Tuesday, March 17, 2015
Wednesday, March 11, 2015
"No stripes please"
At the LRB blog, Inigo Thomas considers the sartorial flair or lack thereof of Guy Burgess:
From Moscow, he carried on paying his annual membership fee to the Reform. He banked at Lloyds on St James’s. His clothes came from tailors on Jermyn and Bond Streets. The actress Coral Browne, who met him in Moscow, bought clothes on his behalf and sent them on. Their correspondence was the inspiration for Alan Bennett’s play An Englishman Abroad.(Reminds me rather of this....)
‘Thanks for your kindness in shopping for me and visiting my mum,’ Burgess wrote in an undated letter. ‘I really begin to think that English women, like Russian ones, are better characters than men.’ He tells Browne he is impressed not only with her shopping but with her thoroughness: she knows how to ‘dot the ‘i’s in “miaow”’. Having had suits made for him and ordered Homburg hats with their rims turned up from Locke’s, Burgess has a last favour to ask: pyjamas.What I really need, the only thing more, is pyjamas. Russians ones can’t be slept in – are not in fact made for that purpose. What I would like if you can find them is 4 pairs (2 of each) of white (or off white, not grey) and Navy Blue Silk or Nylon or Terrylene [sic] – but heavy, not crêpe de chine or whatever is light pyjama. Quite plain and only those two colours… Don’t worry about price… Gieves of Bond Street used always to keep plain Navy blue silk. Navy and white are my only colours, and no stripes please.
Monday, March 09, 2015
Swimming with Byron
I remember when I first started blogging that I found it slightly painful, the way that a really good post would immediately be superseded by the next one above it - it is definitely an ordering principle that takes a bit of getting used to. In this case, though, I am happy to bump my dreadful last post down the page....
Kickstarter invitations galore come through my feeds, but this is truly one after my own heart: a documentary film called Swimming with Byron!
(On which note, I think my review of the excellent Swimming with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale should be out soon in the academic journal Biography.)
Kickstarter invitations galore come through my feeds, but this is truly one after my own heart: a documentary film called Swimming with Byron!
(On which note, I think my review of the excellent Swimming with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale should be out soon in the academic journal Biography.)
A quick note from Philadelphia
The timing is so unlikely as to be actively confusing: my brother M. and I were already talking, in the car down here this morning, about how hard it will be to explain.
Our mother's husband Jim died two weeks ago.
On Friday, I got very worried when my father didn't answer our usual end-of-week phone call. I emailed him in case his phone had accidentally turned itself off, but I didn't hear back from him in either medium. Wrote another email saying I'd try the next afternoon instead.
I was so tired I went to bed at 7, slept till midnight, was up for a few hours and then slept again - made it to Chelsea Piers for my beloved 10am spin, then came home and went back to bed.
(Have been operating in huge fatigue hole. Common for this time of the school year.)
When I woke up in the late afternoon, I was suddenly consumed with alarm that there was still no email response. This is very unusual. And yet one must respect the autonomous habits and preferences of another human being?
I emailed B. with some rather frenetic thoughts and worries along these lines, and decided that it would not in fact be going overboard to call the Philadelphia police and ask if they could do a "welfare check." (The front desk person in his apartment building doesn't have keys or access to apartments and the maintenance workers, who do, don't work weekends.)
That was 6:30. I was glued to the phone for the next three hours waiting for a call back, didn't want to pester. Finally I called around 9:30 and it emerged, after some transferring hither and thither, that really nobody had ever gone to the apartment. The woman on the phone promised to send an officer immediately and suggested that I call back in half an hour.
The officer called me back less than half an hour later. He was outside my father's apartment door, with no response. (It's not an option to break down doors in this sort of situation.) He was leaning towards going away again as there was no obvious next step.
I said a few words about my father as a person of regular habits, with life spent between home and work. The officer heard me and said he would go and try to find the off-site security people to let him in.
He called back a few minutes later with bad news.
My father's body was lying on the floor. He had been dead for some time.
That was about twenty-four hours ago. (Could there have been a worse night of the year to "spring forward"?)
There is no doubt that we will get through this. But I am still rather reeling, Job-like, at the latest turn of events....
Our mother's husband Jim died two weeks ago.
On Friday, I got very worried when my father didn't answer our usual end-of-week phone call. I emailed him in case his phone had accidentally turned itself off, but I didn't hear back from him in either medium. Wrote another email saying I'd try the next afternoon instead.
I was so tired I went to bed at 7, slept till midnight, was up for a few hours and then slept again - made it to Chelsea Piers for my beloved 10am spin, then came home and went back to bed.
(Have been operating in huge fatigue hole. Common for this time of the school year.)
