I must say that I was absolutely overwhelmed on Monday and Tuesday by life re-entry panic. This to-do list is going to kill me!
All I really want is to be exercising and getting back into my own work mode, but instead I have this huge list of school things and life things and especially things to do with my father's estate that must be ticked off (Pennsylvania estate taxes must be prepaid by June 6 for the discount, the condo closing is early next week and I belatedly realized yesterday that my brother in NJ had the only set of keys with electronic fob and mailbox - my sister-in-law came to the rescue, express-mailing them this morning to paralegal in Philadelphia).
Dissertations are being defended left and right and I need to round up a few more committee members for the third of three upcoming (I hate to ask the same people multiple times, it is a lot of extra work, but then again we ask those people because they are so good at it and answer emails promptly - no virtue goes unpunished in academia!).
ARGHHHHHHH!!!!
I have an amazing slate of work stuff that I'm really excited about, but need to clear the head space so that I can actually get down to business. Summer projects: researching and writing the talk for this Johnson Shakespeare conference (this is the most pressing!); writing proposals for books about reading Austen and reading Clarissa. Back-burner upcoming project is the Gibbon's Rome book, but that will mostly have to wait till my year of sabbatical in 2016-2017 (woo-hoo!). Also a Secret Editorial Project that I will wait to unveil till it's more official, but that should be pretty interesting....
I have a very demanding year upcoming; only teaching one class per semester, due to course release for administrative stuff, but the two really huge things are that I will be chairing the Tenure Review Advisory Committee (that's between 70 and 80 tenure cases over the year), and I've also agreed to do something that as a Young Person was one of my institutional dreams (it's an honor to be asked, I couldn't say no!): writing the annual eighteenth-century studies roundup review for Studies in English Literature, which entails reading and reviewing the 100+ books and journal issues published in my field in 2015. It will be very interesting, I think, and it should benefit my graduate students down the road in terms of giving me a keener sense of the field as it currently exists, but it is a lot of work.
Closing tabs:
My review of Hanya Yanagihara's new novel is in the new issue of Bookforum, but not available online (read Garth Greenwell's piece instead!).
Ben Anastas on the pain of being edited.
Victor LaValle interviews Mat Johnson (keen to read his new novel).
At Public Books, Benjamin Eldon Stevens writes about a novel I loved, Jo Walton's Just City.
Jane Yeh has a poem in the New Republic!
An excellent interview with my colleague Edward Mendelson about morals and criticism.
A tale of two velodromes!
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges (lots of planes and trains):
Asali Solomon, Disgruntled (I really liked this one - very clear and captivating voice and vision, and of course due to the Philadelphia stuff I am especially interested - going to send a copy to my mother now as I think she will much enjoy it).
Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (I think he's an extremely good writer, and yet I do not love his books - I suppose that my preference is for something more character- and voice-driven, which is really not a criticism, just an observation!).
Andrew Klavan, Werewolf Cop (title of genius!)
Tim Lebbon, The Silence - I really, really liked this one.
Anyway, I've spent the morning clearing various minor list items, and am no longer feeling quite so panicky (I also have a personal assistant scheduled to come a couple times in the next few weeks to help me/make me do mine and my dad's postponed taxes for 2014, apply for Global Entry and more passport pages, move things from home to office, etc. etc.).
Showing posts with label stress. Show all posts
Showing posts with label stress. Show all posts
Wednesday, June 03, 2015
Wednesday, January 14, 2015
Closing tabs
I often find January challenging, and this year is no exception! A close family member is facing a difficult medical situation and we are all, I think, bracing ourselves for what's to come. Taking things day to day and trying not to worry too much about the failure to accomplish pretty much any of the work I'd hoped for (there were more other bits and bobs of work than I had admitted to myself, including Skyping in for a day and a half of MLA interviews for our eighteenth-century search). School starts next week, and will be crazy from the get-go....
However there have been many good things this month too.
Two Days, One Night is utterly mesmerizing in a terribly depressive way (glimpse of hope at the end); also, who knows whether everyone in Belgium eats their ice-cream cones like that or whether it just happens that the two actors in that scene were asked to lick in distinctive and identical fashion?
