The Davidson rule

Postscript on previous post: the Davidson rule is that you do not have to do work in airports or on planes.

(See also The Davidson criterion, for judging novels: is this book suitable for reading on a train or plane? Dickens is, Fielding is not - if you have a book that does not meet this criterion, you will let it fall closed on your lap and stare out the window, making the time pass very slowly.)

Catch-up

Strange and distressing week following news in Boston. My trip to Maine for the reading was very lovely, other than Boston thoughts hanging over us all - and some combination of distress and general excess-travel-related discombobulation led to me accidentally leaving my Kindle on the plane on Tuesday in Portland! Have filed missing property report, it's not at the Delta lost-and-found either in Portland or LGA, so I will wait and see whether it turns up - can read on phone (or of course actual "books") in the meantime. Am going to write a separate post tomorrow with Portland linkage, as my host did an absolutely lovely job taking me to all the most delicious and beautiful places, and they deserve a full account.

Logging of light reading will be slightly erratic: I read a lot of novels over last week due to time in airports etc. but cannot swear this list is inclusive without the record in the "Finished" folder on lost Kindle.

I think this is most of it:

I had a good run of books that are exactly what I like. I read Sarah Pinborough's A Matter of Blood and loved it so much (it was perfectly what I wanted to read) that I was only thwarted to discover that the second and third volumes have only been published in England and are not yet available for US Kindle. However ILL (which reminds me I must reread Jo Walton's novel Among Others, the novel written by one of the few other people in the world who loves ILL as much as I do) has served me well, I have volumes 2 and 3 in my possession (UK hardcover) and will shortly finish 2 and turn to 3.

Two absolutely perfect novels by Deborah Coates, crime fiction with excellent sense of place and mild element of supernatural - read them! I liked them enough that I pillaged the Amazon page for her bits of short fiction as well - the novels are just super.

Gene Kerrigan's The Rage: excellent Irish noir (this crime fiction of the Irish financial crisis is a depressing but extremely interesting subgenre - Alan Glynn and Tana French most obviously coming to mind, but make recommendations in the comments if you have any more suggestions).

Harlen Coben's Six Years is not good value for the money, wait and get it from the library - Crais's books have gotten better, I think, as Coben's have gotten weaker. Too often here I just had the feeling He is making this up, this is nonsense!

A Mira Grant zombie tie-in I missed at the time, and thoroughly enjoyed: San Diego 2013: The Last Stand of the California Brownshirts. Seanan McGuire/Mira Grant = true genius of popular fiction!

Melissa Scott's Five-Twelfths of Heaven, which I loved - but I am halfway through the sequel now (very glad these novels are all available electronically) and it does not seem to me nearly as sharp and engaging. However I certainly will read the whole trilogy.

Strangest and most complex of the bunch: a really uncanny and haunting novel by Richard Bowes, Minions of the Moon. I definitely hadn't read this before, though I think I must have an ARC of it sitting around somewhere in my apartment - and I also had a strange conviction that my friend M. had recommended to me, but could not then decide whether this was a real memory or an imaginary one based on the similarity (minus supernatural elements) of this book to Lawrence Block's Scudder novels and also to M.'s own story. The book it is most like, I think, Scudder notwithstanding, is Graham Joyce's The Tooth Fairy. Highly worthwhile.

Miscellaneous additional linkage:

Beautiful but also distressing: the library at Guantanamo. (Via.)

A happy note to end on: a nice story about a Muswell Hill tortoise.

Training exercise

"County officials who investigated the mishandling of the remains had called it a well-intentioned mistake."

All is well with me in San Francisco - seems that Facebook is better for tracking minor activities on travels (look on my page over there if you are curious, I don't think I can link directly to pics). Mental soundtrack whenever I am here: Camper Van Beethoven's "Tania."

Closing tabs

The reviewer from the Columbia Spectator was not at all keen on my novel; on a brighter note, the picture accompanying the article is very nice! We took it Wednesday morning on the steps of the gazebo in Sakura Park, as Grant's Tomb was closed off from visitors. Really my favorite days of all involve the production of quota on the order of 1500 words and 2-3 hours of fairly strenuous exercise, but I was thoroughly enjoying my week of minor limelight (i.e. photo shoot morning after book party!).

I'm in San Francisco - had a beautiful run this morning, did a spot of work on my taxes so that it wouldn't all await me when I get home Sunday evening and am heading out shortly to visit a friend and her baby. Will read tomorrow night at Writers With Drinks - come and say hello if you find yourself in the neighborhood.

