Rather grumpy about ongoing minor respiratory ailment. Had hoped I might be able to run for a bit today, but really I'm still hawking up huge gobs of disgusting phlegm, it will not do lungs any good to strain them with exercise! Behind on various work stuff, generally feeling rather low. (About to dig in on clearing some of these overdue tasks, which with any luck will lead to a feeling of considerable relief .)
Nice writeup of last week's Swift symposium. I had a very funny conversation afterwards with an elderly Irishman who was peculiarly vivid of conversation. He was excited to tell me that I was "a BORN LECTURER: BORN TO THE PODIUM" - also I used two words he was unfamiliar with, paratactic and hypotactic, which let him tell me a wonderfully complex multi-part anecdote about an alcoholic friend of his, now deceased, who was a great lover of language and once told this gentleman, when he used the word "creature" to describe a lady, "to refer himself to the discipline of the dictionary"! This is now a good new phrase in my repertoire. Said friend died in hospital of complications due to alcoholism, but on his deathbed sung this gentleman two songs which I promised I would go and hear online: one I think was "The Parting Glass," if I am remembering correctly, and the other was a Gaelic song whose title loosely translated into "Nobody knows her name" (various versions here). Some reciting of Yeats was also involved....
Fun to see this profile of an old friend in my Digg feed!
Jane Goodall's jungle.
The link B. sent me yesterday really did bring a smile to my face: the Shetland Pony Grand National!
Showing posts with label racing. Show all posts
Showing posts with label racing. Show all posts
Sunday, October 26, 2014
Thursday, September 11, 2014
Catch-up
It is hard to believe I've only been back in New York for two weeks. Once the semester starts it is a roller-coaster, all you can do is hang on and wait for it to stop! I guess it is about one-twelfth of the way done?!? Hmmmm, better pace myself for the remaining eleven-twelfths....
Did an amazing triathlon on Sunday (race report here). One more next weekend and then I just need to get on a regular exercise schedule. I've been resting all week due to tired legs, scraped-up elbow and knee and general insanity of school!
Some good light reading around the edges (weeks worth, really - I am annoyed with myself when I go so long without posting it as it becomes tedious to paste in a good many links at once!):
My friend Marco posted a picture drawn by his ten-year-old daughter that reminded me of my passion for Martin Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl. I checked Amazon and there was indeed a new installment of this utterly enthralling series: The Anxiety of Kalix the Werewolf! It is just as good as the previous two. Imagine Jilly Cooper (he has her rare gift for writing funny appealing characters you care about & being able to spool off stories about them at nearly infinite length) as rewritten with input from Stephen Elliott and Francesca Lia Block - these books are frankly just ridiculously appealing!
Then I read Millar's pseudonymously published Thraxas, but it is not as much to my taste (if you want to try Millar without werewolves, a good place to start is the hilarious Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me).
I liked Declare so much that I downloaded a few more books by Tim Powers; The Drawing of the Dark and Three Days to Never are bot good reads but neither is as much to my taste as Declare.
A cycling-related recommendation from my friend Troy: Richard Moore, Slaying the Badger: Greg LeMond, Bernard Hinault and the Greatest Tour de France.
I got Gwenda Bond's Girl on a Wire as an electronic advance reading copy via Amazon Prime. It is delightful! Gave me happy memories of reading again and again from the school library a Noel Streatfeild book that was not one of my absolute favorites (theaters being more exciting places to me than circuses!) but that still captivated me like all her others, Circus Shoes. (It was clear even to optimistic childhood self that I could not have a career as an acrobat or a trick horse rider if I had to run away and join the circus, but I thought there was a good chance that I could play in the band!)
Amazing two-fer that got me blissfully through the knackered evenings of the first week of classes: Lee Child, Personal and Tana French, The Secret Place. These two books are perfect of their respective kinds, and they are appealing kinds at that. I would teach these on a syllabus to show the equal importance of voice, character and plotting to perfect popular fiction! The Tana French in particular is just remarkably good, I am sure I will read it again very soon - shades of Miss Pym Disposes! Especially impressive is the way the whole thing really depends on the creation of a grimly intense mood - it is really like a much more effective and amazing version of what I was trying to do in The Magic Circle.
A very appealing SF novel by Daryl Gregory called The Devil's Alphabet (reminded me of another underrated old favorite of mine, Peter Dickinson's The Green Gene).
Finally, devastatingly (I finished it an hour ago and can't quite imagine what novel I could read immediately following it - might have to turn to some nonfiction instead?): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun.
One more tenure letter to write this weekend, and a letter of recommendation I should have done already (many others hard on its heels!); meetings tomorrow morning, but after that mostly just plans to do a lot of work and some exercise. Had to get this post written this evening because light reading catch-up is one of the throat-clearing procrastinatory things I do when I have to write something that takes attention but that I don't really feel like doing, and it will be better to have gotten it out of the way this evening!
Did an amazing triathlon on Sunday (race report here). One more next weekend and then I just need to get on a regular exercise schedule. I've been resting all week due to tired legs, scraped-up elbow and knee and general insanity of school!
Some good light reading around the edges (weeks worth, really - I am annoyed with myself when I go so long without posting it as it becomes tedious to paste in a good many links at once!):
My friend Marco posted a picture drawn by his ten-year-old daughter that reminded me of my passion for Martin Millar's Lonely Werewolf Girl. I checked Amazon and there was indeed a new installment of this utterly enthralling series: The Anxiety of Kalix the Werewolf! It is just as good as the previous two. Imagine Jilly Cooper (he has her rare gift for writing funny appealing characters you care about & being able to spool off stories about them at nearly infinite length) as rewritten with input from Stephen Elliott and Francesca Lia Block - these books are frankly just ridiculously appealing!
Then I read Millar's pseudonymously published Thraxas, but it is not as much to my taste (if you want to try Millar without werewolves, a good place to start is the hilarious Suzy, Led Zeppelin, and Me).
I liked Declare so much that I downloaded a few more books by Tim Powers; The Drawing of the Dark and Three Days to Never are bot good reads but neither is as much to my taste as Declare.
