Closing tabs

Just a few, in preparation for travel to Cayman and I HOPE some writing (it has not been a productive month for me, due mostly I think to factors beyond my control but also to the fact that it is very difficult to sustain full-on sabbaticalage over the entire 18 months that you get if you have a full school year and both summers). More realistic will be to make a detailed but modest list of ALL THINGS THAT MUST BE DONE BY THE END OF AUGUST (including updating fall semester syllabi and making the new syllabus for my spring-semester course in Paris so that we can get it cleared with the Committee on Instruction and have course book information in advance of the relevant dates) and then proceed to tick them off as I can. But I will be happier if I write some Gibbon pages as well....

Madame Bovary's wedding cake. (I am surprised by the negative orientation towards this sort of patisserie, I am a wholehearted fan!)

On a related note, I am still meaning to stop in and get a look at this. I think I have missed my chance to see the ballet....

Favorite items at the Houghton Library.

Subway maps compared to their actual geography

Watch the movements of every refugee on earth since the year 2000

J.G. Ballard, "The Index"!

Michel Houellebecq is not easy to interview

"There is no empirical reason for his gloomy attitude"

At the WSJ, Liesl Schillinger on why Knausgaard can't stop writing:

To heighten the stakes and to increase Knausgaard’s resolve, his publisher at Oktober suggested he produce the book serially, “as Dickens did,” one short volume a month, then rerelease them as a single, 1,500-page magnum opus. Knausgaard thought the idea was “fantastic.” If he missed a single deadline, he would be publicly shamed, at least in his own mind. “The risk factor was very important,” he says. “I couldn’t say, ‘I need more time.’ If you have to do it in eight weeks, you can’t care about the writing or composition; anything goes. It’s a way of making yourself free.” However, once the terror of falling behind on his deadlines had liberated him, Knausgaard wrote so many pages so quickly that he and his editor, Geir Gulliksen, realized a new format had to be devised. They and Oktober’s then-CEO, Berdahl, announced that they would publish six full-length novels, back to back: And thus, My Struggle was born. Fed up with the artifice of fiction, Knausgaard decided to use actual names and events to the greatest extent possible. “I felt like I never said what I really meant to anyone; I was trying to please everybody. I felt like a coward, and I wanted to break out of all of that.”

(Nice shot of Elaine Scarry's book The Body in Pain in one of the photos!) Here was Knausgaard at the NYTBR on reading Michel Houellebecq's latest novel.