Swimming with Byron

I remember when I first started blogging that I found it slightly painful, the way that a really good post would immediately be superseded by the next one above it - it is definitely an ordering principle that takes a bit of getting used to. In this case, though, I am happy to bump my dreadful last post down the page....

Kickstarter invitations galore come through my feeds, but this is truly one after my own heart: a documentary film called Swimming with Byron!

(On which note, I think my review of the excellent Swimming with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale should be out soon in the academic journal Biography.)

Swimming the Hellespont

Another one of my grandmother's books, and a favorite poem of mine from it....

Closing tabs

Swimming the Hellespont! (FT site registration required; thanks to Ian C.-B. for the link.) I must do this one day....

A lovely piece by novelist Alan Warner at the Observer about what it meant to him, as a boy in the Western Highlands, to get his driver's license. (I am a person without a driver's license, and really I enjoy a life without driving, but triathlon in the end is going to make me have to learn to drive and get comfortable renting a car and driving self and bike out of the city to get to good training areas and/or races; public transportation is not so convenient in this regard, alas.)

I've been thinking quite a bit this past week about the whys and wherefores of book promotion; it is not my metier, but it must be done, and various friends and colleagues have offered thoughtful suggestions as I ponder the impending publication of Invisible Things. Several former students have been especially generous with their time and attention, and Brent contributes a link to Gary Butler's interesting 2007 profile of science fiction writer Robert J. Sawyer:

He works seven days a week, and the definition of “work” covers many tasks, including writing/editing, developing personal marketing strategies, and graciously participating in too-long media interviews. Each novel takes a year of his life: three to four months of research (mostly reading, predominantly popular science, philosophy, and history – his favourite part of the process); two to three months for the first draft, writing a fixed target of 2,000 words per day (“it’s the only part I don’t enjoy – like a sculptor making his own clay”); three to four months of revisions, yielding anywhere from four to eight drafts before the book is “abandoned, never finished”; and finally, two months of vigorous promotion.

Slightly to my own amazement, I will be signing ARCs at BEA on Wednesday, May 26 from 3:30-4 at Table 19 (the HarperCollins Children's Books booth is #3340), so if you are there, please do stop by and pick up a copy and say hello.

Chicken and champagne

From Clement Freud's collected racing columns, as reviewed at the Guardian by Stephen Moss:

"I asked a friend who had been to a West Country course to assess the meal he had eaten, to be told that: 'If the soup had been as warm as the champagne, the champagne as old as the chicken, and the chicken as fat as the waitress, it would have been adequate." At Yarmouth, he recalled, "a fish and chip van was on hand to sell what St Paul in his letter to the Philippians called 'the piece of cod that passeth all understanding'."

"Who killed John Keats?"

My favorite stanza of Byron's Don Juan:

John Keats, who was killed off by one critique,
Just as he really promised something great,
If not intelligible, - without Greek
Contrived to talk about the Gods of late,
Much as they might have been supposed to speak.
Poor fellow! His was an untoward fate: -
'Tis strange the mind, that very fiery particle,
Should let itself be snuffed out by an Article.