A cycling-related recommendation from my friend Troy: Richard Moore, Slaying the Badger: Greg LeMond, Bernard Hinault and the Greatest Tour de France.
I got Gwenda Bond's Girl on a Wire as an electronic advance reading copy via Amazon Prime. It is delightful! Gave me happy memories of reading again and again from the school library a Noel Streatfeild book that was not one of my absolute favorites (theaters being more exciting places to me than circuses!) but that still captivated me like all her others, Circus Shoes. (It was clear even to optimistic childhood self that I could not have a career as an acrobat or a trick horse rider if I had to run away and join the circus, but I thought there was a good chance that I could play in the band!)
Amazing two-fer that got me blissfully through the knackered evenings of the first week of classes: Lee Child, Personal and Tana French, The Secret Place. These two books are perfect of their respective kinds, and they are appealing kinds at that. I would teach these on a syllabus to show the equal importance of voice, character and plotting to perfect popular fiction! The Tana French in particular is just remarkably good, I am sure I will read it again very soon - shades of Miss Pym Disposes! Especially impressive is the way the whole thing really depends on the creation of a grimly intense mood - it is really like a much more effective and amazing version of what I was trying to do in The Magic Circle.
A very appealing SF novel by Daryl Gregory called The Devil's Alphabet (reminded me of another underrated old favorite of mine, Peter Dickinson's The Green Gene).
Finally, devastatingly (I finished it an hour ago and can't quite imagine what novel I could read immediately following it - might have to turn to some nonfiction instead?): Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Half of a Yellow Sun.
One more tenure letter to write this weekend, and a letter of recommendation I should have done already (many others hard on its heels!); meetings tomorrow morning, but after that mostly just plans to do a lot of work and some exercise. Had to get this post written this evening because light reading catch-up is one of the throat-clearing procrastinatory things I do when I have to write something that takes attention but that I don't really feel like doing, and it will be better to have gotten it out of the way this evening!
Thursday, August 14, 2014
Closing tabs
I have been remiss in the matter of closing tabs! Partly because I have a draft blog post open that I haven't gotten around to finishing - this is unusual for me, mostly I just whip 'em off, but I am due a correction for a missing chapter's worth of endnotes that vanished from the style book, I pasted in the notes but need to add numbers and check carefully so that I am not piling error upon error. Partly because I am having what is basically an amazing writing and exercise retreat in Cayman, with many posts at my other blog and much typing of quota (it's not draft as such, more notes and thoughts, but it is accumulating at a fine rate - I am at about 18K and if I keep working steadily I should have gone through the whole novel before school starts, which is the idea - sometimes I can keep writing quota for some weeks into the semester, but this September I have two major triathlons and a brand new lecture course with a clutch of seminar leaders to work with, and it is not going to be sensible even to try!).
So:
Rebecca Mead on why it's silly to distinguish rigidly between reading for pleasure and reading for self-improvement, especially in adolescence.
A great interview with Coach Dave and his fiancee Megan, who have been burning up the trails this summer! It's the first time I've worked with a coach for quite a while, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.
Twin novelists: an interview with Lev and Austin Grossman.
David Gerrard on the badness of Geoff Dyer's most recent book.
So:
Rebecca Mead on why it's silly to distinguish rigidly between reading for pleasure and reading for self-improvement, especially in adolescence.
A great interview with Coach Dave and his fiancee Megan, who have been burning up the trails this summer! It's the first time I've worked with a coach for quite a while, and I am thoroughly enjoying it.
Twin novelists: an interview with Lev and Austin Grossman.
David Gerrard on the badness of Geoff Dyer's most recent book.
Sunday, November 24, 2013
Closing tabs
Best weekend viewing: Weekend of a Champion at the IFC. It is amazing - reminds me (I am laughing, I am the only person who would foreground this association I think!) of what I most like about the early novels of Dick Francis. Here's the trailer - see it if you get a chance.
Reread most of Dangerous Liaisons last night in partial preparation for Tuesday's seminar meeting. It really is the most incredible novel - I wish I could write something with that beautifully taut spring-like construction - it is almost as well-put-together as Oedipus Rex.
Miscellaneous links:
Imagining a future without antibiotics.
What do you do when you're a mathematician and you make a mistake?
At the FT, Pankaj Mishra on the problem with talking about the global novel (site registration required).
Light reading around the edges: Joshilyn Jackson, Someone Else's Love Story; Vidar Sundstol, The Land of Dreams.
Reread most of Dangerous Liaisons last night in partial preparation for Tuesday's seminar meeting. It really is the most incredible novel - I wish I could write something with that beautifully taut spring-like construction - it is almost as well-put-together as Oedipus Rex.
Miscellaneous links:
Imagining a future without antibiotics.
What do you do when you're a mathematician and you make a mistake?
At the FT, Pankaj Mishra on the problem with talking about the global novel (site registration required).
Light reading around the edges: Joshilyn Jackson, Someone Else's Love Story; Vidar Sundstol, The Land of Dreams.
Wednesday, November 20, 2013
Powered by donuts
Incentivized comment-writing this morning with a donut. After today, only three more lectures and two more seminar meetings - it can be done, especially as (miraculously) I do not need to travel over Thanksgiving....
Last week was a bit too busy, and culminated in an enjoyable but demanding weekend trip to Philadelphia, but this week I have every evening at home: beneficial for mental health. B. arrives tomorrow, which is also good and will make me work less this weekend than I have over the last few days. Will either run or go to yoga this afternoon depending on some light/temperature/laziness calculus as yet to be determined, but more immediately am going to get into bed with my Kindle and start reading Joshilyn Jackson's new novel, which I have been eagerly awaiting.
(There is a whole next round of letters of recommendation coming up due, but I cannot face them until later in the week!)
Light reading around the edges:
Richard Kadrey's Dead Set (not bad, but I read it just after finishing The Goldfinch, an imperfect novel whose language is so rich and satisfying that anything else feels flat and monochromatic afterwards); Shawn Vestal's short memoir A. K. A. Charles Abbott; and Kate Maruyama's Harrowgate.
