

2011-10-02T22:22:00.000-04:00

What have I been reading, aside from work stuff? Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding (genuinely charming - and no, you don't have to care about baseball); Jon-Jon Goulian's The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt (highly engaging); Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone (loved it, can't wait for the next installment!).

At the LRB, Colin Burrow offers a fascinating account of Kristine Haugen's Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment, a book I need to get hold of as soon as I can!

Also: Things Magazine takes up the BLDG BLOG invitation to consider the spatial history of trapdoors.

Blogging is likely to be light this week, as I'll be in Ottawa from Tuesday to Sunday.

Pantone cookies

2011-09-29T14:22:00.002-04:00

These are among the most alluring sweets I have ever seen...

Two bits

2011-09-29T11:50:00.001-04:00

I'm supervising two independent studies this semester, and in both cases our first substantive meetings are today. (Usually I think I'm going to try and cram them into Tuesday, when I'm in my office to do office hours anyway, but this week it simply wasn't plausible, and in fact it may be a generally unrealistic notion as I also use Tuesdays for a committee meeting I attend regularly, for department faculty meetings and for meetings with grad students doing oral exams or needing substantive meetings on drafts.)

Today's readings provide a particularly incongruous juxtaposition!

From Alain Robbe-Grillet's Project for a Revolution in New York:

"What do you see from the window of this apartment?"

"Central Park."

(That's what it had looked like to me.)

"Is this part of it lit?"

"Yes, dimly . . . There's a streetlamp."

"And what can be seen near the streetlamp?"

"Three people."

"Of which sex?"

"Two men, a woman. . . She's wearing pants and a cap, but you can see her breasts under her sweater."

"What is this lady's name?"

"Her name--or at least what they call her--is Joan Robeson, or sometimes Robertson too."

"What does she do?"

"She's one of the fake nurses who works for Doctor Morgan, the psychoanalyst whose office is in the Forty-second Street subway station. The other nurses are blond, and . . ."

"But what is she doing here, now, in the bushes bordering the park, with those two men? And who are those two men?"

"That's easy: one is Ben-Said, the other is the narrator. The three of them are loading cartons of marijuana cigarettes disguised as ordinary Philip Morrises into a white Buick."

From Hume's Essays, more particularly the essay "Of Simplicity and Refinement in Writing":

There is no subject in critical learning more copious, than this of the just mixture of simplicity and refinement in writing; and therefore, not to wander in too large a field, I shall confine myself to a few general observations on that head.

First, I observe, That though excesses of both kinds are to be avoided, and though a proper medium ought to be studied in all productions; yet this medium lies not in a point, but admits of a considerable latitude. Consider the wide distance, in this respect, between Mr. POPE and LUCRETIUS. These seem to lie in the two greatest extremes of refinement and simplicity, in which a poet can indulge himself, without being guilty of any blameable excess. All this interval may be filled with poets, who may differ from each other, but may be equally admirable, each in his peculiar stile and manner. CORNEILLE and CONGREVE, who carry their wit and refinement somewhat farther than Mr. POPE (if poets of so different a kind can be compared together), and SOPHOCLES and TERENCE, who are more simple than LUCRETIUS, seem to have gone out of that medium, in which the most perfect productions are found, and to be guilty of some excess in these opposite characters. Of all the great poets, VIRGIL and RACINE, in my opinion, lie nearest the center, and are the farthest removed from both the extremities.