On procrastination in letter-writing

It was a funny convergence....

I've been writing this week under the auspices of a fourteen-day boot camp organized by the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity; my college classmate and fellow academic Julie Lynch was praising this organization on Facebook a few weeks ago, so when I got an email from the provost's office shortly thereafter saying that Columbia is now a member and that we would have free use of many of its resources, I thought I should give it a try. In fact since I am on sabbatical (and since I have long hewed to a "production of quota" method that basically is very similar to what these boot camps do) it was not really necessary, but if I am going to recommend it to others, I will always prefer to have tried it myself.

Anyway, today's writing was fun because I got to the part of my skeleton draft that includes all the material about Gibbon's habit of putting off writing important letters! He refers in a letter to his good friend Holroyd to "[t]he aversion to Epistolary Conversation, which it has pleased the Daemon to implant in my nature” (2:14), and the problem produces many very funny but also rather painful expressions of penitence and shame.

This is from a letter to Gibbon's Swiss friend Deyverdun, apologizing for a long silence: “my long silence has been occasioned, as far as I understand the anatomy of my own mind, by various reasons: during the summer it was mere idleness and procrastination: from the meeting of Parliament, when it became necessary to finish my book and to subdue America I found myself really involved in a greater hurry of public private and litterary business than I have ever known in any part of my life” (2:104).

There are a lot of good ones to Holroyd:

You wish I would write as a sign of life. I am alive, but as I am immersed in the decline and fall, I shall only make the sign.—It is made. (2:246-47)

Since my retreat to Lausanne our Correspondence has never received so long an interruption, and as I have been equally taciturn with the rest of the English World it may now be a problem among that sceptical nation whether the historian of the decline and fall be a living substance or an empty name. So tremendous is the sleepy power of laziness and habit, that the silence of each post operated still more strongly to benumb the hand and to freeze the Epistolary ink. (3:4)

And to his stepmother: “… you will be satisfied to hear that for many Wednesdays and Saturdays, I have consumed more time than would have sufficed for the Epistle in devising reasons for procrastinating it to the next post” (3:130).

Secret messages

The masked letter (I have an earlier one like this in my hypocrisy book!) and other steganographic ploys.

Oliver Sacks, 1933-2015

I have been steeling myself for the death of Oliver Sacks since he made his terminal illness public earlier this year, but it's still a hard one to process.

I never really met him personally (I saw him speak several times, and we exchanged letters), but he was my literary hero, and more than just a literary hero: more like my childhood hero Jane Goodall, I think, than like most of the many writers I've been obsessed with since, many of whom one couldn't really persuade oneself it would be actually enjoyable to meet (Gore Vidal, Anthony Burgess - I felt significantly reconciled to the fact that I never met Burgess before he died when I read Paul Theroux's "my other life/my secret history" piece about AB).

I found so many things to love in Sacks's last memoir (powerlifting!), but one thing I didn't really write about in that post is the way that Sacks inspires me because he is both hero and everyman: his struggles with depression and weight gain and substance abuse, his wrestling with his sexuality, his long periods of self-dissatisfaction are balanced out by his joy in the natural world, his remarkable empathy, his love for music and his lucid literary intelligence. What a life!

Some links:

Here's what I wrote in Bookforum some years ago about his hallucinations book.

A delightful NYT bit from 2008.

Maria Popova's thoughts on the recent memoir (great pictures).

I am 90% certain that Oliver Sacks had a membership at Chelsea Piers, unless it was some other increasingly frail elderly Englishman who swam there so regularly. I did not want to accost him and introduce myself, not least in case I was mistaken but mostly because I didn't want to bother him! But I wished I could invite him to come to our powerlifting club at the "Iron Arena" by the sand volleyball court. I think he would have liked the vibe...

We had one good friend in common, a friend who died about six months after I met him but who left an indelible impression on me. That is swimming teacher and life coach extraordinaire Doug Stern, who I wrote about here and also here in connection with Sacks.

