A long career

Donald Keene retires from Columbia at 88 and moves to Japan: it is an unusual and amazing story.

(I often think, for myself, that really I will need to take the next interesting and suitable job that is offered to me, should there be one, just because I fear that I will stagnate or be psychologically and professionally deformed (!) if I spend my entire teaching career at a single university; I started teaching at Columbia in 2000, that's already eleven years in one institution, it seems like quite a long time. I like it here very much, the students are unbeatable and Manhattan is the place I would choose to live above all others, and yet at some point I may need to tear myself away...)

"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!

Rag-and-bone shops of the heart

At the Guardian Review, William Boyd on Elizabeth Bishop's life in Brazil.

The crocodile room

The primal feeling of hunting with a hawk (FT site registration required).

Also at the FT, a fabulous piece by William Leith on the 200 million animals that pass through Heathrow every year:

Bradfield hands me a face mask. “To filter out fecal dust,” he says. We walk into a rank-smelling room containing several black-throated monitors – lizards the size of terriers. Their feet are like the wizened hands of Egyptian mummies. They have crinkly necks with dry, shedding skin, like Michael Gambon in The Singing Detective. Tongues shoot out of their mouths like party tricks. When Bradfield gets too close to one of these lizards, the tail, which is getting on for a yard long, whips against a crate.

"Box 58 is Death"

The game of Nim and other ruses (via literary Eds).

Helen DeWitt: "A-free, C-free and G-visited".

It has been another odd week - I was only in Cayman for a few days before we went ahead and scheduled a trip to Miami for a nuclear stress test. There was no true worst-case scenario, I was pretty sure everything would be fine or (if not) eminently fixable (a term my more precise traveling companion corrected to "treatable!"), but I was nonetheless rather discombobulated and on tenterhooks until late Thursday afternoon, when the cardiologist declared him in the pink of health (not his exact words, but that was the gist of it). This is good!

So it was a week of airports and hotels and junk food and highway travel; we saw Inception and The Karate Kid at the mall opposite our hotel, and had a very good (but hot!) trip to the Miami Zoo on Saturday (the Amazon exhibits are particularly recommended - delightful venomous frogs and slinky snakes and lizards! - but I also particularly enjoyed the cotton-topped tamarins, always a favorite of mine, and a comical series of interactions between a bunch of lemurs that clearly demonstrated the dominance of the ringtailed over the red-ruffed when they share a single enclosure).

Had a bunch of light reading to while away the hours: first of all some fairly trivial stuff from the Humane Society Book Loft (it is not an infinitely renewable resources, alas, despite its excellence), Amanda Craig's Love in Idleness (very glad I am not the sort of English person she describes!) and Eileen Dreyer's Head Games (not as good as early Patricia Cornwell) and Lynda LaPlante's Red Dahlia (highly formulaic) and a pair of novels by Tonya Huff (the first of which it turned out I had read before, and the second of which mildly displeased me by failing to satisfy the obligations of a crime novel as opposed to "romantic suspense").

It was with delight that I then buried myself in another Humane Society find, Donna Tartt's wonderful novel The Little Friend. I loved it - the use of language is so much more vivid and interesting and appealing than everything else I've been reading recently - not to knock the other stuff - but really, it is something very special! Very funny in parts - and now I cannot stop using the word chunking - I chunked my duffel bag into the back of the SUV in the airport parking lot when we got back to Cayman a few hours ago...

And I had a bookstore splurge at the mall in Florida too (it was the slightly dubious-sounding Books-A-Million), and got a few things I've been coveting that made today's travels pass fairly quickly: Tana French's Faithful Place (not perhaps quite as good as the first two, and I was still expecting one more twist when the book quite abruptly came to an end, but still very good) and Joe Hill's Horns, which I am enjoying very much indeed and will finish as soon as I put a period to this excessively lengthy post.

An update from the road

In the Detroit airport at lunchtime yesterday I was overcome with a desire for sushi so powerful it must have been synonymous with homesickness; I settled for a chicken quesadilla, which was a more realistic cuisine expectation, but today I had a very delicious lunch with my father at Pod in West Philadelphia, so that is a step in the right culinary direction.

I'll go to New York tomorrow and then fly back to Cayman from JFK on Sunday. Minor inconvenience: my keys and appointment book are of course still in Cayman, as when I flew from Cayman to Ottawa on June 25 I assumed I wouldn't be away for more than 10 days or so! It will be a huge relief to settle back into some sort of a routine...

In Ottawa, we were staying in the guest suite at Meridian Place; no internet in the room, thus the lack of posting, but a nice little library downstairs from whence I plucked a volume or two of Dick Francis, true comfort reading. I reread Straight and The Edge, though honestly I have read them both a disgustingly high number of times already; I started but put aside a Joy Fielding novel whose characters I found unlikeable, then trudged through Robert Crais's Hostage, which I enjoyed rather less than I remember doing when I first read it some years ago.

We had a good and essential if extravagant visit to a Chapters bookstore on Thursday or Friday for me to pick up some things to get me from Ottawa to Philadelphia yesterday; I started very early in the morning at the airport with Tim Wynne-Jones's The Uninvited, which I thought was very good but which reminded me that there really is in some cases a difference between fiction written for young adults and (as it were) non-age-specific fiction, then read Stephen Booth's Lost River, which I found over-full of geological and geographical padding (and talk about stringing out a modest personal storyline over a huge long sequence of novels/years!) but nonetheless enjoyable.

It was a long day of travel, so I subsequently made a dent in the precautionary value-for-money purchase, Justin Cronin's The Passage. It seems to me highly worthwhile, and I quite see why it is the big book of the summer; I liked the opening sequence better than the more science-fictional future middle bit I'm in now (Cronin does Greg Bear better than he does Octavia Butler, and the mythic/scriptural/eschatological flavor is a bit much!), but I would definitely recommend it pretty strongly on the basis of what I've read so far.

(Had a stop at the Penn Bookstore earlier today and picked up a few more things just to make sure that I do not run out over the next few days. Nothing worse than living on the ragged edge of having nothing left to read!)

I'm scaling back my plans for the rest of the year in a number of different ways, as I think things will continue to be significantly disrupted. I made a painful sacrifice, but I'll get over it. (2011 is another year!) I'm putting ABCs of the novel temporarily on hold and figuring that the style book will almost certainly need significant further work/revision before it reaches its semi-final state; I have to write two talks for October and an essay for February, all three of which things are related to the ABCs of the novel, so that will allow me to make at least a modest dent in what is no doubt a massive and long-term project.

My most immediate desire, though, is to bury myself in a new novel. I was already thinking in early June that it felt strange and undesirable not to have one on the boil; I am now very certain that I'd like to get started on a new one sooner rather than later. (Not least because it is much easier for me to work on a novel than a critical/intellectual book while traveling, for both mental and logistical reasons.)

I am not sure yet if it will really be young-adult or 'regular' adult fiction (with further uncertainties about 'genre' etc.), but it is going to be a retelling of The Bacchae set in a fantastical alternate version of Morningside Heights. This gives me all sorts of interesting and enjoyable things to ponder, such as what the relationship might be between the Greek/pagan aspects of the mythology and the plot and the Christian churches and cathedrals that border the neighborhood...

A snippet

from The Possessed, about a recurring nightmare that began to plague Elif Batuman during a stressful homestay in Samarkand:

I had applied for a grant to go to Russia on a homestay, and the household I got assigned to was a family of penguins in Antarctica. "But penguins don't even have a language!" I protested. In fact, those penguins did have a language, with two branches, one epic-narrative and one lyric-folkloric. I was jerked awake by the pounding of my own heart.