Knowlesian dispatches

Nico on Beyoncé's new album.

(Also - more along my taste axis, I am regrettably deaf to the charms of Beyoncé - see Peter Terzian on Throwing Muses.)

Lungs still horribly full of junk, and it will be at least one more day before I can exercise, but I have submitted all my grades for the semester. Various other tasks remain (including two letters of recommendation that I must write tomorrow), but I am going to take the rest of the afternoon and evening off!

Fractions

It has been an extremely busy week, and I haven't yet started my end-of-semester grading, though I think it shouldn't take too long. It will be the middle of next week at the earliest, I would guess, before I can do any of my own work.

Have had some pleasurable distractions in spite of pressures of work. On Monday night, saw my friend Elliot Thomson's little gem of a comedy (he and actor Peter Hirsch call it his "Faberge egg roll"), Le Refuge.

Last night I met up with G. for the highly enjoyable Le Jazz Hot. The documentary joining-together bits are a little amateurish, though the footage is interesting, but the musicians are superb: I would definitely go and see them again. (The Anderson brothers are twins, and I was strongly reminded of my own twin brothers by the way each referred to the other as "my brother"!) Extremely delicious dinner afterwards at Bottega del Vino; I had beef carpaccio and spinach gnocchi before confirming my previous impression that this restaurant serves the best tiramisu in New York.

Closing tabs:

Colin Wilson is dead. Ritual in the Dark is more an artifact of its time than a great novel, I think, but it's a fascinating phenomenon, that mid-century period of British occultism. You get a bit of it in Jonathan Coe's B. S. Johnson biography - I don't think there's a Wilson biography, but there should be.

Teju Cole on truth and reconciliation in South Africa and elsewhere.

Light reading around the edges: several more Eva Ibbotson comfort re-reads; Charlie Williams' excellently titled Love Will Tear Us Apart; Michael Connelly's The Gods of Guilt (the plot is too intricate and the characters too shallow, but fairly readable regardless); Paul Cornell's London Falling, which is so exactly the sort of book that I like to read that I fell into a psychological slump when I came to the end and realized the next installment hasn't yet been published; and Laini Taylor's really delightful novella Night of Cake and Puppets (more books should have the word "cake" in their titles). I am contemplating a resolution for 2014 to read more nonfiction - one does occasionally, especially when reading something like the Connelly, get the feeling that the brain will rot on a diet of so much pap - but I would have to reserve the right to consume a good deal of light reading regardless, perhaps just not the fodder-level books.

Tom Jones and two cats

It has been very beneficial to have a few evenings at home, but I am still suffering from fairly pronounced cold symptoms! I got up early and had a productive morning, including a lot of paper commenting, then got back off course when the keyboard on my laptop stopped working - I took it in to a repair place in midtown and am anxiously awaiting news (writing in the meantime on my iPad - really I have device redundancy - but I have letters of recommendation I need to submit Tuesday, I had better be able to get it back before then!).

My evening: a lot more paper comments, but also - more pleasantly - 2 cats and the first two books of Tom Jones!

Timothy Leary's Nintento Power Glove

Sent corrections on final pages today for The Magic Circle. Fingers crossed that everything goes smoothly now towards publication.

I am doing a thirty-day yoga challenge (thirty classes in thirty days), but I may not have given my lungs quite time enough to repair post-ailment! Will see how they are doing tomorrow....

Closing tabs:

The value of authorial clutter. (Via Jim Caudle.)

John Tierney on why teachers secretly hate grading papers. (Via Lisa Cody.)

Charlie Jane Anders' list of some desirable science-fiction and fantasy titles forthcoming in 2013.

Just a note

to observe that I was released from jury duty at the end of the day - they kept the four of us who were alternates in a separate room for the afternoon, but though deliberations hadn't finished, they let us go regardless. Too tired for true celebration to be in order, but I am incredibly happy that I can spend tomorrow luxuriously at Chelsea Piers - and finally get back to end-of-semester grading responsibilities!