Doug was a remarkable person. I signed up for his deep-water running sessions when I had to stop running due to a stress-fracture (this was about 1.5 years into my mega-fitness mid-30s transition), and I knew right away - THIS WAS THE GUY WHO WOULD TEACH ME HOW TO SWIM PROPERLY SO THAT I COULD START DOING TRIATHLONS! It was all wrapped up in a slew of emotions, distress about the stress fracture and then more intensely distress at my friend Helen Hill's murder, which happened the first week of January 2007 and which sent me into a mental tailspin. Signing on for swimming lessons with Doug was like entering a magical new world, a refuge from real life but also something more real than life itself usually feels.

But Doug had something wrong with his shoulder and neck that turned out to be cancer, and those lessons that spring were bittersweet due to his frighteningly rapid physical decline. (I remember staying after the session one time because Doug wanted to get in the pool and he'd promised family members he wouldn't swim without someone else present, but he had lost so much fat and muscle that it was too cold for him to stay in: he had to get out after just a few minutes, it was heartbreaking.)

Doug was anxious to tell his life story, and I sat down with him and a tape recorder for one initial session. He was too sick after that to record anything more, and the piece (which I shared with his family and a few friends) had to stand alone. He talked about being a patient in hospital, empathy, pain, life, death and bicycles.

(Links: Tom Demerly wrote this letter to Doug after Doug first got the cancer diagnosis; here's Doug on arm recovery; and here's a memorial thread for Doug on the Slowtwitch forum.)

Doug ran an annual swim camp in Curacao. I was hugely keen to attend - only Doug died, and also I am romantically involved with a fellow who lives on another Caribbean island, so there was no way it made sense to go there for the swim trip the following year (January is my precious Cayman time), though his friends and swimmers kept it going.

But I was tantalized by my knowledge (I am a person of the internet, Google is one of my natural senses!) that Oliver Sacks had once written a short piece about the Curacao swim camp, and I got up my nerve to write Dr. Sacks a letter in which I enclosed a copy of Doug's thoughts and asked him whether he had access to the old story in Triathlete magazine, which not all the powers of Columbia library access and internet persistence seemed to be able to grant me.

This is what I got back in the mail. (I've transcribed the text at the bottom.)

Jan 3/10
Dear Jenny Davidson.

Thank you for writing to me - and especially for sending me that immensely moving, and utterly Doug-like, comment/conversation with Doug about being disabled, trussed up, losing muscle and strength, foreseeing his end, being maddened by the stupid rituals of the hospital (being woken at 2AM to have one's BP taken, etc), but, equally, his characteristic efforts + power to make personal, human contact with his fellow-patients - his nurses, his doctors etc. --

I enclose a copy of the "Triathlete" piece I wrote in 1997.

Perhaps I will see you in Curacao one year, tho' I am still somewhat disabled myself at this point from two operations (L knee replacement, R hemilaminectomy) on top of each other.

With all good wishes,
Oliver

And the article itself:

Ingots

At the New York Times, Oliver Sacks on the consolations of the physical sciences:

Next to the circle of lead on my table is the land of bismuth: naturally occurring bismuth from Australia; little limousine-shaped ingots of bismuth from a mine in Bolivia; bismuth slowly cooled from a melt to form beautiful iridescent crystals terraced like a Hopi village; and, in a nod to Euclid and the beauty of geometry, a cylinder and a sphere made of bismuth.

Bismuth is element 83. I do not think I will see my 83rd birthday, but I feel there is something hopeful, something encouraging, about having "83" around. Moreover, I have a soft spot for bismuth, a modest gray metal, often unregarded, ignored, even by metal lovers. My feeling as a doctor for the mistreated or marginalized extends into the inorganic world and finds a parallel in my feeling for bismuth.

And another nice recent piece: "My letter from Oliver Sacks." (Links courtesy of Dave Lull.)

New York living

One of the services the professional catsitters provide is a very funny note to greet you on your arrival home (NYC often outdoes even your most extravagant imaginings!)....

Closing tabs

It can't really be a week since I last posted here, can it?

Hmmm, yes, it can: because I foreswore any voluntary/frivolous forms of writing until I had cleared the desk of letters of recommendation (big round of due dates on Monday and Wednesday) and most of all this now-overdue tenure letter that was supposed to be finished by mid-September. Have just had a very nice quiet Saturday evening at home working on it, and have emailed the PDF to the relevant department chair with a sense of TRIUMPH!

