Socratic fitness

An interesting article by Eric LeMay at Salon on the ethos of CrossFit.

Stone Cold Jane Austen

Eighteenth-century scholar Devoney Looser has a great note on Facebook on how roller derby let her rediscover her inner athlete.

Putting the shot

Sam Lipsyte on growing up a sportswriter's son.

Wax off

The ten best personal trainers in film and television.

Closing tabs redux

Wish I could see this. 

Also rather wish I could go here!  (Link via B., who got it here.  Note to self: acquire camp chair?)

Great Oliver Sacks piece in last week's New Yorker, including an amazing description of the genesis of his vision of his writing vocation - online for subscribers only, but that podcast is open to all, I think.

Asad Raza's Wimbledon diary.

Rereading We Need To Talk About Kevin for a fuller discussion of Lionel Shriver as stylist in my style revision - but really I need to put that aside and get my syllabi finalized, course readers arranged, books checked on etc.  Still have a bit more leeway time-wise, as my first classes don't meet till next Wednesday and then the following Monday, but can't seem to concentrate on the other with this still unresolved, so I think I'll take a few days this week to do that, return library books, etc. 

I do have some good news that I think no longer needs to be secret - awaiting contract on the style book from Columbia University Press!  Very excited about working with them on this, though there are a couple other editors I've mentally bookmarked as people I'm eager to collaborate with on future projects.

Got home from Cayman late Sunday night and had another endodontist appointment yesterday afternoon.  Fingers crossed that this was the last one, though doctor says there is a ten percent chance a further procedure will be needed.  Went to regular dentist this morning to get the temporary filling in the crown replaced with a permanent one.  Devoutly hoping that this is it for this year's dental woes!  It was certainly much less painful afterwards than the two prior sessions, though there is still some infection.

Magic circles

This amazing set of pictures by my colleague Taylor Carman notates in a very different idiom the same sort of place and feeling I wanted to capture in my novel.  (Which, by the way, I am still wrestling with; there's one little penultimate scene that isn't right, and a couple other tweaks, but I am going to have to wait and have another crack at it in the very early morning.  Tomorrow is the day I'm hoping to do a long endurance workout starting at 10am, so if I don't write first, it's hopeless: the pleasant post-exercise brain fog will neutralize intellectual activity later in the day.)

Midnight oil

It's just after midnight, and I'm relieved to say that after a brutal marathon day and evening of work, I've just sent a pretty decent Magic Circle rewrite to my editor.  We will have one more pass through it next week; the ending still isn't right, and I did a lot of new writing for the last stretch that will probably look rough when I come back to it after a few days off.  Final deadline: next Friday.  I will be glad to see the back of this one, though of course books always come back at you for copy-edit, proofing, etc. 

Need to leave for the airport in about 5.5 hours, so I think I will pack now and then see if there's any chance I might get a few hours of sleep.  It may not be an option, as it's been 3 or 4 in the morning before I've fallen asleep the last couple nights....

Light reading around the edges: David Gordon's The Serialist, which I absolutely loved.

Bonus links: nice swim bit with shout-out to my old teacher Doug Stern; Olympic training technology; "First, then, read your book."

Over the hump of the week?

Radio silence here largely due to the fact that I've been so frazzled that sharing was contraindicated!  Really I have just been disastrously busy from mid-February to late March, and I always pay the price in terms of insomnia and stress.  However I had a very useful day yesterday knocking things off a school-y to-do list; today's still busy with school stuff, but I then have four days completely clear of all obligations (Thursday-Sunday) and a lighter load than usual for next Monday, so I think I am finally going to be able to dig back in on the wretched novel, which has been fruitlessly calling for my attention in the face of an extremely demanding work schedule!

(Absolute priority once I clear this next bunch of deadlines and finish the teaching semester: lower stress levels!)

Miscellaneous light reading: Jonathan Mahler's Kindle Single Death Comes to Happy Valley: Penn State and the Tragic Legacy of Joe Paterno (a bit luridly written as well as titled, and not reported from interviews but more like a synopsis of published sources, but informative and worthwhile); Barry Graham's The Book of Man; Lewis Shiner's Dark Tangos. 

Have also burned through most of the first two seasons of The Good Wife on the theory that it might be good if I spent evenings not just reading books so compulsively, but really good TV episodes are at least as addictive as light reading, so I am not sure that this is any kind of a solution.  Stayed up late last night reading the first half of Tim Parks's odd but compelling Teach Us to Sit Still: A Skeptic's Guide to Health and Healing, recommended to me recently by a colleague to whom I was lamenting my lack of work-life balance.  (Afterwards, though, I realized that it's not really the right term: I don't want work-life balance, I just want to be able to work a lot and be calm and quiet the rest of the time!)

Bonus link: Lee Child's lessons for success.

Lops

More on rabbit show-jumping.  (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Kaninhop

"As long as you train them, they really like to do it": competitive rabbit jumping in Scandinavia! (Via Carrie Frye.)

