My six months

 We all count it from different days.  My shelter in place really started on Thursday, March 19.  I'd seen it coming - I saw the footage of Wuhan hospitals in late January and it was clear to me it was going to be "the big one" - but that's not the same as being able to envisage the transformations that would ensue.

I hosted a small book party in my apartment on the evening of March 5 - we had the windows open and the fan blowing from the window-unit AC, uneasily bumped elbows and so forth.  Given that community spread was already taking place in my Columbia community (people who'd returned from Italy) we were lucky, I think, that it didn't become a small super-spreader event.

Classes were suspended on the 9th, and Columbia asked employees not to undertake non-essential international travel, but I was hungry to see Brent (it was essential for me!) and I got on a plane to Cayman on the 11th as planned for ten days to overlap with the week-long spring break.  Each day the situation seemed more grave; we went to Fidel Murphy's for early happy hour on Friday as always, and the bar was deserted except for a handful of panicky servers looking at the collapse of St. Patrick's Day prospects and the likelihood that many of them would have to leave the island if shutdowns continued on the planned trajectory.

I wasn't supposed to fly home until the 21st, but on the 17th the Cayman government announced that the border would close on the 22nd; my flight was canceled and I hastened to get on the next flight back to NYC.  I wouldn't have gone to Cayman if it would have been an absolute disaster to get stuck there, but it is not desirable to be where you don't have immigration status and access to your real work materials in a time of pandemic.  Got a business class seat on Cayman Airways and was home late on the 18th.  As I left the apartment the next morning to lay in a few essentials (I'd been stockpiling cat food and toilet paper already before I went to Cayman), I felt something like a membrane stretch across my door, I had to press my way through it, and I saw that it was a very good thing that I run five times a week outside, a non-negotiable commitment for me, or else I would be looking at a serious exacerbation of mild agoraphobia.

I said goodbye to Brent at the airport on March 18.  I thought then that I'd probably be able to get back to Cayman for the summer months, but the borders have remained closed.  There's a soft opening for Oct. 1, but it's still only repatriation flights and you have to book through a government agency: I'm not sure whether or not I would get permission, though at some point I need to try.  We're still hoping to see each other in December, but there are too many variables to make more than a good guess about how and where that will happen.

In almost every respect I have been extremely fortunate through all this.  I have a secure job and can easily work from home.  I like being at home and am not itching to travel, unless I could suddenly be teleported to Brent's condo.  I have two funny cats who are excellent companions!  I've had harder summers.  And yet....

The start of the new school year has brought a sense of movement to my life that was sorely lacking.  Depression has been hovering, but it's mostly lifted (leaving me with acute anxiety, inevitably, but I can work with that). 

It is going to be a meaningful and rewarding year of work, I think, within just about manageable bounds.  I made a choice last winter that now looks prescient: once I realized I was going to be running my pilot Work Inside and Outside the University seminar and also chairing the Arts and Sciences Policy and Planning Committee, I decided to use up a semester of banked course release (I am operating in an extraordinarily privileged realm of academic life) so that I could teach 1-1 rather than 2-2 for 2020-21.  (The work seminar carries through for the whole year, and I was particularly worried about having in effect 3 courses as well as PPC chairing for the spring semester.)

 And this morning I printed out my book manuscript, the version I finished in January and haven't touched since.  I hired a developmental editor in July to give me a detailed edit letter, and she provided me with truly excellent comments and insights.  I had genuinely no wherewithal for it over the summer, all my energy was going towards getting from day to day (running and yoga were good, and so was the writing accountability group I was running every day, but mostly I just huddled in bed doomscrolling), and that didn't contribute to my sense of well-being. I always have a book going!  It may not be realistic to think I'll be able to work on it consistently this semester, but I am at least going to see whether it might be possible to have about forty-five minutes a day for it, five days a week....

Border closures

The premier of the Cayman Islands has been a very effective leader these last couple of weeks. I am interested to see today the clearest hint yet, in this article from the Cayman News Service, what he's thinking about borders and covid-19 going forward. They initially closed for three weeks (I hastily got myself out a few days before that happened - it wouldn't have been a terrible thing if I got stuck there, but for almost every reason it was clearly better that I should be at home in my own apartment on US soil) - and now this:

He also revealed that the border shut down will be formally extended by Cabinet this week, and while it has not yet confirmed the length of the extension, it is expected to be until 30 May.

However, that does not mean that the port or airport will open then, as government will continue to extend the closure because of the global situation.

McLaughlin said, as he has before, that it is unlikely the borders will be open for visitors again for many more months. And even when they do open, given the expected global recession in the fallout from COVID-19, tourism in Cayman is unlikely to return to anything like what it was by next year.

It is a set of circumstances I can easily approach with fortitude, but it is strange not knowing when I will next see Brent!....

Wrestling with angels

I see the last few posts here are mistakes, entries that should have gone to the other blog! Which I keep up very faithfully, only it is boring to read (insanely repetitive, as training must be!). Still overdue a light reading update and a year-end best post, I would like to keep the blog going to that extent but I've been too busy with other things: especially, finishing the Austen book (and juggling the other work commitments that you can only put on hold for so long). Leaving for the airport for Rome in a couple of hours, got some last bits of packing still to do and library books to return, but thought I'd blog a few sentences from J.D. Daniels' very good little book of essays The Correspondence. I think it may have been a mistake to include the two pieces originally written as short stories - they feel different and they don't work as well as the essays. But even so it's a great little volume. Here are a couple paragraphs I especially liked, for obvious reasons:

I took eight weeks off to squat and dead-lift heavy and eat everything that wans't nailed down, and I gained thirty-five pounds and had to buy new pants. Then I went back to sparring and I broke a guy's ribs. That was nice.

And then I did it all again, the way you find yourself eating dinner again the next night; the way you have sex, if you do, again; the way too much to drink was barely enough. It didn't end, it doesn't end, and if I knew what to say next, this wouldn't be the end.

Light reading update

Jet lag has me up much earlier than usual: I must make sure not to squander this advantage, if I am smart I can type up the notes for my two remaining Austen chapters and get the production of quota underway before life too much intervenes! Very happy to be home - I always forget how much I love my apartment, and of course the warm welcome from the two funny cats is huge....

