The solace and the grief

Not sure how I missed this one when it came out, but saw something about it in advance of the publication of Yiyun Li's new novel in coming weeks and thought I'd better read this small collection of essays to catch up. It is a haunting book, it resonates strongly with me: it has the amazing title Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life. Four bits I especially liked (it is a bleak book about a year of suicidal ideation and multiple hospitalizations):

To articulate it demands honesty that I am almost unwilling to offer. Though evasion rarely leads to joy; there is, one must admit, a sense of joy if one can dissect something, oneself included, with precision. (In college and as a young scientist the tasks I had most enjoyed were the peripheral activities: to peel everything away and leave only the neural system intact in an insect; to harvest the bone marrow from a mouse’s femur until the bone became nearly transparent; to carefully flush out a mouse’s lungs. Perhaps my deficiency as a scientist, a lack of ultimate purpose, is why I love writing. Precision gives me more pleasure than the end result.) (117)

In an ideal world I would prefer to have my mind reserved for thinking, and thinking alone. I dread the moment when a thought trails off and a feeling starts, when one faces the eternal challenge of eluding the void for which one does not have words. To speak when one cannot is to blunder. I have spoken by having written—this book or any book; for myself and against myself. The solace is with the language I chose. The grief, to have spoken at all. (152)

Only by fully preparing oneself for people’s absence can one be at ease with their presence. A recluse, I have begun to understand, is not a person for whom a connection with another person is unattainable or meaningless, but one who feels she must abstain from people because a connection is an affliction, or worse, an addiction. (183)

Many drafts were written when things began to feel unbearable. Composing a sentence is better than composing none; an hour taken away from treacherous rumination is an hour gained; following the thread of a thought to the end is better than having many thoughts entangled. In a sense, writing becomes the effort of detecting a warning sign before it appears. There are moments when it must sound as though I am arguing against hope and happiness, against others and myself, but any attachment, even to the most fallacious idea, is an anchor when solidness cannot be felt. (200)

"A mathematician offers the game"

Karr's memoir book also includes a superb list of memoirs (she stars the ones that are exceptional as books as well as personal histories - I find a high degree of congruence between her tastes and my own). One that I hadn't read and immediately obtained and devoured was G. H. Hardy's heartbreaking A Mathematician's Apology, which comes with a wonderful introductory essay by C. P. Snow.

Snow on Hardy: "His life remained the life of a brilliant young man until he was old: so did his spirit: his games, his interests, kept the lightness of a young don’s. And, like many men who keep a young man’s interests into their sixties, his last years were the darker for it." And this striking description of the relationships Hardy had with a handful of young men over the years:

These were intense affections, absorbing, non-physical but exalted. The one I knew about was for a young man whose nature was as spiritually delicate as his own. I believe, though I only picked this up from chance remarks, that the same was true of the others. To many people of my generation, such relationships would seem either unsatisfactory or impossible. They were neither the one nor the other; and unless one takes them for granted, one doesn’t begin to undertand the temperament of men like Hardy (they are rare, but not as rare as white rhinoceroses), nor the Cambridge society of his time. He didn’t get the satisfactions that most of us can’t help finding: but he knew himself unusually well, and that didn’t make him unhappy. His inner life was his own, and very rich. The sadness came at the end.

The charm of Hardy's style of thought: “The proof is by reduction ad absurdum, and reduction ad absurdum, which Euclid loved so much, is one of a mathematician’s finest weapons. It is a far finer gambit than any chess gambit: a chess player may offer the sacrifice of a pawn or even a piece, but a mathematician offers the game.”

Here is Hardy on the morality of mathematics:

... there is one purpose at any rate which the real mathematics may serve in war. When the world is mad, a mathematician may find in mathematics an incomparable anodyne. For mathematics is, of all the arts and sciences, the most austere and the most remote, and a mathematician should be of all men the one who can most easily take refuge where, as Bertrand Russell says, ‘one at least of our nobler impulses can best escape from the dreary exile of the actual world’. It is a pity it should be necessary to make one very serious reservation—he must not be too old. Mathematics is not a contemplative but a creative subject; no one can draw much consolation from it when he has lost the power or the desire to create; and that is apt to happen to a mathematician rather soon. It is a pity, but in that case he does not matter a great deal anyhow, and it would be silly to bother about him.

