Life reentry day: international travel wreaks havoc with exercise schedule and many other things. Yesterday was extremely demanding, and today I am paying the price!
Closing a few tabs in the meantime:
Brook Stevenson interviews Marlon James (his new book is on a pile here, but it's a tome - might have to buy a copy for Kindle as well, easier to hold while reading!).
David Gordon: doomed to read and write?
Chaucer's advice on how to survive the holidays.
For those who have been demoralized by having a journal reject an article! (And underlying link. This fits closely with my own experience as a referee for journals.)
A short history of the shipping pallet.
Perils of digital preservation.
The rise of livestreaming funerals.
Shane Gould on learning to swim.
Last but not least, Michael Hofmann really didn't like it....
Showing posts with label recovery. Show all posts
Showing posts with label recovery. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Tuesday, August 06, 2013
Closing tabs
Cumulative fatigue has made me unproductive! It's a recovery week, training-wise, but of course there are many small things that need to get done before I leave town early Thursday morning: things to do with bicycles, things to do with syllabi and course book orders, things to do with library materials for an article revision and a secret project that is beginning to percolate, etc. etc.
Miscellaneous light reading (not enough of it - I need the soothing mental bath of reading a good many narrative pages!): Ivy Pochoda's Visitation Street (I thought it was very good - definitely lived up to the advance praise - in vein of Richard Price or Colin Harrison, with good feel for inner lives of teenage girls); a reread of Tana French's Broken Harbor; and an extremely good epic fantasy, Daniel Abraham's The Dagger and the Coin. I saw someone reading it on a plane earlier this summer and it looked appealing: epic fantasy is often a dodgy bet (it's a genre I much enjoy, but I also find a great deal of it unreadable), but this really was good. I would have gotten it even sooner if I had realized that Abraham is one of the co-authors of those pseudonymous science-fiction novels I recently enjoyed so much.
Closing tabs:
How the FBI turned Natalie Zemon Davis on to rare books.
Phil Dyess-Nugent on Funky 4 + 1's "That's the Joint" (and check out the whole series here).
Salad-bar ingenuity. (Great pictures at that link.)
Miscellaneous light reading (not enough of it - I need the soothing mental bath of reading a good many narrative pages!): Ivy Pochoda's Visitation Street (I thought it was very good - definitely lived up to the advance praise - in vein of Richard Price or Colin Harrison, with good feel for inner lives of teenage girls); a reread of Tana French's Broken Harbor; and an extremely good epic fantasy, Daniel Abraham's The Dagger and the Coin. I saw someone reading it on a plane earlier this summer and it looked appealing: epic fantasy is often a dodgy bet (it's a genre I much enjoy, but I also find a great deal of it unreadable), but this really was good. I would have gotten it even sooner if I had realized that Abraham is one of the co-authors of those pseudonymous science-fiction novels I recently enjoyed so much.
Closing tabs:
How the FBI turned Natalie Zemon Davis on to rare books.
Phil Dyess-Nugent on Funky 4 + 1's "That's the Joint" (and check out the whole series here).
Salad-bar ingenuity. (Great pictures at that link.)
Tuesday, July 09, 2013
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.)
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.)
Wednesday, July 18, 2012
Everything's coming up roses
Just a quick post to say that I started my first-person rewrite of BoMH part III on Monday night and I'm incredibly excited about it! It's totally turned around how I feel about the book: there's always been a claustrophobic hothouse-type aspect to the story that I have disliked, and this opens things up in a funny and interesting way that I am very much enjoying. Haven't been so interested and engaged by something I was writing since a day I stole in February to reimmerse myself in a piece I wrote a while ago about the 'minute particular' in life-writing and the novel. (It's one of my projects for August to get that out as a real article.)
I was unusually frenzied in my work life from December through May, and then in the aftermath of that I was uncharacteristically grumpy from May pretty much right up until now. I'm hoping this marks a real turning point.
