NYC day 30

Quarantine doesn't change the fact that Facebook leaches my energy away from blogging - it's just so easy to post a trivial sentence with a picture there! But I'm surfacing again here....

On balance I've been doing really well. I'm distracted by coronanews and finding it hard to get off the internet, also of course weighed down by the weight of global calamity, but my morale is good and my day-to-day life is quite similar to how it always is. April is probably the single busiest month in the academic year, and I've got a lot of stuff to do, but the workload is on balance mitigated rather than exacerbated by the move online, and my life is definitely easier when there can be absolutely no expectation that I should meet people face to face, especially for evening social commitments!

I had a low spell Sunday evening, but this week has been really good.

I thoroughly enjoyed my seminars on Monday on Tuesday (it's not really for the teacher to evaluate whether they were great classes or not, but I experienced them as great!).

A PhD student of mine got a job offer on Wednesday, always a prompt for joy but under these circumstances extraordinarily so!

My mother is doing well, and I had another really joyful conversation via Zoom on Thursday with a student who's been writing poetry in quarantine and shared some of it with me.

Running and yoga are both going very very well.

And various choices I'd already made about what I'm doing the coming year make it relatively low-stakes for me whether we're teaching online in the fall or not, so I've been able not to obsess too much about that (or whether we'll wait to start the fall semester till January? I'm not keen on that as I feel that the US is so disorganized and chaotic that the kind of protocols that let schools be open in China or Singapore are absolutely unenforceable here, and I think the following fall is more realistic for moving students safely back into dorms).

Due partly I think to the morale boost from good seminar meetings but also to various other external tasks having been accomplished, I assessed things post-run on Wednesday morning and decided that what I really needed was a day off. For the last four weeks I've basically been working sort of all the time but so inefficiently that I am getting less done than usual. Decided to really just give myself the whole day, and it was a gift!

I took a long nap (had slept very badly - the early waking remains an issue), then read not one but TWO novels, new releases of the day before. I liked Joanna Hershon's St. Ivo very much - the writing is superb, the characters are interesting and not at all stereotypical, the choice to have short sharp cuts rather than more conventional novelistic development works very well (in some ways it feels more like a novella than a full-blown novel, or rather perhaps the scenario for a film - the technique of excision might be related to what Jenny Offill's been doing too, only it plays out in a completely different technical fashion here). Would also make an interesting teaching pairing with The Need on the grounds of shared emotional terrain.

It was the other book, though, that really spoke so directly to my heart that I might have cried at the end if I were a slightly different person! The book is Jenn Reese's A Game of Fox & Squirrels; a middle-grade fantasy novel, it is as suitable for the adult reader as anything I have ever read in this vein. A powerful and deeply moving book about the experience of being the child of an angry parent, and how that damage can be resolved by love. Read it! It's going on my top ten novels of 2020 for sure. It broke a spell for me, too: it was the first novel I read in its entirety since I've been back in NYC and sheltering in place.

Thursday was another rather unproductive work day - somehow just doing those few hours of Zoom meetings, plus morning exercise of course, leaves me completely tapped out for anything other. I had one truly pressing work task and two more general ones that I need to attend to sometime and couldn't touch any of them.

I held out till 9 for bedtime and actually slept from 9-5:30, which is almost like a normal night of sleep, albeit weirdly early for my natural clock. Felt surprisingly well rested - probably the first "regular" night of sleep I've had this week - and was able to sit down and complete time-sensitive priority task in a bit more than an hour of focused work. That felt really good, and I'm going to share it as its own blog post in a minute!

Glitch on yoga logistics meant I thought I had an 8:30 session but didn't really, so I've been able to write this post as well and will go out for my easy Friday run (40 as 1:1) momentarily. I have a dissertation chapter conference at 11 and still need to read the 40-page chapter but it is my coronadiscretionary thought that doing the run and only reading half the chapter will be more productive for all concerned than just reading the chapter and not doing the run. (I don't like to go out later because the park will be so much more crowded.) I can get more detailed comments to the chapter-writer later in the day if that's the way it goes....

Image: all of us yesterday.

