"Bond, Michael Bond"

Many good tributes to the creator of Paddington Bear, but this old one from Pico Eyer is a good one (the NYT obituary was nice too):

Bond’s greatest moment is in describing how the attempt to make a live-action film about Paddington began with “a midget dressed up in a bearskin” (though a midget a mite too large). Given that “the person inside the skin couldn’t hear what was being said to him, let alone where he was going”, and given that, according to Bond, “midgets also tend to be temperamental” (especially when stuck inside a papier-mache head), it makes for a scene worthy of its hero – even before the man “who had invented an automatic lawn mower” is brought in to give the bear emotions, producing an artificial head whose eyes blink at different moments, generating an effect both sinister and salacious.

Sweetness and light

Paris was amazing partly just because walking around and thinking about past and present and looking at things is so amazing. About the only thing I did my last day there was lunch with a friend and Columbia colleague near the beautiful Reid Hall (conversation included exploring the possibility that I might teach there in some future semester).

I do not have the gift of assiduous museum-going, and really my only goal was to hit this one, which quite lived up to my expectations. I am not a good photographer, but this gives a little bit of a taste of the wares on offer:




Afterwards, a cupcake from Bertie's Cupcakery! (The proprietor is ""The Girl" of DC Rainmaker fame, and also made some custom-designed cookies to celebrate my brother and sister-in-law's acquisition of their first boat, a Nimble Nomad named Gunny.)

No discredit to an excellent cupcake, but the best dessert I had in Paris was with A. at Le Stella (after a dinner that started with a green bean and parmesan salad, then scallops and sole): a vacherin glace of utter deliciousness!

I had another very good dessert that involved a sort of almond and pistachio foam with raspberries in it, and the other thing I ate several times and most enjoyed was the "filets de dorade" (sea bream), in one case with anchovy butter and in another with sauteed fennel....

Closing tabs

A long-overdue post to close some tabs. I am finally running again this weekend, very slowly, though lungs are still impaired. In work as opposed to lung capacity, though the two may be loosely aligned, I am at the point of the semester where I am barely functioning at 60% capacity - teaching Heart of Midlothian and associated criticism tomorrow just overwhelmed me with a desire to write JEDEDIAH CLEISHBOTHAM on all forms of social media, and I must also, alarmingly, write a lecture on Endgame and Adorno for Tuesday evening!

A wonderful personal assistant from my friend Jill's company Lambent Services helped me clean up my work office so that I have lots of room for NEW PROJECTS (about which more anon at some more leisurely moment probably about a month from now). This service is highly recommended - that office has always been a chaotic and neglected enclave, to the point of functionality being impaired, and I am going to make sure to have regular tune-ups to keep it in good nick.

Liz had an extra ticket to this for Thursday: Black Mountain Songs. Enjoyable, interesting, thought-provoking: I had some pangs of guilt that though I am a dedicated teacher with considerable meta-interest in teaching, I have never (yet) been involved in a really utopian teaching scheme. I wouldn't rule it out, only in reality such things probably happen mostly in summers and I am not sure I would survive year-round teaching! Deep Springs has always interested me as a possibility: now I think they either have gone or about to go co-ed, it might be an actual opportunity?

Other bits of interest:

On founding your own country. (Via I.H.D.)

Helen DeWitt's personal library.

Lottje Sodderland on recovery from a stroke.

The Tingle Alley bear report.

Himalayan marmots! (Via B.) Also, an eagle's view of London.

Slight obsession with this historic food site, especially the ices... (Original link possibly via Teri D.?)

Last but not least, pygmy marmoset loves being brushed with a toothbrush and a short history of the black pug.

I must log the light reading or it will be forever lost in the dim mists of history. It has mostly been a very large number of werewolf-vampire-type novels that I think I will not log individually - Ilona Andrews' Kate Daniels novels, which I thought were really very good (I should not have then read the first couple of the Edge series, they are not so much suited to my taste); Stephen King, Revival (suffered for me in comparison to The Shining and sequel, which I read last year, but certainly worth the time); two crime novels by the Israeli writer D. A. Mishani, The Missing File and A Possibility of Violence, both very much the kind of thing I enjoy reading; a reread of a favorite novel of mine by Diana Wynne Jones, Deep Secret, now happily available for Kindle (this caused me to think I should write a long essay or a short book about her); Heather Abel's fascinating and troubling Gut Instincts, an excellent Kindle Single about celiac and mysterious gut woes (could be paired with Leslie Jamison's Morgellon's essay and Sarah Manguso on illness for an interesting trio); Dorothy Hughes' The Expendable Man; then Patricia Briggs' Mercy Thompson novels en masse (still finishing the last few of these - it is mighty soothing to have such a good flow of high-quality light reading).

