"Extractum carnis"

At the FT, Polly Russell on the history of Lemco "liquid beef" (FT site registration required), with special emphasis on Eva Tuite's Lemco-inspired recipe book:

Interspersed with the recipes and seasonal lists are adverts for Liebig Company products: Oxo “fluid beef” (“Energy without Waiting”) and Fray Bentos canned goods (“Always Ready, Always Acceptable”).

There is no mincing words:

Soviet aerialism

Courtesy of Marina H., a lovely piece by Chloe Aridjis on time spent in  East Berlin researching the early Soviet space program:

One tome suggests applying the four humours to the process of task selection: the choleric individual is quick to learn but, prone to impatience, makes mistakes – therefore best for special assignments rather than routine ones; sanguine types flourish under variety and constant excitement rather than repetition (Gagarin was apparently one of these); phlegmatic types, on the other hand, are recommended for systematic activity; and melancholic types . . . cannot become cosmonauts due to their nervous, fearful temperament, and are best suited to be scientific advisors on ground.

Writer as corporation

Interesting interview here with YA writer Cassandra Clare about the business of writing.  I have none of the gifts she clearly possesses in abundance - for all sorts of reasons, I am very lucky to be a professor rather than a writer trying to make a decent living off publishing fiction! - but I like reading about the truly entrepreneurial...

Information management

There is nothing wrong with the way I am actually going to spend my day (except that I still need to lay hands on my wretched course reader originals and class notes for the style lecture - why, oh why am I not a much better-organized person?!?), only what I really want is to spend the day in a virtual-reality version of the London Zoo animal audit!  Exceptional slideshow - definitely click through...

(Link via B., who got it here.)

How to write a novel

At the TLS, Tim Shippey on a posthumous collection of nonfiction by Diana Wynne Jones.  To write a novel,

What you need (she says) is, first, the “flavour” of the book, second, the detail of at least two central scenes, and third, the voice that shouts “NOW”.

On criticism

Daniel Mendelsohn's manifesto.

Another MAGIC CIRCLE teaser

Again, courtesy of the copyeditor...

Places, character names, titles of works, authors, brand names:

30 Day Shred

A Midsummer Night’s Dream

agnès b

Aldous Huxley

Amsterdam

Anna

Annabelle

Arne Jacobsen

Bergdorf

Beth Orton

Blade Runner

Bloomberg

Bloomingdale Asylum

Bloomingdale’s

Bookforum

Broadway

Brooklyn Lager

Bryn Mawr

Buell Hall

Bushmills

Butler Library

Bwog

Cadmus

Candy Land

Carl Schurz

Chelsea Piers

Chippendale

Columbia University

ConEd

Croton Aqueduct

Daniel Schreber

Daryl Hannah

Death of a Salesman

Dionysus

Elizabeth Bishop

Euripides

Fiestaware
David Brenner

Firefly

Flatiron Building

Fortinbras

Foursquare

Fraser

Frederick Law Olmsted

Friedrich Nietzsche

Gatorade

Ghostbusters

Golden Bough

Grant’s Tomb

Guerlain

Hamlet

Harlem Plain

Hudson River

Hulk

I, Claudius

Ibsen

iPad

Jillian Michaels

John D. Rockefeller

John Jay

John Loudon McAdam

Kashi

Kate Spade

Ken Saro-Wiwa

Kent Hall

Kipling

Lajos Kossuth

Lemon Pledge

Lenox

Lois Duncan

Lower Merion

Lucy

Lululemon

Malbec

Marlboro Lights

Martin Ericsson

Martin Luther King, Jr.

Mary Renault

Max Soha

Mayor Giuliani

McKim

Meade

Memoirs of My Nervous Illness

Milton Bradley

Miss Julie

Mogi

Mont Blanc

Morningside Drive

Morningside Park

Mr. H––

Murphy’s Oil Soap

Narnia

Narnian

Nike

NYU

Oedipus Rex

Old Bay

Pentheus

Peter the Great

Pisticci

Playmobil

Plutarch

Polaroid

Pook’s Hill

Prada

Pris

Pushkin

Randall Jarrell

Riverside Drive

Riverside Park

Robespierre

Rosa Luxembourg

Ruth

Sakura Park

Samuel Tilden

Semele

Siân Hughes

Sophocles

St. John the Divine

St. Luke’s

Stalin

Star Trek

Streetcar Named Desire

Summer of Fear

Sun Chips

Terrance Hayes

The Bacchae

The Bell Jar

The Birth of Tragedy

The Blue and White

Tiffany

Tocqueville, Alexis de   

Tse

Tumblr

Twister

Urban Outfitters

White

Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf?

