NYC day 6

I had good intentions about doing some initial reading recommendations today here, but by the time I finished all the other important things, I was all tuckered out! Tomorrow, I think - I've got Zoom meetings with advisees starting around 3 or so but should have some morning time to do a real post here as well as taking care of one or two more logistical things for next week's classes.

It was a good day for me. I had a lovely 1hr as 1:1 jog-walk in the morning (having had quite serious chronic back pain for the last 3 years I finally figured two major fixes out about a month ago and the fact of running and walking without extreme soreness is really helping my mood). I did some rethinking for my Clarissa seminar (Richardson's million-word-long epistolary novel - one of my two classes semester is dedicated just to reading that book from start to finish) and had a great Zoom conversation with about 2/3 of the students in our normal time slot. The university extended spring break through tomorrow, so we didn't have "real" classes yesterday and today, but it was extremely good for my morale to see those faces and hear about how and where everyone is.

Ordered some hot-weather UV+ protective buffs for when the weather gets warmer. I'm using my winter one as a mask outdoors, for running, walking and errands (and yes, it gets washed after each use), but it's a bit scratchy and these ones will be better once I have them in hand.

Predictions are pretty much useless, but I'm figuring I'm home here like this for at least two months. Fingers crossed that I still get to exercise outside during that period!....

Pamela Weaponized

The stress of the trip gave me a huge relapse vis-a-vis ongoing lung ailment and precipitated a visit to a doctor who gave me some serious medications. But I was very set on seeing Martin Crimp's Pamela adaptation When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other so that I could write about it, and it was highly worthwhile in the end - my piece has just gone live at The Rambling.

A teaser:

My Pamela, when I teach or write about Richardson’s novel, is the Pamela of resistance. I don’t care whether or not my students read much (any?) of the dreadful parts that follow Pamela’s acceptance of Mr. B’s marriage proposal. I refuse to foreground the fact that Pamela voluntarily marries her would-be rapist, or that the main work (the deluded and delusory work!) of the rest of the novel is retrospectively to redeem all that was violent, coercive, troubling in the relationship between the two. Before that, in the first few hundred pages, Richardson has brilliantly conveyed the moment-by-moment consciousness of a young woman under constant threat from the sexual predator who employs her.

Closing tabs

Ah, I am long overdue some tab-closing and a light reading update, but life is complicated and Facebook continues to leach the energy out of blogging! I'm in Cayman for a couple more days, but my term isn't really over - flying back to New York Thursday for a couple more Friday tenure meetings and some end-of-semester teaching stuff. Can get through a couple more weeks without disaster I think....

Anyway, links first (I have upgraded to a new Kindle and will need to consult 2 different devices to get the full log):

How many eggs does a chicken lay in its lifetime?

On the subject of recreational zoology, read Jane Yeh's rhino poem in the NYRB!

At the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman on loving and loathing Samuel Richardson.

The new era of drone vandalism.

Should brand protection extend to paper offerings to the dead?

Top ten things junior faculty should know in order to get tenure. (There was a feminist rebuttal to this somewhere, but I have misplaced the link, and besides, it didn't invalidate the original points, just complemented them!)

What do Enid Blyton's school stories teach a reader about ethics?

Who will come with me to try this sour-cherry-pie sundae?

Finally, on a sadder note, Frederic Tuten interviewed Jenny Diski in 1999 and it's well worth a reread. I won't write more about Diski here, as I am attempting to write a proper piece about her for an online publication I admire, but I have been thinking very much of one of my favorite passages of hers, from On Trying to Keep Still (I think of it all the time and have certainly never read such an uncannily accurate description of why I have such a strong aversion to making plans to see even my favorite people!):

Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.

The libertine aesthetic

Possibly the most obscene poem you will read today or any other day. (Called up in preparation for my final Clarissa seminar later this morning.)

Clarissa repaired

Initially when the book falls into fascicles, it's almost convenient: you can just take a 200-page chunk to class rather than hauling the whole cinderblock of it. But once it falls into so many pieces that you have to keep it in a plastic bag, a repair job is in order....

