Closing tabs

Had a day of errands, including a visit to the dentist to get my broken filling replaced, and am now utterly knackered! Leaving town Thursday and have much to sort out between now and then.

On Saturday, walked out on this at intermission, it seemed so utterly pointless: but had a good dinner afterwards at the West Bank Cafe, including one of the most delicious desserts I've ever eaten. We ate there last week too, after 1 Henry IV; that time I had a butterscotch parfait which a food critic would have called much too sweet but which to me was appealingly like eating a cup full of icing. This was a frozen lemon mousse with a scoop of browned meringue on top and mixed berries around the edge, with a possibly superfluous but delicious-in-themselves scattering of candied pistachios. It was sublime!

Miscellaneous linkage:

The art of lip-reading.

A. L. Kennedy is a fan of Derek Raymond. (Via Sarah W.)

Light reading around the edges (a backlog that I haven't been good about keeping up with here): Tom Pitts, Piggyback (loved it - and thought it compared very favorably with the more-hyped Don Winslow Savages, which I found skillful but almost unreadably pretentious); Chris Pavone, The Expats (fundamentally implausible for all sorts of reasons, but a gripping read and really beautifully executed - I liked this one very much indeed); Nick Harkaway, The Angelmaker (quite good I think, but unfortunately I come to it at a time when I have had an absolute surfeit of this sort of thing - not Harkaway's fault that I have so recently read all of Ben Aaronovitch's novels - let's have a ban, though, on crypto-Dickensian secret occult Londons!); Miss Jane's Undoing, a steamy Regency novella by a former student; and Melissa Scott's The Kindly Ones. Then I followed the Melissa Scott thread down the rabbit-hole: first read Lost Things, co-authored by Scott and Jo Graham (I can disparage this as series fiction all I want, but the fact is that it was sufficiently immersive that I missed my subway stop coming home from Chelsea Piers on Saturday afternoon and had to walk home from 125th St., so absorbed was I in the last bit of the story!), then two novellas that begin the related series in the present day, David Niall Wilson's The Temple of Camazotz and Aaron Rosenberg's Brought to Light. There are a couple more following this one, and they are possibly what I will read next.

Somewhere in the middle there I had a really wonderful mini-binge on novels by Peter Dickinson, almost all of whose novels I've read many many times - but they will bear a good deal of rereading, he is criminally underread and underrated - and some of which are now newly released in digital editions: Some Deaths Before Dying (this one is particularly good); The Yellow Room Conspiracy; and In the Palace of the Khans.

Read one other novel which deserves its own post, but which I may be too tired to write about now. More anon!

Taming the everyday

At the Guardian, A. L. Kennedy on writing in chaos versus writing in peace:

Some writers I know thrive on emotional cataclysms and can barely wait for their next divorce, plummet into infatuation, flirtation with ridiculously violent criminals or encounter with rabid shrews. Some authors can only work when surrounded by inspiring volumes, delicate prints and a selection of antique spinets. Their perfect house with kind prospects must be miles from the irritating coughs of barrow boys, or the dreadful possibility that someone socially unsuitable might drive past playing something urban on a chip-scented stereo or simply loiter while looking dowdy. Most of us bounce along in the fatter section of the bell curve.

Stage psychics, booth psychics and one 'cyber witch'

I am eager to read A. L. Kennedy's new novel. (Link via Bookforum.)

Linkage

Not literary in any particular sense, but do read this piece by Michael Ogg on what it means to depend on home health care aides when sidelined by a permanent disability (via Jane Gross).

A. L. Kennedy on why the worst part of writing is waiting.

Phil Nugent on the trials and tribulations of Winter Wipeout!

Finally, I got a nice piece of news the other day from my friend Helen Hill's mother Becky. Helen's last film, "The Florestine Dresses," has been completed by her husband Paul, and will premiere at the Indie Grits Film Festival at the Nickleodeon Theatre in Columbia, South Carolina on April 13-17, 2011. I will definitely be there for the premiere, and will do what I can to help gather a large group of Helen's friends for the occasion.

(There was an exhibit of the dresses themselves a few years ago; alas, I missed it, though I remember seeing the dresses not long after Helen had first found them - there were more than a hundred of them! - in trash bags on the street and rescued them and begun to investigate the story of their creation.)

Writing fitness

At the Guardian, A. L. Kennedy on the trials and tribulations of starting a new novel.

Flowy!

At the Guardian, A.L. Kennedy on rewriting.

Almond Ladybits

Katy Guest interviews A. L. Kennedy for the Independent. I have to get that book, even though I do not usually read short stories...

(NB Sherman Alexie had a really extraordinary piece in the New Yorker last week - well worth reading...)

"The Enthusiastically Sticky zone of the Self-Love Continuum"

A.L. Kennedy on how rehearsing her comedy show feeds back into the writer's "voice" on the page:

It's been fascinating, working on my literal voice again for a while (in order to be audible and flexible) and seeing that work slowly have an effect on the "voice" on the page.

I've always been in favour of writers working with their voices. Although we are usually fugitive creatures, often grating (at best) in person and rambling of tongue – writers (especially poets) will almost inevitably end up reading their work in public for many pressing financial reasons. This will very often involve standing in a space specifically designed to make spoken-word events impossible and to irritate as many of those involved as possible. There will be noise, there will be atrocious sight-lines, there will be non-functioning mikes, there will be wild pigs in the foyer … you simply have to accept that nothing will run smoothly. Meanwhile, as the writer, you have to make the experience as nice as possible for the ladies and gentlemen (I never like kiddies to hear my versions of adult life in case they become disheartened and go all Tin Drum and stunted) who have turned out for the event – who may even have paid money for it to happen at them. This is not only polite, it's also deeply practical.

If a writer can experience their words being enjoyed by others, can make strangers laugh, or go "hmmmmm…" or sigh, or cry, or clap, or sit, alarmingly, with eyes closed in an attitude of profound concentration, sleep, or death – then the writer can feel more confidence in his or her words and move forward with them. This short-circuits something of that "playing alone with people you made up earlier for the benefit of strangers" aspect of the typing life.

Closing tabs: Stephen Fry on the joys of being a member of English Heritage's blue plaques panel; “If you need cake, eat the cake”; a secret history of the New Criticism and counterintelligence; Levi Stahl on why self-publishing was the perfect choice for Caleb Crain's latest book, a "meatspace edition" of some years' worth of very high-quality blogging (and Caleb gives a direct link with discount); and a delightful piece by one of my favorite sports journalists about the Flowers Sea Swim in Grand Cayman, which I will hope to do next weekend (this weekend, it's the Park to Park 2-mile Hudson River swim - the start is at W. 125th St., less than a mile from my apartment!).

Syringed

Exposure to the open air has left A.L. Kennedy's ear feeling shy and wayward.

"Unisex Richard III isn't always what the occasion demands"

A. L. Kennedy is funny!