Adelie love

Penguinscapes!

Closing tabs

Hot weather is not conducive to thought or activity! I did make the necessary additional pass through my style manuscript to reduce the length of selected block quotes - my editor gave me a very intelligent list of page numbers, nicely distinguishing between long passages that truly couldn't be cut and ones that would not suffer excessively from trimming or cutting....

Miscellaneous light reading: I read and loved Steve Hamilton's latest Alex McKnight novel, Let It Burn; its description of present-day Detroit is so amazing, it sent me back to a book I only dipped into when it first came out, Mark Binelli's Detroit City is the Place To Be, and also to the next-to-last book in the McKnight series, which I must have missed at the time, Misery Bay. Also, the second installment in Ben Winters' Last Policeman series, Countdown City

Closing tabs:

Martin Amis interviewed at the Telegraph.

My colleague Edward Mendelson on priestly language and the cathedral of Apple.

Digitization of the Board of Longitude archive.

Olga Khazan on drinking in Antarctica.

Catch-up

Very mixed feelings about my month of idyll coming to an end. On the other hand, idyll might pall if it were extended indefinitely (not, in any case, a temperamental possibility for me, even aside from logistical and career concerns). Things to look forward to in New York: the library, Joanna's spin classes at Chelsea Piers, winter running and most of all my little cat Mickey! Also Nadia Sirota on Tuesday night at the Kitchen and an evening of theatergoing on Wednesday with G. (almost certainly to be followed by dinner at Petrarca).

Miscellaneous linkage: a story by Charlie Jane Anders; the coldest journey! (Via B.)

Miscellaneous light reading: Jojo Moyes, Me Before You (a novel my English grandmother would have thoroughly enjoyed!); Alan Russell, Burning Man (very good, and I will certainly read more of his, but it was curious to read two novels about LAPD K-9 officer-dog partnerships in as many days - this was the other one); Matthew Mitcham, Twists and Turns; and an excellent historical mystery (it is a genre that makes me suspicious, but Jane Y. sent me a link that persuaded me I had to check this one out) by Imogen Robertson, Instruments of Darkness. Halfway through the second one in the series now; also midway through Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I have been meaning to read ever since it came out but never quite got around to.

Over the next few days in Cayman, three final hot yoga classes at Bliss (I finished the thirty-day challenge yesterday - thirty classes in less than four weeks definitely leads to a significant feeling of consolidation and progress), a four-mile leg Sunday morning for the Cross-Island Relay (B. has inadvertently intimidated me by observing that he believes I can run 8:15 miles on current fitness and heat acclimation!) and a decadent Sunday-night dinner at Michael's Genuine.

Closing tabs

Steve Burt's life as a girl.

I was distressed yesterday to realize I was coming down with a cold, but I think I've dodged the worst - still somewhat stuffed up, but it has receded somewhat overnight rather than descending to the lungs.  Session #2 on The Golden Bowl this afternoon, and I am about to rewrite my old lecture, as I was visited with inspiration while rereading last night as to a better way to try and bring the book alive in class.

Miscellaneous other links: one year I really am going to go to this; working in Antarctica; Larissa MacFarquhar on Hilary Mantel.

Pemmican

The best cuisine in Antarctica.

"Every part of the world is habitable!"

Sexual habits of Adelie penguins.

Also: Darwin's prose style.

Endurance

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!

A snippet

from The Possessed, about a recurring nightmare that began to plague Elif Batuman during a stressful homestay in Samarkand:

I had applied for a grant to go to Russia on a homestay, and the household I got assigned to was a family of penguins in Antarctica. "But penguins don't even have a language!" I protested. In fact, those penguins did have a language, with two branches, one epic-narrative and one lyric-folkloric. I was jerked awake by the pounding of my own heart.

Closing tabs

I have spent much of the last week in a pleasant haze, in subway cars or during the later-evening couch hours mandated by the anti-insomnia protocol which forbids computer time at night, induced and maintained by the first five books of Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series.