Closing tabs:
The utility of post-its, George R. R. Martin edition.
I want this pie! (Also to read a Sacksian essay on octopus consciousness.)
An interesting article by James Mallinson on the early history of hatha yoga.
Last week was a bit too busy, and culminated in an enjoyable but demanding weekend trip to Philadelphia, but this week I have every evening at home: beneficial for mental health. B. arrives tomorrow, which is also good and will make me work less this weekend than I have over the last few days. Will either run or go to yoga this afternoon depending on some light/temperature/laziness calculus as yet to be determined, but more immediately am going to get into bed with my Kindle and start reading Joshilyn Jackson's new novel, which I have been eagerly awaiting.
(There is a whole next round of letters of recommendation coming up due, but I cannot face them until later in the week!)
Light reading around the edges:
Richard Kadrey's Dead Set (not bad, but I read it just after finishing The Goldfinch, an imperfect novel whose language is so rich and satisfying that anything else feels flat and monochromatic afterwards); Shawn Vestal's short memoir A. K. A. Charles Abbott; and Kate Maruyama's Harrowgate.
Closing tabs:
The utility of post-its, George R. R. Martin edition.
I want this pie! (Also to read a Sacksian essay on octopus consciousness.)
An interesting article by James Mallinson on the early history of hatha yoga.
Sunday, October 20, 2013
In memoriam redux
Wheelmen is causing my jaw to drop: much of this story, of course, I know already, but even so, the revelations about the financial improprieties & interdependency of the UCI and the US Postal team in the late 90s are pretty amazing - makes me wish I were a financial journalist, there is much potential in that field for stories of Shakespearean dimensions.
Also, IMAX Gravity completely lived up to the hype!
Coming week got thrown for a loop: B.'s old friend J. died this weekend.
(He had a bad cancer diagnosis in fall 2009, but thanks to amazing surgery and radiation he was able to run a triumphant 3:23:40 in Boston in April 2010. B. and I went to Boston to spectate on that occasion; it was a celebration of life. He had a few good years of remission, and then a scary recurrence last summer, so that his death comes more as a sorrow than a surprise.)
Funeral in Toronto on Friday, we'll fly up Thursday and then back to NYC Saturday evening so that B. can make his Sunday early-morning flight back to Cayman. Ugh, let us say fervently what dressed-up friends and I were all saying to each other on the Metro-North train to Yonkers a few weeks ago for K.'s memorial: please can't the next time we find ourselves in our best clothes traveling out of town together be for a wedding or a christening, not for a funeral?
(The need to make travel arrangements and generally contemplate ramifications, mortality, etc. also means that I am way behind on work for the week, but one way or another it will all have to get done in the next few days, so there's no point worrying about that now! On a brighter note, I had a beautiful run yesterday and finally made it to hot yoga today after too long a layoff, so that definitely has a beneficial effect on the moral and physiological equilibrium.)
Closing tabs:
Nico Muhly's career as Baroque archetype. (Also: Nico's Reddit AMA!) We're going tomorrow night, I'm really excited....
Also, IMAX Gravity completely lived up to the hype!
Coming week got thrown for a loop: B.'s old friend J. died this weekend.
(He had a bad cancer diagnosis in fall 2009, but thanks to amazing surgery and radiation he was able to run a triumphant 3:23:40 in Boston in April 2010. B. and I went to Boston to spectate on that occasion; it was a celebration of life. He had a few good years of remission, and then a scary recurrence last summer, so that his death comes more as a sorrow than a surprise.)
Funeral in Toronto on Friday, we'll fly up Thursday and then back to NYC Saturday evening so that B. can make his Sunday early-morning flight back to Cayman. Ugh, let us say fervently what dressed-up friends and I were all saying to each other on the Metro-North train to Yonkers a few weeks ago for K.'s memorial: please can't the next time we find ourselves in our best clothes traveling out of town together be for a wedding or a christening, not for a funeral?
(The need to make travel arrangements and generally contemplate ramifications, mortality, etc. also means that I am way behind on work for the week, but one way or another it will all have to get done in the next few days, so there's no point worrying about that now! On a brighter note, I had a beautiful run yesterday and finally made it to hot yoga today after too long a layoff, so that definitely has a beneficial effect on the moral and physiological equilibrium.)
Closing tabs:
Nico Muhly's career as Baroque archetype. (Also: Nico's Reddit AMA!) We're going tomorrow night, I'm really excited....
Sunday, September 15, 2013
Closing tabs
My only complaint about this week, if it is a complaint, is that it was too full of a rich and complex variety of things!
On Tuesday I taught The Princesse de Cleves and on Wednesday, A Journal of the Plague Year. These are two of my particularly favorite books of all time, and I'm really excited about this semester's courses.
On Thursday I went with G. to see Mr. Burns, a post-electric play. The third act is brilliant and genuinely haunting - I am not quite so sure about the long first act, which seems to me to have too much of the sort of conversation that seemed fresh when we heard it in Pulp Fiction but which strikes me on the stage these days as overly rambling and a little self-indulgent. The three acts of the play take place in the near future, seven years later and seventy years later - it covers some familiar ground in terms of thinking about linguistic and cultural transformations after an apocalyptic break (think Riddley Walker or other post-nuclear scenarios), but the originality comes from the way that we see time morphing the "Cape Fear" Simpsons episode together with Gilbert & Sullivan and all sorts of other random cultural snippets, especially musical, into a postapocalyptic morality play, with Bart Simpson as familiar to modern audiences as the medieval Vice would have been to audiences many hundreds of years ago. The acting is very good, and so is the production. (Dinner afterwards at the West Bank Cafe, which is currently offering a very good prix fixe dinner - $20 for appetizer, main course and dessert. I had spinach ravioli, a very delicious skate with capers and an even more delectable lemon mousse.)
Lots of meetings with graduate students - I think I have finally reached critical mass. Also was given a brand new iPad for a major committee assignment, something that presages huge amounts of online reading.
