"A mathematician offers the game"

Karr's memoir book also includes a superb list of memoirs (she stars the ones that are exceptional as books as well as personal histories - I find a high degree of congruence between her tastes and my own). One that I hadn't read and immediately obtained and devoured was G. H. Hardy's heartbreaking A Mathematician's Apology, which comes with a wonderful introductory essay by C. P. Snow.

Snow on Hardy: "His life remained the life of a brilliant young man until he was old: so did his spirit: his games, his interests, kept the lightness of a young don’s. And, like many men who keep a young man’s interests into their sixties, his last years were the darker for it." And this striking description of the relationships Hardy had with a handful of young men over the years:

These were intense affections, absorbing, non-physical but exalted. The one I knew about was for a young man whose nature was as spiritually delicate as his own. I believe, though I only picked this up from chance remarks, that the same was true of the others. To many people of my generation, such relationships would seem either unsatisfactory or impossible. They were neither the one nor the other; and unless one takes them for granted, one doesn’t begin to undertand the temperament of men like Hardy (they are rare, but not as rare as white rhinoceroses), nor the Cambridge society of his time. He didn’t get the satisfactions that most of us can’t help finding: but he knew himself unusually well, and that didn’t make him unhappy. His inner life was his own, and very rich. The sadness came at the end.

The charm of Hardy's style of thought: “The proof is by reduction ad absurdum, and reduction ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.”

Here is Hardy on the morality of mathematics:

... there is one purpose at any rate which the real mathematics may serve in war. When the world is mad, a mathematician may find in mathematics an incomparable anodyne. For mathematics is, of all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote, and a mathematician should be of all men the one who can most easily take refuge where, as Bertrand Russell says, ‘one at least of our nobler impulses can best escape from the dreary exile of the actual world’. It is a pity it should be necessary to make one very serious reservation—he must not be too old. Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject; no one can draw much consolation from it when he has lost the power or the desire to create; and that is apt to happen to a mathematician rather soon. It is a pity, but in that case he does not matter a great deal anyhow, and it would be silly to bother about him.

Travels part II - Oxford!

In short, one of the best conferences I've ever attended. Incredibly stimulating and enjoyable: also, they treated us like kings and queens! (Unfortunately I came down with a sinus infection that turned into a chest cold, I was laboring with it the following week also and passed it on to B., but this is perhaps just the reality of international travel for me). Good times with friends old and new, including a dinner with Claude R. and co. at Gee's, sundry meals and drinks with a remarkable former student of mine and generally lavish hospitality. Here are some highlights:

We left Sunday after the final plenary talk (missing the college wine-tasting, alas, not to mention the staged reading of Irene!): traveled by car to LHR, where we killed some hours in the Aer Lingus lounge (reciprocal privileges with IcelandAir, which gives lounge access even with the Economy Comfort fare).

And thence to Iceland!

Jay Furman, 1942-2015

My old friend Jason's beloved father Jay died this weekend. I went to the funeral yesterday; there was not an empty seat in the house as people gathered to honor the memory of a great friend and benefactor.

It is difficult to describe how important the Furman family were to me during the crucial years of transition from adolescence to adulthood. From my first year of college, the Furman house at 170 Sullivan Street was my home away from home: at times I was actually living there, but even in my late 20s it was still the place to retreat to as a refuge when I needed a New York bolthole (I particularly remember holing up there for some days during a summer heatwave c. 1999 - I had no air-conditioning in my New Haven apartment during grad school years!), and when I walk by that corner it feels like home.

The Furmans among other things gave me my first glimpse into a world of hospitality that was only partly enabled by wealth. Money was an underlying condition that made possible the spare bedrooms, the amazing supply of theater tickets and restaurant meals, the weekends in the Hamptons - I grew up in a culturally rich milieu, but not one where the whole family regularly going out for dinner and a movie would have been casually affordable, and it was an eye-opener to me that such a thing was even possible. Money alone doesn't do this, though, and the Furman hospitality was really facilitated by the depth and quality of the generosity that both Jay and Gail brought to life in such exceptional measure. It has stayed with me as a vision of what one might aspire to in the matter of helping people of all ages find their way in the world.

Jay was an unforgettable character. Manic, intellectual, a disconcerting trickster figure, he was full of boundless energy, with interests in all sorts of unexpected topics and activities (I obviously didn't know him at this stage of life, but I believe that when Gail first met him, Jay kept a pet monkey in the bathroom of his New York apartment!). Jay was one of the greatest readers I've ever met, partly because he was curious about everything, and he never met a movie he didn't like (he probably saw one almost every day during some periods of his life). At the funeral, he was quoted as having said that his favorite movie was Snakes on a Plane; given that he must have seen every movie ever screened at the Angelika, the New York Film Festival etc., and was immensely knowledgeable about all contemporary art cinema (Korean, Iranian, etc.), this gives a nice flavor of his ecumenical tastes and his ability to surprise (also of the way you never quite knew how serious he was about anything he said). Jay was possibly the least snobbish person I ever met: everything was interesting and deserved his attention in equal measure.

