Eidolon, eiderdown

Via Dave Lull, Wayne Koestenbaum's Trance Notebook #14:

in a station wagon

parked on Union

I puzzled over “eidólons”

and rejected it

as if “Eire” or “dreidel”

or “eiderdown”

were buried

in that awkward

noun—

Closing tabs

I'm dug in properly on BOMH revisions now: I started yesterday morning, it takes a day or two to get into the swing of it but I'm definitely getting there...

My task is very clear, I have three priorities:

(1) Give the 'thriller' plot a better shape and momentum and build it more clearly from the start, including having a clearer sense of one main character's backstory and concerns as they shift over the course of the story the novel tells (and as they appear to and arouse the suspicions of the two other main characters);

(2) Address a couple of places where things suddenly end in an abrupt or overly compressed fashion (my besetting vice!);

(3) Handle the nonfictional/theoretical material about games and game-playing in a way that better integrates it throughout).

The last is easiest, the second is challenging because it's such a weakness of mine but not inherently that difficult, the first involves the need for extended concentration and reimagining and is the hardest part of what needs to be done. Aside from these three specific points, I need to give it one really good further pass through and make sure that the feel is as seamless and suspenseful as I can manage: my mental model for the effect I wanted to create was Donna Tartt's The Secret History, which I haven't reread for at least ten years but which is unusually effective in capturing the reader's attention with a relatively arcane body of material/subject matter melded with a genre-style suspense plot.

Meanwhile, a few tabs to close:

Ted Gioia's list of the top 50 postmodern mysteries includes many particular favorites of mine.

Joanne van der Woude on anagrams and acrostics of grieving in seventeenth-century New England.

Amazing cakes at the Night Kitchen Bakery in Philadelphia (link courtesy of my father, who went to a birthday party featuring one of their cakes and knew I would be entranced!).

Tiddlywinks nomenclature!

Sunday miscellany

Very nice Times review of Nico, Sam and Thomas's concert!

(On another note, I could not endorse Ben Brantley's review of The Pride of Parnell Street, which I saw earlier this week - the performers were doing their best, they were really very good, and the language is gorgeous, but there seemed to be absolutely no reason the piece could not as well have been a short story as a play!)

Times trifecta: Jonathan Lethem on J.G. Ballard.

Finally, Christian House profiles William Boyd at the Independent - Boyd is in any case one of my favorite writers (annoyingly his new book will not be published in the U.S. till January - I might be due an Amazon UK order...), but I leave you with these excellent lines:

London, he once wrote, poisoned him with insomnia and allergies. He declared it "a tax my body has to pay if I want to live in London – the most interesting city on the planet".

"Oh Print Wo nih"

Courtesy of EEBO and Joanne van der Woude's interesting talk here last week on the poetry of New Netherland (and what a strange alternate-historical feeling to contemplate those seventeenth-century Dutch fellows writing poetry in a physical location that is exactly where I live and work now), a instance of the amazing genre (hitherto unknown to me) of the acrostic/anagrammatic broadsheet elegy:

Click to enlarge to the point of readability.