Also I remembered during grumpy desperate non-exercising binge of book acquisition that I very much wanted to read my longtime digital correspondent Robert Hudson's second novel, and finally got around to obtaining a copy: it is called The Dazzle, and I enjoyed it hugely. Recommended in particular to readers of Peter Dickinson and good interwar period pastiche, but really it's just very appealing (good use of epistolary format!): I am going to pass it on to my mother now, in confidence that she will enjoy it as much as I did.

On eating and being eaten

The changing diet of polar bears, with a new emphasis on the eggs of snow geese:

David Iles, a graduate student at Utah State University, who has been working at La Pérouse Bay for several years, set out cameras to observe goose nests and caught the bears in the act. He now has 40 cameras set up over a stretch of tundra. They take photographs every two minutes and shoot a burst of 30 images when an animal walks in front of the camera.

In addition to capturing photographs of bears consuming eggs last season, the cameras caught cranes, wolves, eagles and foxes eating. “Everything seems to love eggs out here,” he said.

One goose or one nest may not seem like much. But polar bears are gluttons. Dr, Rockwell described one case in which a bear ate about 1,200 eggs — of eider ducks, in this case — in four days. He said Dr. Gormezano had calculated that a clutch of four eggs would amount to 825 calories, the equivalent of one and a half Big Macs. Three hundred four-egg clutches would be 247,500 calories, or about 10 percent of a bear’s yearly nutritional needs.

Back to school

It is nice to be back at home in New York. This time of year is always cheery in Morningside Heights, with students moving in and the optimism of a new school year!

I got home from Cayman yesterday evening, did a dissertation defense this morning and then came home and crashed for a deep and discombobulating three-hour afternoon nap that will probably wreak havoc with tonight's sleep possibilities, but I think it was worth it regardless. I still have one surplus cat staying with me, which is nice (two cats are more than twice as funny than one cat).

I need to get in gear for my opening classes next week (this means trying to unearth notes, course readers, books etc. and wondering why I do not leave them in some better and more systematically accessible fashion) - both are classes I have taught before and enjoy, so it shouldn't be too overwhelming. I'm on a big committee this year that will take up a significant amount of time and attention, and I also have three or four talks scheduled for October and early November, so I think things will be fairly busy.

I am done with the bulk of Ironman training and now have eleven days before I race next weekend in Madison! I am actually finding it nice to have the school stuff to worry about/concentrate on, it takes a bit of pressure off the other. I need to pick up my tri bike tomorrow from the store where it was having a tune-up, make all my complex lists for gear and travel and then drop off my road bike (which I'm actually using for the race) and gear bag on Friday to be transported in a truck to Wisconsin. One more long day on Saturday - the recommendation in the training plan I'm loosely following is to swim 1hr, ride (I will spin indoors) 2hr and run 2hr - at this point, that actually seems pretty short! Otherwise just bits and pieces to stay sharp/fresh.

(Over the past twelve weeks, I have completed approximately 165 hours of training - my biggest week was 20 hours, but many hovering in the region of 15 and recovery weeks at more like 6 or 8. It has been a pleasure and a privilege - I do want to do another iron-distance race in the not-too-distant future, but I think the training has to come in a semester where I have a sabbatical and am not trying to start or finish a major book! Next summer probably just a couple of half-ironman races and an Olympic distance or two.)

Light reading (airport edition): Samantha Shannon, The Bone Season (quite reasonably good - a thousand times better than The Night Circus, which only suggests itself as a comparison because of industry hype, but not perhaps as perfectly suited to my tastes as Laini Taylor's wonderful Daughter of Smoke and Bone books, with which it has a good bit more in common); a super book by David Epstein, The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (I only wished it was longer - had the same experience with Wright's Scientology book - if the notes in the Kindle edition take up the final 30%, one comes very abruptly upon the end of the narrative while still wishing for more!); Kelly Braffet's Save Yourself, which I enjoyed very much indeed. Now reading Elmore Leonard's Raylan Givens stories.

Closing tabs:

The distribution of octopus intelligence.

Grizzlies prefer the overpass, black bears prefer the underpass. (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Another good interview with Wayne Koestenbaum. (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)

Closing tabs

I am so taken with the gummy bearskin rug that I have to post this link. (Courtesy of Peggy.)

Brent sent me a good link the other day: reindeer UV vision!

The face of marmalade

Paddington Bear signed to represent Robertson's Golden Shred.