Reacher's checklist

Via my father, Jack Reacher's wardrobe choices! (FT site registration required. NB in the middle books of Sara Paretsky, there is too much detail about the washing machine - it is the way of V.I. to wash clothes ruinously dirtied by some investigative enterprise, forget them in the washer and then find them smelling moldy a few days later and run them through another wash cycle - this is also the first set of books I read, other than the novels of Dick Francis, where the detective's exercise habits occupy a significant proportion of the pages, including the question of the affordability of new running shoes on a private investigator's income).

I remain excessively frazzled, but a good play and late dinner were soothing. Last night I needed to be home more than I needed to be at the opera; we sensibly left at the first intermission!

My main feeling right now is intense self-reproach at having dug myself so deep into the fatigue pit this semester that jury duty seemed cataclysmic. Now we have the schedule for the next week, it seems at least doable (in retrospect, based on the intensity of my distress yesterday and today, I probably should have deferred service, but between teaching and travel, it's rare that I am actually available, and I thought I should get it over with). We have Tuesday off and that's one of the two days I had a lot of stuff scheduled for on campus, so I only had to reschedule half, not all. Still slightly stymied as to when and how I will read the large heap of end-of-semester student work and dissertation chapters, but it should be that it will be one week from now and I'll be done with the fall semester work and also, if the trial isn't over, have a week's hiatus for Xmas holiday. Could be worse....

Closing tabs

The most amazing tiny food ever!   (Link courtesy of Julia.)  His Etsy store also has some very good things: I will have to get the Christmas cookie earrings for someone I know will like them.

Stephen Burt on zines.

Edmund White on Cranbrook.

Minor opera thoughts to follow later this evening once I have (I hope!) finished my grading....

"That rain-forest experience"

I enjoyed this profile of a choirmaster who lives in the Cathedral Close at St. John the Divine.  I need to go and prowl around the cathedral sometime in the next couple weeks; I have a list of local spots of interest (Grant's Tomb, Sakura Park, Morningside Park) that I need to do some more footwork on so that I can make more of them in the revision of BOMH that I'll be working on over the winter break.  I am most anxious for the semester to be really and truly over so that I can clear the mental space for experiencing places and thinking those revisions through!  Two more very busy weeks, but if I am diligent and not overly dilatory about paper-marking I am mentally and logistically free from the 19th...

The school year

This is perhaps the moment at which I declare that the semester is officially getting the better of me! I have temporarily wrangled it back into submission - I've done all the reading for tomorrow's classes (Plato's "Phaedrus," Derrida's long essay "Plato's pharmacy," poems about women by Pope and Swift, Johnson's life of Pope), I've done the subsequent week's reading for the MA seminar so that I could write the assignment that's due in class next week and hand it out tomorrow, I've answered three of the five copy-editor's queries on my Shakespeare adaptation piece and am about to head out to the library to get the books I need to answer the other two. I've written comments on eight of the sixteen undergrad assignments I intend to give back in class tomorrow, and will perhaps find a quiet table in a cafe post-library visit where I can finish the other eight: if I do that, then I can stop for the evening and figure there's enough time in and around the cracks tomorrow to do the actual class prep....

(I was out too many evenings this week, especially given the fact that I didn't really have a weekend last week due to travels; I am already thumped by fatigue and it's not even Monday! I didn't make it out for a run this afternoon, either - too much work - which was a pity as it was the most perfect weather and I'm not very happy about how little I've been running this fall.)

The table in my living room has a huge and ominous pile of materials that I need to read and write important letters about (important to people other than myself, I mean!): I think I won't be able to tackle that until Wednesday. Ugh, ugh, ugh...

Light reading catch-up

I had such good intentions about making this a semester in which I would spread my work out evenly across the week, but in fact I worked so hard Sunday through Tuesday that I basically collapsed and could do nothing yesterday except exercise and read a novel (the first two thirds or so of Neal Stephenson's Reamde, on which my verdict so far is very similar to that of the Amazon reviewers - fun fast read, but there's not so much to it - it rather reminds me of Bruce Sterling's Islands in the Net - I prefer my female protagonists to have a more fully rendered interiority!). I must write comments on some assignments today, or Sunday will not be a pretty sight chez Davidson (I am doing a long swim on Saturday morning, one for which I am signally undertrained, and am not counting on any great level of mental acuity and application in the afternoon!).

