Showing posts with label cake. Show all posts
Showing posts with label cake. Show all posts
Friday, October 20, 2017
A filbert for finial
Good sentence from Peter Dickinson's A Summer in the Twenties (he is one of the great underrated novelists of the twentieth century IMO): "The crinkled paper cake-cup held a little turret of amazingly yellow sponge, roofed with a baroque twirl of cream with a filbert for finial."
Thursday, June 29, 2017
Closing tabs
Just a few, in preparation for travel to Cayman and I HOPE some writing (it has not been a productive month for me, due mostly I think to factors beyond my control but also to the fact that it is very difficult to sustain full-on sabbaticalage over the entire 18 months that you get if you have a full school year and both summers). More realistic will be to make a detailed but modest list of ALL THINGS THAT MUST BE DONE BY THE END OF AUGUST (including updating fall semester syllabi and making the new syllabus for my spring-semester course in Paris so that we can get it cleared with the Committee on Instruction and have course book information in advance of the relevant dates) and then proceed to tick them off as I can. But I will be happier if I write some Gibbon pages as well....
Madame Bovary's wedding cake. (I am surprised by the negative orientation towards this sort of patisserie, I am a wholehearted fan!)
On a related note, I am still meaning to stop in and get a look at this. I think I have missed my chance to see the ballet....
Favorite items at the Houghton Library.
Subway maps compared to their actual geography
Watch the movements of every refugee on earth since the year 2000
J.G. Ballard, "The Index"!
Michel Houellebecq is not easy to interview
Madame Bovary's wedding cake. (I am surprised by the negative orientation towards this sort of patisserie, I am a wholehearted fan!)
On a related note, I am still meaning to stop in and get a look at this. I think I have missed my chance to see the ballet....
Favorite items at the Houghton Library.
Subway maps compared to their actual geography
Watch the movements of every refugee on earth since the year 2000
J.G. Ballard, "The Index"!
Michel Houellebecq is not easy to interview
Thursday, April 30, 2015
Cake!
At the intersection of two of my favorite things. (I slightly aspire to write a guest post for this blog one day!)
Icing delivery
A Facebook friend posted this birthday cake recipe; I can take or leave the cake and filling, but I am very tempted to mix up a batch of the icing....
(Ingredients: 25g/1oz cocoa powder, 300g/10½oz icing sugar, 50g/1¾oz butter, 50ml/2fl oz double cream!)
(Ingredients: 25g/1oz cocoa powder, 300g/10½oz icing sugar, 50g/1¾oz butter, 50ml/2fl oz double cream!)
Sunday, September 14, 2014
Cake fest
One of the toys I most coveted as a child, though I think in reality baking real cakes in a real oven is preferable!
Monday, July 21, 2014
Closing tabs
Very nice birthday, but tiring! Too weary now to write projected thoughts on midlife....
A link I have been saving to post today.
10 questions I answered in support of tomorrow's midday event at Bryant Park.
An archeology of marginalia.
Good night!
A link I have been saving to post today.
10 questions I answered in support of tomorrow's midday event at Bryant Park.
An archeology of marginalia.
Good night!
Tuesday, April 08, 2014
Tuesday, February 11, 2014
Saturday, December 21, 2013
Of butter and buttercream
At the TLS, Alex Danchev on two new books about food and art. It includes a luscious description of a book I have been meaning to look at ever since I first saw some of these cakes (I would buy a pink Thiebaud cake if I lived in the Bay Area) and this amazing passage written by Henry James (quoted by Mary Ann Caws in the other book under review):
I had an excellent repast – the best repast possible – which consisted simply of boiled eggs and bread and butter. It was the quality of these simple ingredients that made the occasion memorable. The eggs were so good that I am ashamed to say how many of them I consumed. “La plus belle fille du monde”, as the French proverb says, “ne peut donner que ce qu’elle a”; and it might seem that an egg which has succeeded in being fresh has done all that can reasonably be expected of it. But there was a bloom of punctuality, so to speak, about the eggs of Bourg, as if it had been the intention of the very hens themselves that they should be promptly served. “Nous sommes en Bresse, et le beurre n’est pas mauvais,” the landlady said with a sort of dry-coquetry, as she placed this article before me. It was the poetry of butter, and I ate a pound or two of it; after which I came away with a strange mixture of impressions of late gothic sculpture and thick tartines.
