"I don't care too much for money"

Harlan Coben on the muse's voice as annoying whine; how to write a book in two months. Really each of these writers is mostly talking about the particular kind of book he has written...

I picked up several months' worth of mail at the office yesterday; undoubtedly the nicest thing was a copy of Cody James's really staggeringly good little novel The Dead Beat with a warm note from Dan Holloway, its publisher at eight cut galleries press. I read it electronically this summer and loved it; it never hurts to have a 'real' copy as well, this way I can press it into someone else's hands too! A free PDF of the novel is available just now at the press's website (scroll down four or five paragraphs), and here's a link to Mari Juniper's interesting interview with Dan about the press and its mission.

Postscript

I am 'homesick' for the worlds of these books by Doris Egan/Jane Emerson (planetary and interstellar science fiction built on a Pride and Prejudice chassis): I want to go back there...

(That said, I was in a ridiculously good mood today: first day back on campus! Clearly I am in the right line of work.)

The Roomba/Scooba squadron

A fleet of Roombas.

I've switched to the new Blogger interface; one thing I really like is how it handles labels in a sidebar. Here are the a's, which I think vividly conjure up the Light Reading lifestyle:

"it", -iads, a sense of proportion, A. L. Kennedy, abbreviations, ABCs of the novel, abecedarianism, ablutions, abundant recompense, abuse, academia, accommodations, accomplishment, acronyms, acting, activity levels, Adam Phillips, adaptation, addiction, addled things, adolescence, adulteration, advance notice, advances, adverbs, advertising, aeronautics, Agatha Christie, air safety, airports, Alan Bennett, Alan Hollinghurst, Alan Warner, alarms, Alasdair Gray, alcohol, alcohol abuse, Alexander Pope, Alexander technique, Alfred Jarry, Alfred Nobel, aliases, Alice, Alice Boone, Alison Bechdel, alliteration, allusion, alphabets, altered states, alternate histories, alternate universes, Alzheimer's, Amazon, American punctuation, amphibians, anachronism, anagrams and acrostics, analogies, anatomy, anchovies, Andre Aciman, Andrew Gelman, Andrew O'Hagan, Andrew Solomon, Andy Warhol, anecdotes, animal welfare, animals, animatronics, Anne McCaffrey, annotation, announcements, Antarctica, antediluvianism, Anthony Burgess, Anthony Grafton, Anthony Powell, anthropomorphic cannibalism, anthropomorphism, ants, apartment life, aphorisms, apocalypso, appearances can be misleading, appendages, apps, archaeology, archeology, archery, architecture, archives, Arctic unicorns, armadillos, arms and armor, art, art of the transaction, artificial insemination, artificial kangaroo pouches, astringency, asylums, Athanasius Kircher, Athol Fugard, atomic toys, attention spans, auctions, austerity, authenticity, autism, autobiography, autographs, automata, autopsy, Ayn Rand

Things neatly arrayed

The alphabet soup arrangement is especially compelling.

Light reading catch-up

Plane fare: Eric Nylund's Mortal Coils (good of its kind, and a kind I have traditionally liked quite a bit, but I am swearing off eschatological fantasy for a while, the vein has been too deeply mined!); first volume of Daniel Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy, about which more anon when I have finished it all (the prose is excellent, setting too, but sometimes hard to tell one character from another, that's my only complaint).

Found an amazing stash of stuff waiting for me at home. Seized upon Elisabeth Townsend's Lobster: A Global History, which has a most beautiful cover and also an alluring name but which did not quite live up to my expectations (it is good for what it is, but it is a serious little book about the history of lobster-eating, not a strange and postmodern Sebaldian exercise as I had fantasized - that said, the bits on lobster nomenclature I found highly worthwhile [scrubs, shorts, etc.!], and also the pictures of the 'hotels for lobsters' where the live creatures are stored before they are brought to market). Then devoured 'Jane Emerson''s City of Diamond, perhaps not quite as immediately delightful as the same author's Ivory trilogy but only because the material is rather darker - still the same great gifts of storytelling and characterization. It is silly to say anyone is a natural anything if one does not know their history and background, for all I know this craft was carefully honed over many years, but I do not know that I can think off the top of my head of any novelist I've encountered with greater natural storytelling gifts than Doris Egan: it makes sense to me, alas, that she has found it better worth her while to work in television!

A host of other treasures await, but school starts tomorrow and I will definitely start to be busy again - I don't actually teach until next Monday, due to an oddity of schedule, but I need to write the letters of recommendation I was already saying I had to write last week, and finalize my syllabi and check on course book orders, and have some meetings with grad students, etc. etc. I'm doing a big race on Sunday (course was significantly affected by Irene, and has been altered and to some extent curtailed, but as I am very undertrained I am not complaining). It is good, I like it best when I face a long and varied to-do list!