Other light reading around the edges (really I feel I have had no time to read anything, but this is clearly a misapprehension of sorts, I seem to have read several novels): Marcus Sakey's excellent Chicago noir The Blade Itself; Erin Morgenstern's The Night Circus (quite reasonably good, but falling under the same rubric as what William Empson diagnoses as "the badness of much nineteenth-century poetry," explained by him as being "written by critically sensitive people [who] admired the poetry of previous generations, very rightly, for the taste it left in the head, and, failing to realise that the process of putting such a taste into a reader's head involves a great deal of work which does not feel like a taste in the head while it is being done, attempting, therefore, to conceive a taste in the head and put it straight on to their paper, they produced tastes in the head which were in fact blurred, complacent, and unpleasing"). Unfair as a description of, say, Tennyson's best poems, and in a similar respect perhaps slightly unfair to apply to Morgenstern, but there is something to the diagnosis (and in fact this is, curiously, what Morgenstern's novel is about/thematizes, as her circus is even more clearly than her novel trying to 'put the taste into a reader's head' without grounding it effectively in technique).

Closing tabs:

Guinea pig rentals! (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Things Apple is worth more than.

Light reading catch-up

I took the weekend completely off from work, which was hugely beneficial; have now spent this morning writing up comments on MA essays and doing one last proof of an interview I've been involved with, and am now steeling myself to plunge into the week's most substantial job, grading the final assignments for the two courses I was teaching this semester. Flying back to NYC on Wednesday evening; midday Friday onwards is very thoroughly booked up with school-related things, so I am hoping the grading will all be done by Friday lunchtime...

(After that I need to get back to my long-overdue essay on Restoration drama and the novel; with luck, I can send that out before the end of the month? Next week's still looking a bit busy with school stuff, but the week after is relatively empty and I should be able to polish it off then.)

Plans are starting to come together for my Coeur d'Alene trip at the end of June, which is pretty exciting (even if it remains absurdly complicated and/or expensive to transport a bicycle cross-country!).

I was really so busy in the past few weeks that I lost track of logging my light reading!

I read two quite different 'trilogies' of books that shared the quality of being both addictive and somewhat bad (or at least not ideal representatives of their respective genres); the first was three novels by Lois McMaster Bujold, whose books I've never been able to get into but who comes very warmly recommended by Jo Walton, whose books I love. These were The Curse of Chalion, Paladin of Souls and The Hallowed Hunt. They are totally addictive, I started a new one as soon as I'd finished the previous one and looked forward to subway travel so that I could dig back in on whichever one it was I was reading, and yet they are also strangely shallow, facile; the storytelling is completely fluent, the writing is fine, but there is something quite unsatisfactory about the characters and the stories as well, they miss being really good books by a long stretch. Can't put my finger on it more precisely, but there is just a slight pro forma feel.

(I don't know whether I already said that I'd read Charlie Huston's The Shotgun Rule and Holly Black's Red Glove - worthwhile contributions by two writers I particularly enjoy. I am sure I did already say that I loved Henning Mankell's last Wallander book, which I felt rose to greater heights than most of its predecessors.)

Then I read three serial-killer thrillers, also quite addictive even as I was internally grumbling about the way they seemed like Patricia Cornwell 'lite' (also they are full of the most outrageous implausibilities and some quite melodramatic writing here and there): Cody McFadyen's Shadow Man, The Face of Death and The Darker Side. Couldn't put 'em down, though!

On the plane on Thursday I enjoyed Molly Jong-Fast's The Social Climber's Handbook. Also catching up on last few issues of the New Yorker and the New York Review of Books...

Over the weekend I completely devoured Mira Grant's Feed. I was initially suspicious, as the book seemed a bit too clearly to jump on bandwagons I have seen too much of already in recent years: like, put together one pinch Hunger Games, one pinch M. T. Anderson (who really already had that title!), two pinches Justin Cronin and a tiny dash of Bruce Sterling's Distraction. But I soon changed my mind: I thought it was excellent, I can't wait for the next installment!

Blue books

It is a professorial vice to do much of one's work in bed.

In point of fact this picture is from last December - I'm not teaching any classes with final exams this semester, so no blue books. But I feel this picture sums up how I always feel in the final weeks of the fall semester!