Personal blogging

In an effort to reclaim the territory of the blog back from social media....

They are jackhammering up the street in front of my apartment. The noise is such that the two cats are agitated; it was so loud downstairs that a little boy with his father was afraid to leave the building!

I am up so early only because I had an 8am tooth-cleaning appointment; you have to make them so far in advance, it's the only safe time when I really know I won't have a conflict. It's a beautiful day, upper 50s and sunny; lying in the chair, though, gave me a view of my sandals that made me acknowledge that they have lived their last days - the foam footbeds are completely torn out in chunks - no longer shoes of respectability - I have thrown them in the trash....

Closing a few tabs:

A nice piece at the Guardian about Nadia Sirota and her Meet the Composers show.

Anne Fernald on Goodnight, Moon and modernism. (Mush!)

Closing tabs

A lovely interview with Alysia Abbott, whose memoir Fairyland is one of my favorite of all the books I've read in the past few years.

The Hove roots of Anthony Burgess' Enderby.

John Brewer reviews Colin Jones' new book on the smile in eighteenth-century Paris (must get this one and read it, I like the history of dentistry in the eighteenth century!).

Last but not least, an amazing sequence of X-rays of the human body performing yoga poses.

Closing tabs redux

Wish I could see this. 

Also rather wish I could go here!  (Link via B., who got it here.  Note to self: acquire camp chair?)

Great Oliver Sacks piece in last week's New Yorker, including an amazing description of the genesis of his vision of his writing vocation - online for subscribers only, but that podcast is open to all, I think.

Asad Raza's Wimbledon diary.

Rereading We Need To Talk About Kevin for a fuller discussion of Lionel Shriver as stylist in my style revision - but really I need to put that aside and get my syllabi finalized, course readers arranged, books checked on etc.  Still have a bit more leeway time-wise, as my first classes don't meet till next Wednesday and then the following Monday, but can't seem to concentrate on the other with this still unresolved, so I think I'll take a few days this week to do that, return library books, etc. 

I do have some good news that I think no longer needs to be secret - awaiting contract on the style book from Columbia University Press!  Very excited about working with them on this, though there are a couple other editors I've mentally bookmarked as people I'm eager to collaborate with on future projects.

Got home from Cayman late Sunday night and had another endodontist appointment yesterday afternoon.  Fingers crossed that this was the last one, though doctor says there is a ten percent chance a further procedure will be needed.  Went to regular dentist this morning to get the temporary filling in the crown replaced with a permanent one.  Devoutly hoping that this is it for this year's dental woes!  It was certainly much less painful afterwards than the two prior sessions, though there is still some infection.

Morning edition

Things look significantly rosier this morning, I am happy to say.  My mouth feels much better, and I've just sent off a review (due today) to a new venue.  Now to hit the library for some style books (haven't yet made master list, but time is running short) and a quick look at the Edward Gorey exhibit!

Dental woes ongoing

Nothing calamitous, but still very painful!  I had to call the endodontist's office yesterday and get a prescription for amoxycillin, which is clearly a miracle drug and did wonders overnight (after I waited for two hours at the useless local pharmacy, missing all but the final hour of last night's meditation class); but at my appointment today, it was still infected enough that the doctor just recleaned it and put in another temporary filling.  By the end of the session, I had reason to contemplate the evocative nature of the cliche touched a nerve, and it is still very painfully jangling, although knowing that the antibiotics are working makes the pain considerably easier to tolerate than yesterday's throbbing.  I am away for the next two weeks, so we will let it settle and hope for the best (no chewing on that side obviously); I have another appointment on August 27, at which point we will see whether the permanent filling can go in or whether the infection is still unresolved.

But really I should not be complaining, as thanks to the kindness of Maggie Griffin I have in my possession the single thing most calculated to relieve Davidsonian woes, dental or otherwise!  Yep - it's the new Jack Reacher novel...

Catch-up

Huge pang as I finished rereading Faithful Place (which I think is the most formally perfect of the four, though each has its own particular appeal) - no more Tana French books!  However fortunately I was able to plunge straight into Megan Abbott's superb Dare Me, which I loved, and it was a natural progression from that to a book I've been meaning to read for ages, Rebecca Godfrey's Under the Bridge.

Dental woes continue - the right lower jaw is still surprisingly painful, and I have another appointment on Wednesday - but physical therapy has worked wonders for my back, which is largely though not entirely better.  I'm only in New York through Sunday, then in Cayman for two weeks - will be working mostly on the style book, I think, though I'll take a few long novels to read with a view to contemplating ABCs of the novel....

Closing tabs

Z-z-z.  (Via GeekPress.)

Ed Park's "Two Laptops: A Short Story"!

Phil Dyess-Nugent on Gore Vidal.  (Also recommended: Inigo Thomas's 2007 LRB piece on the last installment of Vidal's memoirs;  Marcie Frank's How to Be an Intellectual in an Age of TV.)

Elaine Scarry on literature and empathy.