Wikipedia

Wind on the Moon, the

Y.

Zeus

Closing tabs redux

Wish I could see this. 

Also rather wish I could go here!  (Link via B., who got it here.  Note to self: acquire camp chair?)

Great Oliver Sacks piece in last week's New Yorker, including an amazing description of the genesis of his vision of his writing vocation - online for subscribers only, but that podcast is open to all, I think.

Asad Raza's Wimbledon diary.

Rereading We Need To Talk About Kevin for a fuller discussion of Lionel Shriver as stylist in my style revision - but really I need to put that aside and get my syllabi finalized, course readers arranged, books checked on etc.  Still have a bit more leeway time-wise, as my first classes don't meet till next Wednesday and then the following Monday, but can't seem to concentrate on the other with this still unresolved, so I think I'll take a few days this week to do that, return library books, etc. 

I do have some good news that I think no longer needs to be secret - awaiting contract on the style book from Columbia University Press!  Very excited about working with them on this, though there are a couple other editors I've mentally bookmarked as people I'm eager to collaborate with on future projects.

Got home from Cayman late Sunday night and had another endodontist appointment yesterday afternoon.  Fingers crossed that this was the last one, though doctor says there is a ten percent chance a further procedure will be needed.  Went to regular dentist this morning to get the temporary filling in the crown replaced with a permanent one.  Devoutly hoping that this is it for this year's dental woes!  It was certainly much less painful afterwards than the two prior sessions, though there is still some infection.

Closing tabs

Internet telegraphy!  (Courtesy of Alice.  It is an old obsession of mine...)

Matthew Kirschenbaum on Tom Clancy's use of tabletop gaming to choreograph battle scenes.

I liked Ready Player One hugely more than I expected to - I caught a glimpse of a few paragraphs over B.'s shoulder when he was reading it, the sequence in which the narrator describes the eighties cultural materials with which the book's characters are obsessed, and thought it really would not be my cup of tea, but in fact it is quite delightful.  Then a good recommendation from Becca, Harriet Lane's Alys, Always, and that sent me back to another of Becca's recommendations that I had put on my Kindle but never gotten around to, The Flight of Gemma Harding by Margot Livesey.  I love Livesey's writing, and this is an enjoyable read, but I think I just know Jane Eyre too well, and was perplexed by how closely this book followed the earlier novel's contours.

Also: Stanislas Dehaene's Reading in the Brain, which I found worthwhile but not as generally gripping as Maryanne Wolf's book; and a reread of the curious and fascinating Lost in a Book: The Psychology of Reading for Pleasure, by Victor Nell, which I blogged about here when I first read it.  Highly recommended!

Flying back to New York later this afternoon.  One more week before the semester starts.

The superiority of classical restraint in writing

At the Paris Review, Harry Mathews on translating Georges Perec and Marie Chaix:

The photograph of Marie Chaix on the back cover revealed a woman of thirty-two and great attractiveness. When John Ashbery first saw her, he remarked how pretty she was, then corrected himself immediately: “No, not pretty—beautiful.” Her beauty was not that of any stereotype: strong-featured, full of energy and passion. From the start I fantasized about having one of my noncommittal affairs with her. I knew ahead of time that I was safe from any deeper involvement, since she was married and the mother of two little girls. What I did not know was that she had never cheated on her less-faithful husband but now felt inclined to indulge in a small infidelity of her own.

Our interest in one another had preceded our meeting. Two months before, in the hope of one day winning her, I had composed a four-page handwritten letter intended for her, in which I deployed every seductive wile my experience as a writer could supply. I was pleased with the results and confident that they would dispose Marie to think of me as someone more than her translator.

It then occurred to me that this was a shabby way to approach the woman I had come to know in her book: an intensely serious and compassionate human being who had generously taken her readers into the intimate, moving world of her feelings. I tore up my handwritten letter and replaced it with a page containing a dozen typed lines of a formality for which written French is perhaps uniquely capable (“Madame, I have the honor and pleasure of being the translator of your admirable book…”). This was the letter I mailed her.

