NYC day 8

A delivery from CookUnity, another one from MaxDelivery. I did finally get a FreshDirect slot but it's not till next Wednesday.

A very good day for me actually but a tiring one. Woke at 4, realized around 5:30 that I really wasn't going back to sleep and that I should just get up. A non-run day, 50 mins brisk exercise walk. Busy morning of reformulating Gibbon, some media follow-up (!) from the Washington Post piece, the two-hour Columbia UP publications committee meeting (on Google Hangouts). I am exhausted and intend to lie down with Kindle soon in bed.

At midnight

this long-awaited book was delivered to my Kindle - hmmm, might be I will read it right now....

Stern distinctions (AMNESIA/INSOMNIA)

Aleksandr Hemon interviews Teju Cole at BOMB:

TC Nigeria is an ideal for me in two ways. One, it’s a space of possibility, an opportunity for its people to move beyond the pressures of tribe or ethnic group. This opportunity is often squandered. Two, it’s a soccer team, one that could be one of the world’s best—there’s certainly enough talent to be, at least, on Uruguay’s level. This opportunity, too, is often squandered. So, Nigeria haunts me in terms of being a space of unfinished histories. But my identity maps onto other things: being a Lagosian (which is like a city-state), being a West African, being African, being a part of the Black Atlantic. I identify strongly with the historical network that connects New York, New Orleans, Rio de Janeiro, and Lagos. But, as a subject, Nigeria won’t let go of me.

Like you, I am now in a country where people (convinced of their innocence) sleep well; and like you, I’m still one of history’s amnesiacs.

AH Amnesiacs?

TC I meant to write “insomniacs”! But the error is illuminating.

Also: "yes, I believe in life online, the way a person in 1910 might believe in aviation, or a person in 1455 might believe in movable type: with excitement and apprehension."

Sheets of jute

Olivia Fraser's neo-miniatures.

One writer cherishes the feeling of "seclusion and power" an attic room gives him.

I'm at the gate at the terminal at JFK. Slept one hour only, barely. Weary! Pilots just boarding plane: looks like it's a go....

End-of-week update

Have still been editing frenetically all week, but have just sent what I hope is near-final (it would be rash to say final) novel version to my editor.  I wrote an ending that I am really happy with, it happened yesterday, it felt amazing! 

Up since 6:30 for marathon last editing session and have had very little sleep this week, but need to refocus now and write one other thing I promised to get out today.  Possible/probable good news related to style book, but it will be a couple months before I know anything for certain, so I will wait to give details at a later stage.  I have been working too hard...

Read a stunningly good book over last couple days, Tana French's Broken Harbor.  I think it's her best yet.  (Sorry to see I don't have the others on my Kindle, as I am now extremely keen to reread them all - will have to stop by the library...)  I am probably on the record elsewhere on the topic of how much I dislike Mark Danielewski's House of Leaves, but imagine all the genuinely chilling aspects of that haunted-house story (perhaps Kelly Link's amazing "Stone Animals" is a better comparison) in a realistically rendered psychological thriller about the fallout of the financial crisis in Ireland.  IT IS AMAZINGLY GOOD.

Midnight oil

It's just after midnight, and I'm relieved to say that after a brutal marathon day and evening of work, I've just sent a pretty decent Magic Circle rewrite to my editor.  We will have one more pass through it next week; the ending still isn't right, and I did a lot of new writing for the last stretch that will probably look rough when I come back to it after a few days off.  Final deadline: next Friday.  I will be glad to see the back of this one, though of course books always come back at you for copy-edit, proofing, etc. 

Need to leave for the airport in about 5.5 hours, so I think I will pack now and then see if there's any chance I might get a few hours of sleep.  It may not be an option, as it's been 3 or 4 in the morning before I've fallen asleep the last couple nights....

Light reading around the edges: David Gordon's The Serialist, which I absolutely loved.

Bonus links: nice swim bit with shout-out to my old teacher Doug Stern; Olympic training technology; "First, then, read your book."

Existentially sad?

"The book is just the loss leader for the speech."  (Via varied internet schadenfreude re: Jonah Lehrer, trail no longer retraceable.) 

I have occasionally contemplated the notion that in my ideal universe, I would write fewer reviews and branch out into a mega-speaking-empire, but I think that the exacerbation of habitual insomnia by travel would probably render it inadvisable, even aside from the question of whether literary topics would be likely to attract dollars on that sort of scale....

Abundant recompense

It was a strange week.