My friend Tanya's show Sorry Robot is absolutely delightful: like Hedwig, only with robots, and the exact right balance of existential and hilarious! It is really about the human condition, and I am only sorry that the song "Tears on the Treadmill" is not yet available as a Youtube link.... (A nice review at the Times.)
This is the sporting activity I have just taken up. It is making me extremely happy.
Lots of tabs to close:
Peter Hirsch on how a trip to the spa could end your marriage.
Greene Street soundscape c. 1972!
Memorable reference questions at the NYPL.
Identifiable images of bystanders extracted from corneal reflections.
R. Crumb on the Charlie Hebdo deaths.
Checking in with Thomas Lauderdale at the Pink Martini world headquarters in Portland, OR.
And quite a bit of light reading, all things considered (very soon I'm going to have little time for it, between teaching Clarissa and the TRAC committee shifting into heavy mode, although really the quantity speaks to the fact that I've been slightly struggling to get from day to day!):
Two very enjoyable albeit largely fantastical crime novels (I can tolerate preposterousness in the grand scheme of things so long as the sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph developments are plausible, which is so in this case) by Pierre Lemaitre, Irene and Alex. Which I read the wrong way round: ignore Amazon's use of the term "prequel" to describe the first one I list, it was written and published first in France, takes place chronologically prior to the subsequent volume and only happens to have been published belatedly in the US! More on Lemaitre here.
Comfort reread that reminded me of my deep conviction that I should write a long essay or a short book about Diana Wynne Jones, The Islands of Chaldea, posthumously completed by her sister Ursula Jones.
The first three books of Adrian McKinty's excellent Sean Duffy series, set in Belfast during the Troubles: The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, In the Morning I'll Be Gone. Another installment coming soon, but I felt bereft when I'd finished these three: the comfort of finding a really transporting fictional world and knowing that there is more of it where that came from is inversely proportional to the pain of being cut off at the end. I am always convinced, when I finish a series of books I enjoy, that I am never going to find anything I like to read ever again....
Ben Aaronovitch's Foxglove Summer: these novels are pretty much perfect in my book, though it took me some chapters to become fully immersed in this one - that may have been circumstantial, though, as I have had a lot of minor subway travel and waiting around for things.
Meghan Daum's new essay collection, The Unspeakable, which I enjoyed very much. (Here's an interview with Daum in Bookforum.)
Finally, Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends. Several friends have recommended Macintyre's books to me, and I certainly enjoyed this one (I wanted to follow up the factual story of Kim Philby, so far as it is known, after reading Tim Powers and other alternate-history versions).
I am really beginning to be grumpy about not having written anything recently. I need to think about this semester and whether I can build in a couple sessions a week of writing time. I think it is conceivable, but it will only happen if I make a concrete and realistic plan....
However there have been many good things this month too.
Two Days, One Night is utterly mesmerizing in a terribly depressive way (glimpse of hope at the end); also, who knows whether everyone in Belgium eats their ice-cream cones like that or whether it just happens that the two actors in that scene were asked to lick in distinctive and identical fashion?
My friend Tanya's show Sorry Robot is absolutely delightful: like Hedwig, only with robots, and the exact right balance of existential and hilarious! It is really about the human condition, and I am only sorry that the song "Tears on the Treadmill" is not yet available as a Youtube link.... (A nice review at the Times.)
This is the sporting activity I have just taken up. It is making me extremely happy.
Lots of tabs to close:
Peter Hirsch on how a trip to the spa could end your marriage.
Greene Street soundscape c. 1972!
Memorable reference questions at the NYPL.
Identifiable images of bystanders extracted from corneal reflections.
R. Crumb on the Charlie Hebdo deaths.
Checking in with Thomas Lauderdale at the Pink Martini world headquarters in Portland, OR.
