Shadow plays

Helen Hill named as one of five women animators who shook up the industry.  (Via Dan Streible.)

I'm in Cambridge for a couple of days to visit a friend of mine who had surgery last month (she's recovering well, but it's a long path of course).  It's bucolic up here!  The Megabus was rather dreadful: every time I swear I won't take it again, but the price differential between bus and Amtrak always sucks me back in (my ticket yesterday cost $7!).  However really for future Boston trips, Amtrak it must be - we waited for forty minutes on 10th Avenue between 40th and 42nd in pouring rain for the bus to actually arrive, and it was a good hour and a half late getting to South Station.  I'd eaten breakfast at 10:30 and figured I could get by to 4:30 with just a Clif Bar (didn't get organized to buy food, and you're not supposed technically to eat on the bus), but was of course starvationally low-blood-sugared by 2:30, and still had four more hours before I hit terra firma.  Amtrak can be very late too, but it is much more comfortable....

Closing tabs

Just had another truly terrible night of sleep.  For the last four or five days I have been clenching my jaw so tightly during the night that I am afraid it's going to break, and jaw-ache itself becomes a stress factor, but I can't fall asleep with the mouthguard in, so it's really a catch-22! 

I must confess that as hard as I'm working, I still have had time to read a few novels around the edges.  Three good ones, in fact: Taylor Stevens' excellent The Innocent, follow-up to last year's superb debut The Informationist (let us just start calling her "the female Lee Child"!); a truly delightful novel by Daniel O'Malley, The Rook (it's reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones somehow but also quite a bit like Charlie Stross's Laundry books or the Dresden Files - really genuinely charming and funny, I was hugely impressed); and a recommendation from Jo Walton, Sharon Shinn's Summers at Castle Auburn.

Closing tabs:

How long does it take to find an agent?

Wikis in the classroom.

A competition in honor of Helen Hill.

I can't wait to read Francis Spufford's new book!

Irresistible juveniles.

Love letters

The Florestine Collection in New Orleans.

Closing tabs

Yesterday was a complex and rewarding day (got up at 5:45, rode my bike downtown for 7am boot camp at Chelsea Piers, then back uptown to teach Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden in the morning and Swift's Argument Against Abolishing Christianity and Johnson's Life of Swift in the afternoon, then musings on Helen Hill's film "The Florestine Collection" and a pizza party at my place afterwards for colleagues, friends and family, my own and Helen's, lay my head down on the pillow around 1am).

Today I am knackered!

Had a very productive afternoon appointment with a pulmonary specialist who has a number of thoughts on how I might tackle the exercise-induced asthma (he also recommends a mighty tome that I have ordered through BorrowDirect; it is prohibitively - comically! - expensive, it is for clinicians!), took a long nap and have spent the rest of the evening devouring Lee Child's The Affair.

I have some treats for upcoming days: the book party for Helen DeWitt's Lightning Rods (here's a good interview at Bookforum, and I am delighted to say that Helen is also going to catsit for me next week while I am in Ottawa next week for a visit with Brent's parental units); a production of The Bald Soprano...

Miscellaneous linkage:

Benjamin Weiss defends the Cambridge History of the American Novel against Joseph Epstein's depredations. (These controversies make me throw up my hands in perplexity, I see that they are still 'live' in some sense but they bear no relation to my own personal lived experience of reading and writing and teaching in the academy, so it is hard for me to take them seriously as an account of true living intellectual controversies as opposed to some sort of late-stage playing-out of a long battle between ancients and moderns. I really am going to teach a class on the battle of ancients and moderns one of these days, by the way...)

B. R. Myers at the Atlantic on Peter Temple's crime fiction.

Upcoming

events:

At the next meeting of the Columbia University Cultural Memory Colloquium, on Monday, Sept. 26 at 6pm in 754 Schermerhorn Extension, Professor Jenny Davidson will present on the work of filmmaker Helen Hill. Helen Hill, experimental animator and handmade film advocate, was shot and killed in her home in New Orleans in January 2007. Her last film, completed posthumously by her husband Paul Gailiunas, is 'The Florestine Collection.' One Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans some years earlier, Hill found more than a hundred handmade dresses in trash bags on the curb; she set out to restore them and recover the story of the woman who had made them, a recently deceased African-American seamstress named Florestine Kinchen. Both the dresses and the footage were seriously damaged by Katrina; the completed film includes Helen's original silhouette, cut-out, and puppet animation, as well as flood-damaged and restored home movies. Three of Hill's films will be screened - 'Madame Winger Makes a Film' (9:29), 'Mouseholes' (7:40) and 'The Florestine Collection' (31:00) - followed by a discussion by Professor Davidson that will touch on questions about memorialization and the materiality of film, the persistence and contingency of archives and the imperatives of preservation in the wake of catastrophe.