Jay gave me a clerical job at RD Management during a year I needed work (that was where I learned to type from dictation and do a good job at least pretending to be a corporate secretary, though I remember getting called up on the carpet by Jay's brother-in-law once for wearing tights with holes in them!). Jay was an unusual businessman. He was a fast and associative thinker who often left other people behind, but this was of course what made him such fun to be around. His impatience was tempered by a deep temperamental kindness that stopped him from becoming the slightly nerve-racking boss he might have been otherwise!

At one point that year there was an embezzlement scandal at the office, and I remember the conversion of Jay's office and associated boardroom into a massive investigative archive, with boxes of papers spread over the tables. Amy Davidson was called in to work at that point too, it was perhaps our first extended acquaintanceship with the forensic pleasures of delving into archives (I still remember the day when Amy realized that many of the suspect checks bore vertical creases because they had been folded into three and slipped into a breast pocket), and the workplace had the sort of frenetic fun energy that you associate with a newspaper or magazine on production day: Jay's curiosity lent charisma even to an unglamorous kind of investigation.

When I was admitted to the PhD program at Yale with only partial funding for the first two years (they were in transition to a model of full funding for all students, but it hadn't yet been implemented, and I did not have the spotless undergraduate record that would have pushed me up to the top of their list), Jay made up the difference between my fellowship and the standard stipend: I suggested that it should be a loan, but he was adamant that it was a gift, and that the only thing I needed to do in return was to help others at some place down the road. I remember meeting him once to get that year's check from him at his fitness club in midtown before work. He was the most vibrant, physically energetic person you could imagine (his physical qualities to an unusual degree matched his intellectual ones): he had a towel around his neck and announced, with glee, "I just did a twelve-hundred-calorie workout!"

The stories I most loved hearing at the funeral yesterday all involved Jay reading a book in slightly unexpected circumstances. This is exactly how I remember him: reading a book as he walked down the street to the movie theater, reading a book as he waited in the elevator for the lobby back up to the office. Jay liked to go out and play a round of golf on his own, toting his clubs and reading a book all the while; in eminent company (John Sexton, Rudy Giuliani, etc.), in the owner's box at Fenway Park for a playoff game, Jay, who did not care for baseball, took out a book at the end of the first inning and calmly read for the rest of the game!

Jay loved many things, but one of my favorite things about him was how proud he was of his sons Jason and Jesse. He lit up when he talked about them; he loved it that they both were able to excel in so many different ways in the world, and he rejoiced in their remarkable accomplishments (Jesse is a federal judge and Jason is the Chairman of the Council of Economic Advisors) but he would have loved it if they were elementary-school teachers or jugglers or indeed anything else worthwhile and interesting, which in his book would have meant just about anything, so long as it was done with love and conviction.

I can't pin down this anecdote with enough specificity to tell it really well, but one thing Jay particularly enjoyed in the mid-90s was taking the shuttle from LaGuardia to Boston or Washington for the day to visit with one or the other of his sons, and I particularly remember one occasion (I cannot say which way round it was) when he was so used to the Boston option that he absent-mindedly strolled onto the Boston shuttle instead of the Washington one, even though Jason was at that point living in Washington! He roared with laughter when he told this story - he only realized he'd made the mistake when he landed in the wrong city (it is the hazard of reading a book everywhere you go, and it was in any case an easy mistake to make), and the comic nature of the confusion made it a source of pleasure rather than irritation.

On Monday, Jason sent me this picture of one of Jay's bookshelves. It means a lot to me that my book is there. It couldn't have been written without the support of the Furmans (the same thing goes for my first academic book), and I will continue to hold up Jay in my mind as an extraordinary example of what it really means to be a friend and benefactor. I have made a modest donation to Lungevity in his memory, and encourage others who knew him to do the same; most of all, though, we should all aspire to follow his example in our own small ways. He was a remarkable person. He will be much missed.

Syllabus revamp

I first taught this graduate seminar about ten years ago - I wasn't that long out of graduate school, and though it's not exactly classic eighteenth-century studies, it made more sense at that time, since there were no eighteenth-century graduate students and I was more hoping to woo a few nineteenth-centuryists over the romantic divide, to teach something like this that complemented the lecture course I also offered on the eighteenth-century novel more traditionally conceived. In that iteration (the list of novels was a little different too), I gave a big critical bibliography and had each student write a report one week on a work of criticism or history that would summarize & make accessible that essay or book's arguments for classmates.

It was a late curriculum decision to add this course for the fall semester (leaves and departures left us undersupplied with graduate seminar in 18th- and 19th-century literature). This is an easy and fun one for me to bring out for the occasion, and we again have a strong incoming cohort of nineteenth-centuryists who may find these readings interesting and useful. But I really wanted to do a fuller job with the criticism.

