Third acts

Sylvia Nasar remembers John Nash.

Woodsies, buttons

Really I need to go to the library and dig in on this week's teaching stuff (chunks of Tristram Shandy and Rousseau's Confessions plus the inevitable pile of assignments to comment on), but I will close some tabs first. Busy week, but mercifully I was able to collapse at the end of it - did a spin class and hot yoga on Friday, and yesterday I had pretty much the ideal day of exercise: an hour of spinning at Chelsea Piers, an hour of restorative yoga and then eight miles in Prospect Park with L. (we are running the half-marathon in Philadelphia next week). Evenings at home are essential if I want to regain equilibrium, especially as I seem to have multiple nights out this coming week. Much novel-reading, too: in short, I feel finally back to normal for the first time all semester.

Tabs:

The McLeod collator.

Natasha Shapiro offers an amazing list of materials for making altered books.

Dewlaps!

Soothing light reading around the edges:

Luke Barr, Provence, 1970; Joshilyn Jackson's short story (a teaser for her new novel, for which I am very impatient) My Own Miraculous; Jo Nesbo, Police (over-ingenious in a "wink-wink" fashion in its plot twists, but gripping regardless); Helen Fielding, Bridget Jones: Mad About the Boy (I liked it much better than rather negative reviews would have led me to expect, though I thought Bridget's weight loss in the opening stretch of the book was implausibly easily accomplished!); Laurie King, Touchstone (rather static and artificial in its opening, though it picked up momentum as it went along - absurd in its premises!); Mira Grant, Parasite (an appealing novel of sapient tapeworms by an emergent genius of light reading). Also, my friend "Lilia"'s erotic SF story The Slave Catcher (very good - I would eagerly read a whole novel set in this world).

About halfway through The Goldfinch - lay on the couch for some hours last night reading with one cat draped over my stomach and the other cat flopped out next to my head. Mixed feelings about it (it's uneven), but the good parts are very good indeed.

Martin/Mantel

An outtake from the wretched review that I'm still wrestling with (when they don't come out right the first time round, they often take horrible amounts of subsequent wrangling!):

I have been recommending Wolf Hall to readers impatient for the next volume of George R. R. Martin’s Game of Throne series. They share a good deal of the same source material from Tudor history, but while Martin is a good writer in many respects, especially if one disregards the language at the level of the sentence and concentrates instead on his ability to render complex human and political relationships with clarity and vividness, Mantel is a great one. She demonstrated decades ago, in A Place of Greater Safety (her 1992 novel about the French Revolution), an ability to tell large world-historical stories with the kind of imaginative precision about politics more often associated with works like Robert Caro’s biographies of Robert Moses and Lyndon B. Johnson, or indeed with the great nineteenth-century narrative historians Carlyle and Michelet.

Diagnoses

This piece really resonates with me!

Closing tabs

Can't explain why it was such a tiring week: maybe it's just a tiring point in the semester? Anyway, I'm knackered, and am going to take the evening completely off for phenomenal laziness that may or may not involve novel-reading and a couple episodes of the (non-appealing) new season of Fringe.

On Tuesday I went to a lovely event - my long-ago tenth-grade English teacher Charlotte Pierce-Baker, now a professor at Vanderbilt, was at Columbia to speak about her distressing and moving memoir, This Fragile Life: A Mother's Story of a Bipolar Son. Haven't read it yet, but will do so soon.

Will Wiles on being published by Amazon's new literary fiction imprint (same publisher that's bringing out my novel in the spring).

Two takes: Phil Dyess-Nugent and James Parker on Neil Young's new memoir.

Richard Marshall interviews Paul Fry on various matters to do with theory and literature (good list of reading recommendations at the end!).

Check out Tough Mudder pics!

Light reading around the edges: Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins (and here's a bonus link) and Invisible Murder, the second installment in an excellent Danish crime series.

Catch-up

Mondays are taxing this semester!

Finished reading Victor LaValle's The Devil in Silver.  It is a strange book; I liked it a good deal, but it also made me feel moderately perplexed much of the time I was reading (not a disagreeable feeling).  Wished he did not feature sudden one-paragraph shifts to different viewpoint character, but that is just a tic of mine, to find such shifts induce something like motion sickness.  Made me feel grateful I have never been institutionalized.

Then: J. K. Rowling, The Casual Vacancy!  Curiosity makes us do strange things; I could not resist reading it, though it is not so much my kind of book and I think they have priced the Kindle edition too high ($17.99).  It's fine, but lightning didn't strike twice.

(I recommend instead, if you like that sort of thing, one of Jilly Cooper's epic village novels - she is less good than Rowling with characterization, but she gives you more characters to root for, and the dogs and cats in her books are very fully realized! - in fact this novel is sort of the weird double of Cooper's Wicked!...)