Fiendishly busy for the next week and a half, so much so that I do not quite know how it is all going to get done. There probably won't be much blogging as I am too busy even to be at the computer!

Good things this weekend: a talk about disfigurement, disability and eighteenth-century poetic form by one of my intellectual and academic role models, the excellent Helen Deutsch, and a very lovely dinner afterwards at a colleague's house; Thomas Bartlett's musical salon at Poisson Rouge (it was a birthday celebration for my friend and former student Evans Richardson, and this is the set list), and a party afterwards in an uptown location for once (123rd and Adam Clayton Powell Blvd. - I could walk home)!

Off shortly to family Easter celebration in New Jersey. Chocolate coconut cream eggs may be involved...

The Western tradition

Ah, it is such a luxury to be starting my morning with coffee and wireless internet! I forgot to write yesterday about what was probably the most interesting book I've read recently, William Gibson's Zero History, which I enjoyed very much but found not up to the standard of Pattern Recognition. Also enjoyed Andre Agassi's autobiography - both part of a book splurge at McNally Robinson last week. I finally have my Kindle in my hands, but have not yet opened the box and set it up - must do that before my Maine trip tomorrow...

Last night I had the perfect New York evening - my brother turned up at the loft where I'm staying (he is working as a carpenter on the Men in Black III production in Williamsburg, and the commute from Philadelphia means getting up at 4am and not getting home till 8pm, so he is going to try and ease things up by staying one or two nights a week in New York), we hung out for an hour, then G. and I went to see the very funny and apt Office Hours by A. R. Gurney at what is rapidly becoming my favorite small theater in Manhattan, The Flea. Young company The Bats are superb, and though the play is slight, I thought it was very well done; also, of course, as someone who has taught in Columbia's Literature Humanities program, I must be pretty much the exact/ideal target audience...

(And a delicious dinner afterwards at Petrarca: we shared piatto rustico to start [G.: "I never remember the food we eat, but I remember we had that before and how good it was!"], then I had a pizza with capers, anchovies and black olives and a specialty dessert of vanilla gelato with amarena cherries.)

Tonight I'm speaking on Clarissa and counterfactuals at the Fordham eighteenth-century seminar: should be fun...

A start

Today I read the two books that seem to me to provide the most immediate prompt for my notional new novel (I'm in somewhat low spirits, and thus cannot really imagine undertaking a huge new project right now, but also know that an interesting new book is the most likely thing to infuse me with vim and vigor if I can only get it rolling): The Bacchae and Andrew Dolkart's Morningside Heights: A History of its Architecture and Development.

A nice tidbit from the latter:

Thus, by 1900 residential development on Morningside Heights remained slow and erratic. The New York Tribune reported in 1900 that "The development of this beautiful hilltop has been retarded by its somewhat inconvenient accessibility." The major access problem was the "series of long and circuitous flights of steps" leading to and from the 115th Street station of the elevated on Eighth Avenue. In order to alleviate this problem, several large property owners in the area commissioned designs for an elevator that would transport people up and down the cliff of Morningside Park. As designed by civil engineers Percival Robert Moses and Samuel Osgood Miller, the elevator was to be a steel structure with two electric-powered cars. A walkway would extend out from Morningside Drive to the elevators and a cupola was to cap the open steel shaft.

Last night's light reading: Michael Lewis's The Blind Side (pretty interesting, even given near-complete lack of knowledge of football).

The mouse helpline

The recent House of Lords debate on pest control:

Baroness Finlay of Llandaff: I thank the noble Lord for his reply. How many calls have there been to the mouse helpline? Has the accuracy of that information been checked, given that the staff report seeing mice on a daily basis at the moment in the eating areas? Has consideration been given to having hypoallergenic cats on the estate, given the history? Miss Wilson, when she was a resident superintendent in this Palace, had a cat that apparently caught up to 60 mice a night. The corpses were then swept up in the morning. Finally, does the noble Lord recognise the fire hazard that mice pose, because they eat through insulating cables? It would be a tragedy for this beautiful Palace to burn down for lack of a cat.

The Chairman of Committees: My Lords, there are a number of questions there. I cannot give an answer to the number of calls made to the mouse helpline-if that is its title. I suspect that it would not be a good use of resources to count them up. But I am well aware of the problem of mice, as I said in my Answer. It is something that we take seriously.

As for getting a cat, I answered a Question from the noble Lord, Lord Elton, last week on this matter. I was not aware that such a thing as a hypoallergenic cat existed-I do not know whether our cat at home is one of those. There are a number of reasons why it is not a good idea to have cats. First, they would ingest mouse poison when eating poisoned mice, which would not be very nice for them, and there would be nothing to keep them where they are needed or stop them walking around the House on desks in offices or on tables in restaurants and bars-and maybe even in the Chamber itself. Therefore, we have ruled out at this stage the possibility of acquiring a cat, or cats.