First, though, an overdue light reading update, a sort of throat-clearing before getting back into the real work.

The trip home from England went smoothly, with the proviso that I arrived at the airport six hours in advance of my flight (B.'s flight to Miami was a couple hours earlier from a different terminal) and was horrified to learn that the airline would only take checked bags (I had 2 bags of approximately fifty pounds each, one small and densely full of books, the other a cumbersome large duffel full of clothes and miscellaneous running gear) three hours in advance of flying time. Fortunately Heathrow Terminal 5 is very nice and I was able to hole up in a reasonable restaurant for the duration.

Key to successful travel for me is having the right books to read, and in fact the day passed very enjoyably. I read part of and put aside a Swedish thriller I wasn't enjoying, then had an undemanding and enjoyable urban fantasy (at its best, this genre is undemanding and wonderfully immersive) that took me through the first stint of waiting, an incredibly good and funny noir novel for the next bit of waiting and first bit of the flight, and then, incredibly immersively, a long science fiction novel that I have been meaning to read and that absolutely captivated me.

I haven't logged light reading since mid-September, which means I am well overdue for it - forthwith! As always, loosely sorted by categories and with the best stuff mostly singled out at the top. This includes reading from the Australia trip and then the stint of Oxford light reading (probably a little lighter than usual, in volume as well as kind, as I was doing a fair bit of work reading as well).

Strong all-round recommendation at the top, then.

Natasha Pulley, The Watchmaker of Filigree Street. My favorite kind of book - captivating! This was a consensus recommendation when I crowdsourced my light reading demands on Facebook before traveling to Oxford, and I enjoyed it very much indeed (reminiscent of but also quite different from Frances Hardinge's The Lie Tree, also I thought an extremely good book).

Garth Nix, Goldenhand - latest installment in the Old Kingdom series, which must be my favorite YA fantasy series running today (it was the first three books in this series, plus Pullman's His Dark Materials, that made me write The Explosionist when I got tired of not finding a new trilogy along the lines of Nix's or Pullman's on the shelves of the Bank Street Bookstore)

James Lasdun, The Fall Guy. He is a genius! He writes as good a sentence as anyone you have ever read, but he also has this chilling Talented Mr. Ripleyesque imagination about doubles and secret selves - this one's very good indeed.

The book that surprised and delighted me most perhaps of everything I'm logging here, and that made the first part of the trip from Heathrow to JFK pass as if in a flash, was Joe Ide's IQ. I loved this so much I can hardly say! It's a Sherlock Holmes homage (the story of a young detective coming into his full powers of deductive reasoning), but it's also learned from Walter Mosley's socially conscious noir (with a dash of George Pelecanos) and has a strong satirical element that is genuinely comic rather than just striving for it. The parody rap lyrics are some of the funniest things I've read all year - I had just found this one as a random recommendation on Amazon, hadn't particularly registered anything about it in the world - everyone should read this book!

And the book that captivated me for the remainder of the voyage was N. K. Jemisen's justly lauded The Fifth Season. I loved her earlier trilogy and have had this one on my Kindle for a while, but hadn't quite gotten into it - I think I read the first few chapters and found them a little alienating (I have observed that one weakness of digital publication for novels is that when you have a novel written in a few different voices and timelines you really lose something not having the physical book in your hands, with the extra help it can give in the way of headers and being able easily to leaf back a few pages to orient yourself), put it aside for a quieter moment. But it is glorious - really expansive imaginative storytelling at its absolute best (as ambitious as Kim Stanley Robinson's Aurora, for instance, a book I enjoyed very much, but much more unusual and startling in its willingness to invoke fantastical as well as science-fictional elements). Loved it and can't wait to read the next installment.

Kevin Wignall, The Traitor's Story (love his cool unemotional way with storytelling - some storytelling minds are just more attractive than others, the economy and precision of his imagination much appeal to me!)

Tana French, The Trespasser. I continue to feel she's one of the couple best crime novelists writing today - we are used now to the contours of her imagination, so it's a bit less startling than those first few books in the series were, but they are still pretty much at the top of my list of what I most want to read.

A new novel in Emma Newman's appealing Planetfall world, After Atlas (B. was reading this also a few days ago and comments on the miraculously readable convergence of SF and noir investigation). And then what might have been the best discovery of my last few months of light reading because it was so joyful and so well-timed (it saved me from a good amount of post-election angst - not that I was spared, just that I had places to escape into like my Austen book and these novels) - a wonderful series called the Split Worlds. Between Two Thorns, Any Other Name, All is Far, A Little Knowledge - I was slightly gnashing my teeth when I came to the end of book four and realized that it wasn't the end of the story, but now I am glad of it as it means there is another one to read. I had vaguely had the impression that Planetfall was Newman's first novel, which surprised me given what a very very good book I found it - so this makes sense, she had a journeyman series before that might be a little more ragged around the edges but that are absolutely delightful and pretty much my favorite sort of thing in the world to read in times of trouble!

A first installment in a series that is another version of what I most enjoy collapsing into (I was happily downloading books from Amazon end-of-year recommendations for transatlantic travel, only I started this one the night before and stayed up till I finished it, and was only outraged to realize that I could not immediately get the next chunk of story): Todd Lockwood, The Summer Dragon. I was then saying to B. in the car we took to the airport the next morning that books about girls raising dragons are pretty much my favorite thing in the world - he said, implacably, "I find them Pernicious"! (Which reminded me of the time we were riding in a boat across a lake in Costa Rica and saw a huge flock of sea birds, prompting B. to turn to me and observe that one good tern deserves another.)

Connie Willis, Crosstalk. Enjoyable, very much in the vein of her earlier fiction like Bellwether, but slight. I am mildly outraged that the boring book that you are supposed to read if you are a telepath who needs to shield your mind from the intrusion of other people's chaotic thoughts is Gibbon's Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire! And

New Virgil Flowers book from John Sandford, Escape Clause, cause for minor celebration! (I read through the whole of that series and then the Lucas Davenport ones late this spring in a reading binge that was incredibly well timed to coincide with the time of the academic year when I still need a pipeline of light reading but don't have the energy or attention to discover new veins of ore.

