Data covered in cats

Twitter account details plotlines from unaired Season 8 of Star Trek: TNG. (Via Brent.)

NB this is clearly written out of same impulse that prompted the only short story I've written in adulthood! I should write another one like this sometime - many life stress problems would be largely solved if I could write shorter pieces instead of books primarily!

12/12/12

Final classes plus other school obligations plus day one of jury duty have absolutely flattened me. This is all I have to share!

Thanks to the kindness of the excellent Maggie Griffin, I saw the Jack Reacher movie on Monday night - highly enjoyable, though of course I will always much prefer the books. The urban audience is seized with hilarity whenever Tom Cruise has either banter or a fight scene!

Great lunch on Tuesday with Amazon publicity people. I'm really excited about what they're going to be able to do for the book. Galleys not quite ready yet, but I should have them soon.

Light reading around the edges: Attica Locke's superb Black Water Rising and J. Robert Lennon's Familiar, which I also enjoyed a good deal, though not perhaps as much as some other particular favorites in a similar vein (1Q84, Glimpses).

I haven't been able to become enthusiastic about the current season of Fringe, but perhaps I'll give it another go this evening. I am so tired that I can hardly see straight!

End-of-week update

These Seven Sicknesses, a.k.a. the Sophocles marathon at the Flea, was highly worthwhile: the treatment of the Oedipus plays seems a bit unstable on the farce-tragedy axis (and I thought the actor playing Oedipus was perhaps the weakest in the show, or at any rate his performance was too campy to be at all moving), but the middle segment of Philoctetes-Ajax is excellent (the Ajax staging is just superb, particularly the handling of the sheep scene) and the concluding pair of Electra-Antigone works very well also.

I finished reading A Dance with Dragons and all I can say is that I really do not see that George R. R. Martin will be able to wrap up the rest of the story in only one more volume, however long!  He is temperamentally averse to leaving anything out, and it leads to some frustrating choices in volumes four and five; my heart sank when I realized that the last volume was literally going to go back to the temporal starting point of the previous one and cover exactly the same time period, not to show a markedly divergent view but just to fill out some things that didn't fit in.  You then see a character you care about, who grew and changed over the previous installment, back in his pre-change version, and for no good reason; this strikes me as a fundamental breach of the compact with the reader, just as I dislike the playing-fast-and-loose-with-alternate-timestream thing that a certain television series I love has been indulging in: the sense of reality you have in television drama is thin enough that you cannot afford to erode it too far by, say, bringing back to life a character you have killed off in the alternate timestream by letting the space-time continuum shift and reconfigure everything. . . .

(You can get the first four installments of George R. R. Martin in a box or a bundle, but really what I recommend instead is Wolf Hall on the one end or Garth Nix's brilliant Abhorsen trilogy on the other.)

The due date is rapidly approaching for my ratings on second-round reading for the New York Public Library Young Lions Prize, so I won't be writing much here about what I'm reading over next few weeks (confidentiality!), and I'm also teaching Clarissa again this semester, which eats up quite a bit of reading time.  However there is always room for a little light reading round the edges...

Miscellaneous links:

Neil Gaiman on growing up reading C. S. Lewis, Tolkien and Chesterton.

And I'm giving a talk today at 4pm at the CUNY Graduate Center; I am just hoping it will stop raining to the extent that people will actually be willing to leave their dwellings and venture out into the world to come to it!

Air chrysalis

Dennis Lim's Bookforum piece on Haruki Murakami gives a good sense of why 1Q84 was my favorite novel of 2011....

Two moons

I think it is now really and truly the end of the semester: I was still finishing up little leftover bits of business this morning, but the way now seems to be clear towards novel revisions...

Read a lovely book the other night, Anna Goldsworthy's Piano Lessons: A Memoir.  It is fantastic, and this copy is now destined for my mother, who will love it at least as much as I did.  It makes me think now that sometime I should teach a seminar on pedagogy that would be constructed around this and other books that shed light on great teaching?  At any rate I will start trying to collect readings around that theme, and suggestions are welcome in comments or by email.

