Little a

Meet Ed Park!

Book party!

Thanks to all who came! This is me with my lovely editor Ed Park, as things were winding down.

Incidentals

Max Sebald's writing tips. (Via Ed.)

Also, via Jane Y., groundhog training regimens!

"The tot in question"

Ed Park on Rosemary's Baby.

Closing tabs

Z-z-z.  (Via GeekPress.)

Ed Park's "Two Laptops: A Short Story"!

Phil Dyess-Nugent on Gore Vidal.  (Also recommended: Inigo Thomas's 2007 LRB piece on the last installment of Vidal's memoirs;  Marcie Frank's How to Be an Intellectual in an Age of TV.)

Elaine Scarry on literature and empathy.

I'm currently slightly under the weather with dental woes.  It is not a particularly interesting backstory; my teeth are otherwise pretty good, but I had a root canal about 10 years ago, and at my annual check-up in May, the dentist asked on the basis of the x-ray whether I'd been having any trouble with it.  The answer then was no, but a week ago I had some swelling and redness/soreness; yesterday I had an appointment with the endodontist that I imagined would be purely brief and diagnostic (I thought I would book whatever treatment was likely to be necessary for perhaps mid-September), but instead I found myself in the chair for an arduous and really fairly unpleasant 90 minutes of excavation!  Walked out slightly reeling, with face still half-numb from the anesthesia.  Am taking a couple days off from exercise, and will continue to be careful over the weekend not to put undue stress on the immune system; apparently they don't give antibiotics for this as a default, only if it gets infected.  I have a follow-up next week for the rest of the work to be done, assuming it's healing properly, and am strongly hoping that it won't be as major as yesterday's appointment!  The co-pay was $400, but it would have been over $2,000 if my insurance didn't cover it, so I can consider myself fortunate that the Columbia dental plan has improved considerably in recent years....

Everything's coming up roses

Just a quick post to say that I started my first-person rewrite of BoMH part III on Monday night and I'm incredibly excited about it!  It's totally turned around how I feel about the book: there's always been a claustrophobic hothouse-type aspect to the story that I have disliked, and this opens things up in a funny and interesting way that I am very much enjoying.  Haven't been so interested and engaged by something I was writing since a day I stole in February to reimmerse myself in a piece I wrote a while ago about the 'minute particular' in life-writing and the novel.  (It's one of my projects for August to get that out as a real article.)

I was unusually frenzied in my work life from December through May, and then in the aftermath of that I was uncharacteristically grumpy from May pretty much right up until now.  I'm hoping this marks a real turning point. 

I had one of those days yesterday where everything just seems to go right (clearly this follows in the psychological aftermath of  near-magical Monday-night and Tuesday-morning writing sessions).  I walked down a block I don't usually traverse and found myself in the amazing surrounds of the flower market, which is really like something out of a fairy story; I had an amazing lunch (best conversation ever!) with my editor at the hyper-palindromic Ilili (the space is beautiful and the food is very good; I recommend the prix fixe lunch - we shared grape leaves and hummus for appetizers, then I had the grilled chicken salad and the "Ilili candy bar" for dessert); I generally avoid crosstown buses, as they are often slower than walking, but heat changes the equation and the M23 - I had known this but somehow forgot it - actually goes all the way to Chelsea Piers; I had an enjoyable run workout on the indoor track at Chelsea Piers followed by a dip in the pool; then I took the M23 again to the first meeting of a mindfulness-based stress reduction class I found online and that seems exactly what I've been looking for.

Closing tabs

Crossing borders makes us all vulnerable.

"One of the rarest - and most expensive - TSR products"!

Have a browser full of open tabs re: journal articles for thoughts I want to jot down this weekend on formalism and literary study.  Also: two meals today with family and close friends that make me very grateful for good health and fellowship, perennial insomnia problems notwithstanding!

Update

OK, that's good, I have now finished the three-hour work session that I really should have had before I put that messy marked-up tea-stained manuscript away for some weeks.  All old revisions are typed up, and I'm printing out the full draft so that I can work on the hard copy rather than on-screen (no internet distractions, and gives me a better sense of proportion about how parts relate to whole, pacing, etc.).  I have a good new set of comments from Ed on the rewritten first half, too, so I think I'll start with that/those.