Will now segue to the couch for a glass of wine and the rest of the Wollstonecraft I'm teaching Monday: have finished all the reading for Tuesday's lecture already (had to do SOME work yesterday but was too tired to deal with this letter, even though it was more important), which means that my tomorrow is now clear for (a) a longish run and (b) a lovely day of reading and note-taking for the other (more enjoyable) thing on which I'm currently delinquent, the short paper on Swift and commentary that I am due to deliver in Dublin on October 18! We were supposed to send them to the respondent a long time ago, but this is one of those things that is difficult to feel as a hard deadline in such a flurry of other more concrete and consequential ones (sorry, Frank - if you are reading this, I promise I will get it to you at least a few days before the conference, and hopefully a full week in advance!).

Closing tabs:

Book historian Erik Kwakkel on some of the world's oldest doodles (utterly enchanting).

A must-read piece by my friend Marco Roth on the language of secrecy, a contribution to Alysia Abbott's new collaborative project recording the memories of the adult children of parents who died of AIDS.

Heard a great talk Thursday on Soay sheep - it put me in a good mood! (I went to another very good one on Tuesday, my friend and colleague Joey Slaughter talking about the literature of counter-insurgency. I find great academic talks absolutely exhilarating, while boring or bad ones make me want to stick a fork in my eye: I have never found the knack of tranquilly zoning out, I am more squirming in my seat in distress!)

Some good links at this Paris Review post, including a really fantastic poem called "Treacle" by Paul Farley that I urge you to go and read in its entirety. (Should be paired with the sugar section in The Rings of Saturn!)

Among other features of a very busy week, a fun meeting with rare-book curator Karla about what we will show students in the forthcoming library sessions: lots of great stuff there that I am too lazy to link to, but I cannot resist sharing my enthusiasm about this!

Finally, Lindsay Gibson makes me curious to read Joseph O'Neill's new novel.

Light reading around the edges: Seanan McGuire's latest October Daye book, The Winter Long (this kind of urban fantasy is not for everyone, but she is a writer of immense gifts!); Arnaldur Indridason, Strange Shores (a weak contribution by a strong writer, full of ridiculous things - I kept on saying to myself as I was reading discoveries just don't happen like this!, but on the other hand it passed an evening when I was too tired to do anything more productive!); and Sarah Waters' latest novel, The Paying Guests, which I absolutely loved.

Wollstonecraft calls: I need to get offline!

23 and me

This really made me laugh!

Tuesday update

Lungs have recovered sufficiently that I was able to go to hot yoga yesterday and today, though they are still full of junk (I am chomping at the bit to do two-a-day workouts, but the lungs really benefit from a full twenty-four-hour recovery when they are not quite right - I'll do a double class in the morning tomorrow and then see how I'm doing as far as Wednesday Night Run Club goes).

Tore through a good number of tasks on the to-do list yesterday and today, also suggesting that I am well on my way back to health. Two letters of recommendation, some interview questions for a friend whose book I want to help publicize, full proofread on the first pages of the style book - but I think I will have to incentivize the typing-up of a reader's report on a journal article with cookies or some other kind of delicious food, it is too late in the day now for me to pull my attention together otherwise....

Have several other miscellaneous letters of evaluation to write, and some requests for blurbs and similar, but the main thing I hope to get done by the end of the weekend is the style index.

Tasks for next week: revisions to the essay on particular detail (everything I can do without the library stuff I failed to assemble before leaving New York - but really it doesn't make sense to cart around a huge load of books, it will just have to wait till school starts and I'm back at home, only of course then I am deluged with other work!); some preliminary thoughts for a Clarissa book proposal.