New Daniel Faust installment from Craig Schaefer, The Castle Doctrine (these are good but not great - they are not as immediately appealing as Ben Aaronovich's Rivers of London series and not as masterfully told and plotted as Paul Cornell's Shadow London, but very enjoyable - definitely recommended).

Justine Larbalestier's My Sister Rosa is excellent, though I wasn't sure I endorsed the final twist - you can see it coming and I think it complicates what is otherwise a very emotionally true and compelling book

I found Harlen Coben's initial Myron Bolitar novels a bit silly/slight, but like Robert Crais he has gotten better over time. Enjoyed Home, then read the trio of YA Mickey Bolitar novels, which are wildly implausible in their imaginings but quite enjoyable to read (Chelter, Seconds Away, Found). Then read Fool Me Once. Then read Missing You. Then felt I had had enough Coben for a while!

Pre-election solace (genius timing!): Lee Child's new Jack Reacher novel! The last one wasn't great (the dark web stuff is too silly, and really the Reacher premise works best in a time before cellphones and pervasive computing) but this one is a return to form - I thoroughly enjoyed it.

Doug Johnstone, The Jump (very good - subtle, moving)

Walter Jon Williams, This is Not a Game (not bad, sort of sub-William-Gibson)

Seanan McGuire, Full of Briars (novelette in the October Daye world); Mira Grant, Feedback. Poppy Z. Brite, Last Wish and The Gulf.
Michelle Belanger, Mortan Sins (short story in the Conspiracy of Angels world)

Matthew FitzSimmons, Poisonfeather (Gibson Vaugn #2, sequel to The Short Drop). Not quite as smooth as the first one, but it's a worthwhile series, I will certainly continue to read.

Michael Connelly's new Harry Bosch novel, The Wrong Side of Goodbye. I think the quality of the series has declined over the years. This one is a little stronger than some of the couple previous, but I always have a curious feeling as I am reading that it is almost as if he has written the book as an outline rather than a fully imagined and realized story.

A pair of quite reasonable British police procedurals by Sarah Ward, In Bitter Chill and A Deadly Thaw (but don't you wish series naming protocols would undergo a major overhaul?)

David Anthony Durman, Acacia: The War with the Mein (book 1 of a series, I thought it was good and I enjoyed it but I do not know that I have the fortitude quite to read the rest of the saga - also, though I do not imagine influence just deep mythic patterning/stereotype, the children in the displaced ruling family have exactly the same roles and personalities as the Stark children in Game of Thrones!)

Peter Straub, Ghost Story (for some reason I'd never read this, but I think it feels dated now - the gender roles are offputting - and it's so reminiscent of some of the Stephen King of that era that I really wonder who thought of it first). Liked it enough to read Floating Dragon thereafter, but once I'd read those two I felt it really was sufficient, though they are long reasonably enjoyable books of the sort I always need more of.

Helen Callaghan, Dear Amy (couldn't quite get behind this one, I think thriller writers should be banned from writing stories that rely on dissociative selves with comparmentalized knowledge a-la Girl on a Train, whether due to alcohol abuse or mental illness)

Aoife Clifford, All these Perfect Strangers (Australian crime novel, not bad but not memorable); Kirstyn McDermott, Madigan Mine (good premise well told but not quite my preferred genre - I think I was trying to get local color via reading Australian genre fiction)
Ann Turner, Out of the Ice, an Antarctic thriller, was the best of the bunch - reminds me I meant to get her other novel but it was not I think available for Kindle.

Carol O'Connell's latest Mallory novel, Blind Sight. These are so eccentric as to sometimes have become almost unreadably silly, but I didn't think this volume was such a brazen offender as a couple of the others. The story rather recapitulates elements of her standalone novel The Judas Child, which remains my favorite of all her books.

I don't read urban fantasy obsessively, I am too critical of the writing in its bottom tiers, but Ilona Andrews, Magic Binds was worthwhile, and I was very pleased (this was the one I read yesterday morning at the airport with too much luggage) with Suzanne Johnson's Royal Street. Was happy to realize that it is the first of a five-book series, will get the others promptly (though by the time I realized I could do this, I was in a no-wireless zone and had a moment of feeling profoundly thwarted!).

Susan McBride, Walk into Silence - sub-literary, though the writing is quite good - I always feel a bit tricked when I think I'm reading "crime" genre and it turns out to be built on the romance chassis, there is a thinness of imagining around the storytelling

I must have been desperate - a Supernatural novel, Mythmaker! (Actually I do occasionally like reading this sort of tie-in story, though it is mostly only when I can't settle on anything else decent to read!)

Charlie Engle, Running Man: A Memoir. Very enjoyable in parts, but I thought the account of his arrest and imprisonment was somewhat lacking in self-awareness.

Comfort reread: Robin McKinley, The Blue Sword. Philip Pullman's His Dark Materials, though that was more of a tourism reread - and I suddenly remember now that I never walked into the Botanic Garden, though I ran past it almost every day, to see if I could find Will and Lyra's bench!

Closing tabs

Leaving for the airport very early for a flight to LAX en route to Sydney, and having the usual scramble to get ready to leave town (it's almost 8 and I haven't gotten out to run, must at least do SOME kind of a run though 2hr may at this point be overkill given that I'm not going to sleep much).  Austen notes woefully behind where I'd hoped they'd be, but I can at least bring the LETTERS chapter with me to work on, having made a little packet of xeroxes and selected three out of the ten volumes whose bits are more extensive & haven't yet been transcribed by me into typed notes.  I've mostly packed.  Cleaning up some tabs (was really looking to find one on Austen's letter-writing that I opened a while ago, but will have to use Google to find that again as it does not seem to be here):

Charlie Stross on why interruptions are a disaster when you're trying to work.

That said, Marilyn Berlin Snell on the disaster of the meditation retreat!

Perec in Australia.

Elizabeth Bishop's alcoholic admissions.

An interview with Mary Gaitskill.

Luc Sante on the art of nonfiction.

Geoff Dyer's new book sounds good.

Hermit crabs make homes out of beach trash.