On Friday I had dinner at La Lunchonette with an old friend from graduate school who has invited me to come and speak at Tel Aviv University in May, a trip I am very much looking forward to.
On Saturday I went to Governors Island on the ferry and met up with my brother and his family at Fête Paradiso. Among other things we rode the world's first bicycle carousel.
Today I finally had time to write my race report for Ironman Wisconsin.
This coming week is very busy too, though after that I am hoping things will settle down a bit. I could use a few quiet days at home with little to do!
Light reading around the edges:
Seanan McGuire's new October Daye novel, Chimes At Midnight, which ends very abruptly but regardless confirms my impression of McGuire as one of today's great geniuses of popular fiction in the fantasy/science-fictional vein; and Gwenda Bond's lovely The Woken Gods, which entirely lived up to my very high expectations.
Closing tabs:
Open up this essay by Mark Kingwell in a new browser tab and save it to read later!
A humble plea for the bumblebee.
On Tuesday I taught The Princesse de Cleves and on Wednesday, A Journal of the Plague Year. These are two of my particularly favorite books of all time, and I'm really excited about this semester's courses.
On Thursday I went with G. to see Mr. Burns, a post-electric play. The third act is brilliant and genuinely haunting - I am not quite so sure about the long first act, which seems to me to have too much of the sort of conversation that seemed fresh when we heard it in Pulp Fiction but which strikes me on the stage these days as overly rambling and a little self-indulgent. The three acts of the play take place in the near future, seven years later and seventy years later - it covers some familiar ground in terms of thinking about linguistic and cultural transformations after an apocalyptic break (think Riddley Walker or other post-nuclear scenarios), but the originality comes from the way that we see time morphing the "Cape Fear" Simpsons episode together with Gilbert & Sullivan and all sorts of other random cultural snippets, especially musical, into a postapocalyptic morality play, with Bart Simpson as familiar to modern audiences as the medieval Vice would have been to audiences many hundreds of years ago. The acting is very good, and so is the production. (Dinner afterwards at the West Bank Cafe, which is currently offering a very good prix fixe dinner - $20 for appetizer, main course and dessert. I had spinach ravioli, a very delicious skate with capers and an even more delectable lemon mousse.)
Lots of meetings with graduate students - I think I have finally reached critical mass. Also was given a brand new iPad for a major committee assignment, something that presages huge amounts of online reading.
On Friday I had dinner at La Lunchonette with an old friend from graduate school who has invited me to come and speak at Tel Aviv University in May, a trip I am very much looking forward to.
On Saturday I went to Governors Island on the ferry and met up with my brother and his family at Fête Paradiso. Among other things we rode the world's first bicycle carousel.
Today I finally had time to write my race report for Ironman Wisconsin.
This coming week is very busy too, though after that I am hoping things will settle down a bit. I could use a few quiet days at home with little to do!
Light reading around the edges:
Seanan McGuire's new October Daye novel, Chimes At Midnight, which ends very abruptly but regardless confirms my impression of McGuire as one of today's great geniuses of popular fiction in the fantasy/science-fictional vein; and Gwenda Bond's lovely The Woken Gods, which entirely lived up to my very high expectations.
Closing tabs:
Open up this essay by Mark Kingwell in a new browser tab and save it to read later!
A humble plea for the bumblebee.
Sunday, September 01, 2013
"The myth prescribes the garret rather than the Guggenheim"
I have been exhausted all week, but I think I am finally starting to feel more normal - failed to get up for projected early-morning bike ride today, but it was for the best, I needed the sleep more. Had a good swim yesterday but am feeling much thwarted by August swimming-pool closures.
All sorts of Seamus Heaney-related tabs open, waiting for a proper send-off, but I realize that I could wait forever, so here are a few good ones (I never took a class with him, but he was an active and benevolent presence during my undergraduate days in Adams House): Henri Cole interviewed Heaney for the Paris Review (this one's a must-read, all sorts of the things he says are quite arresting, including thoughts about living in two places); Andrew O'Hagan at the LRB on car trips with Heaney and Karl Miller (note blethering discussion, which strongly reminded me of my Scottish grandfather - it was a word he loved - that and shoogly are two Scots words that remain in my personal idiom).
A good interview with Ruth Franklin about the art of criticism.
Lee Child has an amazing apartment! (I like my current apartment very much, indeed it is somewhere I will very happily live until the day I die if that is the way things go, but at this time of year I hugely regret not having central air-conditioning - it is the nature of the Columbia housing stock to be pre-war and very beautiful/spacious, but the humidity right now is killing me, and it leaves me with the impression of my apartment being a sinkhole, even though really it is the same as always.) Very impatient for the new Jack Reacher book - if I am sensible, I will save it to read on Thursday in the airport en route to Madison for my race.
Light reading around the edges of copious trivial errands and obsessing about upcoming race and digging out books and papers for fall-semester classes: Mick Herron, Slow Horses.
Also I forgot to say I read Adam Phillips' Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life as my "airplane book" (I am ready for the silly rule about not using electronic devices during takeoff and landing to be abandoned - but in the meantime, I will continue to have some kind of nonfiction or essay collection with me to while away those stretches of Kindle-banned time). There are only about three worthwhile paragraphs in the whole book, but on the other hand it is a very short book. At his best, Phillips is transfixing, but one also feels he spools this stuff out without regard to quality - he could use a more challenging interlocutor at this point, I suspect, than his own ears!
All sorts of Seamus Heaney-related tabs open, waiting for a proper send-off, but I realize that I could wait forever, so here are a few good ones (I never took a class with him, but he was an active and benevolent presence during my undergraduate days in Adams House): Henri Cole interviewed Heaney for the Paris Review (this one's a must-read, all sorts of the things he says are quite arresting, including thoughts about living in two places); Andrew O'Hagan at the LRB on car trips with Heaney and Karl Miller (note blethering discussion, which strongly reminded me of my Scottish grandfather - it was a word he loved - that and shoogly are two Scots words that remain in my personal idiom).
A good interview with Ruth Franklin about the art of criticism.
