Right/wrong

What Tanner Colby learned when he re-reported Bob Woodward's biography of John Belushi. (Via Phil.)

Production of quota

Immensely relieved to be back on a more regular schedule.

Enjoyable, too, to be writing again in the first person.

Briefly stymied by fact that I am now close to 'real time' (almanac-style - it is said that Tom Jones is the first novel composed with an almanac and accurate details about the stages of the moon on particular nights and in particular locations), and have to take into account as I write of Dec. 22 and 23 in New York what the weather actually was.

I must say that I have a pang that I have missed this blizzard, though I am very glad not to have been affected by airline disruptions; I guess I will have to use my imagination when I get to the days after Xmas. (This site is handy.)

c. 1,000 words, for a total of 23,268 words

"Novelistic gloss"

Facebook movie?

Fact-checking

Correct 'alternateness' can involve making things up or finding obscure 'true' things: the Dewar bulb is what Sophie and Mikael have instead of a Thermos when they drink tea en route from Helsingborg to Stockholm!

TK

Though I do not share his enthusiasm for shad, and though I am finding the magazine's new site registration policy (and the limits it puts on linking) somewhat irksome from a blog-related standpoint, I liked John McPhee's piece about magazine fact-checking in the latest issue of the New Yorker:

In a freight train a mile and a half long, there is a vital tube of air that runs the full length and controls the brakes. In "Coal Train" (2005), I felt a need for analogy and guessed at one:

The releasing of the air brakes began at the two ends, and moved toward the middle. The train's very long integral air tube was like the air sac of an American eel.

Before long, the checking department was up to its chin in ichthyologists, and I was informed by Josh Hersh that the air sac of an American eel is proportionally a good deal shorter than the air sac in most ordinary fish.

"Who says so?"

"Willy Bemis."

"Oh."

Willy Bemis is to the anatomy of fishes what Eldridge Moores is to tectonics. Willy was the central figure in a book of mine that had been published three years before, parts of which appeared in The New Yorker. He had since left the University of Massachusetts to become director of Shoals Marine Laboratory, the offshore classrooms of Cornell University and the University of New Hampshire. I called him in Ithaca to ask what could be done. Ever accommodating, Willy at first tried to rationalize the eel. Maybe its air sac was up to the job after all. Maybe the analogy would work. I said the eel would never make it through the checking department, or, for that matter, past me. We were close to closing, and right offhand Willy was unable to think of a species with a long enough sac. What to do? What else? He called Harvard. The train's very long integral air tube was like the air sac of a rope fish.

Also: Rogue eel on the loose! (Via Nico.)