Eighteenth-century documents discovered in birds' nests during cathedral renovation.

Last but not least, a charming bit of nomenclature: "Johnny Blue Pants"!

Closing tabs

I did something sensible on this trip and only brought five monographs to read out of the diverse heap of books that have come my way for the Studies in English Literature eighteenth-century roundup which I will be writing in another month or two (still waiting for more books to come in - it's much fewer so far than in previous years, more like 40 or 45 rather than 110+, and I need to figure out whether they don't exist or whether, for instance, review copy budgets are down across the board). Four and a half down, half to go (but I have read it before, in manuscript - I saved it for last because I know I like it!).

Brought a few other substantive books as well as part of resolution for 2016 to read more nonfiction and not quite so much "fodder"....

I always bring any agitation I may be experiencing with me when I come to Cayman, which can be a bit of a trial for all concerned (bouncing off walls!), but fortunately on this trip I am experiencing an unusual degree of peace of mind. (One factor: gratitude that this January is so much less stressful than last January. January through March of 2015 were of sufficient dreadfulness that I really hope I'm not going to have another sequence of months like that any time soon - fingers crossed, anyway.)

Will do the aquabike on Sunday out on the East End; have been doing a lot of hot yoga and similar. A few meals with friends, more quiet time at home, minor work obligations that can be aquitted by phone and email (as B. says of his own work, "Can do it anywhere. Might as well do it on a beach!"). Spa week(s)! Feeling optimistic about the spring semester - the load for the tenure committee will be extremely heavy, but I have gotten into good mental and physical shape in preparation....

Closing tabs:

An interview with Tom Stoppard.

National biscuits?

A fascinating long account of an elaborate con.

Doveman covers David Bowie's Lazarus.

Is reheated pasta less fattening? (Via Jane!)

Miscellaneous light reading, including a couple of real standouts:

Asne Seirstad, One of Us: The Story of Anders Breivik and the Massacre in Norway. I couldn't put this down - the narration is rather melodramatic (the narrative framework is like that of a serial killer novel) but the reporting goes deep and it is an incredibly compelling read. Strongly recommended.

And Charlie Jane Anders, All the Birds in the Sky - I loved this one (it's kind of like The Magicians but completely in reverse!), I had it via Netgalley but will perhaps see if I can get Charlie Jane to do a blog interview bit in publication week

Also (much that I really loved here, but it can't be said that January is the best month for new releases):

Reread of an old favorite, William Boyd's Armadillo (I still think it's very good, but I now have read a lot more other books in this vein, which somewhat lessens the impression).

Becky Chambers, The Long Way to a Small Angry Planet (loved it!).

Linda Nagata, The Red and subsequent installments (brilliant, haunting, wouldn't have minded if it were a bit less unrelentingly military in its episodes - would make great TV series).

Kim Stanley Robinson, Aurora (quite enjoyed it but it caused me to ruminate on why I have such a strong preference for Neal Stephenson even though it can similarly and fairly be charged that his female protagonists might as well be male - but there is something about Stephenson's explanatory and descriptive sentences that is itself compelling to me in a way that Robinson's are not).

Marcus Sakey's Brilliance trilogy (excellent light reading - that's good value for money!).

Pam Brondos, Gateway to Fourline (wasn't sure about this one at first - it reminded me a lot of Charlie Stross's Merchant Princes series, my least favorite of all his books - but decided I was keen, then realized with horror at the end that the next installment isn't out yet! But it is pre-ordered for January 19, which means I can read it in the airport on the way home).

Lila Bowen, Wake of Vultures (at first I found the writing a little too formulaic/polished, but it grew on me - in the end I really liked it - reminded me of the excellent Joan Vinge novelisation of Cowboys and Aliens!).

Sam Hawken, The Night Charter (like a sort of cross between Lou Berney's caper books and Lee Child but with a female Reacher equivalent - I liked it but didn't love it, will definitely seek out more by this author).

Kirsty Eagar, Raw Blue, a very good recommendation from Justine Larbalestier (this is the very best of contemporary YA I think in the non-fantastic vein - really beautifully written and rendered).

Elizabeth Little, Dear Daughter (pretty good, though I never quite bought into the voice - but it is better than Gone Girl!).

Several crime novels by Belinda Bauer (not bad but I am really tired of the serial-killer-close-to-home trope)

Two books about overeating (am on regimen of nutritional soundness which makes me want to read books about people who eat too many doughnuts), Allen Zadoff's Hungry and Lisa Kotin's My Confection: Odyssey of a Sugar Addict. The writing in the latter is very good but it becomes pretty repetitive, I am not sure there was really a whole book in it as opposed to a few very good essays.

That's it for now.

Closing tabs

Traveling tomorrow (not super-early but early for me), just finishing up getting things ready to go. A few tabs to close:

A shortage of tutu-makers. (Via GeekPress.)

Caleb's 2015 in notes. (I was startled recently by the discovery of the word zarf as applied to the cardboard ring that fills a comparable function!)

Ellis Avery on life at waist level.

The FT's interview with Elena Ferrante (site registration required):

A page is well written when the labour and pleasure of truthful narration supplant any other concern, including a concern with formal elegance. I belong to the category of writers who throw out the final draft and keep the rough when this practice ensures a higher degree of authenticity.

I have designs on this lounge for tomorrow morning....

Footnotology

Have sacrificed my morning run in order to get a handle on the huge list of tasks that need to be done in advance of tomorrow's travels. First up: returning a long-overdue ILL book I procured at great trouble earlier this year.

Peter Riess's Footnotology: Towards a Theory of the Footnote (New York and Berlin: Walter de Gruyter Publishers, 1985): “The footnote is (or pretends to be) the carrier of academic information, but is not the object of academic study” (3).

A functional typology of footnotes (pp. 15-17): excursive, supplementary, cautionary, disassociative, disputatious, cartel, clique, camouflage. Footnote neurosis, footnote fetishism, footnoteophobia, footnote aversion.

