Fractions

It has been an extremely busy week, and I haven't yet started my end-of-semester grading, though I think it shouldn't take too long. It will be the middle of next week at the earliest, I would guess, before I can do any of my own work.

Have had some pleasurable distractions in spite of pressures of work. On Monday night, saw my friend Elliot Thomson's little gem of a comedy (he and actor Peter Hirsch call it his "Faberge egg roll"), Le Refuge.

Last night I met up with G. for the highly enjoyable Le Jazz Hot. The documentary joining-together bits are a little amateurish, though the footage is interesting, but the musicians are superb: I would definitely go and see them again. (The Anderson brothers are twins, and I was strongly reminded of my own twin brothers by the way each referred to the other as "my brother"!) Extremely delicious dinner afterwards at Bottega del Vino; I had beef carpaccio and spinach gnocchi before confirming my previous impression that this restaurant serves the best tiramisu in New York.

Closing tabs:

Colin Wilson is dead. Ritual in the Dark is more an artifact of its time than a great novel, I think, but it's a fascinating phenomenon, that mid-century period of British occultism. You get a bit of it in Jonathan Coe's B. S. Johnson biography - I don't think there's a Wilson biography, but there should be.

Teju Cole on truth and reconciliation in South Africa and elsewhere.

Light reading around the edges: several more Eva Ibbotson comfort re-reads; Charlie Williams' excellently titled Love Will Tear Us Apart; Michael Connelly's The Gods of Guilt (the plot is too intricate and the characters too shallow, but fairly readable regardless); Paul Cornell's London Falling, which is so exactly the sort of book that I like to read that I fell into a psychological slump when I came to the end and realized the next installment hasn't yet been published; and Laini Taylor's really delightful novella Night of Cake and Puppets (more books should have the word "cake" in their titles). I am contemplating a resolution for 2014 to read more nonfiction - one does occasionally, especially when reading something like the Connelly, get the feeling that the brain will rot on a diet of so much pap - but I would have to reserve the right to consume a good deal of light reading regardless, perhaps just not the fodder-level books.