It's not true for all graduate seminars, and I would consider my particular strength as a teacher and scholar being more my ability to make even the oddest and most obscure of 18th-century books come alive than any particular affinity for big-picture critical thinking, but it is very useful if a seminar like this can provide an introduction to the sub-discipline, touching on a few big critical controversies that extend even outside the subfield (here, say, the Sedgwick-Miller axis and also the Moretti) and that would put the student in a better position to write a dissertation chapter or an article on a constellation of comparable primary texts.

Now the class is telling two different stories in counterpoint, something I enjoy!

I love Facebook these days for crowdsourcing questions of this sort - I got some great recommendations from friends and colleagues. Here is the retooled list of readings (special thanks to Anahid Nersessian, who suggested a couple things I never would have thought of, and to Marcie Frank for sharing her in-press essay on Inchbald):

WOMEN, POLITICS AND THE NOVEL, 1790-1818

9/8 Introductory class

9/15 Elizabeth Inchbald, A Simple Story (1791)

#Terry Castle, “Masquerade and Utopia II: Inchbald’s ‘A Simple Story,’”from Masquerade and Civilization: The Carnivalesque in Eighteenth-Century English Culture and Fiction (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1986), 290-330
#Marcie Frank, “Melodrama and the Politics of Literary Form in Elizabeth Inchbald,” forthcoming in Eighteenth-Century Fiction

9/22 Charlotte Smith, Desmond (1792)

#Gary Kelly, “Women Novelists and the French Revolution Debate: Novelising the Revolution/Revolutionizing the Novel,” Eighteenth-Century Fiction 6:4 (July 1994): 369-88
#Claudia L. Johnson, “The Age of Chivalry and the Crisis of Gender,” from Equivocal Beings: Politics, Gender, and Sentimentality in the 1790s: Wollstonecraft, Radcliffe, Burney, Austen (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1995), 1-19

9/29 William Godwin, Caleb Williams (1794)

#Jon Mee, “Critical Conversation in the 1790s: Godwin, Hays, and Wollstonecraft,” from Conversable Worlds: Literature, Contention, and Community, 1762-1830 (Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press, 2011), 137-167
#John Bender, "Impersonal Violence: The Penetrating Gaze and the Field of Narration in Caleb Williams," in Critical Reconstructions: The Relationship of Fiction and Life, ed. Roger B. Henkle and Robert M. Polhemus (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994), 111-126
#Andrew Franta, “Godwin’s Handshake,” PMLA 122:3 (2007): 696-710

10/6 Mary Wollstonecraft, Mary (1788) and The Wrongs of Woman: or, Maria (1798)

#Claudia L. Johnson, “Embodying the Sentiments: Mary and The Wrongs of Woman,” in Equivocal Beings, 47-69
#Miranda J. Burgess, “Wollstonecraft and the revolution of economic history,” from British Fiction and the Production of Social Order, 1740-1830 (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 113-49

10/13 Mary Hays, Memoirs of Emma Courtney (1796) and William Godwin, Memoirs of the Author of the Vindication (1798)

#Tilottama Rajan, “Autonarration and Genotext in Mary Hays’ Memoirs of Emma Courtney,” Studies in Romanticism 32:2 (Summer 1993): 149-76
#Clara Tuite, “Tainted Love and Romantic Literary Celebrity,” ELH 74.1 (2007): 59-88
#James Chandler, “Sentimental Journeys, Vehicular States,“ from An Archaeology of Sympathy: The Sentimental Mode in Literature and Cinema (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 2013), 176-202

10/20 Elizabeth Hamilton, Memoirs of Modern Philosophers (1800)
#Richard Polwhele, The Unsex’d Females (1798)

# M. O. Grenby, “Novels reproved and reprieved,” from The Anti-Jacobin Novel: British Conservatism and the French Revolution (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2001), 13-27
#Claire Grogan, Politics and Genre in the Works of Elizabeth Hamilton, 1756-1816 (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2012), 51-89
#David Simpson, from Romanticism, Nationalism, and the Revolt Against Theory (Chicago and London: University of Chicago Press, 1993), 104-125

10/27 Amelia Opie, Adeline Mowbray (1805)

#Franco Moretti, “Style, Inc. Reflections on Seven Thousand Titles (British Novels, 1740-1850),” Critical Inquiry 36:1 (2009): 134-158
#Katie Trumpener, “Paratext and Genre System: A Response to Franco Moretti,” Critical Inquiry 36:1 (2009): 159-171
#Kenneth Johnston, “Whose History? My Place or Yours? Republican Assumptions and Romantic Traditions,” in Romanticism, History, Historicism: Essays on an Orthodoxy, ed. Damian Walford Davies (New York: Routledge, 2009), 79-102

11/3 Election holiday: no class

11/10 Maria Edgeworth, Belinda (1801)

