Seven-league boots

I wish I could be there in person, but it's simply not possible - my flight was very much delayed, and I only got home from Madison last night after 2:30 in the morning! Teaching at 2:10, and had hoped to get down to Lincoln Center for at least a half-hour of it, but really it's not feasible. But the memorial service for the great Albert Murray will be streamed on the web here. It starts at 1 today.

Particles and waves

There are simply no words to describe how much I loved Paul Devlin's list of things you should know about Albert Murray. Go and read it!

Catch-up

Have had some extremely good light reading in recent days - I tend to fall behind on logging it when I am in Cayman, it is too relaxing here!

Best of all, Wayne Koestenbaum's My 1980s and Other Essays - it is a super collection in any case, but I am also happy because it includes a couple pieces I've been assigning regularly and it is useful to have them between covers. Also, an amazing piece I hadn't read before about Lana Turner, and a "Play-Doh Poetics" that struck me considerably. (Adam Kirsch didn't like the book as much as I did.)

Warren Ellis, Gun Church (odd and rather haunting - I liked it); Kimberly Rae Miller, Coming Clean: A Memoir (interesting counterpoint to Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding, but enough of these punny names, they are good books and don't need that sort of gimmick!); Erin Kelly, The Burning Air (I didn't believe at all in the characters - like, at all - but it is very readable); and David Mark, The Dark Winter, which is a bit melodramatic (compounded by being narrated in the present tense I think) but otherwise not at all bad.

Closing tabs:

Anne Fernald's reminiscences of John Hollander. Professor Hollander's death has given me much thought about teachers and teaching, and what we get from our teachers and leave behind of ourselves with our students....

The rise of the mini-monograph.

Against "strong" female characters. (Via Jane.)

40 trashy novels that are worth reading. (It is a good list, with considerable overlap to my own version of similar, only I would have less "women's fiction" and more science fiction and fantasy.)

Tim Maly on NSA-proofing your email.

Walton Muyumba on Albert Murray. I hope Paul Devlin does write Murray's biography....

"Knowing what to choose"

Another obituary that gives me that sinking end-of-an-era feeling: the great Albert Murray has died at age 97. Here was a description of the time that my friend Paul Devlin kindly took me for a visit to meet the great man. A great loss.