"A stubborn little bulldog of a reviser"

Thinking memoir these days - Mary Karr's The Art of Memoir was helpful not least because of how much it encourages you to write bad pages in the wrong voice first and worry later about how it is all going to come right! "Carnality" is her term for what makes memoir come alive - can you feel it through the five senses? My own personal carnality (yes, of course there are sounds and smells and colors as well) is overwhelmingly in words and ideas....

Some highlights:

Each great memoir lives or dies based 100 percent on voice…. The secret to any voice grows from a writer’s finding a tractor beam of inner truth about psychological conflicts to shine the way. While an artist consciously constructs a voice, she chooses its elements because they’re natural expressions of character. So above all, a voice has to sound like the person wielding it—the super-most interesting version of that person ever—and grow from her core self…. However you charm people in the world, you should do so on the page.

A memoirist’s nature—the self who shapes memory’s filter—will prove the source of her talent. By talent, I mean not just surface literary gifts, though those are part of the package, but life experiences, personal values, approach, thought processes, perceptions, and innate character.

There's a good account of why Karr couldn’t write the story of her childhood in the form of a novel, and how and why The Liars' Club only came to life when she admitted that it had to be nonfiction (I heard Robert Polito tell this story, they were in the same writing group during those years, but it is nice to have a citable version from the author herself!). Maybe the most useful stretch for teaching would be Chapter 14: “Personal Run-Ins with Fake Voices.”

Karr writes extremely well about the psychological shift she experiences, with each book project, of finally finding the right voice: “The images in my head suddenly had words representing them on the page. And accompanying the words was a state of consciousness. It almost felt like I’d walked into some inner room where my lived experiences could pass through and come out as language.” Her sequel thought (and why she is a memoirist rather than a novelist, this wouldn't be true for many writers of fiction): “If the voice worked as a living contract with the reader, it also strangely bound me to candor. To make stuff up would somehow have broken the spell the voice cast over me.”

She is also particularly good on revision:

I always circle my own stories, avoiding the truth like a pooch staked to a clothesline pole, spiraling closer and closer with each revision till—with each book—my false self finally lines up eye to eye with the true one.

On the most basic level, bad sentences make bad books. Poet Robert Hass taught me you can rewrite a poem by making every single line better. I revise and revise and revise. Any editor of mine will tell you how crappy my early drafts are. Revisions are about clarifying and evoking feelings in the reader in the same way they were once evoked in me.

... other than a few instances of luck, good work only comes through revision ....

... those early pages I threw away were somehow necessary, even if I wrote past them. They were way stations I needed to visit to eliminate them from the final itinerary.

For me, the last 20 percent of a book’s improvement takes 95 percent of the effort—all in the editing. I can honestly say not one page I’ve ever published appears anywhere close to how it came out in the first draft. A poem might take sixty versions. I am not much of a writer, but I am a stubborn little bulldog of a reviser.

"An aliquot of gefilte fish every waking hour"

In his last days, Oliver Sacks rediscovered the pleasures of a food of his youth. (Via Becca.) Shades of Lear here: "Men must endure. Their going hence, even as their coming hither: Ripeness is all."

Also: Jerome Groopman on Sacks' autobiographical writings (with some especially interesting thoughts on what happened when one of Sacks's older mentors plagiarized extensively from his work on migraines after discouraging Sacks from publishing such "trash"):

Sacks attributes Friedman’s bad behavior to a role reversal of the “youthful son-in-science” outshining “the father.” I take a less generous view. Serving on grant review committees, I have observed senior researchers who are fair and well-intentioned, but also those who slam proposals from creative investigators, then steal their ideas. Similar fratricide occurs with submitted manuscripts, with reviewers denigrating competing research so it is not published. There is an ugly side to the scientific hierarchy that comes from unchecked lust for success and fame.

I have been thinking very strongly, over this last week or so, about the fact that while it is easy to descend into a swirling array of plans for self-improvement amidst lashings of self-criticism, I could really boil down my remaining life goals to one thing: to make sure that everything I write from now on aspires to whatever I can muster of the spirit and kind of Sacks's best writings!