#Clifford Siskin, “What We Remember: The Case of Austen,” from The Work of Writing: Literature and Social Change in Britain, 1700-1830 (Baltimore and London: Johns Hopkins University Press, 1999), 193-209
#Clara Tuite, “Sensibility, free indirect style and the Romantic technology of discretion,” in Romantic Austen: Sexual Politics and the Literary Canon (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2002), 56-97

11/17 Jane Austen, Sense and Sensibility (1811)

#Claudia L. Johnson, “A ‘Sweet Face as White as Death’: Jane Austen and the Politics of Female Sensibility,” Novel 22:2 (1989): 159-174
#Eve Kosofsky Sedgwick, “Jane Austen and the Masturbating Girl,” Critical Inquiry 17 (1991): 818-837
#D. A. Miller, “Secret Love,” from Jane Austen, or The Secret of Style (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2003), 1-29

Paper proposal and annotated bibliography due Friday 11/21 to my mailbox in 602

11/24 Sir Walter Scott, Heart of Midlothian (1818)

#Beth Newman, “The Heart of Midlothian and the Masculinization of Fiction,” Criticism 36:4 (1994): 521-540
#Katie Trumpener, “National Character, Nationalist Plots: National Tale and Historical Novel in the Age of Waverley, 1806-1830,” ELH 60:3 (1993): 685-731

12/1 Final class meeting: Mary Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)

#Ronald Paulson, “Gothic Fiction and the French Revolution,” ELH 48:3 (1981): 532-554
#Maureen McLane, “Literate species,” from Romanticism and the Human Sciences: Poetry, Population, and the Discourse of the Species (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2000), 84-108
Carolyn Steedman, “Nelly’s Version,” from Master and Servant: Love and Labour in the English Industrial Age (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2007), 193-216

12/8 No class

Final paper due Monday 12/15 to my mailbox in 602

"One voluptuous delight at a time"

Read Paul Fournel's Need for the Bike last night in one sitting - a gift from my dear friend T.. I loved it - highly recommended.

Here is a representative bit - Fournel is an Oulipo member as well as an avid lifelong cyclist, it is a perfect combination of style and topic (the translator is Allan Stoekl - it's a beautiful little book from the University of Nebraska Press):

For the cyclist there are two types of meals and two types of appetite: during and after.

During the effort, eating is a complex problem. One has to indulge in things that are high-calorie, light, quickly chewed, quickly swallowed, quickly digested. 'Eat before getting hungry,' Paul de Vivie advised, and he was right.

Wanting to do the right thing, and certainly guided by the memory of the contents of the old-time racers' musette bags, riders often set off with a chicken drumstick, a gooey-fruited tart, a leftover bit of steak, a ham sandwich, just to make sure they're not hungry at dinnertime. Hunger exists, but effort conceals it, and the prospect of swallowing a chicken thigh while pedaling up an inviting false flat is enough to make you heave.

There are yet deeper mysteries. I can't think of anything better than chocolate. I eat it upon getting up in the morning and every time I come across it during the day. I like it dark, dry, and hard. But I've never been able to eat a bit of it on the bike. The bike eliminates my taste for chocolate by turning it into a sticky, nauseating goo. No doubt I should see this as a nice lesson in the nonconcurrence of pleasures. One voluptuous delight at a time.

The effect of marzipan is the opposite; I don't like it, but on a bike it's a blessing.

The mounted cyclist is a different person.

Week of culture!

Too many evenings out this week - I really do better when I have a lot of time at home with books and cats! That said, I saw the most amazing set of things this week.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is completely captivating - I endorse Ben Brantley's rave for the Times.

Hearing Nico, Sam and Nadia perform "The Only Tune" live at Carnegie Hall was absolutely exhilarating (it is the most transcendently beautiful piece of music, both in its composition and in its remarkable instantiation through Sam's amazing voice); bonus for the evening was some stuff I really liked and didn't know at all in the form of The Uncluded, a collaboration between Kimya Dawson and Aesop Rock (here is one of my particular favorites - I have to say, I feel like this song could have been written by me, and it is certainly the best song about candy that I can think of - "the other good news is an apple Jolly Rancher"!).

Then last night I saw the most amazing film, not quite like anything I've seen before but in another sense perfectly the kind of thing I most like - my old friend Sean Gullette's feature debut Traitors, which was showing at the Tribeca Film Festival. Gripping female noir, a thriller with a mesmerizing protagonist and the most beautiful visuals and soundscapes - really exceptional. I feel very lucky I am in a position to see so many longtime friends making the most incredible stuff!

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges of a very busy week: Laini Taylor's conclusion to her Smoke and Bone trilogy, Dreams of Gods and Monsters (now I want to go back and reread the whole thing in one swoop); Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Jones, The Islands of Chaldea. Also, Shirley Hazzard's novel The Great Fire, which for some reason I have never read although I think I remember seeing the paperback on my mother's shelf. It is very good, only it makes me extremely glad that given I am stuck being female, I am living in the English-speaking world in 2014 rather than the late 1940s!

