Checking in

I am determined to reclaim the blog as a place where at the very least I log what I've been reading! Action prompted in particular by trying to download content from Facebook (I am just getting started on a short piece called "Reading Gibbon in the Time of Trump" and want to see which Decline and Fall bits I posted on which days - one of the ways in which Facebook is much inferior to the old-fashioned blog!) and remembering why it would have been better if I'd just posted those bits here. Also thinking quite a bit, around and after the two-year anniversary of my father's death, on the fact that it may not just have been social media that leached the energy away from my blogging vim; it was also very much the nature of my relationship with my father that we shared links and talked about bits we'd seen online, and my avoidance of the FT weekend magazine for instance seems part and parcel of the same phenomenon. Also, keeping so many tabs open is causing Chrome to fail - a tech guy at work showed me a good tool that lets you save a whole host of open tabs onto a single page of links, but really clearing tabs by posting what interested me would be a smarter way....

Personal blogging

In an effort to reclaim the territory of the blog back from social media....

They are jackhammering up the street in front of my apartment. The noise is such that the two cats are agitated; it was so loud downstairs that a little boy with his father was afraid to leave the building!

I am up so early only because I had an 8am tooth-cleaning appointment; you have to make them so far in advance, it's the only safe time when I really know I won't have a conflict. It's a beautiful day, upper 50s and sunny; lying in the chair, though, gave me a view of my sandals that made me acknowledge that they have lived their last days - the foam footbeds are completely torn out in chunks - no longer shoes of respectability - I have thrown them in the trash....

Closing a few tabs:

A nice piece at the Guardian about Nadia Sirota and her Meet the Composers show.

Anne Fernald on Goodnight, Moon and modernism. (Mush!)

Dill battalions

Ah, I continue to fight the battle against the easy allure of Facebook and the way it saps blogging vim - it has been compounded, on this trip, by the fact that my lovely brand new computer (it arrived the day before I left, I hastily met with an IT guy who set it up for me), which is in every way great and weighs about one-quarter what my previous laptop did, has a non-functional battery (CURSE OF DELL). Given travels in places needing plug adaptors, and often a system where power shuts down in the room when you take the keycard out of the slot by the door, I have avoided having it plugged in at all, as it goes into automatic shutdown if it's in sleep mode and the power goes off. The iPad is much more suited to quick Twitter/Facebook posts than to more elaborate ones, further compounding the unwanted transition....

(Will pursue battery replacement as soon as I'm home properly on Monday.)

So lots of blogging to catch up on. For now, just one funny piece that COULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN BY ME (via Bronwyn). One of the things that's very nice about food in Iceland versus other Scandinavian countries and Russia/Eastern Europe: I have not encountered a single bit of dill, it is chives for the most part instead which is a much more humane alternative! My aversion to dill knows no bounds....

Anyway, Shaun Walker at the Guardian on the "spindly menace" of dill in Russia:

It’s one thing when dill blankets traditional Russian dishes like the emptied contents of a lawnmower bag, but quite another when it shows up on pizza, sushi, quiches: occasions when you naively hadn’t even thought to request a dill-free meal from the waiter. It is a sabotage apparently borne of a grotesque, atavistic culinary longing, like some deranged Brit on the Costa del Sol lacing a paella with brown sauce.

More anon - we are off shortly (it is our last full day in Iceland) to soak in the Blue Lagoon....

Cake!

At the intersection of two of my favorite things. (I slightly aspire to write a guest post for this blog one day!)

Swimming with Byron

I remember when I first started blogging that I found it slightly painful, the way that a really good post would immediately be superseded by the next one above it - it is definitely an ordering principle that takes a bit of getting used to. In this case, though, I am happy to bump my dreadful last post down the page....

Kickstarter invitations galore come through my feeds, but this is truly one after my own heart: a documentary film called Swimming with Byron!

(On which note, I think my review of the excellent Swimming with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale should be out soon in the academic journal Biography.)

Twitter tabs

Twitter isn't so much a closed space as Facebook, but I've been trying to be a little more active there (book promotional purposes) and I find myself too often just retweeting a good link instead of more usefully for my own purposes sharing and archiving it here! One great thing about blogging is that it makes for such a consistent archive - these other more tailored proprietary formats (especially Facebook) are much less suited to that purpose....

Anyway, some funny bits I've had on my Twitter feed:

Cat paws have an uncanny resemblance to tiny little bears. pic.twitter.com/bUfk1KfXH5

— Faces in Things (@FacesPics) July 8, 2014

Long-lost section of the Bayeux Tapestry shows what happened when Pooh met the Normans (artist: E. H. Shepard)... pic.twitter.com/cW8I8XEfCO

— Britannia PR (@Britanniacomms) July 16, 2014

"Ghostbusters is a movie about 3 scrappy technologists who build disruptive tech to do supernatural defense." - @TimHwang #Transition2014

— Percolate (@percolate) July 16, 2014

Also: Will Amazon provide a Netflix-type service for books? (Via Sarah W. NB this will do me no good if a lot of books are excluded....)

"I made my husband try a sex robot."