Miscellaneous linkage:

Too much Twitter?

Gravy lakes of the world.

Fast and furious Jurassic life in the egg.

Best literary cat picture ever?

Book party!

Thanks to all who came! This is me with my lovely editor Ed Park, as things were winding down.

Madrid pink, Prague green, Waddesdon navy

Via my father, a good Thatcher bit at the Guardian, reminiscences from Thatcher's personal assistant Cynthia Crawford:

In 1987 she was going to Russia for the first time and I had seen a wonderful coat in Aquascutum's window and I went to get it. A lot of her clothes up until that time had been homemade by a lady. She made all those dresses and blouses with bows and things. Mrs Thatcher went to Russia and she looked absolutely fabulous. I said to her: "If you are going to fight an election in June, why don't we ask Aquascutum to make you up some working suits." She agreed, so we ordered these suits. It was when the power shoulders were in and it just revolutionised her. She looked fantastic. She enjoyed all the new outfits and got away from the dresses. She never wears trousers, not even today. She always likes formal clothes, even at home. She hasn't got a lot of casual clothes.

Because her mother was a dressmaker, she knew exactly how things should be made, how hems should be turned and how stitching should be done.

Every outfit had a name. It was mostly the name of the place where it was first worn, such as Madrid Pink or Prague Green. We might say, "We'll take Waddesdon Navy" – because she had several suits in navy. Waddesdon was where she took Mitterrand, and they had a wonderful meal. We knew we were talking about a navy suit that had a trim of a cream collar with navy roses. That was easy because then we knew what we were talking about.

A three-year phenomenon

A highlight for me from the eighteenth-century studies conference was this bit from Anne Stevens' talk about microgenres, the "Thinks-I-To-Myself" novel:

1811 Edward Nares, Think’s-I-to-Myself. A Serio-ludicro, Tragico-comico Tale, Written by Think’s-I-to-Myself.
1812 I’ll Consider of It! A Tale, in Three Volumes, in Which Thinks I to Myself is Partially Considered.
1812 Barbara Hofland, Says She to Her Neighbour, What? By an Old-Fashioned Englishman.
1812 Edward Nares, I Says, Says I; a Novel. By Thinks-I-to-Myself.
1813 It Was Me, a Tale, by Me, Who Cares for Nothing or Nobody
1813 She Thinks For Herself.

Naphtha, xylene, Japan drier

Mimi Lipson's story about a dog.

Split-leaf psalters

One thing I learned about at the conference today.

The thing I was charmed by on the internet!

Conferences

are the most tiring single thing I do: much more tiring than endurance events, as those do not involve nearly so much human contact! I am claiming a human-free evening, and am going to go and skulk somewhere with something along lines of book/burger/beer in a bar far enough away from the conference hotel that I won't get sucked in to joining a table of fellow eighteenth-centuryists! Who are delightful, but I have not read a book since Wednesday, that's not good for my mental health. Conference is going very well, it's highly worthwhile, only it always puts me into state of collapse...

Also: my blog post about The Magic Circle is up at the Kindle Daily Blog; before the Book Culture event the other day, Ron Hogan interviewed me for an installment of The Handsell.

In other news: more rabbit show-jumping! (Via Brent.) If you only click on one link in this post, it should definitely be this one.

Or this, on a rather different note: very good hawkcam at Cornell this year (they would make short work of those bunnies).

Light reading around the edges: two quite good mysteries by M. J. McGrath, White Heat and The Boy in the Snow; two books for the Handsell recommendation process, David Bell's Cemetery Girl and Will Lavender's Dominance; Amanda Davis, Wonder When You'll Miss Me.

Rooftop fliers

Pigeon breeding may become a lost art if a younger generation doesn't take it up. (This book sounds fantastic.)

Frenetic morning

Finished writing my paper at the crack of dawn, printed it in the business center and had very good conversation at the "Novel Experiments" panel - bought sandwich to bring up to room for Reddit chat (I want to run mid-afternoon and need to eat now if that's going to happen), only to find that my room key was no longer working! Mild panic ensued, as that was about when I was supposed to be logging on to the site, but a bellman from the main lobby came up with me to let me in (their key machine is down too!), and I am here and ready to go. All of which is to say come and ask me a question at Reddit from 12 to 1!

Self-promotional

So thoroughly knackered and in need of bed that I will not write at length about light reading or anything else, except to say that the Book Culture event last night was absolutely lovely (a dream evening, and it was particularly nice to see so many former students!); I am writing now from a hotel in Cleveland for my eighteenth-century studies conference, Cleveland is extremely nice (we had a great dinner here - my dessert was the best key lime pie EVER!).