I had one of those days yesterday where everything just seems to go right (clearly this follows in the psychological aftermath of near-magical Monday-night and Tuesday-morning writing sessions). I walked down a block I don't usually traverse and found myself in the amazing surrounds of the flower market, which is really like something out of a fairy story; I had an amazing lunch (best conversation ever!) with my editor at the hyper-palindromic Ilili (the space is beautiful and the food is very good; I recommend the prix fixe lunch - we shared grape leaves and hummus for appetizers, then I had the grilled chicken salad and the "Ilili candy bar" for dessert); I generally avoid crosstown buses, as they are often slower than walking, but heat changes the equation and the M23 - I had known this but somehow forgot it - actually goes all the way to Chelsea Piers; I had an enjoyable run workout on the indoor track at Chelsea Piers followed by a dip in the pool; then I took the M23 again to the first meeting of a mindfulness-based stress reduction class I found online and that seems exactly what I've been looking for.
I was unusually frenzied in my work life from December through May, and then in the aftermath of that I was uncharacteristically grumpy from May pretty much right up until now. I'm hoping this marks a real turning point.
I had one of those days yesterday where everything just seems to go right (clearly this follows in the psychological aftermath of near-magical Monday-night and Tuesday-morning writing sessions). I walked down a block I don't usually traverse and found myself in the amazing surrounds of the flower market, which is really like something out of a fairy story; I had an amazing lunch (best conversation ever!) with my editor at the hyper-palindromic Ilili (the space is beautiful and the food is very good; I recommend the prix fixe lunch - we shared grape leaves and hummus for appetizers, then I had the grilled chicken salad and the "Ilili candy bar" for dessert); I generally avoid crosstown buses, as they are often slower than walking, but heat changes the equation and the M23 - I had known this but somehow forgot it - actually goes all the way to Chelsea Piers; I had an enjoyable run workout on the indoor track at Chelsea Piers followed by a dip in the pool; then I took the M23 again to the first meeting of a mindfulness-based stress reduction class I found online and that seems exactly what I've been looking for.
Sunday, October 09, 2011
Light reading catch-up
A very tiring but also very productive week in Ottawa: several pieces of important business seem to have been well and truly accomplished. Collapsed into bed when I got home this afternoon, slept for some hours, then did my reading for tomorrow (Roland Barthes's The Neutral, Pope's The Rape of the Lock and a very good essay by Claude Rawson on mock-heroic and 'Pope's Waste Land') but will have to write my comments on last week's graduate student writing assignments in the morning: digging deeper to get them done now seems impossible. However I think I've done enough tonight that I can carve out the time for the Beast boot camp tomorrow morning: it knocks out everything from 5:45 rising all the way through to 9 or so, with a quick interlude for breakfast post-class before I get back on my bike to ride uptown, so I wasn't sure it really was going to be feasible, but it is a priority as I missed two classes last week.
I had hardly any time to read while I was away (mostly only in airports): an advance copy of Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel, Snuff, got me to Canada, and James Lee Burke's Rain Gods whiled away a few nighttime hours during the week and got me most of the way home. My copy of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, ordered from England via The Book Depository, finally arrived in Cayman in September, and B. brought it to give to me in Ottawa, but I haven't even had a chance to crack it open. Fairly busy this week till Tuesday late afternoon, and with one substantial chunk of reading (Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments!) to do for Wednesday afternoon also, but the week opens up as of Tuesday evening and I am very much hoping I will be able to lounge, recumbent, and devour it - I am feeling much in need of restoration and recovery!
I had hardly any time to read while I was away (mostly only in airports): an advance copy of Terry Pratchett's latest Discworld novel, Snuff, got me to Canada, and James Lee Burke's Rain Gods whiled away a few nighttime hours during the week and got me most of the way home. My copy of Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, ordered from England via The Book Depository, finally arrived in Cayman in September, and B. brought it to give to me in Ottawa, but I haven't even had a chance to crack it open. Fairly busy this week till Tuesday late afternoon, and with one substantial chunk of reading (Adam Smith's Theory of Moral Sentiments!) to do for Wednesday afternoon also, but the week opens up as of Tuesday evening and I am very much hoping I will be able to lounge, recumbent, and devour it - I am feeling much in need of restoration and recovery!
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