NYC day 7

A satisfying but very tiring day. I got through three of my four essential tasks and had several other Zoom meetings of various kinds; this was highly worthwhile! Those reading this may be thinking "gosh she is a shill for neoliberalism," but Zoom worked incredibly well for my meeting with one of my senior essay advisees: I made my comments on Word and tracked changes (yes this is more time-consuming, I prefer my usual scribble method), then we had it up on the screen and went through it together, it worked really well.

I found a nice little notebook on the shelves to use for daily to-do lists. Clearly there is going to be frequent carry-over of even essential tasks to the next day.

The day started with an excellent run and is going to end with novel-reading and a whisky on the couch.

I think that for this first week or so, I'm going to recommend just one absolutely tried and true piece of comfort-reading: books I have read again and again and think might arrest your attention for long enough that you can tear yourself away from the news cycle!

#1: Eva Ibbotson, The Morning Gift. All of Ibbotson's books are absolutely delightful; I read them again and again, especially when I'm so fatigued during a teaching semester that I don't know what to do with myself. This I think is my favorite - and there are lots more along very similar lines (that is a feature, not a bug...) if you pick this one up and like it as much as I do.

NYC day 6

I had good intentions about doing some initial reading recommendations today here, but by the time I finished all the other important things, I was all tuckered out! Tomorrow, I think - I've got Zoom meetings with advisees starting around 3 or so but should have some morning time to do a real post here as well as taking care of one or two more logistical things for next week's classes.

It was a good day for me. I had a lovely 1hr as 1:1 jog-walk in the morning (having had quite serious chronic back pain for the last 3 years I finally figured two major fixes out about a month ago and the fact of running and walking without extreme soreness is really helping my mood). I did some rethinking for my Clarissa seminar (Richardson's million-word-long epistolary novel - one of my two classes semester is dedicated just to reading that book from start to finish) and had a great Zoom conversation with about 2/3 of the students in our normal time slot. The university extended spring break through tomorrow, so we didn't have "real" classes yesterday and today, but it was extremely good for my morale to see those faces and hear about how and where everyone is.

Ordered some hot-weather UV+ protective buffs for when the weather gets warmer. I'm using my winter one as a mask outdoors, for running, walking and errands (and yes, it gets washed after each use), but it's a bit scratchy and these ones will be better once I have them in hand.

Predictions are pretty much useless, but I'm figuring I'm home here like this for at least two months. Fingers crossed that I still get to exercise outside during that period!....

NYC day 5 (?)

I'm counting quarantine from Thursday.

When I was a small child, I was obsessed with the idea that if I just had a bathroom off my bedroom, I could seal myself off and float away in it like a little boat. My apartment is now that little boat.

The landmark days have come fast and furious.

On Thursday, March 5 I hosted a small book party for a friend. I didn't think of canceling it (it was perhaps fifteen people in my living room, not thronged), but I bought extra hand soap and paper towels and made sure everything was spotless so that being in a social gathering wouldn't provoke undue anxiety.

On Sunday, March 8, Columbia emailed us to say that Monday and Tuesday classes were suspended in preparation for a move online starting Wednesday. (Spring break was the following week and would give us additional adjustment time.)

I was following the news closely; Columbia recommended against non-essential university travel, but I weighed the pros and cons and did indeed fly to Cayman on Wednesday. My main reservation was that I was coming from a high-spread area to a low and that it might be irresponsible; Brent noted that since 10,000 cruise passengers were still coming ashore every day, the additional risk I might contribute was negligible.

Thursday night I realized I shouldn't go to Friday 6am hot yoga in case I was an asymptomatic carrier. Downloaded a hot 26 timer app and did a session on Brent's balcony. Started soft social distancing (worked at home rather than heading to Cafe del Sol), though we had early (deserted) dinner at Fidel's that night and picked up pizza from XQs to take to Gord and Enoka's on Saturday evening. But

The first Cayman death was announced later on Friday - an Italian man in his 70s, in bad health, who was rushed from his cruise ship to Health City for cardiac treatment. Health City closed down its hospital for two weeks to sterilize everything.

