Work update

Oxford lifestyle continues idyllic - the weather and terrain are so perfect for running, and I have found great yoga and a great lifting coach to work out with. Went to London for a couple days over the weekend for some family visiting, and my mother was here for two nights which was very nice, but I am ready to plunge into total workaholism for the rest of the time I'm here - I must make a quick trip to Cambridge to see friends, but I don't think I'm going to go back to London, I just want to hole up and read and write!

The only tricky thing for me work-wise just now is that I'm totally torn between my desire to draft the Austen book as expeditiously as possible (don't want to lose momentum) and my desire to (a) make use of library materials here to do broad reading for footnotology and (b) make progress on Gibbon project and make sure my lecture at the end of term on Gibbon and Gray is really good. I had an amazing evening of Gibbon-related reading last night that culminated in a massive plan and greater clarity: at home in NYC I have a great collection of Gibboniana from the library, but I don't need to reproduce that collection here, I will have access again in December; I do need to reimmerse myself in Gray (requested amazing slew of stuff to read at the Weston in the rare book room); and I do need to pull together at least a mini-footnote library to reimmerse myself and identify crucial primary sources for library investigation, couldn't bring that stuff with me as luggage book space was given over to the Austen volumes. So I've ordered four things from Amazon UK and identified the area of open stacks in the Bodleian where I can find the 10 or so other things I think I really need to have to hand (list can be found at the bottom of this post).

Austen, though! I hate to lose momentum! This is the chart I made once I had had a week of settling in. As I said previously, I don't think I can finish the draft while I'm here, but I should be able to have the book drafted in full (it is a very rough draft) by Xmas.

Going to step up the pace a bit now - I've drafted three chapters (out of eight, but it's possible that seven and eight aren't really two distinct chapters), so I'll press ahead with five days per chapter for the next three, on manners, morals and voice (one day of assembling the notes, four days of producing quota), then type up the notes for the remaining two chapters (teeth, mourning and melancholy) so that I've at least got something on paper.

I'll be doing some reading and library stuff in the meantime, but week 7 will be wholly devoted to footnotology and Bodleian-Weston time and week 8 will involve delivering my two talks, putting finishing touches on the second one (the first is ready to go) and spending some time with Brent, who will come over for that last week.

Bonus library method picture. (I do not know that there is better evidence for consistency of character than this - in fact, I wrote about it at least once before on this blog, it was a meme making the rounds in 2005 about what you'd look for in the library in 2015 and I will quote the relevant line here - "Then I would arm myself with a pen and paper (one thing I can guarantee is that in 2015 I will still be jotting down call numbers on the back of an old envelope or a supermarket receipt) and write down a huge long list of call numbers and hit the stacks and then go home for a huge orgy of reading.") (In this case it's on the other side of the piece of paper where I made notes about the new powerlifting warmup sequence!)

Closing tabs

Quiet summer on the blog - Facebook is getting the sort of idle thought that used to show up here, and I think there is no point resisting the drain in that direction.  Have a lot of open tabs to close, as well as a light reading update that I will write separately.  Funny summer in life - I have done no substantive work of my own, it's all life stuff (apartment declutter, 100 runs in 100 days, family Disney trip etc.) and other people's work stuff - but I am going to have to accept that sometimes I have to pay attention to things that are not a book that I am writing....

The Clown Egg Register.

The beautiful afterlife of Edward Gorey's mink stroller coat.

Starbucks card value exceeds money on deposit at many financial institutions.

Eighteenth-century note-taking (and the interesting underlying link).

Secrets of the London Library.

Roger Luckhurst on trouble in Lovecraft Country.

Sheep View 360.

Baroque wigs of paper.

Closing tabs

Traveling tomorrow (not super-early but early for me), just finishing up getting things ready to go. A few tabs to close:

A shortage of tutu-makers. (Via GeekPress.)

Caleb's 2015 in notes. (I was startled recently by the discovery of the word zarf as applied to the cardboard ring that fills a comparable function!)

Ellis Avery on life at waist level.

The FT's interview with Elena Ferrante (site registration required):

A page is well written when the labour and pleasure of truthful narration supplant any other concern, including a concern with formal elegance. I belong to the category of writers who throw out the final draft and keep the rough when this practice ensures a higher degree of authenticity.

I have designs on this lounge for tomorrow morning....

44

I need an amanuensis to come and type up these notes for me!

My mood has picked up quite a bit, to my relief - in fact, when I look through past summers of blog posting, I begin to suspect that I always spend June and the first half of July in a state of mild grumpiness (consequence of overwork during the school year plus need to clear minor external writing tasks). I was training a lot more last summer but I don't think I was really feeling good about stuff until round about now, it may just be a structural cost of balancing the workload so unevenly over the academic year.

I have a lot to do before I leave on Friday, including thinking about packing for three totally different climates and sets of activities. Will still be writing Oxford talk next week in Cayman, not optimal but inevitable....

A minor bright spot the other day: my brother found our father's SSA-1099 in a bag of papers that had become separated from the other stuff he took from his apartment, which will let me file his 2014 taxes WITHOUT having to go in person to the local Social Security office and wait in line with complicated paperwork to beg a new copy! This is huge: it might be that the SS office is not as heinous a place as I imagine, but I have built this up into absolutely most-dreaded job, and having the form in hand will save me half a day of high irk and a good deal of dread in the anticipation. PROCRASTINATION WAS REWARDED - my brother was almost afraid to tell me he'd found it in case I'd already spent a horrible day obtaining a new one!

This year brought me several bad things I really wasn't expecting, and I am still pretty much just scrambling through from day to day, but I'm looking forward to the coming school year and an interesting committee-chairing assignment, and after that I will have a full year of sabbatical! I have not made enough writing time in the last year or so, and am looking forward to getting the chance to remedy the omission.

"Now Casanova's memoirs"

On reimagining biography. Makes me want to read both the book described here and John Lahr's Tennessee Williams biography....

(Thinking quite a bit about annotation as I am - slightly to my regret, as it is causing much procrastination - drafting a proposal for funding to integrate some electronic annotation tools and digital close-reading tutorials into my introduction to the major course for next year....)

(Also thinking seriously about making 2015 the year of reading mostly nonfiction except for novels I am truly eager to read?)

Eidolon, eiderdown

Via Dave Lull, Wayne Koestenbaum's Trance Notebook #14:

in a station wagon

parked on Union

I puzzled over “eidólons”

and rejected it

as if “Eire” or “dreidel”

or “eiderdown”

were buried

in that awkward

noun—

Closing tabs

Have had a bit of a breather in Cayman for a few days, with some important pieces of work finished and much exercise, but am on another plane tomorrow to another country! Then home on Sunday. I am ready, really, for the semester to be over: five more weeks, but two of them only with Monday teaching rather than Monday-Wednesday...

Closing tabs:

Vanessa Veselka on a truck-stop killer and the life of teenage runaways.

Chickens have to live somewhere too!

Note-taking habits of prior ages.

9 political poems to read now that the election's over.

An alluring excerpt from Nancy Marie Brown's Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths.

Smallest man in the world dances with his cat.

Alos: my favorite local sports journalist Ron Shillingford profiles the Wednesday Night Run Club. (B.'s marathon relay team gets a mention!)

Miscellaneous light reading: Jacqueline Carey's Dark Currents: Agent of Hel (not bad, but not up to the standard of her best - she's working in a genre that Seanan McGuire has more of a natural gift for!); Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot; Scott Jurek's Eat and Run.