There is something very comforting about knowing how many of them there are - eight books in this series, and then a whole other six-book series. I love multi-volume series (also very pleasant is discovering a crime novelist of excellence who has already published six or seven volumes in his or her series which can then be consumed at a steady but more or less voracious pace over the course of four or five days); I think that these are not in the end up to the standard of Patrick O'Brian on the one hand or Susan Howatch on the other, but I am now very much looking forward to reading the Lymond books once I finish with these.

Further link miscellany:

This year's "oddest book title" contest. (A number of these books inevitably sound to my ears highly worthwhile!)

Shackleton's whisky excavated from beneath floorboards of polar hut!

At the New Yorker, Macy Halford on the importance of e-mail to romance (with commentary by Abigail Adams) (courtesy of Amy).

On Thursday I saw Parsons Dance at the Joyce. The dancing was excellent, the music perhaps to a somewhat lower standard (though not as dire as I feared - it is a truly bizarre endeavor, though, with famous opera arias set as lavishly orchestrated pop songs - "La donna e mobile" as torch song really made me want to laugh! - it is the East Village Opera Company and their music can be sampled here if you are curious).

By far the highlight of the evening was the short prelude before the main piece. It is called "Caught," and it is truly spectacular - it takes advantage of the kinds of theatricality and athleticism one associates with Cirque du Soleil, which seems to me a very good idea indeed. The combination of strobe lighting and unbelievable jumps and timing truly makes it seem as though the dancer is flying through the air due some occult power - it is very "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," I loved it! There is a link here which gives some of the flavor of it, but the essence is exactly what cannot be captured on film or digital media - the staggering part of it is the way that after the flying sequence you suddenly see the dancer standing quietly at the back of the stage, only the sheen of sweat and the heaving ribcage speaking to the effort that has just been expended. Really magical!

(A good dinner afterwards, too, at the Viceroy Cafe. I had a steak salad - slabs of rare beef served on a heap of mesclun salad with balsamic vinaigrette and roquefort cheese, with cucumber, tomato and avocado laid out delicately around the plate - and a truly delicious helping of tiramisu.)

No bearing on reality

Virtually unprecedented week-long radio silence at Light Reading - I had no internet access at all over the weekend, and have barely been at a computer for the last couple days either. Lethally busy time of year! But a brief interruption in some frenetic last-minute commenting on student paper proposals to clear tabs, with a promise of some more posts over the next couple days:

Sam Amidon performs his lovely cover of R. Kelly's "Relief" (worth watching the whole 7+ minutes - that song is the second one he sings).

Stephen Covey moves e-book rights directly to Amazon for one year. (I could use a re-read of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People!)

Album of obscene Gillray drawings surfaces in archives of the former Home Office.

Unfortunately a subscription is required to read this wonderful and worrying article about the precarious future of the Adélie penguin by Fen Montaigne at the New Yorker. I saw only one Adélie the whole time I was in Antarctica, out of many thousands (tens of thousands?) of penguins - in that part of the continent, the chinstrap and gentoo penguins really have almost completely displaced the Adélies, which cannot breed in warming climes. The audio slide-show does not require a subscription - take a look at these pictures!

Windex meringue

Well, the travel posts have gone up at my other blog, so do not bother to click through if you have already read them there, but here is the manic Light Reading recap: La Recoleta cats, the adventure begins, Ushuaia harbor, beer/whales, pre-race gear fussing, race day of utter (tortoise-speed) gloriousness, feathers, thrillingly frigid Antarctic swimming, ice, and finally the happy return to a world of swimming and blogging...

Back from the internet black hole

and an utterly lovely trip it was, too - a whole SLEW of posts will follow on my other blog (will link here once they're all sorted out), including a LAVISH race report on what was a truly magical day out there on King George Island - penguin included! - but in the meantime (I write from Buenos Aires, where I am off for a quick swim before lunch in what is promised to be a 25-METRE SWIMMING POOL), I must just share this dream review of Breeding by Peter Gay in Bookforum.

More TK!

AWOL

The adventure begins! An interval of no non-emergency internet connectivity is about to ensue - I will be incommunicado for the next ten days - fuller report to follow, of course...

