Work TBR

New "tower" approach to organizing work TBR in bedroom (I think best lying in bed!). I have another one of these in a box waiting to be assembled, but it must be said that the screwholes were so badly bored that the person helping me assemble the first one had to take the pieces to the hardware store and get them to help her ream them out so that the screws would actually go through!

"The myth prescribes the garret rather than the Guggenheim"

I have been exhausted all week, but I think I am finally starting to feel more normal - failed to get up for projected early-morning bike ride today, but it was for the best, I needed the sleep more. Had a good swim yesterday but am feeling much thwarted by August swimming-pool closures.

All sorts of Seamus Heaney-related tabs open, waiting for a proper send-off, but I realize that I could wait forever, so here are a few good ones (I never took a class with him, but he was an active and benevolent presence during my undergraduate days in Adams House): Henri Cole interviewed Heaney for the Paris Review (this one's a must-read, all sorts of the things he says are quite arresting, including thoughts about living in two places); Andrew O'Hagan at the LRB on car trips with Heaney and Karl Miller (note blethering discussion, which strongly reminded me of my Scottish grandfather - it was a word he loved - that and shoogly are two Scots words that remain in my personal idiom).

A good interview with Ruth Franklin about the art of criticism.

Lee Child has an amazing apartment! (I like my current apartment very much, indeed it is somewhere I will very happily live until the day I die if that is the way things go, but at this time of year I hugely regret not having central air-conditioning - it is the nature of the Columbia housing stock to be pre-war and very beautiful/spacious, but the humidity right now is killing me, and it leaves me with the impression of my apartment being a sinkhole, even though really it is the same as always.) Very impatient for the new Jack Reacher book - if I am sensible, I will save it to read on Thursday in the airport en route to Madison for my race.

Light reading around the edges of copious trivial errands and obsessing about upcoming race and digging out books and papers for fall-semester classes: Mick Herron, Slow Horses.

Also I forgot to say I read Adam Phillips' Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life as my "airplane book" (I am ready for the silly rule about not using electronic devices during takeoff and landing to be abandoned - but in the meantime, I will continue to have some kind of nonfiction or essay collection with me to while away those stretches of Kindle-banned time). There are only about three worthwhile paragraphs in the whole book, but on the other hand it is a very short book. At his best, Phillips is transfixing, but one also feels he spools this stuff out without regard to quality - he could use a more challenging interlocutor at this point, I suspect, than his own ears!

Extreme sport

Lucie Brock-Broido interviewed at Poetry (via Douglas W.):

Attar of hyacinth is the scent I’ve worn all of my adult life, the only scent in fact. (I eschew change.) So consummate is this pressed oil, though, that on more than one occasion, I’ve been told of the lingering presence of my absence in rooms I’ve been in. The man who runs the elevator in the building where I live once told me that, were I to commit a crime, I would be apprehended instantly. Hours after I am gone, he told me, the evidence of hyacinth goes up and down with the elevator all night long.

Getting high

Cleaning up my study has given little cat Mickey an opportunity to ascend...

Kipple

Is Jonathan Ames a stunted Grey Gardens bachelor drowning in kipple?

"LACK occasional tables"

Via Carolyn, what Lisbeth Salander bought at Ikea!

Closing tabs

It has been an unproductive day thus far in the sense that I have neither exercised nor done any 'real' work, but it was hugely beneficial in terms of mental health and tidying and organizing just to have a day at home sorting things out.  B. is arriving in an hour or so from the airport, and the apartment is ready for a visitor; the kitchen table (a.k.a. desk: it is actually an old drawing table bestowed on me by a neighbor in Cambridge c. 1993) is covered with neat piles of work and manuscripts; I have my Boston hotel reservation for the week immediately after Thanksgiving and have called in prescription refills and done a host of other minor errands of that sort.

I'm about halfway through John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection Pulphead, and finding it completely mesmerizing.  His essay on Michael Jackson sent me last night to this uncanny clip.  

Life vicissitudes of A Very Young Dancer.