And quite a bit of light reading, all things considered (very soon I'm going to have little time for it, between teaching Clarissa and the TRAC committee shifting into heavy mode, although really the quantity speaks to the fact that I've been slightly struggling to get from day to day!):
Two very enjoyable albeit largely fantastical crime novels (I can tolerate preposterousness in the grand scheme of things so long as the sentence-by-sentence and paragraph-by-paragraph developments are plausible, which is so in this case) by Pierre Lemaitre, Irene and Alex. Which I read the wrong way round: ignore Amazon's use of the term "prequel" to describe the first one I list, it was written and published first in France, takes place chronologically prior to the subsequent volume and only happens to have been published belatedly in the US! More on Lemaitre here.
Comfort reread that reminded me of my deep conviction that I should write a long essay or a short book about Diana Wynne Jones, The Islands of Chaldea, posthumously completed by her sister Ursula Jones.
The first three books of Adrian McKinty's excellent Sean Duffy series, set in Belfast during the Troubles: The Cold Cold Ground, I Hear the Sirens in the Street, In the Morning I'll Be Gone. Another installment coming soon, but I felt bereft when I'd finished these three: the comfort of finding a really transporting fictional world and knowing that there is more of it where that came from is inversely proportional to the pain of being cut off at the end. I am always convinced, when I finish a series of books I enjoy, that I am never going to find anything I like to read ever again....
Ben Aaronovitch's Foxglove Summer: these novels are pretty much perfect in my book, though it took me some chapters to become fully immersed in this one - that may have been circumstantial, though, as I have had a lot of minor subway travel and waiting around for things.
Meghan Daum's new essay collection, The Unspeakable, which I enjoyed very much. (Here's an interview with Daum in Bookforum.)
Finally, Ben Macintyre's A Spy Among Friends. Several friends have recommended Macintyre's books to me, and I certainly enjoyed this one (I wanted to follow up the factual story of Kim Philby, so far as it is known, after reading Tim Powers and other alternate-history versions).
I am really beginning to be grumpy about not having written anything recently. I need to think about this semester and whether I can build in a couple sessions a week of writing time. I think it is conceivable, but it will only happen if I make a concrete and realistic plan....
Wednesday, May 21, 2014
Light reading round-up
It is very bad when I go for too long without logging - the books mount up at an alarming rate, especially when I have been spending so much time on airplanes and in airports. It's the need to paste in links that slows me down - I work faster than the computer does, and if I'm not careful the Amazon page hasn't yet loaded and I paste in the same link as previously! I think I will sort them rather than just listing in the order I read them - a few deserve special singling out.
(I am going to rot my brain if I keep on reading so much random fiction. I contemplated and then discarded the notion, at the beginning of this calendar year, that I might resolve to have a year of reading only nonfiction - that would just be needlessly punitive. But I do think I should read a lot more complex and interesting stuff this summer and less of the pap....)
So:
An absolutely stunning novel, an excellent recommendation from Marina Harss: Delphine de Vigan's Nothing Holds Back the Night. It is more novelistic (though really the material is mostly true to life) than many of the nonfiction novels I have been reading and pondering recently (Sebald as progenitor perhaps, and V. S. Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival, but Teju Cole and Sheila Heti and Jenny Offil - I want to teach a class on this!), but it is extraordinary - a must-read.
It got me through a very tough night on the flight to Tel Aviv - I had a gruesome day of travel, first Ottawa to LGA, then the bus from there to JFK and then the horrible realization that the check-in desk for El Al was not even going to open for almost 4 more hours (it was just before five, my flight was 11:30pm, the desk only opened three hours before - I should have checked, but I was making plans in haste, and it really didn't make sense to go home in between - if I set foot inside my apartment, I was not at all sure I would have the resolution to leave again, and traffic and taxis are both costly). JFK Terminal 4 is one of the terminals that is both under construction and also with nothing (well, one diner, mercifully) on the outside of security. No air-conditioning, very few bathrooms, no seats (people are sprawled all over the floor surrounded by luggage). I was singled out for special security screening, which wasn't especially stressful in itself except that it meant I was stuck at the gate for a very long time with no hand luggage other than wallet and Kindle, and a reluctance to go and get food in case my bags were about to be returned (they were not). Then when I finally boarded, almost an hour after the flight was supposed to have left, I discovered - it was the cost of the security screening, I'd been rather flustered and hadn't looked at boarding pass when check-in person issued it to me under stern eye of security guy - the flight was completely sold out and I was in a middle seat, not the aisle seat I believed I'd booked when I bought the ticket. It was a low moment - I had left the hotel in Ottawa about 16 hours previously, and still had an eleven-hour flight to come - I couldn't sleep at all, too wired and too tired and too claustrophobically surrounded by neighbors (they were very nice actually), but the de Vigan novel was so gripping that it calmed me down and got me through the night!
