NYC 32

This past weekend I found myself in the grip of a much stronger urge than usual to spend money on things. It is ethically questionable (warehouse and delivery worker safety issues) and somewhat unseemly (22 million newly unemployed) but it was not to be resisted. One of the many extraordinarily lucky things about my situation in the current crisis is that I can afford this sort of discretionary spending still, and I am super-aware of my good fortune in this and other respects.

Very happy with this purchase! I paid my nice housecleaner for ten weeks starting in the middle of March, as it seemed inconceivable to me that she would be coming again any time before the end of May at the earliest. Yes, I am fully capable of cleaning my apartment myself, but I am not keen on it, and most of all I dislike using the vacuum cleaner, one of those ones that's like a stout little fire hydrant with a long proboscis. It's loud and it hurts my tender R lower back a little; I acquired and used a broom last week instead, but though it's good for grit, it's definitely not as good at capturing cat hair.

Andrea and Jane persuaded me I needed one of these! It really is genius: the cordless thing gets rid of a major psychological obstacle (plugging and unplugging in each room is a pain), the position you use it in is basically totally upright and puts none of the strain on lower back that the other one does, you can even see the stuff you've vacuumed up afterwards....

Velvets

At the New Yorker, Alex Abramovich on the culture clash between Warholites and VU:

“We spoke two completely different languages,” Mary Woronov, who’d been a dancer with the Exploding Plastic Inevitable, said. “We were on amphetamine and they were on acid. They were so slow to speak with these wide-open eyes—‘Oh, wow!’—so into their ‘vibrations’; we spoke in rapid machine-gun fire about books and paintings and movies. They were into ‘free’ and the American Indian and ‘going back to the land’ and trying to be some kind of ‘true, authentic’ person; we could not have cared less about that. They were homophobic; we were homosexual. Their women, they were these big round-titted girls, you would say hello to them and they would just flop down on the bed and fuck you; we liked sexual tension, S & M, not fucking. They were barefoot; we had platform boots. They were eating bread they had baked themselves—and we never ate at all!”

Here's Douglas Wolk on the reissue of the Matrix tapes and Dean Wareham ditto - might have to acquire this set....

(One of my cats has been having dental woes - he had to go in Monday to have seven [!] teeth extracted - but when the vet was here last week to do the preliminary check-up, we had a funny conversation about Lou Reed. Dr. P. spotted the name on the spine of a book on my shelf, and told me the tale of how he bid through some kind of charity auction for the leather jacket Clinton gave to LR when he played at the inauguration - and then got it signed by Lou himself....)

Celluloid heroes

Entertaining evening with L., who I do not see often enough, watching Nobuhiko Obayashi's wonderfully demented film House. The girls are enchanting and it is genuinely haunting despite the kitsch. Then we wandered fruitlessly around the neighborhood looking for a place to eat, but it was grotesquely crowded. Found a high-top table finally at Smith & Wollensky, where we lifted a glass in my father's memory. (We shared a shrimp cocktail to start and sides of sauteed spinach and mashed potatoes; L. had the sirloin, I had branzino.)

Travels part III - Iceland!

By the time we got there, we were pretty much just due to collapse in the hotel room! (This was predicted in advance.) Fortunately it was an incredibly nice hotel.

(Our final two nights in Iceland were at the Geo Hotel in Grindavik - both of these hotels are pretty much brand new - I was initially a bit horrified that I had rashly taken us from lovely cosmopolitan city to isolated country location, but really it is good to see something a bit different - we had an interesting walk around small town and harbor, and the nearby restaurant was surprisingly good - I think this is it - we ate three meals there as options in walking distance were limited.)

Food in Iceland in general was ridiculously good. I don't have links for everything (or even most things), but we had fantastic Thai food here, very decent random local pizza, tons of good fish (with and without chips), a beer at Nico's favorite place, steak lunch here with my friend J. and his two older kids after an episode of puffin watching and delicious cocktails in the lobby at our hotel.

The Golden Circle bus tour was a little overwhelming (the landscapes are amazing, but there are too many people - tourist infrastructure really isn't up to current volume); I loved the small zoo in Reykjavik and the Blue Lagoon also exceeded expectations.