Closing tabs

“A body-temperature wallet is a petri dish.” (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Also: the private lives of public bathrooms (via I.H.D.).

Snails.

Upcoming: Little Women/Girls mashup - see it while you can!

Good but busy week upcoming (still have slightly implausible amount of work to do between now and Wednesday morning): a dissertation defense, an oral exam, the regular weekly meetings and seminars, but also tickets to various friends' artistic enterprises (this, this and this).

I am sad to have finished all three books of Jane Gardam's Old Filth trilogy! And surprised I didn't read them sooner. They are perhaps not quite as much to my taste as Susan Howatch's Church of England books (I prefer a novel's span to be defined by a period of crisis rather than the entirety of the character's life), but they are very good indeed - I will certainly read her other ones. Have been reading a lot of top-secret books for the Tenure Review Advisory Committee - I suppose at the end of the year I could make a few recommendations, as committee membership is public and so is fact of tenuring, once it's gone through final stages of approval.

Highlight of the week: IMAX 3D Island of Lemurs: Madagascar! Only was able to stay for the first two segments of The Mysteries on Thursday evening (I got home at 11pm and still had a couple more hours of work I had to do before Friday morning meetings, really couldn't face getting home a couple hours later than that with remaining work ditto!); not sure it is quite as transcendent as the Sophocles marathon a few years ago (there is unevenness in the switch from one playwright to another, also too many of them want to make the same sophomoric jokes), but many great aspects, and I definitely recommend it.

"Sorry, H.T.L."

A lovely set of reminiscences of the late John Hollander by a set of distinguished Spenserians. (Courtesy of Jenn Lewin, whose piece is especially good.) Taken together, they really convey what it was like to spend time with John; here is Stephen Orgel for instance on a summer spent working with John on an index for his father-in-law's book:

Anne’s father, Arthur Loesser, a musicologist and a superb pianist, had written a history of the piano, and we spent two months preparing a copious index. We would work all day in an attic study, reading proofs and making index cards, which included entries for an increasing number of fictitious composers and parodic keyboard instruments invented by John—Arthur eventually complained that we were using too many index cards, but on the whole he was a singularly indulgent employer and host, and much of our work was conducted in a condition of high hilarity. We would descend at the end of the day, and Arthur would ask for the most arcane or absurd items we had indexed, and would then play them for us, astoundingly, from memory. I still recall his spirited rendition of Kotswara’s Battle of Prague, for which he provided a moving commentary (“Cries of the wounded and dying”; “Field Marshall Maximilian orders a retreat”). The prodigy Leopoldine Blahetka, who was pronounced an excellent pianist when she played for Beethoven at the age of 5 (by which time, John immediately pointed out, Beethoven was totally deaf) remained a figure in our personal mythology for years afterward.

And this is Kenneth Gross, capturing better than anything else I have seen the texture of John's teaching:

Innumerable moments from his intense and rambling seminars still stick in my mind. I remember how he improvised a self-descriptive pastiche of a song-setting by Handel, sung in gravelly tenor, in order to demonstrate how music and text might mutually sustain and gloss each other in this composer’s work (a performed version of the kinds of poetic examples which compose his Rhyme’s Reason). I remember how, when we were reading Book V of The Faerie Queene, he said of the Egalitarian Giant: that giant is John Rawls, and one of the troubling things about American intellectual life these days is that John Rawls hasn’t read Spenser, and that most Spenser scholars have not read John Rawls. I remember how he traced the journey made by the phrase “wat’ry flower” as it passed from lines describing the dying Narcissus in the Gardens of Adonis to Robert Frost’s “Spring Pools”—the account reminded you not just of Frost’s powers of echo and revision but of just how strange the original phrase itself is.

I remember his response to a comment of mine in a Milton seminar, when I said that perhaps, after all, Samson Agonistes couldn’t be staged, for how could you imagine someone coming on stage in a shaggy wig, and suddenly discovering that his hair is troped—John looked at me somewhat disapprovingly, and said: “That’s why there are actors.” I remember a wonderful excursion on the history of aspirin (the first truly synthetic drug, whose name spoke of hope), which glossed the figure of the “Canon Aspirin” in Wallace Stevens’s “Notes Toward a Supreme Fiction.” I remember how, dwelling on a line from Thomas Hardy’s “During Wind and Rain”—“And the rotten rose is ript from the wall”—he conveyed a kind breathless delight in the look and substance of an actual rotted rose.

Tentacles of filth!

"Lilia Ford" on the fallout of traditional publishers' failure to understand the erotica market. "Lilia" is an old friend of mine who was kind enough to answer interview questions here last year; her new story The Slave Catcher is now available at Amazon.

In memoriam redux

Wheelmen is causing my jaw to drop: much of this story, of course, I know already, but even so, the revelations about the financial improprieties & interdependency of the UCI and the US Postal team in the late 90s are pretty amazing - makes me wish I were a financial journalist, there is much potential in that field for stories of Shakespearean dimensions.

