Possible source for a few sentences to add to the new and improved little book on style, which I will be coming back to after I get back from vacation. It is the project for April and May, and if it spills over into June that is fine too; The Bacchae on Morningside Heights can wait, and I think that revising that will be my main summer project after I do this (direct link here) on June 26.
(Yes, I am going on a vacation over spring break - to see monkeys, sloths and venomous frogs, plus a host of other creatures [the resplendent quetzal!], in Costa Rica! Blog hiatus during travels: I'm not bringing my computer, and I think it will be good to have some time well and truly offline, though I am sure I will check email sporadically when there is convenient access. I'm leaving Friday middle of the day, and have a ridiculous pile of work that must be done before I go!)
Showing posts with label internet black holes. Show all posts
Showing posts with label internet black holes. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 08, 2011
Wednesday, March 18, 2009
Back from the internet black hole
and an utterly lovely trip it was, too - a whole SLEW of posts will follow on my other blog (will link here once they're all sorted out), including a LAVISH race report on what was a truly magical day out there on King George Island - penguin included! - but in the meantime (I write from Buenos Aires, where I am off for a quick swim before lunch in what is promised to be a 25-METRE SWIMMING POOL), I must just share this dream review of Breeding by Peter Gay in Bookforum.
More TK!
More TK!
Friday, March 06, 2009
AWOL
The adventure begins! An interval of no non-emergency internet connectivity is about to ensue - I will be incommunicado for the next ten days - fuller report to follow, of course...
Monday, December 22, 2008
The passion for dumbness
Aurora borealis. (Courtesy of Tarvo.)
Not having a fully functional internet connection at home is making me batty! No chance of getting it sorted out before next week, maybe longer than that, so expect blogging to continue light through early January. I'm in the office today, though, so will hope to sneak in a few posts here and there...
Coincidentally I read what I thought was a wonderfully good novel last night, Vendela Vida's Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. It is a novel that asks to be read in one sitting (Ken Bruen would love this novel!), magically well-written in an understated way - and the heroine is named after Richardson's Clarissa, not Woolf's!
Miscellaneous other light reading (moving turns up interesting books that I fully intended to read when I first got 'em!): Kage Baker's In the Garden of Iden (very good - made me want to reread Connie Willis); Reginald Hill's A Pinch of Snuff (I burned out on this series in its later stages, but the early ones are better - formulaic but good); T. Jefferson Parker's Storm Runners (must have purchased in an airport and then never gotten to it - farfetched, shallow).
And dipping into some non-fiction that is absurdly directly speaking to me: Gayle Greene's Insomniac, which I highly recommend - Greene's website gives you a taste); and Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One.
Here is a bit of Dylan that I especially liked (the book gives me a surreal feeling that it must have been ghostwritten by Toni Schlesinger, as it has a deadpan noir New York voice that I strongly associate with her!):
Not having a fully functional internet connection at home is making me batty! No chance of getting it sorted out before next week, maybe longer than that, so expect blogging to continue light through early January. I'm in the office today, though, so will hope to sneak in a few posts here and there...
Coincidentally I read what I thought was a wonderfully good novel last night, Vendela Vida's Let the Northern Lights Erase Your Name. It is a novel that asks to be read in one sitting (Ken Bruen would love this novel!), magically well-written in an understated way - and the heroine is named after Richardson's Clarissa, not Woolf's!
Miscellaneous other light reading (moving turns up interesting books that I fully intended to read when I first got 'em!): Kage Baker's In the Garden of Iden (very good - made me want to reread Connie Willis); Reginald Hill's A Pinch of Snuff (I burned out on this series in its later stages, but the early ones are better - formulaic but good); T. Jefferson Parker's Storm Runners (must have purchased in an airport and then never gotten to it - farfetched, shallow).
And dipping into some non-fiction that is absurdly directly speaking to me: Gayle Greene's Insomniac, which I highly recommend - Greene's website gives you a taste); and Bob Dylan's Chronicles: Volume One.
Here is a bit of Dylan that I especially liked (the book gives me a surreal feeling that it must have been ghostwritten by Toni Schlesinger, as it has a deadpan noir New York voice that I strongly associate with her!):
[I] went into another room, a windowless one with a painted door - a dark cavern with a floor-to-ceiling library. I switched on the lamps. The place had an overpowering presence of literature and you couldn't help but lose your passion for dumbness. Up until this time I'd been raised in a cultural spectrum that had left my mind black with soot. Brando. James Dean. Milton Berle. Marilyn Monroe. Lucy. Earl Warren and Khruschchev, Castro. Little Rock and Peyton Place. Tennessee Williams and Joe DiMaggio. J. Edgar Hoover and Westinghouse. The Nelsons. Holiday Inns and hot-rod Chevys. Mickey Spillane and Joe McCarthy. Levittown.This is the passage in Thucydides that I've been obsessed with every since I first read it, & which I obsessively cited to the students in my Swift and Burke class this fall. My copy of the book is still boxed up in some more or less inextricable fashion, so I borrow the text from this post at Crooked Timber:
Standing in this room you could take it all for a joke. There were all types of things in here, books on typography, epigraphy, philosophy, political ideologies. The stuff that could make you bugged-eyed. Books like Fox's Book of Martyrs, The Twelve Caesars, Tacitus lectures and letters to Brutus. Pericles' Ideal State of Democracy, Thucydides' The Athenian General - a narrative which would give you chills. It was written four hundred years before Christ and it talks about how human nature is always the enemy of anything superior. Thucydides writes about how words in his time have changed from their ordinary meaning, how actions and opinions can be altered in the blink of an eye. It's like nothing has changed from his time to mine.