Via this blog and Robert Hudson's tip-off.

NB Robbie is the author of a truly lovely novel that I somehow omitted to blog about when I read it this fall: it is called The Kilburn Social Club, and I found it one of the funniest and most delightful things I've read for a long time. Not least because by some curious and inexplicable alchemy Robbie likes almost all the same things I like, and I can rest in peace now that I have found the one other person in the world (a good example of the Hudson style can be found in this old Light Reading post) who has Jorge Luis Borges and Jilly Cooper enshrined on two plinths of equal prestige and prominence in the temple of his heart!

Pluto platters

Frisbee inventor dies.

I was very sorry to come to the end of the House of Niccolò books. At roughly 600+pp. per volume, the total narrative clocks in at close to 5,000 pages - reading through the series has very much lubricated my passage, in the last couple of weeks, through various bits of the New York public transportation system and the insomniac's couch.

I now am wedged halfway into the first volume of the Lymond chronicles, but it is a bit too Scott-ish for my tastes - I believe, however, that subsequent volumes take us out of Scotland/Border raid territory etc. I have just gone and checked the remaining five volumes out of the Barnard library - it takes a certain amount of trouble to identify and secure a suitable supply of light reading!

The light and the dark

Recent bits at the LRB by Colm Tóibín and Jenny Diski.

Delightful light reading

Strange to say, the supply of truly delightful light reading in the world is NOT infinite, so I have been very lucky to have within the last couple days the final installment of Stieg Larsson's trilogy, The Girl Who Kicked the Hornet's Nest (very good, but not as much character-driven stuff as the previous books; still a page-turner, though), and Terry Pratchett's Unseen Academicals - more of a sport-related novel than an academic novel, truly, but very delightful to me nonetheless! (The closing pages, describing the culminating "football" match, are almost as pleasing to me as the stories of Caymanian sports journalist Ron Shillingford!)

The absence of narrative progression plus cross-circuited schematism

I guess it was Sarah Manguso's "Writing about not writing" syllabus at Bookforum that prompted me to put this and a few other things into the shopping cart - but at around 10:30 last night when I should have been going to BED I instead picked up David Markson's Reader's Block and LITERALLY found it impossible to put it down until I finished it.

It is the most absolutely mesmerizing book!

It made me feel, too, as though I were its perfect reader ("A novel of intellectual reference and allusion, so to speak minus much of the novel") - I wonder whether it would be appealing to someone who did not so strongly as I grow up reading T. S. Eliot and that Eliotian canon, and with years of reading the Romantic poets and literary biographies in my early twenties - at any rate, it is a sad and staggeringly good book. I will teach a class one day where I can include it on the syllabus, that's for sure - it would make a fascinating end point for an upper-level undergraduate seminar on the debate over ancients and moderns, which is the new class I am thinking I must develop sometime over the next couple years...

I have been very busy (sent my final novel revisions to the editor yesterday!), so light reading has been sporadic and perhaps even more eclectic than usual! Golly, I am overdue for a MASSIVE STINT OF NOVEL-READING - not sure, though, quite when that is going to happen.

Dara Torres's Age is Just a Number reveals more details of the unattractive personality one suspects on the basis of various stories and interviews (if you want an inspirational sport-related book by a significant athlete of that generation who also battled an eating disorder, you will be much better off with Monica Seles' Getting a Grip).

It is no discredit to Frank Bruni's interesting and highly readable memoir Born Round when I say that the most fascinating detail I gleaned from it was that the New York Times has an arrangement with American Express whereby the credit card company provides cards with multiple names for restaurant critics who have to eat incognito!

And as part of a big haul from the excellent Book Depository (free worldwide shipping of books from the UK - though I see I could have gotten it very cheap used!), I indulged in Victoria Clayton's A Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs (enjoyable, but perhaps not her best - motifs from other books too obviously hashed out again).

"Let the wild rumpus start!"

Close Read goes hog-wild on FOOTBALL!

"Like Sophia Loren, and equally difficult to catch"

The mysterious death of a giant carp (courtesy of Julia).

"Gosh, I could do with a bathe"

At the Guardian, John Mullan lists ten of the best literary swimming scenes!

(Hmmm, I am thinking he has not read Andre Aciman's Call Me By Your Name, or it would be there too...)

In a happy development, I received a copy of the Folio Society edition of The Go-Between as a birthday present - time for a re-read, I think...

(Aciman alert: Eight White Nights: A Novel will be published in February 2010, certainly on my list of most desired things....)

(Oh, I stopped by the office today to take care of several mundane and long-overdue administrative tasks and discovered several things in my mailbox of UTTER DELIGHTFULNESS - namely, new books by Charlie Williams and Peter Temple - if I have self-control, I will save them for the Caymanian interlude that begins next Thursday, but they may prove IRRESISTIBLE!)