Uptown mice

The effects of city living on the white-footed mouse.

Rabbits of Gowanus

"These are angry, hardened city rabbits and possibly carnivorous."

The originals

Richard Price's history of the NYC Housing Authority:

In most housing projects these days, a hard-times hidden economy thrives, what Mark Jacobson and others call the gray market, consisting of improvised and in some cases ingenious ways of making ends meet—apartments doubling as daycare centers, some licensed, some not; takeaway lunches sold out the door or lowered from the window; a legion of bootleg car mechanics whose garage is the street; come-to-your-house handymen, plumbers, carpenters, computer programmers, and repairmen; just-text-me drivers for hire; CD and DVD duplicators leaving for the commercial strips of Fordham Road, Harlem, and elsewhere; wholesale candy hustlers, kids mostly, heading out to Grand Central Station, Penn Station, and tourist-centric Times Square, introducing themselves as grassroots fundraisers in order to sell ten-cent chocolate bars for two dollars a pop, a 2,000 percent markup.

Rebalancing acts

The busiest Citi Bike in New York! (This would make a funny children's book.)

The real thing

Gary Panter on the New York Public Library.

"It gave focus to their work"

An oral history of Ghostbusters.

Tunnels and bridges

Manhattan's lost meat infrastructure.

Today was in theory my "weekend" day, only really the timing is such that I needed to spend the evening doing a final read of various job materials (cover letters, dissertation abstracts, writing samples) for PhD students applying to jobs with Nov. 1 deadlines! I am at the level of fatigue where I can basically do little more than copy-editing, I am afraid.

Fall break next week, only I'm giving a talk out of town on Monday afternoon, so it will not be as restorative as one might hope. New Haveners, it's Monday at 4pm in LC 317, on the topic of Restoration theater and the eighteenth-century novel - make sure to say hello if you are there. Will be home late Monday night, though, so am hoping for a restorative Tuesday that involves quite a bit of work and exercise (and no alarm set in the morning).

(I am also very sorry to be missing the Cayman triathlon on Sunday, traditional for me on this weekend over the last couple years, though given accumulated fatigue plus the fact that I have neither spun nor swum for many a week, it is really just as well! I thought about going to a swim workout this evening, but the pool chemicals really trigger allergies and asthma: I think I had better just wait till my teaching semester is over; hot yoga is more gentle on the immune system.)

Light reading around the edges: Antonia Fraser's Must You Go?, a memoir (extracted from diaries) of her life with Harold Pinter. Much here to enjoy and appreciate.

RIP

Site itself is not exciting, but the name is amazing: Rat Information Portal! (Via.)

Simulacron-3

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!

Morningside redux

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.)

A ticket to Buffalo

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 perfect evening

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.)

Two bits

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.

Morning update

The Magic Circle has just been emailed to Kathy in its for-now-final version. Very glad to have it off my desk for a bit, though these books always come back at you for more revisions even in best-case scenarios...

I'm here in Cayman just for a couple more days, which will give me time to do some bits and pieces of 'work' work that I'd like to sort out before I'm back in New York (flying home Wednesday evening, settling myself back in and then going to Philadelphia over the weekend to celebrate my niece's second birthday and retrieve my little cat from my mother's house): a couple letters of recommendation, a couple conference-paper abstracts, a journal-article reader's report.

Light reading catch-up:

The two 'Dick Francis' novels that have appeared in the last year, the first a collaboration between Dick and his son Felix and the second Felix's first solo addition to the family franchise. Crossfire was pretty weak, but Dick Francis's Gamble seemed to me stronger. Really I will read any book published under the Dick Francis imprimatur...

Lee Child's Kindle Single Second Son brought a huge smile to my face, only it was over much too quickly! It reminded me of the mystery stories of my childhood, Encyclopedia Brown and Sherlock Holmes and Dorothy L. Sayers and G. K. Chesterton; there is a highly artificial simplicity that results from the compression of a mystery plot into that short form, it is not psychologically realistic but it is nonetheless attractive to me.

Robert Lipsyte's piece in last week's NYTBR sent me back to the book of his I read when I was a kid, One Fat Summer (it holds up very well), and then to a newer one that I also liked very much, Raiders Night.

I absolutely loved Tow Ubukata's Mardock Scramble! Thanks to Nick Mamatas for the recommendation; it is a book that has almost everything I like (including a really fantastic long sequence in the middle concerned with the psychology and tactics of professional gambling in a casino).

I think I will save my thoughts on Gravity's Rainbow for a separate post.

Really I'm looking forward to school starting, not so much the meetings and letters-of-rec aspect of things but getting back into the classroom; I'm teaching the seminar we require of all our incoming MA students for the first time, and will be interested to see how that goes. I'll post that reading list here once I have taught the initial class - it would seem to me very unfair to those students for the internet to see it before they do! Also: a new undergraduate seminar on Swift and Pope!

The combination of novel-finishing and then some sort of minor stomach bug that afflicted me Saturday have thrown me off re: exercise, but I am heading to the gym shortly for a treadmill run. Haven't heard whether the Camana Bay pool has reopened this morning as per the original schedule, but it would be good if I could get in a pool workout in the next couple days. I'll see if I can't hit a TNYA workout on Thursday evening in New York; the Chelsea Piers pool is closed all of this week for refurbishing, unfortunately, and I think the Columbia gym isn't open either, it is the evil season of pool closures universally!

