"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.

Closing tabs

A weird crystal.

The notorious difficulty of breeding hyenas.

The Sasquatch of Minecraft.

An interview with James Ellroy.

Glitch!

Impending closure of one of my very favorite New York restaurants, La Lunchonette.

Bad electronic health record software and the handling of the Dallas Ebola patient.

Stephen Fry on the battle for gay rights in Estonia. (Courtesy of Tarvo.)

Finally, something amazing: most epic bike ride ever? I would NEVER do this, but it is lovely to watch....

In it

Did I ever link to this at the time? Anyway, some thoughts on immersion - in novels, in games, in water - following the publication of The Magic Circle.

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Sleeping subjects.

5000-year-old games.

Unremarkable men walk 40 miles for no particular reason. (Via Liz.)

Like Colleen, I'm excited for Sara Ryan's upcoming graphic novel!

Dangerous games

Nice article from the weekend section of the Cay Compass - not available online, but here's the scan. Publicist for Books & Books has gone all out! (Not sure you can get a readably large version, but try clicking?)

Home comforts

Always very good to see little cat Mickey, who is ridiculously affectionate after I have been away for a bit! Now need to have life re-entry: I tend to forget the extent to which the day after travel pretty much needs to be written off as a recovery day. I need to catch up on miscellaneous minor business and pick up dissertation chapters from the office to read for upcoming meetings, but the only two substantive things I intend to accomplish other than that are picking up my bike post-tuneup and going to 6:30 masters swim workout at City College.

During yesterday's travels, for some reason all of the novels I had on my Kindle seemed inadequate or offputting, but I found myself completely immersed in a very interesting and unusual memoir, Alysia Abbott's Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. I couldn't put it down - highly recommended.

Closing tabs:

Interesting article on introvert teachers. (Via.)

An unusual scavenger hunt. (Via Al Coppola.)

Womb Maze

Party-sponsored video games in China. (Via Hua Hsu.)

Swarmlogix

TEDxSummerisle.

"The cat, which has no name..."

A new Monopoly token.

Closing tabs

Internet telegraphy!  (Courtesy of Alice.  It is an old obsession of mine...)

Matthew Kirschenbaum on Tom Clancy's use of tabletop gaming to choreograph battle scenes.

I liked Ready Player One hugely more than I expected to - I caught a glimpse of a few paragraphs over B.'s shoulder when he was reading it, the sequence in which the narrator describes the eighties cultural materials with which the book's characters are obsessed, and thought it really would not be my cup of tea, but in fact it is quite delightful.  Then a good recommendation from Becca, Harriet Lane's Alys, Always, and that sent me back to another of Becca's recommendations that I had put on my Kindle but never gotten around to, The Flight of Gemma Harding by Margot Livesey.  I love Livesey's writing, and this is an enjoyable read, but I think I just know Jane Eyre too well, and was perplexed by how closely this book followed the earlier novel's contours.

Also: Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain, which I found worthwhile but not as generally gripping as Maryanne Wolf's book; and a reread of the curious and fascinating Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, by Victor Nell, which I blogged about here when I first read it.  Highly recommended!

Flying back to New York later this afternoon.  One more week before the semester starts.

Bleed

Via former student Gabriel, Nathan Thornburgh's excellent piece on Nordic larp.  This is the world of my novel (only in Morningside Heights)!

"V is the Velocipede"

Back at home and on the grid, after detours to Cambridge and Philadelphia.  Finally sent out the long-overdue Austen essay yesterday evening: a considerable relief.

(I seem to have been operating at about 30% of usual horsepower, due to some combination of residual fatigue and other distractions.  It is ridiculous that I let that piece take up so much time....)

Next up: final revision of The Magic Circle!  I have a hard deadline of Thursday, June 28 for getting it to my editor; he'll then go through one more time and I'll do quick turnaround on any further suggestions around the 4th of July holiday.  The quality of his comments is really exceptional, and I have already said here that I feel he almost deserves a co-author credit, given how many good ideas he's given me.  So: ten days of work, counting today.  What I did first today at the library was to go through all of his pages of notes along with the manuscript itself, fixing the 80% of stuff that's minor and marking remaining points that will require more attention.  This evening, I will do some pondering.  Tomorrow I'll get started again properly at the beginning, with bulk of energy devoted to really significantly revamping the final section, which still isn't quite working.

Saw As You Like It at Shakespeare in the Park; it was quite good, with a Western stockade-and-country-music theme that reminded me of Frontierland at Disney.  Other highlights of the weekend: the Butterfly Garden in the Academy of Natural Sciences and my first time on board my brother and sister-in-law's first boat at Fox Grove Marina.

Light reading around the edges: N. K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun; and Gideon Lewis-Kraus's A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, which must be one of the most unflattering self-portraits in the history of memoir-writing but which is nonetheless an extremely worthwhile and interesting book.

Bonus links:

My last academic book got a good review.

This made me think of some of the games in my novel (it would also make a good basis for some sort of TV episode); link courtesy of Bill Anders.

A nineteenth-century alphabet at the Beinecke.

"I wanted to stay a democracy"

What happens when you play a game of Civilization II for ten years?  (Via Ken Wark.)

An update

Six days in a row of chipping away at the thing have been beneficial.  I've finished a line edit all the way through, and the manuscript is now bristling with post-its in places where I need to draw out or amplify or weave together different threads.

