Katrina

Nothing much to say, only it's been much on my mind these past few weeks. The event itself is especially clearly marked in my mind because it was the week I moved into a rather desolate and lonely sublet year in Cambridge, Massachusetts; I felt unanchored there, but also shamed by the much more profound exodus I saw on television.

(That was the only year in adulthood that I've lived with broadcast television, and I am sure the scenes are more strongly seared onto my mind for that reason; I think I stayed calmer than many, during the months after 9/11, by dint of consuming news only through newspapers and a dial-up internet connection.)

Just sharing a few pieces (old and new) by friends more immediately affected than I was:

Alan Chin was on site taking photographs.

Phillip Dyess-Nugent wrote this piece about the friend we both lost in Katrina's long aftermath.

And a lovely song I can't listen to without tears flooding into my eyes, the inimitable Pete Sturman's "Wasn't Plannin' on Leavin'" - you can hear it at that link, don't miss it....

Upcoming

events:

At the next meeting of the Columbia University Cultural Memory Colloquium, on Monday, Sept. 26 at 6pm in 754 Schermerhorn Extension, Professor Jenny Davidson will present on the work of filmmaker Helen Hill. Helen Hill, experimental animator and handmade film advocate, was shot and killed in her home in New Orleans in January 2007. Her last film, completed posthumously by her husband Paul Gailiunas, is 'The Florestine Collection.' One Mardi Gras Day in New Orleans some years earlier, Hill found more than a hundred handmade dresses in trash bags on the curb; she set out to restore them and recover the story of the woman who had made them, a recently deceased African-American seamstress named Florestine Kinchen. Both the dresses and the footage were seriously damaged by Katrina; the completed film includes Helen's original silhouette, cut-out, and puppet animation, as well as flood-damaged and restored home movies. Three of Hill's films will be screened - 'Madame Winger Makes a Film' (9:29), 'Mouseholes' (7:40) and 'The Florestine Collection' (31:00) - followed by a discussion by Professor Davidson that will touch on questions about memorialization and the materiality of film, the persistence and contingency of archives and the imperatives of preservation in the wake of catastrophe.

On a totally different note, I'm speaking about my ABCs of the novel project at Columbia's Cafe Humanities on Monday, Oct. 17 at 6pm.

The joys of truffle-hunting

Phone calling zones as alternate states (via Bookforum).

"The e-book is yesterday's mass-market."

Great piece on Fiona McCarthy at the Guardian (link courtesy of my father) - I have Amazoned a copy of Last Curtsey...

I do not usually have cause to say this, but there is an absolutely delightful essay in the current issue of Eighteenth-Century Studies! (Also a very good review by Suzanne Keen of two particularly interesting recent books in eighteenth-century studies, Blakey Vermeule's Why Do We Care about Literary Characters? and Alan Richardson's The Neural Sublime.) This link will only work for Columbia affiliates, but hie thee to thine own local library website to read Patrick Spedding's really indispensable essay "'The New Machine': Discovering the Limits of ECCO." The abstract doesn't really do justice to the essay's delightfulness:

This essay explores some of the difficulties faced by eighteenth-century scholars when conducting research using scanned text-bases, particularly Eighteenth Century Collections Online (ECCO). It begins with an explanation of some of the general problems that face the users of all scanned text-bases. These problems are illustrated in an account of research undertaken into the history of the condom and its representation in eighteenth-century texts. The failure of ECCO searches to produce meaningful results brings these problems into sharp focus, but also suggests novel ways in which they may be overcome.

I am fascinated by these questions about ECCO, and anyone who regularly relies on searching OCR-produced databases has to read the whole essay; but it also has an excellent appendix of eighteenth-century references to condoms, of which I single out this one for your delectation:

White Kennett's Condom, a Poem (London, 1723) and "Armour: A Poem" (London, 1723) do not survive. The poem was reprinted in Cupid's Metamorphoses or, Love in All Shapes. Being the Second and Last Volume of the Poetical Works of Mr. William Pattison (London, 1728), 306–7: "Hear, and attend: In Armour's mighty Praise / I sing, for sure 'tis worthy of a Song. / … / Happy the Man, who in his Pocket keeps, / Whether with Green or Scarlet Ribband bound, / A well made C—— He, nor dreads the Ills / Of Shankers or Cordee, or Buboes Dire!"

Light reading catch-up to follow later in the day once I have done more unpacking - I got home late Wednesday night, but things were in relative disarray here and I had to wait till subletters finished getting stuff out Thursday evening before I could really think about putting anything away or getting things set up for my own purposes again. Had a great trip to the library on Thursday, though - got all sorts of good things (highlights include this and this and a whole host of other things to read to get ready to talk about Helen Hill's last film at the end of the month). Have also been luxuriating in the amazing lavishness of the Chelsea Piers Sports Center - it is not really the salient thing to single out, but the showers there are completely unbelievable (it seems unlikely that I will ever live in an apartment with this sort of style, but it is my fantasy one day to have a commodious shower room with a slate floor!)...

Johnny Cash ticket

I saw a fantastically good show earlier this evening; it was a small venue and a relatively little-known singer-songwriter, Pete Sturman at Dixon Place on the Lower East Side, but the quality of the material and the performance would have warranted filling a much larger venue.

Anyway, just a great catalog of songs, a very nice mix of the moving and the comical; the one that makes the tears run down my face (partly because I first heard it not long after our mutual friend Helen Hill died, indeed at her memorial, and because it so strongly makes me think of her, but also just because it is a very good song) is "Wasn't Plannin' on Leavin'". It is a good reminder, too, of the perfection of things on a small scale - this is what the popular song can do, no other genre or mode that I can think of does quite the same thing, it is very lovely and I wish I wrote and sang such things myself!

(Am actually very tempted to get one of the little electric ukeleles that guest performers Sonic Uke were playing...)

Light reading around the edges: Emma Donogue's Room (very good, surely justly deserved to be the huge bestseller it has been); Jennifer Egan's A Visit from the Goon Squad (engaging, memorable, it actually belonged in a talk I heard the other day only perhaps it has been written too recently to have made its way in). Curiously both books make something of the word contrail; I would say I had rarely seen this term in fiction, only of course the reason I noticed it in Egan was having just seen it foregrounded in Donoghue...

(I am trying to "read up" a lot of things I put on my Kindle and then didn't quite get to - seeking an "inbox zero"-type level of purity and cleanliness over there!)

The case of the green parrot

As soon as I heard of this book the other day, I knew I had to read it as soon as possible: I sent several emails, and due to the kindness of the author and her in-house publicist, I received an ARC several days later.

The book is Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead; it is at once rather divinely good and also exactly the sort of book I most like! Let's call it metaphysical noir and group it with two other favorites of mine, Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist and Victor LaValle's Big Machine. Oh, it was so good...

(The only trouble with books is that they take years to write and only a few hours to read, so that I know I won't be getting the next installment any time soon! But I can re-read this one when it comes out, there's a thought...)