Upcoming

Interesting conference on British women's history coming up at Columbia on Feb. 8-9. More details here. And on a related note, I am very keen to read this book!

Having a morning of work catch-up (administrative rather than writing), but will go to this yoga workshop at 10. It has truly been spa month!

Also: this is an idea of genius. Unfortunately I don't use gmail (I run Thunderbird as my main program, but the web-based option is the hopelessly out-of-date Cubmail) - I have to see if I can get transferred to Lionmail....

Table to table

Colm Tóibín is a person of great virtue!  Here's a bit of the interview I especially liked:

These CDs (pictured) are all different recordings of A German Requiem. But I'm not allowed to listen to any of them until I finish the novel I'm working on – I started it in April 2000. There will be a moment at the end of the novel where the woman will say, 'I'm going to sing in A German Requiem.' I haven't written that scene yet and until I do, I can't listen to my CDs. Everywhere I go I find another recording of A German Requiem and I have them piled up as a warning to myself: get on with your work.

Mystery cheats anonymous

Quota seemed as though it might fall victim to the false sense of accomplishment that comes from doing a ninety-minute treadmill run, but in the end it did get produced: c. 1,100 words, for a total of 15,234 words....

A good link: Music Machinery on what the Kindle might tell Amazon about how we're reading!

Chicken chicken

From Liz Leyden's NYT piece about 'farm camp':

As the campers worked, Ms. Small spotted a hen whose beak dripped with yolk. She explained that once a chicken tastes a yolk it will start cracking every egg it finds.

“You can never cure a chicken of being an egg eater,” she said, separating the chicken from the group. “Sorry, my dear.”

Boxes, bags, bundles

At the Washington Post, an extremely moving piece by Michael Rosenwald about how difficult he finds it to throw anything away. (Via Tyler Cowen)

Musing

For a few weeks in January, I was almost certain that for the first time since c. 1996 or so I was only going to be working on one book this year.

Alas, it does not seem temperamentally feasible - the bread and butter of the novel book is an ambitious project that must be executed thoughtfully and slowly over the process of a few years, it will need to be complemented by a little book that I (no doubt wildly unrealistically) feel I might be able to dash off in a matter of weeks - a little book on style in which I pretty much just write exactly what I taught in my lecture class this fall!

I would like to get it out there more widely, that is the thing, it is the fruit of much reading and many years of thought on the matter of sentences and voice in the novel, it is a pity not to transform it into something that will sit on bookshelves here and there...

Brain food

"Nutritious brains"!

Squeak!

Went with my Clarissa students to see Quartett at BAM this evening. Some lovely moments: Isabel Huppert is a sight to behold, and I am fascinated by this notion of transforming Laclos's portrait of eighteenth-century libertinism for the modern stage (but can it really be that Heiner Müller never finished reading the whole of Dangerous Liaisons, as the program suggests? It is not a long novel!). But I found the music utterly awful. Embarrassingly awful! That spells ruination for the production as a whole, since it so much depends on the successful evocation of a sensibility.

(The only other Robert Wilson production I have seen, also at BAM, was much more effective - it was the 2002 Woyzeck - what was happening on stage was quite similar, and Isabel H. is the superior actor, quite mesmerizing at moments - but the Tom Waits music, performed live by a real orchestra, was so lovely in that case that it really brought the whole thing to life for me in a way that worked. The techno moments in this current production really made me squirm, but more generally even the snippets of classical stuff seem banal and thinly imagined - live music, for me, would have made a huge difference, as what was happening on stage was highly watchable, and the language and concept are engaging.)

I have hardly read any books recently! Or, rephrased, I am reading a lot for work stuff and between that and the Worm Triathlon's brain-tunneling effects plus marathon training obsessions, there has not been a lot of Light Reading going on round here. Sebastian Faulks's A Week in December was slight, a disappointment to me as I really loved his last one; William Boyd's Ordinary Thunderstorms was better (and tapped into standard academic's fantasy of walking away from current life for something completely different and under the radar), but not his best. My Columbia colleage Mark Taylor's Field Notes from Elsewhere: Reflections on Living and Dying is an unusual and interesting book that really caught my attention, despite the fact that I am not its ideal audience (too pragmatic, more on the ethical and less on the metaphysical/existential end of intellectual pondering).

There is a passage on idleness that particularly resonated, and that I will share here (I was going to say "that I will share when I am less fatigued," but in fact it is precisely the things that make the passage speak to me that mean I am now unable not to transcribe it given that I have mentioned it!):

Nothing is harder for me to do than nothing. The issue is not merely psychological -- it is metaphysical, ethical, even religious. I guess my problem with doing nothing shows how deeply Protestant I remain. I have never been able to forget my grandmother's severe warning to me when I was a child: "Idleness is the devil's workshop." For her the idle person was not merely lazy but shiftless, useless, worthless. As the work of the devil, idleness, I was taught, is sin and sin, of course, breeds guilt. Even today I never feel more guilty than when I am doing nothing. I doubt I will ever completely overcome this sense of guilt and, indeed, sometimes I'm not even sure I want to do so.

What makes idleness so dangerous and thus so tempting is its purposelessness. Idleness, like play, has no end other than itself. If you can explain why you are idle, you are not idling. Redemption from this sin, my grandmother drilled into me, comes from work. That is why she always kept me busy--sometimes working, sometimes playing, or what she thought was playing. The problem was that my grandmother never really understood how to play. Forever suspicious of idleness, she had the remarkable ability to transform play into work, and she somehow managed to pass on this talent to her daughter, who in turn passed it on to me.

"F***ing hearts!"

At the Independent, Bee Wilson on the eccentricities of Elizabeth Taylor in later life as revealed by William Mann's new biography:

During her marriage to Fisher, she was getting through a pack of cigarettes a day “and never used the same holder”. Her butler had to prepare a special box of holders each day, colour-co-ordinated not just with her outfits but with any tablecloths she might come into contact with. When she and Burton were in Mexico, she flew in the wife of her London chauffeur just to cook them a couple of meals of roast pork. Her hypochondria was stupendous. She once called in sick complaining of a severe injury caused by wearing tight breeches. She consumed jewels as casually as cups of coffee and thought nothing of asking a friend to fly to Switzerland to buy her a house, before summarily calling him back to play cards with her: “Just buy the damn thing so you can get back here and we can play f***ing hearts!”