Two bits

I read Sara Gran's seven pieces of advice to a young writer with considerable interest; I love her books (check out Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead if you haven't already), but I am also very impressed with her professional acumen. This advice is much more directed to those who will have a realistic chance of making a living as fiction writers than to those who will combine writing with some other means of support (I would note that I myself am in flagrant disregard of points #2 and #6, but I also would have to dissent respectfully from point #7 - it would make me absolutely crazy and bored out of my mind to be a full-time fiction-writer, I am truly a professor at heart, I need the stimulation that comes from having a full-time academic appointment!).

Also (a very good recommendation from Cristina Linclau): Elisabeth Weed interviews agent and publicist Lucinda Blumenfeld.

Men of feeling

At the LRB, Ferdinand Mount on Harold Macmillan's diaries and a new biography. Here is Mount on the long aftermath of Macmillan's wife's affair with Bob Boothby in the late 1920s (she claimed that Boothby was the father of her youngest daughter Sarah):

In 1975, he went to see Boothby at his flat and asked, for the sake of his peace of mind, to know the truth one way or another about Sarah. In the unbearably painful conversation that followed, Boothby assured him that Sarah was not his daughter because he was always scrupulously careful in his affairs. What Macmillan did not know was that Boothby had just been presented with a tape recorder by the Royal Philharmonic Orchestra of which he’d been chairman for many years. Before Macmillan’s arrival, he had been taping a Tchaikovsky symphony from the radio. He had turned off the radio but unwittingly left the tape recorder running on the floor behind a sofa. And so all the agony that Macmillan had poured out to him was on tape, and Boothby played it back to his new wife, Wanda, when she came in, with tears running down his face.

This is how D.R. Thorpe tells the story, eloquently and elegantly, as he does everything in this exemplary biography, which complements if it does not entirely supplant Alistair Horne’s two-volume official Life; Horne is better on the military, Thorpe on the political and personal. At every juncture Thorpe presents the evidence in a scrupulous and equable style. He is charitable, just as he was in his earlier biographies of Selwyn Lloyd and Eden, both of whom had reasons to be resentful of Macmillan’s behaviour. By not taking sides, Thorpe leaves readers room to come to their own judgment.

And if you want my guess here, I don’t think that Boothby, that insatiable seducer of both sexes, left the tape recorder on by accident. I don’t mean that he had it in for Macmillan exactly, although it is always hard to forgive those you have wronged, especially when you have been wronging them for years. It is more that Boothby, himself the ripest of old hams, would have been unable to resist the dramatic potential of the scene: the aged ex-prime minister with tears running down his face, and then a few hours later Boothby, the man of feeling, recalling the recalling with tears running down his face.

The joys of truffle-hunting

Phone calling zones as alternate states (via Bookforum).

"The e-book is yesterday's mass-market."

Great piece on Fiona McCarthy at the Guardian (link courtesy of my father) - I have Amazoned a copy of Last Curtsey...

I do not usually have cause to say this, but there is an absolutely delightful essay in the current issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies! (Also a very good review by Suzanne Keen of two particularly interesting recent books in eighteenth-century studies, Blakey Vermeule's Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? and Alan Richardson's The Neural Sublime.) This link will only work for Columbia affiliates, but hie thee to thine own local library website to read Patrick Spedding's really indispensable essay "'The New Machine': Discovering the Limits of ECCO." The abstract doesn't really do justice to the essay's delightfulness:

This essay explores some of the difficulties faced by eighteenth-century scholars when conducting research using scanned text-bases, particularly Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). It begins with an explanation of some of the general problems that face the users of all scanned text-bases. These problems are illustrated in an account of research undertaken into the history of the condom and its representation in eighteenth-century texts. The failure of ECCO searches to produce meaningful results brings these problems into sharp focus, but also suggests novel ways in which they may be overcome.

I am fascinated by these questions about ECCO, and anyone who regularly relies on searching OCR-produced databases has to read the whole essay; but it also has an excellent appendix of eighteenth-century references to condoms, of which I single out this one for your delectation:

White Kennett's Condom, a Poem (London, 1723) and "Armour: A Poem" (London, 1723) do not survive. The poem was reprinted in Cupid's Metamorphoses or, Love in All Shapes. Being the Second and Last Volume of the Poetical Works of Mr. William Pattison (London, 1728), 306–7: "Hear, and attend: In Armour's mighty Praise / I sing, for sure 'tis worthy of a Song. / … / Happy the Man, who in his Pocket keeps, / Whether with Green or Scarlet Ribband bound, / A well made C—— He, nor dreads the Ills / Of Shankers or Cordee, or Buboes Dire!"

Light reading catch-up to follow later in the day once I have done more unpacking - I got home late Wednesday night, but things were in relative disarray here and I had to wait till subletters finished getting stuff out Thursday evening before I could really think about putting anything away or getting things set up for my own purposes again. Had a great trip to the library on Thursday, though - got all sorts of good things (highlights include this and this and a whole host of other things to read to get ready to talk about Helen Hill's last film at the end of the month). Have also been luxuriating in the amazing lavishness of the Chelsea Piers Sports Center - it is not really the salient thing to single out, but the showers there are completely unbelievable (it seems unlikely that I will ever live in an apartment with this sort of style, but it is my fantasy one day to have a commodious shower room with a slate floor!)...

