Week of culture!

Too many evenings out this week - I really do better when I have a lot of time at home with books and cats! That said, I saw the most amazing set of things this week.

Hedwig and the Angry Inch is completely captivating - I endorse Ben Brantley's rave for the Times.

Hearing Nico, Sam and Nadia perform "The Only Tune" live at Carnegie Hall was absolutely exhilarating (it is the most transcendently beautiful piece of music, both in its composition and in its remarkable instantiation through Sam's amazing voice); bonus for the evening was some stuff I really liked and didn't know at all in the form of The Uncluded, a collaboration between Kimya Dawson and Aesop Rock (here is one of my particular favorites - I have to say, I feel like this song could have been written by me, and it is certainly the best song about candy that I can think of - "the other good news is an apple Jolly Rancher"!).

Then last night I saw the most amazing film, not quite like anything I've seen before but in another sense perfectly the kind of thing I most like - my old friend Sean Gullette's feature debut Traitors, which was showing at the Tribeca Film Festival. Gripping female noir, a thriller with a mesmerizing protagonist and the most beautiful visuals and soundscapes - really exceptional. I feel very lucky I am in a position to see so many longtime friends making the most incredible stuff!

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges of a very busy week: Laini Taylor's conclusion to her Smoke and Bone trilogy, Dreams of Gods and Monsters (now I want to go back and reread the whole thing in one swoop); Diana Wynne Jones and Ursula Jones, The Islands of Chaldea. Also, Shirley Hazzard's novel The Great Fire, which for some reason I have never read although I think I remember seeing the paperback on my mother's shelf. It is very good, only it makes me extremely glad that given I am stuck being female, I am living in the English-speaking world in 2014 rather than the late 1940s!

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.

Things you love

A great writing exercise from Laini Taylor, via Sara Ryan (whose lovely YA novel Empress of the World has just been reissued):

Do this exercise where you freewrite about the book you would write. (“Writing about” is so much easier than “writing”.) Don’t just describe the plot. Try to get at the feeling of it too, the mood and atmosphere. Be fanciful. You won’t have to abide by this, it’s just an exercise. Think about this too: imagine you are browsing in a bookstore or library, reading flap copy. You’ve had this happen before, you read flap copy that makes your heartbeat speed up, your mind brightens. This book is what you want, it is full of things you love, that fascinate you. You can’t wait to read it. What are those things? Come up with your own ideas that will speed up your heart and brighten your mind.

Only one novel of mine was written at all under this sort of sign - The Explosionist. My first novel was the book I felt compelled to write rather than the book I felt huge desire to read, and it was a strange and exciting feeling when I realized - after perusing the shelves of the Bank Street Bookstore to see whether anything else had come out that could reproduce the thrill for me of Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials trilogy and Garth Nix's Abhorsen books - that if the book I most wanted to read didn't yet exist, I had to write it!

The new novel has not been written under exactly that sign - it was more a compulsion to tell a story that would capture some of the intellectual charisma of the theory and practice of role-playing games, plus longterm desire to write something that reimagines The Bacchae. Then when I was revising, I kept on saying to myself, "I just need to make this world as much a one that readers want to enter as I feel about the world of Fringe...."