Mescal and sympathy

Oliver Sacks has luxuriant eyelashes. (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)

My favorite bit of the exchange:

How often do you prepare your own meals?

Once or twice — in my lifetime. Usually I subsist on cereal, sardines, and tabouli. Sometimes I have food delivered by Tea & Sympathy, or my local sushi place.

Have been very busy this week. Insane amounts to get done in next 10 days or so. That said, have found time for minor extracurriculars: an odd play at the Flea (weirdly chronologically unanchored play about nuns and priests leaving their orders, with disconcerting moment in which a cellphone appears & thoroughly disrupts peculiarly timeless ambience - why weren't they talking about the molestation scandals and the difficulty of recruiting high-quality young nuns if it really is set in the present day as opposed to the 1960s?), a fun show by Titus Andronicus courtesy of my good friend and triathlon training partner Lauren whose sister Amy is in the band and was kind enough to put us on the guest list. Tomorrow I am going to see Nico's thing at St. Ann's Warehouse. New York life: very stimulating, very tiring....

The great game

It is far from the usual Light Reading fare, but I cannot resist the opportunity to link to two major pieces published this week by my dissertation advisor David Bromwich. In general, I have been extraordinarily lucky in my teachers; but perhaps I learned more from David Bromwich than from almost anybody else, not just in terms of an abiding obsession with the writings of Edmund Burke but by virtue of a language for talking about the connections between thought and intellectual temperament and character that I rely upon very heavily in daily life.

The first is at the LRB, on Obama's delusion ("His way of thinking is close to the spirit of that Enlightenment reasonableness which supposes a right course of action can never be described so as to be understood and not assented to"). The second is this NYRB review of Taylor Branch's Clinton book:

Maybe Clinton in his final year in office spoke more easily; in any case, the narrative has a sharper focus now, and the anecdotes fall into a characteristic rhythm:

The president was eating a bowl of bran in January. He said Bob Squier, the campaign consultant, never had a colonoscopy in his life. They diagnosed him six months ago, and he died today at sixty-five. The end comes on quickly if you don't catch it early. "I always eat bran when a friend dies of colon cancer," Clinton said.

Bottom's dream

About the play, the less said the better, but we certainly had a very good dinner afterwards at Bottega del Vino. It inadvertently (though not randomly, because clearly I am very fond of cheese) turned into the Delicious Dinner of Cheese - I had beef carpaccio (arugola, parmesan) to start, then another appetizer (a daily special of roasted peppers stuffed with mozzarella and anchovies and served on a bed of julienned baby vegetables and greens) and then what is pretty certainly the most delicious tiramisu I ever had in my life (mascarpone)...

(It is a silly question, but I have a habit of asking the waiter what is the most delicious dessert - sometimes they hem and haw, but in this case the fellow was very certain that it was the tiramisu, and I feel sure he was correct!)

Random light reading round the edges (and I am finally as of today back on what I consider a really proper work-productivity schedule, so though I will need to make every day count, I feel slightly calmer about the prospect of making my end-of-month novel-revision deadline): Minette Walters' The Chameleon's Shadow, S. J. Rozan's In This Rain, Laura Lippman's To the Power of Three, Tess Gerritsen's The Keepsake (in case it is not clear, I hit the so-called "new books" shelf at the public library - it is not a well-stocked branch, but so long as I don't go there too often, I am able to pluck hardcover crime fiction happily from the shelf), Malcolm Gladwell's Outliers, Monica Seles' Getting a Grip. (The last is very good, by the way, whether or not you have a serious interest in tennis.)

Orange Gatorade

Like something from a Dick Francis novel.

Perpetual Motion Food

From James McGurn, On Your Bicycle: An illustrated history of cycling (highly recommended):

Alfred Jarry, best known for his chaotic Ubu Roi plays, was the most committed cyclist of them all. He described the bicycle as an ‘external skeleton’ which allowed mankind to outstrip the processes of biological evolution. Jarry was an outrageous eccentric and a wild cyclist. He was no Bois de Boulogne buff, and counterpointed the public obsession with Bois fashions by wearing at all times the tight and gaudy costume of a professional racing cyclist. Jarry caused a stir by wearing it at the funeral of the revered poet Mallarmé, after having followed the cortège on his bicycle. He did make one concession at the funeral of his close friend Marcel Schwob: he pulled his trouser bottoms out of his stockings. He habitually rode round Paris with two revolvers tucked in his belt and a carbine across his shoulder. Some sources say he fired off shots to warn of his approach. It is known for certain, however, that in his maturer days he fixed a large bell from a tram car onto his handlebars. At night he kept his bicycle at the foot of his bed and cycled round the room on it during the day. He died in poverty at the age of thirty-four as a result of malnutrition and absinthe abuse. His literary works include a scandalous magazine article, ‘The Passion considered as an Uphill Bicycle Race’, and also ‘The Ten Thousand Mile Race’, in which the five-man crew of a multicycle, bound by rods to their machine, hurtle across Europe and Asia in a grotesque race against an express train. Paced by jet cars and flying machines they reach speeds of 300 kilometres an hour thanks to their diet of Perpetual Motion Food, a volatile mixture of alcohol and strychnine. One of the riders dies of an overdose whilst in the saddle, an event hardly noticed in the farcical pandemonium of technology.