Marie’s reaction was not what I had foreseen. She later told me that her first impulse was to drop everything and get on the next train to Venice. She wanted to see this mysterious American who had unexpectedly appeared in her life. It was as though my original letter had been encrypted in its typewritten replacement. (This incidentally delighted me as definitive proof of the superiority of classical restraint in writing to the rhetoric of expressionistic overtness.)

Pemmican

The best cuisine in Antarctica.

Style sheet teaser

Courtesy of my excellent copyeditor, and with assistance from the Chicago Manual of Style and Webster, The Magic Circle in a nutshell...

Words and spelling if alternatives exist or CMS or Webster differs from text:

Absolut

Asian American

backstory

Benthamite

Berber

boiler room (Webster)

brick red

Brobdingnagian

bûche de noel

catty-corner (variation)

cover-up

crèche

crisscrossing

Dickens, Charles

dog-eared

dreidl (alternative spelling)

earbud

e-mail

exposé

Foucauldian

frisson

game master (CMS)

hauntology

inhering; inhere

Internet

larping

late-afternoon

Livejournal

living room

low carb

ludic

madhouse

maquillage

MFA (per Webster)

mica

multisided

namaste

nitpicky

outwards (secondary)

PhD

photoshopped

pocketknife

postdoctoral (per CMS 7.85)

present-day (adj.)

prorated

reemerged

Renaissance Fayre

ringleading

ringleted

Sanning eller konsekvens

sauteed (alternative spelling)

schist

scuff mark

self-contained

self-possessed

self-sustaining

setup

shape-shifters

spin the bottle

stained glass

stalkery

sugar-free

super glad

temper-stricken

Thebes

through line

towards (secondary)

trebuchet

tricorder

Twister

villanelle

vinyasa

V-neck

Yggdrasil

Closing tabs

A few weeks ago B. sent me a link with the subject line "A Young Scientist's Illustrated Primer," and it inevitably gave me an irresistible urge to reread what is surely my favorite Neal Stephenson novel, The Diamond Age.  I first read it c. 2001 or so, when I picked up a used mass-market paperback from the science-fiction-oriented table in front of Milano Market, and it was something of a revelation.  It  is the perfect book for me! 

(I think my two other favorites of Stephenson's are Cryptonomicon, which I read in a single sitting on the redeye flight back from Seattle when I was doing the low-budget book tour for Heredity - in certain respects, the length of Stephenson's novels is a vice, but for travel reading, it's a huge virtue, and I think I can also say with some specificity that though I bought a hardcover copy of Anathem, I didn't actually read it until I purchased a second copy for Kindle and devoured it on the trip we took last year to Costa Rica.  Snow Crash is more iconic, perhaps, but it doesn't hold as dear a place in my heart...)

Anyway, the reread totally lived up to my memory of it (I've probably read it a couple times before, couldn't say exactly).  Mouse army!  The texture of the primer passages is perhaps not quite as captivating as a different kind of writer might have managed, but it really is an excellent book.

Finally finished the last section of True Believers, which I'd stalled out on.  Also, this Black Cat Appreciation Day post made me realize that the two Carbonel books I knew very well as a child were followed by a third that I could actually obtain on Kindle.  It is not up to the standard of the first two, but it caused me to reflect on how I might obtain a copy of another book that represented a fantastically desirable and unavailable thing to me as a child, the fourth and final installment in Pamela Brown's Blue Door Theatre series, Maddy Again - I read the first three countless times, but this one I have never read.  Interlibrary loan?

The copyedited manuscript of The Magic Circle came back to me last night, which is exciting.  My favorite thing (I will scan and post a page of it, I think): the personalized style sheet, with all of my proper nouns and allusions tabulated in neat columns. 

About to have a morning session on the style book.  Slightly anxiety-provoking having two projects on my desk and the start of the semester so close, but everything should be manageable if I keep my head.

Miscellaneous other linkage: FBI files on Sylvia Plath's father; literary soap (underlying link is rather delightful); Tom Stoppard interviewed at More Intelligent Life.

Retinal

Teju Cole's blind spot.

Closing tabs

Miscellaneous minor linkage:

Larry McMurtry and the used book market.

Alan Garner's life in books.

Dry mammals.

