NYC 36

Mush!

Slept 9pm-4:30am, huddled in bed a while reading coronanews on my phone, did finally get up once it was getting light. Once the teaching semester is done, I have to start going to bed later again - 4:30 is TOO EARLY TO GET UP! Eating a bowl of mush now, will go out for an exercise walk momentarily, and then I've got yoga with Susanne at 9! And a day with NOT A SINGLE ZOOM APPOINTMENT - I have several work things I've been unable to make headway on because they aren't directly related to teaching and the day-to-day needs of students and others are using up all of my energy and attention, but they are not intrinsically offputting tasks and I am committed to making significant progress on at least one of them today! (A report on the theory and practice of how course releases are granted for individual service to the department and to Arts & Sciences and the university more generally.) We have a subcommittee meeting tomorrow so yes, it helps that there's a hard deadline, and once I get this one further forward, I can turn my attention to the Writing Studies Certification proposal that is my other important Thing....

Closing tabs

It gets quiet on this blog, I think, when I am training a lot and writing more than one post a day at my other one!

A lot of pretty decent light reading: Thomas Berger, Meeting Evil, which gave me a strong urge to reread the strange Margery Allingham novel The Tiger in the Smoke (I am keen on books in this vein); Lee Child's Jack Reacher teaser, Not a Drill, which did indeed make me hungry for the next one (more hungry than I already was, I mean!); Michael Koryta, Those Who Wish Me Dead, which I am sorry to say reminded me why I have historically avoided reading his books - he is a very capable writer, but it is absolutely preposterous, people simply don't act like this!; Patrick Lee, Runner, which I enjoyed enormously and highly recommend to readers of thrillers; Tom Bouman, Dry Bones in the Valley (very good indeed - read if you like Woodrell et al., or the Longmire/Justified TV axis - excellent police procedural, beautifully written, interesting setting).

Just finishing up a really satisfying one, Tim Powers' Declare, which B. drew to my attention on the basis of an interesting conversation between Ian Tregillis and Charlie Stross, both of whose roughly comparable spy-novel-meets-Cthulhu-and-higher-mathematics novels I enjoy hugely. Made me remember reading a few of Powers' novels more than a decade ago, the Fault Line trilogy I believe: I am sure they were a big influence when I was writing The Explosionist. Hmmm, there are a lot of novels by Powers that I have never read, that is appealing....

Many tabs to close:

Dyer on Dyer.

Jennifer Michael Hecht reads Lucie Brock-Broido (a former teacher of mine, and now my upstairs neighbor).

M. H. Abrams honored with the National Humanities Medal.

Living on the internet: part one, part two.

Black cats unsuited to selfies?

Also: I finally got to try salt fish and ackee. It is delicious although the ackee bears a slightly disturbing resemblance to scrambled eggs.

Convergences

This one caught my attention last week at the symmetrical breakfast blog.

This one is more extreme and therefore more amazing, only I don't understand why the lines have to be so irregular - it is insufficiently compulsive, by my lights, though I love the concept....

Tea for two

The case can definitely be made that breakfast is the best meal of the day.

The rhythm of the semester

Slightly grumpy about the fact that train delays meant that I didn't get to 10am hot yoga - I waited on the platform for a few minutes to see if predicted train time (15min - usually it takes me 15min door to door!) would be reduced, but it didn't seem the odds were good that I'd get there in time for class, so I went and got cooked breakfast instead at the Deluxe Diner. Morning task is checking the PDF of my style index - if I can get a chunk of work done on that, maybe I can go to 12:30 yoga instead....

I am finding this semester's work genuinely stimulating and fresh, but it is also kicking my ass! Again slept for 4 hours yesterday afternoon due to cumulative fatigue of the week. Busy week ahead, including evening work things on Wednesday and Thursday - but then I am flying to see B. very early Friday morning. I have to take quite a lot of work with me, but there will be spinning and a 3hr outdoor ride and yoga for sure as well.

Very small amounts of light reading around the edges of slightly insane piles of work reading: Ian Rankin, Saints of the Shadow Bible; Ben Aaronovitch, Broken Homes (latest installment in the Rivers of London series). I still want someone to make a massive chart of how the fantasy police-procedural mode snowballed into a dominant subgenre - I suspect that there are strong television antecedents that are largely outside my ken (Doctor Who?).

Closing tabs:

At the Guardian, Andy Beckett on the lasting impact of Raymond Williams' Keywords.

Leslie Jamison on the syndrome called Morgellons (her forthcoming collection is The Empathy Exams).

Last but not least, an astonishing demonstration of the behaviour-warping allure of fried potatoes!

Back to normal

It's amazing having my real computer again - I went and picked it up a couple hours ago, and it feels like coming home! I live a good deal of my life via email and reading things on the internet: that little tablet was a good stopgap, but still.... In particular the Columbia webmail is hopeless, very happy to be using Thunderbird again.

New Kindle Paperwhite arrived yesterday, and I have just ordered a replacement watch (in the meantime I am wearing my other watch, a rather nice diving one - with a bezel! - that Wendy gave me after I got my scuba certification when she came to visit for Breakfast Near Tiffany's).

Saw an odd little play last night with G., Bull at 59E59. It is more of a scenario than a fully fledged play, and I thought only the sole female character had much depth - it's watchable but feels a bit purposeless. (I wasn't that keen on its predecessor Cock either.) Delicious dinner afterwards here - I had beef carpaccio (in my opinion this is the perfect dish - the combination of arugola, parmesan and raw beef is just ridiculously good), an amazing very simple branzino with lightly sauteed vegetables and a tiramisu I ordered after dimly recalling that we had eaten here once before and I had ordered what turned out to be the best tiramisu I have ever tasted. And it still is.

Loss

Gutted to wake up this morning to an email from longtime correspondent Dave Lull to let me know that Maxine Clarke has died. Petrona has been one of my favorite blogs for as long as I can remember. I only met Maxine once - we had a delightful lunch at the British Library in St. Pancras - but our emails and comments flew back and forth across the Atlantic like you would not believe. This tribute takes the words out of my mouth. What a lovely person she was, in every way: kind, humane, generous, incredibly bright and unassuming. An inconsequential detail: when we talked about my "breeding" book, she revealed that her grandfather was the agronomist who bred the particular strain of wheat used to make Weetabix!

Eggishness

Remarkably beautiful breakfasts. (Courtesy of Sarang, who found it via The London Review of Breakfasts.)

I wish I had thought of this!

Judith Klausner has made a series of Oreo cameos.

(Via BoingBoing.)

(The cereal sampler is also particularly effective...)

"A spoonful a day"

"I am not so sure that marmalade sales really are declining."

Also: what would Paddington have said?

A poached egg and a double Jack Daniels

How Athol Fugard came to stop drinking.

Boxes, bags, bundles redux

This picture is incorrectly captioned - the dog is clearly dressed as Breakfast at Tiffany's!