Friday, October 18, 2013
Cake theory
At the intersection of two Davidsonian interests: cake and physics (FT site registration required).
Monday, October 07, 2013
Tuesday, August 13, 2013
Closing tabs
I read a very good book that slightly spoiled me for others, the first volume of Peter May's Lewis trilogy, The Blackhouse. It was a recommendation from my college friend and fellow recreational triathlete Jean-Jacques; it is an odd book in certain respects, and I am not sure the unusual formal choices are entirely justified, but it's an immersive read with an appealing main character and amazing settings. Alas, though volumes two and three of the trilogy exist, I can't get them until I get back to New York: I had this one from BorrowDirect (various libraries in that system collect UK crime fiction), but even the first one isn't released to U.S. markets until September. I believe there is an earlier series I can plunder in the meantime.
Near the end of the third installment of Daniel Abraham's Dagger and the Coin quartet, but slightly regretting the sheer length of epic fantasy - it is my own fault for reading them all in a week rather than over something more like a month, I am still liking them, but it is slightly over the top!
Also: Christa Faust's second Fringe novel, The Burning Man (the Amazon reviews are unduly harsh, I quite enjoyed it, but it's true that it doesn't fill in backstory in the conventional sense - I think it is a difficult situation writing for obsessive fans!).
I was interviewed on local television this morning, which was very enjoyable but required an emergency visit yesterday to Camana Bay for a colored top and some face powder, neither of which is really in my usual repertoire! A good interview in the weekend edition of the paper, too, but not online - I may post a scan if I can get it formatted correctly.
Closing tabs:
"Her own cats now assume the iPad exists for them." (Via Marginal Revolution.)
David Epstein's new book sounds highly worthwhile.
I want to read this, but even more so I want to eat a piece of one of the cakes! (Also - via Jane - cat donuts.)
10 questions for Wayne Koestenbaum, courtesy of Dave Lull. Much looking forward to the release of My 1980s and Other Essays.
Last but not least, Matthew Kirschenbaum on archiving digital media. (Via Glenn Hendler.)
Near the end of the third installment of Daniel Abraham's Dagger and the Coin quartet, but slightly regretting the sheer length of epic fantasy - it is my own fault for reading them all in a week rather than over something more like a month, I am still liking them, but it is slightly over the top!
Also: Christa Faust's second Fringe novel, The Burning Man (the Amazon reviews are unduly harsh, I quite enjoyed it, but it's true that it doesn't fill in backstory in the conventional sense - I think it is a difficult situation writing for obsessive fans!).
I was interviewed on local television this morning, which was very enjoyable but required an emergency visit yesterday to Camana Bay for a colored top and some face powder, neither of which is really in my usual repertoire! A good interview in the weekend edition of the paper, too, but not online - I may post a scan if I can get it formatted correctly.
Closing tabs:
"Her own cats now assume the iPad exists for them." (Via Marginal Revolution.)
David Epstein's new book sounds highly worthwhile.
I want to read this, but even more so I want to eat a piece of one of the cakes! (Also - via Jane - cat donuts.)
10 questions for Wayne Koestenbaum, courtesy of Dave Lull. Much looking forward to the release of My 1980s and Other Essays.
Last but not least, Matthew Kirschenbaum on archiving digital media. (Via Glenn Hendler.)
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Running away to join the circus
In my ideal world, I live in a monastic cell with no housekeeping responsibilities and a divine disregard for all matters material. In practice, it is clear that at least every couple weeks, it is important to take a morning to catch up on business, alas. I haven't quite cleared the deck - I need to write a conference-paper abstract and put away some clean clothes - but I have usefully spent the morning doing things like consolidating large amounts of cardboard and taking it down to the recycling area (between Amazon, FreshDirect, etc. an extraordinary amount of packaging enters my apartment on a regular basis), booking catsitting for August travels, unpacking glassware from my adopted grandfather's house in NJ (soon to be sold - more boxes!), tidying up overflow triathlon bits and bobs, etc. etc.