Lee Child has an amazing apartment! (I like my current apartment very much, indeed it is somewhere I will very happily live until the day I die if that is the way things go, but at this time of year I hugely regret not having central air-conditioning - it is the nature of the Columbia housing stock to be pre-war and very beautiful/spacious, but the humidity right now is killing me, and it leaves me with the impression of my apartment being a sinkhole, even though really it is the same as always.) Very impatient for the new Jack Reacher book - if I am sensible, I will save it to read on Thursday in the airport en route to Madison for my race.
Light reading around the edges of copious trivial errands and obsessing about upcoming race and digging out books and papers for fall-semester classes: Mick Herron, Slow Horses.
Also I forgot to say I read Adam Phillips' Missing Out: In Praise of the Unlived Life as my "airplane book" (I am ready for the silly rule about not using electronic devices during takeoff and landing to be abandoned - but in the meantime, I will continue to have some kind of nonfiction or essay collection with me to while away those stretches of Kindle-banned time). There are only about three worthwhile paragraphs in the whole book, but on the other hand it is a very short book. At his best, Phillips is transfixing, but one also feels he spools this stuff out without regard to quality - he could use a more challenging interlocutor at this point, I suspect, than his own ears!
Tuesday, August 27, 2013
Back to school
It is nice to be back at home in New York. This time of year is always cheery in Morningside Heights, with students moving in and the optimism of a new school year!
I got home from Cayman yesterday evening, did a dissertation defense this morning and then came home and crashed for a deep and discombobulating three-hour afternoon nap that will probably wreak havoc with tonight's sleep possibilities, but I think it was worth it regardless. I still have one surplus cat staying with me, which is nice (two cats are more than twice as funny than one cat).
I need to get in gear for my opening classes next week (this means trying to unearth notes, course readers, books etc. and wondering why I do not leave them in some better and more systematically accessible fashion) - both are classes I have taught before and enjoy, so it shouldn't be too overwhelming. I'm on a big committee this year that will take up a significant amount of time and attention, and I also have three or four talks scheduled for October and early November, so I think things will be fairly busy.
I am done with the bulk of Ironman training and now have eleven days before I race next weekend in Madison! I am actually finding it nice to have the school stuff to worry about/concentrate on, it takes a bit of pressure off the other. I need to pick up my tri bike tomorrow from the store where it was having a tune-up, make all my complex lists for gear and travel and then drop off my road bike (which I'm actually using for the race) and gear bag on Friday to be transported in a truck to Wisconsin. One more long day on Saturday - the recommendation in the training plan I'm loosely following is to swim 1hr, ride (I will spin indoors) 2hr and run 2hr - at this point, that actually seems pretty short! Otherwise just bits and pieces to stay sharp/fresh.
(Over the past twelve weeks, I have completed approximately 165 hours of training - my biggest week was 20 hours, but many hovering in the region of 15 and recovery weeks at more like 6 or 8. It has been a pleasure and a privilege - I do want to do another iron-distance race in the not-too-distant future, but I think the training has to come in a semester where I have a sabbatical and am not trying to start or finish a major book! Next summer probably just a couple of half-ironman races and an Olympic distance or two.)
Light reading (airport edition): Samantha Shannon, The Bone Season (quite reasonably good - a thousand times better than The Night Circus, which only suggests itself as a comparison because of industry hype, but not perhaps as perfectly suited to my tastes as Laini Taylor's wonderful Daughter of Smoke and Bone books, with which it has a good bit more in common); a super book by David Epstein, The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (I only wished it was longer - had the same experience with Wright's Scientology book - if the notes in the Kindle edition take up the final 30%, one comes very abruptly upon the end of the narrative while still wishing for more!); Kelly Braffet's Save Yourself, which I enjoyed very much indeed. Now reading Elmore Leonard's Raylan Givens stories.
Closing tabs:
The distribution of octopus intelligence.
Grizzlies prefer the overpass, black bears prefer the underpass. (Via Tyler Cowen.)
Another good interview with Wayne Koestenbaum. (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)
I got home from Cayman yesterday evening, did a dissertation defense this morning and then came home and crashed for a deep and discombobulating three-hour afternoon nap that will probably wreak havoc with tonight's sleep possibilities, but I think it was worth it regardless. I still have one surplus cat staying with me, which is nice (two cats are more than twice as funny than one cat).
I need to get in gear for my opening classes next week (this means trying to unearth notes, course readers, books etc. and wondering why I do not leave them in some better and more systematically accessible fashion) - both are classes I have taught before and enjoy, so it shouldn't be too overwhelming. I'm on a big committee this year that will take up a significant amount of time and attention, and I also have three or four talks scheduled for October and early November, so I think things will be fairly busy.
I am done with the bulk of Ironman training and now have eleven days before I race next weekend in Madison! I am actually finding it nice to have the school stuff to worry about/concentrate on, it takes a bit of pressure off the other. I need to pick up my tri bike tomorrow from the store where it was having a tune-up, make all my complex lists for gear and travel and then drop off my road bike (which I'm actually using for the race) and gear bag on Friday to be transported in a truck to Wisconsin. One more long day on Saturday - the recommendation in the training plan I'm loosely following is to swim 1hr, ride (I will spin indoors) 2hr and run 2hr - at this point, that actually seems pretty short! Otherwise just bits and pieces to stay sharp/fresh.
(Over the past twelve weeks, I have completed approximately 165 hours of training - my biggest week was 20 hours, but many hovering in the region of 15 and recovery weeks at more like 6 or 8. It has been a pleasure and a privilege - I do want to do another iron-distance race in the not-too-distant future, but I think the training has to come in a semester where I have a sabbatical and am not trying to start or finish a major book! Next summer probably just a couple of half-ironman races and an Olympic distance or two.)
Light reading (airport edition): Samantha Shannon, The Bone Season (quite reasonably good - a thousand times better than The Night Circus, which only suggests itself as a comparison because of industry hype, but not perhaps as perfectly suited to my tastes as Laini Taylor's wonderful Daughter of Smoke and Bone books, with which it has a good bit more in common); a super book by David Epstein, The Sports Gene: Inside the Science of Extraordinary Athletic Performance (I only wished it was longer - had the same experience with Wright's Scientology book - if the notes in the Kindle edition take up the final 30%, one comes very abruptly upon the end of the narrative while still wishing for more!); Kelly Braffet's Save Yourself, which I enjoyed very much indeed. Now reading Elmore Leonard's Raylan Givens stories.