(We had two very fancy meals in Iceland, food on New Nordic lines: one at the Lava Restaurant at the Blue Lagoon, the other at Haust in our hotel lobby. The regular-place food is so good, the fancy food is slightly wasted on me & B. - but it was genuinely exceptional, and I would especially single out lovely desserts. Not so photogenic - subtle rather than flashy - but utterly delicious: at Haust, a rhubarb victoria with almond sorbet, roasted almonds and arctic angelica syrup, and at Lava a poached pear with ginger sorbet, praline cake and elderflower syrup. Divine!)

Pictures below are piecemeal: the final ones are only a small fraction of what was on offer at the glorious Saga Lounge at the airport on the day we left!

Closing tabs

A long-overdue closing tabs post. (Alas, the combination of Facebook and a general lack of exuberance is making my blog much less active than usual - the era of the blog is largely over, I am afraid, though I am hoping I will be posting more often again once I'm through the slump.)

Have had some good sessions at the rare book library with Johnson's Shakespeare, Bentley, Theobald and various other eighteenth-century stuff. I have my work cut out for me, only two more weeks in New York with library access - better start pulling some of this stuff together....

Have seen a few really wonderful plays written and performed by friends: first of all, Winsome Brown's immensely touching and funny This is Mary Brown; second of all, Abby Rosebrock's equally touching and funny but ALTOGETHER different (I was laughing out loud, it really is a play to make you laugh and cry) Singles in Agriculture. Both of these just had short runs for now but will be seen again in future in NYC and elsewhere, I'm sure. Abby is a comic genius!

Reading a lot for work is my only excuse that light reading has been so thoroughly brain-rotting (really it is like living on Pringles, Cheetos and SweeTarts!).

Three rather appealing urban fantasy novels by Jaye Wells, the Prospero's War trilogy; five novels of variable quality in a co-authored series by Edward Fallon and others (there are some wild implausibilities in three and four in particular, but the books are readable), the Linger books (strongly reminiscent of F. Paul Wilson's Repairman Jack books, and more like television episodes than full-length novels, but I applaud these experiments in publishing - I would certainly read more books like this if people were writing them); a novella by Mira Grant called Rolling in the Deep (she is always very good, but it's more appealing when you see glimpses of a world or characters you care about from the novels - I still think very regularly about the excellent The Day the Dead Came to Show and Tell!); Charlie Stross's new Laundry novel The Annihilation Score (harder for Stross to capture Mo's voice than Bob's, inevitably, though these books are always delightful); then a funny and disconcerting urban fantasy series by a MAN - there is of course no reason that urban fantasy shouldn't be written by men, Charles de Lint is one of its great pioneers, but I suppose the genre collided with romance/erotica in a way that makes it tend to be strongly female-dominated in terms of the writing, Kevin Hearne's "Iron Druid" books. Have read the first four and am happy that there are more. Also, an Amazon First giveaway, Sam Reaves' Cold Black Earth, which I thought was extremely good, particularly in the writing: will definitely seek out his others.

Massive number of tabs to close, in the order from left to right across the browser (sometimes I organize according to internal logic, but I don't think I have the energy!):

Marie Curie's work is still radioactive.

A new swim stroke - the fastest yet?

I am slightly horrified by the idea that Dune is the most important novel in the science fiction canon, but Hari Kunzru makes me consider a reread.

Warhol's cover illustration for The Red and the Black.

Lion facial recognition. (Reminded me of this.)

Donald Judd at 101 Spring Street.

Creepy but fascinating: the art of preserving tattooed skin after death.

A conversation with Mike Watt.

Lauren Klein on the carework and codework of the digital humanities. (Lauren is in NYC now for some weeks and we happily had a very good spin-swim session yesterday at Chelsea Piers - good for mood and morale!)

Wallace Kalkin on Deep Springs College, a place I've always had a fascination with ever since doing a Telluride Association summer program at Williams College before my senior year of high school.

I MUST DO THIS ONE OF THESE YEARS. It can be done, it's not a heroic exploit (contra Byron), but I will need to pay some attention to the logistics (this I think is the best option).

I wrote a short thing for the new Aeon Ideas site: is artistic talent innate?