Also recommended, as an "instead" rather than an "as well": Peyton Place! (In this case the exclamation point is my own.)

Abundant recompense

It was a strange week.

I spent way too much time on the phone to my health insurance company trying to figure out things about sleep specialists and what would or wouldn't be covered depending on who I saw, and I also had my teeth cleaned at the dentist's, something that always causes me to contemplate the Francis-Bacon-like aspects of human embodiment!

Tuesday was ceremonially meaningful; I gave congratulations to graduating English majors and their families and handed out awards in the humanities at a college-wide event. I had meetings this week with a couple of my graduate students who have made the significant step forward from passing their orals (qualifying exams) and are beginning to work on dissertation prospectuses; on Wednesday I succumbed, horribly, to a sinus infection, but I also attended a very lovely party at the Century Associationin celebration of my emeritus colleague Martin Meisel's receiving an honorary doctorate from Columbia (and it was his eightieth birthday to boot!). These things caused me to reflect that I typically underrate the ceremonial; I am anti-ceremonial and something of a debunker in temperament, I much prefer to cut to the chase and I do not enjoy pomp and circumstance, and yet there is a place for them, there is some meaning in this sort of show of things...

Yesterday I had a really lovely lunch with someone I admire greatly and am hugely grateful to for what I've learned from him over the years, my dissertation advisor Claude Rawson; he was doing some work in the Berg Collection at the NYPL, and we had an altogether decadent and delightful lunch at Aureole (we both had the same very delicious selections from the prix fixe lunch menu: fluke ceviche with citrus, endive, avocado and shallots, roasted skate with pureed potato, spinach and capers and a strawberry macaron with lavender lemon sorbet and perfect little freshly baked thumbnail-sized madeleines).

Last night I started going crazy when I realized I was still getting, as it were, more sick and that I would be an idiot to do the triathlon this weekend that I've been so much looking forward to (I am looking to a longer-term goal of a race about five weeks away and cannot afford the bout of bronchitis that I risk by pushing myself under such circumstances); it was a bitter pill to swallow, that I really shouldn't do it, something that my state of health when I woke up this morning made very clear, and I was languishing in self-pity all morning despite having had what otherwise would be described as a very nice week...

It was clear, really, that literature was going to be the best remedy for mental insanity: the intolerable noise of the facade cleaning they're currently doing on my building finally drove me out of the apartment, and I hit the public library and got a good haul of crime novels, came home and devoured Karin Slaughter's Broken, which I thought was very good.

Casting around for what to read after this, I was saved from less good crime novels by the arrival from Amazon of my graduate school colleague Priscilla Gilman's The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy. I started reading, and I really and truly couldn't put it down; it's a pretty extraordinary book, I kind of think everyone should read it!

Like Oliver Sacks, Priscilla manages to write about a life of deficits and losses in a way that shows, without minimizing the associated difficulties and costs, the magical forms of recompense that come along with them; she also manages to pull off something that often makes me cringe, the attempt to articulate (as opposed to taking as given, which is what I do) that literature is meaningful in some large part because of what it tells us about life. "As someone who has lived to learn," Priscilla writes of herself (she is a Yale graduate and taught at Yale and at Vassar before becoming a literary agent), she found in her son Benj, who has never been diagnosed with a specific label but who has battled a wide range of motor and social deficits that leave him perhaps best described as 'borderline Asperger's,' her "greatest and most meaningful coursework": and the book is an emotionally authentic and intellectually illuminating account of what she learned as Benj's mother and how it changed her.

Really I probably have time to read one more book before I go to sleep, but it is going to be difficult to top that one!...

As the world comes into its proper alignment!

Just one of those funny little moments....

Probably the thing I find hardest about being in Cayman is lack of near-instantaneous access to the wonderful Columbia library system. After twenty-plus years of having this kind of access at one library or another, I take it almost for granted; I am always running over in the hour before the library closes to grab an armful of books from the stacks.

This morning it suddenly came to me that Julius Chambers's journalistic expose of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum was the book I most wanted to get my hands on in all the world (at least vis-a-vis immediate research imperatives of TBOMS). I grumpily inveighed to myself against Google Books when it seemed that I couldn't get it there, regretted that there wasn't an electronic version in the Columbia Library catalog, was about to pay good dollars for an electronic copy elsewhere and then, magically, realized that I could get a scanned PDF copy of Chambers' A Mad World and Its Inhabitants for free at Kobo Books. I have now transferred it to my Kindle for easy reading in a reclining position, as the early stages of novel-writing always make me feel that I would be able to concentrate better if I were lying down with my eyes closed.

