Hons and rebels

At the FT (site registration required), Jo Ellison on the late Duchess of Devonshire's possessions going up for auction:

Ironically, another lot, a pre-edition of Brideshead Revisited by Evelyn Waugh (£15,000-£20,000) exposes Debo as an early Waugh reader and occasional editor. “She did once recount saying something like, ‘In 1930 women wouldn’t have worn Cartier clips ... ’ ” says MacDonald, of her contribution to his oeuvre. “But, I don’t know if that’s Brideshead.”

PTEROPODS/PARACUSES

At the NYT, Oliver Sacks on the mishearings of deafness:

And yet there is often a sort of style or wit — a “dash ”— in these instantaneous inventions; they reflect, to some extent, one’s own interests and experiences, and I rather enjoy them. Only in the realm of mishearing — at least, my mishearings — can a biography of cancer become a biography of Cantor (one of my favorite mathematicians), tarot cards turn into pteropods, a grocery bag into a poetry bag, all-or-noneness into oral numbness, a porch into a Porsche, and a mere mention of Christmas Eve a command to “Kiss my feet!”

Postscript

No sooner had I posted my favorite reading of 2014 list than I realized that I had left out my latest favorite discovery, the books of Elizabeth Wein. Both the WWII ones and the Arthurian-Ethiopia ones are superb. I am sure there are a few other important things I omitted, but this is the key one.

(In case you are curious for a glimpse into my working method, it is no wonder that I missed it - I just skim through the blog and jot down notes in this format, with things loosely grouped together in categories, then type it up in a new post, ticking things off as I proceed. Although I am characteristically very accurate in terms of proofreading and copy-editing, my tendency is to be extremely messy - I guess I like the environment to be the right balance of austere and chaotic - and it has been suggested that I might have a mild undiagnosed case of ADD, symptoms of which include the inability to wake up easily in the morning and the desire to stab myself in the eye with a fork when I have to listen to a boring talk or lecture.)

A Mimi sandwich

Life is full of good things just now, only so many good things that I don't have time and leisure to appreciate them fully!

I thoroughly enjoyed reading on Wednesday night with Mimi and Jenny O., but stayed out much later than was really advisable.

The St. Thomas Messiah on Thursday was extremely good: while the soloists are capable though nothing extraordinary (sparkly soprano!), the sound of the boys of the choir is truly the most amazing thing you will ever hear!

After being stuck on a subway platform for almost an hour yesterday on the way to doctor for allergy shots and flu vaccine (high frazzle factor), and also just being out late two nights in a row, I got up at an ungodly hour and then couldn't get into the dreaded RAPS to read files - very stressful couple hours as I developed a few workarounds with the help of a colleague and an office computer - but at some point I had a sad epiphany that really I should not go to my old friends' holiday party in Brooklyn this evening, it was going to prompt a minor nervous breakdown to have another night out given that I also need to be in Prospect Park tomorrow morning at 9am to run 10K for a good cause (and flying out of the country again on Monday).

Much light reading and other Paris catch-up to do still, but not sure how much I will get through this evening. Bed may be on the agenda SOON!

Hot zone update

Sitting at my desk in New York and trying to gear up to write a letter of recommendation that's due today - fortunately I don't need to be on campus until three, as I still have quite a bit of reading to finish before class as well.

Dublin was excellent but phenomenally tiring - any time I was not actually seeing people and doing conference things, I was essentially huddled in bed in my hotel room (fortunately it was quite a nice room - I put up the Do Not Disturb sign and just left it up!).

Interesting interview with Richard Preston at the New York Times about current plans to update his thriller-like account of Ebola as of the early 1990s, The Hot Zone. I vividly remember reading this during my first year of grad school - my roommate LeeAnn had the hardcover and I devoured it! I have been following Ebola developments closely and with interest: my two main fantasy alternate careers are neurologist and epidemiologist, and I am a little sorry that I am not involved in planning and organizing ways to contain the epidemic.

I am relieved to see that Preston admits that one bit of the book is especially in need of correction (I always wondered!):

In the original “Hot Zone,” I have a description of a nurse weeping tears of blood. That almost certainly didn’t happen. When a person has Ebola, the eyes can turn brilliant red from blood vessels leaking and blood oozing out of the eyelid. That’s horrifying, but it’s not someone with tears of blood running down their face. I want to fix that.

Here's his piece in this week's New Yorker.