Part of that kind of housekeeping is closing tabs here and logging light reading. Enjoyed Mira Grant's novella How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea and Ben Winters, Bedbugs (the latter didn't quite live up to the strength of its opening, and has given me a desire to reread Tana French's Broken Harbour - another recommendation in this vein is Kelly Link's strange and haunting story "Stone Animals.")
It has been a good week. It was my birthday on Sunday, and I saw a play I loved, Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy - amazing performances, and some of the best integration of music into a theatrical script that I have ever heard. An evening of cake and champagne afterwards with old friends and family: very nice indeed.
It's the time of year when various former students pass through town, and I've had lovely evenings with Adela and Wei, who was one of my very first students at Columbia (you can read his marathon-running guest post here) and whose beautiful wife and two-year-old son I was delighted to meet for the first time.
Last night, courtesy of Tanya (whose book is coming out soon - she answered some questions about it here), another extraordinary theatrical performance, really remarkable: Aurélia Thierrée's Murmurs.
At the beginning she is moving house, but then there are all sorts of other transformations, haunting and enchanting - amazing use of props and of a historically evocative set of circus and clowning techniques. My favorites were the transformations into anthropomorphic animals (a handbag that when A., kneeling, puts her head into it turns out to have eyes that make her into a cartoon quadruped, a suited man with an anteater head that has previously been seen in its incarnation as old-fashioned leather bellows), and also the phantom-limb dummy bits with real people as the dummies that seem to be alive - you can always see the seams of the illusion, but that doesn't make it any less uncanny. Here's another trailer for her previous show, which I don't see; and the amazing backstory of the performer's mother, co-creator of the show.
(On which note, I add that this is a book I read repeatedly as a child: it troubled me that under no stretch of the imagination could I imagine making a living as an acrobat, but I comforted myself with the fact that playing the clarinet in a circus band and taking care of performing animals would probably suffice in a pinch.)
I didn't quite hit the five-hour mark on my long ride yesterday, but almost - triathlon training is going well, if one concentrates on what one has accomplished rather than on omissions and shortcomings!
Miscellaneous linkage:
Friend and sometime catsitter Joanne McNeil on the Bradley Manning trial.
Two good links from B.: eradication of an enormous nest; telegraphic love!
How can you not want one of these as a pet? (Via Jane.)
For diagram purists, a New York City subway map in concentric circles.
Part of that kind of housekeeping is closing tabs here and logging light reading. Enjoyed Mira Grant's novella How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea and Ben Winters, Bedbugs (the latter didn't quite live up to the strength of its opening, and has given me a desire to reread Tana French's Broken Harbour - another recommendation in this vein is Kelly Link's strange and haunting story "Stone Animals.")
It has been a good week. It was my birthday on Sunday, and I saw a play I loved, Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy - amazing performances, and some of the best integration of music into a theatrical script that I have ever heard. An evening of cake and champagne afterwards with old friends and family: very nice indeed.
It's the time of year when various former students pass through town, and I've had lovely evenings with Adela and Wei, who was one of my very first students at Columbia (you can read his marathon-running guest post here) and whose beautiful wife and two-year-old son I was delighted to meet for the first time.
Last night, courtesy of Tanya (whose book is coming out soon - she answered some questions about it here), another extraordinary theatrical performance, really remarkable: Aurélia Thierrée's Murmurs.
At the beginning she is moving house, but then there are all sorts of other transformations, haunting and enchanting - amazing use of props and of a historically evocative set of circus and clowning techniques. My favorites were the transformations into anthropomorphic animals (a handbag that when A., kneeling, puts her head into it turns out to have eyes that make her into a cartoon quadruped, a suited man with an anteater head that has previously been seen in its incarnation as old-fashioned leather bellows), and also the phantom-limb dummy bits with real people as the dummies that seem to be alive - you can always see the seams of the illusion, but that doesn't make it any less uncanny. Here's another trailer for her previous show, which I don't see; and the amazing backstory of the performer's mother, co-creator of the show.