"The mind is its own place"

I'm having a good week in Cayman.  If I come here when I'm feeling tormented and obsessive, which is fairly often, it can feel strangulatingly quiet; I count on a certain amount of impersonally chaotic activity in the outside environment as pushback against the internal sensation of "too much traffic"!  But things are in a good place right now. 

Earlier this morning I finished my first close pass through the style book; certainly a few weeks of hard work still remaining on that, but I'm shooting to finish the preliminary rewrite in the next couple weeks and have set a provisional self-imposed deadline of Oct. 1 for a good clean final version. 

In a digressive moment, I drafted what might be the first few pages of a notional essay on why Clarissa is worth your while to read despite its length, and I've read some interesting stuff for the style book too (though I think its new title - it started out as the little book on style and morphed into Notes on Style - is simply Notes on Reading).  Whether or not this will be my best book to date (I think that's a difficult discrimination to make concerning your own work), it certainly feels like the book I was born to write, and the book that most fully conveys the texture of my own interior life.  I'm excited!

Found a great new fitness class here, too; this summer has been colored by back pain in opening and dental woes more recently, but both are now happily behind me and I feel I can (within reason) exercise as much as I like for the next couple of weeks.  It's actually been a good summer for exercise notwithstanding those limiters, and I note that I will take back and jaw pain any day over bronchitis, which really brings everything to a grinding halt....

I've got tickets for some great stuff in NYC in the middle of September, including this trifecta of a single weekend: the Joshua Light Show (with John Zorn, Lou Reed and others); Toni Schlesinger's The Mystery of Oyster Street; Einstein on the Beach.

Light reading around the edges: Victor LaValle's Lucretia and the Kroons (but what I really want is The Devil in Silver - will have to wait another few days for that); Emily St. John Mandel's The Lola Quartet; Sean Chercover's The Trinity Game (of the Dan Brown school of character development, but an enjoyable read); Hjorth and Rosenfeldt's Sebastian Bergman (unstably satirical now and again, particularly in its treatment of the title character, but on the whole appealing); and Katia Lief's Vanishing Girls, which like its predecessors combines the most wildly and distractingly implausible scenarios and procedural details with a very effectively rendered first-person voice and characters.

In other news, it's National Black Cat Appreciation Day.

Heinz tomato-red

At Wired Science, the splendid web-footed salamander.

Hmmm...

Either tonal instabilities in the transition from conversation to page, or else just the most unsympathetic author interview I've seen in a long time!

Reachermania

The effect of reading the first few pages of Lee Child's A Wanted Man was basically to bathe my cells in the soothing elixir of perfect light reading!  (The last time I felt that sensation so strongly was one day earlier in the summer, when I was in a rather bad mood until I realized that a six-minute hard warmup running around the sand volleyball court at Chelsea Piers has an amazingly pronounced positive chemical effect on the body.)  I am only sorry that the book is now finished; I might have to do a massive Reacher reread in the not-too-distant future. 

There is always one particularly funny and knowing sentence early on, sometimes but not always concerning coffee.  Here's my pick, this time round: "He had never killed or injured anyone with a car, except deliberately, but he was a realistic man and didn't kid himself: his driving was much worse than average."

My mouth seems to be truly on the mend now, so I should be able to get back to exercising tomorrow, which will be beneficial; I have chosen to err on the side of caution given risk of further compounding infection, but I think it's better enough that I can go to spin class...

Morning edition

Things look significantly rosier this morning, I am happy to say.  My mouth feels much better, and I've just sent off a review (due today) to a new venue.  Now to hit the library for some style books (haven't yet made master list, but time is running short) and a quick look at the Edward Gorey exhibit!

Dental woes ongoing

Nothing calamitous, but still very painful!  I had to call the endodontist's office yesterday and get a prescription for amoxycillin, which is clearly a miracle drug and did wonders overnight (after I waited for two hours at the useless local pharmacy, missing all but the final hour of last night's meditation class); but at my appointment today, it was still infected enough that the doctor just recleaned it and put in another temporary filling.  By the end of the session, I had reason to contemplate the evocative nature of the cliche touched a nerve, and it is still very painfully jangling, although knowing that the antibiotics are working makes the pain considerably easier to tolerate than yesterday's throbbing.  I am away for the next two weeks, so we will let it settle and hope for the best (no chewing on that side obviously); I have another appointment on August 27, at which point we will see whether the permanent filling can go in or whether the infection is still unresolved.

