Twitter tabs

Twitter isn't so much a closed space as Facebook, but I've been trying to be a little more active there (book promotional purposes) and I find myself too often just retweeting a good link instead of more usefully for my own purposes sharing and archiving it here! One great thing about blogging is that it makes for such a consistent archive - these other more tailored proprietary formats (especially Facebook) are much less suited to that purpose....

Anyway, some funny bits I've had on my Twitter feed:

Cat paws have an uncanny resemblance to tiny little bears. pic.twitter.com/bUfk1KfXH5

— Faces in Things (@FacesPics) July 8, 2014

Long-lost section of the Bayeux Tapestry shows what happened when Pooh met the Normans (artist: E. H. Shepard)... pic.twitter.com/cW8I8XEfCO

— Britannia PR (@Britanniacomms) July 16, 2014

"Ghostbusters is a movie about 3 scrappy technologists who build disruptive tech to do supernatural defense." - @TimHwang #Transition2014

— Percolate (@percolate) July 16, 2014

Also: Will Amazon provide a Netflix-type service for books? (Via Sarah W. NB this will do me no good if a lot of books are excluded....)

"I made my husband try a sex robot."

Book recommendations from Stephen King.

"It gave focus to their work"

An oral history of Ghostbusters.

Closing tabs

Ugh, I'm still ailing - I feel terrible! Canceled my class this morning and slept much of the day but still have to pull myself together to finish writing my overdue review and get student papers read for tomorrow and Wednesday. Have already taken Advil to no avail - perhaps more caffeine might be helpful? Really lying down seems like the only thing I am inclined to do....

Read my friend and colleague Rachel Adams' new book Raising Henry on the train back from New Haven yesterday. It is superb - highly recommended.

Closing tabs:

Ghostwriting for Tom Clancy. (Curious omission: he never even hints at what he was paid. If I were a ghostwriter, I'd prefer it to be for celebrity autobiographies, but I've always been curious about whether it really would be possible to make a living that way - I mean, it would be less suited to my skill set than my actual job, but I like thinking about it!)

The Hollywood mountain lion known as P-22.

Ruth Franklin's devastating account of Norman Rush's new novel.

This is what I will need for the coming zombie apocalypse. (One cat on each float?)

Custom-built bicycle for a man with no arms.

At Public Books, Katie Gemmill considers eighteenth-century Pygmalion Thomas Day and the victims of his project.

Ghosts

At the Kenyon Review, Amy Boesky on her secret life as a Sweet Valley High ghostwriter.

"He was calm because of the Mandrax"

At the Phoenix, James Parker on recent lives of Rod Stewart and Leonard Cohen:

Rod spent much of his adolescence perfecting, and then maintaining, his exquisite ragged bouffant, or "bouff": "Picture me if you will, then, carefully dressed and styled for the night, accompanied by my mates, and standing down in Archway Station as the train thunders in — and all of us cowering into the wall, with our arms up over our heads, trying to protect our bouffs from getting toppled by the wind."

The literary treadmill

At the TLS, Geoffrey Wheatcroft has a great piece on Peter Clarke's new book about Winston Churchill's literary career (the tax details are especially fascinating!):

It was when installed in a government office that Churchill discovered the delights of dictation to a shorthand-typist, and thereafter all his work was dictated. This gave, as it happened, a kind of homogeneity to everything he produced “by tongue or pen”. His speeches were first dictated and then typed before being delivered in public, his books were dictated and set in galley proof to be endlessly amended at outlandish cost. And he also soon learned the value of enlisting the help of others: his first private secretary, at the Colonial Office, was (later Sir) Edward Marsh, who would follow Churchill from one ministry to another and then serve him with personal devotion, reading his proofs, ghostwriting his articles, and even compiling his tax returns.

Monday round-up

Ghosts of the Leningrad siege (via my father).

Bits and pieces of light reading: Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim, a recommendation from Brent that I enjoyed quite a bit (I've read other books rather like it - it is along Dresden Files lines - also we are in the thick of an angel-demon zeitgeist, and I was struck by similarities to the TV series Supernatural - but it is really appealingly well-written, with a fresh and lively and distinctive first-person voice); and Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, which seems to me flawed in various respects but so energetic and interesting and engaging that I was willing to forgive various implausibilities and awkward handlings of narrative point of view.

I got a good haul of books on Saturday at the Hobbies & Books store in Grand Harbour, which is unfortunately closing - but all books were discounted 30%, with an additional free fourth book for every three purchased. A few of the ones I walked away with are true local curiosities, which I will perhaps post about anon...

I'm looking at a funny situation vis-a-vis work. I'm very tempted to plunge straight into drafting the new novel, but have decided it is impractical and that it will be better for me to leave it on the boil for a little while and come back to it later in the fall. I'll be in Ottawa for ten days or so in September, and then I'll be in New York for about four weeks in October, with side trips to Maine (for a friend's wedding) and Buffalo (for a conference).

