Catch-up

Clawing my way back to where I should be. Two nights in a row of twelve-hour sleep were highly beneficial: I sat down this afternoon and wrote comments on a dozen student assignments without it seeming like an intolerable effort of will. My inability to do even a single one on Wednesday morning really just told me that I was down to the absolute dregs! That's less than a quarter of the total number I need to comment on for Monday, but it's a good start, and I read a dissertation draft that I've been remiss with - still need to type up comments, but it is a relief to be finally making headway.

(The allergy doctor yesterday clucked with disapproval at the sound of my cough, and took out her stethoscope; she tells me what I knew already, that my lungs are "full up," bronchitis not asthma, and that the only treatment for viral bronchitis is to take an expectorant - Mucinex! - and drink lots of water. I was hoping to exercise today, but it didn't really make sense - tomorrow I will have a stab at something easy and see how it goes. Painful psychological deprivation - all I want is to be running and/or doing hot yoga!)

Seeing Betrayal tomorrow afternoon with a former professor of mine who has an extra ticket. Did finish and send that Bookforum review yesterday, though I am awaiting its return with trepidation as I suspect it is in need of considerable fixing-up!

Starting Tom Jones on Monday, which is fun (I find it easiest when teaching to dig in on a longish book and then just proceed through it in chunks - it requires much less attention than starting a new text or author almost every lecture); and Sentimental Journey on Tuesday, also very good fun to teach. A dissertation defense Wednesday morning early, and then B. arrives Wednesday evening for a 10-day visit!

I am possibly slightly in denial about the fact that the season of letters of recommendation is hard upon us - I have four I think I need to do this weekend, with others looming. Need to start doing daily meditation again - I got out of the habit in August, as I was doing so many training hours & it has some of the same benefits, but really it is very worthwhile, I need to get it back in the mix.

Light reading around the edges: Sara Ryan's amazing graphic novel Bad Houses; Arnaldur Indridason's Black Skies, which gave me a terrible pang of missing my friend Maxine Clarke, who loved these books and all their ilk; and Alex Marwood, The Wicked Girls (some wild implausibilities, but really very good, very gripping, very much the kind of novel I like to read). Close to the end of Pelecanos's latest, The Double; will finish it in bed now and hope for an early night.

Light reading catch-up

Really I have been too busy to have much time for novel-reading, it is the way of the beginning of the semester, and in fact the next 4 weeks now look slightly dauntingly overscheduled. Have squeezed in a few things round the edges: Laurie King's latest installment about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, The Pirate King; George Pelecanos's The Cut. I had a really wonderful collection of pieces by Mark Kingwell sent to me as PDFs: I'm not sure if this link is subscriber-only, but the Fukuyama takedown in the August issue of Harper's was especially delightful to me (it is rare that the stars come into alignment for this sort of piece to be so good - Mark is supremely intelligent but also essentially kind-hearted rather than vicious, and Fukuyama is so eminent and to some extent so distinctly above the fray that there is none of the usual worry I experience reading this sort of piece about its subject might feel!), and I was also very tickled by his piece "As It Were," on the metaphysics and ethics of fiction (I think it's in this collection?).

Haven't gone to any more plays (got an Ionesco on the slate for next week, though), but though lavish restaurant-eating without prefatory theatergoing seems somewhat immoral, I was treated to a very lovely lunch yesterday at Petrossian by my friend and former student Julia Hoban.

I promised thoughts on the style of Daniel Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy, which I enjoyed a good deal. (It also made me wonder why I hadn't thought to put Chester Himes into my style book - I was incredibly taken with Himes about ten years ago, I should look back and see if there's anything that I could grab there to add and round things out.) I really love noir in all of its literary incarnations, the stripped-down kind as well as the baroque (Megan Abbott is another good example I have come across recently), and Woodrell's sentences are arresting, over-the-top in a way that spins from one end of the spectrum to the other:

They took a table in the back, far removed from the other customers. The Catfish drew a decent lunch business but it was still too early for the legitimately hungry to appear, so the few tables of customers were made up of unemployed, but entrepreneurial, young men, as well as the diurnal conventions of phlegmatic tipplers.

The benefits of racquetball and modest weight training gave her arms a fetching versatility of attitude.

Tip Shade was a jumbo package of pock-faced bruiser, with long brown hair greased behind his ears, hanging to his shoulders. His eyes were of a common but unnamed brown hue. He tended to scowl by reflex and grunt in response. His neck was a holdover from some normal-necked person's nightmare, and when he crossed his arms it looked like two large snakes procreating a third.

And here is Woodrell in retrospection: "My love for pulp and for other forms of fiction seems obvious on every page. I was and am much taken with the sort of language that can hold high and low expression in the same sentence. Rough and refined."

And I read one other very good book too, now that I think of it: the near-final draft of a friend's memoir, forthcoming next year. I opened the file on my Kindle intending just to read a little bit of it last night, but I ended up staying up till it was done!