(On which note, I add that this is a book I read repeatedly as a child: it troubled me that under no stretch of the imagination could I imagine making a living as an acrobat, but I comforted myself with the fact that playing the clarinet in a circus band and taking care of performing animals would probably suffice in a pinch.)
I didn't quite hit the five-hour mark on my long ride yesterday, but almost - triathlon training is going well, if one concentrates on what one has accomplished rather than on omissions and shortcomings!
Miscellaneous linkage:
Friend and sometime catsitter Joanne McNeil on the Bradley Manning trial.
Two good links from B.: eradication of an enormous nest; telegraphic love!
How can you not want one of these as a pet? (Via Jane.)
For diagram purists, a New York City subway map in concentric circles.
Friday, June 28, 2013
Closing tabs
I have said this before, but when I was a little kid, I wanted to be famous when I grew up. I wanted to have an interesting life, and I thought you had to be famous for that to be the case. Little did I know that I was grossly mistaken. Many famous people have what I would consider very boring lives, and some of the most interesting days of my life have been spent in libraries and classrooms!
It is a good week that sees the successful completion of the Syracuse half-Ironman, the final revisions completed on the style book (I sent the file to my editor earlier this afternoon) and news of the official confirmation, by the trustees of Columbia University, of my promotion to full professor! Not so status-oriented myself, but it means a decent raise and I have also been irked for some years that my lovely doctoral advisees have to have their primary letter of recommendation written by an associate professor - I am particularly glad to have set that straight...
Some very enjoyable light reading: two novels I absolutely loved by Alex Bledsoe, The Hum and the Shiver and Wisp of a Thing; Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane (gave me a keen desire to reread the tales in Joan Aiken's A Touch of Chill - also, Pobby and Dingan!); installments two and three of the Expanse series, Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate (it really is a super trilogy - the characters are much more fully and appealingly rendered than in standard space opera); and Iain M. Banks, The Quarry.
Next work thing I have to do is a reader's report on a book manuscript for a university press - haven't cracked it open yet, but am rather looking forward to it, if not easier then certainly more intellectually engaging than putting final touches on one's own book. Looking forward to much (warm) triathlon training, yoga and reading in the days to come - I'm here in Cayman through Monday the 8th.
Closing tabs:
My former student Sarah Courteau on the self-help movement and the logic of affirmation.
A friend is recognized for excellence in book design.
Ian Bogost's principles for university presses (I am very strongly in favor of most of these, though I think the tenure question is more complicated than this format permits delving into).
Last but not least, sconic sections.
It is a good week that sees the successful completion of the Syracuse half-Ironman, the final revisions completed on the style book (I sent the file to my editor earlier this afternoon) and news of the official confirmation, by the trustees of Columbia University, of my promotion to full professor! Not so status-oriented myself, but it means a decent raise and I have also been irked for some years that my lovely doctoral advisees have to have their primary letter of recommendation written by an associate professor - I am particularly glad to have set that straight...
Some very enjoyable light reading: two novels I absolutely loved by Alex Bledsoe, The Hum and the Shiver and Wisp of a Thing; Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane (gave me a keen desire to reread the tales in Joan Aiken's A Touch of Chill - also, Pobby and Dingan!); installments two and three of the Expanse series, Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate (it really is a super trilogy - the characters are much more fully and appealingly rendered than in standard space opera); and Iain M. Banks, The Quarry.
Next work thing I have to do is a reader's report on a book manuscript for a university press - haven't cracked it open yet, but am rather looking forward to it, if not easier then certainly more intellectually engaging than putting final touches on one's own book. Looking forward to much (warm) triathlon training, yoga and reading in the days to come - I'm here in Cayman through Monday the 8th.
Closing tabs:
My former student Sarah Courteau on the self-help movement and the logic of affirmation.
A friend is recognized for excellence in book design.
Ian Bogost's principles for university presses (I am very strongly in favor of most of these, though I think the tenure question is more complicated than this format permits delving into).
Last but not least, sconic sections.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Morning edition
Slow start this morning. Got up very early but dragged heels to the point where I no longer really had time to make it out the door for a run. (Will just have to make the effort to do something serious later.)
I liked what Christopher Ricks had to say about Lydia Davis at the TLS.
