Space tourism

Drinking whisky in space.

The sorrows of gin

My former student Siobhan Phillips on women and the gin market.

Fluff

The distillery cat tradition.

Catch-up

My mother was commiserating with me on the telephone about my self-proclaimed lack of time this semester for light reading, but I had to allow as how I'd read a few books over the weekend (this was last week), which made her laugh and observe that really if the day comes that I do not have time for light reading, it is only because I am dead! Have spent spare moments and late nights over the past week devouring volumes one through four of Elizabeth Jane Howard's Cazalet Chronicle. Have just bought the final volume for Kindle (the first four I had to gather through BorrowDirect and library - it is a pity they are not available as an electronic bundle).

Tessa Hadley's LRB piece seems to me right, but perhaps understates the pure enjoyable readability of the novels taken as a sequence: I would compare them slightly unfavorably on the one hand to Sybille Bedford and Rebecca West, and on the other to series-novel geniuses like Susan Howatch (the Church of England books, not the earlier ones which are much less interesting to me) or Dorothy Dunnett, and yet this is really not fair insofar as they are really providing one of the most immersive and enjoyable reading experiences I have had for years.

Good cultural bits: heard a very lovely recital by pianist Simon Mulligan the other day at the Morgan Library (it is not my canon, but I forgot how beautiful the shimmery bits of Ravel are when played really well, and the Schumann fantasies are perfect - capped, enjoyably, by Speckled Hen at the Shakespeare); and my friend Toni Schlesinger's captivating Mystery of Pearl Street at Dixon Place (dinner after with G. - steak frites, deliciously - at Jacques).

Very busy week of work upcoming, but I am thoroughly enjoying this semester: the reading and thinking for my big committee are stimulating (the other demanding committee I'm on, attempting to reconceive the basic science requirement in Columbia's Core, also very interesting), and my solitary seminar is super-fun (Robinson Crusoe last week, Gulliver's Travels this Thursday).

Having a hard time fitting in quite enough exercise, but hoping to do better as the days get warmer and longer (saw asthma doc last week and he is pretty clear, which really I know intuitively, that if you have exercise-induced asthma it is a bad idea to exercise outdoors in temperatures below freezing - I am hoping to have a bit of a run on the indoor track at Chelsea Piers tomorrow afternoon).

End-of-the-week news

Phenomenally tired; must buckle down and do one more hour of reading before bed. What I don't have but would like: parabolic sherry!

The Spouter-Inn

A ravishing paragraph from the early pages of Moby Dick:

Abominable are the tumblers into which he pours his poison. Though true cylinders without--within, the villanous green goggling glasses deceitfully tapered downwards to a cheating bottom. Parallel meridians rudely pecked into the glass, surround these footpads' goblets. Fill to this mark, and your charge is but a penny; to this a penny more; and so on to the full glass--the Cape Horn measure, which you may gulph down for a shilling.

This is the first time I have reread this novel since reading Harry Stephen Keeler - Keeler's style is peculiarly Melvillean, I wonder whether there is some line of influence that can be clearly traced.

Sometimes sabbatical time can be quite stressful - there are a lot of pressures, internal and external, to write books! - but this semester is a sort of "bonus," time I wasn't expecting to get: a function of the mysterious TFRP (I have declined the money option for a few years, but didn't realize leave would accrue so quickly, and it doesn't affect my regular sabbatical accrual - I have another semester coming to me in the academic year 2015-16, even if I don't apply for outside funding to get a second semester).

One book is completely done, and the other just needs a couple weeks of work to be effectively finished also. I intend, luxuriously, to spend a great deal of time this semester doing early stages of reading for the ABCs of the novel project! My intention for this book is to take it in a truly leisurely fashion: anxiety is my spur and my vice, and I feel it can be seen in the pages of the books I've written thus far. This one is going to be for the ages!

Also I'm doing hot yoga every day, and finding it highly beneficial for mental and physical health....

Movie music

I had to stock up on cough drops, but Rheingold was appealingly vulgar and very watchable.  And as L. said, the machine hardly creaks at all...

Grumpy at lung ailment and not having run for a week, but I am on the mend, I think tomorrow will mark a return to full-on exercise.

Also: mother's ruin!  (Via Sarang.)

Endurance

Replicating the Shackleton spirit.

I had a good moment in the stacks today: I'd gone in to get this so that I could check a couple of quotations in the proofs of my Shakespeare adaptation essay.  My eye wandered (it is the argument for open stacks) down the shelf and I spotted a book I have often heard about but never read, The Girlhood of Shakespeare's Heroines.  It is too fragile to pack to take with me, but I am very curious to read some of it.  (Also: disambiguation!)

I've been working steadily albeit in a small way every day on novel revisions, and it's interesting to see how it's coming together.  Confession: desperate situations call for desperate remedies, and I did have to break out the device one day to liberate myself from the internet...

My alarm's set for 5:30am, and my flight to Cayman leaves at 8:45 from JFK.  Apartment is clean and tidy for the catsitter.  Only pity is that it is currently such nice running weather here!

Sparkling things

A taste of the eighteenth century?

"Like a long fat leech"

At More Intelligent Life, Tom Shone considers what happens when novelists sober up. (Courtesy of The Rumpus.)