The uncanny red landscapes of Kodak Aerochrome.

Bret McKenzie of Conchords fame has written three songs for the new Muppets movie (the piece is by Adam Sternbergh).  Writing for Disney has its constraints:

For example: At one point, McKenzie wrote a lyrical joke for Kermit, in which he would sing, “I remember when I was just a little piece of felt.” That didn’t fly. “I was told: ‘You’re not allowed to do that. The Muppets have always existed. You can’t break down their world.’ ” Another rule: Frogs and bears and pigs can talk, but penguins and chickens can’t. They can cluck or squawk musically, but they can’t say words. “So I was like, ‘Can we get the penguins to sing?’ And they’d say: ‘No. Penguins don’t sing.’ ”

Last night I saw the slight but charming She Kills Monsters at the Flea; afterwards, the place we usually eat at after a show at the Flea was closed for a private party, so we checked out White & Church.  The menu is quite limited and the space and set-up give the feel more of a bar than a restaurant as such, but the food is superb.

Evening update

It's difficult to explain how crazy it's been round here; partly I just always feel off-kilter if I don't have quite a bit of quiet time at home, something that's been singularly lacking, and then of course it's the craziest time in the semester...

I finished up two non-school things today that have turned my apartment into a chaos of books and papers (a review and a late-stage supplement to someone else's interview for a literary journal); I got a much-needed haircut in the late morning; in the afternoon it became clear to me that pretty much the only thing I could do was take a nap (they are doing horrifyingly loud facade work outside my apartment, like right outside, but I closed all the windows and doors I could and then put the duvet very firmly over my head and gave myself over to sleep). I slept in a sort of paralysis for a couple of hours; it was probably the deepest sleep I've had for several weeks.

I had a good run this morning, and when I got home from swimming this evening I took an hour to finally tidy up the chaos - recycling all the printed-out drafts of things, stacking library books on shelves, getting rid of old magazines and mail and sorting out the huge detritus of triathlon training. (Triathlon and writing basically have the same effect on my apartment, they introduce significant disarray until things get so bad that a brief lull gives me the impetus to impose my will once more on the random chaos.)

Now I have an absolutely huge mound of student work that must be read tonight; these couple pieces of outside work, plus the usual extra talks and lectures one needs to attend at this time of year, have left me very much behind on marking assignments. But the (relative) tidiness of my surroundings persuades me that it is possible I will actually get everything done in the next week that I need to....

Snake tales

Luc Sante's neighbors (via the Dizzies).

The ambient years

Geoff Dyer exists in a vast and turbulent ocean of regret.

"Women, Willie. Women"

Two good things in the weekend's Times from Toni Schlesinger, author of the superlative Five Flights Up: thoughts on cruising the Caribbean aboard a behemoth and an interview with a much-loved Norwegian cruise-ship captain.

Also: I have rather a yen for a cube of this ilk!

Production of quota

c. 1,000 words, for a total of 35,790 words.

I had hoped to write yesterday also, but after an initial stab at heading out to set up shop in a cafe somewhere I had to admit defeat, there were simply too many things clamoring for my attention at home...

(I am home! And it is snowing, and I am going to go out for a gloriously snowy run later - it is good...)

The trip back from Cayman went fairly smoothly, though I was traveling with an excessively large amount of luggage (books are heavy!): I had four bags, two of them c. 52 lbs. each and the other two adding up to an additional 70 lbs. or so (the big ones were my XL North Face duffel and the Aerus bike bag that I used to take that second-hand road bike I acquired this spring down to Cayman, only stuffed with clothes and with no bicycle in it; the small ones were my Tyr transition bag packed so absolutely full with books that they have torn a hole along a seam, it is not what it was designed for, and an ancient small duffel bag to which I will not be able to find a link online), plus a backpack with laptop and a large handbag for carry-on. It was a relief to get here with everything still in tow; the carts at JFK are not designed for carrying so much stuff at once!