The Amazing Acro-Cats! My mother and I had a funny conversation on the phone about this piece last night - I am overbooked until I am leaving NYC, and surely tickets are sold out already, but I might have to see if I can get some.... (Will pursue this as soon as I finish writing this post.) (Also, from Jane Yeh, list of cats!)

At the TLS, Peter Stothard on Antonia Fraser.

I am still sore about having to cancel my epic triathlon for September, but it made me think about this piece I liked very much - I think we could make up something similar for reading and writing, i.e. what you need to do in the way of writing during non-serious stretches to be ready to start up again hard and get a lot done in a span of some weeks.

I want this book!

Canadian slang terms (courtesy of B.). Over many years of fraternizing with Canadians, most of these terms were already familiar to me, but I still find them strange and frequently enchanting (double double!)....

A train with whiskers

Nice obituary at the Economist for Tama the stationmaster cat.

Fellow travelers

The Cat Tracker Project.

New York living

One of the services the professional catsitters provide is a very funny note to greet you on your arrival home (NYC often outdoes even your most extravagant imaginings!)....

Birds bearing gifts

Shiny things! (Via B.)

Also:

Rock-climbing cats (via Jane); unwarranted pouncing (ditto).

Incidental pleasures

I am having a very lovely visit to Henrix College. Incidental pleasures: lunch yesterday at the Oxford American in Little Rock (I not very adventurously had a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup, rather than sampling new Southern cuisine of various kinds - it is a simple pleasure I can rarely resist when I see it - but the meal ended with one of the most delicious desserts I've ever eaten, Do-si-do Girl Scout cookies crumbled up in a jar with white chocolate ganache and a salted caramel peanut ice-cream). Pizza, salad and a margarita for dinner at Zaza with my host Dorian and old friend Giffen. And a cat colony on campus!

Nyan nyan

Via Bonnie H., wine for cats:

The chief executive of B&H Lifes said it was created in response to requests from cat owners. "Cat owners were complaining there was no gift they could give their pets, while dogs could get sunglasses, raincoats, and boots," Masahito Tsurumi is cited as saying in media reports.

WORLDCAT

Edinburgh University gives a library card to a cat.

Cataviz

Song Hia's Murakami cat count. (Via Amy K.)

Fluff

The distillery cat tradition.

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.

Closing tabs

Ayn Rand, cat fancier.

Vanilla is the old black.

Rebecca Traister on the violence of adolescent girls. (Joyce Carol Oates and Megan Abbott are two great novelists on this theme - I am much looking forward to Megan's new novel The Fever.)

This is interesting. (Via GeekPress.)

Have been doing some very interesting reading this week, about which more anon, and am more strongly resolved than ever to stop rotting my brain with so much junk! I am not contemplating denying myself light reading altogether, that would be simply penitential, but I would guess only about a third of the novels I read are things I am really avid for, the others are just to fill up the time. More nonfiction for the rest of the year, and I have some research topics I'm excited to begin reading in more deeply, so that's perfect.

(I think this disgust was particularly prompted by two poor books I read last week. Usually I link to bad books without naming them - I have a protective feeling that minor authors of minor books should not have to read me saying cruel things about their novels in the first page of Google results! But these two were ones by high-profile authors that inevitably have a lot of buzz, so my scruples in that case do not apply - instead I think I am doing a bit of public service in warning others about their demerits....)

I have let it go too long without logging light reading - it becomes a pain when I have to paste in a ton of links!

First of all, and very good (though I find the spin put on things at the end quite bizarre), Jo Walton's My Real Children, which among other things confirms my suspicion that the novel as a genre is built upon a scaffolding of counterfactuals!

A reread of Dorothy Dunnett's first Lymond book, but I am not sure I am really in the mood for this (I like having a long series on the go in a month when I am spending time in airports - started the second one but have left it idle for now).

Deborah Coates's Strange Country, which is frustratingly slow in opening (as if you set Alice Munro to rewrite the first half of a Lee Child thriller!) but picks up speed to become one of my very favorite kinds of novel. The writing is really exceptionally good, and the characters are very appealing, though I wish she were getting more crime-series-type editing (I don't know that you would enjoy this without having read the first couple in the series, whereas I think some editing ought to have made it into a more satisfying book in its own right).

Now the two really poor ones.