The uncomfortable desire to be writing books

I am having a very nice quiet week in Cayman: not completely off from work, but there wasn't any single obvious thing that I needed to motor ahead on, so I'm just taking care of bits and bobs as they come up.

It is always sort of awful to have to write a title and description for a future talk that is as yet not even begun, and this one has the typical flaws of vagueness and grandiosity, but I did enjoy contemplating it this morning and getting some sentences down on paper for the draft program:

“Talking Pages: The Eighteenth-Century Variorum Page”

Jenny Davidson will consider the form and function of the variorum page in Johnson’s Shakespeare editions in the context not just of eighteenth-century scholarly editing but of Scriblerian takes on the edited page. She will look closely at the workings of several specific pages of Johnson’s Shakespeare, but her larger concern is to consider Johnson’s literary career in the light of a late-stage revisiting of the quarrel of ancients and moderns. After telling a sort of prequel story about Swift, Bentley, Theobald and Pope, she will turn to Johnson’s editorial work as an effort of reconciliation and resolution in response to still unresolved tensions between the Scriblerian critical project and the reading techniques of a triumphalist modernity. Johnson’s reclamation of a “conversational” and relatively civil variorum page for what is in some ways a conservative literary project seems to represent a critical turning point in eighteenth-century literary history, and Davidson will conclude by considering analogies between Johnson’s use of the variorum page and the theme of generosity in present-day relationships with the past elsewhere in his writing, with brief excursions to Gibbon and Burke as points of comparison.

This made me think about how there are now three projects I am urgently desiring to work on (four if you count the "Gibbon's Rome" offshoot of the ancients-and-moderns project as a separate book), and how that feeling of desire is so satisfying and yet also so uncomfortable, almost so much so as to make me feel out of breath with anxiety and dissatisfaction that I am not doing anything towards any of 'em RIGHT NOW! I think getting new books started is my single highest priority for 2015, though calm and freedom from anxiety are always the highest thing on the list (time spent on my own work is good for this, so the two goals are not inherently incompatible).

I am still really excited about the Clarissa book, and as I'm teaching that seminar in the spring (and no other course - course release for the Tenure Review Advisory Committee, which keeps me very busy, but it's nice to imagine having the mental space free for doing some bits of actual work on this), it seems not implausible to think I might get some actual pages drafted. But higher priorities for January are to put in some of the groundwork for the Johnson's Shakespeare talk and to draft a proposal for a book that would be something like this only titled "Reading Jane Austen"!

If I'm not miscalculating, I have a full year of sabbatical coming up for 2016-2017: I've been considering taking it as two separate semesters (teach fall and take spring off for two years in a row), as in certain respects you get more bang for the buck that way (two very decent stretches of writing time rather than just one long one, and the fall-semester load of letters of recommendation and job market candidates is heavy enough that it doesn't always feel like leave if you're not teaching), but really if I have all these different books on the go, I should just take both at once, make as much progress as I can and then perhaps apply for a year of fellowship somewhere in the couple years following to finish up what remains undone. A project has to be pretty far forward before I can write a really good fellowship application for it, I think; this is not true for everyone, but seems to be for me....

Light reading round-up

I haven't had a huge amount of time for light reading as I am still ploughing through Clarissa! About 70% through, and quota (in the form of notes rather than draft in this case) is piling up nicely* - I am sorry to say that I resolutely ignored various other work-related imperatives until they became so strong that I could no longer postpone them....

Had a useful day Friday sorting out a lot of the remaining stuff for my new lecture course - it is the sort of thing that will take up as much time as you let it, the only way to hold on to real writing time in August is to put this stuff out of mind, though I felt very guilty leaving it so late (it is inconvenient and stressful for the seminar leaders I will be working with!).

Hoping to finish with Clarissa before I return to New York on Wednesday (I have it divided into ten sections for teaching purposes and am following those divisions here too, reading a chunk and then typing up notes while the thoughts are fresh in my mind), but I also still have three more tenure letters that I'd like to get done before school starts (have done most of the work on one, but since it is not the one due this coming Monday, that's not as useful as you might think).

