NYC 21-22

It's end of day Thursday, that to-do list doesn't actually look too bad, at least if you forget that there are two important things at the bottom (the course release committee, the writing studies proposal) that need some quality attention from me, and I've got enough Zoom stuff on the schedule for tomorrow that I don't imagine I'm likely to make huge inroads. It is the best I can do, at any rate!

Had a gloriously exciting thing this morning - my first online yoga session (one on one) with Susanne, my great teacher from the Oxford studio 3.5 years ago. Gonna have private sessions with her Thurs. and Fri. and join her Monday class as well, that will give me automatic willpower-free 3 yoga/week which will be very good. It's a really busy time of the school year even aside from the extra demands of the current situation, but I don't think that's putting on too much. Any time I'm NOT in NYC I find an amazing studio and go near-daily, but when I'm here I'm basically just too busy - and don't have an obvious one that covers all the bases right near me. Doing online private sessions may be my solution to the "but how do I do yoga regularly during a teaching semester?" conundrum....

This is Susanne's website. She's a really good teacher, and it's the kind of yoga I most like - gentle, strong, with much attention to alignment.

NYC day 16

I've had a lot of nights these past weeks where I slept a first shift (after a lifetime of insomnia I have finally found the perfect safe sleep drug for me, trazodone - it actually makes me for the first time ever feel sleepy at bedtime when I am tired, this is a miracle for which I am now especially grateful as otherwise I'd be cycling round a clock of 4am, 5am, 6am times after tossing hotly in bed for many hours), woke for a couple hours and read news online, then slept for another few hours in the very early morning. Last night I was actually able to sleep for 8 hours more or less continuously - I got through the middle of the night pee break without full wakefulness. Of course, those eight hours were 8pm to 4am. It will be good as dawn gets earlier and I can run outside super-early!

A surprisingly good day today, with lots of work things that were stimulating and fully immersive. Some email about rescheduling as online the book events that have had to be canceled, that's good (I am due a real Duchess of Angus post soon). Gonna have a drink now, read a novel on the couch and go to bed at 7:30!

(Even the idea of being able to take this picture and show MORE THINGS CHECKED OFF THE LIST did not get me to complete any of the more manageable tasks that remain undone. It will have to be tomorrow....)

A good recent light reading recommendation: a pair of haunting crime novels by the excellent Marcie Rendon. The first is Murder on the Red River, the sequel is Girls Gone Missing. They are pretty certainly the best new(ish) crime fiction I've read so far this year, with both writing and setting far above the usual and remarkable in kind as well as quality - highly recommended.

NYC day 7

A satisfying but very tiring day. I got through three of my four essential tasks and had several other Zoom meetings of various kinds; this was highly worthwhile! Those reading this may be thinking "gosh she is a shill for neoliberalism," but Zoom worked incredibly well for my meeting with one of my senior essay advisees: I made my comments on Word and tracked changes (yes this is more time-consuming, I prefer my usual scribble method), then we had it up on the screen and went through it together, it worked really well.

I found a nice little notebook on the shelves to use for daily to-do lists. Clearly there is going to be frequent carry-over of even essential tasks to the next day.

The day started with an excellent run and is going to end with novel-reading and a whisky on the couch.

I think that for this first week or so, I'm going to recommend just one absolutely tried and true piece of comfort-reading: books I have read again and again and think might arrest your attention for long enough that you can tear yourself away from the news cycle!

#1: Eva Ibbotson, The Morning Gift. All of Ibbotson's books are absolutely delightful; I read them again and again, especially when I'm so fatigued during a teaching semester that I don't know what to do with myself. This I think is my favorite - and there are lots more along very similar lines (that is a feature, not a bug...) if you pick this one up and like it as much as I do.

Caught my eye

in this story about a junior doctors' strike in the UK:

The National Health Service says it employs 1.6 million people, putting it in the top five of the world's largest work forces, alongside the United States Defense Department, McDonald's, Walmart and the Chinese People's Liberation Army.

Closing tabs

Trying to tidy up my utterly chaotic apartment - but the counterpart bit of tidying involves closing a lot of tabs that have been open for too long....

Best sight over Thanksgiving - PEZ dispensers at the American Visionary Art Museum in Baltimore!

Closing some tabs:

Photographs of Arctic foxes.

William McIlvanney has died - his Laidlaw books were a favorite with my Scottish grandfather.

Novel-reading has been fairly pitiful, though I need to write separate posts on books by Elana Ferrante and Garth Greenwell that are not pitiful.

