All is well, except that I am suffering from an absolute dreadful cold!
On a brighter note, the NEASECS conference in New Haven is excellent (both yesterday and today I basically went to good morning stuff then came back to hotel room and collapsed for much of the afternoon - I did have some good pizza for dinner last night on my own at Zinc Kitchen, and a lovely dinner at Ibiza on Thursday with C., lunch yesterday with A. at Zinc, coffee with S. at Atticus, etc. etc. - I've got a lot of old friends here).
(I am feeling too ill to paste in links!)
Have just had a long nap and a hot shower to moisten lungs and de-sinusify face, it has given me fortitude I think for pre-dinner cocktails at the Union League with C., B. and J. and the conference dinner at the Peabody Museum. Am taking a whole box of tissues in my bag, I keep on having to fall back on awful brown recycled ones from bathroom paper towel dispensers. One panel to chair tomorrow, then I'll be on a panel home mid-afternoon, having done absolutely NONE of my grading for Monday....
(And I got an extension till Monday on my review from my kind editor, but still haven't really felt well enough to deal with it - if I can get most of the grading done tomorrow evening at home, then I should have a couple hours first thing Monday morning to consolidate what I have and turn it into an actual coherent piece.)
Americaneh is stunningly good, one of the best couple novels I've read all year - not quite sure why I haven't read her other two, but have loaded them onto the Kindle and will look forward to reading them sooner rather than later.
Dinner on Wednesday with G. at the West Bank Cafe was nice, though the play (DeeDee Bridgewater as Billie Holiday) was predictably slightly dreadful - they should just do it as a musical revue rather than trying to make it a melodramatic bio-retrospective! (The flashback scenes in the first half are particularly awful, but I am also not keen on the singer-pretending-to-be-drunk thing in the second half - which is a pity, because really in many respects the music is extremely good, if you can swallow the pastiche element.)
Had a very nice lunch with E. on Thursday at Artisanal (en route to Grand Central - that is possibly the best macaroni and cheese I've ever had, though it is so rich you feel slightly queasy after eating most of the large portion - the cheese crumb/crust on top is absolutely perfect) to talk about my upcoming presentation at the NYU humanities institute - that's one I'm really looking forward to. Many restaurant meals and no exercise do not lead to a feeling of mental and physical equilibrium, but really I just have to let this cold pass - I think Tuesday morning is the first day I'm likely to be really legitimately functional for a run, ugh....
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