But really I should not be complaining, as thanks to the kindness of Maggie Griffin I have in my possession the single thing most calculated to relieve Davidsonian woes, dental or otherwise!  Yep - it's the new Jack Reacher novel...

Bow bells

BLDGBLOG on the Whitechapel Bell Foundry.

Bird dogs

Truly demented.

Catch-up

Huge pang as I finished rereading Faithful Place (which I think is the most formally perfect of the four, though each has its own particular appeal) - no more Tana French books!  However fortunately I was able to plunge straight into Megan Abbott's superb Dare Me, which I loved, and it was a natural progression from that to a book I've been meaning to read for ages, Rebecca Godfrey's Under the Bridge.

Dental woes continue - the right lower jaw is still surprisingly painful, and I have another appointment on Wednesday - but physical therapy has worked wonders for my back, which is largely though not entirely better.  I'm only in New York through Sunday, then in Cayman for two weeks - will be working mostly on the style book, I think, though I'll take a few long novels to read with a view to contemplating ABCs of the novel....

"Let them slip soundlessly..."

Eggs à la Nabocoque.  (Via Ian C.-B.)

Closing tabs

Edward Gorey at the Columbia Rare Book Library.  (NB I must get over to see this before the exhibit closes on Friday.)

Gary Panter's Dal Tokyo!

Nomenclature and cuisine of the British meal.

Piers Anthony loomed large in the imagination of young readers in the 1980s.

Douglas Coupland's advice for young writers.

Douglas Kennedy on Maeve Binchy.

F. X. Feeney on Gore Vidal.

Anomalies

Some interesting thoughts on style and anachronism in Alan Hollinghurst's review of Peter Carey's new novel at the NYRB:

In Henry Brandling’s narrative, unlike Olivier’s, Carey is claiming to present a historical document, a journal quite specifically written in 1854; here again a number of anachronisms may be mere fictional license, or reasonable guesses that for instance “potty” (meaning a bit mad) might have been idiomatic some time before its first recorded usage in 1920. But still, “you scared the pants off Hartmann,” an idiom first recorded in 1925, “ashtray” (1887), “guff” (US, 1888), “bumph” (1889, and then only as bumf, for bum-fodder), “programmer” and “programme” as a verb (1948 and 1945), are all more or less jarring. When Brandling uses terms like “celluloid” (a plastic invented in 1870) and “snookered” (when the game of snooker wasn’t named till 1889), you start to feel that Carey, a supreme virtuoso of language, who besides can look these things up as easily as I can, must be aiming at some deliberate alienation effect. To what end, though, it is rather hard to say.

Blocked

Minna Proctor on an encounter with Muriel Spark.

Also: Dickens' best novel?

Celebration!

My book has an ISBN!

This goes some way towards consoling me for jaw pain...

Closing tabs

Z-z-z.  (Via GeekPress.)

Ed Park's "Two Laptops: A Short Story"!

Phil Dyess-Nugent on Gore Vidal.  (Also recommended: Inigo Thomas's 2007 LRB piece on the last installment of Vidal's memoirs;  Marcie Frank's How to Be an Intellectual in an Age of TV.)

Elaine Scarry on literature and empathy.

I'm currently slightly under the weather with dental woes.  It is not a particularly interesting backstory; my teeth are otherwise pretty good, but I had a root canal about 10 years ago, and at my annual check-up in May, the dentist asked on the basis of the x-ray whether I'd been having any trouble with it.  The answer then was no, but a week ago I had some swelling and redness/soreness; yesterday I had an appointment with the endodontist that I imagined would be purely brief and diagnostic (I thought I would book whatever treatment was likely to be necessary for perhaps mid-September), but instead I found myself in the chair for an arduous and really fairly unpleasant 90 minutes of excavation!  Walked out slightly reeling, with face still half-numb from the anesthesia.  Am taking a couple days off from exercise, and will continue to be careful over the weekend not to put undue stress on the immune system; apparently they don't give antibiotics for this as a default, only if it gets infected.  I have a follow-up next week for the rest of the work to be done, assuming it's healing properly, and am strongly hoping that it won't be as major as yesterday's appointment!  The co-pay was $400, but it would have been over $2,000 if my insurance didn't cover it, so I can consider myself fortunate that the Columbia dental plan has improved considerably in recent years....