I have renewed my lease, I have sorted out the overdue library book situation, I have begun to unpack (but there is still much more to do, as I very thoroughly stowed everything away for subletters and now need to excavate and rearrange as well as unpacking the things I had with me in Cayman). It is also amazing how much junk mail accumulates in just a couple of months; I last picked up mail in late October, but there was still a huge shopping bag of catalogs and credit card offers and so forth waiting for me here...

It's about a week and a half till school starts; I need to make up my syllabi for the new semester and take care of associated logistics, but really the two main other things I am doing are striving to maintain quota production and ramping up the fitness schedule. I am looking forward to teaching again, though; I guess in that sense the purpose of the sabbatical has been served!

Often horizontal

I love this WSJ piece about Lee Child's principles of apartment living! I am much on the same scheme - I would definitely live somewhere like that if it were financially feasible - but of course one needs a cluttered office in order to get anything done... (Link courtesy of Sarah.)

I am moving one baby step closer towards the clutter-free lifestyle myself, as my background activity for these weeks is getting my apartment ready to hand over to subletters in preparation to relocating for some months to Cayman. I have a huge box of books to get rid of - this is more of a Facebook-type question, but my local public library has now set a limit of 10 books for donation (per pop, but I cannot be going over there every day with a little bag of books!) - New Yorkers, where can I easily donate? Preferably somewhere that will come and pick them up, or else that is near to Columbia - a taxi to Housingworks is certainly an option, but I live far away from there...

(The new Jack Reacher novel is due to be published on May 18. If I were a perfectly self-disciplined person, I would pre-order it and save it to read on the flight to Cayman on the 27th - but on the other hand, a free copy may come my way before that, and it seems unlikely that I would be able to resist it for those intervening days - I would definitely have to leave it in the box, it would be all over once I actually had the naked book in my hands!)

Extreme movie makeovers

At the Telegraph, pictures of an amazing (insane!) Star Trek bachelor pad...

"Get out your Richards!"

Now and again someone asks me why it is that I am a teacher rather than a full-time writer. There are all sorts of reasons, of course, but one easy answer is that three out of my four grandparents-by-blood were teachers (the fourth, my beloved English grandmother, did a certificate in social work at the London School of Economics at a time when that was quite unusual).

(My mother is a teacher, too - I grew up in a school, even more than most people do!)

My father's parents met at the teacher training college in Glasgow and both specialized in English (British!) literature, and my grandfather went on to become the headmaster of several different high schools (here, by the way, you can see two of his paintings of the town he retired in, North Berwick!).

My English grandfather never understood how my Scottish grandfather could live within walking distance of one of Britain's best golf courses and yet remain thoroughly immune to the charms of the green! I was less close to him than I was to my Scottish grandfather (or, indeed, than I am to the very dear adopted grandfather who is my regular theatergoing companion in New York!), but we had many points of interest in common.

The English grandparents moved to a smaller (but not much smaller!) house a few years before they both died, which entailed some massive cleaning out of the extraordinary house they had lived in for many years (I cannot find a good picture online, though I know I found one once of it standing in solitary splendor of a gothically Victorian kind before the other houses were built on that road in the later nineteenth century, but if you scroll down to the bottom right-hand picture on this site, you will find 16 Broadlands Road - it is the house that, while I stood on a stepladder next to my mother handing her down countless mysterious and useless and yet non-throw-away-able things from a high shelf in the pantry, caused me to utter the most heartfelt words ever heard from my mouth: "I never want to live in a house, I only want to live in an apartment!")

It pained my grandfather to get rid of anything at all, though he steeled himself and managed to part with a great mass of possessions. One thing he was very happy to give to me was a pair of notebooks from his undergraduate years. They contained (in his characteristically illegible writing) his notes on English political thought during the American and French Revolutions, including many pages on my particular favorite Edmund Burke.


(Here was the Guardian obituary by his dear friend Richard Robbins; here was my Uncle Patrick's for the Independent.)

I have saved the best for last: a very nice back-garden picture, taken probably c. 2000 (actually I have no idea!), of me and Granny and Gramp.