NYC 17-20

Just as in normal times, the ease of posting to Facebook multiple times a day leaches the energy away from the blog! Staying light-hearted over there (lipstick, grilled cheese) so much as it is possible.

My Monday class went well, though 2 of 8 students couldn't be there. We had a riveting discussion of Convolute C of Benjamin's Arcades Project!

Nice Zoom chat this morning with a student in Korea who can't join the Clarissa seminar live but has stayed very involved with the material. She's just declared an English major - joyous news....

Light reading: The Stand, which somehow I don't think I ever read! Was slightly sorry to read the introduction and see that this is King's restoration of a lot of text that was cut from the original. Both as scholar and as reader, I am more interested to see what was initially out in the world (and there have been paragraphs here and there that cause me to speculate, with grim humor, that they simply couldn't - or at least rightly shouldn't - have been in the original published edition!). But yes, it's highly engaging....

More later perhaps, but I thought I'd at least get something down before the day bears down heavily on me.

Oh, and two things that caught my eye yesterday. A good Spec story about the devastating impact on universities like Columbia of the loss of revenue from medical faculty practice. Also, Kate Tulenko's Facebook post, text copied here: "This is from an obstetrician on Long Island. 30% of their asympto[ma]tic pregnant women in labor are COVID Positive. Health workers need to wear a full protective equipment for all patient contact.
“We started testing all patients on L&D a week ago. So far, in our weeks worth of data, 30% of asymptomatic patients tested positive. We are now wearing full PPE on L&D for all patient encounters.”" Sure does seem like one of the clearest indicators I've seen of true viral penetration in this area....

NYC day 11

I still need to reread for class tomorrow, but it was a pretty good day. Tidied up the three "real" rooms plus the kitchen in preparation for full-on Zoom work mode and teaching tomorrow. The living-room table is where the work lives when I'm not doing it (the three main piles are for the Epic Histories class, the Clarissa class and Duchess of Angus stuff). I normally sit at my desk in my study with my back to the window, but that's not great for video (backlighting makes face invisible), so I've been sitting on the other side of the desk. Now I've cleared up the stuff in the background (including putting away the massive pile of clean laundry that normally lives on a little white plastic armchair) and set up a standing desk thing to elevate the computer slightly for a more flattering view! Finished reading Clarissa pages for Tuesday but still haven't been able to get to grips with returning emails: usually I'm quite good about this, but they've mounted up and they all seem to require an emotional commitment I can't quite muster.

Comfort reading rec #5 (the third in the trio with Eva Ibbotson and Diana Wynne Jones): Robin McKinley. If you haven't read her at all, Sunshine is a great one to start with (baking, vampires); I do love The Blue Sword and The Hero and the Crown although I agreed when I saw in some old interview that McKinley herself is a bit embarrassed by the first one especially (I think she said "it has a whiff of The Sheihk about it"!); her saddest and darkest book Deerskin might be my favorite of all. All of her books have very good animals in them....

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.

Good teeth

Lucy Kellaway lunches with Jonathan Franzen for the FT. I am laughing, I have been a Franzen defender in my time (his books are better than 95% at least of those with a reasonable claim to be worth reading, why trash him?), but he does have a nearly unprecedented ability to say things that make him sound utterly insufferable!

I bogged down halfway through Purity (might finish it this weekend) - the East German scenes seem to me embarrassingly bad, and the limited range of characters and emotions (especially female characters and female emotions) struck me more here than with his last couple books, but it is certainly well above the bar of basic readability...

Reading like Nabokov

Janine Barchas on Nabokov's annotations of Mansfield Park.

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.)

A fan's notes

I am not sure whether it was idiocy or insanity that made me say yes to an invitation to participate in Sharyn November's blog book tour in celebration of Diana Wynne Jones; this time of the school year is so busy anyway, and on top of that I have a vast amount of work to do on my novel revision before I leave town for a few days next Thursday!  I was supposed to write yesterday, but it just didn't happen, and I was smitten with guilt when I got home in the later evening from a work event and found Sharyn's email wondering what had happened to me....