I was watching the news closely. My ticket home was for Saturday, March 21. It wasn't a disaster if I got stuck in Cayman (friends in NY urged me to stay there), but it equally wasn't a choice between two options - I am on a tourist visa there, and the health system isn't robust (patients with serious illnesses are usually treated in Miami, and the per-capita hospital bed count is lower than NYC; rationing would prioritize Caymanians).

On Monday, March 16, Cayman announced that the following Sunday, the island would close to passenger air traffic for three full weeks. Visitors would be prohibited entry from Thursday.

The next day, JetBlue emailed me to cancel my flight. I hastily booked myself onto a flight the next day, Cayman Airways GCM-JFK.

I was nervous, but it went incredibly smoothly. The airport was underpopulated. I had a mask from my friend Dr Enoka (I failed to press it down over my nose, I should have looked it up on the internet, I couldn't understand why it was making the bridge of my nose so sore!) and didn't eat or drink anything once I was in the airport. Last pee in airport bathroom, with soap and water handwashing, but underhydration sufficient that I didn't need to use the toilet on the plane (they are hives of germs at the best of times and I had a little bottle of sanitizer). I paid $150 for a business upgrade and it was almost like having my own little room - the seat next to me was empty and I could reach my legs out straight at a right angle to my torso and still not touch the bulkhead.

Taxi driver at the airport (it was maybe 8:30pm) said he'd been in the queue since 7am and I was his first fare. He was going to drive an hour and a half home to Long Island after he dropped my at my apartment in Morningside Heights.

So I'm counting from Thursday. Hard social distancing, a couple brief shopping trips. I'm running outside (and walking the 2 non-run days) with a buff as face cover and a pair of running gloves - it stops me touching my face and makes it less likely I'll get droplets on anybody else.

Without testing, none of us really know what's going on. I'm pretty sure that I haven't had COVID-19 already in its asymptomatic variant - I get lung involvement even with minor colds, and I haven't been sick at all since early January. Risk of exposure from when I arrived in Cayman on the 11th seems to me quite low.

I've brought Light Reading back to life so that I can write here for the duration. Facebook is ephemeral, chaotic. I would like a record. And I will be making light reading recommendations too.....

End of year, end of decade

My decades do run from 0 to 9 currently.

2010-2019? A decade of unrelenting losses.

The first and worst was Brent's beloved sister Wendy. It put us into a downward spiral of Ottawa eldercare worries, adding a third country and a huge amount of added stress to our already somewhat strenuous two-country life.

Brent's dad Chuck died in 2014. My mother's dear husband Jim was diagnosed with metastatic melanoma at the end of 2014 and died a few months later after some brutal weeks in the ICU (here was my eulogy for him). Implausibly, my father died suddenly about two weeks later, and it was a "dog ate my homework situation" when for the second time that month I told my powerlifting coach that I had to go to Philadelphia in the aftermath of the death of someone very close to me. I wrote too many eulogies that year.

Time with our beloved step-grandfather Gene was always a gift, but it was tough watching him go, slowly, over the final six months of congestive heart failure. I wrote his obituary too: it's a little more than two years ago now and we are only just starting to regroup in the wake of his loss. Gene also left money that has put me in a position of financial security that I did not think I would ever achieve: I retain humility in the face of it and am very happy to be in a position now to fulfill the dream of my twenties, which was to pick up the restaurant tab for a table of friends or students without worrying about how much it costs!

Brent's mother had a series of strokes that took away first independence then movement and speech; she died in June of this year. Brent is still handling various estate business, but as a consequence of her death, he was able to spend his first Christmas at home in Cayman since he moved here in 2005.

At the same time - 2010-2019? A decade of rich simulating writing and fitness and friendship and family - a decade of enormous pleasures and privileges.

I wrote and published three books - a novel (I need to write another one of those soon or I will lose the thread!), a literary-critical memoir of my life as a reader, a short book about Jane Austen. I drafted another book that's close to done now and I had a surprise bonus book project fall into my lap as well: after Gene died, I got his and his wife's literary manuscripts, Margaret's novel The Duchess of Angus turned out to be an unsung masterpiece and will be published in a few months by Trinity University Press. See you at the San Antonio book festival in April!

