Closing tabs

Brent Cox on William Gibson. (Via Alice.)

"We know when Dzhokhar Tsarnaev sleeps." (Via James Bridle.)

The shape of careers?

Eggs will pop soon!

At the intersection of my two blogs, but I found this post by Gordo Byrn thought-provoking. He lays out a minimal base fitness schedule that will let you do something crazy in triathlon after twelve weeks of training without wrecking yourself (2 x 20min strength, 3 runs at shorter of 5mi or 1hr, 3 bikes at 2 x 45 and 1 x 75, 3 swims at shorter of 1350 yards or 25min, for a total of a little over seven hours per week); I think there are close analogies in literary matters, which is to say that you need to do a certain amount of reading and writing every day and every week if you want to be able to call upon all your powers of composition intensely over a more sustained period of time - but huge output over the whole of life is not sustainable, and comes at the cost of too many other things. Worthwhile to think of maintaining base writing fitness even through times when a big writing project can't be a priority.

The anternet and other wonders

I had the Mondrian cake on my Facebook page the other day, but here's a much fuller account by the cake's creator Caitlin Freeman of the art cake enterprise...

If you find yourself in Chelsea, make sure to go and see Julian Hoeber's amazing and truly queasiness-inducing gravitational mystery spot!

A charming link whose tab I haven't been able to bring myself to close. (Courtesy of B.)

Taught my first class yesterday, got another first class meeting on Monday and then things are really properly underway; in the meantime I've mostly just been having a pretty quiet week and gearing up mentally for Sunday's big race.

All I could persuade myself to do over the weekend, other than exercise, was reread the selected works of Lee Child!

I have read the early ones too many times already to revisit them again now, but a mere one or two previous reads leaves pleasure still to be leached, so I devoured Without Fail, The Enemy and Bad Luck and Trouble (I especially love the installments that fill in Reacherian backstory). Then I mourned the loss of Dick Francis and the fact that there is only a finite number of books in the Francis and Child canons, and new Reacher installments cannot come fast enough to sate the monster.

Then I read Charlie Stross's The Fuller Memorandum, which I felt was the book already on my Kindle most likely to scratch the Jack Reacher itch (it did, very enjoyably so - not that they are at all similar in tone or style, but Stross's Laundry books, like the Reacher novels, represent the pinnacle of light reading!).

Then I happily realized that Gwenda Bond's Blackwood, a modern-day YA novel about the occult history of the Roanoke disappearance, was now officially published; I loved it, and it was a particular pleasure to read a novel by someone whose blog I've been reading and enjoying since the very early days of literary blogging. It definitely had something of the feel of my favorite Margaret Mahy novel The Changeover; both main characters and geographical settings are especially well rendered.

It is possible that I will revisit the Reacher barrel and dig out a couple more that I can stand to reread....

Primary colors

You are what you eat!

"Pogos"

Artist may have chosen wrong ant species to test anti-fast-food hypothesis (the story is by Sheila Prakash for the New York Times):

Dr. Michael S. Engel, a paleontologist and entomologist at the University of Kansas and a co-author, with David Grimaldi, of the sweeping book “Evolution of the Insects,” said the exhibit sounded fascinating but added, “If I had to toss in a particular group of ants into an enclosure to see how well they were going to thrive off of junk food, I’d throw in generalist carnivores and omnivores like army ants.”

Pogonomyrmex, or “Pogos,” as they are affectionately known in the trade, are more selective eaters. Though mostly granivores, Pogonomyrmex badius workers will sometimes patrol for dead insects and termites to bring to the colony after a desert rain.

At the gallery last week, many of the ants were dead. A few looked disoriented. This exhibit lacks a queen and brood, so the workers are leading a life devoid of its fundamental purpose.

"This is great, Ed"

Also at the Science Times, Nicholas Wade interviews E. O. Wilson:

Over lunch he describes his novel in progress, currently titled “Anthill.” Its contents have occasioned certain differences of emphasis between himself and his publisher, even though it was his editor at Norton, Robert Weil, who suggested he write it. Dr. Wilson would like ants to play a large role in the novel, given all the useful lessons that can be drawn from their behavior. The publisher sees a larger role for people and a smaller, at most ant-sized, role for ants. The novel is rotating through draft after draft as this tension is worked out.

Dr. Wilson has won two Pulitzer Prizes for literature, but that is no shield against a publisher’s quest for perfection. “They said, ‘You can do better than that, Ed,’ ” he recalled. “I wrote another draft. They said, ‘This is great, Ed, but we need more emotion, ambivalence.’ ” In the next draft, he plans to have the human characters stand alone, without the ants if necessary.

I must confess that I am curious to read the ant-heavy version! I always think of those great scenes in The Once and Future King...