Home again

Feel much more settled now that I am back at home with my little cat, who was flatteringly happy to see me last night.  I do not know why feline company should be so soothing, but there is no doubt that I am on a more even keel when there is a cat around. 

Read two good books on my travels: Johan Theorin's The Darkest Room (this guy is an awe-inspiringly good popular storyteller - the book gave me a yen to watch Hitchcock movies obsessively and see whether I couldn't craft such a formally perfect and atmospherically chilling narrative of suspense); and Katherine Boo's Behind the Beautiful Forevers.  The amount and quality of reporting that went into this book is staggering: it is really a feat of human achievement like few other things!  It is not a criticism, but I am struck by the oddity of the fact that the style of narration really recognizably is still like what the cluster of mid-19th-century novelists that include Hugo and Dickens and Eliot and Balzac developed - ditto for The Wire - it is a powerful form of narration that, once discovered, has had considerable longevity.

Closing tabs:

Brent's friend Larry Thompson has printed a beautiful edition of "Tintern Abbey."

The National Eagle Repository.

This is the kind of writing I should really be doing.

No bearing on reality

Virtually unprecedented week-long radio silence at Light Reading - I had no internet access at all over the weekend, and have barely been at a computer for the last couple days either. Lethally busy time of year! But a brief interruption in some frenetic last-minute commenting on student paper proposals to clear tabs, with a promise of some more posts over the next couple days:

Sam Amidon performs his lovely cover of R. Kelly's "Relief" (worth watching the whole 7+ minutes - that song is the second one he sings).

Stephen Covey moves e-book rights directly to Amazon for one year. (I could use a re-read of The 7 Habits of Highly Effective People!)

Album of obscene Gillray drawings surfaces in archives of the former Home Office.

Unfortunately a subscription is required to read this wonderful and worrying article about the precarious future of the Adélie penguin by Fen Montaigne at the New Yorker. I saw only one Adélie the whole time I was in Antarctica, out of many thousands (tens of thousands?) of penguins - in that part of the continent, the chinstrap and gentoo penguins really have almost completely displaced the Adélies, which cannot breed in warming climes. The audio slide-show does not require a subscription - take a look at these pictures!

Diplopedia

The State Department embraces the wiki.