To fit in with the change of events, words, too, had to change their usual meanings. What used to be described as a thoughtless act of aggression was now regarded as the courage one would expect to find in a party member; to think of the future and wait was merely another way of saying one was a coward; any idea of moderation was just an attempt to disguise one’s unmanly character; ability to understand a question from all sides meant that one was totally unfitted for action. Fanatical enthusiasm was the mark of a real man, and to plot against an enemy behind his back was perfectly legitimate self-defence . . . and indeed most people are more ready to call villainy cleverness than simple-mindedness honesty. They are proud of the first quality and ashamed of the second. (Thucydides, The Peloponnesian War III, 82, trans. Rex Warner, The Penguin Classics, pp. 209-210)
Saturday, December 13, 2008
Transported!
I am in my new digs - but without internet for now. It may be a week or more before I am connected again from home - slightly insanity-inducing, but I thought I had better explain in case any of my usual correspondents are alarmed by the lack of a near-instantaneous reply to e-mail!
The movers were bad but cheap. They were full of interesting tales!
The driver was from Surinam and had recently relocated back to New York after thirteen years in Atlanta, where he worked as a dental technician and pioneered the use of dental bling on the hip-hop scene - gold, diamonds - there was a lot of money in it back in the day, but now that everyone has been doing that stuff for a while, the bottom has dropped out of the business, so he is picking up extra work as a van driver.
The boss was a manic and voluble Russian who spent much of the day on the telephone to various irate customers as my job stretched out ever longer and he failed to show up to successive appointments (they were at my place almost an hour late to begin with, and I concluded that there was a certain amount of optimism in play with regard to scheduling - he was planning on working until 2:30am, he moonlights as a bartender/party service provider, or perhaps the moving is the moonlight bit).
About six hours later, as we waited for the van so that I could double-check that there was nothing actually precious to me among the stuff that they (very kindly - they were only bad on the count of efficiency, partly because of the bottleneck created by the small freight elevator in my old building, but all four movers were really wonderfully good-natured and obliging) were going to take for me to the Salvation Army, he began one last wonderful verbal riff about how, before he branched out into the moving business, he used to work the most lavish parties.
"Craziness, baby! You can't believe those parties! We had lions! Tigers! Bear cubs!"
(Increasingly skeptical looks from me & crew members.)
"Penguins!"
(Mirth ensues.)
"No, really! It was Miami - Puff Daddy had a party, they got sixteen, eighteen penguins in there - it was hot, the penguins were passing out all over the place" (this bit accompanied by suitable flapping gestures) "and the papers got hold of it the next day, they wouldn't let it drop..."
I was especially tickled because there is a penguin-related adventure in my future, only it involves something so implausibly and extremely exciting to me, I still slightly believe it is not really happening - I will perhaps wait a bit longer for it to sink in, & for private gloating & contemplation, before I share the news...
Blogging will be sporadic over the next week or so, unless somebody has special pull with CUIT and can get me an Ethernet connection in my apartment with apparatchik-like celerity!
The movers were bad but cheap. They were full of interesting tales!
The driver was from Surinam and had recently relocated back to New York after thirteen years in Atlanta, where he worked as a dental technician and pioneered the use of dental bling on the hip-hop scene - gold, diamonds - there was a lot of money in it back in the day, but now that everyone has been doing that stuff for a while, the bottom has dropped out of the business, so he is picking up extra work as a van driver.
The boss was a manic and voluble Russian who spent much of the day on the telephone to various irate customers as my job stretched out ever longer and he failed to show up to successive appointments (they were at my place almost an hour late to begin with, and I concluded that there was a certain amount of optimism in play with regard to scheduling - he was planning on working until 2:30am, he moonlights as a bartender/party service provider, or perhaps the moving is the moonlight bit).
About six hours later, as we waited for the van so that I could double-check that there was nothing actually precious to me among the stuff that they (very kindly - they were only bad on the count of efficiency, partly because of the bottleneck created by the small freight elevator in my old building, but all four movers were really wonderfully good-natured and obliging) were going to take for me to the Salvation Army, he began one last wonderful verbal riff about how, before he branched out into the moving business, he used to work the most lavish parties.
"Craziness, baby! You can't believe those parties! We had lions! Tigers! Bear cubs!"
(Increasingly skeptical looks from me & crew members.)
"Penguins!"
(Mirth ensues.)
"No, really! It was Miami - Puff Daddy had a party, they got sixteen, eighteen penguins in there - it was hot, the penguins were passing out all over the place" (this bit accompanied by suitable flapping gestures) "and the papers got hold of it the next day, they wouldn't let it drop..."
I was especially tickled because there is a penguin-related adventure in my future, only it involves something so implausibly and extremely exciting to me, I still slightly believe it is not really happening - I will perhaps wait a bit longer for it to sink in, & for private gloating & contemplation, before I share the news...
Blogging will be sporadic over the next week or so, unless somebody has special pull with CUIT and can get me an Ethernet connection in my apartment with apparatchik-like celerity!
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