Killer Queen

Currently having a very happy sojourn in Cayman. Having a Kindle means I can download anything reasonably current instantaneously, and it is a special blessing this year that even though I am not in Paris or New York, I can continue to send lists of library requests to Zack at Butler's Delivery Services, so that when I am back in my office there is going to be a bumper load of books waiting for me! I read Christopher Woodward's excellent In Ruins and it made me "need" about twenty new books.

OF all the amazing Institute things this year, the one that most amazes and delights me - it is by far the most important quality-of-life factor for me - is the system that's been put together to get Columbia books to us. Most amazing of all: "Reid Hall (Paris)" is now available as a delivery option on my beloved BorrowDirect! WHOA! The books go to Delivery Services and then get packaged up with the books that Zack's staff pull from the shelves and check out to us and posted to Paris. We're streamlining as we go along; I think most of the other fellows just send a list to our on-site research officer Grant, but since I am requesting so many it makes more sense for me to do a bit more of the work first, so that I send a list of the books as author and title and the stable URL from Columbia's CLIO catalog for the internal ones; initially I had to email lists of BorrowDirect ones too, but now I can request them directly, which is much preferable.

NB I am relying more heavily on BorrowDirect than usual because of the ways the project touches on architectural history; Columbia has an excellent school of architecture, and accordingly a really superb architectural library in Avery, but it's a non-circulating collection, so anything I want from there (scan and deliver will do me an individual essay from a collection) needs to come through the BD network. Funny note on numbers (imprecise): I was surprised when Grant said that the total number of books received as of early November was under 200, but not so surprised that 50 of those are mine! I think I will continue to be responsible for about 25% of total borrowing (I am one of 15 fellows, about half aren't academics), I just have unusually extensive book needs (it is my way of being in the world).

Mostly I'm in work & exercise mode here, those are 2 great pleasures in my Cayman life, but there have been a few other highlights. Very nice dinner last night at Ragazzi, where we were generously comped as a thank-you to the Cayman Islands Triathlon Association (it was a committee meeting for post-race debrief, really my intention was to say hello and then eat on my own at the bar, but there was an empty seat and I was invited to join properly - I always volunteer at the Stroke and Stride races if I'm not participating myself, so it is not quite as freeloady as it sounds!).

On Saturday we went to the movies. The film was Bohemian Rhapsody, and I thoroughly enjoyed it (would have made it a higher priority if I'd known about the prominence of cat actors!). Not a Queen fan as such (the songs I know are great, I like them a lot, but I don't know that I ever listened to an individual album, I just know the classic rock radio hits), but feedback from friends and particularly having read Daniel Nester's thoughts on the movie at Barrelhouse made me figure I would like it, and I did, very much.

Daniel is my personal Queen guru (here's another recent interview that you might like if you liked the movie); he published two amazing books about Queen, in Soft Skull days (I met him because Richard Nash was publishing us both there c. 2004).

Here is God Save My Queen and its sequel. I highly recommend them both - alas, they are not available digitally, so I will have to wait to reread until I am home in NYC.

I was bemoaning the lack of a good real biography of Freddie Mercury, and got this good recommendation from Daniel: Matt Richards' Somebody to Love: The Life, Death and Legacy of Freddie Mercury. Which I have downloaded and hope to read soon....

Miscellaneous links: a nice story about a beloved eighteenth-century scholar and what it means to be a first-generation college student; at the Guardian, Brian Dillon on our love affair with ruins; Garth Greenwell's new story; the secrets of wombats' cube-shaped poo.

Closing tabs

I have said this before, but when I was a little kid, I wanted to be famous when I grew up. I wanted to have an interesting life, and I thought you had to be famous for that to be the case. Little did I know that I was grossly mistaken. Many famous people have what I would consider very boring lives, and some of the most interesting days of my life have been spent in libraries and classrooms!

It is a good week that sees the successful completion of the Syracuse half-Ironman, the final revisions completed on the style book (I sent the file to my editor earlier this afternoon) and news of the official confirmation, by the trustees of Columbia University, of my promotion to full professor! Not so status-oriented myself, but it means a decent raise and I have also been irked for some years that my lovely doctoral advisees have to have their primary letter of recommendation written by an associate professor - I am particularly glad to have set that straight...

Some very enjoyable light reading: two novels I absolutely loved by Alex Bledsoe, The Hum and the Shiver and Wisp of a Thing; Neil Gaiman's The Ocean at the End of the Lane (gave me a keen desire to reread the tales in Joan Aiken's A Touch of Chill - also, Pobby and Dingan!); installments two and three of the Expanse series, Caliban's War and Abaddon's Gate (it really is a super trilogy - the characters are much more fully and appealingly rendered than in standard space opera); and Iain M. Banks, The Quarry.

Next work thing I have to do is a reader's report on a book manuscript for a university press - haven't cracked it open yet, but am rather looking forward to it, if not easier then certainly more intellectually engaging than putting final touches on one's own book. Looking forward to much (warm) triathlon training, yoga and reading in the days to come - I'm here in Cayman through Monday the 8th.

Closing tabs:

My former student Sarah Courteau on the self-help movement and the logic of affirmation.

A friend is recognized for excellence in book design.

Ian Bogost's principles for university presses (I am very strongly in favor of most of these, though I think the tenure question is more complicated than this format permits delving into).

Last but not least, sconic sections.

Vacant residences or animal remains

There is a slightly occult feel to this description in William T. Broad's Science Times piece about Peter Rona's two-mile-deep diving quest:

Dr. Rona has found that P. nodosum thrives in restricted areas of Atlantic seabed. Its only visible feature consists of tiny holes arranged in six-sided patterns that look curiously like the hearts of Chinese checkers boards. He has photographed thousands of the hexagons and found that large ones have 200 or 300 holes.