Closing tabs:
The distribution of octopus intelligence.
Grizzlies prefer the overpass, black bears prefer the underpass. (Via Tyler Cowen.)
Another good interview with Wayne Koestenbaum. (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)
Friday, August 09, 2013
Monday, June 17, 2013
Closing tabs
I have been remiss in documenting theatergoing! A Picture of Autumn was perhaps overly long but highly watchable (very good dinner afterwards at Esca); to my surprise, since it is a play I've never really seen the point of, the Shakespeare in the Park Comedy of Errors was wonderfully good! Everything about the production is inspired: the costumes, the music, the fact that the actors sound as though they genuinely understand the words they are saying (not always the case); the performance of Jesse Tyler Ferguson as Dromio is particularly good.
Finishing revisions on the style book this week and next before I go to Cayman at the end of next week. (Also final tinkering with two essays, one on Restoration drama and the eighteenth-century novel and the other on conditions of knowledge in Austen's fiction.) Week two of Ironman training went well and I am racing this coming weekend in Syracuse.
Linkage:
Research on holes in cheese. (Via GeekPress.)
Medieval leprosy bacterium sequenced.
Malcolm Gladwell on A. O. Hirschman (I must read that biography - this is a particular favorite of mine).
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges of far too much internet time-wasting: Gene Kerrigan, Little Criminals (this guy's books are amazing, only I am afraid I have now read them all!); Joanna Hershon, A Dual Inheritance; Karin Slaughter, Busted (a teaser for the full-length book, which I am eagerly awaiting); Ake Edwardson, Room No. 10 (annoyingly poetic, and definitely not his best); and M. E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath (luridly enjoyable, and rings true to my personal experience of this type - realized I had to read the book after reading this endorsement). I would like to read a long essay or a book-length discussion of quasi-truthful first-person narratives, from Robinson Crusoe through things like this - especially it seems to me an interesting topic in American Studies (someone should write a dissertation!).
Finishing revisions on the style book this week and next before I go to Cayman at the end of next week. (Also final tinkering with two essays, one on Restoration drama and the eighteenth-century novel and the other on conditions of knowledge in Austen's fiction.) Week two of Ironman training went well and I am racing this coming weekend in Syracuse.
Linkage:
Research on holes in cheese. (Via GeekPress.)
Medieval leprosy bacterium sequenced.
Malcolm Gladwell on A. O. Hirschman (I must read that biography - this is a particular favorite of mine).
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges of far too much internet time-wasting: Gene Kerrigan, Little Criminals (this guy's books are amazing, only I am afraid I have now read them all!); Joanna Hershon, A Dual Inheritance; Karin Slaughter, Busted (a teaser for the full-length book, which I am eagerly awaiting); Ake Edwardson, Room No. 10 (annoyingly poetic, and definitely not his best); and M. E. Thomas, Confessions of a Sociopath (luridly enjoyable, and rings true to my personal experience of this type - realized I had to read the book after reading this endorsement). I would like to read a long essay or a book-length discussion of quasi-truthful first-person narratives, from Robinson Crusoe through things like this - especially it seems to me an interesting topic in American Studies (someone should write a dissertation!).
Sunday, June 09, 2013
Closing tabs
Iain Banks has died.
What is it like to be an octopus? (Via Mike Doe. I note that though I am not a vegetarian, the one creature I really cannot eat is octopus, though in the past I have found grilled octopus delicious. The problem: the part you eat is the part it thinks with....)
Adam Johnson on Kim Jong-il's sushi chef. (Still haven't read the novel - I am torn, often I buy books I suspect I will want to hand on to others in paper rather than electronically, only it makes me much less likely to read them myself - I might have to buy a second copy for Kindle!).
An interesting survey on women and clothes - go and fill it out if you have some spare minutes, I found it quite thought-provoking.
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: James S. A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes (I don't read a great deal of this style of science fiction, but I hugely enjoyed this one, and will definitely continue with the next installment soon); Jo Nesbo, The Redeemer (it's an earlier installment in the Harry Hole story, I suppose just now published in the United States - I liked it very much indeed, I think it's stronger than the last couple I've read, which lose a little steam compared to the early ones); Taylor Stevens, The Doll (I have been a huge fan of this series so far, but I'm a little worried about the direction it seems to be moving in - I will certainly read the next one, but the Mary Sue element is stronger and there's a bit of Patricia-Cornwellesque grandiosity in the international serial-killer plot - on the other hand, I think Stevens should be counted on a very short list of writers who could be considered to come close to beating Lee Child at his own game, and I still definitely would recommend the series); and Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls. Curiously extended similarities to Nos4A2 (neither author's fault, just in the DNA of this genre), and not I think as impressive to me as her previous novel, which is probably one of my favorite books of the last five years, but still very much worthwhile, with some really lovely stretches of writing.
Next two weeks: massive triathlon training (especially cycling) culminating in a 70.3 race in Syracuse (I'm not tapering, I'm just going to train through); style book revisions; revisions on the essay I wrote a couple years ago about the relationship between drama and the novel in eighteenth-century Britain. A couple plays - I don't have tickets yet to this, but I'm very keen to see it.
What is it like to be an octopus? (Via Mike Doe. I note that though I am not a vegetarian, the one creature I really cannot eat is octopus, though in the past I have found grilled octopus delicious. The problem: the part you eat is the part it thinks with....)
Adam Johnson on Kim Jong-il's sushi chef. (Still haven't read the novel - I am torn, often I buy books I suspect I will want to hand on to others in paper rather than electronically, only it makes me much less likely to read them myself - I might have to buy a second copy for Kindle!).
An interesting survey on women and clothes - go and fill it out if you have some spare minutes, I found it quite thought-provoking.