I spent way too much time on the phone to my health insurance company trying to figure out things about sleep specialists and what would or wouldn't be covered depending on who I saw, and I also had my teeth cleaned at the dentist's, something that always causes me to contemplate the Francis-Bacon-like aspects of human embodiment!

Tuesday was ceremonially meaningful; I gave congratulations to graduating English majors and their families and handed out awards in the humanities at a college-wide event. I had meetings this week with a couple of my graduate students who have made the significant step forward from passing their orals (qualifying exams) and are beginning to work on dissertation prospectuses; on Wednesday I succumbed, horribly, to a sinus infection, but I also attended a very lovely party at the Century Associationin celebration of my emeritus colleague Martin Meisel's receiving an honorary doctorate from Columbia (and it was his eightieth birthday to boot!). These things caused me to reflect that I typically underrate the ceremonial; I am anti-ceremonial and something of a debunker in temperament, I much prefer to cut to the chase and I do not enjoy pomp and circumstance, and yet there is a place for them, there is some meaning in this sort of show of things...

Yesterday I had a really lovely lunch with someone I admire greatly and am hugely grateful to for what I've learned from him over the years, my dissertation advisor Claude Rawson; he was doing some work in the Berg Collection at the NYPL, and we had an altogether decadent and delightful lunch at Aureole (we both had the same very delicious selections from the prix fixe lunch menu: fluke ceviche with citrus, endive, avocado and shallots, roasted skate with pureed potato, spinach and capers and a strawberry macaron with lavender lemon sorbet and perfect little freshly baked thumbnail-sized madeleines).

Last night I started going crazy when I realized I was still getting, as it were, more sick and that I would be an idiot to do the triathlon this weekend that I've been so much looking forward to (I am looking to a longer-term goal of a race about five weeks away and cannot afford the bout of bronchitis that I risk by pushing myself under such circumstances); it was a bitter pill to swallow, that I really shouldn't do it, something that my state of health when I woke up this morning made very clear, and I was languishing in self-pity all morning despite having had what otherwise would be described as a very nice week...

It was clear, really, that literature was going to be the best remedy for mental insanity: the intolerable noise of the facade cleaning they're currently doing on my building finally drove me out of the apartment, and I hit the public library and got a good haul of crime novels, came home and devoured Karin Slaughter's Broken, which I thought was very good.

Casting around for what to read after this, I was saved from less good crime novels by the arrival from Amazon of my graduate school colleague Priscilla Gilman's The Anti-Romantic Child: A Story of Unexpected Joy. I started reading, and I really and truly couldn't put it down; it's a pretty extraordinary book, I kind of think everyone should read it!

Like Oliver Sacks, Priscilla manages to write about a life of deficits and losses in a way that shows, without minimizing the associated difficulties and costs, the magical forms of recompense that come along with them; she also manages to pull off something that often makes me cringe, the attempt to articulate (as opposed to taking as given, which is what I do) that literature is meaningful in some large part because of what it tells us about life. "As someone who has lived to learn," Priscilla writes of herself (she is a Yale graduate and taught at Yale and at Vassar before becoming a literary agent), she found in her son Benj, who has never been diagnosed with a specific label but who has battled a wide range of motor and social deficits that leave him perhaps best described as 'borderline Asperger's,' her "greatest and most meaningful coursework": and the book is an emotionally authentic and intellectually illuminating account of what she learned as Benj's mother and how it changed her.

Really I probably have time to read one more book before I go to sleep, but it is going to be difficult to top that one!...

Light reading catch-up

Very, very grumpy about the traditional end-of-semester cold which is ruining my training week and preventing me from doing the race I was looking forward to tomorrow. Nothing to be done about it but wait for it to go away and try not to go too crazy in the meantime. Am pursuing insomnia treatment options as it seems clear that almost everything bad in my life can be attributed to insufficient sleep!

Last week I raced through four novels that were so much my perfect kind of light reading that I now can't seem to find anything else quite right: Seanan McGuire's October Daye novels. I think I had heard of them and previously avoided on grounds of cutesy name, but once I'd read and loved her pseudonymous Feed it seemed an obvious next thing to get and read. They are great - better than even the very best early before-it-all-devolved-into-erotica Anita Blake books, and certainly far better than anything Laurell K. Hamilton ended up doing with her "faerie" series - highly recommended to the reader of urban fantasy.

Then I tried one more novel by Sophie Hannah, The Truth-Teller's Lie, but that's it for me, no more Sophie Hannah novels, they are too full of absolutely preposterous things!