I am laughing, I think I now have something like five prospective book projects that are equally important to me (reading Austen, reading Clarissa, Gibbon's Rome, triathlon memoir, etc. etc.), but the biggie longterm one right now (I've just sent out a proposal for a short-term research fellowship) is for the most ambitious academic book I have contemplated to date, a literary history of the footnote, 1680-1818. Here is some of what I wrote recently:

In an essay on the history of the transition from marginal annotation to footnotes, Evelyn B. Tribble has suggested that the shape of the page often becomes “more than usually visible” at periods when “paradigms for receiving the past are under stress”: “In the early modern period, as models of annotation move from marginal glosses to footnotes, the note becomes the battlefield upon which competing notions of the relationship of authority and tradition, past and present, are fought” (“‘Like a Looking-Glas in the Frame’: From the Marginal Note to the Footnote,” in The Margins of the Text, ed. D. C. Greetham [Ann Arbor: The University of Michigan Press, 1997], 229-244). In this context, the page itself rather than the book in all of its rich materiality becomes the focus of interest. This matters for a number of significant literary works of the period that are still widely read, and the monograph that I am looking towards writing will be structured around discussion of those more or less canonical texts: Swift’s Tale of a Tub, Pope’s Dunciad, Richardson’s Clarissa and its increasingly controlling use of footnotes to cross-reference and moralize in subsequent revisions, the self-annotation of mid-century poets such as Thomas Gray and James Grainger, the apotheosis of the footnote in Gibbon’s Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire, with a convenient end point provided by the multiple texts of Coleridge’s Rime of the Ancient Mariner and the notorious marginal glosses of the version published in 1817. But I want to offer very full contextualization concerning the more general literary and historical record; more than that, I suspect that there is a good deal of interpretive work to be done on books with footnotes in their own right, especially in the genre of history.

The practices of glossing and marginalia run much longer than the history of the printed book, but I am especially interested in the new structures of page-based meaning that are facilitated by the sudden predominance of notes at the foot of the page rather than as a long appendage at the end of the text as the annotating authors of printed books in the 1680s move relatively quickly from margins to the foot of the page (Marcus Walsh has identified the French historian Richard Simon as an important node of change here, and his books are one of my first targets, with another important early French exemplar being Brossette’s two-volume 1716 edition of Boileau, whose importance for Pope’s vision of what could be done in the Dunciad Variorum has been roundly demonstrated by James McLaverty). These footnotes are continuous with older forms but also strikingly innovative in various respects, not least because one promise of the print world is that an author can relatively easily sanction multiple editions of his or her own work with increasingly complex and multi-layered annotation. One of my interests here is authorial involvement in the production of multiple editions of a given work, not revision in the most general sense but the specific problem of revision as it comes up in the question of writers with a compulsion to annotate their own works. I will be especially keen to find multi-edition works whose critical apparatus increases with each iteration or indeed in some cases transforms the work at hand.

Some initial theoretical work on this concept was done in Gérard Genette’s Paratexts, and the monograph I will ultimately write will touch briefly on some important twentieth-century forms of authorial annotation (The Waste Land, Pale Fire, the novels and essays of David Foster Wallace). In the early modern period, much of the footwork on this topic has been done and has begun to be elaborated in sophisticated critical works: Evelyn Tribble, Anthony Grafton, William Slights in his work on marginalia. But though work has begun in this area in the long eighteenth century, I was taken aback to realize when I began delving into the critical literature that there was no existing literary history of the footnote in this period; I think there’s a need for it, and I think what I must do before anything else is read exhaustively across the 12 or so decades I am contemplating (but with an initial concentration in the first half of the period) just to track the use of the footnote across major genres in English and French. I am especially interested in history, poetry and the novel, but I will be keeping an eye out for other genres that may prove especially interesting (natural history, say, or theology and moral philosophy – I will initially cast a very wide net).

Travels part III - Iceland!

By the time we got there, we were pretty much just due to collapse in the hotel room! (This was predicted in advance.) Fortunately it was an incredibly nice hotel.

(Our final two nights in Iceland were at the Geo Hotel in Grindavik - both of these hotels are pretty much brand new - I was initially a bit horrified that I had rashly taken us from lovely cosmopolitan city to isolated country location, but really it is good to see something a bit different - we had an interesting walk around small town and harbor, and the nearby restaurant was surprisingly good - I think this is it - we ate three meals there as options in walking distance were limited.)

Food in Iceland in general was ridiculously good. I don't have links for everything (or even most things), but we had fantastic Thai food here, very decent random local pizza, tons of good fish (with and without chips), a beer at Nico's favorite place, steak lunch here with my friend J. and his two older kids after an episode of puffin watching and delicious cocktails in the lobby at our hotel.

The Golden Circle bus tour was a little overwhelming (the landscapes are amazing, but there are too many people - tourist infrastructure really isn't up to current volume); I loved the small zoo in Reykjavik and the Blue Lagoon also exceeded expectations.

(We had two very fancy meals in Iceland, food on New Nordic lines: one at the Lava Restaurant at the Blue Lagoon, the other at Haust in our hotel lobby. The regular-place food is so good, the fancy food is slightly wasted on me & B. - but it was genuinely exceptional, and I would especially single out lovely desserts. Not so photogenic - subtle rather than flashy - but utterly delicious: at Haust, a rhubarb victoria with almond sorbet, roasted almonds and arctic angelica syrup, and at Lava a poached pear with ginger sorbet, praline cake and elderflower syrup. Divine!)

Pictures below are piecemeal: the final ones are only a small fraction of what was on offer at the glorious Saga Lounge at the airport on the day we left!

Travels part I

In Cayman, my mother and I saw blue iguanas and dined lavishly at Michael's Genuine and Casa 43 (not to mention Fidel Murphy's), with lots of visiting of Cayman friends.

On Saturday, August 1, B. and I flew to Miami and thence overnight to Heathrow (lie-flat beds!). Four nights at the Premier Inn Waterloo (slightly inferior to the companion hotel at County Hall, but still very good value for the money), the Mission Impossible movie at the nearby IMAX theater, mother's-side family meal at aunt's in Islington Monday night, father's-side family day in Greenwich (the queen's deer!) Tuesday (including a very convenient and pleasant but gastronomically undistinguished meal at Jamie's Italian - it is a great place to go with young kids, though I was suffering here as elsewhere with the English lack of air-conditioning - it was a warm week and everywhere inside was incredibly stuffy!), lunch meetup Wednesday at the Anchor and Hope with Jane and then on to Scootercaffe for a meetup with my cousin George before her shift started.