The missing notes for chapter six

Pretty much as soon as the style book was published, I started receiving emails from readers gently noting that there were no endnotes for chapter six! Alas, as per Alice Boone on the progress of error, somehow this omission eluded all of us as we read proofs.

In any case, I wanted to make sure that the information was available somewhere for searching, and it should be corrected in subsequent printings.

(Now that I have really looked through and pulled this stuff from the manuscript, I have a theory about what happened - note 8 is the anomaly here, it was a parenthetical aside in the manuscript and I dimly recall my editor suggesting that it should be either cut or moved to a note, but this was after I had already submitted my final manuscript and I would have sent changes by email rather than integrating them into the file myself - I suspect that tinkering with that text may have precipitated the larger omission.)

Notes for Chapter Six, "Late Style: The Golden Bowl and Swann's Way," Reading Style: A Life in Sentences:

1. Theodor W. Adorno, “Late Style in Beethoven,” in Essays on Music, intro. Richard Leppert, trans. Susan H. Gillespie (Berkeley, Los Angeles and London: University of California Press, 2002), 565-67.

2. Leon Edel, Henry James: A Life (New York: Harper and Row, 1985), 456.

3. Henry James, The Golden Bowl, ed. Ruth Bernard Yeazell (London and New York: Penguin, 2009), 3.

4. Susan Sontag, “Notes on ‘Camp,’” in Against Interpretation and Other Essays (New York: Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1967), 280.

5. Alan Hollinghurst, “The shy, steely Ronald Firbank,” TLS (15 Nov. 2006).

6. Ronald Firbank, Concerning the Eccentricities of Cardinal Pirelli (1926), in Five Novels (Norfolk, CT: New Directions, [1949]), chapter 1, 333-34. The following paragraph reveals that the entity being christened is “a week-old police-dog."

7. Quoted in the introduction to Marcel Proust, Swann’s Way, trans. Lydia Davis (New York: Penguin, 2004), xiv.

8. When my brothers and I were small children, our Scottish grandmother used to give us a sort of sachet or envelope labelled “Japanese Water Flowers” full of colored snippets that would magically unfold into blossoms when placed on the surface of a bowl of water; they are most commonly made out of paper, so that there is perhaps something additionally and self-consciously literary about the notion of reading the past from such signs.

9. André Aciman, letter, NYRB 53:6 (6 April 2006), as given at http://www.nybooks.com/articles/18851.

Spinoza!

Just a taste, to whet the appetite (I am hungry to be back at the library so that I can check out a huge pile of books about biblical criticism), from the Theological-Political Treatise:

Possibly someone will say that I am completely undermining Scripture by my manner of proceeding, since it may lead everyone to suspect that the Bible is everywhere full of mistakes. But on the contrary, I have shown that my methodology works in favour of Scripture by preventing passages which are clear and pure from being corrupted to fit defective passages and simply because some passages are defective, we are not justified in placing every passage under suspicion. There has never ever been a book without mistakes: has anyone (I ask) therefore ever supposed that they were defective throughout? Of course not, especially when the expression is lucid and the meaning of the author is clearly evident.

Closing tabs

Best weekend viewing: Weekend of a Champion at the IFC. It is amazing - reminds me (I am laughing, I am the only person who would foreground this association I think!) of what I most like about the early novels of Dick Francis. Here's the trailer - see it if you get a chance.

Reread most of Dangerous Liaisons last night in partial preparation for Tuesday's seminar meeting. It really is the most incredible novel - I wish I could write something with that beautifully taut spring-like construction - it is almost as well-put-together as Oedipus Rex.

Miscellaneous links:

Imagining a future without antibiotics.

What do you do when you're a mathematician and you make a mistake?

At the FT, Pankaj Mishra on the problem with talking about the global novel (site registration required).

Light reading around the edges: Joshilyn Jackson, Someone Else's Love Story; Vidar Sundstol, The Land of Dreams.

The quiet volume

I went and saw a funny thing today with my friend T. - it is a sort of immersive piece, not entirely unlike one of the games in my new novel, that takes place in a reading room at the NYU library. Though it is a piece about reading, I'm really not the ideal spectator for it - I have thought too much about reading, my opinions are too strong and my knowledge too copious to immerse myself in the experience as I am supposed to! I thought it was better in the idea than in the execution, though again this may be partly due to my own excessive reading speed - they have set it up to accommodate readers of different speed, but they do not really take into account the truly abnormal, which I fear mine is. I wanted the makers of the piece to read Thomas Warton's amazing book about reading, The Logogryph, which I loved and am now keen to revisit.

