Miscellaneous update

I have just had rather a dreadful week due to circumstances well beyond my control (medical calamity of an extended family member, won't go into more detail than that!), and in short, the spring break that I hoped might be restorative just dug me deeper into the hole!

Last night, on a plane to San Antonio for the big annual eighteenth-century studies conference, I thought with dislike about the deep unpleasantness of flying and the unfortunate scheduling of such academic events at a time of year when I am already in any case barely keeping my head above water.

In short, I have been grumpy and glum indeed!

However now that I have actually written my paper (it was in my head, but I did not have time and concentration to get it down on the page until just this afternoon in my hotel room), I feel much less grumpy - that is good.  I remain perplexed that the institution of these conferences still has so much traction in the age of the internet (if one thousand academics each need to spend something in the region of $1,500, probably mostly reimbursed by their home institutions but often coming at least partly out of pocket, and 10 hours of travel time and an entire Wednesday to Sunday when none of their other work and life responsibilities offer any surcease, just in order to press the flesh, is that really a good use of communal resources?), but it is admittedly a very attractive setting here, and I will go out for dinner later on with my graduate students and junior colleagues from Columbia.  The conference hotel is very nice!  The metaphysical advantages of non-virtual presence, though, are surely overrated.

Closing tabs: Ed Park on Harry Stephen Keeler; Amy Davidson on the Hunger Games and counterinsurgency; at the TLS, Robert D. Hume on Michael Dobson's book about amateur Shakespeare performance.

Light reading around the edges:

A wonderful book by Will Chaffey, someone I only met recently in the wake of Carey Monserrat's death, called Swimming with Crocodiles (free for Kindle with Amazon Prime, though enthusiasm led me to purchase my copy before I realized I could get it for free!); very vivid and moving in its account of the geology and wildlife of Australia, and also a nerve-racking survivalist tale of a wilderness trek that did not make me reverse my anti-camping position (but I do wish I could go swimming with 'freshies' if not with 'salties'!);

Lauren Groff's mesmerizing and moving Arcadia, which I resisted at first but then fell into headlong (it is not relevant, but I am predisposed to like Groff's work not just because I enjoyed her first novel so much but also because her sister is a top triathlete!);

Seanan McGuire's new novel Discount Armageddon, which is full of charming and humorous details and which I thoroughly recommend if you read this sort of thing;

and an electronic advance copy of Rosamond Lupton's forthcoming Afterwards, which will sound ludicrous if I describe it to you and whose narrative premise I cannot really endorse as a matter of principle but which is certainly one of the most grippingly readable thrillers I will read this year.  It was the only redeeming feature of yesterday's plane flight, that's for sure!

In conclusion, saltwater crocodiles are almost certainly more dangerous than sharks, from a swimmer's point of view - a shark is only going to chomp you by accident (especially if you're wearing a wetsuit that makes you resemble a seal), whereas the croc really does want to digest not just your limbs but probably also your torso if at all possible.

Now I am going to go and find the business center to print out my paper....

The case of the green parrot

As soon as I heard of this book the other day, I knew I had to read it as soon as possible: I sent several emails, and due to the kindness of the author and her in-house publicist, I received an ARC several days later.

The book is Sara Gran's Claire DeWitt and the City of the Dead; it is at once rather divinely good and also exactly the sort of book I most like! Let's call it metaphysical noir and group it with two other favorites of mine, Colson Whitehead's The Intuitionist and Victor LaValle's Big Machine. Oh, it was so good...

(The only trouble with books is that they take years to write and only a few hours to read, so that I know I won't be getting the next installment any time soon! But I can re-read this one when it comes out, there's a thought...)

Table-talk for December 7

1. I do not like the holiday season - there is a paucity of fresh literary news, it is all unsurprising best-of lists!

2. Some weeks ago I was combing desperately through my apartment for the lightest of light reading - something really trashy.

(In an ideal world, I would read or reread something of the highest quality light-reading-wise, only books of that ilk are so rare and are subsequently reread so frequently by me that they are finally leached of their rereading potential!)

Afterwards I was laughing at myself, because I really and honestly feel that I literally found the trashiest book in the entire apartment! It was this; I suppose I bought it a few years ago when it first came out as a delightfully fat mass-market paperback, and read it then. So I read it again and enjoyed it very much - light reading is soothing to the frenzied brain! And then in a train station bookstore a week or two later I was delighted to find the sequel, which I read with considerable enjoyment.

It has an embarrassingly awful cover, but really these books are highly readable - in a slightly different universe from this one, where I am not a professor but am instead a reclusive author of cult-classic science fiction, I am writing sultry Darkover-Pern style romans fleuves and keeping bees and training hawks and generally living an insane faux-medieval lifestyle and attending the odd fantasy convention in a far-fetched get-up...

3. Happily this weekend, as I packed, I found a much more delightful bit of light reading - I do not know why I did not read it when it first arrived in my apartment, but it has my very high light reading recommendation! It is Jenn Reese's Jade Tiger, and it is altogether excellent, like a divine mash-up of a romantic thriller by Mary Stewart and the most adventurous and superb of all kung-fu novels.