Swiss dot

Sadie Stein has a wedding dress in her closet.

Morning update

The Magic Circle has just been emailed to Kathy in its for-now-final version. Very glad to have it off my desk for a bit, though these books always come back at you for more revisions even in best-case scenarios...

I'm here in Cayman just for a couple more days, which will give me time to do some bits and pieces of 'work' work that I'd like to sort out before I'm back in New York (flying home Wednesday evening, settling myself back in and then going to Philadelphia over the weekend to celebrate my niece's second birthday and retrieve my little cat from my mother's house): a couple letters of recommendation, a couple conference-paper abstracts, a journal-article reader's report.

Light reading catch-up:

The two 'Dick Francis' novels that have appeared in the last year, the first a collaboration between Dick and his son Felix and the second Felix's first solo addition to the family franchise. Crossfire was pretty weak, but Dick Francis's Gamble seemed to me stronger. Really I will read any book published under the Dick Francis imprimatur...

Lee Child's Kindle Single Second Son brought a huge smile to my face, only it was over much too quickly! It reminded me of the mystery stories of my childhood, Encyclopedia Brown and Sherlock Holmes and Dorothy L. Sayers and G. K. Chesterton; there is a highly artificial simplicity that results from the compression of a mystery plot into that short form, it is not psychologically realistic but it is nonetheless attractive to me.

Robert Lipsyte's piece in last week's NYTBR sent me back to the book of his I read when I was a kid, One Fat Summer (it holds up very well), and then to a newer one that I also liked very much, Raiders Night.

I absolutely loved Tow Ubukata's Mardock Scramble! Thanks to Nick Mamatas for the recommendation; it is a book that has almost everything I like (including a really fantastic long sequence in the middle concerned with the psychology and tactics of professional gambling in a casino).

I think I will save my thoughts on Gravity's Rainbow for a separate post.

Really I'm looking forward to school starting, not so much the meetings and letters-of-rec aspect of things but getting back into the classroom; I'm teaching the seminar we require of all our incoming MA students for the first time, and will be interested to see how that goes. I'll post that reading list here once I have taught the initial class - it would seem to me very unfair to those students for the internet to see it before they do! Also: a new undergraduate seminar on Swift and Pope!

The combination of novel-finishing and then some sort of minor stomach bug that afflicted me Saturday have thrown me off re: exercise, but I am heading to the gym shortly for a treadmill run. Haven't heard whether the Camana Bay pool has reopened this morning as per the original schedule, but it would be good if I could get in a pool workout in the next couple days. I'll see if I can't hit a TNYA workout on Thursday evening in New York; the Chelsea Piers pool is closed all of this week for refurbishing, unfortunately, and I think the Columbia gym isn't open either, it is the evil season of pool closures universally!

"Don't tell everything you know"

Back-to-school bits at the Oxford American from writers who are also teachers. Scroll down especially for J.D. Daniels' "What We Know," which contains a sentence that has captivated me: "I don’t trust the way being a teacher pleases me."

Romper room

Katie Roiphe interviews Nicholson Baker for the FT (site registration required).

Update

Just printed out the new and improved BOMH (really it is called "The Magic Circle"). One more light copy-edit through, then typing in those corrections and a final careful proof: it will definitely be ready to go back out by the end of the day Monday.

Rock biorhythms

At the Phoenix, James Parker on the new Metallica bio:

The most vivid and engaging passages of Enter Night, actually, are in this key of reminiscence: Wall bumping into Ulrich at the Hammersmith Odeon, the little drummer for some reason on crutches ("His outraged eyes studied mine. A precocious child growing rapidly into a full-on fuck of a man"); Mustaine emerging crackling from some toilet or drug tabernacle to be interviewed ("He held out his paw and allowed me to grasp it"); Hammett chatting pleasantly about essential oils and then clamming up at the arrival of macho man Hetfield ("As we all walked into the bar together, I noticed Kirk affecting a sort of mini-Hetfield saunter. Safety in numbers, I found myself doing the same"). It makes one wish that Wall could have departed further from the conventions of rock biography — got more personal or more poetic/fragmentary, or written a book called My Life In Heavy Metal. Except that Steve Almond already wrote that book, and it had fuck-all to do with heavy metal.

Shifting, shifty

At the Guardian, Teju Cole's top ten novels of loneliness. I am excited about this list as it gives me several good new things to read (persuasive to me via the fact that the thoughts on Sebald, Naipaul and Davis are so much what I would choose to note myself, though I dissent from the verdict on Ishiguro's Remains of the Day - I spin out from The Unconsoled as a hub and view Remains and Never Let Me Go as useful clarification of the master project). Naipaul's Enigma of Arrival is surely one of the great underrated books of modern literature, well worth a look for those who have not read it.

(More common style - not criticizing! - on these Guardian lists is to use up several spots, uselessly, on things like Robinson Crusoe - this is more practical.)