Thursday to Oxford! Part II to follow.

Closing tabs/light reading roundup

Life re-entry is always a bit overwhelming, especially when it's so hot in NYC and I've been away for many weeks. I have just spent a couple of hours responding to emails, making travel plans and to-do lists, etc. and feel a little calmer about my chances of getting everything I need to done before school is properly underway.

(I made an initial stab at laptop battery replacement effort on Monday, but the tech support call got cut off and I didn't have the time or psychological wherewithal to pursue further - must either get back at that tomorrow morning or hand it over to an office staff person if I really don't think I am going to be able to get it done myself!)

I'm planning to fight the Facebook creep by belatedly posting some catch-up vacation photos here, but first I'm overdue for a long light-reading roundup and some closing of tabs.

Tabs:

A good list of reading recommendations.

A non-embarrassing classical music scene in a blockbuster movie! (Via Nico, and I totally agree. B. and I saw this movie the day we arrived in London - movie-going is a good activity for the jet-lagged and sleep-deprived....)

Light reading, international travel edition (that's three weeks' worth, I guess, though I was still working pretty frenetically on Johnson and Shakespeare that week in England):

Max Gladstone's latest Craft book, Last First Snow (these books are extremely good - I found this one a little slow in opening, but I suspect it had more to do with poor attention on my part than anything to do with the actual writing).

A reread of Garth Nix's wonderful Abhorsen sequence, starting with the most recently published by chronologically earliest and then proceeding with the central trilogy - ah, if only there were way more books as good as these and in this vein!

Blake Crouch, Pines (NOT recommended - I skimmed through it with increasing incredulity and dislike!)

Sam Reaves, Mean Town Blues (not bad).

Maggie Mitchell, Pretty Is (I liked this a lot - the voices of the two main characters could be more clearly differentiated, and the ending is implausible, but the writing is extremely good, and the protagonist teaches Richardson!).

Then (ah, my Amazon recommendation algorithm is going to flog all sorts of unfortunate things for years to come - I was in Cayman still, I like digging in to a long book that is first in a series!) the first Dune (a mixture of appealing and silly) and then subsequent two installments, which become increasingly silly - I think I can do without reading any more of these!

By then I was in England, and took up a very good and suitable urban fantasy series set in many of the same places I was spending time: Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus series. These are extremely good, very appealing light reading: not quite as funny and original, I think, as Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London books, but certainly worth mentioning in the same breath.

A very silly book I regretted wasting my time on: the storytelling isn't bad, but I really just wish characters wouldn't stop to have sex in the middle of my nice suspenseful genre fiction, I wouldn't have picked it up if I realized it was more on the romantic suspense lines....

Two installments that I LOVED in a new series by Rachel Aaron (haven't read her others and brief sampling persuaded me I wouldn't necessarily like them as much, but these are delightful, whimsy notwithstanding): Nice Dragons Finish Last and One Good Dragon Deserves Another. Less "indie" in sensibility than Martin Millar's extraordinary Kalix the Werewolf books, but not totally dissimilar in sensibility and appeal.

Elizabeth Hand's Wylding Hall (quite good, and yet flawed by a deep romanticism that is not at all subjected to critique - I think I am tough on Hand's books in the way that one is overly critical of books that have a lot in common with someone one would want to write oneself - but I really prefer the Pamela Dean vision of such things).

By now I think I was in Iceland....

Peter Robinson's latest Inspector Banks book, In the Dark Places (not earth-shattering, but well-conceived and -executed - these books are always readable).

An amazing novel I've had on my Kindle for a little while but for some reason hadn't tackled (possibly due to the word "Love" in the title), Alaya Dawn Johnson's Love is the Drug. Highly recommended.

A reread of Nos4A2 because I couldn't find anything I liked and decided it would be better to have something good for the second time than something bad for the first, and then a reread of Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls to see if the two had as much in common as I remembered (yes and no - definitely share the same DNA - Beukes' main characters are more fully individuated, but Hill's storytelling is perhaps slightly more gripping).

The first two-thirds of The Three-Body Problem, which I enjoyed very much but found too little character-driven to keep my attention during a day of travel (I will finish it tomorrow or the next day I expect).

On the plane back from Iceland, grippingly, a book I was excited for at the time but somehow never quite opened up (or maybe I did and found the opening pages bleak?), but it is GLORIOUSLY appealing and what I most like: Nicole Kornher-Stace's Archivist Wasp. Throw this book in the face of anyone who suggests that the dystopian YA genre is all tapped out!

Then a reread of the four Arnaldur Indridason books I had in my Kindle library, to get into the Icelandic frame of things (the most recent four, basically - there's a new one out in England but not yet in the US I think). These books are thoughtful in a way that rewards rereading: I like the way he gives different characters the detective role in different books (a good way to avoid the kind of series burnout that afflicts certain writers I will not name).

Then, last night, a really delightful novella by the superb Mira Grant (she is a genius of light reading), Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus.

That's it for now, I think....

Dill battalions

Ah, I continue to fight the battle against the easy allure of Facebook and the way it saps blogging vim - it has been compounded, on this trip, by the fact that my lovely brand new computer (it arrived the day before I left, I hastily met with an IT guy who set it up for me), which is in every way great and weighs about one-quarter what my previous laptop did, has a non-functional battery (CURSE OF DELL). Given travels in places needing plug adaptors, and often a system where power shuts down in the room when you take the keycard out of the slot by the door, I have avoided having it plugged in at all, as it goes into automatic shutdown if it's in sleep mode and the power goes off. The iPad is much more suited to quick Twitter/Facebook posts than to more elaborate ones, further compounding the unwanted transition....

(Will pursue battery replacement as soon as I'm home properly on Monday.)

So lots of blogging to catch up on. For now, just one funny piece that COULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN BY ME (via Bronwyn). One of the things that's very nice about food in Iceland versus other Scandinavian countries and Russia/Eastern Europe: I have not encountered a single bit of dill, it is chives for the most part instead which is a much more humane alternative! My aversion to dill knows no bounds....