Then I read her earlier novel No and Me, which is less formally unusual but really wonderful as well - very highly recommended.
Last night I devoured a book I've been keenly awaiting (a lot of good Kindle pre-orders appeared magically overnight from Monday to Tuesday, including Jo Walton's new novel, which I am really looking forward to): Paul Cornell's The Severed Streets, sequel to the excellent London Falling.
Miscellaneous literary fiction: William Boyd, Waiting for Sunrise (at first I couldn't get over my fundamental perplexity that people write books like this any more - not that we exactly choose the books we write, but still.... - I think of Boyd as having much in common with an older generation of novelists who were already themselves out of time, Anthony Burgess for instance, colonial novelists writing in a postcolonial era - Boyd is very good, but he is curiously not at all of his own generation - then once it turned into a spy thriller, it made more sense to me - but read this one instead I think if you want a more contemporary take on what can be done in the genre - certainly not all books can or should be funny, but all things being equal, I will prefer one that is very funny to one that is not!); and a Margaret Drabble novel I'd never read, a good recommendation from Karen Valihora for lady academics traveling to lecture in far-flung locations, The Realms of Gold.
Miscellaneous urban fantasy: Seanan McGuire, Sparrow Hill Road (very much the sort of book I like - really she can't write a bad book, though I am surprised she can write so many good ones, and wonder as with Charlie Stross whether she wouldn't be better off writing fewer really exceptional ones rather than spreading the imagination so thin - it does not have the density of imagination you see in Joe Hill's Nos4A2, but that is the cost of writing many books versus few - certainly shares DNA appealingly with that and with Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls).
Random science-fiction reread: Joan D. Vinge, Psion (what I really wanted was to reread The Snow Queen, I can't remember now what it was but something had caught my eye that reminded me of the very striking cover of the sequel - traveling in really unfamiliar parts of the world always makes me think of the more anthropological kind of science fiction - but it wasn't available on Kindle, and really I have a hard copy at home anyway, not that this would have stopped me from buying an electronic edition for immediate consumption!).
Miscellaneous crime: Laura McHugh, The Weight of Blood (pretty good I thought); Denise Mina, The Red Road (very good series); Doug Johnstone, The Dead Beat (not dissimilar from the previous - Scottish journalism noir - and quite good, barring some wildly implausible plotting - but I think there needs to be a moratorium on the title!) Oh, and a very poor one on the plane on the way home, one of a couple paperbacks I bought in the Ottawa airport as a precaution against possible Kindle fail (the idea of being trapped on a long flight with nothing to read is basically my worst nightmare - I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it is not really an exaggeration): one of these thrillers with a female protagonist who is so idiotic and oblivious that you can't even really care what happens to her.
Miscellaneous other: Warren Ellis, Crooked Little Vein (I liked it and found it very funny and appealing, though I think it is not as much to my taste as the true gonzo weird of Heath Lowrance, who is less well-known than he should be).
The two books I mentioned in my last post, Ari Shavit's My Promised Land and Pamela Olson's Fast Times in Palestine. I have already had a couple very good recommendations by email of books on Israel and Palestine - please let me know if you have more suggestions.
(I am going to rot my brain if I keep on reading so much random fiction. I contemplated and then discarded the notion, at the beginning of this calendar year, that I might resolve to have a year of reading only nonfiction - that would just be needlessly punitive. But I do think I should read a lot more complex and interesting stuff this summer and less of the pap....)
So:
An absolutely stunning novel, an excellent recommendation from Marina Harss: Delphine de Vigan's Nothing Holds Back the Night. It is more novelistic (though really the material is mostly true to life) than many of the nonfiction novels I have been reading and pondering recently (Sebald as progenitor perhaps, and V. S. Naipaul in The Enigma of Arrival, but Teju Cole and Sheila Heti and Jenny Offil - I want to teach a class on this!), but it is extraordinary - a must-read.