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: James S. A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes (I don't read a great deal of this style of science fiction, but I hugely enjoyed this one, and will definitely continue with the next installment soon); Jo Nesbo, The Redeemer (it's an earlier installment in the Harry Hole story, I suppose just now published in the United States - I liked it very much indeed, I think it's stronger than the last couple I've read, which lose a little steam compared to the early ones); Taylor Stevens, The Doll (I have been a huge fan of this series so far, but I'm a little worried about the direction it seems to be moving in - I will certainly read the next one, but the Mary Sue element is stronger and there's a bit of Patricia-Cornwellesque grandiosity in the international serial-killer plot - on the other hand, I think Stevens should be counted on a very short list of writers who could be considered to come close to beating Lee Child at his own game, and I still definitely would recommend the series); and Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls. Curiously extended similarities to Nos4A2 (neither author's fault, just in the DNA of this genre), and not I think as impressive to me as her previous novel, which is probably one of my favorite books of the last five years, but still very much worthwhile, with some really lovely stretches of writing.
Next two weeks: massive triathlon training (especially cycling) culminating in a 70.3 race in Syracuse (I'm not tapering, I'm just going to train through); style book revisions; revisions on the essay I wrote a couple years ago about the relationship between drama and the novel in eighteenth-century Britain. A couple plays - I don't have tickets yet to this, but I'm very keen to see it.
Friday, May 03, 2013
Friday, February 01, 2013
Catch-up
Very mixed feelings about my month of idyll coming to an end. On the other hand, idyll might pall if it were extended indefinitely (not, in any case, a temperamental possibility for me, even aside from logistical and career concerns). Things to look forward to in New York: the library, Joanna's spin classes at Chelsea Piers, winter running and most of all my little cat Mickey! Also Nadia Sirota on Tuesday night at the Kitchen and an evening of theatergoing on Wednesday with G. (almost certainly to be followed by dinner at Petrarca).
Miscellaneous linkage: a story by Charlie Jane Anders; the coldest journey! (Via B.)
Miscellaneous light reading: Jojo Moyes, Me Before You (a novel my English grandmother would have thoroughly enjoyed!); Alan Russell, Burning Man (very good, and I will certainly read more of his, but it was curious to read two novels about LAPD K-9 officer-dog partnerships in as many days - this was the other one); Matthew Mitcham, Twists and Turns; and an excellent historical mystery (it is a genre that makes me suspicious, but Jane Y. sent me a link that persuaded me I had to check this one out) by Imogen Robertson, Instruments of Darkness. Halfway through the second one in the series now; also midway through Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I have been meaning to read ever since it came out but never quite got around to.
Over the next few days in Cayman, three final hot yoga classes at Bliss (I finished the thirty-day challenge yesterday - thirty classes in less than four weeks definitely leads to a significant feeling of consolidation and progress), a four-mile leg Sunday morning for the Cross-Island Relay (B. has inadvertently intimidated me by observing that he believes I can run 8:15 miles on current fitness and heat acclimation!) and a decadent Sunday-night dinner at Michael's Genuine.
Miscellaneous linkage: a story by Charlie Jane Anders; the coldest journey! (Via B.)
Miscellaneous light reading: Jojo Moyes, Me Before You (a novel my English grandmother would have thoroughly enjoyed!); Alan Russell, Burning Man (very good, and I will certainly read more of his, but it was curious to read two novels about LAPD K-9 officer-dog partnerships in as many days - this was the other one); Matthew Mitcham, Twists and Turns; and an excellent historical mystery (it is a genre that makes me suspicious, but Jane Y. sent me a link that persuaded me I had to check this one out) by Imogen Robertson, Instruments of Darkness. Halfway through the second one in the series now; also midway through Thinking, Fast and Slow, which I have been meaning to read ever since it came out but never quite got around to.
Over the next few days in Cayman, three final hot yoga classes at Bliss (I finished the thirty-day challenge yesterday - thirty classes in less than four weeks definitely leads to a significant feeling of consolidation and progress), a four-mile leg Sunday morning for the Cross-Island Relay (B. has inadvertently intimidated me by observing that he believes I can run 8:15 miles on current fitness and heat acclimation!) and a decadent Sunday-night dinner at Michael's Genuine.
Wednesday, January 23, 2013
Tropical island paradise
Really it falls under the category of unseemly gloating, at least for those reading in northern climes, but this is where I was early Sunday morning!
I am having the best month that I've had for a long time - probably haven't felt this non-insane for ten years! - need to buckle down and get back to work soon, but in the meantime it is a lot of swimming and running and hot yoga, extremely mentally calming. Reading The Tale of Genji and sundry crime fiction of minor import that I will log at a later date.
I am having the best month that I've had for a long time - probably haven't felt this non-insane for ten years! - need to buckle down and get back to work soon, but in the meantime it is a lot of swimming and running and hot yoga, extremely mentally calming. Reading The Tale of Genji and sundry crime fiction of minor import that I will log at a later date.
Friday, October 26, 2012
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.
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.
Monday, October 22, 2012
Catch-up
Six more teaching Mondays between me and the end of the semester, with a Monday holiday the week of the election as a respite. I am weary!
Today in the classroom: two de Man essays, "Semiology and Rhetoric" and "Literary History and Literary Modernity"; also, for my afternoon lecture, the opening stretch of Swann's Way!
My apartment is full of books various publishers have sent me that I don't want to read - there's a stack of thirty or so currently awaiting donation - but then I get one that is the thing I most want to read in the world, and am delighted again at the influx: in this case, it was James Lasdun's Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. I read it in two short sittings, partly because of the gripping nature of the topic (the way the internet has hugely amplified stalking possibilities for the sociopathic and borderline, as exemplified in a terrible multi-year experience Lasdun himself had with a student who turned into his passionate stalker). In some sense, I deem the book a failure, although because the topic is so interesting and because Lasdun is such a good writer, it remains quite worthwhile. But I don't think he's had enough time to process the experience into a book-length piece (and of course he has the horrible irony of the fact that his novels are about this already, uncannily and avant la lettre, though I have certainly myself found it to be more generally the case that things in life happen that are like things one already wrote in one's novels); it probably would have been better saved as draft and then rewritten as more like a ten-thousand-word essay another few years down the road. He wants the book also to be about anti-Semitism, despite his nagging suspicion that both his stalker and the letter-writer who once sent an obscenely defaced missive to his father are really "just" mentally ill, and there is a general feeling of Lasdun (quite understandably, I hasten to add) still being in the grip of the experience rather than having moved away from it to shape it into something with the clarity and perfection of his fictions.