The Swift conference paper is clearly not going to get written this month, but that's OK, have been reading Anthony Grafton on footnotes and thinking about various things to do with Swift and commentary. Can do this after my classes are underway and I have done both of my September triathlons: it makes sense for me to choose races for early fall, as I have much more training time over the summer than during the school year, but it is a pity to have the attention divided between starting school and big races - it will be good when I am over that particular hump!

A couple highlights of recreational reading around the edges:

First of all, Kipling's Kim. It is such a strong source of inspiration for so much contemporary genre fiction (Tim Powers' excellent Declare was the one that most recently brought it to mind, but it's hugely important for Laurie King's Holmes books and crops up in all sorts of other places as well). I must have read it once or twice as a child, but it's not one of the ones I know really well (that would be the Just-So Stories, from early childhood, and then the glorious Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies, which I reread every two years when we visited our English grandparents' house). It is amazingly good, so much so that I think I might need to start rereading a lot of Kipling and Chesterton in lieu of sometimes mediocre recent stuff. Most eloquent and evocative object/image: Kim's "little Survey paint-box of six colour-cakes and three brushes"....

Judy Melinek and T. J. Mitchell, Working Stiff - very good book by a former NY medical examiner about the work she does. I love this stuff, and the book's gripping and worthwhile in any case, but the account of the aftermath of the World Trade Center attacks is especially interesting - would be worth reading the book for that alone, I think. (I am laughing, this one also called my thoughts back to another favorite book of childhood: Mostly Murder, the autobiography of pathologist Sydney Smith!

A couple other novels worthy of note: Marcus Guillory, Red Now and Laters, which I acquired because of the title and very much enjoyed, especially in its account of childhood in Houston in the 1970s and early 1980s - it is overwritten/lyrical in parts, but I am willing to forgive that when there is so much else to like; and the long-awaited last installment of Lev Grossman's Magicians trilogy, The Magician's Land.

These can really only be described as "fodder": Patrick Lee, The Breach (not sure about this one, a bit too grandiose for me in its schemes, though he is certainly a good storyteller); and Melissa Olson, Dead Spots (nothing wrong with it, an enjoyable read, but I fear it is rather the sort of book that makes me feel I am rotting my brain!).

* Tracking quota August 2014

8/8/2014 2194 words (lost a few?)
8/10/2014 7687 words (through end of ONE)
8/11/2014 reading day
8/12/2014 12628 words (through end of TWO)
8/13/2014 reading day
8/14/2014 18117 (through end of THREE)
8/15/2014 reading day
8/16/2014 20217 (through end of FOUR)
8/17/2014 reading day
8/18/2014 23474 (through end of FIVE)
8/19/2014 26599 (through end of SIX)
8/20/2014 reading day and first half of typing
8/21/2014 31752 (through end of SEVEN)
8/22/2014 LTCM work

Random thoughts

The cumulative effect of Clarissa involves an unabashed sublimity, at least for me, and yet one of the interesting things about the novel is that it is full of stretches of embarrassingly bad writing, especially in the letters of Lovelace. Context for this would be not just the caviling of some of Richardson's contemporaries about his failure to create a plausibly upper-class male rake's voice, but an older critique of similar in something like the record playwright Thomas Shadwell left of Dryden attempting and failing to capture the obscene wittiness of Rochester et al.: supposedly at Windsor one day, while Dryden was working on Marriage-a-la-Mode and spending time with the wits of the court circle, somebody asked how they would spend the afternoon and Dryden said “Let’s Bugger one another now, by God."

Good example of the sort of passage I have in mind - it makes me laugh and cringe, it's amazingly over-the-top in a way that I think is not tonally within Richardson's control or comprehension, though that is of course debatable:

Let me perish, Belford, if I would not forgo the brightest diadem in the world for the pleasure of seeing a twin Lovelace at each charming breast, drawing from it his first sustenance; the pious task continued for one month, and no more!