Main fact of last few days is that I have fallen hard into the amazing stream of words that is Haruki Murakami's 1Q84.  It is the perfect novel that I most want to read of all things in the world!  I bought a real copy of the book when it came out, as I figured it was the sort of thing I like to keep on the shelf after I've read it, but the physical book seemed so cumbersome (it is beautifully designed but hard to hold) that it went unread.  So I bought a second copy for Kindle (and IMO this is what publishers should be trying to do, i.e. sell bundled copies in multiple formats) and am completely and passionately smitten by it.  Alternate-universe fiction at its very best: I think it probably gets my vote for favorite novel of the year.

(Oh, yes, I think I read one other novel as well, a good recommendation from Maxine: Jussi Adler-Olson's Mercy a.k.a. - same book - The Keeper of Lost Causes.)

Took the plunge

and ordered tickets for Cycle 3 of the Ring Cycle at the Met - found a good friend who would do it with me, that was the clincher.  Who knows when I will have the chance again?  In a best-case scenario, it is a truly magical and transporting experience; in the worst-case scenario, parts of it are somewhat boring and it adds an onerous number of hours to a busy week, but I think there is no huge downside, it will be worthwhile whether or not I absolutely love it.

(Have uncharacteristically watched some hours of television this weekend - usually I only watch seasons of television on DVD with B. in Cayman, but we were very near the end of the third season of Fringe when we parted ways at the end of the Thanksgiving odyssey, it is a program which is very perfectly suited to my tastes, and my new laptop makes it very easy to watch videos from Amazon anywhere in my apartment - I watched the last three episodes of season 3 and then, regrettably, the first seven of season 4, which is as far as it now goes - am in horrible desiring limbo now of wanting all the rest of the season in one fell swoop, when really it will only be doled out WEEK BY UNREASONABLE WEEK over the rest of this year.  Anybody who has secret early access, tell me and get me in on it too!  Though I do observe, as always with this series, that they play overly fast and loose with the alternate universes: I feel that though high-quality television does a good job creating investment in characters over a season and its successors, the provision of too many alternates in this sort of a plot erodes general belief in and concern with the characters, to a sometimes problematic degree.)

Like minds

The latest xkcd echoes the opening of Charlie Stross's The Family Trade!

I spent the later part of the evening soliciting the soothing effects of the Jeeves Omnibus.

What I wish I were doing right now?

Things to look forward to in 2010!

I am tempted to link to the very gruesome stories about Peruvian murders for human fat, but will instead end on a happier note: pet duck rescued from overflow pipe by team of firefighters.

Stopping warlocks

At the LA Times, Ed Park asks Lev Grossman how he came to write his new novel The Magicians.

Also: the genesis of Charlie Williams' Stairway to Hell! (Worth going and reading if you have a fondness for secret histories, even if you do not plan to read the novel - though you should!)

The secret order of things

At the FT, George Pendle has a truly delightful piece on Mark Miodownik and his Materials Library (site registration required):

The Materials Library has no star chamber through which its materials must pass for inclusion. Other than those Miodownik and his staff track down themselves, each week they are sent a handful of parcels and envelopes holding the weird and wonderful. One week they were sent a lump of floating concrete. Another week, a dress made of parachute silk floated in. Through fellowships and grants from Nesta, the Engineering and Physical Sciences Research Council (EPSRC) and a host of other acronyms, Miodownik keeps his library alive. He is adamant about not commercialising it. “It’s such a narrow way of looking at materials. We don’t want to enslave them, we want to nurture them.”

And, half-joking: “Ask not what materials can do for you, but what you can do for materials.”

Commercialising would also mean streamlining. Miodownik estimates that barely 5 per cent of the materials in his library are also in Material ConneXion’s. “The Materials Library has a big tub of mercury in it,” he explains. “Now you’re never going to specify a product with mercury in it. It’s toxic. In fact everyone’s trying to get rid of mercury. But it should exist in a materials library, because it may give you an idea about something, it may embody some philosophical thought. It’s a physical embodiment of something in an Aristotelian way.

“I really don’t think [utility] is a criteria for having things in a university. The world is run by people who want things to be ‘useful’ and that’s great, but universities should be these places of awe and craziness – they shouldn’t be the ‘real’ world.”

Treacle Mine Road

British town 'twinned' with Discworld capital Ankh-Morpork - and a fuller account at the Independent.

(NB photo accompanying second story makes me feel I must adopt a more striking style of authorial dress.)