When I woke up in the late afternoon, I was suddenly consumed with alarm that there was still no email response. This is very unusual. And yet one must respect the autonomous habits and preferences of another human being?
I emailed B. with some rather frenetic thoughts and worries along these lines, and decided that it would not in fact be going overboard to call the Philadelphia police and ask if they could do a "welfare check." (The front desk person in his apartment building doesn't have keys or access to apartments and the maintenance workers, who do, don't work weekends.)
That was 6:30. I was glued to the phone for the next three hours waiting for a call back, didn't want to pester. Finally I called around 9:30 and it emerged, after some transferring hither and thither, that really nobody had ever gone to the apartment. The woman on the phone promised to send an officer immediately and suggested that I call back in half an hour.
The officer called me back less than half an hour later. He was outside my father's apartment door, with no response. (It's not an option to break down doors in this sort of situation.) He was leaning towards going away again as there was no obvious next step.
I said a few words about my father as a person of regular habits, with life spent between home and work. The officer heard me and said he would go and try to find the off-site security people to let him in.
He called back a few minutes later with bad news.
My father's body was lying on the floor. He had been dead for some time.
That was about twenty-four hours ago. (Could there have been a worse night of the year to "spring forward"?)
There is no doubt that we will get through this. But I am still rather reeling, Job-like, at the latest turn of events....
Saturday, March 07, 2015
Ogres in passing
Lorien Kite interviews Kazuo Ishiguro at the FT (site registration required):
“About 50 or 60 pages in, maybe slightly more, I thought, well, maybe I’ll show Lorna this,” says Ishiguro. “And she looked at it and said: ‘This is appalling — this won’t do.’ I said: ‘So what’s wrong with it? What should I change?’ She said: ‘You can’t change anything. You’ll just have to start again from scratch; completely from scratch.’”
Ishiguro couldn’t face the job of reconstruction immediately, turning instead to the short-story collection that would be published as Nocturnes in 2009. But when he did return to the Dark Ages, the approach was different. “The first time I had a go at this thing it was a bit like Sir Walter Scott, over-egged with a kind of period vernacular. The second time around I just tried to keep the language as simple as possible. I worked more at taking words from what you or I would say rather than adding things like ‘prithee’ — just by removing prepositions or the odd word here and there, I ended up with something that sounded slightly odd or slightly foreign.”
Tuesday, March 03, 2015
Incidental pleasures
I am having a very lovely visit to Henrix College. Incidental pleasures: lunch yesterday at the Oxford American in Little Rock (I not very adventurously had a grilled cheese sandwich and tomato soup, rather than sampling new Southern cuisine of various kinds - it is a simple pleasure I can rarely resist when I see it - but the meal ended with one of the most delicious desserts I've ever eaten, Do-si-do Girl Scout cookies crumbled up in a jar with white chocolate ganache and a salted caramel peanut ice-cream). Pizza, salad and a margarita for dinner at Zaza with my host Dorian and old friend Giffen. And a cat colony on campus!
Sunday, March 01, 2015
Literary classrooms
My brief description:
As students and teachers, we spend a lot of time in the classroom. It witnesses moments of exhilaration, boredom, discovery and hilarity, and the dynamics of conversation in the classroom occupy a good deal of our attention. But most of the great canonical novels we read are more interested in domestic scenes - husbands and wives, parents and children, siblings and friends - than in school ones. An exploration of literary classrooms - the humiliations and torment, for students and teachers, depicted by Dickens in Nicholas Nickeby and David Copperfield and by Charlotte Bronte in Villette; the small-group dynamics of Muriel Spark's The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie; the classrooms of contemporary children's literature from Harriet the Spy to J. K. Rowling. What are the risks and rewards of setting fictional scenes in classrooms? And what is the relationship between the dreams of reading and writing and dreams of teaching and learning?More information here.
My host Dorian Stuber has lined up a couple other really wonderful things for me to do while I'm on campus (and I am promised swimming-pool access too): namely, visiting a class that's reading Clarissa and running a student discussion on the topic of light reading by way of Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot, which I now have a good excuse to reread on my flights tomorrow morning!
(6:20am departure from JFK: just trying to figure out how early I really should leave for that....)
(Just the thought of it makes me think that I might have to lie down right now for a short nap - napped so long yesterday afternoon that I slept very badly last night and am now feeling on the verge of collapse!)