But really it wasn't idiocy or insanity.  It was the sheer fact that there is no single author whose novels I love more or whose books have brought me more pleasure over the years.  I have a lot of different kinds of favorite novelist.  I might name Haruki Murakami or Kazuo Ishiguro or Muriel Spark; Lee Child and Dick Francis occupy another axis of favorite reading, with Dorothy L. Sayers and Chester Himes popping in their heads at different angles; at the age when I first encountered the novels of Diana Wynne Jones, other favorites (this is a slightly funny list!) were Anthony Burgess, John Fowles, Robert Graves and Mary Renault.  Austen and Dickens were favorites then and remain favorites now.  Teju Cole is a new favorite; Charlie Williams and Ken Bruen are favorites on the five-year horizon, and really I could name about a hundred other favorites if I spent ten more minutes racking up the list.  There are always the Narnia books, too, which so thoroughly imprinted me at age six when I got the boxed set for my birthday that I think probably every other novel I have read since them has been an attempt to find something as thoroughly and magically transporting!  But there is some core sense in which Diana Wynne Jones is my absolutely favorite novelist.  Her books have an unusual quality of being both delightful and emotionally true; they are also quite complex, although to the best of my knowledge they were published almost exclusively for children or young adults.

If you haven't read her before, you couldn't do better than to order the Firebird reissue of Fire and Hemlock (it has a new introduction by Garth Nix, another favorite of mine whose new novel I am eagerly awaiting).  I had a battered paperback copy of this as a teenager that I must have read twenty times.  Howl's Moving Castle is probably her most formally perfect book, and I have a particular soft spot for the Chrestomanci books and for the absolutely wonderful and probably underrated Deep Secret, which describes the occult layout of the convention hotel more persuasively and accurately than any other novel ever written.  There are also revealing oddities like The Time of the Ghost, not her best novel but her most revealingly autobiographical one.  It is a trope of all of her novels that some people and some situations are so toxic that they leach the most important aspects out of our personalities, so that we forget our most authentic selves and can be dimmed into partial 'split' selves that lose any ability to make decisions or maintain autonomy or self-respect; one reason that fantasy is a particularly cherished genre for me is that it seems to me invoking magical explanations and histories is the single best way to describe this dispiriting aspect of human psychology....

I am still feeling the loss of Diana Wynne Jones.  I hate it that I won't get to read a dozen more new books by her, and I always secretly thought that one day our paths would cross.  It was not meant to be!  Her books are a treasure trove, though, and almost persuade me what I have sworn off, that it would be worth sitting down every few years to write a new novel if there was any chance it could capture some small part of the magic of one of hers.

Note to self

It is very strange: I've been thinking at the back of my mind all day about a review I drafted last week that didn't come out quite right and that I didn't have time to sit down with properly during daytime hours today due to other obligations.  But as I finished tomorrow's reading for lecture (the first two books of Tom Jones), not only did the brand-new first paragraph of the reimagined review burst into my mind, I also near-simultaneously thought of a different and better way of handling two representative arguments about the 'minute particular' in a talk I'm giving next week.  I feel more alert and cognitively capable than I have all day; have scrawled down a rough version of the new opening for the review as well as a memorandum about my intended mobilization of notionally opposing arguments about detail and historicity by Hartley and Sheridan, and will shortly stop work to try and wind down for the night....

Better set alarm very early to work on that review properly and get it sent off before my 10:30 appointment at the gym: nighttime is mentally active, for better and for worse, but writing proper generally needs to be done before I get sucked into the vortex of the rest of the day!  This post can be considered a thank-you note to Fielding for prompting intellectual activity, even if I do not love his novels the way I love Richardson's.

Light reading catch-up

What have I been reading, aside from work stuff? Chad Harbach's The Art of Fielding (genuinely charming - and no, you don't have to care about baseball); Jon-Jon Goulian's The Man in the Gray Flannel Skirt (highly engaging); Laini Taylor's Daughter of Smoke and Bone (loved it, can't wait for the next installment!).

At the LRB, Colin Burrow offers a fascinating account of Kristine Haugen's Richard Bentley: Poetry and Enlightenment, a book I need to get hold of as soon as I can!

Also: Things Magazine takes up the BLDG BLOG invitation to consider the spatial history of trapdoors.

Blogging is likely to be light this week, as I'll be in Ottawa from Tuesday to Sunday.