Today I made this chart (click for a fuller view!), with color-coding for the three main games the characters develop and play: Trapped in the Asylum, Places of Power and The Bacchae on Morningside Heights.  (The yellow pen I used for the fourth element, a blog called Anna's Aphorisms, has not reproduced very vividly.)  The colors show very clearly the extent to which I pick up a game and then let it drop; I need it all to be much more thoroughly interspersed, including some new material that still needs to be written.  One afternoon very soon, too, I will go and wander around Morningside Park again and pin down locations for the reconceived final showdown.

I have what seems to me a fairly natural and in that sense 'hard' deadline of April 25 to send the book back to my editor; that's the last day I'm teaching, too, so it's not exactly intuitive, but I'm going to B.'s the day after for a week (if I don't go right when I finish teaching, I then can't get away until after graduation, so it's better to seize the moment), and I also have a book review due on the 30th and an academic essay due May 15 that I think I will need to clear before it makes sense to come back to the novel.  So, two weeks of intensive revision: I've bought a lot of pens and post-its and other supplies and am ready to dig in. . . .

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What Whit Stillman reads.

Wayne Koestenbaum on a prince of parataxis. (Via.)

Jane Smiley rereads a beloved book of my childhood, Enid Bagnold's National Velvet.

Plants vs. Zombies eats up a full "Anna Karenina" of Sam Anderson's leisure time.

V. S. Naipaul in Buenos Aires.

Finally, on a non-literary note, check out these amazing nautical cookies  I was lucky enough to be able to commission to celebrate my brother and sister-in-law's acquisition of their first boat!  (Not sure whether or not this picture is accessible, but this is the actual vessel....)

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Last weekend's conference was worthwhile but exhausting.  With regret but fortitude I announce that I have decided that I must attend the national ASECS conference every year as part of my core responsibilities: fortunately the coming three years will be easier to get to as well as probably rather less expensive (Cleveland, colonial Williamsburg and Minneapolis).  Had some great conversations with friends old and new, with older people I consider wise and with current and former students; meal venues included here and here.

The trip back was horrible and took fourteen hours door to door due to various delays; I got slightly lost in the Dallas airport (the SkyTrain shut down, and it's not well marked for pedestrians) and had significant anxiety that I was not going to make even the later flight I'd been rebooked on due to the initial delay, though all was fine in the end.  My bag turned out to have been on the earlier plane, but before I realized that, I spent a discouraged spell watching an increasingly empty carousel go round at LaGuardia: the sensation of relief when I realized my bag was actually in the luggage room is indescribable.

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Norwegian larp!

How George Takei conquered Facebook.

The history of the O-U-I-J-A board.

The case for sleeping pills?

And last but not least, a highly archeological cake situation....

More tabs

Fiendishly busy through the end of next week, and a little worried about snowballing March commitments also - but it's only two and a half weeks from now until spring break, at which point I will dig my head down hard into novel revisions...

A great profile of Vanessa Veselka.

A feast of sounds at the British Library.

Dave Lull kindly forwarded Tom Shippey's amusing 1982 review of Martin Amis and others on videogames.

On Friday night (I'm giving a talk in Boston on Thursday) I am going to stay with a dear old friend and see this production of one of my favorite plays!

Have hardly even had any time to read a novel, too much other work and other reading, though I did reread Diana Wynne Jones's Enchanted Glass on Friday night as most soothing available option and also, on the subway, Charlie Williams's appealing latest installment of bouncer noir, Graven Image.

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Dancing your PhD (FT site registration required).

The amazing kidney chain.

Martin Amis's arcades project.

Botanical forensics.

Can't recommend The Broken Heart at all (I think this review was too kind); Galileo had its moments, and the set and staging are gorgeous, but it necessarily provokes the thought It is a good thing that Brecht does not have much of an influence on current playwriting...

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Slightly outside my usual bailiwick, but I enjoyed Gideon Rachmann's piece about lunching with Kenneth Rogoff for the FT (site registration required).  The discussion of chess addiction is compelling, there's good advice about eating before a meal during which one will be expected to talk a lot and I like the small drama of the food-ordering as it plays out on this particular occasion (one always feels a pang for the interviewer deprived of dessert!).

Jace Clayton's amazing alternate Kindle screensavers!

Robin McKinley on starting a novel and revising it.

Commitment strategies

I'm now full of regret that I didn't push harder on novel revisions over the winter break, as it is indeed very difficult to get work done steadily once the semester starts and with the additional commitment to a demanding fitness regimen!  I am trying to remember that I was working as hard as I could manage through a spell of rather low spirits and the accumulated tiredness of the fall semester, but still - this is now exactly the sort of work overload situation that I am trying to avoid in order not to find myself so wiped out in the first place!...

I think I have to be done with this revision before the week of Feb. 13 (that week I've got a book review due, a guest lecture at the New School and a dissertation defense, and I'm giving a talk out of town the following week, so it's pretty much a guarantee of no mental or practical space for my own writing for the whole middle stretch of the month).  I want to be able to get one more round of editorial feedback and also let the new draft sit and gel for a few weeks before I come back to it for a good final round of revision over my spring break in March.  If I say here that I intend this, it will help make it happen....

I've got a few interesting books to read for additional fillips of research and thinking.  Ken Wark kindly sent me a copy of his book Gamer Theory, and I plucked the classic Dodds The Greeks and the Irrational from a shelf in Butler the other evening (it was nearly adjacent to this volume which I could not resist checking out as well, though I am not sure when I'll get around to reading it).