I was still in the grip of triathlon at the start of the decade, had to back off training for my first Ironman the summer Wendy died, tried for it again the next summer but got horrible bronchitis after my peak training weekend and took a DNS, had a year off to regroup and then finally did really pull it off: completing IMWI in 2013 remains my proudest and most unlikely achievement!

Back problems started in a big way in 2011 and have plagued me on and off ever since; I am currently on a mix of running, yoga and swimming and am bent on continuing to regain mobility and running with less discomfort in 2020. My run coach is a voice for sanity and joy in my life, and I am extremely grateful for him and the community he has created.

I had amazing stints at the American Academy in Rome, at Balliol College, Oxford and at Reid Hall in Paris. I made friends in all three places and continue to pick up funny nice friends everywhere I go. Specially precious friends are Darren and Jane, who cared for Gene and Christine respectively in their final months. We could not have done all this without them.

Teaching continued to be one of the greatest pleasures of my life, and it was in this decade that it belatedly sunk in that the work I do as an educator is pretty certainly more important than the work I do as a writer. I was a reluctant leader in various institutional capacities, and there is a good chance I will be elected to chair the committee in 2020 that has most been driving me crazy and wiping me out over the last four months! (If I am chair I have more control over how it goes....)

I started teaching at Columbia in 2000 which means that I'm coming up on year twenty; from a professional point of view, I saw more change in the conditions of my work life from 2000 to 2009 than I did from 2010 to 2019, but really I've just been doing the same thing pretty happily since I started grad school in the mid-90s. The thought of two more decades in the same job is a little daunting, but the job changes as you age and grow, so I trust it will remain stimulating and sufficiently challenging!

I am at an interesting juncture in my professional life: there is a constant tug towards administration, but I believe that my temperament truly better fits me for quiet time alone, reading and writing and exercising and cuddling with cats. WHICH WAY WILL IT GO? Even I don't really know, though I am pretty sure that if I get the chance to back off significantly, I will take it. (But if someone asked me to be the dean of the graduate school, I would also find it hard to say no....)

My specific goals for the coming year: more consistent PT exercises, yoga and mobility work to improve baseline back functionality; work less, rest more. I really think my most important agenda for the year is to write much, much less - between fall of 2016 and now I have essentially written two books, a host of essays and introductions as well as the normal slew of work-related documents (tenure and promotion letters especially), and my brain needs a recovery period.

Brent and I will continue to live in two different countries - neither of us is movable, and having two separate establishments suits us both in many ways - but I believe we will be able to spend more time together (fostering cats while I'm in Cayman turned out to be the last piece of the puzzle, everything is better about being here now that I have lovely cats!). My own cats continue to delight me - Jose had a health scare this summer and every day I get with him now is precious.

I am certain that the new year will bring me more joy than sadness, and what else could I wish for?

Some favorite books of 2019

A list of some books I loved in 2019. No particular order within sections, and doesn't include work reading or books I read in paper.

Nonfiction/memoir:

Yiyun Li, Dear Friend, from My Life I Write to You in Your Life (and Where Reasons End, though I think the former will be more universally compelling)
Emily Bernard, Black is the Body
Ellis Avery, The Family Tooth: A Memoir in Essays
Annie Ernaux, Happening
Esmé Weijun Wang, The Collected Schizophrenias
Asne Seirstad, Two Sisters
Anna Funder, Stasiland
Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises
Ann Marlow, How to Stop Time: Heroin from A to Z
Lawrence Weschsler, And How Are you, Dr. Sacks? (falls apart towards the end, but there’s a lot of new material)
Emilie Pine, Notes to Self
Imani Perry, Breathe
Saeed Jones, How We Fight for Our Lives

Top general fiction:

Colson Whitehead, The Nickel Boys
Minae Mizumura, A True Novel
Maurice Ruffin, We Cast a Shadow
Nafissa Thompson-Spires, Heads of the Colored People: Stories (possibly the very best book I read this year)
Susn Choi, Trust Exercise
Johannes Lichtman, Such Good Work (standout first novel)
Deborah Levy, The Man Who Saw Everything
Chia-Chia Lin, The Unpassing (a great rec from Garth Greenwell)

Top general fiction, SFF subcategory:

Tade Thompson, The Rosewater Insurrection (sequel)
Sarah Pinsker, A Song for a New Day
Chuck Wendig, The Wanderers
Fonda Lee, Jade War (sequel to the unmissably good Jade City)
Annalee Newitz, The Future of Another Timeline
Aliya Whiteley, The Loosening Skin (exceptional, must get and read her other books)

Two excellent novels in a genre that is not mine:

Jami Attenberg, All This Could Be Yours
Cynthia D’Aprix Sweeney, The Nest

I would recommend Neal Stephenson, Fall; or, Dodge in Hell with certain reservations– I actually really enjoyed this while also finding it periodically maddening; basically, NS’s retelling of, as it were, a mashup of Paradise Lost and An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Interesting to see a gifted storyteller write a novel that essentially refuses all the pleasures of fiction....

Crime:

Jane Harper, The Lost Man
Ron Corbett, Cape Diamond (Frank Yakabuski installment 2)
Attica Locke, Heaven, My Home
Dervla McTiernan, The Scholar
Denise Mina, Conviction
Kate Atkinson, Big Sky
Adrian McKinty, The Chain
Robert Crais, A Dangerous Man
Karin Slaughter, The Last Widow
S. L. Huang, Null State
Alex North, The Whisper Man
Laura Lippman, Lady in the Lake (her best yet IMO)
Rene Denfield, The Butterfly Girl (sequel)
Soren Sveistrup, The Chestnut Man
Lee Child, Blue Moon
Robert Bryndza, Nine Elms
John Sandford, Bloody Genius
Ausma Zehanat Khan, The Unquiet Dead, The Language of Secrets (very solemn, but the writing is extremely good)
Alison Bruce, The Silence
Sophie Hénaff, The Awkward Squad

SFF

Nalo Hopkinson, Brown Girl in the Ring
Katherine Arden, Winternight (conclusion of trilogy)
S. A. Chakraborty, The City of Brass and The City of Copper (love these books so so much!)
Tom Sweterlitsch, The Gone World
Alex White, A Big Ship at the Edge of the Universe and sequel
Zen Cho, The True Queen (#2 in series)
K. Chess, Famous Men Who Never Lived
Emma Newman, Atlas Alone (Planetfall)
Rebecca Roanhorse, Storm of Locusts (Sixth World #2)
Joan He, Descendant of the Crane
Leo Carew, The Wolf and sequel (Under the Northern Sky series)
Ben Aaronovitch, The October Man
Sergey and Marina Dyachenko, Vita Nostra (very good, unusual)
Sarah Painter – a happy discovery, first two Crow Investigations book very enjoyable, then I devoured her whole backlist, then Crow #3 came out at the end of the year
Paul Cornell, A Long Day in Lychford
Emily Tesh, Silver in the Wood
Laurie Marks, Air Logic (final installment of Elemental Logic series)
Kali Wallace, Salvation Day
Claire O’Dell, The Hound of Justice (Janet Watson #2, flaws perhaps a bit clearer here than in the first one but still very appealing)
Ada Hoffman, The Outside
Craig L. Gidney, A Spectral Hue
Garth Nix, Angel Mage
Christelle Dabos, the Mirror Visitor books (these are new favorites, really good)
Waubgeshig Rice, Moon of the Crusted Snow (haunting, has stayed with me)
Kai Ashante Wilson, The Sorceror of the Wildeeps
Maggie Stiefvater, The Raven Boys and sequels (obtained after I read https://maggiestiefvater.com/the-years-without-words/)
Stephen King, The Institute
Paul Cornell, The Lights Go Out in Lychford
James S. A. Corey, Auberon (Expanse novella, not as good as The Churn which is my favorite, a bit cookie-cutter and politically schematic, but still of course highly readable
Karen Tei Yamashita, Tropic of Orange

Urban fantasy/paranormal romance:

Melissa Olson, Boundary Broken (#4 in series)
Anne Bishop, Wild Country
Patricia Briggs, Storm Cursed
Deborah Blake, Wickedly Unraveled
Nalini Singh, Wolf Rain, Archangel’s War
Ilona Andrews, Sweep of the Blade, Sapphire Flames

Romance:

Hoang, The Kiss Quotient (a recommendation from Roxane Gay)
Charlotte Greene, Legacy

Good rereads:

Jennifer Egan, A Visit from the Goon Squad
Naomi Novik, Uprooted
Kate Atkinson’s Jackson Brodie books, in preparation for new installment
Deborah Coates’s Hallie Michaels series

Others I enjoyed and would recommend to those to whom subject matter or genre appeals:

Richard Kadrey, The Grand Dark
Jean Kwok, Searching for Sylvie Lee
Angie Kim, Miracle Creek (not my genre but very good)
Liz Emens, Life Admin
Lewis Shiner, Outside the Gates of Eden (long novel exploring aftermath of the 60s, too unstructured and could have used one more serious female character but it has stayed with me)
Olivia Kiernan, Too Close to Breathe, The Killer in Me (decent police procedurals, Irish setting)
Claire McGowan, What You Did
Helen Phillips, The Need
Alan Russell, LA Woman (Gideon and Sirius book, they’re not especially well-written but I really enjoy them)
M. T. Edvardsson, A Nearly Normal Family
Catherine Kirwan, Darkest Truth
Joshilyn Jackson, Never Have I Ever
Jo Nesbo, Knife
T. Kingfisher, Minor Mage
Ben Winters, Golden State
Becky Chambers, To Be Taught, If Fortunate
Seanan McGuire, The Unkindest Tide
Michael Connelly, The Night Fire
Leah Bobet, An Inheritance of Ashes

Biggest disappointment of the year: The Book of Dust: The Secret Commonwealth! The book just felt like a sustained assault against Lyra, and the uncritical use of Great Game-style politics is insufferable.

"Special rates for wayward eagles"

The trouble with high roaming charges.

Process

Cut-and-paste process post. Experimenting with embedding a link to Facebook....

Summer reading recs

Summer reading recs for all, just a few particular standouts (big books that I think anyone and everyone would like):

Chuck Wendig, The Wanderers (Michael Crichton/Stephen King style near-future epic with fungal pandemic and scary AI)

Adrian McKinty, The Chain (moved from brilliantly well-written police procedurals set in the Belfast of the Troubles to mega-blockbuster thriller mode, very well done)

Fonda Lee, Jade War (sequel to Jade City - two of my favorite books of the last few years)

Chandler Baker, Whisper Network (character-driven with topical not-quite-crime plot)

Two newish crime writers you might not have heard of but should be reading if you like police procedurals: Ron Corbett, Dervla McTiernan.

Brilliant near-future SF set in Africa with aliens (but even if you don't think you like this genre, you should read these!): Tade Thompson's Rosewater books.

For fans of The Magicians: Sergey and Marina Dyachenko, Vita Nostra.

Unusual romance (autistic protagonists): Helen Hoang.

Note on the text

No time or wherewithal to write an elaborate post here, but if you are my friend on Facebook you have heard me rhapsodizing about the unpublished novel by Margaret Kilik that came into my possession last year and that will be published by Trinity University Press. I've been finalizing the text of the novel itself this past week. It's a reader's edition, not a scholarly edition of any kind, and I haven't gone deep into textual criticism or anything like that, but I did enjoy writing the "Note on the Text" just now (I've always wanted to write one!) and thought I would share that draft here. The novel is called The Duchess of Angus, and I will be pressing it into your hands next year for sure!...

Note on the text

When I first realized what I had on my hands, I envisioned a scholarly edition of the novel that would follow Margaret Kilik’s typescript in all of its particulars. At least part of the appeal of an unpublished manuscript like The Duchess of Angus derives from its idiosyncrasies: the misspellings, oddities of punctuation and quirks of grammar that have not yet been eliminated by the normalizing work of a copy-editor. I soon realized, though, that in order to produce a true reader’s edition, I would need to correct errors of various kinds. My guideline was to stick as closely as possible to the words that Kilik wrote, but to make small changes anywhere that would ease the reader’s passage through the sentence or paragraph.

Kilik’s use of commas was especially scattershot, and I have frequently re-punctuated sentences and stretches of dialogue for clarity and ease of comprehension. That said, I hope the text retains the original sense of comma use being relatively light in order to convey the flat affect of Jane Davis’s narration. I have sometimes added or moved paragraph breaks, but I have retained the frequent ellipses, which Margaret used for emphasis and to indicate a pause especially in speech, except in a small number of cases where the substitution of a comma for the ellipsis made the text much clearer to the eye.