Had a very good conversation with my editor yesterday over lunch to discuss style revisions. That's the priority: I'm hoping to be done with it by mid-June, which seems fairly realistic (depending on how much attention and time I have to devote to my least-favorite triathlon sport, the time-consuming and stressful CYCLING). Official due date of June 30, which I will certainly make - I'm flying to Cayman June 27, so that's my real effective deadline. It sounds as though the book will be out as early as May or June 2014, which I am excited about - I had imagined it might not be coming out till fall or winter.
I usually like Adam Mars-Jones's criticism, but I feel he really missed the point of Kate Atkinson's new novel (that is a LRB subscriber-only link). He doesn't seem to feel at all the deep emotional affective investment in the characters that dominated my experience of it, or the intensity with which we feel the entanglement of paths taken and not taken in individual women's lives (the fallout of a rape, an abortion, a murder, a choice about what sort of job to undertake or whether to have a child) with world-historical events (English-German relations, the Blitz, the arrival of the Russians). I really loved the book - that and Knausgaard are my two favorites of the year, very different from each other in obvious respects but sharing the qualities of being mesmerizing to read and also important in what they have to say. To talk so much about inconsistencies in the cosmology, as it were, without saving space for what Atkinson wants to do in terms of showing how people in families love each other and tug against the imperatives of necessity - I don't know, it's just a little obtuse! I think I might need to write an essay on counterfactuals and the novel: I have some of that work done already, an argument about novels and alternate lives that starts with the famous passage in Middlemarch and considers some obvious important aspects of that topic before going into a more extended reading of Clarissa's counterfactuals. Could write about Atkinson, the Ian Tregillis books and other paths-not-taken science fiction....
On a more frivolous note, I had cause to utter a rare and happy sentence to B. on Sunday evening: "I have had a sufficiency of cake"! A good friend of bride and groom is the proprietor of Meera's Cakes, and she really outdid herself. There were two enormous cakes at the party on Saturday night (I think I can only find a picture of one of them, a reproduction of the turntable P. was spinning the night he first met G. - I can't see/remember what it was, but the single is even accurately rendered! - the other was a ginormous blue-and-green globe, with red dots marking the places where bride and groom have traveled together - one chocolate, one vanilla, both delicious as well as beautiful to look at), and their remains made their way back to my aunt's house, where we gathered for family tea on Sunday. (Photo courtesy of Mark Pringle.)
I liked what Christopher Ricks had to say about Lydia Davis at the TLS.
Had a very good conversation with my editor yesterday over lunch to discuss style revisions. That's the priority: I'm hoping to be done with it by mid-June, which seems fairly realistic (depending on how much attention and time I have to devote to my least-favorite triathlon sport, the time-consuming and stressful CYCLING). Official due date of June 30, which I will certainly make - I'm flying to Cayman June 27, so that's my real effective deadline. It sounds as though the book will be out as early as May or June 2014, which I am excited about - I had imagined it might not be coming out till fall or winter.
I usually like Adam Mars-Jones's criticism, but I feel he really missed the point of Kate Atkinson's new novel (that is a LRB subscriber-only link). He doesn't seem to feel at all the deep emotional affective investment in the characters that dominated my experience of it, or the intensity with which we feel the entanglement of paths taken and not taken in individual women's lives (the fallout of a rape, an abortion, a murder, a choice about what sort of job to undertake or whether to have a child) with world-historical events (English-German relations, the Blitz, the arrival of the Russians). I really loved the book - that and Knausgaard are my two favorites of the year, very different from each other in obvious respects but sharing the qualities of being mesmerizing to read and also important in what they have to say. To talk so much about inconsistencies in the cosmology, as it were, without saving space for what Atkinson wants to do in terms of showing how people in families love each other and tug against the imperatives of necessity - I don't know, it's just a little obtuse! I think I might need to write an essay on counterfactuals and the novel: I have some of that work done already, an argument about novels and alternate lives that starts with the famous passage in Middlemarch and considers some obvious important aspects of that topic before going into a more extended reading of Clarissa's counterfactuals. Could write about Atkinson, the Ian Tregillis books and other paths-not-taken science fiction....