Nipped

It will have to rank in the lists of life's missed opportunities, but I have had a most wonderful shelf full of library books on Antarctica and have had no time to read 'em and/or blog about 'em!

I do not think I will have any spare time to speak of between now and my departure on Tuesday evening, but I thought that I would at least single out one of the most utterly lovely for your enjoyment.

It is The Antarctic Manual for the Use of the Expedition of 1901, and it actually has maps folded into a pocket at the back...

Heading: "Antarctic Ocean. Sheet No. 2. Between Latitudes 45ºS. & 85ºS. and Longitudes 25ºW. & 160ºE. Shewing Tracks of Explorers."

The relevant detail is scanned below (the explorer whose tracks are marked - + - + is Bellingshausen - we are running our marathon early next week on King George Island):

And now, a more strictly verbal treat - ice nomenclature!

Great Scott!

Newly digitized pictures from Scott's Antarctic expedition at the Guardian (courtesy of C.B.); more pictures here from the Telegraph (courtesy of I.H.D.).

The Freeze Frame digitization project goes live on March 4.

Hasty light reading miscellany

Last Monday I read my first Gossip Girl book, You Know You Love Me.

I was standing in the news store at the airport in Tampa and contemplating the utter wretchedness of everything they were fobbing off on the unsuspecting customer in the name of books when I suddenly realized that in fact there was a huge stash of Gossip Girl books as yet unplumbed by me!

I enjoyed it very much - it is paced in a sharp snappy satirical way that makes me think that anyone who reads these books is reading them in a slightly ironic or tongue-in-cheek vein, surely nobody can really be actually wanting the luxury goods whose names are dropped on every page - and I was charmed by the fact that several of the characters were reading Goethe's The Sorrows of Young Werther, which I am teaching this semester!

I always like to know that there will be something I could read and enjoy in random airport bookstores, so I think I will resist the temptation to get and read the others now and instead 'save' them for future situations of this sort...

On the flight before that I'd finished reading a really excellent novel, one that happily crossed the borders between light reading and serious fiction, Heidi Julavits's The Uses of Enchantment. Surely this book is a rewriting of one of Josephine Tey's best novels, The Franchise Affair! Clues: (1) the headmistress is called Miss Pym, the name of the title character in one of Tey's best other novels; (2) Julavits's protagonist's name is Mary Veal, "Veal" being a significant name in eighteenth-century writing and Tey's novel a retelling of an eighteenth-century story.

At any rate, I thought it was very good indeed - I was also reminded of another favorite book of mine from childhood, E. L. Konigsberg's underrated Father's Arcane Daughter.

Two sporting books: the first, John Hanc's highly readable The Coolest Race on Earth: Mud, Madmen, Glaciers, and Grannies at the Antarctica Marathon (about which more here); the second, Graeme Obree's rather wonderful Flying Scotsman: Cycling to Triumph through my Darkest Hours. The book is slightly uneven but quite moving in places, and there is a simply excellent description of a championship race in Bogota where Obree lays out his strategic planning for the different rounds - I really, really loved this.

The book is published by Velo Press, a specialist publisher the quality of whose books has been making an extraordinary impression on me: their list is a very interesting mix of books about cycling that are of genuine literary attraction and import and some of the most indispensable books on triathlon training (NB if you are only going to buy one book about triathlon training, it should certainly be Gale Bernhardt's Training Plans for Multisport Athletes, a book I obtained on Brent's recommendation and have since recommended to several friends - it is second only to Daniels' Running Formula in my affections!).

Good light reading: Michael Connelly's The Brass Verdict, kindly delivered to me by my former student Julia Hoban, whose young-adult novel Willow is about to appear to what I predict will be great acclaim!

And on Saturday, I had a pleasant theatrical interlude and went with my grandfather G. to see what turned out to be an excellent production of Richard Greenberg's The American Plan. Greenberg writes characters amazingly well - the play really is (Henry) Jamesian in a wonderful way. And as a bonus, there are some very lovely bits of conversation about swimming!

