Wormwood forest

Ah, I see that it is exactly a year since I last posted here - a link to Gene's obituary. He has been much on my mind this month, for obvious reasons.

Am deep in Gibbon book and its writing - just spent the afternoon reading a book that I first heard about more than ten years ago (in this TLS review, though I can't access the whole piece without requesting it through ILL - in all these years, the TLS still hasn't improved the usability of its archive!), Mary Mysio's Wormwood Forest: A Natural History of Chernobyl. It is a very good book without being a great one (the excellence of the topic exceeds the skill level of the writer, perhaps - the copy-editing isn't great and in the hands of a different publisher it might have developed into something more for the ages). Which is to say that it doesn't have the literary force (the unforgettable shock value) of Svetlana Alexievich's Voices From Chernobyl: An Oral History of a Nuclear Disaster, with which it must be read in tandem (I'm thinking about a reread now). And yet it is an absolutely extraordinary story! Not least in the episode it recounts about the release into the wild of several small herds of Przewalski's horses, a longtime favorite of mine (I just saw some at the small zoo at the Jardin des Plantes the other week).

My reading was prompted by this passage in Gibbon, in which he discusses the repeated and ongoing invasions of the Illyrian provinces after the death of Valens:

Could it even be supposed, that a large tract of country had been left without cultivation, and without inhabitants, the consequences might not have been so fatal to the inferior productions of animated nature. The useful and feeble animals, which are nourished by the hand of man, might suffer and perish, if they were deprived of his protection: but the beasts of the forest, his enemies, or his victims, would multiply in the free and undisturbed possession of their solitary domain. The various tribes that people the air, or the waters, are still less connected with the fate of the human species; and it is highly probable, that the fish of the Danube would have felt more terror and distress, from the approach of a voracious pike, than from the hostile inroad of a Gothic army. (26, 1:1068-69)

The Gibbon book is going to be weaving together a lot of different stories, memoiristic as well as critical, but is really about the cast of thought that makes information become intellectually and analytically interesting....

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....

Closing tabs

Demanding week, but highly worthwhile, including a very good dissertation defense this morning (I always think it is a pity that these conversations happen in private, they are so interesting and stimulating [at their best] - this is the dissertation that drew to my attention some time ago to this particularly lovely bit of Adorno on four-handed piano music).

My laptop is fully functional once again, except that something the fixer did stopped the right-click function from working (will investigate this tomorrow when I am less tired); I think I still have two letters of recommendation that should be submitted before the clock turns from the 16th to the 17th, only I am not sure I have it in me, I might just have to hope for the best and submit them tomorrow in the hope that date-based electronic banning of some sort does not cause me to have to fall back some old-school stopgap!

(Fax - but really, it is very unlikely that all letter-writers made this deadline, I imagine the system will still take my letter tomorrow?)

Just got back from a delightful event for my friend and colleague Eleanor Johnson's learned and accessible book about Boethius and the mixing of prose and verse in the Middle Ages.

Light reading around the edges: Pelecanos's new novel The Double, which I liked very much; and Alan Glynn's Graveland, which I found something of a disappointment. He's such a good writer, but he's let all his books sort of converge on one single long conspiracy theory; of course it must be said that there is something quite prescient about the thriller plot of this book, which anticipates a Tsarnaev-style local terror plot and mashes that storyline together with a more Aaron Swartzian sort of paranoia about the way government and big corporate interests can bring down individual journalists and seekers after truth, but really the whole thing doesn't work as a true self-sufficient novel (it was the last straw for me when he brought in a performance-enhancing drug a-la-Limitless - on which note, this is up soon in the reading queue thanks to a good advance bit from B.).

Near the end of Aifric Campbell's On the Floor. The trading-floor bits seem to me superb, but the other plot is a bit weak - I wish she'd just written it as a more extremely descriptive fiction/non-fiction amalgam, more along the lines of this.

Finally, this delightful picture of my nephew, like other photos of both of the very young people who are quite closely related to me, causes me to reflect on the pronounced nature of family resemblance!

Season of lost and broken things

It is mildly ironic, since things in my life right now are very good and distinctly neither lost nor broken - but it has been the season of lost and broken things!

My Kindle stopped working and I got a new Paperwhite, only to leave it in the seat pocket on a plane in Portland, ME. I filed a lost property report with Delta online, but I haven't heard anything, and I think if they haven't sorted it out by now, it's not likely to surface subsequently. Will order a new one - have been using Kindle app on phone and on my new Kindle Fire, but really as an excessive novel-reader it is worth it for me to have the dedicated reading device.

The SD card on my smartphone stopped working, so I replaced the phone (it was old, I was overdue for a free upgrade), so that doesn't really count. But in the meantime I started getting an error message on my laptop saying that the battery wasn't recognized - it hasn't worked on battery power for weeks now, but as the messages became more frequent, I realized I'd better do something about it. Dropped it off earlier today with repair guy who thinks it is either the battery or the motherboard - very happy to have the Kindle Fire HD (with bluetooth keyboard) to fall back on, as being completely computer-less is not conducive to my tranquility.

I had a lovely time at swim practice last night, but not only did I leave my watch on the floor in the showers (it's old-school gym-building, even in the women's locker room there are no stalls and no shelves to put anything on, I rested my cap/goggles/suit/watch on the floor but the watch must have camouflaged itself sufficiently that I didn't see it), I also seem to have been on auto-pilot and relocked my lock onto the locker when I left! One or both of these may be retrievable by me on Sunday, and both are cheap and easy to replace - but I hope I can put a stop to this trend before it sweeps away something irreplaceable....