One of the three books in the pile in front of me - the most interesting thing about the piece, I think, and probably the locus of interest for its makers, is the way it makes you think about the physical position of the reader sitting next to you - was a novel I loathe, in theory and in practice: Jose Saramago's Blindness. I had time to read much more of it than I think I was intended to.

(With the thought running in the back of my head, about the notebook with text produced by the piece's "authors" - "There are many typos on p. 35!" At various times the recorded text coming in through the ears was at odds in ways minor to moderate from the printed text one was asked to find and follow, but I could not imagine that they had deliberately misspelled those words on that page. It was highly distracting.)

Tooth and throat singing

A good error correction in this story at the Times:

An article on Thursday about Caroline Shaw, who won the Pulitzer Prize for music this week, referred incorrectly to a vocal technique explored by a group she has sung with, Roomful of Teeth. It is Tuvan throat singing — a tradition of the Tuvan people of Siberia — not “tooth and throat” singing.

Usage

In the last issue of the LRB, the final paragraph of Christopher Tayler's review of a new book about the friendship between Kingsley Amis and Philip Larkin (not sure whether or not this one's gated):

Either way, it seems unfair to rap Amis on the knuckles for telling Larkin that ‘you seem to observe women much more closely and sensitively and well lovingly ah ha well perhaps not that than I do.’ Or to detect psychic torment in Larkin’s ‘I sometimes read a poem over with a tiny Kingsley crying How d’you mean at every unclear image, and it’s a wonderful aid to improvement.’ It also seems a bit hostile to pack a study of the two sticklers with phrases like ‘sham hypocrisies’, ‘the fact … is prescient’, ‘very contemporaneous presences’ and ‘not much is said but a great deal is magnificently inferred.’ Though it’s humbling to be shown how much of the believability of literary history comes down to getting words right, Bradford ought to get a tiny Kingsley of his own. Failing that, he could consult Amis’s The King’s English (1997), which deals with the imply/infer thing pretty helpfully, then concludes: ‘If you feel you have mental room for only one of the two, stick to infer while you wait for a new head.’

The spinach myth

Popeye's nutritional preferences the consequence of a transcription error. (Via GeekPress.)

"I am Philip Roth"

Philip Roth's open letter to Wikipedia.

Closing tabs

Jay Winter on Paul Fussell.

Susanna Rustin interviews Adam Phillips for the Guardian.

The FT has a very good lunch with George R. R. Martin (site registration required).

"It was as if a light had been Nookd" (courtesy of Anjuli and Alice).

I've been trying to stay off the computer due to what is probably a slightly pulled back muscle, but it's somewhat better this morning.  It is fishy that my back is sore enough to prevent me writing my overdue Austen essay but still permits a couple of hours of exercise every day!  Really I was just working too hard from January through May and am now having the traditional post-semester willpower collapse - having now slightly bored myself by watching the first two seasons of House as if under a compulsion, it is now preferable to write the essay, which I am hoping I might finish by the end of the day tomorrow so that I can get back to The Magic Circle for one more round of revision.

Mid-morning update

9:45am (Cayman doesn't observe daylight savings).  Just typed in final edits for first half (parts one and two); it will only now need printing out and a final proof against the marked-up edit where new typing may have introduced new errors.

Second half (part three) still needs a few 'bits'; I will write them on my computer at Cafe del Sol (I have spent many happy hours here working on something or other!), then go back to the condo and print the whole thing out.  Determined to be done by 5pm.  If I finished by 2:30, I could go to yoga at 3, but that seems a bit of a stretch (!)....

Two thoughts in the meantime:

• I overuse the words "as" and "that"
• Though I think that sometimes the effect of elegant variation should be deliberately embraced, it is probably just as well that I have only used the word "confiture" once (there are seven instances of jam)

Source statements

Brent sent a good link earlier, subject line "Suitable background bit for a thriller." Really it could probably be milked for an entire series...

The home stretch

It's been a quiet week at Light Reading; August is always slow as far as digital treasures go (though I enjoyed Andrew O'Hagan's Pippa Middleton piece for New York Magazine) and really I've just been dug in on the style book, which is now in the home stretch. (Mixed metaphor alert? But I cannot do without those phrases.) If it's not done by the end of the day today, I should be finished with it by lunchtime tomorrow...