Book recommendations from Stephen King.

More books!

At the Columbia UP blog, five of the best books about hoarding.

Cruise on the couch

Some necessary preconditions for viral video.

On presence

"My blog was the Web equivalent of my body." (Via BoingBoing.)

Exclusivity redux

I flagged this quotation mentally as I was reading for class, only I dimly remembered (and indeed it is so!) I blogged it the last time I taught this book also....

(I am entering the stretch of the semester where the only thing I want is to be able to spend a month entirely by myself reading books and not talking to anybody!)

Take five

Five facts about The Magic Circle. Thanks to Matt Staggs for the invitation to contribute!

The short list

For every author who ever lost a moment's peace of mind over an Amazon review!

Another thing

The aesthetics of love and hate in cultural criticism.

So true!

Maud Newton on David Foster Wallace and the problem of voice.

Production of quota

c. 2,000 words, for a total of 27,042 words.

An aside: it seems clear to me that the blog is a medium curiously well suited to my modes and interests (I include Tumblr-type things under the category of blogs, but not Twitter, which I cannot find any way of feeling enthusiastic about, either as consumer or producer).

I quite like Facebook, though I wouldn't miss it much if it suddenly went away again; but the thing I most regret about it is that it seems clear that most people strongly prefer a social media-Facebook-type format to blogging - whereas to my mind, the way a blog lets you get to know its author over time is uniquely appealing, and the expressive possibilities of blogging also seem unmatched by anything Facebook and its ilk have to offer.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I have two good links to offer that come by way of Facebook status updates: a vegetable orchestra (courtesy of Charles Flatt); the eclipse in Biblical and Mesopotamian thought (courtesy of Seth Sanders). Alas, I fear it is the end of an era...

Three weeks

until the official publication of Invisible Things.

Here's an early review (the discussion in the comments thread makes me laugh and shake my head - authors have no control over covers!), and I'll post links as other stuff comes up, including entries in the forthcoming Traveling to Teens blog tour.

I won't be blogging regularly at the site I used for The Explosionist, as it seems to me to make more sense to consolidate my efforts here, but I'll probably use the sidebar there to keep track of interviews and online reviews. I've also just posted the author's note over there, as it wasn't included in the ARCs that went out this summer.

(I am pleased to know that US residents can pre-order a Kindle edition!)

Out of sight, out of mind

I have a shameful confession: when I was in New York, people kept on saying "You have a book coming out soon, don't you?" At that point I would cringe internally and then stumble into an explanation of how I don't yet have a publisher for the little book on style and that it needs another round of revision . . . before suddenly realizing that yes, I do have a book coming out soon!

It is of course Invisible Things, sequel to The Explosionist and due out officially as of November 23.

I'll be devoting quite a bit of time over the coming month to doing various online publicity bits.

I'm excited about the Traveling to Teens blog tour that Steph Su has very generously arranged for me.

And this evening at 6:30pm eastern time, I'll be interviewed by Barry Eva for his Book and a Chat program; the program will be available afterward as a podcast, and I'll link to it then.

I like speaking in public and writing a blog, so this may seem self-contradictory, but I shrink from all forms of authorly self-promotion, and have been very slow to do what I need to vis-a-vis this stuff. I have to take the time here to thank my friend and former student Julia Hoban, author of the excellent Willow, for her help in this regard. She has kindly but firmly reminded me how important it is to do this sort of thing, and in fact she is directly responsible for both of these two publicity opportunities, as she recommended me to Barry for his show and sent me the link to the Traveling to Teens website, which I might not otherwise have seen!

"It's an abominaccino!"

For some reason I haven't seen much to blog these last few days (it is never clear to me, except on August weekends when the news is genuinely slow, whether this is due to internal or external factors), but here are a few tabs to clear:

Ancient beehives; gladiator graveyards.

David Markson has died; thoughts and a links round-up from Sarah Weinman.

Thirteen writers and scientists name their favorite science books.

And I have saved the best for last - Geoff Dyer on discovering the perfect doughnut-and-cappuccino combination! It was National Doughnut Day on Friday, and I consider it a minor miracle that I resisted the temptation to obtain and consume one. NB the kind that Dyer mentions are indeed pretty much the best I have ever tasted - they have them at my local branch of Oren's Daily Roast - but I am surprised that he does not mention the fact that they can be obtained from the actual Doughnut Plant on the Lower East Side.

Facts, fragility of, passim

At TNR, Anthony Grafton considers Oxford don Mary Beard's blog-to-book odyssey. (Courtesy of Ian Corey-Boulet.)

The dead speak

Caleb Crain revisits the to me utterly fascinating question of how John Keats actually talked.

(This post is a nice small example of how Caleb uses his blog to organize and annotate his more official publications.)

Also recommended: Lynda Mugglestone's Talking Proper: The Rise of Accent as Social Symbol. And there is a magical essay by Peter Holland, "Hearing the Dead: The Sound of David Garrick," in Players, Playwrights, Playhouses.

Bonus link: Marco Roth has a really lovely piece at n+1 about Caleb's self-published collection of blog posts The Wreck of the Henry Clay.