Knowing selves

Jessica Gross interviews Vivian Gornick. On writer versus persona in memoir:

Well, look at all the great fiction writers who have such brilliance about the characters they create, but know very little about themselves. Here’s a perfect example. Doris Lessing is a great writer in my view, but also very limited in some ways. There are novels and stories she’s written that are extraordinarily perceptive about men and women, but when she writes her own memoirs, she is stupid. She doesn’t know how to create out of her own unsurrogated self a narrator who knows how to be honest. So her memoirs are dishonest in the sense that where self-knowledge is required, it doesn’t work.

Sacks and his fives

Oliver Sacks is my hero; I have read every one of his books eagerly (and wrote about his last book for Bookforum); I devoured On the Move and urge you to do the same. He has written about sex and his own sexuality here, remedying a striking omission from the rest of his work, but there are all sorts of other delights (one library bit I already linked to some time ago).

As a SWIMMING and powerlifting obsessive, I am of course especially enchanted by those bits (and pained by the lost suitcase of Muscle Beach photographs and other material! - so many lost books here...); but I am also just very struck by the vision of a working life. I found myself thinking several times as I read that I am too much of an insider, that I need really to rediscover my independence: the way to write amazing books is not to be an easy creature of the institution....

Anyway, THIS! (NB squat still weakest of the three lifts for me, but I am getting my technique down and there are some BIG NUMBERS in my near future I hope....)

Training intensively, even obsessively, at a small gym in San Rafael, I worked up to doing five sets of five reps with 555 pounds every fifth day. The symmetry of this pleased me but caused amusement at the gym--"Sacks and his fives." I didn't realize how exceptional this was until another lifter encouraged me to have a go at the California squat record. I did so, diffidently, and to my delight was able to set a new record, a squat with a 600-pound bar on my shoulders. This was to serve as my introduction to the power-lifting world; a weight-lifting record is equivalent in these circles, to publishing a scientific paper or a book in academia.

And an account that has the overly shapely ring of storytelling but that surely has a good deal of truth in it (bonus link: squid giant axon!):

I committed a veritable genocide of earthworms in the college garden: thousands of earthworms would be needed to extract a respectable sample of myelin; I felt like Marie Curie processing her tons of pitchblende to obtain a decigram of pure radium. I became adept at dissecting out the nerve cord and cerebral ganglia in a single, swift excision, and I would mash these up to make a thick, myelin-rich soup ready for fractionation and centrifugation.

I kept careful notes in my lab notebook, a large green volume which I sometimes took home with me to ponder over at night. This was to prove my undoing, for, rushing to get to work one morning after oversleeping, I failed to secure the elastic bands on the bike rack and my precious notebook, containing nine months of detailed experimental data, escaped from the loose strands and flew off the bike while I was on the Cross Bronx Expressway. Pulling over to the side, I saw the notebook dismembered page by page by the thunderous traffic. I tried darting into the road two or three times to retrieve it, but this was madness, for the traffic was too dense and too fast. I could only watch helplessly until the whole book was torn apart.

I consoled myself, when I got to the lab, by saying at least I have the myelin itself; I can analyze it, look at it under the electron microscope, and regenerate some of the lost data. Over the ensuing weeks, I managed to do some good work and had started to feel some optimism again, despite some other mishaps, as when, in the neuropathology lab, I screwed the oil-immersion objective of my microscope through several irreplaceable slides.

Even worse, from my bosses' point of view, I managed to get crumbs of hamburger not only on my bench but in one of the centrifuges, an instrument I was using to refine the myelin samples.

Then a final and irreversible blow hit me: I lost the myelin. It disappeared somehow--perhaps I swept it into the garbage by mistake--but this tiny sample which had taken ten months to extract was irretrievably gone.

A meeting was convened: no one denied my talents, but no one could gainsay my defects. In a kindly but firm way, my bosses said to me, "Sacks, you are a menace in the lab. Why don't you go and see patents--you'll do less harm." Such was the ignoble beginning of a clinical career."