Anyway, Shaun Walker at the Guardian on the "spindly menace" of dill in Russia:

It’s one thing when dill blankets traditional Russian dishes like the emptied contents of a lawnmower bag, but quite another when it shows up on pizza, sushi, quiches: occasions when you naively hadn’t even thought to request a dill-free meal from the waiter. It is a sabotage apparently borne of a grotesque, atavistic culinary longing, like some deranged Brit on the Costa del Sol lacing a paella with brown sauce.

More anon - we are off shortly (it is our last full day in Iceland) to soak in the Blue Lagoon....

Closing some tabs

And with unusual finality - I was finally due for a new computer from Columbia (we're on a four-year cycle), it arrived yesterday and I had an emergency meeting this morning at 9:30 with a faculty desktop support guy who set it up all up for me - I'm leaving tomorrow morning for a lovely but complicated trip to Cayman, England and Iceland, and it is a boon to have this new tiny computer to travel with rather than the current BEHEMOTH!

(Which I will now leave in my office so that I have a computer permanently there, and it may be the source of future blog postings, but it will no longer be the main device....)

Links:

Neglected books still neglected, including a very funny one noted by Anthony Burgess (clearly a major source for his own somewhat neglected novel The Wanting Seed). (Via.)

Listen to all ten of August Wilson's plays for free between now and the end of August!

What would Daniel Kahnemann eliminate if he had a magic wand?

Jane Goodall on 55 years at Gombe.

Sarah Waters' ten rules for writing fiction.

A delightful roundup at the TLS on four recent books about the history of British cooking and Steven Shapin at the LRB on the history of tea (subscriber-only I think).

44

I need an amanuensis to come and type up these notes for me!

My mood has picked up quite a bit, to my relief - in fact, when I look through past summers of blog posting, I begin to suspect that I always spend June and the first half of July in a state of mild grumpiness (consequence of overwork during the school year plus need to clear minor external writing tasks). I was training a lot more last summer but I don't think I was really feeling good about stuff until round about now, it may just be a structural cost of balancing the workload so unevenly over the academic year.

I have a lot to do before I leave on Friday, including thinking about packing for three totally different climates and sets of activities. Will still be writing Oxford talk next week in Cayman, not optimal but inevitable....

A minor bright spot the other day: my brother found our father's SSA-1099 in a bag of papers that had become separated from the other stuff he took from his apartment, which will let me file his 2014 taxes WITHOUT having to go in person to the local Social Security office and wait in line with complicated paperwork to beg a new copy! This is huge: it might be that the SS office is not as heinous a place as I imagine, but I have built this up into absolutely most-dreaded job, and having the form in hand will save me half a day of high irk and a good deal of dread in the anticipation. PROCRASTINATION WAS REWARDED - my brother was almost afraid to tell me he'd found it in case I'd already spent a horrible day obtaining a new one!

This year brought me several bad things I really wasn't expecting, and I am still pretty much just scrambling through from day to day, but I'm looking forward to the coming school year and an interesting committee-chairing assignment, and after that I will have a full year of sabbatical! I have not made enough writing time in the last year or so, and am looking forward to getting the chance to remedy the omission.

Peaking

An appealing extract from Ed Caesar's new book on endurance sport at the FT (site registration required). Hahahahaha, I had a wave of grumpiness that the book is available as of today in the UK but not till October in the US - then I remembered that in two weeks I will be in England and can purchase it in a bookstore! (Or, indeed, order it immediately from the Book Depository....)

Life re-entry

I must say that I was absolutely overwhelmed on Monday and Tuesday by life re-entry panic. This to-do list is going to kill me!

All I really want is to be exercising and getting back into my own work mode, but instead I have this huge list of school things and life things and especially things to do with my father's estate that must be ticked off (Pennsylvania estate taxes must be prepaid by June 6 for the discount, the condo closing is early next week and I belatedly realized yesterday that my brother in NJ had the only set of keys with electronic fob and mailbox - my sister-in-law came to the rescue, express-mailing them this morning to paralegal in Philadelphia).

Dissertations are being defended left and right and I need to round up a few more committee members for the third of three upcoming (I hate to ask the same people multiple times, it is a lot of extra work, but then again we ask those people because they are so good at it and answer emails promptly - no virtue goes unpunished in academia!).

ARGHHHHHHH!!!!

I have an amazing slate of work stuff that I'm really excited about, but need to clear the head space so that I can actually get down to business. Summer projects: researching and writing the talk for this Johnson Shakespeare conference (this is the most pressing!); writing proposals for books about reading Austen and reading Clarissa. Back-burner upcoming project is the Gibbon's Rome book, but that will mostly have to wait till my year of sabbatical in 2016-2017 (woo-hoo!). Also a Secret Editorial Project that I will wait to unveil till it's more official, but that should be pretty interesting....

I have a very demanding year upcoming; only teaching one class per semester, due to course release for administrative stuff, but the two really huge things are that I will be chairing the Tenure Review Advisory Committee (that's between 70 and 80 tenure cases over the year), and I've also agreed to do something that as a Young Person was one of my institutional dreams (it's an honor to be asked, I couldn't say no!): writing the annual eighteenth-century studies roundup review for Studies in English Literature, which entails reading and reviewing the 100+ books and journal issues published in my field in 2015. It will be very interesting, I think, and it should benefit my graduate students down the road in terms of giving me a keener sense of the field as it currently exists, but it is a lot of work.

Closing tabs:

My review of Hanya Yanagihara's new novel is in the new issue of Bookforum, but not available online (read Garth Greenwell's piece instead!).

Ben Anastas on the pain of being edited.

Victor LaValle interviews Mat Johnson (keen to read his new novel).

At Public Books, Benjamin Eldon Stevens writes about a novel I loved, Jo Walton's Just City.

Jane Yeh has a poem in the New Republic!

An excellent interview with my colleague Edward Mendelson about morals and criticism.

A tale of two velodromes!

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges (lots of planes and trains):

Asali Solomon, Disgruntled (I really liked this one - very clear and captivating voice and vision, and of course due to the Philadelphia stuff I am especially interested - going to send a copy to my mother now as I think she will much enjoy it).