The talk for NEASECS will be a preview of the ABCs of the novel project in the form of an argument about Laurence Sterne and novelistic conventions for the transcription of human movement and expression, and I'm also giving a talk earlier that month at the Fordham 18th-century seminar on Richardson's Clarissa; so that's two high-quality talks to write.

I also have two tenure letters to write this month, the first ones I have done (I turned down a few before I had tenure and I also turned down one or two in the first year I had tenure, but at this point I really have no good reason to say no, it is an important part of service to the profession); so I think that really my goal for the rest of the month is to write those two letters and get to work on Sterne and Richardson so that when I leave for Ottawa I at least have something down on paper in the way of draft. I may only have a week or so in Cayman between the return from Ottawa and the departure for New York, and it will be foolish to count on getting a lot of work done then; and my notion for the work I'll do during the New York weeks, aside from school catch-up stuff and the seasonal flood of letters of recommendation, is that it will be a good time to give the style book a wholesale going-over...

Animal crossing

Savegames of the deceased, courtesy of Ed.

"Not silence, only publicity could protect us in the west"

At the Guardian, this year's Nobelist in Literature Herta Müller on the file kept on her by the Romanian secret service:

In my file I am two different persons. One is called Cristina, who is an enemy of the state and is being fought. To compromise this Cristina a dummy is produced in the falsification workshop of Branch "D" (Disinformation), with all the ingredients that harm me the most – party faithful communist, unscrupulous agent. Wherever I went, I had to live with this dummy. It wasn't just sent after me, it hurried ahead of me. Even though I have, from the beginning and always, written only against the dictatorship, the dummy goes its own way to this day. It has become independent of me. Even though the dictatorship has been dead for 20 years, the dummy leads its ghostly life. For how long yet?

Monday ghost miscellany

An eerie glimpse of Anne Frank on film.

Deborah Solomon interviews Rosanne Cash about her new album: covers of songs chosen by her father.

Phil Nugent on Jim Carroll.

Hauntings

From the NYT's report on the latest round of technical service bulletins from auto manufacturers:

INFINITI Is the G37 possessed? In T.S.B. 09-025 issued on May 12, Infiniti says the windows on 2008-9 models will lower an inch and then rise again when someone closes the glovebox. Apparently, a sensor wire is plugged in at the wrong spot. Putting this wire in the right place should purge “Christine.”

Related: I read Sarah Rees Brennan's absolutely wonderful The Demon's Lexicon. My only complaint is that I wished the book had been called Goblin Market instead - but it is really excellent, redolent of some of my favorites (Margaret Mahy, Diana Wynne Jones) but very fresh and original in its voice and world-building.

Travel miscellany

Airport/plane/train reading: Rachel Vincent's Pride (have not read first installments in series, but backstory is well handled, and I can never resist a good were-animal story); Laura Lippman's What the Dead Know; Charles de Lint's Memory and Dream; Mark Billingham's Buried; Sarah Waters' The Little Stranger (very good); Linwood Barclay's Too Close to Home.

The last was the only one that irked me - I thought it was not up to the standard of his previous one. The plot is very transparent (I am not a plot-driven reader, but it was extremely obvious as soon as the real murderer appeared on the scene who he must be and what his motive was - this is very clunkily handled), and more importantly I felt that the couple main characters are fundamentally wildly implausible. At times they seem like thinnish, almost satirical Elmore Leonard-style creations, so that one cannot really take them seriously at the other points when the author seems to expect the reader to consider them as fully motivated and thoughtful human beings...

Glimmering images

From Elaine Scarry, Dreaming by the Book:

Why, when the lights go out and the storytelling begins, is the most compelling tale (most convincing, most believable) a ghost story? Since most of us have no experience of ghosts in the material world, this should be the tale we least easily believe. The answer is that the story instructs its hearers to create an image whose own properties are second nature to the imagination; it instructs its hearers to depict in the mind something thin, dry, filmy, two-dimensional, and without solidity. . . . It is not hard to imagine a ghost successfully. What is hard is successfully to imagine an object, any object, that does not look like a ghost

Hauntings

I have been following the coverage of Sarah Waters' new book The Little Stranger and thinking that I must get hold of a copy (here's the Bat Segundo interview, but Waters' own essay on how this book was inspired by Josephine Tey's The Franchise Affair is the clincher!

"The pages turn themselves"

Gaby Wood has a strangely interesting James Patterson interview at the Observer:

The genius of Patterson's collaborative method is its salesmanship. His co-authors are plainly credited on the covers in a font several point sizes smaller, but the books are always James Patterson books. Patterson used to be chief executive at the ad agency J Walter Thompson, and he knows a thing or two about branding. So savvy is he that he has become the subject of an MBA course at Harvard. (The professor, John Deighton, had heard Patterson give a talk and was stunned by his canniness. "I'd never actually heard a product speak," Deighton said. "It was like listening to a can of Coca-Cola describe how it would like to be marketed.")

Putting it to the bishop

This is an irresponsible illustration for a serious news story! (Thanks to my dad for the link.)