NYC 35

Until the teaching semester is done (soon!), Mondays and Tuesdays basically need all of my available vim for my classes. Wednesday morning has a TINY bit the effect of a Saturday morning (not really, student appointments starting at 11 and pretty booked through end of day) and I have just read my friend Marina Harss's wonderful article about learning the Merce Cunningham solo through Zoom sessions. I might even give this a try myself in May - have been thinking that this summer might not be a bad time to try some beginner barre classes too....

This afternoon at 4:30pm EDT: Kaiama L. Glover and I will talk about Margaret's novel at the virtual humanities center. Join us if you can possibly bear another hour on Zoom!

Off outside momentarily for Wednesday's faster run intervals. It is still in the 30s today, that's sort of amazing.

Sleeping in

I was so phenomenally tired last night that I accidentally fell asleep from 6pm to 9pm with the lights on and 2 cats sprawled beside me on the bed. Then I couldn't sleep till late, maybe 2am: but it was clear when the alarm went off at 8:45 that I was not really ready to get up, despite the pull of my beloved 10am spin class. Messaged the teacher to let her know I wouldn't be there, then went back to bed. It was the right choice - I feel much more functional now, and will go out for an easy 90-minute run in another hour or so (it is 40 degrees and sunny!).

Saw a very poor play by Brecht on Wednesday (not recommended, though there are some funny bits and the production's not bad); good grilled ham and cheese sandwich afterwards with G. at Linen Hall.

Saw an amazing film called The Unseen Sequence yesterday at Lincoln Center with friends. Particularly mesmerizing are the teaching sequences, but really the whole thing was incredibly worthwhile (and with some lovely music also). A treat afterwards - their friend who works at the Met gave us an amazing behind-the-scenes tour, including the "dome" (little box up at the very top above the chandelier) and the hydraulic lift - gigantic pistons! - used to bring up enormous scenery from the bowels of the complex to the stage. Then another grilled cheese sandwich, this time with tomato soup (I had rushed straight from a long morning meeting to the movie, it was 3:30 and I was dropping from fatigue and hunger!), at the Alice Tully cafe.

I am much enjoying this semester so far, but it has a very different work rhythm than my usual - the committee load is extremely heavy (it is fascinating work, though, and very well-suited to my inclinations and abilities - basically reading and synthesizing huge amounts of material across a wide range of fields), with deadlines on Wednesday morning for report-writing and Friday morning for the meeting itself, and my class is Thursday afternoon. Won't have much time for leisure reading, but it is a worthwhile tradeoff (confidentiality prevents me from linking to either of the 2 books I read this week, or to any of the four candidates for tenure we discussed at our meeting yesterday). The weekend feels more relaxed because of not teaching on Mondays, but I have to make it through to the end of the week intact, rather than collapsing happily on Wednesday evening when I am mostly done.

Light reading around the edges: a comfort reread of Gerald Durrell's My Family and Other Animals (can't remember now what reminded me of this - it is a book I read many many times as a child, I loved it, I practically know it by heart - but I bought this copy for B., who doesn't know it, and then couldn't resist rereading it myself first); and I am well dug in on Rebecca Mead's absolutely lovely My Life in Middlemarch, which is gloriously good. I have been thinking a lot about what books I want to write next, and I think I am on a Rebecca Mead-Geoff Dyer-Francis Spufford axis of writing about reading, though with more similarities I think to Spufford than to either of the other two....

Closing tabs

Dancing your PhD (FT site registration required).

The amazing kidney chain.

Martin Amis's arcades project.

Botanical forensics.

Can't recommend The Broken Heart at all (I think this review was too kind); Galileo had its moments, and the set and staging are gorgeous, but it necessarily provokes the thought It is a good thing that Brecht does not have much of an influence on current playwriting...

Closing tabs

It has been an unproductive day thus far in the sense that I have neither exercised nor done any 'real' work, but it was hugely beneficial in terms of mental health and tidying and organizing just to have a day at home sorting things out.  B. is arriving in an hour or so from the airport, and the apartment is ready for a visitor; the kitchen table (a.k.a. desk: it is actually an old drawing table bestowed on me by a neighbor in Cambridge c. 1993) is covered with neat piles of work and manuscripts; I have my Boston hotel reservation for the week immediately after Thanksgiving and have called in prescription refills and done a host of other minor errands of that sort.

I'm about halfway through John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection Pulphead, and finding it completely mesmerizing.  His essay on Michael Jackson sent me last night to this uncanny clip.  

Life vicissitudes of A Very Young Dancer.

The uncanny red landscapes of Kodak Aerochrome.