It got me through a very tough night on the flight to Tel Aviv - I had a gruesome day of travel, first Ottawa to LGA, then the bus from there to JFK and then the horrible realization that the check-in desk for El Al was not even going to open for almost 4 more hours (it was just before five, my flight was 11:30pm, the desk only opened three hours before - I should have checked, but I was making plans in haste, and it really didn't make sense to go home in between - if I set foot inside my apartment, I was not at all sure I would have the resolution to leave again, and traffic and taxis are both costly). JFK Terminal 4 is one of the terminals that is both under construction and also with nothing (well, one diner, mercifully) on the outside of security. No air-conditioning, very few bathrooms, no seats (people are sprawled all over the floor surrounded by luggage). I was singled out for special security screening, which wasn't especially stressful in itself except that it meant I was stuck at the gate for a very long time with no hand luggage other than wallet and Kindle, and a reluctance to go and get food in case my bags were about to be returned (they were not). Then when I finally boarded, almost an hour after the flight was supposed to have left, I discovered - it was the cost of the security screening, I'd been rather flustered and hadn't looked at boarding pass when check-in person issued it to me under stern eye of security guy - the flight was completely sold out and I was in a middle seat, not the aisle seat I believed I'd booked when I bought the ticket. It was a low moment - I had left the hotel in Ottawa about 16 hours previously, and still had an eleven-hour flight to come - I couldn't sleep at all, too wired and too tired and too claustrophobically surrounded by neighbors (they were very nice actually), but the de Vigan novel was so gripping that it calmed me down and got me through the night!
Then I read her earlier novel No and Me, which is less formally unusual but really wonderful as well - very highly recommended.
Last night I devoured a book I've been keenly awaiting (a lot of good Kindle pre-orders appeared magically overnight from Monday to Tuesday, including Jo Walton's new novel, which I am really looking forward to): Paul Cornell's The Severed Streets, sequel to the excellent London Falling.
Miscellaneous literary fiction: William Boyd, Waiting for Sunrise (at first I couldn't get over my fundamental perplexity that people write books like this any more - not that we exactly choose the books we write, but still.... - I think of Boyd as having much in common with an older generation of novelists who were already themselves out of time, Anthony Burgess for instance, colonial novelists writing in a postcolonial era - Boyd is very good, but he is curiously not at all of his own generation - then once it turned into a spy thriller, it made more sense to me - but read this one instead I think if you want a more contemporary take on what can be done in the genre - certainly not all books can or should be funny, but all things being equal, I will prefer one that is very funny to one that is not!); and a Margaret Drabble novel I'd never read, a good recommendation from Karen Valihora for lady academics traveling to lecture in far-flung locations, The Realms of Gold.
Miscellaneous urban fantasy: Seanan McGuire, Sparrow Hill Road (very much the sort of book I like - really she can't write a bad book, though I am surprised she can write so many good ones, and wonder as with Charlie Stross whether she wouldn't be better off writing fewer really exceptional ones rather than spreading the imagination so thin - it does not have the density of imagination you see in Joe Hill's Nos4A2, but that is the cost of writing many books versus few - certainly shares DNA appealingly with that and with Lauren Beukes's The Shining Girls).
Random science-fiction reread: Joan D. Vinge, Psion (what I really wanted was to reread The Snow Queen, I can't remember now what it was but something had caught my eye that reminded me of the very striking cover of the sequel - traveling in really unfamiliar parts of the world always makes me think of the more anthropological kind of science fiction - but it wasn't available on Kindle, and really I have a hard copy at home anyway, not that this would have stopped me from buying an electronic edition for immediate consumption!).