And the note: "Perhaps I had never really expected to succeed in research. In a 1960 letter to my parents, wondering about doing research in physiology at UCLA, I wrote, 'I am probably too temperamental, too indolent, too clumsy ad even too dishonest to make a good research worker. The only things I really enjoy are talking . . . reading and writing.' And I quoted a letter I had just received from Jonathan Miller, who, writing about himself, Eric, and me, said, 'I am, like Wells, enchanted by the prospect and paralyzed by the reality of scientific research. The only place where any of us move nimbly or with grace is with ideas and words. Our love of science is utterly literary.'"

The last...

At the end of January my father and I were both keen to read Antonia Fraser's memoir of childhood, My History; it's not properly published in the US, i.e. unavailable for Kindle, so he kindly ordered us each a copy from the Book Depository in the UK. Thus leading to my painful awareness, as I read the book this week with considerable pleasure, that this is the last book my father will ever send me....

A passage that I know would have caught his eye, as Enid Blyton was also famously banned by the librarian in the Kirkcaldy of my father's childhood:

One author was never allowed to pollute our imaginations and that was Enid Blyton. In an excess of Thirties moralistic disapproval - the only example of such that I can remember - my mother banned her works. Unusually for me, I took no steps to get hold of the books in question later from the library. Indeed, I followed my mother when dealing with my own family, more for reasons of intellectual snobbery, I suspect, rather than anything else. My daughters, however, showed more spirit: it was not long before a stockpile of the dread works came tumbling out of their wardrobe. 'Jane' - a lively schoolfriend - 'gave them to us' was the explanation. 'She felt sorry for us not being able to read them. It was so exciting reading them in secret.' (A lesson, surely, in the dangers of censorship.)

To a curious degree, I share some of Fraser's influences in the matter of childhood reading: I suppose these were my English grandmother's books rather than even my mother's (Our Island Story and the unforgettably good Puck of Pook's Hill and Rewards and Fairies). When it came to Our Island Story, I was particularly fascinated by the story of the coming of Hengist and Horsa, which Fraser doesn't single out here but which I cannot resist quoting:

Then Hengist said, "You have indeed given us lands and houses, but as we have helped you so much I think you should give me a castle and make me a prince."

"I cannot do that," replied Vortigern. "Only Britons are allowed to be princes in this land. You are strangers and you are heathen. My people would be very angry if I made any one but a Christian a prince."

At that Hengist made a low bow, pretending to be very humble. "Give your servant then just so much land as can be surrounded by a leather thong," he said.

Vortigern thought there could be no harm in doing that, so he said, "Yes, you may have so much." But he did not know what a cunning fellow Hengist was.

As soon as Vortigern had given his consent, Hengist and Horsa killed the largest bullock they could find. Then they took its skin and cut it round and round into one long narrow strip of leather. This they stretched out and laid upon the ground in a large circle, enclosing a piece of land big enough upon which to build a fortress.

If you do not quite understand how Hengist and Horsa managed to cut the skin of a bullock into one long strip, get a piece of paper and a pair of scissors. Begin at the edge and cut the paper round and round in circles till you come to the middle. You will then find that you have a string of paper quite long enough to surround a brick castle. If you are not allowed to use scissors, ask some kind person to do it for you.

Vortigern was very angry when he learned how he had been cheated by Hengist and Horsa. But he was beginning to be rather afraid of them, so he said nothing, but allowed them to build their fortress. It was called Thong Castle, and stood not far from Lincoln, at a place now called Caistor.

It's a very interesting memoir, but shallow rather than deep: you only get glimpses into more complicated ideas and states of feeling (I liked the aside where Fraser notes of her father that his trait of marking a book with a strong pencil as he read was so characteristic and ingrained that "after his death, I was able to identify a copy of the New Testament left behind in the House of Lords library, without an owner's name, but full of those ritual stabbings"). And here are a few of the passages that most resonated with me:

It is a fact that, being a quick reader, apart from enabling a person to study good books such as Macaulay and Gibbon, enables a person to read a lot of bad books as well. It would however be ungrateful to pick out the titles that gave me such pleasure and stigmatize them as bad books; besides, I would maintain that such books can teach you narrative skill, which certainly never comes amiss in writing History.