Bret McKenzie of Conchords fame has written three songs for the new Muppets movie (the piece is by Adam Sternbergh).  Writing for Disney has its constraints:

For example: At one point, McKenzie wrote a lyrical joke for Kermit, in which he would sing, “I remember when I was just a little piece of felt.” That didn’t fly. “I was told: ‘You’re not allowed to do that. The Muppets have always existed. You can’t break down their world.’ ” Another rule: Frogs and bears and pigs can talk, but penguins and chickens can’t. They can cluck or squawk musically, but they can’t say words. “So I was like, ‘Can we get the penguins to sing?’ And they’d say: ‘No. Penguins don’t sing.’ ”

Last night I saw the slight but charming She Kills Monsters at the Flea; afterwards, the place we usually eat at after a show at the Flea was closed for a private party, so we checked out White & Church.  The menu is quite limited and the space and set-up give the feel more of a bar than a restaurant as such, but the food is superb.

Clouds, water, paper

"Water Stains on the Wall" was not quite what I expected: I had somehow (unrealistically!) imagined this Taiwanese dance piece that promised to mix up calligraphy and tai chi and ballet and all sorts of other things would capture exactly the magic of something else I saw at BAM in the spring, the ombromanie of Philippe Beau. At any rate, it was nothing like that: it was worthwhile, but I found it frustrating to have so little sense of the separate idioms that are being combined. I am really too much an academic, but I found myself with all sorts of questions I could not at all answer: most pressingly, were there specific postures or movements that would be known to the well-informed viewer as allusions to individual calligraphic characters or sequences? The dancers are interesting to watch (they are extraordinarily athletic), but no cumulative meanings emerge from the patterns on the stage; I think my favorite short sequence was one where the music went silent and the projections across the white sheet-of-paper stage suddenly went much more quickly and more really and truly like clouds across the sky - there were a few other moments that really captured my attention, and it was enjoyable to gaze upon throughout, but it withheld significance from the outside viewer. Also: why, oh why do these top-quality companies think it is OK to perform to recorded music? Really all you need is a couple of excellent people and some good equipment and a sense of what to do: Nico has of course spoiled me for this sort of thing, but the canned music is not convincing to me (it is mostly by this guy, it is not an idiom I know well either but it's the lack of a responsive live sound rather than the actual music as such that strikes me as irksome).

Monday miscellany

A rainy day in New York...

Andrew explores a delightful index ("Eggs, correct handling of") and links to an old piece by Philip Hensher on the pleasures and perils of indexing (via Marginal Revolution).

Jo Walton on why professional writers have to be particularly careful what they write online about other books

Former student Ellen Bar's film NY Export: Opus Jazz has its PBS premiere this Wednesday at 8pm.

Last and least: publicity! (The picture was taken in the reading room at Butler Library - our main concern was to minimize disruption to sleeping undergraduates...)

(Also on the topic of publicity, it sounds as though I will most likely be signing advance copies of Invisible Things at Book Expo on the afternoon of May 26, and will hope to see some of you there.)

Closing tabs

I have spent much of the last week in a pleasant haze, in subway cars or during the later-evening couch hours mandated by the anti-insomnia protocol which forbids computer time at night, induced and maintained by the first five books of Dorothy Dunnett's House of Niccolo series.

There is something very comforting about knowing how many of them there are - eight books in this series, and then a whole other six-book series. I love multi-volume series (also very pleasant is discovering a crime novelist of excellence who has already published six or seven volumes in his or her series which can then be consumed at a steady but more or less voracious pace over the course of four or five days); I think that these are not in the end up to the standard of Patrick O'Brian on the one hand or Susan Howatch on the other, but I am now very much looking forward to reading the Lymond books once I finish with these.

Further link miscellany:

This year's "oddest book title" contest. (A number of these books inevitably sound to my ears highly worthwhile!)

Shackleton's whisky excavated from beneath floorboards of polar hut!

At the New Yorker, Macy Halford on the importance of e-mail to romance (with commentary by Abigail Adams) (courtesy of Amy).

On Thursday I saw Parsons Dance at the Joyce. The dancing was excellent, the music perhaps to a somewhat lower standard (though not as dire as I feared - it is a truly bizarre endeavor, though, with famous opera arias set as lavishly orchestrated pop songs - "La donna e mobile" as torch song really made me want to laugh! - it is the East Village Opera Company and their music can be sampled here if you are curious).

By far the highlight of the evening was the short prelude before the main piece. It is called "Caught," and it is truly spectacular - it takes advantage of the kinds of theatricality and athleticism one associates with Cirque du Soleil, which seems to me a very good idea indeed. The combination of strobe lighting and unbelievable jumps and timing truly makes it seem as though the dancer is flying through the air due some occult power - it is very "Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon," I loved it! There is a link here which gives some of the flavor of it, but the essence is exactly what cannot be captured on film or digital media - the staggering part of it is the way that after the flying sequence you suddenly see the dancer standing quietly at the back of the stage, only the sheen of sweat and the heaving ribcage speaking to the effort that has just been expended. Really magical!

(A good dinner afterwards, too, at the Viceroy Cafe. I had a steak salad - slabs of rare beef served on a heap of mesclun salad with balsamic vinaigrette and roquefort cheese, with cucumber, tomato and avocado laid out delicately around the plate - and a truly delicious helping of tiramisu.)