Closing tabs

Quiet summer on the blog - Facebook is getting the sort of idle thought that used to show up here, and I think there is no point resisting the drain in that direction.  Have a lot of open tabs to close, as well as a light reading update that I will write separately.  Funny summer in life - I have done no substantive work of my own, it's all life stuff (apartment declutter, 100 runs in 100 days, family Disney trip etc.) and other people's work stuff - but I am going to have to accept that sometimes I have to pay attention to things that are not a book that I am writing....

The Clown Egg Register.

The beautiful afterlife of Edward Gorey's mink stroller coat.

Starbucks card value exceeds money on deposit at many financial institutions.

Eighteenth-century note-taking (and the interesting underlying link).

Secrets of the London Library.

Roger Luckhurst on trouble in Lovecraft Country.

Sheep View 360.

Baroque wigs of paper.

Closing tabs

I am all tuckered out from the combination of much culture and much teaching!

Too many nights out in a row, to tell the truth; it doesn't suit me.  But it was all very good stuff: the Joshua Light Show on Friday (I was turned on to this by Gary Panter, whose Dal Tokyo is certainly the most amazing-looking book currently in my apartment!); on Saturday, Toni Schlesinger's The Mystery of Oyster Street (very good dinner with G. afterwards at Jacques, including an amazing dessert of coffee and vanilla ice-cream in a martini glass with whipped cream and chocolate sauce and a shot of [decaf] espresso); and on Sunday, the mesmerizing Einstein on the Beach, which I loved.  It seems implausible, but at the end of 4.5 hours, all you want is for it to keep on going forever!  Interesting, too, how the Wilsonian visual semaphore language really converges on Glass's idiom in the last act (this is amazing!).

The friends I was with got a piece of good news after the show and we went and celebrated with oysters and champagne at Walter's, prompting considerable regret on my part that I had not done more of my work earlier in the day...

Got up at an ungodly hour to finish rereading Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity and crank out a few letters of recommendation (the season has begun!); Austen lecture in the afternoon.  Shortly I will collapse?

Miscellanous light reading around the edges: several more Jack Reacher rereads (One Shot and The Hard Way); Deon Meyer's excellent Seven Days; Peter James's Dead Simple (not sure about this one, might have to read the next before I can decide); Chuck Wendig's amazing Blackbirds, which I absolutely loved; and G. Willow Wilson's Alif the Unseen.

"She went, to plain-work, and to purling brooks"

At Slate, Robert Pinsky on Pope's "Epistle to Miss Blount, on Her Leaving the Town, After the Coronation."

Portrait of the cat by a young artist

Courtesy of Oscar:

What the original has been up to recently:

Ghosts

From George Gamow, My World Line: An Informal Autobiography (1970):

During my stay in Göttingen I made friends with a jolly Austrian-born physicist, Fritz Houtermans. He had recently completed his Ph.D. in experimental physics but was always quite enthusiastic about theoretical problems. When I told him about my work on the theory of alpha decay, he insisted that it must be done with higher precision and in more detail. Being a native Viennese, he could work only in a café, and I will always remember him sitting with a slide rule at a table covered with papers and a dozen or so empty coffee cups. (During that period, when one asked for more coffee in Germany, the waiter always brought a new cup, leaving the empty ones on th table to be counted in making up the bill.) We also tried to use the old electric (not electronic, of course) computer in the university’s Mathematical Institute, but it always went haywire after midnight. We ascribed this interference to the ghost of Karl Friedrich Gauss arriving to inspect his old place.