Kilik’s spelling is somewhat unreliable. I enjoyed but eliminated inate, medeocrity, dueces, droziness, stiffled, candolabra, scimmed, decipation, momentoes, whispy, languous. Where names are given in more than one variant, I have made the text consistent by preferring either the first or the more correct-seeming spelling on a case-by-case basis. There are some patterns of misspelling that give a distinctive flavor to the manuscript that this edition no longer retains. Words are given a double letter in the place of a single or vice versa: mentionned, welcommed, poisonned, stationned, accoustics, posessed, Channel No. 5. “Ea” is often preferred incorrectly over “ee”: bear for bare, sleak for sleek, leach for leech, peak for peek, healer for heeler (in the expression “ward heeler”) Kilik adds an extra “e” to adjectives ending in “y”: shiney, smokey, shakey, boney, lacey. She also often uses two words where one is standard usage (ash trays, hitch hike, etc.), and I have given the standard version in all of those cases.

In a handful of places where the misspelling introduces an appealing malapropism of sorts, I have given the manuscript reading in square brackets: so, for instance, I have corrected the manuscript reading “desolute” to “desolate” but provided the original as well, because of how it echoes the term “dissolute” (which conceivably could have been the word the novelist intended to use, though context strongly supports my editorial choice). In another instance, the manuscript reads “unatoned”; I have corrected it to “unattuned,” but didn’t want wholly to efface the hint of sin and redemption that enters by way of the misspelling.

Several of the manuscript’s preferences seem to me sufficiently intrinsic to the novel’s style that I have not forced them into line with the conventional rules. Two things stand out in particular: the use of sentence fragments for emphasis; the inconsistent and shifting use of past and presence tense in some of the narrator’s ruminations. Neither have I tried to smooth over what I see as one of the book’s very few moments of awkward handling, the flashback scene where we revisit the initial encounter between Jess and Mira.

My heartfelt thanks to Mimi Lipson, who typed up the manuscript into a clean Word file. The original manuscript will be deposited in Special Collections at Coates Library, Trinity University in San Antonio, as will the two other unpublished play scripts that came into my possession at the same time the novel did. One of them represents a reworking of the material included in The Duchess of Angus and will be of special interest to readers of the novel. We also intend to create a digital edition of the novel manuscript that can be easily viewed online.

Jenny Davidson
Columbia University
June 18, 2019

Ottoman affairs

I really enjoyed doing this interview with Danny O'Quinn about his remarkable new book Engaging the Ottoman Empire: Vexed Mediations, 1690-1815.

Small teaser:

I’m pretty committed to this violent non-traditional archive and to this unfamiliar repertoire: once one sees these things, they can’t be unseen. But violence poses extremely challenging theoretical questions for what we do: questions pertaining to the limits of form and representation, to matters of historical complicity, to the affective dynamics of economic and political domination and subjugation. Much of my work has revolved around matters of wartime affect; Engaging the Ottoman Empire feels like my most sustained attempt to understand the precarity of life as it permeates the mediascape.

You can find older installments of this interview series at Medium and also at the Rambling.

For me, this format is perfect. I like choosing and reading the book and thinking up the questions - and at that point, my work is pretty much done! The annoying conventions that have to be followed when you write a formal review for publication are a small bane of my existence. In general I prefer to write comments on manuscripts rather than weigh in once something's already been published (and I also place a higher priority on tenure and promotion letters than on published reviews), but I like getting to pose a few questions about things that struck me.

(Note to self: just said yes to promotion/tenure letter #6 for the summer, that is large workload, HARD NO TO ANYONE ELSE WHO ASKS! But then again if it's someone you know, it's very difficult to turn down. At Columbia, declines to write tend to be counted against the candidate, even when the refusal comes with a reasonable explanation that doesn't have to do with the candidate's work.)

Pamela Weaponized

The stress of the trip gave me a huge relapse vis-a-vis ongoing lung ailment and precipitated a visit to a doctor who gave me some serious medications. But I was very set on seeing Martin Crimp's Pamela adaptation When We Have Sufficiently Tortured Each Other so that I could write about it, and it was highly worthwhile in the end - my piece has just gone live at The Rambling.

