New York living

One of the services the professional catsitters provide is a very funny note to greet you on your arrival home (NYC often outdoes even your most extravagant imaginings!)....

Paper moon

Satyagraha was utterly magical.  That's the Times review, click through and watch the video if you have some spare minutes - I don't know that it conveys how lovely the music is, but it does give some approximate sense of the beauty of the mise-en-scene, especially the puppetry and the use of paper and other inexpensive props (I do not know that I have ever seen a better use of paper in a stage production).  It is later in Gandhi's life than his South African career that he would become strongly associated with the handloom, but there is a particularly beautiful scene that involves something like tape being wound back and forth across the stage like the warp on a simple mechanical loom - it is beautiful!

(I often think during a good masters swim workout that the pool exudes an industrious vibe much like a loom - this opera, too, gave me the feeling of structure and variation that is part of what I particularly enjoy about a very good swim workout.  Expansive, opening, industrious!)

Retail therapy

One reason staying in Cayman is surprisingly frugal for me is that it prevents me from ordering things online: it takes forever for stuff to get shipped here, shipping costs are huge and customs duty must be paid on anything that comes in (books excluded, fortunately).

But I was finding myself in need of some retail therapy today, and have ordered some things to be sent to my New York apartment for retrieval in September: a down jacket on sale at Patagonia, which is immaterial for Light Reading purposes but may speak to fantasies of winter, and a great set of books and 'stuff' from Amazon. The latter set of stuff counts as a birthday present from my mother and my brother and sister-in-law, who sensibly sent me Amazon gift certificates when I couldn't suggest actual presents for my birthday!

The glorious list (it accumulated by way of me adding things piecemeal to the shopping cart over the last month or so, but I think it gives a good profile in miniature):

"The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications"
David Deutsch

(This one's more or less self-explanatory: Brent and I were talking about David Deutsch, and I realized that really I might want to read his book)

"Field Notes on Science and Nature"
Michael R. Canfield

(Saw an image from this one a few weeks ago online and realized it was a book I had to have)

"Dover Solo: Swimming The English Channel"
Marcia Cleveland

(Self-explanatory! I am not a fast enough swimmer, unfortunately, to undertake something as epic as the Channel swim - you have to start with considerably higher baseline speeds in order for it to be realistic. Not that I am not tempted...)

"Lobster: A Global History (Reaktion Books - Edible)"
Elisabeth Townsend

(Do not like lobster for eating purposes, but could not resist this book's title and the beautifully designed cover!)

"The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by ... Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes"
Adam Thirlwell

(Curious to see whether this might cast any light for me on what I want to do with the ABCs of the novel book)

"Humiliation (Big Ideas//Small Books)"
Wayne Koestenbaum

(Can't wait for this one - also, I like the idea of writing something for the big ideas/small books series...)

"Marpac 980A Sound Screen Sleep Conditioner White Noise Generator Dual Speed"

(The upshot of reading Farhad Manjoo's piece about sleep noise-canceling devices)

"Jimbo"
Gary Panter

(Gary is one of the most interesting people I know, but I have never read any of his comics - this should be remedied...)

"Gary Panter"
Robert Storr

(...and also perhaps it is worth seeing what others have to say about the stuff Gary makes.)

"City of Diamond"
Jane Emerson

(Same author as "Doris Egan," and another recommendation from Jo Walton: pretty much convinced that this will be more perfect light reading.)

The icing on the cake

The excellent Sara Ryan, author among other things of an appealing YA novel called Empress of the World, sent me imaginative and funny interview questions and has posted the results on her blog.

Another good bit: The Explosionist led Tanita Davis at Finding Wonderland to explore Sophie's Edinburgh!

Lining up good things for New York in January: Metamorphoses at the Flea; Doveman: The Burgundy Stain Sessions at (Le) Poisson Rouge; The Beast Boot Camp at Chelsea Piers! Also, TNYA's one-hour swim and tickets to see Derek Jacobi at BAM later in the spring; shades of my teenage self....

The Western tradition

Ah, it is such a luxury to be starting my morning with coffee and wireless internet! I forgot to write yesterday about what was probably the most interesting book I've read recently, William Gibson's Zero History, which I enjoyed very much but found not up to the standard of Pattern Recognition. Also enjoyed Andre Agassi's autobiography - both part of a book splurge at McNally Robinson last week. I finally have my Kindle in my hands, but have not yet opened the box and set it up - must do that before my Maine trip tomorrow...

Last night I had the perfect New York evening - my brother turned up at the loft where I'm staying (he is working as a carpenter on the Men in Black III production in Williamsburg, and the commute from Philadelphia means getting up at 4am and not getting home till 8pm, so he is going to try and ease things up by staying one or two nights a week in New York), we hung out for an hour, then G. and I went to see the very funny and apt Office Hours by A. R. Gurney at what is rapidly becoming my favorite small theater in Manhattan, The Flea. Young company The Bats are superb, and though the play is slight, I thought it was very well done; also, of course, as someone who has taught in Columbia's Literature Humanities program, I must be pretty much the exact/ideal target audience...

(And a delicious dinner afterwards at Petrarca: we shared piatto rustico to start [G.: "I never remember the food we eat, but I remember we had that before and how good it was!"], then I had a pizza with capers, anchovies and black olives and a specialty dessert of vanilla gelato with amarena cherries.)

Tonight I'm speaking on Clarissa and counterfactuals at the Fordham eighteenth-century seminar: should be fun...

A purchase

Have taken the plunge and ordered a Kindle - they're not shipping till mid-September, but I won't be in New York to pick it up till the end of September in any case.

I have held out against it for quite some time, and am more inherently attracted to the iPad as a device, but I am having serious book supply issues during this Cayman-based time, and realize that the Kindle is now cheap enough that even if it's only an auxiliary device, it is worth my while to have one.

But what I really want is to be able to get LIBRARY books electronically! I am really missing proximity to the Columbia library...

"Go ahead and Google me"

Caleb Crain on canine internet metaphors:

one day a couple of years ago, when I was walking our late lab-shepherd mix, we met a hound who ignored us in order to focus on the scents left on a tree. The hound's owner apologized by saying, "He's checking his email."

New York living

In my regular New York teaching life, I am often so frazzled and stressed out that going anywhere to do anything, no matter how interesting or enjoyable it promises to be, provokes a near panic-attack on the subway platform as I fight the grip of the feeling that I should be at home working. I am making an effort to see that part of my sabbatical is spent refamiliarizing myself with the pleasures of the city, and on that note I saw a very good show last night at BAM, the Magnetic Fields. I love miniature things, and the songs are definitely along marzipan-museum Faberge-egg lines - occasionally it verges on depths of whimsy, but it is very lovely stuff, and they have an unparalleled sense of how to put together a set list with connecting banter.

A favorite: "The Nun's Litany" (sound quality not good, but it gives the flavor).