Lost in the fog

A glorious case of mistaken identity. (Via Jane.)

One second

Widely linked to elsewhere, but - don't text and drive!

The end of literature

I don't think I already linked to this interview with Karl Ove Knausgaard, conducted by Trevor Laurence Jockims and published in June in Bookforum.

Dangerous games

Nice article from the weekend section of the Cay Compass - not available online, but here's the scan. Publicist for Books & Books has gone all out! (Not sure you can get a readably large version, but try clicking?)

Closing tabs

I read a very good book that slightly spoiled me for others, the first volume of Peter May's Lewis trilogy, The Blackhouse. It was a recommendation from my college friend and fellow recreational triathlete Jean-Jacques; it is an odd book in certain respects, and I am not sure the unusual formal choices are entirely justified, but it's an immersive read with an appealing main character and amazing settings. Alas, though volumes two and three of the trilogy exist, I can't get them until I get back to New York: I had this one from BorrowDirect (various libraries in that system collect UK crime fiction), but even the first one isn't released to U.S. markets until September. I believe there is an earlier series I can plunder in the meantime.

Near the end of the third installment of Daniel Abraham's Dagger and the Coin quartet, but slightly regretting the sheer length of epic fantasy - it is my own fault for reading them all in a week rather than over something more like a month, I am still liking them, but it is slightly over the top!

Also: Christa Faust's second Fringe novel, The Burning Man (the Amazon reviews are unduly harsh, I quite enjoyed it, but it's true that it doesn't fill in backstory in the conventional sense - I think it is a difficult situation writing for obsessive fans!).

I was interviewed on local television this morning, which was very enjoyable but required an emergency visit yesterday to Camana Bay for a colored top and some face powder, neither of which is really in my usual repertoire! A good interview in the weekend edition of the paper, too, but not online - I may post a scan if I can get it formatted correctly.

Closing tabs:

"Her own cats now assume the iPad exists for them." (Via Marginal Revolution.)

David Epstein's new book sounds highly worthwhile.

I want to read this, but even more so I want to eat a piece of one of the cakes! (Also - via Jane - cat donuts.)

10 questions for Wayne Koestenbaum, courtesy of Dave Lull. Much looking forward to the release of My 1980s and Other Essays.

Last but not least, Matthew Kirschenbaum on archiving digital media. (Via Glenn Hendler.)

ABCs

Not ABCs of the novel - ABCs of the style book! One of my favorite stages in book-writing is when I get the copy-edited manuscript back from the publisher, usually along with a customized style sheet that includes all the proper names given in the text. (Here was a bit of something similar for The Magic Circle.) This book doesn't have a lot of unusual nouns in it, but it does have an amazing canon of proper names. Too long to paste in the whole thing, but this will give a taste of it:

Aciman, André
Acocella, Joan
Adorno, Theodor
Alexievich, Svetlana
Allworthy, Squire
Anthony, Piers
Assingham, Fanny
Augustine, St.
Austen, Jane
Baldwin, James
Balzac, Honoré de
Banks, Iain M.
Barthes, Roland
Beckett, Samuel
Beddoes, Thomas Lovell
Bennet, Elizabeth
Bernhard, Thomas
Berlin, Isaiah
Blake, Nicholas
Blake, William
Bloom, Harold
Boileau, Nicolas
Borges, Jorge Luis
Boswell, James
Boyd, William
Brainard, Joe
Breton, André
Browne, Sir Thomas
Bruen, Ken
Buckner, Brent
Burgess, Anthony
Burke, Edmund
Burroughs, William
Burt, Stephen
Burton, Robert
Byron, Lord
Carter, Angela
Celan, Paul
Chandler, Raymond
Cheever, John
Child, Lee
Christensen, Kate
Crichton, Michael
Coelho, Paulo
Conan Doyle, Sir Arthur
Conrad, Joseph

A low Reynolds number world

The nightmare of swimming through syrup. (Via.)