Sunday, February 22, 2015
Saturday, February 21, 2015
"Lichtenstein does not torture the paint"
Frederic Tuten on Roy Lichtenstein's studio:
Others could explain more precisely about his process. It started with an outline on the canvas for what would become the painting. He would fill in the spaces with colored paper cutouts, and tape them in place to see how they would look. He’d move the cutouts around until he decided what worked. There was a template for the dots too. So even before the actual painting process began there was a collage of how it would eventually look. His was the exact opposite of the Abstract Expressionists’ aesthetic, which was supposedly the personality of the artist declared on the canvas. His personality was in paintings, but certainly not bombastically so. Roy’s work was very organized, systematic, and intelligent. Nothing left to chance. It was all deliberate, like when he made the “Brushstroke” series. These paintings are a bit of a joke about Abstract Expressionism, because the brush stroke, the rhythm, the swipe, all that was premeditated—as if to say, this is how spontaneity can be engineered.
"Brook your ire!"/toga-speech
At the FT, Simon Schama on what historians think of historical novels (site registration required):
Those who start in the thick of it, I like best of all. The writer who made me want to be an historian was Columbia University professor Garrett Mattingly. In 1959, he published The Defeat of the Spanish Armada, which has the imaginative grip of a novel but is grounded on the bedrock of the archives. It begins with a name the significance of which we, as yet, have absolutely no idea; with an exactly visualised place. Through the repetition of a single word “Nobody,” we hear the tolling of a bell ringing the doom of someone or other.“Mr Beale had not brought the warrant until Sunday evening but by Wednesday morning, before dawn outlines its high windows, the great hall of Fotheringhay was ready. Though the Earl of Shrewsbury had returned only the day before nobody wanted any more delay. Nobody knew what messenger might be riding on the London road. Nobody knew which of the others might not weaken if they wanted another.”What is this? Who is this? Where are we? You want to read on, don’t you? So you do so with the intense excitement of knowing every word is true.
Closing tabs
Lost a very dear family member on Friday to cancer (metastatic melanoma, diagnosed in the days just before Christmas): my mother's husband Jim Kilik. Will write a proper memorial for him in a few days; in the meantime we are really just mourning (I will go to Philadelphia tomorrow to be with my mother for a bit).
I have accumulated a dreadful backlog of links and light reading: even the thought of logging it makes me want to lie down in a darkened room with a moist towel over my eyes! But it must be done before I can get my head around the many other writing-related things that need to happen round here....
Ta-Nehisi Coates on what he owed to David Carr.
Edward P. Jones profiled in the Washington Post.
Todd Gitlin on the enlightenment project.
A brief memorial for the linguist and novelist Suzette Haden Elgin, whose novel Native Tongue made a huge impression on me when I read it at age thirteen or fourteen.
The fantastical imagining of Hungarian paper money.
Eating chocolate in space.
Several independent things this past week prompted me to think of the lovely Eames Powers of Ten.
Inigo Thomas on Fattipuffs and Thinifers. NB this was a book I never actually read, though it was alluringly advertised in the back of some other Puffin children's books I must have had: I should see if I can actually get hold of it.
Art of the Afghan war rug.
Were the soldiers of the terracotta army based on individual people?
Using your cat to hack your neighbors' wifi (shades of "That Darn Cat").
Have been very busy reading things for work, but of course there is always time for some bits of light reading around the edges. Some of it inconsequential, some of it very good indeed.
FODDER of variable quality: Susan Hill, The Soul of Discretion (at first I wondered why I'd let this series drop, then I remembered the things I don't like about them!); Patricia Briggs' Sianim series; Holly Black, The Darkest Part of the Forest; Ned Beauman, Glow (impressive, agile, over-ingenious); Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members: A Novel (I have been avoiding this one as letters of recommendation are FAR TOO MUCH PART OF MY LIFE ALREADY, but really it is very good); Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (supreme comfort reread - the third-person narration doesn't work as well as I remembered, but the voice of the main narrator is incredible, and it's hard to imagine a book that feels more directly written to me - will perhaps now reread James Baldwin's Just Above My Head, which I think of as the secret twin/precursor); Emma Bull, War for the Oaks (another comfort reread); Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train (very depressing, but a decently good read); Simon Wood, The One That Got Away (just about above the bar of readability); Jim Gourley, The Race Within: Passion, Courage, and Sacrifice at the Ultraman Triathlon (afflicted by many of the problems that so much writing about endurance sport has - silly glorifying of what is often stupidity, annoying magazine-feature style of blow-by-blow narration, etc. but nonetheless a very good read - NB I think I do not need to do an Ultraman race, particularly not the Hawaii one, whose bike course just sounds dreadful!).
Then a few things I'll single out for particular recommendation:
Nina Stibbe's Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home is delightful (more here).
Top pick, a book I'm already sure is one of my favorites of the year: Daniel Galera, Blood-Drenched Beard. Dwight Garner's review was electrifying to me. Could there possibly be a novel more closely tailored to my particular loves? (Professional triathlete, sea swimming, whales and penguins, a dog as a main character, face-blindness [which I do not have, just relatively poor facial recognition skills, but I do have the matching thing where every place in the world looks the same to me], a Borges-Murakami access of slight mystical overtones....) Anyway, BEST BOOK EVER! Nice additional Galera bit here.
