Closing tabs

A short history of Velveeta. (Via B.)

Backformation of "hair" from "hairy"?

Miscellaneous light reading: Ned Beauman, The Teleportation Accident (very good); Rhiannon Held, Tarnished (I am always regretful after reading a book in this genre, this one is quite good but no exception to that rule - I am not the target audience!); Bill Loehfelm, The Devil In Her Way (this series is excellent); Jon Bassoff, Corrosion (slightly too Faulkneresque for my taste, but genuinely chilling, a good recommendation from Heath Lowrance); "James S. A. Corey"'s The Gods of Risk novella; and, inevitably, Cat Sense: The Feline Enigma Revealed! Which I finished on the plane home from Cayman this afternoon: gearing up for bitter cold and the first days of a new semester.

Mundanities, a.k.a. "Thursday is my weekend"

Thursday this semester was always my "weekend," unless I had complex meetings or a deadline, but the day after the last day of classes always brings particular relief!

I slept late (late enough that I am not going to hot yoga this morning - may hit a class in the early evening if I have the energy, but it's fine if not).

I finally made two phone calls that I've been meaning to take care of for weeks: scheduling a house call to get my two cats a proper checkup (they both had initial kittenage vaccinations, but I have been remiss about vet visits - this is long overdue!); scheduling an appointment with my asthma doctor to discuss ongoing exercise-induced asthma issues but more particularly to ask what I should do about the fact that my indispensable asthma control medication Flovent will no longer be covered by my prescription health coverage plan as of January. This is frustrating, it has worked very well - it would cost about $200/mo. if I am paying for it out-of-pocket, so really I need to find out what I can take instead, but I wish they weren't messing around with some solid basics!

And I have a haircut appointment at 2 and will go from thence to the allergy doctor for shots - missed last week due to Thanksgiving-related scheduling issues.

Not an exciting day, in short, but a very useful one, and the best part of it is that in half an hour or so I will head out for a lovely quiet run. The weather is foggy but very mild, with temperature in the mid-50s - short sleeves!

(I do have to write one more letter of recommendation, but that won't be too bad....)

Wiggish

Good article at the FT about cinematic hair (site registration required):

Warn was also a hair designer on The Great Gatsby, a follicular showcase featuring 300 extras – only 100 of whom sported their own hair. “Director Baz Luhrmann is very pro-hair, he loves it and wanted the styling to be extreme,” says Warn. “But, because he was shooting in 3D and HD, we had to be really careful about stray hairs, so it was a like a military procedure to keep each hair in place.”

"There's a logic to hair"

Hairdo archeology. (Via Delia Sherman.)

"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."

Bird dogs

Truly demented.

"Now I know how Joan of Arc felt"

I read the first third or so of Patti Smith's Just Kids with increasing hardness of heart. I had thoughtlessly imagined I would love the book, but in fact I am not its ideal reader - I have never idealized Baudelaire and Rimbaud, I find Art irksome (as opposed to the hard yet playful discipline of craft or making things). Patti Smith seems to me to reside at the horrible intersection of the trajectories of Jim Morrison and Susan Sontag BOTH OF WHOM I LOATHE!

A good example of the sort of passage in the opening pages that just makes me shake my head and throw up my hands in temperamental disaffinity:

Where does it all lead? What will become of us? These were our young questions, and young answers were revealed.

It leads to each other. We become ourselves.

For a time Robert protected me, then was dependent on me, and then possessive of me. His transformation was the rose of Genet, and he was pierced deeply by his blooming. I too desired to feel more of the world. Yet sometimes that desire was nothing more than a wish to go backward where our mute light spread from hanging lanterns with mirrored panels. We had ventured out like Maeterlinck's children seeking the bluebird and were caught in the twisted briars of our new experiences.

Robert responded as my beloved twin. His dark curls merged with the tangle of my hair as I shuddered tears. He promised we could go back to the way things were, how we used to be, promising me anything if I would only stop crying.

Ugh! It is intolerable!

I stopped feeling so antagonistic around midpoint, though. There are glimpses even in the first third or so of a more appealing insight and self-awareness (the description of her own response to seeing Jim Morrison perform is spectacular - "I felt both kinship and contempt for him. I could feel his self-consciousness as well as his supreme confidence" - and I also love the notion of Robert Mapplethorpe having to purchase the porn magazines he used for his collages while they were still sealed and returning to their room at the Chelsea hotel to "unseal the cellophane with the expectation of Charlie peeling back the foil of a chocolate bar in hopes of finding a golden ticket"). A bit more of a sense of humor develops as Smith narrates the trials and tribulations of her early attempts to perform before a crowd (it is not one of the more humorous books I have ever read, however, and it compares very poorly in this and other respects to Keith Richards' autobiography - the main mention of Keith Richards here, I note in passing, is in the admittedly compelling yet depressing and perhaps inadvertently hilarious scene in which Smith attains social prominence in the Max's Kansas City circle by giving herself Keith Richards' haircut!).

Patti Smith is an artist of the body, that is what it comes down to - she expresses her frustration with writing ("it wasn't physical enough"), it is force of will and personal charisma that lead to her success as a musical performer (and I still think that the cover of Horses is a greater collaborative creation than anything on the album - in the 1920s she would have been an Isadora Duncan, she is that sort of innovator). She says elsewhere of Mapplethorpe "Robert was concerned with how to make the photograph, and I with how to be the photograph" - this seems to me a fair description. But the love for Mapplethorpe and the way the book works as an elegy, these are very unusual and striking, I will grudgingly admit that I was won over by the end...

Pretty in pink?

Cat dyed pink in 'sick prank'. (And more lurid coverage at the Daily Mail.)

Lettuce-head e-fit

"We are currently experiencing technical problems with the colour of the hair...."

Cover models

There is an Invisible Things page in the HarperCollins catalog! I have been looking every few days to see if there would be an image of the cover somewhere online, and now I can share it with you - I am laughing, don't say it, it is true that Sophie of this book looks nothing like Sophie on the cover of the last book (and probably her hair should be darker!), but it is a very nice cover, isn't it?

The book is available for pre-order at Amazon - official publication date is November 23 - but it was when it first went up some weeks ago at Amazon that I felt that it really was all happening - it is not quite so stunning as when I published my first novel, but there is still the glorious thought I have an ISBN!

The study of whiskers

Poets ranked by beard weight.

Bleeding into the woodwork

My Columbia colleague and fellow-blogger Andrew Gelman offers some thoughts on Breeding: A Partial History of the Eighteenth Century. I am very flattered that he mentions one of my utterly favorite books about the eighteenth century in the same breath - A. O. Hirschman's The Passions and the Interests: Political Arguments for Capitalism Before Its Triumph....