Untitled

Style book reviewed at Publishers Weekly!

(This semester is now officially kicking my ass - so tired I don't really know what to do with myself! Four more weeks - I think it can be done....)

Celebration of the fiftieth anniversary of the Columbia University Seminar on Eighteenth-Century European Culture this weekend - I have had no hand organizing it, but will preside over a graduate student panel and weigh in where appropriate.

Too lazy to log full list of light reading (I had a pile of YA paperbacks that I picked up the last time I visited the Bank Street Bookstore, have just ploughed through them due to dearth of mental attention for anything more challenging), but I did read and love two short books over the weekend, both highly recommended: Jenny Offil's Dept. of Speculation (good interview here) and Teju Cole's Every Day is For the Thief.

Teaching Emile tomorrow. It is a very strange book. To my chagrin, the edition I taught it from last time is out of print, and I haven't been able to lay hands on my own old copy - teachers know that this means my quite reasonable set of teaching notes is now virtually useless! Rectification of page numbers (and it is a different translation, too, alas - I was marking stuff with post-its as I reread in this edition, but it's going to be a pain trying to reconcile things) will have to wait until tomorrow, though. I got nothin'!

Linkage

Trying to gear up for a run - have already curtailed notion of a long one, now just need to get myself out the door for something. Residual fatigue is an obstacle, and hay fever season is upon us; also, not as warm as one might think in April - but really all this just means that I am still very tired!

Miscellaneous linkage:

E. L. Konigsburg has died. I loved so many of her books so much, including the iconic Mixed-Up Files, but I think my two absolute favorites must have always been A Proud Taste for Scarlet and Miniver (what an amazing title aside from everything else - though as someone who has recently felt a bit scathed by 1-star Amazon reviews, I feel slightly relieved to see the vitriol being spilled on this lovely book and its title!) and Father's Arcane Daughter, which I am sorry to see has been retitled My Father's Daughter in the reissue - one of the things I loved as a child about Konigsburg's books was that they made no concessions to imagined notions of children's vocabularies!

At the Guardian: Sebald on Rousseau, Wood/Sinclair/Macfarlane/Self on Sebald.

This is uncanny. (Via Charles. Whole site is very compelling.)

Best thing I saw on the internet this week. (Courtesy of my dad.)

Literary minefields

From Rousseau's Confessions:

I have always considered M. de Malesherbes to be a man of inviolable integrity. Nothing that has happened to me has ever made me doubt for a moment his probity; but, as weak as he is honourable, he sometimes harms the people in whom he takes an interest through his very desire to protect them. Not only did he have more than one hundred pages cut from the Paris edition [of Julie]; but he made a cut that could even be described as an act of disloyalty in the copy of the good edition that he sent to Mme de Pompadour. Somewhere in this work there is a remark to the effect that the wife of a coal-merchant is more deserving of respect than the mistress of a prince. This sentence suggested itself to me in the heat of composition without, I swear it, any allusion being intended. On rereading the work, I realized that the connection would nevertheless be made. Faithful, nevertheless, to my own very imprudent maxim of never suppressing anything out of fear that connections might be made, provided my conscience is my witness that I was not aware of them while writing, I was reluctant to remove this sentence, but contented myself with substituting the word prince for the word king, which is what I had originally written. This modification did not go far enough for M. de Malesherbes: he removed the whole sentence, which is missing from the new page he had printed specially and stuck as neatly as possible into Mme de Pompadour's copy. She was not deceived by this vanishing act. There was no shortage of charitable souls eager to inform her of it.