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: John Searles, Help for the Haunted; Bill Loehfelm, The Devil She Knows (I have lost track of where this recommendation came from - Sarah Weinman, maybe? - but it was a good one); Jesmyn Ward, Men We Reaped (I found it a little slow in opening, but once it gets going it is unbelievably gripping - a must-read, I think, if you are interested in the subject of race and poverty in the rural South); Rhiannon Held, Silver (slight but soothing - sometimes there is nothing better than an animal shapeshifter novel - I am fascinated by the extent to which a set of conventions has been established in this genre!); Tonke Dragt, The Letter for the King (I kept on thinking it was about to get much more complicated, only it does not - it is a children's book originally published in 1962 - it was very enjoyable, but if you want the more complicated version, read Corbenic!).

Halfway through Ned Beauman's The Teleportation Accident, which I almost cast aside on the basis of its being too ostentatiously clever - only then I realized how funny it is, as though you gave Terry Pratchett free rein to do a complete rewrite on Gravity's Rainbow (a good recommendation from Lavie Tidhar).

Mundanities, a.k.a. "Thursday is my weekend"

Thursday this semester was always my "weekend," unless I had complex meetings or a deadline, but the day after the last day of classes always brings particular relief!

I slept late (late enough that I am not going to hot yoga this morning - may hit a class in the early evening if I have the energy, but it's fine if not).

I finally made two phone calls that I've been meaning to take care of for weeks: scheduling a house call to get my two cats a proper checkup (they both had initial kittenage vaccinations, but I have been remiss about vet visits - this is long overdue!); scheduling an appointment with my asthma doctor to discuss ongoing exercise-induced asthma issues but more particularly to ask what I should do about the fact that my indispensable asthma control medication Flovent will no longer be covered by my prescription health coverage plan as of January. This is frustrating, it has worked very well - it would cost about $200/mo. if I am paying for it out-of-pocket, so really I need to find out what I can take instead, but I wish they weren't messing around with some solid basics!

And I have a haircut appointment at 2 and will go from thence to the allergy doctor for shots - missed last week due to Thanksgiving-related scheduling issues.

Not an exciting day, in short, but a very useful one, and the best part of it is that in half an hour or so I will head out for a lovely quiet run. The weather is foggy but very mild, with temperature in the mid-50s - short sleeves!

(I do have to write one more letter of recommendation, but that won't be too bad....)

Closing tabs

Demanding week, but highly worthwhile, including a very good dissertation defense this morning (I always think it is a pity that these conversations happen in private, they are so interesting and stimulating [at their best] - this is the dissertation that drew to my attention some time ago to this particularly lovely bit of Adorno on four-handed piano music).

My laptop is fully functional once again, except that something the fixer did stopped the right-click function from working (will investigate this tomorrow when I am less tired); I think I still have two letters of recommendation that should be submitted before the clock turns from the 16th to the 17th, only I am not sure I have it in me, I might just have to hope for the best and submit them tomorrow in the hope that date-based electronic banning of some sort does not cause me to have to fall back some old-school stopgap!

(Fax - but really, it is very unlikely that all letter-writers made this deadline, I imagine the system will still take my letter tomorrow?)

Just got back from a delightful event for my friend and colleague Eleanor Johnson's learned and accessible book about Boethius and the mixing of prose and verse in the Middle Ages.

Light reading around the edges: Pelecanos's new novel The Double, which I liked very much; and Alan Glynn's Graveland, which I found something of a disappointment. He's such a good writer, but he's let all his books sort of converge on one single long conspiracy theory; of course it must be said that there is something quite prescient about the thriller plot of this book, which anticipates a Tsarnaev-style local terror plot and mashes that storyline together with a more Aaron Swartzian sort of paranoia about the way government and big corporate interests can bring down individual journalists and seekers after truth, but really the whole thing doesn't work as a true self-sufficient novel (it was the last straw for me when he brought in a performance-enhancing drug a-la-Limitless - on which note, this is up soon in the reading queue thanks to a good advance bit from B.).

Near the end of Aifric Campbell's On the Floor. The trading-floor bits seem to me superb, but the other plot is a bit weak - I wish she'd just written it as a more extremely descriptive fiction/non-fiction amalgam, more along the lines of this.

Finally, this delightful picture of my nephew, like other photos of both of the very young people who are quite closely related to me, causes me to reflect on the pronounced nature of family resemblance!

Catch-up

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?