First of all, Mo Hayder's preposterous Wolf. The violence in her books has always been polarizing, and they are also uneven in quality, but the best couple are in my view superb. This one is terrible! The writing is still quite good, and I can't fault it for readability, but the central drama (with ridiculous twist at the end) hinges on a family who are being kept hostage and the detective trying to figure out who they are (and as a consequence where they can be found and rescued), with chapters alternating between the hostage scenes and the detective's quest to identify them. But in fact the information he has plus five minutes with Google would have answered this question immediately!

Then Greg Iles' Natchez Burning, which is particularly cartoonishly written in its sequences set in the past and which more generally just reminded me of the dreadful John Grisham at his most portentous on the topic of race relations in the South (A Time to Kill is possibly one of the most banal and silly books I have ever read). It's marketed as the first in a trilogy, but really we are supposed to know the characters from a prior series of books that I hadn't read - hadn't read and don't intend to! I really, really didn't like this one, though it is competent enough that I read it to the end rather than putting it aside. In fact I dimly recall that I have read one or two others by this author and didn't like them either - this one is a mass of good intentions but didn't work for me.

Finally, Mary Rickert's The Memory Garden, which I wasn't keen on at first but which grew on me as I read further. The first half is dreadfully whimsical, but it becomes much more satisfying as the engagements with the past grow more substantive.

Halfway through Knausgaard volume 3 and very happy to have temporarily arrested the brain rot!

A whole new breed of cat person

The economy of internet cat videos.

Cookie-tickets

The cats are one of the few bright points in Inside Llewyn Davis, which I saw last night with G. It is a watchable but bleak film, minor in its ambitions. I liked Luc Sante's account (that's the movie I saw, unless I'd been reviewing it for Cat Fancy or similar!); here's another interesting related link.

Closing tabs:

Indestructible but non-delicious gingerbread houses; the great Finnish gingerbread ticket fiasco of 2013.

I need to do a proper light reading end-of-year roundup, but that entails reading back through the year's blog posts, and I am not sure I have the vim to do it this evening. Currently having very enjoyable Susan Howatch reread - I reread the three St. Benet's books and now am on the second of the Starbridge novels. Appealingly both like and unlike Trollope.

Reboot

Pretty grumpy at this end, thus lack of blogging (my general policy is to stay offline if I'm down in the dumps) - I have been mostly horizontal with a dreadful cold!

(At the end of last week I was still able to persuade myself that I was just having raw lungs of some minor description, but really I spent the weekend almost entirely in bed; managed to get one set of grades in today, but it left me feeling the need for more horizontality. I think it will be Wednesday at the earliest before I can exercise, which has a strongly negative effect on morale....)

Closing tabs:

Cat stars of the new Coen brothers movie!

"It glows when you lick it."

Mike Tyson, philosopher.

Standardization of the "last meal."

Resurgence of the Presto direct-to-acetate audio recorder. (It is a very cool project, and the Rosanne Cash bit is especially worthwhile.)

What's your OED birthday word? (Via Anne F.)

Mundanities, a.k.a. "Thursday is my weekend"

Thursday this semester was always my "weekend," unless I had complex meetings or a deadline, but the day after the last day of classes always brings particular relief!

I slept late (late enough that I am not going to hot yoga this morning - may hit a class in the early evening if I have the energy, but it's fine if not).

I finally made two phone calls that I've been meaning to take care of for weeks: scheduling a house call to get my two cats a proper checkup (they both had initial kittenage vaccinations, but I have been remiss about vet visits - this is long overdue!); scheduling an appointment with my asthma doctor to discuss ongoing exercise-induced asthma issues but more particularly to ask what I should do about the fact that my indispensable asthma control medication Flovent will no longer be covered by my prescription health coverage plan as of January. This is frustrating, it has worked very well - it would cost about $200/mo. if I am paying for it out-of-pocket, so really I need to find out what I can take instead, but I wish they weren't messing around with some solid basics!

And I have a haircut appointment at 2 and will go from thence to the allergy doctor for shots - missed last week due to Thanksgiving-related scheduling issues.

Not an exciting day, in short, but a very useful one, and the best part of it is that in half an hour or so I will head out for a lovely quiet run. The weather is foggy but very mild, with temperature in the mid-50s - short sleeves!

(I do have to write one more letter of recommendation, but that won't be too bad....)