Also, IMAX Gravity completely lived up to the hype!

Coming week got thrown for a loop: B.'s old friend J. died this weekend.

(He had a bad cancer diagnosis in fall 2009, but thanks to amazing surgery and radiation he was able to run a triumphant 3:23:40 in Boston in April 2010. B. and I went to Boston to spectate on that occasion; it was a celebration of life. He had a few good years of remission, and then a scary recurrence last summer, so that his death comes more as a sorrow than a surprise.)

Funeral in Toronto on Friday, we'll fly up Thursday and then back to NYC Saturday evening so that B. can make his Sunday early-morning flight back to Cayman. Ugh, let us say fervently what dressed-up friends and I were all saying to each other on the Metro-North train to Yonkers a few weeks ago for K.'s memorial: please can't the next time we find ourselves in our best clothes traveling out of town together be for a wedding or a christening, not for a funeral?

(The need to make travel arrangements and generally contemplate ramifications, mortality, etc. also means that I am way behind on work for the week, but one way or another it will all have to get done in the next few days, so there's no point worrying about that now! On a brighter note, I had a beautiful run yesterday and finally made it to hot yoga today after too long a layoff, so that definitely has a beneficial effect on the moral and physiological equilibrium.)

Closing tabs:

Nico Muhly's career as Baroque archetype. (Also: Nico's Reddit AMA!) We're going tomorrow night, I'm really excited....

Prime meridian

On Tuesday we went to Bletchley Park, which was highly worthwhile (I think the Colossus rebuild is the most amazing thing, but it's very cool seeing so many bombes and Enigma machines after having read much about them); on Wednesday, we rode a fast boat to Greenwich and saw among other things precision timekeepers at the Observatory and the Maritime Museum. Visiting these places on consecutive days, one is especially struck by the implicit continuities between two different periods of brilliant technical innovation and superb precision manufacturing in British history.

Yesterday evening, a delicious gin sour and smoked mackerel latkes at Mishkin's with my dear old friend Orion and his partner Harvy, a hatter whose recent creation made a big hit this week. Later this afternoon we'll walk over to see my cousin George at her day job, then meet up with another dear friend of mine for dinner.

Light reading (planes, trains, etc.): Michael Sears, Black Fridays (not sure the autistic son plot was really successfully integrated with the trading skullduggery one, but not bad overall); Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs; Andre Aciman, Harvard Square; Gene Kerrigan, The Midnight Choir (I thought this one was fantastically good, even better than the other book of his I read recently); Melissa Scott, The Empress of Earth (I don't think volumes 2 and 3 lived up to the promise of the opening volume, but the trilogy is a pretty good read); Gordon Dahlquist, The Different Girl (another standout - it is a really lovely YA novel, science-fictional in its affinities and most beautifully written, with something of the strange haunting quality that I found as a child in the novels of John Christopher).

Old but good: basset hounds vs. gravity.

The American Boy

Thanks to a tip from Robert Hudson, I just read an amazing essay by Daniel Mendelsohn about his adolescent correspondence with Mary Renault. Subscriber-only, but get hold of it yourself if you ever had a thing for Renault's books (I was obsessed with them from about age 10 to 15, and they bear up wonderfully well to present-day rereading)....

Usage

In the last issue of the LRB, the final paragraph of Christopher Tayler's review of a new book about the friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (not sure whether or not this one's gated):

Either way, it seems unfair to rap Amis on the knuckles for telling Larkin that ‘you seem to observe women much more closely and sensitively and well lovingly ah ha well perhaps not that than I do.’ Or to detect psychic torment in Larkin’s ‘I sometimes read a poem over with a tiny Kingsley crying How d’you mean at every unclear image, and it’s a wonderful aid to improvement.’ It also seems a bit hostile to pack a study of the two sticklers with phrases like ‘sham hypocrisies’, ‘the fact … is prescient’, ‘very contemporaneous presences’ and ‘not much is said but a great deal is magnificently inferred.’ Though it’s humbling to be shown how much of the believability of literary history comes down to getting words right, Bradford ought to get a tiny Kingsley of his own. Failing that, he could consult Amis’s The King’s English (1997), which deals with the imply/infer thing pretty helpfully, then concludes: ‘If you feel you have mental room for only one of the two, stick to infer while you wait for a new head.’

Bee bit!

Some bees in Cayman had a lucky escape! This is B.'s condo complex, and the video gives you a nice little glimpse of the place (also, why my friend Max, the property manager, is such fun to spend time with!).

In other small-town news, impending showdown at Wednesday Night Run Club! There should be some good coverage in the Cay Compass of the Cayman triathlon, which I'm racing the first weekend in November; I'll definitely link to give a bit of the flavor.

The post-Christian Grey world

A few weeks ago I ran into a very dear old friend of mine at a party.  It was good to catch up, but it was great to learn that she'd just published a pseudonymous erotic novel!  I devoured The Heartwood Box: A Fairy Tale
a day later; it's a great read, highly immersive and extremely well-written.  "Lilia Ford" was kind enough to answer some interview questions....