A teaser:

My Pamela, when I teach or write about Richardson’s novel, is the Pamela of resistance. I don’t care whether or not my students read much (any?) of the dreadful parts that follow Pamela’s acceptance of Mr. B’s marriage proposal. I refuse to foreground the fact that Pamela voluntarily marries her would-be rapist, or that the main work (the deluded and delusory work!) of the rest of the novel is retrospectively to redeem all that was violent, coercive, troubling in the relationship between the two. Before that, in the first few hundred pages, Richardson has brilliantly conveyed the moment-by-moment consciousness of a young woman under constant threat from the sexual predator who employs her.

"The glacier is experienced as a silence"

At the TLS, Robert Macfarlane on the memory of ice:

Ice is a recording medium and a storage medium. It collects and keeps data for millennia. Unlike our hard disks and terrabyte blocks, which are quickly updated or become outdated, ice has been consistent in its technology over millions of years. Once you know how to read its archive, it is legible almost as far back – as far down – as the ice goes.

"J'accuse!"

Not really tracking online reading these days, but I thought it was worth linking to this illuminating NYRB piece about Edouard Louis written by Jason Farago. I must read the novel, but it will probably be worth my while to read the original - the points about structure and style make it sound riveting. Anyway, interesting to students of literature and politics alike...

On procrastination in letter-writing

It was a funny convergence....

I've been writing this week under the auspices of a fourteen-day boot camp organized by the National Center for Faculty Development and Diversity; my college classmate and fellow academic Julie Lynch was praising this organization on Facebook a few weeks ago, so when I got an email from the provost's office shortly thereafter saying that Columbia is now a member and that we would have free use of many of its resources, I thought I should give it a try. In fact since I am on sabbatical (and since I have long hewed to a "production of quota" method that basically is very similar to what these boot camps do) it was not really necessary, but if I am going to recommend it to others, I will always prefer to have tried it myself.

Anyway, today's writing was fun because I got to the part of my skeleton draft that includes all the material about Gibbon's habit of putting off writing important letters! He refers in a letter to his good friend Holroyd to "[t]he aversion to Epistolary Conversation, which it has pleased the Daemon to implant in my nature” (2:14), and the problem produces many very funny but also rather painful expressions of penitence and shame.

This is from a letter to Gibbon's Swiss friend Deyverdun, apologizing for a long silence: “my long silence has been occasioned, as far as I understand the anatomy of my own mind, by various reasons: during the summer it was mere idleness and procrastination: from the meeting of Parliament, when it became necessary to finish my book and to subdue America I found myself really involved in a greater hurry of public private and litterary business than I have ever known in any part of my life” (2:104).

There are a lot of good ones to Holroyd:

You wish I would write as a sign of life. I am alive, but as I am immersed in the decline and fall, I shall only make the sign.—It is made. (2:246-47)

Since my retreat to Lausanne our Correspondence has never received so long an interruption, and as I have been equally taciturn with the rest of the English World it may now be a problem among that sceptical nation whether the historian of the decline and fall be a living substance or an empty name. So tremendous is the sleepy power of laziness and habit, that the silence of each post operated still more strongly to benumb the hand and to freeze the Epistolary ink. (3:4)

And to his stepmother: “… you will be satisfied to hear that for many Wednesdays and Saturdays, I have consumed more time than would have sufficed for the Epistle in devising reasons for procrastinating it to the next post” (3:130).

Two bits (or more...)

It's ironic because I wouldn't say that love stories are my favorite kind of story at all (crime and coming-of-age are far closer to my heart, ditto speculative fictions of ideas and worldbuilding in both SF and F inflections) - but Eve Gerber asked me to recommend five great love stories for Valentine's Day, and here's what we came up with....

Five great love stories suitable for year-round reading.

In other news - highly recommending Samuel Hayat on the gilets jaunes and le macronisme as "pendant" phenomena. Thanks to Elsa Dorlin for the recommendation (her other suggestions for illumination on this topic were very helpful as well: an ethnographic piece by Florence Aubenas for Le Monde that emphasizes gender and self-realization; thoughts from Jacques Ranci`ere; and Patrick Aubiaz on the role of ecology in the movement.