Mined the Theakstons Old Peculiar crime fiction award longlist for some new fodder. I have read a number of them already, and some others are annoyingly not available in the US yet, but I thought Belinda Bauer's Blacklands was superb and S. J. Bolton's Blood Harvest really very good too, though not perhaps as unusual as Bauer's.

Since the only thing I really feel well enough to do is lie in bed with a novel, I will now go and see what else I can find for my Kindle. Recommendations will be taken in the comments!

Production of quota

c. 1,200 words, for a total of 53,228 words.

+: When I opened Word today, I was offered an autosaved version of the draft from Wednesday that let me reclaim my lost words! They will need to be 'reconciled' later on with the subsequent version; I borrow the metaphor if not the exact word from Robbie Hudson's appealing notion of doing an 'audit' on a novel draft before writing the denouement.

-: Very sleepless night last night - I did sleep in the end from 6-9am or so, which is adequate, but it meant I had to miss morning boot camp, which is troublesome! Think I might whisk myself off to the gym now for a midday session; I have an important 4pm meeting on campus, and various administrative duties to do with my courses for the semester (I am compiling a funny and interesting course reader for the drama lecture that needs to get to the copy shop by the end of the day), but if I wait to exercise until the evening, I risk setting myself up for another night of not being able to fall asleep...

Modern Calvaries

An unforgettable piece by Tony Judt at the NYRB on life with ALS:

I leave bedtime until the last possible moment compatible with my nurse's need for sleep. Once I have been "prepared" for bed I am rolled into the bedroom in the wheelchair where I have spent the past eighteen hours. With some difficulty (despite my reduced height, mass, and bulk I am still a substantial dead weight for even a strong man to shift) I am maneuvered onto my cot. I am sat upright at an angle of some 110° and wedged into place with folded towels and pillows, my left leg in particular turned out ballet-like to compensate for its propensity to collapse inward. This process requires considerable concentration. If I allow a stray limb to be mis-placed, or fail to insist on having my midriff carefully aligned with legs and head, I shall suffer the agonies of the damned later in the night.

I am then covered, my hands placed outside the blanket to afford me the illusion of mobility but wrapped nonetheless since—like the rest of me—they now suffer from a permanent sensation of cold. I am offered a final scratch on any of a dozen itchy spots from hairline to toe; the Bi-Pap breathing device in my nose is adjusted to a necessarily uncomfortable level of tightness to ensure that it does not slip in the night; my glasses are removed...and there I lie: trussed, myopic, and motionless like a modern-day mummy, alone in my corporeal prison, accompanied for the rest of the night only by my thoughts.

"The same goes for the bed"

From Georges Perec, Species of Spaces and Other Pieces (translated by John Sturrock):

We generally utilize the page in the larger of its two dimensions. The same goes for the bed. The bed (or, if you prefer, the page) is a rectangular space, longer than it is wide, in which, or on which, we normally lie longways. 'Italian' beds are only to be found in fairy tales (Tom Thumb and his brothers, or the seven daughters of the Ogre, for example) or in altogether abnormal and usually serious circumstances (mass exodus, aftermath of a bombing raid, etc.). Even when we utilize the bed the more usual way round, it's almost always a sign of a catastrophe if several people have to sleep in it. The bed is an instrument conceived for the nocturnal repose of one or two persons, but no more.

Sunday miscellany

Very nice Times review of Nico, Sam and Thomas's concert!

(On another note, I could not endorse Ben Brantley's review of The Pride of Parnell Street, which I saw earlier this week - the performers were doing their best, they were really very good, and the language is gorgeous, but there seemed to be absolutely no reason the piece could not as well have been a short story as a play!)

Times trifecta: Jonathan Lethem on J.G. Ballard.

Finally, Christian House profiles William Boyd at the Independent - Boyd is in any case one of my favorite writers (annoyingly his new book will not be published in the U.S. till January - I might be due an Amazon UK order...), but I leave you with these excellent lines:

London, he once wrote, poisoned him with insomnia and allergies. He declared it "a tax my body has to pay if I want to live in London – the most interesting city on the planet".

E di tutto questo mare, cosa faccio?

From Andre Aciman, "In Search of Blue," in False Papers:

Thinking - as any bookish man is always reminded when confronted by the hard-and-fast business of life, of the body, of pleasure - comes after, not before, and certainly not during. To the question "What am I to do with all this water?" the answer should have been "Swim."