Ian MacLeod's The Summer Isles: very lovely, haunting, makes me want to reread Jo Walton's Farthing books as well.
Richard Price's The Whites, not perhaps as good as his very best books but really a great piece of work regardless (is it just me or does that elegiac breakneck narration of the opening grow wearisome as a narrative mode? He does it so well, but I am not sure it's something I really need more of in my reading life, it seems to express an orientation towards the present and the past that I can't really endorse - something overly sacral, reverential - I like the less elegiac version of similar in gonzo noir).
Last but not least, Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Painfully gripping - a good recommendation from my friend J. B., who comments that it should be required reading for anyone who hopes to grow old.
I have accumulated a dreadful backlog of links and light reading: even the thought of logging it makes me want to lie down in a darkened room with a moist towel over my eyes! But it must be done before I can get my head around the many other writing-related things that need to happen round here....
Ta-Nehisi Coates on what he owed to David Carr.
Edward P. Jones profiled in the Washington Post.
Todd Gitlin on the enlightenment project.
A brief memorial for the linguist and novelist Suzette Haden Elgin, whose novel Native Tongue made a huge impression on me when I read it at age thirteen or fourteen.
The fantastical imagining of Hungarian paper money.
Eating chocolate in space.
Several independent things this past week prompted me to think of the lovely Eames Powers of Ten.
Inigo Thomas on Fattipuffs and Thinifers. NB this was a book I never actually read, though it was alluringly advertised in the back of some other Puffin children's books I must have had: I should see if I can actually get hold of it.
Art of the Afghan war rug.
Were the soldiers of the terracotta army based on individual people?
Using your cat to hack your neighbors' wifi (shades of "That Darn Cat").
Have been very busy reading things for work, but of course there is always time for some bits of light reading around the edges. Some of it inconsequential, some of it very good indeed.
FODDER of variable quality: Susan Hill, The Soul of Discretion (at first I wondered why I'd let this series drop, then I remembered the things I don't like about them!); Patricia Briggs' Sianim series; Holly Black, The Darkest Part of the Forest; Ned Beauman, Glow (impressive, agile, over-ingenious); Julie Schumacher, Dear Committee Members: A Novel (I have been avoiding this one as letters of recommendation are FAR TOO MUCH PART OF MY LIFE ALREADY, but really it is very good); Richard Powers, The Time of Our Singing (supreme comfort reread - the third-person narration doesn't work as well as I remembered, but the voice of the main narrator is incredible, and it's hard to imagine a book that feels more directly written to me - will perhaps now reread James Baldwin's Just Above My Head, which I think of as the secret twin/precursor); Emma Bull, War for the Oaks (another comfort reread); Paula Hawkins, The Girl on the Train (very depressing, but a decently good read); Simon Wood, The One That Got Away (just about above the bar of readability); Jim Gourley, The Race Within: Passion, Courage, and Sacrifice at the Ultraman Triathlon (afflicted by many of the problems that so much writing about endurance sport has - silly glorifying of what is often stupidity, annoying magazine-feature style of blow-by-blow narration, etc. but nonetheless a very good read - NB I think I do not need to do an Ultraman race, particularly not the Hawaii one, whose bike course just sounds dreadful!).
Then a few things I'll single out for particular recommendation:
Nina Stibbe's Love, Nina: A Nanny Writes Home is delightful (more here).
Top pick, a book I'm already sure is one of my favorites of the year: Daniel Galera, Blood-Drenched Beard. Dwight Garner's review was electrifying to me. Could there possibly be a novel more closely tailored to my particular loves? (Professional triathlete, sea swimming, whales and penguins, a dog as a main character, face-blindness [which I do not have, just relatively poor facial recognition skills, but I do have the matching thing where every place in the world looks the same to me], a Borges-Murakami access of slight mystical overtones....) Anyway, BEST BOOK EVER! Nice additional Galera bit here.
Ian MacLeod's The Summer Isles: very lovely, haunting, makes me want to reread Jo Walton's Farthing books as well.
Richard Price's The Whites, not perhaps as good as his very best books but really a great piece of work regardless (is it just me or does that elegiac breakneck narration of the opening grow wearisome as a narrative mode? He does it so well, but I am not sure it's something I really need more of in my reading life, it seems to express an orientation towards the present and the past that I can't really endorse - something overly sacral, reverential - I like the less elegiac version of similar in gonzo noir).
Last but not least, Atul Gawande, Being Mortal: Medicine and What Matters in the End. Painfully gripping - a good recommendation from my friend J. B., who comments that it should be required reading for anyone who hopes to grow old.
Thursday, February 12, 2015
Sunday, February 08, 2015
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