And again:

It was now for the first time that the pleasure of what for tax purposes I came to term (perfectly accurately) Optical Research was revealed to me. It also could be called Going to Places and Looking at Them. But what an essential process it is in the making of a historical biography! With the respectful handling of the original documents, it ranks as one of the major ways of reaching what G. M. Trevelyan in his Autobiography called 'the poetry of history': 'the quasi-miraculous fact that once, on this earth, once, on this familiar spot of ground, walked other men and women, as actual as we are today, thinking their own thoughts, swayed by their own passions, but now all gone, one generation vanishing after another . . .'

(Note to self: you must write that little book about Gibbon's Rome!)

Other appealing details concern the "Fish Furniture" at Admiralty House and Cecil Beaton's pedantic habit of preferring the plural "gins-and-tonic": a life of privilege needless to say, which has irked some readers I think, but I couldn't put it down.

Sympathy for the devil

Gore Vidal's morning-after revisionism.

Closing tabs

A lovely interview with Alysia Abbott, whose memoir Fairyland is one of my favorite of all the books I've read in the past few years.

The Hove roots of Anthony Burgess' Enderby.

John Brewer reviews Colin Jones' new book on the smile in eighteenth-century Paris (must get this one and read it, I like the history of dentistry in the eighteenth century!).

Last but not least, an amazing sequence of X-rays of the human body performing yoga poses.

Ruined by a passion for the Russians

From P.J. Kavanagh, The Perfect Stranger:

Whatever my self-dissatisfaction I knew I had one gift for sure, an ability to recognise the best when my nose was rubbed into it. Indeed it was sometimes more like a curse, accounting for my restless disappointment with almost everything. But the best I was willing to give my life to, and it needs that kind of service. It is true that beauty is in the eye of the beholder, it needs recognition to be fully itself; appreciation gives it a patina, helps it to bloom.

Another aside that snagged my attention: "(It was about this time that I realised my greatest single literary influence had been Constance Garnett. Any chance of a decent style I'd ever had, ruined by my passion for the Russians.)"

I liked David Remnick's piece some years ago on translation:

As a literary achievement, Garnett’s may have been of the second order, but it was vast. With her pale, watery eyes, her gray hair in a chignon, she was the genteel face of tireless industry. She translated seventy volumes of Russian prose for commercial publication, including all of Dostoyevsky’s novels; hundreds of Chekhov’s stories and two volumes of his plays; all of Turgenev’s principal works and nearly all of Tolstoy’s; and selected texts by Herzen, Goncharov, and Ostrovsky. A friend of Garnett’s, D. H. Lawrence, was in awe of her matter-of-fact endurance, recalling her “sitting out in the garden turning out reams of her marvelous translations from the Russian. She would finish a page, and throw it off on a pile on the floor without looking up, and start a new page. That pile would be this high—really, almost up to her knees, and all magical.”

But I want to read someone's more ruminative essay on Garnett, Moncrieff and the other incredibly productive and influential translators of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries (James Strachey's Freud should be in there too?). Andre Aciman prefers the Moncrieff translation to Lydia Davis et al.

Home comforts

Always very good to see little cat Mickey, who is ridiculously affectionate after I have been away for a bit! Now need to have life re-entry: I tend to forget the extent to which the day after travel pretty much needs to be written off as a recovery day. I need to catch up on miscellaneous minor business and pick up dissertation chapters from the office to read for upcoming meetings, but the only two substantive things I intend to accomplish other than that are picking up my bike post-tuneup and going to 6:30 masters swim workout at City College.

During yesterday's travels, for some reason all of the novels I had on my Kindle seemed inadequate or offputting, but I found myself completely immersed in a very interesting and unusual memoir, Alysia Abbott's Fairyland: A Memoir of My Father. I couldn't put it down - highly recommended.

Closing tabs:

Interesting article on introvert teachers. (Via.)

An unusual scavenger hunt. (Via Al Coppola.)

Closing tabs

Can't explain why it was such a tiring week: maybe it's just a tiring point in the semester? Anyway, I'm knackered, and am going to take the evening completely off for phenomenal laziness that may or may not involve novel-reading and a couple episodes of the (non-appealing) new season of Fringe.

