Closing tabs

My only complaint about this week, if it is a complaint, is that it was too full of a rich and complex variety of things!

On Tuesday I taught The Princesse de Cleves and on Wednesday, A Journal of the Plague Year. These are two of my particularly favorite books of all time, and I'm really excited about this semester's courses.

On Thursday I went with G. to see Mr. Burns, a post-electric play. The third act is brilliant and genuinely haunting - I am not quite so sure about the long first act, which seems to me to have too much of the sort of conversation that seemed fresh when we heard it in Pulp Fiction but which strikes me on the stage these days as overly rambling and a little self-indulgent. The three acts of the play take place in the near future, seven years later and seventy years later - it covers some familiar ground in terms of thinking about linguistic and cultural transformations after an apocalyptic break (think Riddley Walker or other post-nuclear scenarios), but the originality comes from the way that we see time morphing the "Cape Fear" Simpsons episode together with Gilbert & Sullivan and all sorts of other random cultural snippets, especially musical, into a postapocalyptic morality play, with Bart Simpson as familiar to modern audiences as the medieval Vice would have been to audiences many hundreds of years ago. The acting is very good, and so is the production. (Dinner afterwards at the West Bank Cafe, which is currently offering a very good prix fixe dinner - $20 for appetizer, main course and dessert. I had spinach ravioli, a very delicious skate with capers and an even more delectable lemon mousse.)

Lots of meetings with graduate students - I think I have finally reached critical mass. Also was given a brand new iPad for a major committee assignment, something that presages huge amounts of online reading.

On Friday I had dinner at La Lunchonette with an old friend from graduate school who has invited me to come and speak at Tel Aviv University in May, a trip I am very much looking forward to.

On Saturday I went to Governors Island on the ferry and met up with my brother and his family at Fête Paradiso. Among other things we rode the world's first bicycle carousel.

Today I finally had time to write my race report for Ironman Wisconsin.

This coming week is very busy too, though after that I am hoping things will settle down a bit. I could use a few quiet days at home with little to do!

Light reading around the edges:

Seanan McGuire's new October Daye novel, Chimes At Midnight, which ends very abruptly but regardless confirms my impression of McGuire as one of today's great geniuses of popular fiction in the fantasy/science-fictional vein; and Gwenda Bond's lovely The Woken Gods, which entirely lived up to my very high expectations.

Closing tabs:

Open up this essay by Mark Kingwell in a new browser tab and save it to read later!

A humble plea for the bumblebee.

Closing tabs

Honeybees trained to detect land mines in Croatia.

Alberto Manguel on why it's so difficult to capture the texture of dreams in writing.

An interview with Mary Karr.

Jordan Ellenberg on primes.

Bee bit!

Some bees in Cayman had a lucky escape! This is B.'s condo complex, and the video gives you a nice little glimpse of the place (also, why my friend Max, the property manager, is such fun to spend time with!).

In other small-town news, impending showdown at Wednesday Night Run Club! There should be some good coverage in the Cay Compass of the Cayman triathlon, which I'm racing the first weekend in November; I'll definitely link to give a bit of the flavor.

Haptic petal-beds

Like something from Titania's bower: Osmia avosetta bees arrange flower petals as beds for their larvae. (Via.)

Homecoming linkage

Very relieved to be back in one place (Cayman).

The lung ailment is finally on the wane - my mother handed me last Wednesday in Philadelphia a bottle of the disgustingly titled and disgustingly effective Mucinex, and I am continuing to pop the tabs twice daily in hopes of banishing the last of the EVIL PHLEGM from my airways. I might even go for a short easy swim later, though really I will wait for tomorrow to return to exercise (I'm still coughing quite a bit) - it has been a horrible three-week exercise deprivation, with high costs for my morale and mental health as well as for my physical fitness...

Miscellaneous linkage:

At the Washington Post, Monica Hesse on Laura Hillenbrand's ongoing battle with chronic fatigue syndrome (read this piece if you are, like me, a writer feeling unduly sorry for yourself and full of self-dislike at not having written enough recently!).

How Charlie Williams' insanely good Royston Blake novels came to see the light of day.

The maraschino cherry bee crisis!

More Invisible Things reviews: ReaderGirls; The Hiding Spot; Book Chic. And another reader starts (sensibly!) with The Explosionist (alas, something that I could do nothing about is that the cover of Invisible Things pretty much completely omits the fact that it is a sequel - I made sure to do what I could do make the novel a free-standing self-sufficient narrative, but I think it is a pity not to read the earlier book first, in fact really they are probably best thought of as one long continuous narrative).

As this post has unduly elongated itself, I think I will put the light reading catch-up in a separate post. I've also just spent an hour looking through this year's blog for a "my year in reading" post for a literary blog I admire - interesting to contemplate, though counterintuitive to write it in November, as I will hope to have a good month of reading still to come...

"It's an abominaccino!"

For some reason I haven't seen much to blog these last few days (it is never clear to me, except on August weekends when the news is genuinely slow, whether this is due to internal or external factors), but here are a few tabs to clear:

Ancient beehives; gladiator graveyards.

David Markson has died; thoughts and a links round-up from Sarah Weinman.

Thirteen writers and scientists name their favorite science books.

And I have saved the best for last - Geoff Dyer on discovering the perfect doughnut-and-cappuccino combination! It was National Doughnut Day on Friday, and I consider it a minor miracle that I resisted the temptation to obtain and consume one. NB the kind that Dyer mentions are indeed pretty much the best I have ever tasted - they have them at my local branch of Oren's Daily Roast - but I am surprised that he does not mention the fact that they can be obtained from the actual Doughnut Plant on the Lower East Side.

A pot of honey

"Doctors have concluded that it was a case of suspended animation."

It is not funny, but...

... honey noir!