On a more frivolous note, I had cause to utter a rare and happy sentence to B. on Sunday evening: "I have had a sufficiency of cake"! A good friend of bride and groom is the proprietor of Meera's Cakes, and she really outdid herself. There were two enormous cakes at the party on Saturday night (I think I can only find a picture of one of them, a reproduction of the turntable P. was spinning the night he first met G. - I can't see/remember what it was, but the single is even accurately rendered! - the other was a ginormous blue-and-green globe, with red dots marking the places where bride and groom have traveled together - one chocolate, one vanilla, both delicious as well as beautiful to look at), and their remains made their way back to my aunt's house, where we gathered for family tea on Sunday. (Photo courtesy of Mark Pringle.)
Tuesday, March 19, 2013
Closing tabs
The world's first cake hotel. (Pictured below: meringue rug.)
Vacations for cat lovers.
I really cannot get it out of my head that the swimming pool at B.'s condo would be the perfect capybara habitat (dachshund extension optional).
Skulls on stage.
This piece produced in me the sensation that I must read this novel instantly! Fortunately it was available in a Kindle edition....
Miscellaneous other light reading: Peter Dickinson, Shadow of a Hero; Becky Masterman, Rage Against the Dying; Denise Mina, Gods and Beasts (I think that texturally there is almost no crime writer I would rather read than Mina, and I enjoyed this book a great deal - I wanted it to go on forever! - but there is no doubt she's less strong on putting together a coherent plot than on establishing character and mood in language, partly because she thinks in series/stream format rather than in terms of single books); Ian Rankin, Standing in Another Man's Grave (not bad, but perhaps didn't benefit from me reading it right after Mina); the second installment of Seanan McGuire's newest series, Midnight Blue-Light Special; and a very appealing collection of short stories by a college friend of mine, Uli Baer: Beggar's Chicken: Stories From Shanghai.
Vacations for cat lovers.
I really cannot get it out of my head that the swimming pool at B.'s condo would be the perfect capybara habitat (dachshund extension optional).
Skulls on stage.
This piece produced in me the sensation that I must read this novel instantly! Fortunately it was available in a Kindle edition....
Miscellaneous other light reading: Peter Dickinson, Shadow of a Hero; Becky Masterman, Rage Against the Dying; Denise Mina, Gods and Beasts (I think that texturally there is almost no crime writer I would rather read than Mina, and I enjoyed this book a great deal - I wanted it to go on forever! - but there is no doubt she's less strong on putting together a coherent plot than on establishing character and mood in language, partly because she thinks in series/stream format rather than in terms of single books); Ian Rankin, Standing in Another Man's Grave (not bad, but perhaps didn't benefit from me reading it right after Mina); the second installment of Seanan McGuire's newest series, Midnight Blue-Light Special; and a very appealing collection of short stories by a college friend of mine, Uli Baer: Beggar's Chicken: Stories From Shanghai.
Thursday, March 07, 2013
Edibility
Book cakes. (Via.)
NB I am keen on these book cakes, only I wish not so many of them featured fondant! It is usefully sculptural, but it is not deliciously edible - the best-looking and -tasting wedding cake I ever ate was at my friend Peter and Michelle's wedding in New Haven, it was decorated like a piece of Wedgewood porcelain, with blue fondant and white decoration, but underneath the fondant was a whole other layer of delicious vanilla buttercream (the cake was vanilla with raspberry filling), so that the beautiful exterior layer could be discarded without penalty.
On an associatively related note, I often use a meditation DVD that is extremely useful, in that it features different recordings of different sorts of guided meditation at varying lengths, only marred by the fact that the speaker has one of the most annoying voices I've ever heard! There is a "hearing meditation" section in a number of them, and my attention is always snagged when he says the phrase "the faculty of audibility - hearing meditation." I do not think audibility is the correct word - it is a good example of unwanted elegant variation!
NB I am keen on these book cakes, only I wish not so many of them featured fondant! It is usefully sculptural, but it is not deliciously edible - the best-looking and -tasting wedding cake I ever ate was at my friend Peter and Michelle's wedding in New Haven, it was decorated like a piece of Wedgewood porcelain, with blue fondant and white decoration, but underneath the fondant was a whole other layer of delicious vanilla buttercream (the cake was vanilla with raspberry filling), so that the beautiful exterior layer could be discarded without penalty.
