Checking in

I am determined to reclaim the blog as a place where at the very least I log what I've been reading! Action prompted in particular by trying to download content from Facebook (I am just getting started on a short piece called "Reading Gibbon in the Time of Trump" and want to see which Decline and Fall bits I posted on which days - one of the ways in which Facebook is much inferior to the old-fashioned blog!) and remembering why it would have been better if I'd just posted those bits here. Also thinking quite a bit, around and after the two-year anniversary of my father's death, on the fact that it may not just have been social media that leached the energy away from my blogging vim; it was also very much the nature of my relationship with my father that we shared links and talked about bits we'd seen online, and my avoidance of the FT weekend magazine for instance seems part and parcel of the same phenomenon. Also, keeping so many tabs open is causing Chrome to fail - a tech guy at work showed me a good tool that lets you save a whole host of open tabs onto a single page of links, but really clearing tabs by posting what interested me would be a smarter way....

Personal blogging

In an effort to reclaim the territory of the blog back from social media....

They are jackhammering up the street in front of my apartment. The noise is such that the two cats are agitated; it was so loud downstairs that a little boy with his father was afraid to leave the building!

I am up so early only because I had an 8am tooth-cleaning appointment; you have to make them so far in advance, it's the only safe time when I really know I won't have a conflict. It's a beautiful day, upper 50s and sunny; lying in the chair, though, gave me a view of my sandals that made me acknowledge that they have lived their last days - the foam footbeds are completely torn out in chunks - no longer shoes of respectability - I have thrown them in the trash....

Closing a few tabs:

A nice piece at the Guardian about Nadia Sirota and her Meet the Composers show.

Anne Fernald on Goodnight, Moon and modernism. (Mush!)

Evaluations

Via Tyler Cowen, Yelp for people (the article is by Caitlin Dewey for the Washington Post).

Dill battalions

Ah, I continue to fight the battle against the easy allure of Facebook and the way it saps blogging vim - it has been compounded, on this trip, by the fact that my lovely brand new computer (it arrived the day before I left, I hastily met with an IT guy who set it up for me), which is in every way great and weighs about one-quarter what my previous laptop did, has a non-functional battery (CURSE OF DELL). Given travels in places needing plug adaptors, and often a system where power shuts down in the room when you take the keycard out of the slot by the door, I have avoided having it plugged in at all, as it goes into automatic shutdown if it's in sleep mode and the power goes off. The iPad is much more suited to quick Twitter/Facebook posts than to more elaborate ones, further compounding the unwanted transition....

(Will pursue battery replacement as soon as I'm home properly on Monday.)

So lots of blogging to catch up on. For now, just one funny piece that COULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN BY ME (via Bronwyn). One of the things that's very nice about food in Iceland versus other Scandinavian countries and Russia/Eastern Europe: I have not encountered a single bit of dill, it is chives for the most part instead which is a much more humane alternative! My aversion to dill knows no bounds....

Anyway, Shaun Walker at the Guardian on the "spindly menace" of dill in Russia:

It’s one thing when dill blankets traditional Russian dishes like the emptied contents of a lawnmower bag, but quite another when it shows up on pizza, sushi, quiches: occasions when you naively hadn’t even thought to request a dill-free meal from the waiter. It is a sabotage apparently borne of a grotesque, atavistic culinary longing, like some deranged Brit on the Costa del Sol lacing a paella with brown sauce.

More anon - we are off shortly (it is our last full day in Iceland) to soak in the Blue Lagoon....

Dept. of desirable but wrong things

Tweet an Oreo....

Branch line problems

Facebook status updates of famous literary characters.

Closing tabs

Last weekend's conference was worthwhile but exhausting.  With regret but fortitude I announce that I have decided that I must attend the national ASECS conference every year as part of my core responsibilities: fortunately the coming three years will be easier to get to as well as probably rather less expensive (Cleveland, colonial Williamsburg and Minneapolis).  Had some great conversations with friends old and new, with older people I consider wise and with current and former students; meal venues included here and here.

The trip back was horrible and took fourteen hours door to door due to various delays; I got slightly lost in the Dallas airport (the SkyTrain shut down, and it's not well marked for pedestrians) and had significant anxiety that I was not going to make even the later flight I'd been rebooked on due to the initial delay, though all was fine in the end.  My bag turned out to have been on the earlier plane, but before I realized that, I spent a discouraged spell watching an increasingly empty carousel go round at LaGuardia: the sensation of relief when I realized my bag was actually in the luggage room is indescribable.

Closing tabs:

Norwegian larp!

How George Takei conquered Facebook.

The history of the O-U-I-J-A board.

The case for sleeping pills?

And last but not least, a highly archeological cake situation....

Thursday linkage

Settling back into a routine is very good!

A few links of interest:

Maxine offers a useful list of her Twitter likes and dislikes. (I cannot get into the Twitter vibe, it seems; I've had an account for a while, and I look over there occasionally to see if anything has changed that might make it more appealing to me, but it gives me an irritable feeling of being peppered with unwanted pellets of information and really I mostly steer clear of it. For some reason Facebook seems much more innocuous, though I do appreciate Twitter's utility for those who are actually following news closely as it develops - that is not me, though!)

A fascinating piece, of particular interest to novelists and would-be novelists, by Alex Shakar at the Millions about getting a 300K novel advance in 2000, then having his book come out just after 9/11. Interesting glimpse of Bill Clegg there... (Link courtesy of Sarah Weinman, who by the way has a grasp of Twitter's potential and best Twitter practice that is matched by few of the other users I "follow" there!)

Also at The Millions: highly anticipated books of upcoming months. Lots of extremely desirable stuff there: I think I am especially excited to get my hands on the next installments from George R. R. Martin and Lev Grossman, Colson Whitehead's zombie novel (Colson is also a gifted Tweeter!), new novels from Helen DeWitt and Lauren Groff, Neal Stephenson's Readme and Haruki Murakami's 1Q84, but the biggie there for me is Alan Hollinghurst's new novel, which is already out in England and which I think I will go ahead and order from the Book Depository (free international shipping, to the Cayman Islands as well as the US...).

And after I do one piece of work that cannot be postponed (overdue reader's report on a journal article), I am going to get back down to work on BOMH...

Blackberry as signalling device

At Wired Magazine, Sudhir Venkatesh on the new economics of prostitution in gentrified New York. (Via Bwoglines.)

Production of quota

c. 2,000 words, for a total of 27,042 words.

An aside: it seems clear to me that the blog is a medium curiously well suited to my modes and interests (I include Tumblr-type things under the category of blogs, but not Twitter, which I cannot find any way of feeling enthusiastic about, either as consumer or producer).

I quite like Facebook, though I wouldn't miss it much if it suddenly went away again; but the thing I most regret about it is that it seems clear that most people strongly prefer a social media-Facebook-type format to blogging - whereas to my mind, the way a blog lets you get to know its author over time is uniquely appealing, and the expressive possibilities of blogging also seem unmatched by anything Facebook and its ilk have to offer.

This is a roundabout way of saying that I have two good links to offer that come by way of Facebook status updates: a vegetable orchestra (courtesy of Charles Flatt); the eclipse in Biblical and Mesopotamian thought (courtesy of Seth Sanders). Alas, I fear it is the end of an era...