Paolo Bacigalupi, The Water Knife (I think he's an extremely good writer, and yet I do not love his books - I suppose that my preference is for something more character- and voice-driven, which is really not a criticism, just an observation!).

Andrew Klavan, Werewolf Cop (title of genius!)

Tim Lebbon, The Silence - I really, really liked this one.

Anyway, I've spent the morning clearing various minor list items, and am no longer feeling quite so panicky (I also have a personal assistant scheduled to come a couple times in the next few weeks to help me/make me do mine and my dad's postponed taxes for 2014, apply for Global Entry and more passport pages, move things from home to office, etc. etc.).

New York living

One of the services the professional catsitters provide is a very funny note to greet you on your arrival home (NYC often outdoes even your most extravagant imaginings!)....

Closing tabs

Life reentry day: international travel wreaks havoc with exercise schedule and many other things. Yesterday was extremely demanding, and today I am paying the price!

Closing a few tabs in the meantime:

Brook Stevenson interviews Marlon James (his new book is on a pile here, but it's a tome - might have to buy a copy for Kindle as well, easier to hold while reading!).

David Gordon: doomed to read and write?

Chaucer's advice on how to survive the holidays.

For those who have been demoralized by having a journal reject an article! (And underlying link. This fits closely with my own experience as a referee for journals.)

A short history of the shipping pallet.

Perils of digital preservation.

The rise of livestreaming funerals.

Shane Gould on learning to swim.

Last but not least, Michael Hofmann really didn't like it....

Light reading catch-up

I hate it when I leave it too long between logging one tranche of reading and the next, it becomes a nuisance rather than a pleasure to write it up here. But since I am now genuinely enjoying a quiet day in Cayman, I thought I would get a grip on it and clear the backlog....

Kiese Laymon's essay "My Vassar Faculty ID Makes Everything OK" caught my attention for obvious reasons, and I immediately got hold of his two books (I've been hearing great things about his YA novel from Sara Ryan and others for a while): How to Slowly Kill Yourself and Others in America and Long Division. Both are superb, and I am buying copies for my mother and several others for Xmas; the essays are reminiscent of James Baldwin, in the best possible way (it is a strain I miss from the neurasthenic subdivision of contemporary essay-writing: I want to hear much stronger and more widespread crypto-preacherly rage!), and the novel is absolutely a delight.

Probably my other favorites were another pair of books that (BECAUSE I AM AN IDIOT) I read in the wrong order: however, third installment in trilogy will come soon and I expect I will read again from the start at that point, I liked 'em that much. I blame Adam Roberts, whose best SF round-up was where I got the recommendation and which didn't mention the fact of the book in question being a sequel; BUT I also blame my own voracious and forgetful nature as a reader - I could tell something wasn't quite right about the opening, but wasn't willing to put the book down to figure it out. When I finished and went to find whether there was yet a sequel (it's coming in May 2015), I realized that in fact I had already bought volume one the year before, only it wasn't on my current Kindle - it must have been on the one I left in the pocket of a plane that took me to Portland, ME when I was travelling for The Magic Circle. Anyway, these books are PERFECT - it's massive Soviet-era alternate history of a fantastical stamp, more on the Ballard-Pynchon axis in terms of style than the Pullman-Aiken-Explosionist one but still pretty much exactly the sort of thing I most enjoy reading. Hungry for vol. 3! Here's the author's site; the books are by Peter Higgins and are titled Wolfhound Century and Truth and Fear.

Many novels by Patricia Briggs, very convenient for purposes of travel (I wish she was still writing fantasy as opposed to werewolf, but I suspect market pressures drive one pretty strongly towards the latter), some Eva Ibbotson rereading for comfort, Michael Connelly's new novel (these are always readable but increasingly thin, confirming my sad conviction that 90% of bestselling fiction will be much less good than the 5% of genuinely brilliant genre fiction that is too violent or troubling to be enjoyed by all); a couple other good recommendations from the Adam Roberts piece (other pet peeve: when will we have a world of simultaneous publication in all English-language markets?!?), Dave Hutchinson's rather delightful Europe in Autumn and Joe Abercrombie's Half a King.

Oh, and one other one I really loved, though I can't remember now where I got the recommendation: Terry Hayes' I am Pilgrim.

I have a bit of a breather this week at B.'s, then home Sunday for a few days of maniacal end-of-semester grading, brief holiday interlude and then three weeks of INSANE WORK AND FITS OF EXERCISE! I am excited about the latter - I have two different book proposals I want to work on, and two talks I need to get some kind of a handle on (one for a general audience at a liberal arts college, one for a plenary address at a conference I really want to have something good for). Various other things churning around at the back of my mind, but time is finite, I must reconcile myself to that in advance.

I ran a 10K on Saturday and got back to hot yoga today for the first time since August, both of which bode well for exercise prospects in upcoming weeks, but it is certainly still possible that I have one more major respiratory ailment in me for 2014, so I'm trying not to count my chickens....

Sweetness and light

Paris was amazing partly just because walking around and thinking about past and present and looking at things is so amazing. About the only thing I did my last day there was lunch with a friend and Columbia colleague near the beautiful Reid Hall (conversation included exploring the possibility that I might teach there in some future semester).

I do not have the gift of assiduous museum-going, and really my only goal was to hit this one, which quite lived up to my expectations. I am not a good photographer, but this gives a little bit of a taste of the wares on offer:




Afterwards, a cupcake from Bertie's Cupcakery! (The proprietor is ""The Girl" of DC Rainmaker fame, and also made some custom-designed cookies to celebrate my brother and sister-in-law's acquisition of their first boat, a Nimble Nomad named Gunny.)

No discredit to an excellent cupcake, but the best dessert I had in Paris was with A. at Le Stella (after a dinner that started with a green bean and parmesan salad, then scallops and sole): a vacherin glace of utter deliciousness!

I had another very good dessert that involved a sort of almond and pistachio foam with raspberries in it, and the other thing I ate several times and most enjoyed was the "filets de dorade" (sea bream), in one case with anchovy butter and in another with sauteed fennel....