The sense of realism

Camels now raced by robot jockeys. (FT site registration required.)

Take five

Five facts about The Magic Circle. Thanks to Matt Staggs for the invitation to contribute!

The Inimitable

At the LRB, Tim Parks on Dickens' children. (That link should work now; the initial version I had was through a Columbia proxy. Thanks, Dave!)

Made it to Cayman safely today, though on only a couple hours of sleep. Am intending to sleep long and hard tomorrow morning!

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.)

"It's easy to be lonely when all your friends are human"

Jane Yeh, "On Being an Android."

"I've been to a lot of chocolate tastings in my life"

Fiona Madducks interviews pianist Matsuko Uchida at the Guardian:

Currently I have four pianos, all Steinways – one I call "the Oldie", who was born in 1962 and I bought in 1982. He is now full of new bits but the body is the same.

You're sounding quite tender about these pianos… They're like human beings – all men. Number 2 is good for practising on. The third I call the Boy from Munich – the kind that would drive a sports car. The fourth is the youngster, just getting nappy trained. I'll probably find somewhere in Europe to house him so I don't always have to transport a piano – which is quite a business.

Was listening among other things in the car to and from Vermont this weekend to Brahms violin sonatas, can't imagine how one would listen to them as a young person (or really at any age) without wanting to play the piano rather than the violin - but car companion pointed out to me that there is almost a coming-out narrative for violists, they have played the violin as a youngster because someone else chose it for them but there is a nascent sense, co-timed with emergence of sexual identity, that it is not quite right in some fundamental way....

(Check out this in some ways more forthcoming interview here.)

"The girl who doesn't sit at the table is a failed girl"

Alex Clark interviews Claire Messud at the Guardian:

A counter-reading, though, might suggest that she [the protagonist of Messud's new novel The Woman Upstairs] is too sane; so determined to keep everything on an even keel that she has sacrificed the kind of spontaneity and wildness necessary to fall in love, or to make art. A key question the novel's title invites us to consider is to what extent this has befallen her because she's a woman. "Is that a gendered state?" says Messud now. "No. But is it something that's more often true of women than men? I think so." She and her husband, the literary critic James Wood, have two children, a daughter, Livia, 12, and a son, Lucian, nine, and she goes on to tell me – with some nifty mimicry of the way children talk to one another – about the differences she observes in the kindergarten classes at their schools: "The boys go in the corner, they wave – Hi, Hi – and then they go off and build a Lego tower or whatever before school starts, and the girls go sit at a table and they draw and they look at each other's work and they chat and they say: 'Is that a flower? It doesn't look very much like a flower. Why did you use that colour? You used brown for a flower? Flowers aren't brown.'" It's very funny, until she adds the thought that: "The girl who doesn't sit at the table is a failed girl."

Life v. literature

The weeks where I am most copious here are weeks I am spending a lot of time at home on my computer. What is good for life is not necessarily good for blogging! I've been busy with all sorts of enjoyable things, including a fantastic party Tuesday night at the Algonquin Hotel for Amazon's little A fiction imprint.

I'm writing this Friday evening on my Kindle Fire (links a bit of a pain to paste in, so I may be selective) in a Vermont bed and breakfast; tomorrow Liz and I will race the Kingdom Even-Up Triathlon, and last night we stayed here on her aunt and uncle's absolutely lovely farm. Both of those links are highly worthwhile, and we had an amazing morning visiting calves in the barn (one of them sucked on the heel of my palm in a most endearing fashion), walking the hyper-energetic and muscular black lab blend down and up a very steep dirt road, looking at chickens and pigs and generally enjoying a magical agricultural interlude. There is also a cat, and another dog (a golden retriever that's considerably less active than the lab)! We will go back there tomorrow night for post-race feeding and recovery, and then drive home to New York on Sunday.

(Liz was telling me recently about this, and the family syrup site has just gone live - order some here! I am definitely intending to take a quart home with me: it is perhaps dubious, but I am thinking that it might make good endurance sport fuel....)