Busy week, somehow. And excessively cold! My lungs are ready for spring.
I enjoyed many of the pieces in MFA vs. NYC, but Alexander Chee's essay was by far my favorite. Leslie Jamison's account of the book is good (via Chloe S.) - I have a review of Jamison's forthcoming essay collection in the next Bookforum, the book's a must-read if you are interested in the contemporary essay or the question of pain, female or otherwise.
Other light reading around the edges: two absolutely delightful young-adult fantasy novels by Sarah Rees Brennan, Unspoken and Untold. These books are perfectly to my taste (they would make a very good television series also) - only I have to wait until September for the next installment!
Stage Kiss at Playwrights Horizons is one of the funniest plays I have seen for a long time - especially in the first half, I was actually laughing uncontrollably out loud. (It was a matinee, so no outright feasting afterwards, but we did have a piece of pie at the diner next door - cherry for me, apple for G.) Between that and Antony and Cleopatra, it was a good weekend for theatergoing. Seeing No Exit tonight at the Pearl; 7pm curtain + short play = more realistic than serious mid-evening theatergoing for a school night.
Closing tabs:
Andrew Solomon on having the demons of depression exorcised - literally.
The inimitable Cintra Wilson watches the Oscars.
Excited about blurbs accumulating for my style book - official publication date is June, but I should have some copies by the end of May.
Last but not least, trilobite! (Time to reread Richard Fortey's book, I think.)
Showing posts with label Andrew Solomon. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Andrew Solomon. Show all posts
Tuesday, March 04, 2014
Monday, September 24, 2012
Closing tabs
Very tired! Mondays are demanding; it is my preference to schedule
it that way, but it leaves me somewhat flattened at the start of the
week....
Saw a couple of plays at the end of last week, both quite enjoyable: Job, at the Flea (actually the Book of Job was one of two things I taught in Lit Hum that made me want to write some kind of adaptation, the other of course being The Bacchae - Richardson's Clarissa is a take on Job...); An Enemy of the People, in a new adaptation.
Went to Philadelphia on Saturday to eat cake in honor of my niece's third birthday.
Read and taught Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden and Madame Bovary.
Did a lot of exercise here and there (great running weather!) and read a few novels on the side: one more Peter James novel (it was very affordable and there are a lot of them, but I do not think I will read any more, they have a curious air of unreality despite being seemingly well researched); an excellent crime novel called The Eyes of Lira Kazan; the first half of Victor Lavalle's The Devil in Silver, which begins with a sequence that makes me wonder whether it is possible that Lavalle is as obsessed with Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels as I am (I will finish it later in the week when I'm less tired, but it's strangely flat in the writing, and it's not gripping me hard like his last novel did). Now immersed in Arnaldur Indridason's Outrage, which I will finish reading later this evening once I detach from the computer.
During a quiet office hours this afternoon, I read a couple fascinating chapters in Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree (I was tipped off that Nico features in the chapter on prodigies, and couldn't resist obtaining to read at my earliest convenience); interesting stuff, from a writer I much admire. Another book I'm looking forward to rereading in its final version is my friend Marco Roth's The Scientists, which I couldn't put down when I saw it in manuscript.
Other links of interest:
Jessamyn West on how not to write about libraries.
Teju Cole on the trouble with Instagram (includes immortal line "your pug wasn't born in 1979"!).
Charlie Jane Anders on the possibility that science fiction might bring back the epistolary novel.
Levi Stahl on what is possibly my most-favorite novel of all time.
Saw a couple of plays at the end of last week, both quite enjoyable: Job, at the Flea (actually the Book of Job was one of two things I taught in Lit Hum that made me want to write some kind of adaptation, the other of course being The Bacchae - Richardson's Clarissa is a take on Job...); An Enemy of the People, in a new adaptation.
Went to Philadelphia on Saturday to eat cake in honor of my niece's third birthday.
Read and taught Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden and Madame Bovary.
Did a lot of exercise here and there (great running weather!) and read a few novels on the side: one more Peter James novel (it was very affordable and there are a lot of them, but I do not think I will read any more, they have a curious air of unreality despite being seemingly well researched); an excellent crime novel called The Eyes of Lira Kazan; the first half of Victor Lavalle's The Devil in Silver, which begins with a sequence that makes me wonder whether it is possible that Lavalle is as obsessed with Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels as I am (I will finish it later in the week when I'm less tired, but it's strangely flat in the writing, and it's not gripping me hard like his last novel did). Now immersed in Arnaldur Indridason's Outrage, which I will finish reading later this evening once I detach from the computer.
During a quiet office hours this afternoon, I read a couple fascinating chapters in Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree (I was tipped off that Nico features in the chapter on prodigies, and couldn't resist obtaining to read at my earliest convenience); interesting stuff, from a writer I much admire. Another book I'm looking forward to rereading in its final version is my friend Marco Roth's The Scientists, which I couldn't put down when I saw it in manuscript.
Other links of interest:
Jessamyn West on how not to write about libraries.
Teju Cole on the trouble with Instagram (includes immortal line "your pug wasn't born in 1979"!).
Charlie Jane Anders on the possibility that science fiction might bring back the epistolary novel.
Levi Stahl on what is possibly my most-favorite novel of all time.
Saturday, June 04, 2011
Friday, August 27, 2010
A kind of static
Via Bookforum, a very good piece in the Yale alumni magazine by Andrew Solomon on his college friend Terry Kirk's suicide:
Depression is a disease of loneliness, and the privacy of a depressed person is not a dignity; it is a prison. Therapists can be perilously naïve about this. Marcello and all of us who loved Terry were locked out by the same privacy that kept him locked in. Privacy is a fashionable value in the twenty-first century, an overrated and often destructive one; it was Terry’s gravest misfortune. The unknowable in him, which I thought was just a kind of static, was actually his heart.
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