In other news, Tough Mudder on Saturday was great. (Although I should note that my knees and shins are ridiculously scraped and bruised, as though I have become an unruly five-year-old!)
Light reading around the edges: two more old novels by Diana Wynne Jones, Eight Days of Luke and Archer's Goon. It is strange, this notion she has of a person being split up into constituent parts and losing memory of him- or herself: it's very consistently developed across a wide number of different books. I really love her novels more than almost anything else I can think of.
Today in the classroom: two de Man essays, "Semiology and Rhetoric" and "Literary History and Literary Modernity"; also, for my afternoon lecture, the opening stretch of Swann's Way!
My apartment is full of books various publishers have sent me that I don't want to read - there's a stack of thirty or so currently awaiting donation - but then I get one that is the thing I most want to read in the world, and am delighted again at the influx: in this case, it was James Lasdun's Give Me Everything You Have: On Being Stalked. I read it in two short sittings, partly because of the gripping nature of the topic (the way the internet has hugely amplified stalking possibilities for the sociopathic and borderline, as exemplified in a terrible multi-year experience Lasdun himself had with a student who turned into his passionate stalker). In some sense, I deem the book a failure, although because the topic is so interesting and because Lasdun is such a good writer, it remains quite worthwhile. But I don't think he's had enough time to process the experience into a book-length piece (and of course he has the horrible irony of the fact that his novels are about this already, uncannily and avant la lettre, though I have certainly myself found it to be more generally the case that things in life happen that are like things one already wrote in one's novels); it probably would have been better saved as draft and then rewritten as more like a ten-thousand-word essay another few years down the road. He wants the book also to be about anti-Semitism, despite his nagging suspicion that both his stalker and the letter-writer who once sent an obscenely defaced missive to his father are really "just" mentally ill, and there is a general feeling of Lasdun (quite understandably, I hasten to add) still being in the grip of the experience rather than having moved away from it to shape it into something with the clarity and perfection of his fictions.
In other news, Tough Mudder on Saturday was great. (Although I should note that my knees and shins are ridiculously scraped and bruised, as though I have become an unruly five-year-old!)
Light reading around the edges: two more old novels by Diana Wynne Jones, Eight Days of Luke and Archer's Goon. It is strange, this notion she has of a person being split up into constituent parts and losing memory of him- or herself: it's very consistently developed across a wide number of different books. I really love her novels more than almost anything else I can think of.
Thursday, October 18, 2012
Catch-up
Looking at my calendar is inducing a feeling of mild awe at the amount of stuff I have to do in the next couple weeks (i.e. before I leave Nov. 1 for some days with B.)! It includes recreational elements as well as just work (Tough Mudder this Saturday, tickets for the Adès Tempest at the Met next Saturday evening, a day-long meditation retreat the following day) but there is no doubt that the season of letters of recommendation is upon us....
Heard a fantastically good talk at lunchtime today at the Society of Fellows. David Russell on George Eliot's rage - excellent stuff!
Tyler Hamilton's book really is unbelievably gripping. I couldn't put it down. Strongly recommended.
Miscellaneous other links:
Swim to work!
Cupcake aversion therapy?
Heard a fantastically good talk at lunchtime today at the Society of Fellows. David Russell on George Eliot's rage - excellent stuff!
Tyler Hamilton's book really is unbelievably gripping. I couldn't put it down. Strongly recommended.
Miscellaneous other links:
Swim to work!
Cupcake aversion therapy?
Friday, September 28, 2012
Closing tabs
A conversation with Randall Munroe, including a fascinating description of the origin of the What If? series (via GeekPress):
Miniature car models photographed (via Things).
Uganda's Royal Ascot goat races! (Via Khakasa.)
It actually started with a class. MIT has a weekend program where volunteers can teach classes to groups of high school students on any subject you want. I had a friend who was doing it, and it sounded really cool -- so I signed up to teach a class about energy, which I always thought was interesting, but which is a slippery idea to define. I was really getting into the nuts and bolts of what energy is, and it was a lot of fun -- but when I started to get into the normal lecture part of the class, it felt kind of dry, and I could tell the kids weren't super into it. And then we got to a part where I brought up an example -- I think it was Yoda in Star Wars. And they got really excited about that. And then they started throwing out more questions about different movies -- like, "When the Eye of Sauron exploded at the end of The Lord of the Rings, and knocked people over from this far away, can we tell how big a blast that was?" They got really excited about that -- and I had a lot more fun doing it than I did just teaching the regular material.
So I spent the second half of the class just solving problems like that in front of them. And then I was like, "That was really fun. I want to keep doing it."A journey into the opium underworld.
Miniature car models photographed (via Things).
Uganda's Royal Ascot goat races! (Via Khakasa.)
Wednesday, May 30, 2012
Closing tabs
Very glad to be back home. I was in Ottawa for a slightly quixotic enterprise, but really I must get back to work; I have several pressing things I need to finish, including the wretched Austen essay, which I didn't have time to tackle again before I left early Saturday morning(it is actually much more relaxing for me to work than to do almost anything else!). This gives a bit of the flavor of our day on Sunday.
Closing tabs:
"Filling udders with gas is becoming a serious problem." (Via Tyler Cowen and Brent.)
One iguana's lucky break.
3-D jello sculpture! (Apparently it's a thing.)
Closing tabs:
"Filling udders with gas is becoming a serious problem." (Via Tyler Cowen and Brent.)
One iguana's lucky break.
3-D jello sculpture! (Apparently it's a thing.)
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