Hahahahaha, have been contemplating this line as I thought longingly about blogging - am now on installments 13 to 15 of Sherrilyn Kenyon's Dark-Hunter novels - they are very good storytelling in their way, albeit somewhat repetitive when binge-read; I would like them better if there were less sex, but this is like saying I would like chocolate chip cookies better if there were no chocolate chips in them! (Also true.) Resolved to read a higher proportion of nonfiction in 2016 as there is less brain rot that way!

Actually I have had quite a few good things now that I think about it - I am always in peaks and troughs of despair and elation, fortunately something good usually turns up to read just when I am utterly dry....

Appealing caper crime: Lou Berney's first two novels, which are not so much my cup of tea as his most recent one but which are still incredibly good - I think he's my new favorite relative-newcomer crime writer.

Another very good first crime novel (from a veteran writer, and it shows): Lisa Sandlin, The Do-Right. There is perhaps a tad too much historical detail, but the writing is excellent and the storytelling is very good too (not always the case): Attica Locke is the closest parallel. I highly recommend this one - I think it will appeal slightly less to the general reader than Berney's The Long and Faraway Gone, as the historical setting is a little too lovingly realized and the story is less plausible, but it is worth mentioning in the same breath, especially on the strength of the characters and the prose.

Denisa Mina's excellent new Alex Morrow novel, Blood, Salt, Water.

Kevin Wignall, A Death in Sweden - great stuff! Not perhaps quite up to Peter Temple in the writing, but very good indeed - that is a standard few can meet, and this is definitely first-rate. Wignall's first few books made a big (positive) impression on me, but he hasn't been on my radar in recent years, and I am hoping that may mean there's some backlist I can catch up on. I just like this guy's brain - you know when you read a novel and it is so intelligent and compact and contained that you feel like you could live with it in your house?

Comfort reread when I couldn't find anything else: Eva Ibbotson, A Song for Summer (I love her books so much and it makes me very sad that there will be no more of them).

Appealing SF: C. A. Higgins, Lightless (I loved this one, and was perplexed by the negative Amazon reviews - yes, this is a little more simplistic than the Expanse books, say, in the best tradition of YA SF of the 50s and 60s, but it is incredibly gripping and the characters are really nicely brought to life - I hugely enjoyed it).

Mira Grant's latest sapient tapeworm installment, Chimera (she is a genius of light reading, everything she writes is what I most enjoy reading). Good thing for me she is so prolific! (And by the way, when did it become acceptable to apply the adjective "prolific" to, say, serial killers? I see it often and it always strikes me as a solecism!)

On the topic of serial killers, a rather terrible book by Alan Jacobson ccalled The 7th Victim. It is capably written and presumably reasonably well-informed about profiling and FBI procedures, but the main character is so utterly preposterous in her motivations and actions that it ruined everything else good about the book for me. (It reminded me of this very good recent post by Charlie Stross - writers take note....)

Three enjoyable and very light books by Deborah Blake, who I will continue to read despite what I feel to be the basic silliness of this kind of paranormal romance because she is a good writer!

My Greenwell and Ferrante posts may have to wait for another day, that's enough blogging after a long dry spell!

Final thought. If I can do four things tomorrow, everything will be OK:

(1) Run
(2) Finalize my spring-semester syllabus, which will involve a bit of library time, and email it to seminar leaders for Thursday morning meeting
(3) Write the two most pressing letters of recommendation
(4) Get to 5pm makeup powerlifting session

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.).

"Infuriating; possibly illuminating"

Shades of my relationship with Anthony Burgess's 99 Novels!

Happiness!

My dear friend Jane Yeh has been chosen for the Poetry Society's Next Generation list, issued once a decade. Not so well-known in the US as in the UK, but this is a BIG DEAL! These are poems that everyone who loves language and play should be reading.

10 books

The "10 books" meme is spreading like wildfire in my Facebook feed! Really I have done this too many times already, so I am linking to three different ones I've posted here before that capture three different through-lines of my reading life....

First and most fundamentally, my ideal bookshelf!

The ten books that most influenced me intellectually.

Ten non-fiction books that have stayed with me.

Perhaps if I get all my work done today I will write up a 10 books of childhood list....

Listicle

Seven black women science fiction writers everyone should know. Two I have not read at all, will follow up on those recommendations....

More books!

At the Columbia UP blog, five of the best books about hoarding.

Light reading

I am a great believer in extracurricular reading - but I really cannot endorse this list!

Naphtha, xylene, Japan drier

Mimi Lipson's story about a dog.

