Perambulations

From the base of the Samuel Tilden memorial on Riverside Drive:

In the Biblical Garden at St. John the Divine:

Update

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

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

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

"That rain-forest experience"

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...

The duckling of Riverside Drive

Sigrid Nunez on what it was like to spend time (a lot of time!) with Susan Sontag. The book-length memoir of their relationship, Sempre Susan, sounds like something I really must read...

A start

Today I read the two books that seem to me to provide the most immediate prompt for my notional new novel (I'm in somewhat low spirits, and thus cannot really imagine undertaking a huge new project right now, but also know that an interesting new book is the most likely thing to infuse me with vim and vigor if I can only get it rolling): The Bacchae and Andrew Dolkart's Morningside Heights: A History of its Architecture and Development.

A nice tidbit from the latter:

Thus, by 1900 residential development on Morningside Heights remained slow and erratic. The New York Tribune reported in 1900 that "The development of this beautiful hilltop has been retarded by its somewhat inconvenient accessibility." The major access problem was the "series of long and circuitous flights of steps" leading to and from the 115th Street station of the elevated on Eighth Avenue. In order to alleviate this problem, several large property owners in the area commissioned designs for an elevator that would transport people up and down the cliff of Morningside Park. As designed by civil engineers Percival Robert Moses and Samuel Osgood Miller, the elevator was to be a steel structure with two electric-powered cars. A walkway would extend out from Morningside Drive to the elevators and a cupola was to cap the open steel shaft.

Last night's light reading: Michael Lewis's The Blind Side (pretty interesting, even given near-complete lack of knowledge of football).