I now, methinks, behold this most charming of women in this sweet office, pressing with her fine fingers the generous flood into the purple mouths of each eager hunter by turns: her conscious eye now dropped on one, now on the other, with a sigh of maternal tenderness; and then raised up to my delighted eye, full of wishes, for the sake of the pretty varlets, and for her own sake, that I would deign to legitimate; that I would condescend to put on the nuptial fetters. (706)

In other news, the minor woe of the last few days: the amazingly named seabather's eruption!

Time passes

I think I liked Alain de Botton's How Proust Can Change Your Life better the first time I read it - I occasionally find myself defending him to others, and I do think it's a little unfair that he is so widely loathed when it is possible that we should consider his archness in the light of a failing he cannot help rather than an affectation for which he should be despised (he seems to serve as arch-nemesis for several writers I know)! It is an insubstantial work, in any case, but I have found in it a good epigraph for TTWC (alongside this one perhaps!):

Whatever the merits of Proust's work, even a fervent admirer would be hard pressed to deny one of its awkward features: length. As Proust's brother, Robert, put it, "The sad thing is that people have to be very ill or have broken a leg in order to have the opportunity to read In Search of Lost Time."

Slow books

From T. C. Duncan Eaves and Ben D. Kimpel, Samuel Richardson: A Biography (Oxford: Clarendon, 1971), p. 599:

The length of his novels has probably done Richardson's reputation even more harm than his moralizing. It has kept Clarissa from being read. Or it has caused it to be read in a version which curtails those minutiae which, Richardson rightly pointed out, are the strength of his method. Or it has caused readers to sample Pamela and reject Richardson on the basis of that book. . . . If one likes to read, there is no necessary assumption that the sooner one gets through reading a book the better. In spite of Poe, it is our opinion that neither poetry nor prose need aim exclusively at sharp, simple effects--length itself, if the details are not dull and are so organized as to support each other, may contribute to an effect unified in complexity and gaining cumulative impact. Whether Richardson succeeds in making his details interesting and in unifying them, each reader must decide. Tennyson, speaking of Clarissa, told FitzGerald that he loved 'those large, still, Books'. It does not seem to us that 'still' is quite the right adjective, since almost every episode in Clarissa is written with considerable intensity. 'Slow' might be more accurate. Clarissa is long not because, like War and Peace, it is rich and varied in incident and character, but because, like The Remembrance of Things Past, it wrings the utmost possible out of the incidents and characters it has.

Thinking with the hand

One of the appealing things about having a very quiet week is that under the right circumstances it leads to great mental fertility! I've been hungry all semester for some thinking and writing time; the most immediate project that I want to get underway is a book I've been thinking about for a few years now, a little book whose provisional title is The Ten-Week Clarissa.

Not as instructional as something like this, though not entirely dissimilar - but more for readers and students and teachers who want some assistance tackling Richardson's million-word-long novel, which I hope to persuade obsessive readers should as much be on their lifetime bucket lists as Proust.

It will have elements in common with funny books like Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage and Jonathan Coe's B. S. Johnson biography; it will also bear a respectful but somewhat ironized relationship to Alain de Bouton's How Proust Can Change Your Life.

(It will start with an opening essay that addresses the question "Why bother?" and considers the topic of immersive reading - then it will proceed through Richardson's novel in ten chunks that have worked well for me as subdivisions in the classroom, with an interlude after each chapter in which I consider some interesting question of relevance (changes in kinship structures and inheritance law, hypergraphia, epistolarity and letters in both their material and conventional aspects, novels and the counterfactual mode, detail and description, clothing, readers kicking back against the ending in a sort of proto-"fanfic" culture, the culture of death as instantiated in mourning rings, coffin designs etc.). I have to write this book quickly because I have a sabbatical in two years that I want to devote wholly to the battle of ancients and moderns, with a few months on the side for a long essay to be called "Gibbon's Rome" - reread Decline and Fall, tromp around Rome, look at the medals and inscriptions and books that he consulted, write it up after the manner of Sebald!)

With a couple more weeks of reading, I feel (it is probably a delusion) that I will be able to sit down and let the proposal just pour out of me like a stream of water. I made a map for it the other day: there is nothing quite like illegible thinking with the hand....