On Tuesday I went to a lovely event - my long-ago tenth-grade English teacher Charlotte Pierce-Baker, now a professor at Vanderbilt, was at Columbia to speak about her distressing and moving memoir, This Fragile Life: A Mother's Story of a Bipolar Son. Haven't read it yet, but will do so soon.

Will Wiles on being published by Amazon's new literary fiction imprint (same publisher that's bringing out my novel in the spring).

Two takes: Phil Dyess-Nugent and James Parker on Neil Young's new memoir.

Richard Marshall interviews Paul Fry on various matters to do with theory and literature (good list of reading recommendations at the end!).

Check out Tough Mudder pics!

Light reading around the edges: Jami Attenberg's The Middlesteins (and here's a bonus link) and Invisible Murder, the second installment in an excellent Danish crime series.

The rabbit died

I ran into my former student Bridget Potter by the elevator in Philosophy Hall yesterday, and was delighted  - but not surprised, as she is fantastic! - to learn that a piece of hers was included in last year's Best American Essays, edited by Edwidge Danticat.  Here is the essay.  Looking forward to the book to come!

Rushdie's naive beguilement

At the Guardian, Pankaj Mishra on Salman Rushdie's memoir (link courtesy of Walid):

Yet the memoir, at 650 pages, often feels too long, over-dependent on Rushdie's journals, and unquickened by hindsight, or its prose. Ostensibly deployed as a distancing device, the third-person narration frequently makes for awkward self-regard ("The clouds thickened over his head. But he found that his sentences could still form … his imagination still spark"). A peevish righteousness comes to pervade the memoir as Rushdie routinely and often repetitively censures those who criticised or disagreed with him. The long list of betrayers, carpers and timorous publishers includes Robert Gottlieb, Peter Mayer, John le Carré, Sonny Mehta, the Independent (evidently the "house journal for British Islam"), Germaine Greer, John Berger and assorted policemen "who believed he had done nothing of value in his life". Small darts are also flung at James Wood, "the malevolent Procrustes of literary criticism", Arundhati Roy, Joseph Brodsky, Louis de Bernières and many others.

Catch-up

I have been working pretty much at capacity; I had to sort of just skip my birthday on Saturday, it would have been too disruptive to switch over to human contact mode!  Finished my last-hundred-pages-from-third-to-first-person rewrite by midday Monday, got a round of comments by the end of the day and sent off a next version a few hours ago.  Will have one more chunk of work on it again tomorrow.  I know the ending isn't quite right, I have a tack to pursue...

I'm finding True Believers slow going; it feels too long, and the voice is unpersuasive in certain respects.  Impatient to get to the big reveal, but not so much so that I don't keep on putting it aside in search of a more immersive read!  It is locally enjoyable but cumulatively puzzling.

Lydia Netzer's Shine Shine Shine is just a hair too whimsical to be perfectly suited to my tastes, but I thought it was excellent: it definitely lives up to the advance hype.  Cheryl Strayed's Wild is also very immersive, though it seems to me that it's a good book because she's an interesting person rather than because of anything about the writing as such.  (It caused me to think with nostalgia for two other memoirs of self-examination and pilgrimage I have read recently that are written by people who clearly think much more as I do about life, the universe and everything, namely Tim Parks's Teach Us to Sit Still and Gideon Lewis-Kraus's A Sense of Direction!)  Strayed's book has interesting things in common with Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water; I gather they are both in the same writing group, it would be an odd experience to be workshopping drafts with someone who had so much in common with oneself.  I am not sure it would be entirely enjoyable!  Other obvious comparables for Strayed would be Elizabeth Gilbert and Alice Sebold, whose memoir Lucky deserves the widest acclaim.

Then the other night when I truly was in the pit of absolute fatigue I downloaded and reread The Hobbit.  I have a stronger attachment to this book than to the Lord of the Rings trilogy as such; as a very small child, I had The Golden Treasury of Children's Literature, and I believe this was where I first encountered an excerpt from Tolkien's novel, though I don't have the volume to hand to check.  The narrative voice is perhaps less capably rendered than Lewis's in the Narnia books, but it is a delightful book regardless.