Three entries

from Sei Shonagon, The Pillow Book. If Barthes and Perec were both reading this, it would explain certain similarities between their writing that I've always been curious about (probably not very deep delving into the question would get me a satisfactory answer - I will follow up on this when I am back in New York).

Refined and elegant things - A girl’s over-robe of white on white over pale violet-grey. The eggs of the spot-billed duck. Shaved ice with a sweet syrup, served in a shiny new metal bowl. A crystal rosary. Wisteria flowers. Snow on plum blossoms. An adorable little child eating strawberries.
...
Cats – Cats should be completely black except for the belly, which should be very white.
...
Endearingly lovely things . . . Things children use in doll play. A tiny lotus leaf that’s been picked froma pond. A tiny aoi leaf. In fact, absolutely anything that’s tiny is endearing.

Wax off

The ten best personal trainers in film and television.

Closing tabs

Abandoned swimming pools.

At the TLS, Jonathan Bate on two new Keats biographies, with interesting more general thoughts on the literary biographer's dilemma.

Emily DePrang on what happened to one man put on Texas's sex offender registry for an offence committed when he was twelve. (And sequel.)

How to create cartoons.

Honey laundering. (Courtesy of B.)

Nine red herrings

Via Alice, two good Encyclopedia Brown links: Tom Scocca on nine red herrings; Kathryn Schulz on the desire to be Encyclopedia Brown.

24 hours behind schedule

Par for the course with this sort of thing.  Visitors over the weekend complicated work schedule.  Can't work such long stints as I used to in the old days, when I would toil maniacally from 8am to 4pm, nap for a couple of hours then work again from 8pm to 3am: it was exactly that sort of work habit that led over many years to huge amounts of insomnia and anxiety, and I've been trying recently not to work after about eight at night unless absolutely unavoidable.  Next three nights it will be unavoidable, I think, though I will have to see how it goes.

• Still have six little slips of paper that need writing/amplifying as real inserts or passages because they were too complicated for me to write easily (an imitation New Yorker Talk of the Town piece about the BoMH game; a cryptic conversation between two characters, overheard by a third; notes that just say "present is a game and game play precipitates an argument that moves forward rel. of Ruth and Anna" and "lipstick/bullet returns in pt. 3" respectively; "old and new signs in Morningside Park," which I remember seeing and which was also noted for me by E. but which I now can't precisely locate in my memory, so that I need to walk back over there and remind myself where they are; one note even more inchoate that I am not sure I will act upon)
• Haven't yet started typing revisions
• But have written up all other new 'bits' from my notecards

Today I will basically be knocked out of action for book work from 10:30am till 7pm (last Clarissa seminar, hasty commenting on assignments I'm hoping to give back in lecture, Austen lecture, office hours, allergy shots at Columbus Circle plus quick meetup with catsitter to hand over keys).  But I have to have a second work session this evening; if I don't get a good chunk of these edits typed in before I go to bed tonight, I'm not going to be happy!

Tomorrow has annoying bits and bobs scheduled (wish it were a complete blank): 8am doctor's appointment to get prescription refills on asthma stuff; noon department meeting; 2-5pm blocked out for meeting on college honors, though I think it won't take that long; 5pm meeting with a student.  I don't teach on Wednesday till 2:40, and it's a shorter day for me than Monday, so I should be able to keep working well into the evening so long as I get my packing done as well.  (Need to bring books for two different pieces I'll be working on while I'm at B.'s, a short piece for Bookforum that will require 4-5 tomes and the Blackwell Companion essay on Austen that means I probably will bring my complete set of Austen World's Classics volumes.) 

Flight Thursday requires departure from home by 5:45am, so though I should be in Cayman by lunchtime, it pretty much knocks that out as a workday given near absence of sleep.  I will prefer to email the final manuscript to my editor before I leave for the airport, but I can do my final pass through the manuscript on Friday if I need to and still be able to get it out before the end of the business day.

Ptydepe

Sarah Weinman's favorite crime novels of 2011.  I have just downloaded all the ones I haven't read already, it's a great selection; I think the one I am most impatiently awaiting of her list of forthcoming ones is the Carol O'Connell.

Also: Adam Thirlwell's bootleg Havel.

End-of-week update

By dint of a fairly ferocious week-long effort I have now crossed off every single item but one on the list of work I brought with me (the exception is a small piece I said I'd write for Frequencies, and I can definitely write that later this evening or tomorrow before I have to go to the airport mid-afternoon).  Phew - contemplating the next three weeks is no longer inducing a minor nervous breakdown...