On an associatively related note, I often use a meditation DVD that is extremely useful, in that it features different recordings of different sorts of guided meditation at varying lengths, only marred by the fact that the speaker has one of the most annoying voices I've ever heard! There is a "hearing meditation" section in a number of them, and my attention is always snagged when he says the phrase "the faculty of audibility - hearing meditation." I do not think audibility is the correct word - it is a good example of unwanted elegant variation!
Friday, December 28, 2012
Saturday, November 10, 2012
Thursday, September 06, 2012
The anternet and other wonders
I had the Mondrian cake on my Facebook page the other day, but here's a much fuller account by the cake's creator Caitlin Freeman of the art cake enterprise...
If you find yourself in Chelsea, make sure to go and see Julian Hoeber's amazing and truly queasiness-inducing gravitational mystery spot!
A charming link whose tab I haven't been able to bring myself to close. (Courtesy of B.)
Taught my first class yesterday, got another first class meeting on Monday and then things are really properly underway; in the meantime I've mostly just been having a pretty quiet week and gearing up mentally for Sunday's big race.
All I could persuade myself to do over the weekend, other than exercise, was reread the selected works of Lee Child!
I have read the early ones too many times already to revisit them again now, but a mere one or two previous reads leaves pleasure still to be leached, so I devoured Without Fail, The Enemy and Bad Luck and Trouble (I especially love the installments that fill in Reacherian backstory). Then I mourned the loss of Dick Francis and the fact that there is only a finite number of books in the Francis and Child canons, and new Reacher installments cannot come fast enough to sate the monster.
Then I read Charlie Stross's The Fuller Memorandum, which I felt was the book already on my Kindle most likely to scratch the Jack Reacher itch (it did, very enjoyably so - not that they are at all similar in tone or style, but Stross's Laundry books, like the Reacher novels, represent the pinnacle of light reading!).
Then I happily realized that Gwenda Bond's Blackwood, a modern-day YA novel about the occult history of the Roanoke disappearance, was now officially published; I loved it, and it was a particular pleasure to read a novel by someone whose blog I've been reading and enjoying since the very early days of literary blogging. It definitely had something of the feel of my favorite Margaret Mahy novel The Changeover; both main characters and geographical settings are especially well rendered.
It is possible that I will revisit the Reacher barrel and dig out a couple more that I can stand to reread....
If you find yourself in Chelsea, make sure to go and see Julian Hoeber's amazing and truly queasiness-inducing gravitational mystery spot!
A charming link whose tab I haven't been able to bring myself to close. (Courtesy of B.)
Taught my first class yesterday, got another first class meeting on Monday and then things are really properly underway; in the meantime I've mostly just been having a pretty quiet week and gearing up mentally for Sunday's big race.
All I could persuade myself to do over the weekend, other than exercise, was reread the selected works of Lee Child!
I have read the early ones too many times already to revisit them again now, but a mere one or two previous reads leaves pleasure still to be leached, so I devoured Without Fail, The Enemy and Bad Luck and Trouble (I especially love the installments that fill in Reacherian backstory). Then I mourned the loss of Dick Francis and the fact that there is only a finite number of books in the Francis and Child canons, and new Reacher installments cannot come fast enough to sate the monster.
Then I read Charlie Stross's The Fuller Memorandum, which I felt was the book already on my Kindle most likely to scratch the Jack Reacher itch (it did, very enjoyably so - not that they are at all similar in tone or style, but Stross's Laundry books, like the Reacher novels, represent the pinnacle of light reading!).
Then I happily realized that Gwenda Bond's Blackwood, a modern-day YA novel about the occult history of the Roanoke disappearance, was now officially published; I loved it, and it was a particular pleasure to read a novel by someone whose blog I've been reading and enjoying since the very early days of literary blogging. It definitely had something of the feel of my favorite Margaret Mahy novel The Changeover; both main characters and geographical settings are especially well rendered.
It is possible that I will revisit the Reacher barrel and dig out a couple more that I can stand to reread....
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