Tractor, truck-like vehicle

Enjoyable week of reading here: Spinoza's Theological-Political Treatise (I was recently almost overwhelmed with a yen to read books by and about Spinoza, and obtained some immediately, but this was the first week it was practical to dig in); the first half of the Kimpel and Eaves Richardson biography, which I have dipped into but never before read straight through from start to finish, and which I am thinking will put me in the right mood to plunge into my Clarissa project (about which, more soon, along with the other more notional projects that also have me in sway to them); and My Struggle vol. 3, which I have just finished.

It is hard to explain why the Knausgaard is so mesmerizing, but I was again absolutely riveted. Here's a bit I especially liked:

Even though history didn't exist for me when I went there as a child and everything belonged to the moment, I could still feel its presence. Grandad had lived there all his life, and in some way or other that influenced the image I had of him. But if there was one image or notion that embodied Grandad, it was not everything he had done in his life, of that I knew very little, and the little I did know, I had nothing to compare it with, no, the one thing that embodied Grandad was the little two-stroke tractor he used for a multitude of purposes. That tractor was the very essence of Grandad. It was red and a bit rusty, needed to be kick-started, and had a small gear stick, a column with a black ball on top, on one hand lever, while the accelerator was on the other. He used it for mowing, walking behind it while an enormous scissor-like attachment on the front cut down the grass in its path. And he used it to transport heavy items; then he put a trailer on the back with a green seat, from which he steered what all of a sudden had become a truck-like vehicle. There was little I rated higher than being with him then, sitting on the back and chugging toward the two shops in Vagen, for example, where he would collect cans of formic acid or sacks of feed or artificial manure. The vehicle was so slow you could walk beside it, but that didn't matter, speed wasn't of any consequence, all the rest was: the rattle of the engine, the exhaust fumes that smelled so god and wafted across the road as we drove, the feeling of freedom in the trailer, being able to hang over one side, then the other, all the things there were to see on the journey, including Grandad's slight figure and his peaked cap in front of me, and getting out at the shop, where the Bergen boat docked, and being able to walk around, often with an ice cream in our hands while Grandad did whatever he had to do.

I am a little worried about the way my summer is slipping away from me! Have had a truly lovely quiet week here, homemade Spa Week with yoga and running and green smoothies and a lot of reading time - only problem is distinct shortage of cats! - but we are already in the middle of June, and I haven't at all gotten started on proper work. I have 3 dissertation defenses in the next four weeks, and rashly also agreed to write four tenure letters - the first two because they came in first, the second two because they are people I know and want to help - and 3 PhD students going on the job market for the first time. I need to make the syllabus for the "Literary Texts, Critical Methods" class I'm teaching for the first time in the fall - this is much more complex than usual syllabus-making. I also want to write a proposal and some pages for the Clarissa book and do substantial reading and thinking about my ancients-and-moderns book; this may be cumulatively unrealistic, as there are of course all sorts of other bits and bobs that must be taken care of too....

Morning edition

Slow start this morning. Got up very early but dragged heels to the point where I no longer really had time to make it out the door for a run. (Will just have to make the effort to do something serious later.)

I liked what Christopher Ricks had to say about Lydia Davis at the TLS.

Had a very good conversation with my editor yesterday over lunch to discuss style revisions. That's the priority: I'm hoping to be done with it by mid-June, which seems fairly realistic (depending on how much attention and time I have to devote to my least-favorite triathlon sport, the time-consuming and stressful CYCLING). Official due date of June 30, which I will certainly make - I'm flying to Cayman June 27, so that's my real effective deadline. It sounds as though the book will be out as early as May or June 2014, which I am excited about - I had imagined it might not be coming out till fall or winter.