(Some interesting reflections from Greenberg here on the difficulties he experienced revising this 1991 play for the new production. It was pure coincidence that we were at this play at all - I had a terrible yen to see Soul of Shaolin and asked G. if there was any chance he could get press tickets - the press agent somehow thought he was asking about this one instead! But it may have been for the best...)

The celestial fix

From Survival in Antarctica, a pamphlet published by the National Science Foundation Division of Polar Programs (1984 ed.). Click to enlarge.

Clouds and bergs, bergs and clouds

From Jenny Diski's Skating to Antarctica (and thanks to Dorothy for reminding me this book existed and prompting me to hie myself to the library and snatch it from the shelf and read it myself):

People from the boat called them ugly, but that doesn't quite catch the aesthetic disaster of the elephant seal. It is more that they are utterly ill-suited for this planet. They might, it occurred to me, have been dropped or fallen from an alien vessel and landed - splat - as we saw them, on the sea shore, to do the best they could in difficult circumstances. Gravity bore down on their enormous bulk (a big bull seal can be up to twenty-two feet long), in the same way that large stones are piled up to squash pressed beef. A grey jellied mountain results, whose sides slope down to their inadequate-looking flippers. One more stone on the pile of gravity and the whole strained substance would rupture, exploding flesh and blubber through its skin for miles around. They lay around as if exhausted, which I suppose they were, their relatively small heads sunk wearily on the black sand. The females and babies had the anthropomorphic advantage of huge, round wet eyes which rolled wide open as someone passed them by, with a fatigued but appealing look as if to say "Can you imagine?" The cows and pups turned on to their stomachs to scratch their bellies idly with the claws at the end of their flippers, so you began to think, "Well, maybe it's not so bad." The bulls didn't roll; the attempt to move their mountain of flesh would probably have burst their hearts. And while they might have just as corny eyes, I hardly noticed them because of my disbelief at the sight of the truncated trunks from which they get their name. Elephant seal is one of those euphemistic names humans give creatures who remind them of what they don't want to be reminded of. If an honest name were to be given, they would be flaccid penis seal, because the wrinkled concertinaed length and the bobbing, swinging floppiness of those extended noses is a satire on the male reproductive member.

Screengrab

Phil Nugent's best of 2008. Arghhhh, I should see more movies, this list puts me to shame!

(And I forgot to mention Encounters at the End of the World on my list, too!)

Another pretty amazing though perhaps less immediately useful end-of-year commentary: the annual jane dark's sugarhigh! single of the year countdown...

"Seal steak and biscuits and pemmican and chocolate"

At the Guardian, John Crace interviews Roland Huntsford on his histories of Nordic skiing and polar exploration. The flavor of bygone days:

How someone who was born in Cape Town in 1927 came to develop a Nordic mentality is a story in itself. Huntford's father was both a soldier and a farmer, while his mother was a Ukrainian exile who had escaped the Bolshevik revolution. Huntford came to London after the second world war to study physics at Imperial College, but lasted only two years before he was asked to leave - "not a high point in my education" - and he disappeared to the continent to do nothing gracefully. "I felt my mind had been deformed by science in the UK," he says. "Over here scientists seemed to have a tunnel vision, whereas the ones I met abroad had a wide range of interests and were happy to discuss Italian literature.

"To be honest, I was a drifter, and probably still am in some ways. I ended up in Florence where I hung out with the other would-be artists, fraudulent or otherwise, that gathered there. I don't know if I had a good time, but one would need to have had a heart of stone not to be affected by its atmosphere, its Renaissance painters and writers: to this day, Dante remains my favourite poet."

He moved back to London in the late 50s, found digs in Chelsea and met a Danish communist double agent who was to change his life. "He was obsessed with Ibsen," Huntford said, "and ordered me not to read him in translation. So I started to learn Norwegian and found the language came to me naturally." On the back of his newly acquired passion for Ibsen, Huntford moved to Scandinavia, spending time in Denmark, Sweden and Norway, and though the provincialism sometimes got to him, he loved the landscape, the winter darkness and, most of all, the snow.