Looking at my calendar is inducing a feeling of mild awe at the amount of stuff I have to do in the next couple weeks (i.e. before I leave Nov. 1 for some days with B.)! It includes recreational elements as well as just work (Tough Mudder this Saturday, tickets for the Adès Tempest at the Met next Saturday evening, a day-long meditation retreat the following day) but there is no doubt that the season of letters of recommendation is upon us....
Heard a fantastically good talk at lunchtime today at the Society of Fellows. David Russell on George Eliot's rage - excellent stuff!
Tyler Hamilton's book really is unbelievably gripping. I couldn't put it down. Strongly recommended.
Miscellaneous other links:
Swim to work!
Cupcake aversion therapy?
Showing posts with label doping. Show all posts
Showing posts with label doping. Show all posts
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Tuesday, October 16, 2012
Closing tabs
Friday night I went to Doveman's Burgundy Stain session at LPR. It was magically good: here's the set list and here's a highlight.
On Saturday, dinner was infinitely better than the play, which was possibly the most abominably bad piece of theater I have ever had to sit through! I am currently having a minor obsession with the dessert known as affogato - both Esca and Petrarca have particularly good versions, though I think it's something you can't really go wrong with...
Had a cold all last week, which was depressing and necessitated woefully reduced exercise volume, but it's pretty much gone now. My class on "Plato's pharmacy" yesterday was highly enjoyable, but the afternoon Golden Bowl session was a little bit like the labors of Sisyphus! Must finish rereading the novel this afternoon and do a more dramatic retool of old lecture notes to see what can be done for the final discussion tomorrow. It is possible that it just suffered by dint of my having been up since 6am to revise a book review and make sure I had time to run before my first class; tomorrow I'll have more attention for that session exclusively.
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Diana Wynne Jones's Aunt Maria (reading her posthumous collection of essays on writing has given me irresistible urge to immerse myself in Spenser, Sidney, Tolkien etc., but I am also pleased to see how many more of her own novels are available on Kindle compared to the last time I checked - there are a couple I've never read, so I'm looking forward to those last few also); Thomas Enger's Pierced. About halfway through the fascinating The Secret Race, Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle's account of doping in the Tour de France (and more, via DC Rainmaker, whose lovely bride's new business enterprise makes me wish I could pay a quick visit to Paris!).
My former student Paul Morton interviews Katherine Boo at The Millions.
Dwight Garner praises Benjamin Anastas's Too Good To Be True.
Finally, unanticipated uses of the Fluksometer....
On Saturday, dinner was infinitely better than the play, which was possibly the most abominably bad piece of theater I have ever had to sit through! I am currently having a minor obsession with the dessert known as affogato - both Esca and Petrarca have particularly good versions, though I think it's something you can't really go wrong with...
Had a cold all last week, which was depressing and necessitated woefully reduced exercise volume, but it's pretty much gone now. My class on "Plato's pharmacy" yesterday was highly enjoyable, but the afternoon Golden Bowl session was a little bit like the labors of Sisyphus! Must finish rereading the novel this afternoon and do a more dramatic retool of old lecture notes to see what can be done for the final discussion tomorrow. It is possible that it just suffered by dint of my having been up since 6am to revise a book review and make sure I had time to run before my first class; tomorrow I'll have more attention for that session exclusively.
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Diana Wynne Jones's Aunt Maria (reading her posthumous collection of essays on writing has given me irresistible urge to immerse myself in Spenser, Sidney, Tolkien etc., but I am also pleased to see how many more of her own novels are available on Kindle compared to the last time I checked - there are a couple I've never read, so I'm looking forward to those last few also); Thomas Enger's Pierced. About halfway through the fascinating The Secret Race, Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle's account of doping in the Tour de France (and more, via DC Rainmaker, whose lovely bride's new business enterprise makes me wish I could pay a quick visit to Paris!).
My former student Paul Morton interviews Katherine Boo at The Millions.
Dwight Garner praises Benjamin Anastas's Too Good To Be True.
Finally, unanticipated uses of the Fluksometer....
Saturday, July 07, 2012
Potboilers
Read two good cycling-related books today, quite different from one another. The first is very strongly recommended - David Millar's Racing through the Dark. In the first third or so I felt I saw a few suspect rhetorical gestures, but I had lost all doubt by the time I reached the main flow of the narrative - it is a mesmerizing book about the culture of professional cycling, the factors that tipped a young rider to dope or not to dope and the ideas about our own identities and selves (often misguided ideas) that are likely to affect decision-making in one's early twenties. Anyway, a great read, and then I read Chris Cleave's Olympic cycling potpoiler Gold. My English grandmother would have liked this book - it's second-rate, but in an agreeable way (it made me miss the best of Jilly Cooper), and it does something earnest in its attempt to make an argument about the kinds of life we choose to lead.
Miscellaneous other light reading: Karin Slaughter's Criminal: A Novel, which I thought was excellent (and admirably ambitious); a European crime novel called Lorraine Connection was illuminating but did not satisfy all my narrative desires fully; two serial-killer books by an author who displays the most frustrating combination of good-voice-and-character with absurd-notions-about-how-psychopaths-and-bureaux-of-investigation work.
Miscellaneous other light reading: Karin Slaughter's Criminal: A Novel, which I thought was excellent (and admirably ambitious); a European crime novel called Lorraine Connection was illuminating but did not satisfy all my narrative desires fully; two serial-killer books by an author who displays the most frustrating combination of good-voice-and-character with absurd-notions-about-how-psychopaths-and-bureaux-of-investigation work.
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