Closing tabs

Abandoned swimming pools.

At the TLS, Jonathan Bate on two new Keats biographies, with interesting more general thoughts on the literary biographer's dilemma.

Emily DePrang on what happened to one man put on Texas's sex offender registry for an offence committed when he was twelve. (And sequel.)

How to create cartoons.

Honey laundering. (Courtesy of B.)

Swim lit

From Leanne Shapton's Swimming Studies:

When I read in an obituary that Cy Twombly's father was a prominent swim coach, I start to see Twombly's paintings as thrashing laps, as polygraphs, as pulse rate.  I wonder if I'm drawn to his work because he might have had an athletic habit he metabolized then rejected.

Devoured Shapton's book this morning in a single sitting (well, actually two sittings, with a short walk from one location to another); it is odd, off-kilter, but in a way that's suited to its subject, loss and the relationship between past and present selves.  NB I made a conscious decision to buy it on Kindle, as I wanted to read it as soon as I could lay my hands on it and I knew I'd be out of the country on pub date, but this is one to buy in hard copy, as the watercolors (and appealing photographs of bathing suit collection!) do not show up well on the small gray screen of the Kindle.  I had a pang that I won't be able to put this book into Wendy's hands, as the Nepean Sportsplex makes several appearances, including in a watercolor!

I am somewhat off-kilter myself today, as the date for receiving editorial comments has been pushed back, and with it my final deadline; I was really hoping to be well and truly done with the wretched creature by the end of the day tomorrow, but it is no longer an option!  Unsettled without proper work tasks.  Haven't brought real other work with me, barring one or two minor things (i.e. reader's report on a journal article or two), as I am still waiting for second report on the style book and the other article I'm working on notionally this month needs a lot of library books that I didn't want to cart down here on spec.  Not really in situation for 'vacation,' though, either, with this hanging over me, and curiously slow internet connection today is further contributing to the feeling that I am on the verge of exploding.  Exercise and projected Middlemarch reread will have to tide me over....

Read the other night: Sheila Heti's intriguing and often comically Socratic How Should a Person Be?; it is a sort of companion piece to The Chairs Are Where The People Go, which I think I found more intensely engaging.  Both volumes are recommended on the grounds that they are not really like anything else and they will stick with you.

Bonus links: Roland Barthes on Cy Twombly; my top five book recommendations for the swim-obsessed.

Ombromanie!

The only reason I got a mini-subscription to BAM this spring was that I desperately wanted to see Derek Jacobi in Lear, and you had to buy tickets to four different shows in order to qualify for the special early advance-purchase set-up that would ensure I got the tickets to the one show I really desperately wanted; I picked the others more or less at random, without much investigation, and the thing that sold me on The Nightingale and Other Short Fables was just the basic attractions of Stravinsky and Hans Christian Andersen plus the mention, in the brief description on the website, of a twelve-thousand-gallon on-stage water-tank. (I am a sucker for aquatic spectacle!)

When I read the Times review, though, I knew that it really was going to be something special, and in fact I would have to say it is one of the most absurdly lovely things I have ever experienced. The loveliness of the voice of the Nightingale (it is the most beautiful music, absolutely otherworldly and perfectly performed in this case too) plus the extraordinary fluttery nightingale puppet, the massive skeleton that rises out of and really directly from the emperor's bed, dozens of other details - everything about it was utterly delightful!

My absolute favorite bit of all was the "Berceuses du chat" in the first half - they are doing the most extraordinary things with shadow puppetry! All I can say that if I were a young person with even the most moderate professional interest in this sort of thing, I would buy a plane ticket and show up on the doorstep of Philippe Beau and just stay there until he promised to teach me everything he knew....

Postscript

Swimming pool of tininess!

Will I never learn?!?...

The pro-zoo camp

Death by fox: penguin cover-up at the London Zoo.

I write from the Hyatt Regency Hotel in Buffalo, New York; I am about to go and register for my conference (I am speaking on Saturday afternoon on Sterne and novelistic conventions for the notation of human gesture) and then investigate the purported rooftop swimming pool...