I'm currently slightly under the weather with dental woes.  It is not a particularly interesting backstory; my teeth are otherwise pretty good, but I had a root canal about 10 years ago, and at my annual check-up in May, the dentist asked on the basis of the x-ray whether I'd been having any trouble with it.  The answer then was no, but a week ago I had some swelling and redness/soreness; yesterday I had an appointment with the endodontist that I imagined would be purely brief and diagnostic (I thought I would book whatever treatment was likely to be necessary for perhaps mid-September), but instead I found myself in the chair for an arduous and really fairly unpleasant 90 minutes of excavation!  Walked out slightly reeling, with face still half-numb from the anesthesia.  Am taking a couple days off from exercise, and will continue to be careful over the weekend not to put undue stress on the immune system; apparently they don't give antibiotics for this as a default, only if it gets infected.  I have a follow-up next week for the rest of the work to be done, assuming it's healing properly, and am strongly hoping that it won't be as major as yesterday's appointment!  The co-pay was $400, but it would have been over $2,000 if my insurance didn't cover it, so I can consider myself fortunate that the Columbia dental plan has improved considerably in recent years....

Closing tabs

Just had another truly terrible night of sleep.  For the last four or five days I have been clenching my jaw so tightly during the night that I am afraid it's going to break, and jaw-ache itself becomes a stress factor, but I can't fall asleep with the mouthguard in, so it's really a catch-22! 

I must confess that as hard as I'm working, I still have had time to read a few novels around the edges.  Three good ones, in fact: Taylor Stevens' excellent The Innocent, follow-up to last year's superb debut The Informationist (let us just start calling her "the female Lee Child"!); a truly delightful novel by Daniel O'Malley, The Rook (it's reminiscent of Diana Wynne Jones somehow but also quite a bit like Charlie Stross's Laundry books or the Dresden Files - really genuinely charming and funny, I was hugely impressed); and a recommendation from Jo Walton, Sharon Shinn's Summers at Castle Auburn.

Closing tabs:

How long does it take to find an agent?

Wikis in the classroom.

A competition in honor of Helen Hill.

I can't wait to read Francis Spufford's new book!

Irresistible juveniles.

Abundant recompense

It was a strange week.

I spent way too much time on the phone to my health insurance company trying to figure out things about sleep specialists and what would or wouldn't be covered depending on who I saw, and I also had my teeth cleaned at the dentist's, something that always causes me to contemplate the Francis-Bacon-like aspects of human embodiment!

Tuesday was ceremonially meaningful; I gave congratulations to graduating English majors and their families and handed out awards in the humanities at a college-wide event. I had meetings this week with a couple of my graduate students who have made the significant step forward from passing their orals (qualifying exams) and are beginning to work on dissertation prospectuses; on Wednesday I succumbed, horribly, to a sinus infection, but I also attended a very lovely party at the Century Associationin celebration of my emeritus colleague Martin Meisel's receiving an honorary doctorate from Columbia (and it was his eightieth birthday to boot!). These things caused me to reflect that I typically underrate the ceremonial; I am anti-ceremonial and something of a debunker in temperament, I much prefer to cut to the chase and I do not enjoy pomp and circumstance, and yet there is a place for them, there is some meaning in this sort of show of things...

Yesterday I had a really lovely lunch with someone I admire greatly and am hugely grateful to for what I've learned from him over the years, my dissertation advisor Claude Rawson; he was doing some work in the Berg Collection at the NYPL, and we had an altogether decadent and delightful lunch at Aureole (we both had the same very delicious selections from the prix fixe lunch menu: fluke ceviche with citrus, endive, avocado and shallots, roasted skate with pureed potato, spinach and capers and a strawberry macaron with lavender lemon sorbet and perfect little freshly baked thumbnail-sized madeleines).

Last night I started going crazy when I realized I was still getting, as it were, more sick and that I would be an idiot to do the triathlon this weekend that I've been so much looking forward to (I am looking to a longer-term goal of a race about five weeks away and cannot afford the bout of bronchitis that I risk by pushing myself under such circumstances); it was a bitter pill to swallow, that I really shouldn't do it, something that my state of health when I woke up this morning made very clear, and I was languishing in self-pity all morning despite having had what otherwise would be described as a very nice week...

It was clear, really, that literature was going to be the best remedy for mental insanity: the intolerable noise of the facade cleaning they're currently doing on my building finally drove me out of the apartment, and I hit the public library and got a good haul of crime novels, came home and devoured Karin Slaughter's Broken, which I thought was very good.

Casting around for what to read after this, I was saved from less good crime novels by the arrival from Amazon of my graduate school colleague Priscilla Gilman's The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy. I started reading, and I really and truly couldn't put it down; it's a pretty extraordinary book, I kind of think everyone should read it!

Like Oliver Sacks, Priscilla manages to write about a life of deficits and losses in a way that shows, without minimizing the associated difficulties and costs, the magical forms of recompense that come along with them; she also manages to pull off something that often makes me cringe, the attempt to articulate (as opposed to taking as given, which is what I do) that literature is meaningful in some large part because of what it tells us about life. "As someone who has lived to learn," Priscilla writes of herself (she is a Yale graduate and taught at Yale and at Vassar before becoming a literary agent), she found in her son Benj, who has never been diagnosed with a specific label but who has battled a wide range of motor and social deficits that leave him perhaps best described as 'borderline Asperger's,' her "greatest and most meaningful coursework": and the book is an emotionally authentic and intellectually illuminating account of what she learned as Benj's mother and how it changed her.

Really I probably have time to read one more book before I go to sleep, but it is going to be difficult to top that one!...

Chompers

From Sam Leith's review of Donald Sturrock's Roald Dahl biography: "though he donated his early royalties to charity, Dahl used the syndication money for the short story ‘Shot Down Over Libya’ for a treat: a $380 set of false teeth (‘new set of clackers’) hand-made from gold and platinum by Lord Halifax’s dentist."