I usually like Adam Mars-Jones's criticism, but I feel he really missed the point of Kate Atkinson's new novel (that is a LRB subscriber-only link). He doesn't seem to feel at all the deep emotional affective investment in the characters that dominated my experience of it, or the intensity with which we feel the entanglement of paths taken and not taken in individual women's lives (the fallout of a rape, an abortion, a murder, a choice about what sort of job to undertake or whether to have a child) with world-historical events (English-German relations, the Blitz, the arrival of the Russians). I really loved the book - that and Knausgaard are my two favorites of the year, very different from each other in obvious respects but sharing the qualities of being mesmerizing to read and also important in what they have to say. To talk so much about inconsistencies in the cosmology, as it were, without saving space for what Atkinson wants to do in terms of showing how people in families love each other and tug against the imperatives of necessity - I don't know, it's just a little obtuse! I think I might need to write an essay on counterfactuals and the novel: I have some of that work done already, an argument about novels and alternate lives that starts with the famous passage in Middlemarch and considers some obvious important aspects of that topic before going into a more extended reading of Clarissa's counterfactuals. Could write about Atkinson, the Ian Tregillis books and other paths-not-taken science fiction....

On a more frivolous note, I had cause to utter a rare and happy sentence to B. on Sunday evening: "I have had a sufficiency of cake"! A good friend of bride and groom is the proprietor of Meera's Cakes, and she really outdid herself. There were two enormous cakes at the party on Saturday night (I think I can only find a picture of one of them, a reproduction of the turntable P. was spinning the night he first met G. - I can't see/remember what it was, but the single is even accurately rendered! - the other was a ginormous blue-and-green globe, with red dots marking the places where bride and groom have traveled together - one chocolate, one vanilla, both delicious as well as beautiful to look at), and their remains made their way back to my aunt's house, where we gathered for family tea on Sunday. (Photo courtesy of Mark Pringle.)

"The mind is its own place"

I'm having a good week in Cayman.  If I come here when I'm feeling tormented and obsessive, which is fairly often, it can feel strangulatingly quiet; I count on a certain amount of impersonally chaotic activity in the outside environment as pushback against the internal sensation of "too much traffic"!  But things are in a good place right now. 

Earlier this morning I finished my first close pass through the style book; certainly a few weeks of hard work still remaining on that, but I'm shooting to finish the preliminary rewrite in the next couple weeks and have set a provisional self-imposed deadline of Oct. 1 for a good clean final version. 

In a digressive moment, I drafted what might be the first few pages of a notional essay on why Clarissa is worth your while to read despite its length, and I've read some interesting stuff for the style book too (though I think its new title - it started out as the little book on style and morphed into Notes on Style - is simply Notes on Reading).  Whether or not this will be my best book to date (I think that's a difficult discrimination to make concerning your own work), it certainly feels like the book I was born to write, and the book that most fully conveys the texture of my own interior life.  I'm excited!

Found a great new fitness class here, too; this summer has been colored by back pain in opening and dental woes more recently, but both are now happily behind me and I feel I can (within reason) exercise as much as I like for the next couple of weeks.  It's actually been a good summer for exercise notwithstanding those limiters, and I note that I will take back and jaw pain any day over bronchitis, which really brings everything to a grinding halt....

I've got tickets for some great stuff in NYC in the middle of September, including this trifecta of a single weekend: the Joshua Light Show (with John Zorn, Lou Reed and others); Toni Schlesinger's The Mystery of Oyster Street; Einstein on the Beach.

Light reading around the edges: Victor LaValle's Lucretia and the Kroons (but what I really want is The Devil in Silver - will have to wait another few days for that); Emily St. John Mandel's The Lola Quartet; Sean Chercover's The Trinity Game (of the Dan Brown school of character development, but an enjoyable read); Hjorth and Rosenfeldt's Sebastian Bergman (unstably satirical now and again, particularly in its treatment of the title character, but on the whole appealing); and Katia Lief's Vanishing Girls, which like its predecessors combines the most wildly and distractingly implausible scenarios and procedural details with a very effectively rendered first-person voice and characters.

In other news, it's National Black Cat Appreciation Day.

Life and opinions

Note to self

It is very strange: I've been thinking at the back of my mind all day about a review I drafted last week that didn't come out quite right and that I didn't have time to sit down with properly during daytime hours today due to other obligations.  But as I finished tomorrow's reading for lecture (the first two books of Tom Jones), not only did the brand-new first paragraph of the reimagined review burst into my mind, I also near-simultaneously thought of a different and better way of handling two representative arguments about the 'minute particular' in a talk I'm giving next week.  I feel more alert and cognitively capable than I have all day; have scrawled down a rough version of the new opening for the review as well as a memorandum about my intended mobilization of notionally opposing arguments about detail and historicity by Hartley and Sheridan, and will shortly stop work to try and wind down for the night....