(After doing a very thorough edit with gap-filling-in new writing in the first half of the week, I typed most of it up late Tuesday night and finished yesterday during the day. Got to Cafe del Sol at 6:30 this morning and sat down and copy-edited the whole manuscript all the way through, finishing around 10 or so. Now I'm sitting at my desk at home about to type in those edits; the only thing remaining to be actually written is several paragraphs for the very end. I don't like writing endings, I prefer just to stop, but it will not do!)

(This is one of the three or four main things I need to fix on BOMH also. That's next up in the queue: say about ten days or two weeks of work on that, and I can get it back to my agent by the end of the month. Couple other bits and bobs of work: reader's report on a journal article, a couple conference paper abstracts. Then change gears and get back into teaching mode; I'm teaching two new classes in the fall, I did one syllabus in June but the other still needs to be sorted out and "thunk" through.)

Anyway, back to style, once I've typed these changes in, I'll print out this final version and read it through one more time, but there are only a few stretches where I've really done significant editing, for lots of the book it's minor changes that I can check just by reading it against the marked-up copy. I am old-school in my methods, I find it is the best way to catch errors...

Mescal and sympathy

Oliver Sacks has luxuriant eyelashes. (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)

My favorite bit of the exchange:

How often do you prepare your own meals?

Once or twice — in my lifetime. Usually I subsist on cereal, sardines, and tabouli. Sometimes I have food delivered by Tea & Sympathy, or my local sushi place.

Have been very busy this week. Insane amounts to get done in next 10 days or so. That said, have found time for minor extracurriculars: an odd play at the Flea (weirdly chronologically unanchored play about nuns and priests leaving their orders, with disconcerting moment in which a cellphone appears & thoroughly disrupts peculiarly timeless ambience - why weren't they talking about the molestation scandals and the difficulty of recruiting high-quality young nuns if it really is set in the present day as opposed to the 1960s?), a fun show by Titus Andronicus courtesy of my good friend and triathlon training partner Lauren whose sister Amy is in the band and was kind enough to put us on the guest list. Tomorrow I am going to see Nico's thing at St. Ann's Warehouse. New York life: very stimulating, very tiring....

"The Pembrokeshire council begs to differ"

Another big cat sighting!

Production of quota

c. 2,000 words, for a total of 40,188 words.

(Not quite as good as it sounds, since some of those were words I am at least for now (copyright issues may mean I need to go back later on to a nineteenth-century translation) borrowing from the Penguin Euripides, and also the Wikipedia definition of thyrsus!)

I have had my eye on 40,000 - it is ridiculously childish, but I cannot stop myself periodically from Googling the phrase "how many words in a novel" and it does seem that 40,000 is the top end of what is considered a novella, NOVEL starts around here. I think 65,000 words would be a good length for this particular novel - it's definitely at the short end but indisputably (?) at that point a novel rather than a neither-fish-nor-fowl - my draft may come in a bit shorter than that, but I think the opening stretch probably needs to have some scenes added, and I guess I will be able to make it to the low 60s without too much difficulty.

I need to finish this draft as soon as I can, there are a lot of other things I would really rather be doing! And unfortunately the supreme recipe for novel composition is to be a bit bored or under-occupied; once I start doing too many other things, the desire (or the will) to write every day is compromised...

Light reading around the edges: a bunch of very good best-of-2010 crime recommendations from Sarah Weinman (the whole list is here), including Jodi Compton's Hailey's War (a bike messenger thriller - I loved it!), Tom Franklin's beautifully titled Crooked Letter, Crooked Letter (probably the best out of these three, though they are all excellent - but this one's the most ambitious) and Alan Glynn's Winterland.

Also, Rosanne Cash's Composed (quite good, but marred for me by the strong presence of a sense of mystic patterning/correspondences that I cannot at all assent to!) and Anne Fortier's Juliet: A Novel, which I found a huge disappointment. I had misremembered the recommendation as having come from Jo Walton, but it was actually another Tor reviewer; the book certainly has some good qualities, but it is about three times as long as the substantive content would suggest suitable (leading to much skimming by this reader), and the heroine is the first one I've seen who could be plausibly considered even worse than Twilight's Bella in terms of passivity, rationalization and general uselessness! NB fourteenth-century Italian Catholic father does not charge rebellious teenage daughter with having possibly been challenging his authority by going so far as to read the Bible!