Limited Contingent

From Svetlana Alexievich, Zinky Boys: Soviet Voices from the Afghanistan War (not sure why I have just spent a beautiful afternoon at a tropical island beach hotel lying in bed in air-conditioning reading an incredibly grim book - but it is a very good book!):

Sometimes I want to write down everything I saw. Like, in hospital, the lad who'd lost his arms, his legs and his mate. I remember sitting on his bed writing a letter for him to his mother. Or the little Afghan girl who pinched a sweet from a Soviet soldier and had both her hands hacked off by her own people. I'd like to write it all down exactly as it was and without any comments. If it rained I'd say it rained, just that, without a lot of talk about whether it was a good or bad thing that it was raining.

Scrubbed

Ken Auletta's profile of Guardian editor Alan Rusbridger makes for an extremely interesting read.

Right/wrong

What Tanner Colby learned when he re-reported Bob Woodward's biography of John Belushi. (Via Phil.)

Closing tabs

Feeling a sense of moderate but pronounced well-being I haven't had since probably early November or so.  End of the school year in sight! 

A few links:

Why Kevin Hartnett started writing by hand.

Amanda Hesser's advice to aspiring food writers.  This piece is a must-read for anyone hoping to make a living as a professional journalist: the financial underpinnings of that sort of work have changed radically in the last fifteen years, and almost everything she says here is equally apt for other kinds of journalism as well, including arts journalism.

More on Teju Cole's small fates.

New Haven trip tomorrow.

Head back in the game

I was very glum yesterday: I had had such visions of productivity in the way of pages and exercise for my spring break, and in the event it is fully halfway over and I have essentially done no pages and no exercise!  Debilitating insomnia on Saturday and Sunday nights, and then on Monday morning it came clear to me that really I wasn't just having the stomach-ache and slight queasiness of insufficient sleep, but really a minor stomach ailment that led to me spending the day in bed.  Didn't even feel well enough to read a book, which is saying something.  Stomach-ache has finally lifted this morning, fortunately, and I think I will run for an hour later on.

In short: I guess I've just been working too hard, and that my plans for the break (it's only one week) were unrealistic.  Just now I am finally about to dig in on the dreaded novel revisions.  Need to get my head back in that game!  This, unfortunately, is quite literally (only it was on the chair visible in the background - I have just transferred the stack to newly cleared desk) the state in which I left it: I put it aside a month ago when pressures of work became too great.  Today will be devoted to figuring out where the hell I left off and trying to reduce the pile of papers I actually need to attend to.  It will be good, really....


Some tabs to close:

Access all areas?

Tradecraft for the aspirational publishing reporter.

The virtues of writing a textbook or synthesis at mid-career.

Last but not least, a strong list of finalists for the Young Lions Fiction Award at the New York Public Library!

Holiday edition

The sad truth about Columbia's election holiday is that I mostly use it to catch up on work!  Just finishing a tenure letter for a scholar at another university (these are time-consuming) and will spend Tuesday and Wednesday working on a similar letter for an untenured but prolific colleague at my home institution as well as writing several other letters of recommendation and an overdue reader's report on a journal article. 

On the bright side, though, I'm in an environment full of lizards and chickens; I got to do an Olympic-distance triathlon yesterday; I intend to go to yoga every day this week unless the minor sinus infection that has been teasing me since Friday escalates; and I read two very enjoyable books, quite different from each other, during Friday travels: Jacqueline Carey's Santa Olivia, which was so thoroughly immersive that I gnashed my teeth when I finished it and realized I couldn't get the next installment for my Kindle until November 22; and Siddartha Deb's The Beautiful and the Damned: A Portrait of the New India, which is so fascinating and so well-written that I gnashed my teeth at the thought that I am not capable of writing such a book myself.  It was a satisfactory day of reading that took away the pains of a long layover in the Miami airport!

Pitches, splits

This is more immediately interesting from a writer's than a reader's standpoint, but I was interested by Emily Witt's Observer piece on the rise of the short non-fiction ebook.