Yes, this search and acquisition process can be much streamlined - really I want to be able to do everything through the library homepage and/or Google and Amazon, I need a simplified interface and a real catalog that will integrate different sources into a single e-book source, but it is still very good, this is the world I thought I should be living in when I was a child in the 1970s dependent on others for physical access to libraries and with that terrible sense of literary scarcity best summed up in these lovely and painful words of Randall Jarrell's!

(Haven't yet written the day's quota, unfortunately - got diverted onto the more enjoyable and easy task of doing research. But it must be eked out before the hour of midnight, that is the rule....)

"The restraint of this place"

An extraordinarily moving piece by Oliver Sacks at the New York Review of Books (subscription only) on what has been lost with the closing of mental asylums. He writes about a number of different books that all sound worthwhile, but I particularly must get Asylum: Inside the Closed World of Mental Hospitals, a book of photographs by Christopher Payne with an introduction by Sacks (a modified version of this NYRB piece) to be published by the MIT Press later this month.

Anyway, here's a bit:

Creedmoor Hospital in Queens, New York, ... had been established in 1912, very modestly, as the Farm Colony of Brooklyn State Hospital, holding to the nineteenth-century ideals of providing space, fresh air, and farming for its patients. But Creedmoor's population soared—it reached seven thousand by 1959—and, as Susan Sheehan showed in her 1982 book, Is There No Place on Earth for Me?, it became, in many ways, as wretched, overcrowded, and understaffed as any other state hospital. And yet the original gardens and livestock were maintained, providing a crucial resource for some patients, who could care for animals and plants, even though they might be too disturbed, too ambivalent, to maintain relationships with other human beings.

At Creedmoor, there were gymnasia, a swimming pool, and recreation rooms with ping-pong and billiards tables; there was a theater and a television studio, where patients could produce, direct, and act in their own plays—plays that, like de Sade's theater in the eighteenth century, could allow creative expression of their own concerns and predicaments. Music was important—there was a small patient orchestra—and so, too, was visual art. (Even today, with the bulk of the hospital closed down and falling into decay, the remarkable Living Museum at Creedmoor provides patients with the materials and space to work on painting and sculpture. One of the Living Museum's founders, Janos Marton, calls it a "protected space" for the artists.)

There were gigantic kitchens and laundries, and these, like the gardens and livestock, provided work and "work therapy" for many of the patients, along with opportunities for learning some of the skills of daily life, which, with their withdrawal into mental illness, they might never have acquired before. And there were great communal dining rooms, which, at their best, fostered a sense of community and companionship.

Thus, even in the 1950s, when conditions in state hospitals were so dismal, some of the good aspects of an asylum life were still to be found in them. There were often, even in the worst hospitals, pockets of human decency, of real life and kindness

"Born in ice cave of centaur stock"

Martin Stannard on Muriel Spark.

"Get out your Richards!"

Now and again someone asks me why it is that I am a teacher rather than a full-time writer. There are all sorts of reasons, of course, but one easy answer is that three out of my four grandparents-by-blood were teachers (the fourth, my beloved English grandmother, did a certificate in social work at the London School of Economics at a time when that was quite unusual).

(My mother is a teacher, too - I grew up in a school, even more than most people do!)

My father's parents met at the teacher training college in Glasgow and both specialized in English (British!) literature, and my grandfather went on to become the headmaster of several different high schools (here, by the way, you can see two of his paintings of the town he retired in, North Berwick!).

My English grandfather never understood how my Scottish grandfather could live within walking distance of one of Britain's best golf courses and yet remain thoroughly immune to the charms of the green! I was less close to him than I was to my Scottish grandfather (or, indeed, than I am to the very dear adopted grandfather who is my regular theatergoing companion in New York!), but we had many points of interest in common.

The English grandparents moved to a smaller (but not much smaller!) house a few years before they both died, which entailed some massive cleaning out of the extraordinary house they had lived in for many years (I cannot find a good picture online, though I know I found one once of it standing in solitary splendor of a gothically Victorian kind before the other houses were built on that road in the later nineteenth century, but if you scroll down to the bottom right-hand picture on this site, you will find 16 Broadlands Road - it is the house that, while I stood on a stepladder next to my mother handing her down countless mysterious and useless and yet non-throw-away-able things from a high shelf in the pantry, caused me to utter the most heartfelt words ever heard from my mouth: "I never want to live in a house, I only want to live in an apartment!")

It pained my grandfather to get rid of anything at all, though he steeled himself and managed to part with a great mass of possessions. One thing he was very happy to give to me was a pair of notebooks from his undergraduate years. They contained (in his characteristically illegible writing) his notes on English political thought during the American and French Revolutions, including many pages on my particular favorite Edmund Burke.


(Here was the Guardian obituary by his dear friend Richard Robbins; here was my Uncle Patrick's for the Independent.)

I have saved the best for last: a very nice back-garden picture, taken probably c. 2000 (actually I have no idea!), of me and Granny and Gramp.