The drift from fiction

Geoff Dyer and others on the blurriness of the line between fact and fiction.

Closing tabs

I have been remiss in the matter of closing tabs! Partly because I have a draft blog post open that I haven't gotten around to finishing - this is unusual for me, mostly I just whip 'em off, but I am due a correction for a missing chapter's worth of endnotes that vanished from the style book, I pasted in the notes but need to add numbers and check carefully so that I am not piling error upon error. Partly because I am having what is basically an amazing writing and exercise retreat in Cayman, with many posts at my other blog and much typing of quota (it's not draft as such, more notes and thoughts, but it is accumulating at a fine rate - I am at about 18K and if I keep working steadily I should have gone through the whole novel before school starts, which is the idea - sometimes I can keep writing quota for some weeks into the semester, but this September I have two major triathlons and a brand new lecture course with a clutch of seminar leaders to work with, and it is not going to be sensible even to try!).

So:

Rebecca Mead on why it's silly to distinguish rigidly between reading for pleasure and reading for self-improvement, especially in adolescence.

A great interview with Coach Dave and his fiancee Megan, who have been burning up the trails this summer! It's the first time I've worked with a coach for quite a while, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.

Twin novelists: an interview with Lev and Austin Grossman.

David Gerrard on the badness of Geoff Dyer's most recent book.

Pratfalls

The piece Geoff Dyer filed from hospital. (Via Leo Carey.)

Geoff Dyer's stroke

As noted elsewhere, the most amazing thing was that he filed his New Republic copy.

The ambient years

Geoff Dyer exists in a vast and turbulent ocean of regret.

"It's an abominaccino!"

For some reason I haven't seen much to blog these last few days (it is never clear to me, except on August weekends when the news is genuinely slow, whether this is due to internal or external factors), but here are a few tabs to clear:

Ancient beehives; gladiator graveyards.

David Markson has died; thoughts and a links round-up from Sarah Weinman.

Thirteen writers and scientists name their favorite science books.

And I have saved the best for last - Geoff Dyer on discovering the perfect doughnut-and-cappuccino combination! It was National Doughnut Day on Friday, and I consider it a minor miracle that I resisted the temptation to obtain and consume one. NB the kind that Dyer mentions are indeed pretty much the best I have ever tasted - they have them at my local branch of Oren's Daily Roast - but I am surprised that he does not mention the fact that they can be obtained from the actual Doughnut Plant on the Lower East Side.

4 more Mondays

I teach Mondays and Wednesdays this semester, but Monday is my heavy day: so, four more Mondays and then (it is a strange thought - I have a sabbatical coming up!) I will not teach again until January 2011; I would guess I can scrape through the next four weeks somehow?!?

Light reading around the edges: three books of true excellence, and all (curiously) very much the sort of thing I would have liked to write myself in a slightly alternate life: Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, which is so funny I was actually regularly laughing out loud as I read it but which makes me also fairly glad I do not live in Geoff Dyer's head (but I am certainly now going to read D. H. Lawrence's book on Thomas Hardy, which David Bromwich was also praising recently); Denise Mina's The Dead Hour, which I do not know why I did not read much sooner (it has been hanging around here for some time, I have loved her previous books - especially the Garnethill trilogy - but had a spate a year or two ago of going slightly off crime fiction - however, it was a happy find on the shelf as I bounced off the walls Friday night with exhaustion and the mental insanity of mid-November in a very busy fall semester); and Daryl Gregory's Pandemonium, which is absolutely the sort of book I most perfectly love and wish I could write, only I am having - not a midlife crisis - a midlife acknowledgment that I will never write the books of Dick Francis, Lee Child, Charlie Huston, Mary Stewart, Charlaine Harris or indeed for that matter Daryl Gregory (the list is quite long, and includes my best-beloved practitioners of the Light Reading genre, with or without demons/vampires/zombies) - I highly recommend it, though...