This revision will happen, come hell, high water or histamines....

(One obstacle to single-minded focus, aside from question of regular teaching and other academic responsibilities, is that I need to go to San Antonio for four nights next weekend for ASECS, which will be demanding: I am giving a short paper and am also on a roundtable, but it's more the travel and the socializing that knock you out!)

Will shortly go out for a run - it is if possible an even nicer day today than yesterday!

Blissful news

I've been sitting on this since the end of last week.  Now it is official, I can announce it publicly! 

In general it always makes me happy to have positive arrangements sorted out for moving forward, but I'm particularly thrilled to be working with  Ed Park, longtime friend and literary co-conspirator: the conversation I had with him a couple weeks ago about what I might do to make the novel even better (book-writing is never done, and I am afraid I am an inveterate draft-writer!) was one of the most inspiring I've ever had.  Let the revisions begin - once this semester is through!

Guggenheim recipient and Columbia professor Jenny Davidson's THE MAGIC CIRCLE, revolving around three women friends in their thirties who all share a passion for gaming, with shocking results, to Ed Park at Amazon Publishing, for publication in Winter 2013, by Kathleen Anderson at Anderson Literary Management (World English).

Light reading catch-up

I thought Lawrence Block's A Drop of the Hard Stuff was sublimely good, as good as the very best in this long-running series; the books grew a bit unfocused in more recent years, but this one is set in the mid-80s near the end of the first year of Matthew Scudder's sobriety, and it works wonderfully well: good stuff. (Gave me a pang, though, in making me think of my friend M., who introduced me to these books and spoke sometimes of seeing Block at AA meetings in the Village but who has since dropped off the face of the earth; I hope he is doing OK somewhere!) Ed Park reviewed it for Time, and here were Levi Stahl's thoughts; I second Ed's observation that When the Sacred Ginmill Closes is not to be missed; in fact, I might have to give the first ones in this series a reread in the near future...

I read three books by Laura Wilson, they are very good but I think I liked the third one less than the first two, possibly because there was not such a clear protagonist to identify with: A Little Death, Dying Voices, My Best Friend.

Then I read Box 21, which I found reasonably decent but incredibly depressing; it might be that I have read enough Scandinavian crime fiction for just now, this one came perhaps too soon on the heels of the Harry Hole books!

Snake tales

Luc Sante's neighbors (via the Dizzies).

On invention

My friend Ed Park's sensibility and our mutual friend Jane Yeh's awareness of it are both so particular and vivid that I immediately labeled this NYT profile of Columbia radiation scientist David Brenner a "Jane reads the paper" bit:

He may have inherited his knack for industrial design from his maternal grandfather, a mechanical engineer who was one of the inventors of the Kit Kat candy bar and the machinery to mass-produce it.

Things of minor note

Closing tabs:

High Gygaxian (via The Dizzies).

Digital collecting at things magazine (I believe the original site link was via L. Lee Lowe; the underlying link to Things Organized Neatly is particularly worthwhile, as a cake theme seems to predominate!).

Light reading around the edges of an especially busy couple of weeks: Patricia McKillip's The Bards of Bone Plain, which I found evocative and engaging but much too reminiscent of the books of hers I endlessly read and reread when I was young, the Riddlemaster of Hed trilogy; a quite mediocre novel by Robert Crais; two novels by Jennifer Crusie on the recommendation of Jo Walton (I preferred Maybe This Time to Faking It); a comfort reread of A Girl's Guide to Kissing Frogs (not Victoria Clayton's best novel, but the one that came most readily to hand); and - last but most certainly not least - the second installment of Patrick Rothfuss's series, The Wise Man's Fear. It is not that those Rothfuss installments are the perfect books, but they are so wonderfully readable, I finished this one with a huge sense of loss when I realized how long I am likely to have to wait for the next installment. However I have just started reading a novel that seems to me wonderfully appealing also, so that is some small consolation: more anon!

(Saw a bunch of movies last week too, and a show, but don't know that I feel that need to blog any of it here.)

Franciscan themes

Nicholson Baker, speaking at Dodge Hall, as reported by Ed Park:

Dick Francis is an inspiration to me: First person. About horses. Every single book.

