NYC 36

Mush!

Slept 9pm-4:30am, huddled in bed a while reading coronanews on my phone, did finally get up once it was getting light. Once the teaching semester is done, I have to start going to bed later again - 4:30 is TOO EARLY TO GET UP! Eating a bowl of mush now, will go out for an exercise walk momentarily, and then I've got yoga with Susanne at 9! And a day with NOT A SINGLE ZOOM APPOINTMENT - I have several work things I've been unable to make headway on because they aren't directly related to teaching and the day-to-day needs of students and others are using up all of my energy and attention, but they are not intrinsically offputting tasks and I am committed to making significant progress on at least one of them today! (A report on the theory and practice of how course releases are granted for individual service to the department and to Arts & Sciences and the university more generally.) We have a subcommittee meeting tomorrow so yes, it helps that there's a hard deadline, and once I get this one further forward, I can turn my attention to the Writing Studies Certification proposal that is my other important Thing....

NYC day 16

I've had a lot of nights these past weeks where I slept a first shift (after a lifetime of insomnia I have finally found the perfect safe sleep drug for me, trazodone - it actually makes me for the first time ever feel sleepy at bedtime when I am tired, this is a miracle for which I am now especially grateful as otherwise I'd be cycling round a clock of 4am, 5am, 6am times after tossing hotly in bed for many hours), woke for a couple hours and read news online, then slept for another few hours in the very early morning. Last night I was actually able to sleep for 8 hours more or less continuously - I got through the middle of the night pee break without full wakefulness. Of course, those eight hours were 8pm to 4am. It will be good as dawn gets earlier and I can run outside super-early!

A surprisingly good day today, with lots of work things that were stimulating and fully immersive. Some email about rescheduling as online the book events that have had to be canceled, that's good (I am due a real Duchess of Angus post soon). Gonna have a drink now, read a novel on the couch and go to bed at 7:30!

(Even the idea of being able to take this picture and show MORE THINGS CHECKED OFF THE LIST did not get me to complete any of the more manageable tasks that remain undone. It will have to be tomorrow....)

A good recent light reading recommendation: a pair of haunting crime novels by the excellent Marcie Rendon. The first is Murder on the Red River, the sequel is Girls Gone Missing. They are pretty certainly the best new(ish) crime fiction I've read so far this year, with both writing and setting far above the usual and remarkable in kind as well as quality - highly recommended.

NYC day 12-13

I taught Decline and Fall chapters 15 and 16 yesterday (Gibbon's devastating and possibly ill-placed attack on miracles!) and the chunk of Clarissa that includes the mad papers today. Both classes went well, I think (really it is for students to say, not me!). I am very lucky to be teaching small humanities seminars this semester rather than the big introduction to the major lecture I did in the fall - I mean, I'd still basically be, like, "Everybody passes!," but the logistics of trying to look out for students and keep them engaged would have been far more overwhelming.

Monday morning is my Policy and Planning Committee meeting, we were already in a budget crisis before coronavirus and now things are looking grim indeed. Two hours of that and then two hours of teaching in the afternoon left me so tired yesterday evening that I went to bed around 8:30, slept maybe 9-3, then woke wide awake and took advantage of feeling adequately rested to respond to some student emails that I've for some reason been having a very hard time getting to. Did get a couple hours more sleep maybe 5-8, then a mad scramble in the am to get my materials ready for class. I had hoped it would be easy to set up with iPad and laptop as dual monitors, it was not self-evident to the help desk guy either (but they are outsourcing now). Have ordered a monitor that is supposed to arrive Saturday - I can work with what I've got, but if I'm using screen share in a big way it would be helpful to have all the students' faces in gallery view on a separate screen. Toggling today was less clumsy than yesterday but still felt somewhat hapless!

Comfort reading recs #6 and 7: two series that concern the Church of England! The first of course is Trollope's Chronicles of Barsetshire (a must-read for academics in particular, since it seems that the 19th-century cathedral is basically the twin of the 21st-century university - even the character types are the same....). Second, Susan Howatch's Starbridge series and the spinoff St. Benet's books. These are books I can reread over and over....

Closing tabs

The new semester has hit me on the head like a gigantic hammer! It's all good, I am thoroughly enjoying it (and particularly excited about teaching Clarissa again), but three of the last four days have featured me collapsing into bed mid-afternoon for a three-hour nap as I try and make the transition back from independently and naturally nocturnal to sociably diurnal - let us hope I can soon compound the transition....

Too lazy to log the light reading and associated links, but here are some tabs to close:

Owl cafes.

Viktor Shklovsky, hilo hero.

Debbie Chachra on why she is not a "maker."

Charles Simic remembers Mark Strand. I didn't know Mark well at all, though we taught in the same department and I used to see him regularly midmorning at Bodystrength Fitness on 106th St., where we both worked out for a stretch of several years. I did have one memorable night out with Mark and his then partner (my colleague and friend) Tricia Dailey: they had an extra ticket to what this (Mary Louise Parker, a great fan of Mark's poetry, was starring in the revival of Craig Lucas's play and had comped him tickets). We said hello to her afterwards and then transferred ourselves for a glorious meal and copious alcohol at the Russian Samovar, also mostly on the house due to Mark's longstanding close friendship with the late lamented Joseph Brodsky. A glimpse into another world!

Finally, the best clip I have seen this week on the internet: how hamsters fit so much in their cheeks.