Better set alarm very early to work on that review properly and get it sent off before my 10:30 appointment at the gym: nighttime is mentally active, for better and for worse, but writing proper generally needs to be done before I get sucked into the vortex of the rest of the day!  This post can be considered a thank-you note to Fielding for prompting intellectual activity, even if I do not love his novels the way I love Richardson's.

Bad habits

Clarissa to Anna Howe, letter dated "Sat. night, Mar. 18" (the Penguin edition edited by Angus Ross seems to be no longer in print, which is dismaying to me!):

 You see, my dear, he scruples not to speak of himself, as his enemies speak of him.  I can’t say, but his openness in these particulars gives a credit to his other professions.  I should easily, I think, detect a hypocrite: and this man particularly, who is said to have allowed himself in great liberties, were he to pretend to instantaneous lights and convictions—at his time of life too: habits, I am sensible, are not so easily changed.  You have always joined with me in remarking that he will speak his mind with freedom, even to a degree of unpoliteness sometimes; and that his very treatment of my family is a proof that he cannot make a mean court to anybody for interest-sake.  What pity, where there are such laudable traces, that they should have been so mired, and choked up, as I may say!—We have heard that the man’s head is better than his heart: but do you really think Mr Lovelace can have a very bad heart?  Why should not there by something in blood in the human creature, as well as in the ignobler animals?

End-of-week update

These Seven Sicknesses, a.k.a. the Sophocles marathon at the Flea, was highly worthwhile: the treatment of the Oedipus plays seems a bit unstable on the farce-tragedy axis (and I thought the actor playing Oedipus was perhaps the weakest in the show, or at any rate his performance was too campy to be at all moving), but the middle segment of Philoctetes-Ajax is excellent (the Ajax staging is just superb, particularly the handling of the sheep scene) and the concluding pair of Electra-Antigone works very well also.

I finished reading A Dance with Dragons and all I can say is that I really do not see that George R. R. Martin will be able to wrap up the rest of the story in only one more volume, however long!  He is temperamentally averse to leaving anything out, and it leads to some frustrating choices in volumes four and five; my heart sank when I realized that the last volume was literally going to go back to the temporal starting point of the previous one and cover exactly the same time period, not to show a markedly divergent view but just to fill out some things that didn't fit in.  You then see a character you care about, who grew and changed over the previous installment, back in his pre-change version, and for no good reason; this strikes me as a fundamental breach of the compact with the reader, just as I dislike the playing-fast-and-loose-with-alternate-timestream thing that a certain television series I love has been indulging in: the sense of reality you have in television drama is thin enough that you cannot afford to erode it too far by, say, bringing back to life a character you have killed off in the alternate timestream by letting the space-time continuum shift and reconfigure everything. . . .

(You can get the first four installments of George R. R. Martin in a box or a bundle, but really what I recommend instead is Wolf Hall on the one end or Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy on the other.)

The due date is rapidly approaching for my ratings on second-round reading for the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, so I won't be writing much here about what I'm reading over next few weeks (confidentiality!), and I'm also teaching Clarissa again this semester, which eats up quite a bit of reading time.  However there is always room for a little light reading round the edges...

Miscellaneous links:

Neil Gaiman on growing up reading C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton.

And I'm giving a talk today at 4pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; I am just hoping it will stop raining to the extent that people will actually be willing to leave their dwellings and venture out into the world to come to it!

Froth and Whip-syllabub

"To the Editor of Pamela":

[L]et us have Pamela as Pamela wrote it; in her own Words, without Amputation, or Addition. Produce her to us in her neat Country Apparel, such as she appear’d in, on her intended Departure to her Parents; for such best becomes her Innocence and beautiful Simplicity. Such a Dress will best edify and entertain. The flowing Robes of Oratory may indeed amuse and amaze, but will never strike the Mind with solid Attention.

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...