Tonight I am going to the theater with G. (we're seeing this).  We will undoubtedly have a good dinner afterwards, which will be a welcome reprieve from excessive computer time!  My back was doing quite a bit better, after swearing off yoga and boot camp, but I had a physical therapy appointment yesterday that has totally done it in.   That is counterintuitive...

Closing tabs:

Margaret Mahy has died.  (Read The Changeover if you don't know it already.)

Interview with a very young Neil Gaiman.

FALSE STARTS

Have just read, in one sitting, an advance copy of Benjamin Anastas's extremely unsettling memoir Too Good to Be True.  It is a book about a true unraveling and an only partial reknitting; the parts about debt are too disturbing for me to excerpt here as I have a Dickensian horror of financial insecurity!  But here is an also very chilling description that will strike fear into the hearts of many of you:

I had a routine all that fall that I stuck to in a dogged search for regularity: I woke up on the early side, somewhere in the sevens, made a pot of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal in the kitchen, then I brought my laptop out on the screened-in porch and "wrote" for the next two hours.  I have put "wrote" in quotation marks because I didn't actually manage to do much writing--instead, I rewrote everything I had started on the computer screen over and over until the spark of life had been extinguished and the paragraphs had a perfect, sculptural look.  No uneven line breaks; no stacks of "the" or "and"; no repeated words.  It is a kind of obsessive polishing made possible only by the computer, and it burns the hours just like real work does, but in fact it is the opposite: a fail-safe system for killing off writing with maximum effort.  Once I had toggled the piece I was working on to death, I would file it away in FALSE STARTS and open up a new file in Word to begin the process all over again.

Swim lit

From Leanne Shapton's Swimming Studies:

When I read in an obituary that Cy Twombly's father was a prominent swim coach, I start to see Twombly's paintings as thrashing laps, as polygraphs, as pulse rate.  I wonder if I'm drawn to his work because he might have had an athletic habit he metabolized then rejected.

Devoured Shapton's book this morning in a single sitting (well, actually two sittings, with a short walk from one location to another); it is odd, off-kilter, but in a way that's suited to its subject, loss and the relationship between past and present selves.  NB I made a conscious decision to buy it on Kindle, as I wanted to read it as soon as I could lay my hands on it and I knew I'd be out of the country on pub date, but this is one to buy in hard copy, as the watercolors (and appealing photographs of bathing suit collection!) do not show up well on the small gray screen of the Kindle.  I had a pang that I won't be able to put this book into Wendy's hands, as the Nepean Sportsplex makes several appearances, including in a watercolor!

I am somewhat off-kilter myself today, as the date for receiving editorial comments has been pushed back, and with it my final deadline; I was really hoping to be well and truly done with the wretched creature by the end of the day tomorrow, but it is no longer an option!  Unsettled without proper work tasks.  Haven't brought real other work with me, barring one or two minor things (i.e. reader's report on a journal article or two), as I am still waiting for second report on the style book and the other article I'm working on notionally this month needs a lot of library books that I didn't want to cart down here on spec.  Not really in situation for 'vacation,' though, either, with this hanging over me, and curiously slow internet connection today is further contributing to the feeling that I am on the verge of exploding.  Exercise and projected Middlemarch reread will have to tide me over....

Read the other night: Sheila Heti's intriguing and often comically Socratic How Should a Person Be?; it is a sort of companion piece to The Chairs Are Where The People Go, which I think I found more intensely engaging.  Both volumes are recommended on the grounds that they are not really like anything else and they will stick with you.

Bonus links: Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly; my top five book recommendations for the swim-obsessed.

"V is the Velocipede"

Back at home and on the grid, after detours to Cambridge and Philadelphia.  Finally sent out the long-overdue Austen essay yesterday evening: a considerable relief.

(I seem to have been operating at about 30% of usual horsepower, due to some combination of residual fatigue and other distractions.  It is ridiculous that I let that piece take up so much time....)