But the main news is that I am doing a Reddit IAMA chat tomorrow, Thursday, at noon - come and ask me a question if you have an idle moment!

On a darker note, this is truly dispiriting. (Via Jonathan L.)

If you are in the neighborhood

come to Book Culture for my reading at 7 this evening....

The five-year plan

It's been a bit quiet round here: lots of triathlon training, and I'm trying (with only partial success) not to spend so much time online. Thought I would share this prospectus of sorts: it has served various practical purposes recently, in slightly different variations, and I think I am ready to go on the record with it.

--

My goal for the next three to five years is an ambitious book project whose working title is The ABCs of the Novel. (My initial title was the more evocative Bread and Butter of the Novel, but one too many people asked me whether I was writing about food in literature, and I realized that rather than the British “bread-and-butter,” meaning elementary or basic, the American “ABCs” would better convey the breaking-down-to-fundamentals aspect of the work I hoped to do.) My first two scholarly books are histories more than anything else, and my own critical imagination remains strongly historical in its procedures and materials. I have found myself wondering, though, what might be done in a non- or even anti-historicist mode: not so much the ‘new formalism’ as a willfully timeless and non-chronologically governed development of the insights of narrative theorists as various as Wayne Booth and Gérard Genette. I have decided to experiment with an abecedarian form something like that of Milosz’s ABCs, Raymond Williams’ Keywords or Barthes’s looser variations on that theme, with the goal of exploring the genre of the novel as widely and deeply as possible and attempting to sum up the results of what now represents about twenty-five years of serious reading on my part in the novel and narrative theory.

As the book is not yet written, it still has a near-magical luster for me (see Samuel Johnson’s lament for “the dreams of a poet doomed at last to wake a lexicographer”): it will be composed of entries that range from 250 words at the shortest to about 6,000 words for more substantive essays. Sample topics include fundamentals about first- and third-person narration, epistolarity, the Pamela-Shamela controversy and narrative epistemologies, the problem of authorial revision, the whys and wherefores of an ongoing communal failure in eighteenth-century studies to supersede or replace the narrative of the ‘rise of the novel’ offered by Ian Watt some fifty years ago, and the emergence of a set of conventions for the notation of human gesture in prose (Sterne and Diderot both loom large in that story). The book will also include brief and highly selective accounts of such topics as the prose fictions of the ancient world and of Japan c. 1000 C.E., romance, fiction and the counterfactual mode, Dostoevsky’s doubles, Tolstoy’s style, theories and histories of the novel by Lukacs, Henry James, E. M. Forster, D. H. Lawrence, Fredric Jameson et al., and a host of other topics.

Alongside this perhaps hubristically ambitious book, I hope to assemble a couple of associated smaller-scale projects: a collection of essays more tightly focused on eighteenth- and nineteenth-century British fiction (this will include pieces I’ve already published as well as some new writing composed especially for that volume); and a short book on Richardson’s Clarissa, directed towards teachers, students and others who would like to read this dauntingly long novel and are not sure how to embark on that project. My other associated dream project is to write the introduction for a new trade edition of Clarissa, preferably published in an attractive three-volume format something like 1Q84; there are few things I would like more in life than to get that novel into the hands of a wider audience of readers.

As far as the essay collection goes, I envisage a volume that would reprint these four already published pieces along with four or five new ones composed specifically for the book and with a view to providing a good range of coverage (possibilities might include essays on Haywood, Fielding, Richardson, Smollett, Burney). These are the essays I’ve already written: (1) “Austen’s Voices,” included in Swift’s Travels: Essays in Honor of Claude Rawson (Cambridge, 2008), considers some fundamental points about the first- and third-person forms of narration that Austen inherits from her eighteenth-century predecessors, especially the prose satirists, and modifies radically according to her own vision and priorities. (2) “Restoration Theatre and the Eighteenth-Century Novel,” forthcoming in Tom Keymer’s Oxford History of the Novel in English, Vol. 1: Origins of Print to 1775, sets forth a simple-minded but provocative hypothesis about what eighteenth-century prose fiction might owe to the forms of notation for bodily action that were developed in the dialogue and stage directions of Restoration comedy. (3) “Reflections on the ‘minute particular’ in life-writing and the novel” (under revision) asks some similar questions about particular detail as it functions in realist fiction and eighteenth-century life-writing, (4) The chapter on Austen for the forthcoming Blackwell Companion to British Literature, edited by Robert DeMaria, Jr. and colleagues.