It has tipped me over into thinking I really have to sign up for the elementary fung-fu class at the gym, I eye it every semester but have hitherto foregone it due to the lure of triathlon - but now it is time to dip my toes in those waters.

My only complaint, other than the fact that there are not ten other Reese novels for me to get and devour at once, had to do with the handling of set-up and back-story: I could not shake the feeling that there was a missing introductory section, one which laid out a bit more of the female protagonist's present-day home-base setting, that had either existed in an earlier draft and been rashly cut or else needed to be there to pave the way for certain later developments in the story. It is an editing rather than a writing flaw - the book where I first consciously noticed this as a phenomenon was the also very well-written Blood Engines. But this is a supremely enjoyable novel! The serendipities of book-packing - Jenn Reese, write more novels at once!...

4. I cannot agree with everything Burke says, but his prose amazes me. Tomorrow's the last session of the class I've been teaching this semester on Swift and Burke, and we are reading among other things the astonishing Letter to a Noble Lord (1796). (I recommend David Bromwich's edition of Burke's speeches and writings if you are finding a lack of Burke in your life.)

Three of my utterly favorite passages, not just in this letter but in all of English literature:

Astronomers have supposed that if a certain comets whose path intercepted the ecliptic had met the earth in some (I forget what) sign, it would have whirled us along with it, in its eccentric course, into God knows what regions of heat and cold. Had the portentous comet of the Rights of Man (which "from its horrid hair shakes pestilence and war," and "with fear of change perplexes monarchs"), had that comet crossed upon us in that internal state of England, nothing human could have prevented our being irresistibly hurried out of the highway of heaven into all the vices, crimes, horrors, and miseries of the French Revolution.

Happily, France was not then Jacobinized. Her hostility was at a good distance. We had a limb cut off, but we preserved the body: we lost our colonies, but we kept our constitution. There was, indeed, much intestine heat; there was a dreadful fermentation. Wild and savage insurrection quitted the woods and prowled about our streets in the name of reform. Such was the distemper of the public mind, that there was no madman, in his maddest ideas and maddest projects, that might not count upon numbers to support his principles and execute his designs.

.....

All this, in effect, I think but am not sure, I have said elsewhere. It cannot at this time be too often repeated, line upon line, precept upon precept, until it comes into the currency of a proverb, 'to innovate is not to reform'. The French revolutionists complained of everything; they refused to reform anything; and they left nothing, no, nothing at all unchanged. The consequences are before us, not in remote history; not in future prognostication: they are about us; they are upon us. They shake the public security; they menace private enjoyment. They dwarf the growth of the young; they break the quiet of the old. If we travel, they stop our way. They infest us in town; they pursue us to the country. Our business is interrupted; our repose is troubled; our pleasures are saddened; our very studies are poisoned and perverted, and knowledge is rendered worse than ignorance by the enormous evils of this dreadful innovation. The revolution harpies of France, sprung from night and hell, or from that chaotic anarchy which generates equivocally "all monstrous, all prodigious things," cuckoo-like, adulterously lay their eggs, and brood over, and hatch them in the nest of every neighbouring state. These obscene harpies, who deck themselves in I know not what divine attributes, but who in reality are foul and ravenous birds of prey (both mothers and daughters), flutter over our heads, and soused down upon our tables, and leave nothing unrent, unrifled, unravaged, or unpolluted with the slime of their filthy offal.

.....

Nothing can be conceived more hard than the heart of a thoroughbred metaphysician. It comes nearer to the cold malignity of a wicked spirit than to the frailty and passion of a man. It is like that of the principle of evil himself, incorporeal, pure, unmixed, dephlegmated, defecated evil. It is no easy operation to eradicate humanity from the human breast. What Shakespeare calls "the compunctious visitings of nature" will sometimes knock at their hearts, and protest against their murderous speculations. But they have a means of compounding with their nature. Their humanity is not dissolved. They only give it a long prorogation. They are ready to declare that they do not think two thousand years too long a period for the good that they pursue. It is remarkable that they never see any way to their projected good but by the road of some evil. Their imagination is not fatigued with the contemplation of human suffering through the wild waste of centuries added to centuries of misery and desolation. Their humanity is at their horizon—and, like the horizon, it always flies before them. The geometricians and the chemists bring, the one from the dry bones of their diagrams, and the other from the soot of their furnaces, dispositions that make them worse than indifferent about those feelings and habitudes which are the supports of the moral world. Ambition is come upon them suddenly; they are intoxicated with it, and it has rendered them fearless of the danger which may from thence arise to others or to themselves. These philosophers consider men, in their experiments, no more than they do mice in an air pump, or in a recipient of mephitic gas. Whatever his Grace may think of himself, they look upon him and everything that belongs to him with no more regard than they do upon the whiskers of that little long-tailed animal that has been long the game of the grave, demure, insidious, spring-nailed, velvet-pawed, green-eyed philosophers, whether going upon two legs or upon four.