Miscellaneous crime: Laura McHugh, The Weight of Blood (pretty good I thought); Denise Mina, The Red Road (very good series); Doug Johnstone, The Dead Beat (not dissimilar from the previous - Scottish journalism noir - and quite good, barring some wildly implausible plotting - but I think there needs to be a moratorium on the title!) Oh, and a very poor one on the plane on the way home, one of a couple paperbacks I bought in the Ottawa airport as a precaution against possible Kindle fail (the idea of being trapped on a long flight with nothing to read is basically my worst nightmare - I know that sounds hyperbolic, but it is not really an exaggeration): one of these thrillers with a female protagonist who is so idiotic and oblivious that you can't even really care what happens to her.
Miscellaneous other: Warren Ellis, Crooked Little Vein (I liked it and found it very funny and appealing, though I think it is not as much to my taste as the true gonzo weird of Heath Lowrance, who is less well-known than he should be).
The two books I mentioned in my last post, Ari Shavit's My Promised Land and Pamela Olson's Fast Times in Palestine. I have already had a couple very good recommendations by email of books on Israel and Palestine - please let me know if you have more suggestions.
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.
Tuesday, November 08, 2011
Timetable woes
Had a minor but total freakout late this afternoon when I realized that I had mentally inserted an imaginary week into my schedule between now and Thanksgiving. When am I going to get all that work done?!?
(The realization came to me as I corresponded with the curators at the Berg Collection at the NYPL, who are generously doing a session for my undergraduate class at a time they persistently referred to as 'next week' - I almost wrote back to correct them and tell them it is scheduled for the 17th, then had my horrifying revelation!)
Hmmm....
(The problem is that on top of normal school stuff, I have overscheduled a bunch of optional but non-opt-outable things of value for next week: Monday heavy teaching load and a set of assignments coming in, then I have opera tickets for Tuesday, seeing a play with G. on Wednesday, NYPL session Thursday evening and also B. is arriving from the airport, another opera on Saturday, then Monday seminars, then the evils of Thanksgiving which is the worst-timed holiday in the academic year; the real problem is that I won't be home till Sunday night on the 27th, then teach both classes Monday and fly to Boston Monday evening to give an as-yet-unwritten lecture on Gulliver's Travels on Tuesday to the students in the core curriculum at BU! I thought I was going to get all of the post-Thanksgiving week's work done before B. got to NYC, only now I realize that I am only home for 4 days before he comes, so that it is not at all a realistic plan! I do have a five-hour train ride on Sunday the 27th from Manassas to NYC, so I will hope to get substantive work done then also, but Amtrak is always very crowded that weekend and it's not always an environment conducive to work.)
(In retrospect there is one other major piece of work - 6-7 novels I need to read for a prize committee - that I should have brought with me to Cayman, only now it is too late to do anything about it...)
The long and the short: the next six weeks are going to be extremely demanding, I'd better pace myself?
(The realization came to me as I corresponded with the curators at the Berg Collection at the NYPL, who are generously doing a session for my undergraduate class at a time they persistently referred to as 'next week' - I almost wrote back to correct them and tell them it is scheduled for the 17th, then had my horrifying revelation!)
Hmmm....
(The problem is that on top of normal school stuff, I have overscheduled a bunch of optional but non-opt-outable things of value for next week: Monday heavy teaching load and a set of assignments coming in, then I have opera tickets for Tuesday, seeing a play with G. on Wednesday, NYPL session Thursday evening and also B. is arriving from the airport, another opera on Saturday, then Monday seminars, then the evils of Thanksgiving which is the worst-timed holiday in the academic year; the real problem is that I won't be home till Sunday night on the 27th, then teach both classes Monday and fly to Boston Monday evening to give an as-yet-unwritten lecture on Gulliver's Travels on Tuesday to the students in the core curriculum at BU! I thought I was going to get all of the post-Thanksgiving week's work done before B. got to NYC, only now I realize that I am only home for 4 days before he comes, so that it is not at all a realistic plan! I do have a five-hour train ride on Sunday the 27th from Manassas to NYC, so I will hope to get substantive work done then also, but Amtrak is always very crowded that weekend and it's not always an environment conducive to work.)
(In retrospect there is one other major piece of work - 6-7 novels I need to read for a prize committee - that I should have brought with me to Cayman, only now it is too late to do anything about it...)
The long and the short: the next six weeks are going to be extremely demanding, I'd better pace myself?
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