On a totally different note, I'm speaking about my ABCs of the novel project at Columbia's Cafe Humanities on Monday, Oct. 17 at 6pm.

The joys of truffle-hunting

Phone calling zones as alternate states (via Bookforum).

"The e-book is yesterday's mass-market."

Great piece on Fiona McCarthy at the Guardian (link courtesy of my father) - I have Amazoned a copy of Last Curtsey...

I do not usually have cause to say this, but there is an absolutely delightful essay in the current issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies! (Also a very good review by Suzanne Keen of two particularly interesting recent books in eighteenth-century studies, Blakey Vermeule's Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? and Alan Richardson's The Neural Sublime.) This link will only work for Columbia affiliates, but hie thee to thine own local library website to read Patrick Spedding's really indispensable essay "'The New Machine': Discovering the Limits of ECCO." The abstract doesn't really do justice to the essay's delightfulness:

This essay explores some of the difficulties faced by eighteenth-century scholars when conducting research using scanned text-bases, particularly Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). It begins with an explanation of some of the general problems that face the users of all scanned text-bases. These problems are illustrated in an account of research undertaken into the history of the condom and its representation in eighteenth-century texts. The failure of ECCO searches to produce meaningful results brings these problems into sharp focus, but also suggests novel ways in which they may be overcome.

I am fascinated by these questions about ECCO, and anyone who regularly relies on searching OCR-produced databases has to read the whole essay; but it also has an excellent appendix of eighteenth-century references to condoms, of which I single out this one for your delectation:

White Kennett's Condom, a Poem (London, 1723) and "Armour: A Poem" (London, 1723) do not survive. The poem was reprinted in Cupid's Metamorphoses or, Love in All Shapes. Being the Second and Last Volume of the Poetical Works of Mr. William Pattison (London, 1728), 306–7: "Hear, and attend: In Armour's mighty Praise / I sing, for sure 'tis worthy of a Song. / … / Happy the Man, who in his Pocket keeps, / Whether with Green or Scarlet Ribband bound, / A well made C—— He, nor dreads the Ills / Of Shankers or Cordee, or Buboes Dire!"

Light reading catch-up to follow later in the day once I have done more unpacking - I got home late Wednesday night, but things were in relative disarray here and I had to wait till subletters finished getting stuff out Thursday evening before I could really think about putting anything away or getting things set up for my own purposes again. Had a great trip to the library on Thursday, though - got all sorts of good things (highlights include this and this and a whole host of other things to read to get ready to talk about Helen Hill's last film at the end of the month). Have also been luxuriating in the amazing lavishness of the Chelsea Piers Sports Center - it is not really the salient thing to single out, but the showers there are completely unbelievable (it seems unlikely that I will ever live in an apartment with this sort of style, but it is my fantasy one day to have a commodious shower room with a slate floor!)...

DIY recovery

Kara Van Malssen on working to restore Helen Hill's films in the wake of Katrina and after.

Postscript

Artist Susan Lenz's post on the actual Florestine dresses as they made their presence felt this weekend. Here is her Flickr set, which includes photos from the 2008 show of the dresses at the McKitterick Gallery; I look very large in this one, alas, but it is nonetheless a nice picture of me (green dress, sunglasses) and college friend Ariane (blue). (Those dresses are a little like the Traveling Pants - they will fit almost anybody, within reason...)

Etymological

At Slate, Paul Collins considers the etymology of the term "shit-faced." (Via John Staines.)

Paul must not have had a copy of Jonathon Green's Dictionary of Slang to hand. If he had, he would have surely quoted an early entry for the first sense of "stupid, ignorant" (a letter by Hemingway: "Some shitfaced critic writes Mr Hemingway retires to his comfortable library to write about despair"), and also the classic instance of the second sense ("very drunk") as it appears in the movie Heathers: "Okay, just as long as it's not one of those nights when they get shit-faced and take us to a pasture to tip cows."

I will write a longer post at some point (possibly even later this week) about The Florestine Collection. One of the most moving things was learning that the beautiful little cinema in Columbia, South Carolina called the Nickelodeon, whose proprietors have been hugely supportive regarding Helen's films, has raised significant funds towards expansion and is going to name the new media education center after Helen. This is definitely a cause I'll be doing some fund-raising for; I'll perhaps post something here once I have more details.