JMD: When I wrote The Explosionist, it was partly because I’d read Philip Pullman’s His Dark Materials trilogy and Garth Nix’s Abhorsen books; I found myself haunting the Bank Street Bookstore and looking in vain for more books exactly like those, and when I realized there weren’t any I thought I had better write one myself.  What were your models, in that sense, for The Heartwood Box?

LF: I wrote the book I wanted to read but couldn’t find.  When you talk about erotica, it’s probably most helpful to distinguish between brows—high, low, middle.  We’ll forget high-brow—no one is going to read my book and think “it’s just like Anaïs Nin!”  Low-brow is porn or so incompetently edited that I feel like I’m grading an expos paper when I read it.  

That leaves the middle, where I’d place my own book.  Critics keep bashing Fifty Shades of Grey, but E. L. James might as well be the Henry James of this genre.  The number one book on the Kindle erotica list as I write this is Training Tessa: Hot Texas Bosses BDSM Erotica, about two brothers who try to one up each other spanking and humiliating their secretary—I highly recommend checking out the cover.  The brothers are billionaires, and Tessa desperately needs money to keep her mother in a special-care facility.  Over the course of the story, she starts to have feelings for one of the brothers, who also falls in love with her.  I read it in less than an hour and for the genre it’s not terrible—the author has a sense of humor, it’s properly edited, it only costs $.99. 

Romance is different: I think in some ways we’re going through the golden age of the romance and paranormal romance genres, with some very talented people working in it.  But those writers (or their publishers) adhere to some pretty hard limits on what they’ll depict.  They’ll dip a toe in the BDSM waters—it’s next to impossible to find a hero who is not portrayed as an “Alpha”—but it’s no more than a toe.  I’m interested in how differences in actual power, whether social, physical, financial, magical, play out in a relationship.  I think those conflicts are very erotically charged, and that’s what I want to read about (as opposed to things like nipple clamps).  But I also want characters who are not completely clichéd, a plot largely free of inane rom-com contrivances, clever dialogue, and a strong sense of the connection between the lovers—why they truly belong together, why their lives would be empty apart.  That’s the book I tried to write.

JMD: The Heartwood Box is such a striking and appealing title.  Did you have the title and/or the concept early, or did it come late in the game?

LF: They were both part of the original idea.  Every piece of fiction I’ve written has started the same way: I have a sudden idea which starts playing out in my head almost like a movie.  Either I type as fast as I can or I sketch it out as an outline, but either way, I have about fifteen pages of material that forms the core of the story.  The seed of Heartwood was the idea of a young woman who has desires that she is unaware of and wouldn’t accept if she were; then the idea of a magical box which could somehow sense and then expose those desires; and most disturbingly, a male who was very happy to take advantage.   

 

JMD: You’ve published this book under a pseudonym.  I like the novel very much and wonder how you can resist the temptation to get more glory from and for it!  I know it’s erotica, but do you see yourself in future integrating your private persona and the Lilia Ford author-persona, or do you guess you will prefer to keep them separate?

LF: I have two parts to this answer, which I’ll call before and after Christian Grey. 

There is nothing simple, mentally speaking, about writing under a pseudonym, and I have no doubt this issue alone will end up making my psychiatrist a lot of money over the next few years.  I initially chose to use a pseudonym because I have a YA novel that I spent years writing and I have been trying to get published.  I’d just had a set back, so I threw myself into Heartwood as a kind of escape.  Next thing I knew, I had an almost finished novel that I could publish myself, in a genre where that is not a disadvantage.  It just made sense to publish it.

But erotica is a tricky genre.  I read a lot of it, so the sex in my book doesn’t seem particularly extreme to me, but it shocked the first people I gave it to who never read that genre.  I’m proud of the book: I wrote the best book I could, but it’s still about a woman with three partners, with spanking and bondage and a lot of power play that does not necessarily reach a politically correct settlement.  As I got closer to publishing, I talked to my husband and teenaged son about it.  My whole family has been extremely supportive of my writing, and I felt like I owed it to them to take their views into account.  We all agreed about the benefits of publishing under a pseudonym. 

And all of this was before Fifty Shades of Grey.  The bottom line is that nothing will ever be the same with the genre.  I’m still glad I went with the pseudonym, but I quickly became much more lax about it. 

JMD: It’s inevitable, I fear, and probably a question you will grow very tired of: but what do you think of the Fifty Shades of Grey books?   Many of the usual literary pundits have read very little erotica and don’t have much context for the whole phenomenon.  Do you have any insights or observations on the basis of having read pretty widely in the field of contemporary American erotic fiction?