Every child needs a typewriter

Paul Collins on the life and death [ED. "disappearance" will be the better word!] of child novelist Barbara Newhall Follett. (Courtesy of Ed Park.)

"A Sentence is not emotional a paragraph is"

At the Independent, Jenny Landreth celebrates the joys of cold-water swimming.

Ed Park on the book-length sentence - and readers offer more examples.

The Autocrat of the Breakfast Table

A must-read: Ed Park at Bookforum on the Chicago Manual of Style.

(I too have a special relationship with the famed fourteenth edition, due to my brief tenure as managing editor at the now-defunct Yale Journal of Criticism, and strong opinions on hyphenation...)

Three links

Charlie Stross bemoans the dominance of steampunk; Phil Nugent mourns the passing of the Walkman; Ed Park makes my mouth water.

Today in culture

More good gaming links from Ed Park: the germ of a novel; Adventure Generator!

I had three books of high research priority Amazoned to the hotel in Miami last week, as shipping to Cayman is either very expensive or very slow; Access All Areas is interesting and relevant to TBOMS and deeply charming, but Pervasive Games: Theory and Design is UTTERLY BRILLIANT! In fact (I am laughing, it is implausible, but somehow my research interests always converge across genres/modes and centuries) I am wondering whether I could somehow assign a chapter or two of it in my spring lecture class on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, which is going to have a "presentation of self" theme and include tons of Erving Goffman and theories of moral sentiments and so forth - isn't it possible that Garrick's Stratford Jubilee was one of the world's first LARPs?!?

In other news, I enjoyed the first part of J. D. Daniels' "week in culture" (I am a Daniels fan - I want a book! - but here are a couple shorter bits you can read for free online), even though the name of the feature slightly makes me laugh...

"Box 58 is Death"

The game of Nim and other ruses (via literary Eds).

Helen DeWitt: "A-free, C-free and G-visited".

It has been another odd week - I was only in Cayman for a few days before we went ahead and scheduled a trip to Miami for a nuclear stress test. There was no true worst-case scenario, I was pretty sure everything would be fine or (if not) eminently fixable (a term my more precise traveling companion corrected to "treatable!"), but I was nonetheless rather discombobulated and on tenterhooks until late Thursday afternoon, when the cardiologist declared him in the pink of health (not his exact words, but that was the gist of it). This is good!

So it was a week of airports and hotels and junk food and highway travel; we saw Inception and The Karate Kid at the mall opposite our hotel, and had a very good (but hot!) trip to the Miami Zoo on Saturday (the Amazon exhibits are particularly recommended - delightful venomous frogs and slinky snakes and lizards! - but I also particularly enjoyed the cotton-topped tamarins, always a favorite of mine, and a comical series of interactions between a bunch of lemurs that clearly demonstrated the dominance of the ringtailed over the red-ruffed when they share a single enclosure).

Had a bunch of light reading to while away the hours: first of all some fairly trivial stuff from the Humane Society Book Loft (it is not an infinitely renewable resources, alas, despite its excellence), Amanda Craig's Love in Idleness (very glad I am not the sort of English person she describes!) and Eileen Dreyer's Head Games (not as good as early Patricia Cornwell) and Lynda LaPlante's Red Dahlia (highly formulaic) and a pair of novels by Tonya Huff (the first of which it turned out I had read before, and the second of which mildly displeased me by failing to satisfy the obligations of a crime novel as opposed to "romantic suspense").

It was with delight that I then buried myself in another Humane Society find, Donna Tartt's wonderful novel The Little Friend. I loved it - the use of language is so much more vivid and interesting and appealing than everything else I've been reading recently - not to knock the other stuff - but really, it is something very special! Very funny in parts - and now I cannot stop using the word chunking - I chunked my duffel bag into the back of the SUV in the airport parking lot when we got back to Cayman a few hours ago...

And I had a bookstore splurge at the mall in Florida too (it was the slightly dubious-sounding Books-A-Million), and got a few things I've been coveting that made today's travels pass fairly quickly: Tana French's Faithful Place (not perhaps quite as good as the first two, and I was still expecting one more twist when the book quite abruptly came to an end, but still very good) and Joe Hill's Horns, which I am enjoying very much indeed and will finish as soon as I put a period to this excessively lengthy post.