Good paintings and bad fathers

At Triple Canopy, David Levine on the matter of Rothko.

Improvement of the breed

"If you’d like to call your pet Kubla Khan, King Kong or Kevin you can always move to Belgium. . ."

I'm in low spirits: I'm totally sick again! Very raw lungs on Monday the day following my long bike ride (heat and humidity exacerbate exercise-induced asthma), and now the predictable course into wheeziness and lung squeaking, phlegm, sinus congestion, etc. In short, another chest cold/bronchitis episode. The first thing I do when I'm back in New York will be to make another appointment with the pulmonary specialist I saw last year about six months after I first realized that I actually had asthma; I also need to find an allergist.

Closing tabs (strangulation edition)

I have always had a preference for writing in coffee-shops as opposed to libraries; I like the buzz of background noise, I find it soothing and mildly stimulating and it makes it much easier for me to concentrate than when I'm in an environment that's totally silent. The same thing goes for city living: New York makes me feel comfortable and able to concentrate because there's this constant mid-level surrounding buzz, whereas Cayman presents difficulties for me due to smotherationally high levels of quiet.

Alas, I have spent the whole week on the verge of total meltdown, or really at times in actual meltdown mode (thus relative broadcast silence, as I prefer not to blog when I am mildly hysterical!), but will take advantage of a moment of relative inner calm to close a few tabs and report on some minor light reading.

(Ottawa worries continue to be overwhelming, and I regretfully observe that really I think I will need to go back there again in August to help with various bits and pieces of next-stage planning: I had hoped to have a spell of weeks in one place with no travel, but on the other hand the "no-travel" preference is at odds with the "urban environment" one, so perhaps there is a silver lining....)

(Note to future self: don't sublet New York apartment in future for more than a month, unless absolutely locked in on irresistible year-long out-of-town sabbatical opportunity i.e. residential fellowship! Over the summer, and especially when I'm going to be away quite a bit anyway, the dollars are the great temptation; it is my best way of getting my finances annually back into whack, as my NYC rent is a bit more than half my monthly take-home salary and I can't really afford it. However, two months is clearly too long to be without access to city life!)

Fascinating piece about an exhibit on Wittgenstein and photography that explores the relationship between photographic composites and the philosopher's idea of a 'family resemblance'. (Via Marjorie Perloff.)

Evan Goldstein profiles Wayne Koestenbaum for the Chronicle of Higher Education on the occasion of the publication of Wayne's new book Humiliation (hmmm, very copious and weird collection of Amazon reviews for a book that has not yet been published!). I am much looking forward to this book, I am a huge fan of Wayne's (really he is one of my couple most important literary and intellectual role models!). (Link courtesy of the excellent Dave Lull.)

(Side note: I had dinner earlier this spring, after Stefan Collini's talk at the humanities center, with sociologist Harriet Zuckerman, whose late husband Robert K. Merton was the person who actually coined the term role model!)

At the NYRB, David Bromwich on Obama's distaste for politics. (DB is of course another one of my role models, in this case perhaps a more impossibly aspirational one!)

Sophia Hollander profiles academic and bestselling novelist Mary Bly for the Wall Street Journal. (Via Bookforum.)

Two good links via Marginal Revolution this morning: How much would it cost to attend Hogwarts?; parrots have individual 'names' in the wild.

Sasscer Hill's Full Mortality does indeed call to mind Dick Francis in its rich and full bringing-to-life of appealing racing settings, but the voice isn't as compelling to me, and it is no discredit to Hill's writing abilities (it speaks more to my own state of mind, and to recent excesses in the way of light reading!) that this was the book, last weekend, that induced a fit of absolute self-disgust at the lack of any nutritional value in much recent literary fare, and a resolve to seek more things out to read that do not simply bathe my brain in cheap serotonin.

That did not stop me from then reading one of the worst novels I've read in a long time (a bargain purchase at Chapters in Ottawa). Then I was truly self-disgusted!

I have read two other books (both nonfiction) that deserve posts of their own, about which more anon. But the hours loom long, and light reading remains necessary; I thoroughly enjoyed Karen Marie Moning's Darkfever, which has some of the appurtenances of trashiness and is not perhaps up to the standard of Seanan McGuire's Toby Daye books but is really very good with regard to any reasonable set of expectations (I have downloaded the next one, and I would evaluate the series as being enjoyable and smart on a level with Charlaine Harris's books, which I also like quite a bit).

Somehow I had never read Connie Willis's Lincoln's Dreams, though I think I've read almost all of her other novels, so that was an excellent way of whiling away an hour or two, and we are also watching an episode or two most nights of the extremely appealing Fringe, often with a chaser of Black Books.

BOMH proceeds in fits and starts; I had a very good work day on Wednesday, yesterday not so much, but this morning I got a decent hour and a half in early and will hope to have another session on it this afternoon.

Finally, I am completely mesmerized by Gillian Welch's latest album The Harrow and the Harvest. There are two songs on it that I like as much (by which I mean to say am absolutely fixated on and can't stop listening to) as any songs I have ever heard in my entire life: "The Way That It Goes" and "Tennessee". Buy the album!

"Up to Lexington, 125"

The rock map of Manhattan? (Via Bookforum.)