Have only really been consuming the most undemanding of light reading, given travel etc.: Henning Mankell, The Troubled Man (highly worthwhile, and possibly even my favorite installment in the entire series); Michael Connelly, The Fifth Witness (reliably enjoyable, only a bit dull in parts due to high levels of courtroom content and also the central "clue" unduly jumps off the page, I didn't work out the twist but I was well aware that it must incorporate this detail, which I think is a slight technical failure on Connelly's part).

Before I was traveling (too busy last week to update, or else I have already listed these and subsequently forgotten?): Holly Black, Red Glove (enjoyed very much); Graham Joyce, The Silent Land (unsettling, good in many ways, not perhaps so much my cup of tea - too much Sartrean afterlife as a teenage reader, no strong preference for this sort of Jonathan Carroll-style vision of afterlife!); Sophie Hannah's Little Face (implausible and with a needlessly complex timeline but more or less readable); Kate Atkinson's Started Early, Took My Dog (loved it - I will read anything she writes, the texture paragraph by paragraph is just so good!).

The Florestine Collection

A story about Helen Hill and how her husband Paul Gailiunas finished her last film.

I'm heading to South Carolina tomorrow for the premiere; it is a bittersweet prospect, but it will be good to see so many of Helen's family and friends gathered in one place, and of course I am very much looking forward to seeing the film itself. I visited Helen and Paul in New Orleans not long after she had first discovered those dresses in trash bags on the curb, and the brightness of her face as she described the treasure and showed me some of the dresses is still very vivid to me.

(It may have been the same visit where she introduced me to Rosie the pig, a delightful housemate, and warned me that if I had a lipstick in my bag, I had better put the bag up out of reach on a high shelf: pigs will root through handbags and snuffle up as delicious anything that is made of animal or vegetable fat!)

Johnny Cash ticket

I saw a fantastically good show earlier this evening; it was a small venue and a relatively little-known singer-songwriter, Pete Sturman at Dixon Place on the Lower East Side, but the quality of the material and the performance would have warranted filling a much larger venue.

Anyway, just a great catalog of songs, a very nice mix of the moving and the comical; the one that makes the tears run down my face (partly because I first heard it not long after our mutual friend Helen Hill died, indeed at her memorial, and because it so strongly makes me think of her, but also just because it is a very good song) is "Wasn't Plannin' on Leavin'". It is a good reminder, too, of the perfection of things on a small scale - this is what the popular song can do, no other genre or mode that I can think of does quite the same thing, it is very lovely and I wish I wrote and sang such things myself!

(Am actually very tempted to get one of the little electric ukeleles that guest performers Sonic Uke were playing...)

Light reading around the edges: Emma Donogue's Room (very good, surely justly deserved to be the huge bestseller it has been); Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (engaging, memorable, it actually belonged in a talk I heard the other day only perhaps it has been written too recently to have made its way in). Curiously both books make something of the word contrail; I would say I had rarely seen this term in fiction, only of course the reason I noticed it in Egan was having just seen it foregrounded in Donoghue...

(I am trying to "read up" a lot of things I put on my Kindle and then didn't quite get to - seeking an "inbox zero"-type level of purity and cleanliness over there!)

Linkage

Not literary in any particular sense, but do read this piece by Michael Ogg on what it means to depend on home health care aides when sidelined by a permanent disability (via Jane Gross).

A. L. Kennedy on why the worst part of writing is waiting.

Phil Nugent on the trials and tribulations of Winter Wipeout!

Finally, I got a nice piece of news the other day from my friend Helen Hill's mother Becky. Helen's last film, "The Florestine Dresses," has been completed by her husband Paul, and will premiere at the Indie Grits Film Festival at the Nickleodeon Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina on April 13-17, 2011. I will definitely be there for the premiere, and will do what I can to help gather a large group of Helen's friends for the occasion.

(There was an exhibit of the dresses themselves a few years ago; alas, I missed it, though I remember seeing the dresses not long after Helen had first found them - there were more than a hundred of them! - in trash bags on the street and rescued them and begun to investigate the story of their creation.)

Scratch and crow

Phil Nugent on the inclusion of one of Helen Hill's short films in the National Film Registry.

(Here's where you can get a DVD that includes many of Helen's films, including two of my personal favorites: "Madam Winger Makes a Film" [2001] and "Mouseholes" [1999].)

Kudos to Dan Streible and many others for making this happen.

Wasn't Plannin' on Leavin'

Pistol Pete's song about evacuating for Hurricane Katrina. I first heard Pete sing this song at a memorial for our dear mutual friend Helen Hill, so it means something special to me - but it is a very good song in any case!