I have no problem at all talking about Fifty Shades of Grey—I only wish that someone close to me had read the damn book.  I find the punditry a lot more painful and stupefying than the book itself.  From what I can tell, it is impossible for a critic for The New York Times to write about a book like this without the most insufferable condescension to the book and the people who liked it.  You don’t have to admire or enjoy Fifty Shades of Grey, but talking down to people who do, privately or openly pitying their lack of taste or education, bemoaning whatever you think this says about American culture—all of that to me feels like a failure of imagination on the part of the critic.  It would be the same if I tried to write about NASCAR: I don’t get it, so I probably shouldn’t write about it. 

You work on the 18^th century novel, so you are very aware that there is a long history of cultural leaders attempting to police popular writing through ideas of taste or morality—and excoriating the (usually female) readers who consume it.  I don’t want to make some kind of fancy academic point here—or even argue that I think the novel is “good.”  But when 20 million people love a book, I think critics need to stretch themselves to understand why. 

In purely selfish terms, I think the book is the best thing that could have happened to writers in this genre.  It’s more than just the attempts to coattail on its success.  The closet door on this kind of reading hasn’t just cracked opened—it’s been ripped off altogether.  E. L. James finished the job the Kindle started.  Arguments that the novel is politically regressive are beside the point: this is fantasy.  People should be able to indulge without feeling like they’re guilty of unmaking civilization.

JMD: What advice do you have for novelists considering digital self-publishing?  Is there a site or two that you’ve found especially useful?

I’ll probably be better able to answer that question when I figure out if I can make this work: self-publish a novel that finds its readers—those who like this genre. There is no question the publishing landscape is changing at a dizzying speed.  I wouldn’t put any weight on my own predictions of where it will be in ten years, except to say that those people who wax nostalgic about paper books sound a little like my husband when he talks about his vinyl collection.  I’ll throw out three things that I think are key. 

1.      Understand the genre you want to publish in.  Read a lot in it, buy a lot of books in it, read the reader reviews, have a sense of the upper and lower ranges of both success and quality (which in erotica are not necessarily the same).  Pay attention to how you make your buying decisions, why you think a book succeeds or fails, and what the general expectations of the readers are.

2.      The single most important thing will always be the quality of the book you write.  The great thing about digital self-publishing is that time is not the same issue that it was.  Your book will stay available—you’re not dependent on Barnes and Noble giving you some of their precious shelf space.  You will have the chance to find and grow your audience if that audience is out there.  But that will only work if you have a good book to begin with.

3.      For God’s sake edit it properly and hire a proofreader—please. 

As far as resources go, I’ll single out Lindsay Buroker’s blog.  She self-published a fantasy series called the Emperor’s Edge and blogs with remarkable candor about her experiences: advertizing, sales numbers, proofreading, kindle, Goodreads—you name it.  She’s extremely generous with her hard-won knowledge, and we can profit from it—and she wrote a great series also, which gives her opinions a lot more weight for me. 

Shadow plays

Helen Hill named as one of five women animators who shook up the industry.  (Via Dan Streible.)

I'm in Cambridge for a couple of days to visit a friend of mine who had surgery last month (she's recovering well, but it's a long path of course).  It's bucolic up here!  The Megabus was rather dreadful: every time I swear I won't take it again, but the price differential between bus and Amtrak always sucks me back in (my ticket yesterday cost $7!).  However really for future Boston trips, Amtrak it must be - we waited for forty minutes on 10th Avenue between 40th and 42nd in pouring rain for the bus to actually arrive, and it was a good hour and a half late getting to South Station.  I'd eaten breakfast at 10:30 and figured I could get by to 4:30 with just a Clif Bar (didn't get organized to buy food, and you're not supposed technically to eat on the bus), but was of course starvationally low-blood-sugared by 2:30, and still had four more hours before I hit terra firma.  Amtrak can be very late too, but it is much more comfortable....

"Oliver. North. Reagan."

Angela Carter's luxury.

RIP

A nice interview from this summer with Carey Monserrat, the friend who died this week.  (Via.)

Closing tabs

The year is ending for me on an unexpectedly somber note.  I got a call late yesterday afternoon to let me know that a college friend had killed himself the day before.  It was more sad than surprising news, as he had spent many years fighting the legacy of a childhood and adolescence marred by deeply neglectful parents and a terrible stint in foster care and then coping with a diagnosis in adulthood of bipolar disorder, but it is such a loss.  In adulthood it is often too late to remedy this sort of damage, and I think the only takeaway is that if you know a child or teenager in need of help, reach out and give whatever help you can!  Spent the evening at a sort of unofficial wake at a mutual friend's apartment in Brooklyn; combination of emotional distress and alcohol consumption have now exacerbated my cold, which has moved from lungs to sinuses and which clearly mandates another day of no exercise...

Some links, in no particular order:

Language Log on the twitter hashtag.

Wage slavery in its natural habitat.

George Pringle's new blog.

Greg Zinman on Bravo's Work of Art.

It seems likely that I will post again between now and the official end of 2011, but just in case not, I hope that you all have a very happy and healthy New Year!

Staircase thoughts

Great interview with Marco Roth at Full Stop.