Next up: final revision of The Magic Circle!  I have a hard deadline of Thursday, June 28 for getting it to my editor; he'll then go through one more time and I'll do quick turnaround on any further suggestions around the 4th of July holiday.  The quality of his comments is really exceptional, and I have already said here that I feel he almost deserves a co-author credit, given how many good ideas he's given me.  So: ten days of work, counting today.  What I did first today at the library was to go through all of his pages of notes along with the manuscript itself, fixing the 80% of stuff that's minor and marking remaining points that will require more attention.  This evening, I will do some pondering.  Tomorrow I'll get started again properly at the beginning, with bulk of energy devoted to really significantly revamping the final section, which still isn't quite working.

Saw As You Like It at Shakespeare in the Park; it was quite good, with a Western stockade-and-country-music theme that reminded me of Frontierland at Disney.  Other highlights of the weekend: the Butterfly Garden in the Academy of Natural Sciences and my first time on board my brother and sister-in-law's first boat at Fox Grove Marina.

Light reading around the edges: N. K. Jemisin's The Killing Moon and The Shadowed Sun; and Gideon Lewis-Kraus's A Sense of Direction: Pilgrimage for the Restless and the Hopeful, which must be one of the most unflattering self-portraits in the history of memoir-writing but which is nonetheless an extremely worthwhile and interesting book.

Bonus links:

My last academic book got a good review.

This made me think of some of the games in my novel (it would also make a good basis for some sort of TV episode); link courtesy of Bill Anders.

A nineteenth-century alphabet at the Beinecke.

Light reading catch-up

Really I have been too busy to have much time for novel-reading, it is the way of the beginning of the semester, and in fact the next 4 weeks now look slightly dauntingly overscheduled. Have squeezed in a few things round the edges: Laurie King's latest installment about Mary Russell and Sherlock Holmes, The Pirate King; George Pelecanos's The Cut. I had a really wonderful collection of pieces by Mark Kingwell sent to me as PDFs: I'm not sure if this link is subscriber-only, but the Fukuyama takedown in the August issue of Harper's was especially delightful to me (it is rare that the stars come into alignment for this sort of piece to be so good - Mark is supremely intelligent but also essentially kind-hearted rather than vicious, and Fukuyama is so eminent and to some extent so distinctly above the fray that there is none of the usual worry I experience reading this sort of piece about its subject might feel!), and I was also very tickled by his piece "As It Were," on the metaphysics and ethics of fiction (I think it's in this collection?).

Haven't gone to any more plays (got an Ionesco on the slate for next week, though), but though lavish restaurant-eating without prefatory theatergoing seems somewhat immoral, I was treated to a very lovely lunch yesterday at Petrossian by my friend and former student Julia Hoban.

I promised thoughts on the style of Daniel Woodrell's Bayou Trilogy, which I enjoyed a good deal. (It also made me wonder why I hadn't thought to put Chester Himes into my style book - I was incredibly taken with Himes about ten years ago, I should look back and see if there's anything that I could grab there to add and round things out.) I really love noir in all of its literary incarnations, the stripped-down kind as well as the baroque (Megan Abbott is another good example I have come across recently), and Woodrell's sentences are arresting, over-the-top in a way that spins from one end of the spectrum to the other:

They took a table in the back, far removed from the other customers. The Catfish drew a decent lunch business but it was still too early for the legitimately hungry to appear, so the few tables of customers were made up of unemployed, but entrepreneurial, young men, as well as the diurnal conventions of phlegmatic tipplers.

The benefits of racquetball and modest weight training gave her arms a fetching versatility of attitude.

Tip Shade was a jumbo package of pock-faced bruiser, with long brown hair greased behind his ears, hanging to his shoulders. His eyes were of a common but unnamed brown hue. He tended to scowl by reflex and grunt in response. His neck was a holdover from some normal-necked person's nightmare, and when he crossed his arms it looked like two large snakes procreating a third.

And here is Woodrell in retrospection: "My love for pulp and for other forms of fiction seems obvious on every page. I was and am much taken with the sort of language that can hold high and low expression in the same sentence. Rough and refined."

And I read one other very good book too, now that I think of it: the near-final draft of a friend's memoir, forthcoming next year. I opened the file on my Kindle intending just to read a little bit of it last night, but I ended up staying up till it was done!

The duckling of Riverside Drive

Sigrid Nunez on what it was like to spend time (a lot of time!) with Susan Sontag. The book-length memoir of their relationship, Sempre Susan, sounds like something I really must read...