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.

Sleeping in

I was so phenomenally tired last night that I accidentally fell asleep from 6pm to 9pm with the lights on and 2 cats sprawled beside me on the bed. Then I couldn't sleep till late, maybe 2am: but it was clear when the alarm went off at 8:45 that I was not really ready to get up, despite the pull of my beloved 10am spin class. Messaged the teacher to let her know I wouldn't be there, then went back to bed. It was the right choice - I feel much more functional now, and will go out for an easy 90-minute run in another hour or so (it is 40 degrees and sunny!).

Saw a very poor play by Brecht on Wednesday (not recommended, though there are some funny bits and the production's not bad); good grilled ham and cheese sandwich afterwards with G. at Linen Hall.

Saw an amazing film called The Unseen Sequence yesterday at Lincoln Center with friends. Particularly mesmerizing are the teaching sequences, but really the whole thing was incredibly worthwhile (and with some lovely music also). A treat afterwards - their friend who works at the Met gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes tour, including the "dome" (little box up at the very top above the chandelier) and the hydraulic lift - gigantic pistons! - used to bring up enormous scenery from the bowels of the complex to the stage. Then another grilled cheese sandwich, this time with tomato soup (I had rushed straight from a long morning meeting to the movie, it was 3:30 and I was dropping from fatigue and hunger!), at the Alice Tully cafe.

I am much enjoying this semester so far, but it has a very different work rhythm than my usual - the committee load is extremely heavy (it is fascinating work, though, and very well-suited to my inclinations and abilities - basically reading and synthesizing huge amounts of material across a wide range of fields), with deadlines on Wednesday morning for report-writing and Friday morning for the meeting itself, and my class is Thursday afternoon. Won't have much time for leisure reading, but it is a worthwhile tradeoff (confidentiality prevents me from linking to either of the 2 books I read this week, or to any of the four candidates for tenure we discussed at our meeting yesterday). The weekend feels more relaxed because of not teaching on Mondays, but I have to make it through to the end of the week intact, rather than collapsing happily on Wednesday evening when I am mostly done.

Light reading around the edges: a comfort reread of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals (can't remember now what reminded me of this - it is a book I read many many times as a child, I loved it, I practically know it by heart - but I bought this copy for B., who doesn't know it, and then couldn't resist rereading it myself first); and I am well dug in on Rebecca Mead's absolutely lovely My Life in Middlemarch, which is gloriously good. I have been thinking a lot about what books I want to write next, and I think I am on a Rebecca Mead-Geoff Dyer-Francis Spufford axis of writing about reading, though with more similarities I think to Spufford than to either of the other two....

Closing tabs

I am looking at an unprecedented semester in which I have so much other reading to do, I hardly have any time in the week for light reading!

One book that I do intend to read at the earliest possible juncture, though, is Rebecca Mead's My Life in Middlemarch, published today. Here is a very good interview at the Millions; she says exactly what I think, too, about the important distinction between literature and self-help:

TM: Where’s the line between self-help and literature? George Eliot, maybe more than most novelists, rather explicitly wanted to make her readers better. I admire how your book is not “How George Eliot Can Change Your Life In Seventeen Steps.” Where do you think that line is?

RM: I began with a piece in The New Yorker that was about the origin of this quotation — “It’s never too late to be what you might have been” — and I wanted to disprove that Eliot had said it. I didn’t disprove it, though I still don’t believe that she said it. When I started thinking about writing this book, I thought maybe I could do chapters based on twelve or thirteen things she did say. But I realized that this didn’t work at all, because that’s not how she works. When you separate what look like nuggets of wisdom from the text, they can make nice refrigerator magnets, but they’re just phrases. I think you have to read the whole book in order for it to make any real difference in your life. Because while you’re reading Middlemarch, you have the experience of empathy. You’re not simply told to be empathetic. You have your empathy shift from one character to another. And you have it change as you go back to the book over time, as most serious readers do. Middlemarch doesn’t tell you how to live, but reading Middlemarch, knowing Middlemarch, thinking about Middlemarch, helps you think about how to live for yourself. It’s a more demanding process than simply being told how to live.

Closing tabs:

Flight paths of fireflies.

Mole locomotion!

Wicked

Martin Amis reflects on the life and work of his stepmother Elizabeth Jane Howard. (Via Rebecca Mead, whose forthcoming book I am eagerly awaiting.)

I am thwarted - the Cazalet Chronicle is not available for Kindle, barring (impractically) the last volume! I will have to wait to read them till I am back in NYC; I have been meaning to for some time.

Lungs still full of junk, but sufficiently recovered for me to go to hot yoga today, which has had a massively cheering effect. I am going to spend the afternoon making a first pass through the typeset pages for my style book and thinking about the index. A day that includes hot yoga and this sort of work is a very good day indeed!