Katrina

Nothing much to say, only it's been much on my mind these past few weeks. The event itself is especially clearly marked in my mind because it was the week I moved into a rather desolate and lonely sublet year in Cambridge, Massachusetts; I felt unanchored there, but also shamed by the much more profound exodus I saw on television.

(That was the only year in adulthood that I've lived with broadcast television, and I am sure the scenes are more strongly seared onto my mind for that reason; I think I stayed calmer than many, during the months after 9/11, by dint of consuming news only through newspapers and a dial-up internet connection.)

Just sharing a few pieces (old and new) by friends more immediately affected than I was:

Alan Chin was on site taking photographs.

Phillip Dyess-Nugent wrote this piece about the friend we both lost in Katrina's long aftermath.

And a lovely song I can't listen to without tears flooding into my eyes, the inimitable Pete Sturman's "Wasn't Plannin' on Leavin'" - you can hear it at that link, don't miss it....

No-style style

David Gordon remembers Elmore Leonard.

(B. and I just finished watching the most recent season of Justified - I really love it, I think I have to go and get the Raylan books right now. Also if you are not reading David's novels, you should be - they are The Serialist and Mystery Girl - the latter just published by Ed Park under the Little A imprint. Honored to share a publisher with David, truly!)

Too many deaths this week of people I cared about. I haven't mentioned it here, but I was fairly shattered to learn at the end of last week that my friend and teacher Gerald Moore had just died. Gerald was the inspirational coach behind the Beast boot camp, which I did off and on over the last couple years at Chelsea Piers. I loved working with him and was looking forward to taking some more of his classes once IMWI was over. He had a heart attack last year and I knew he had been having ongoing health problems, but he was only in his fifties, and leaves a young family and a lot of bereft students!

Here is the picture of Gerald with his proteges before we did the Tough Mudder race last fall - we were wearing T-shirts with Gerald's picture on them, I must dig mine out when I get home....

Saturday update

I was grumpy this morning when my exercise plans were thwarted, but have just had a very productive hour and a half session of brainstorming (it is a ridiculous word, but descriptive) and writing bits of new draft at the library.  A lot of work to be done between now and Thursday, but I think it will work.

Miscellaneous light reading: Christa Faust's highly enjoyable Supernatural tie-in novel, Coyote's Kiss.  I wonder how much this sort of work pays?  Really I have no room for it in my life, but I would love to write a Fringe tie-in.  I guess that is why people write fanfic, for free...

In other television-related news, I continue to spend an inordinate number of hours watching House (currently near end of Season 7).  I am not sure why it's so addictive, but I'm reminded of how when I first read Master and Commander, I then couldn't rest until I had read all of Patrick O'Brian's novels about Aubrey and Maturin (I would walk in to Cross-Campus Library in New Haven and check out another four or five and race home to devour and return - I think I read all twenty over the course of about five days, which is slightly grotesque).  The Aubrey-Maturin friendship is built on the same sort of chassis as the House-Wilson relationship, even if the latter is more obviously Holmesian.

Closing tabs

Jay Winter on Paul Fussell.

Susanna Rustin interviews Adam Phillips for the Guardian.

The FT has a very good lunch with George R. R. Martin (site registration required).

"It was as if a light had been Nookd" (courtesy of Anjuli and Alice).

I've been trying to stay off the computer due to what is probably a slightly pulled back muscle, but it's somewhat better this morning.  It is fishy that my back is sore enough to prevent me writing my overdue Austen essay but still permits a couple of hours of exercise every day!  Really I was just working too hard from January through May and am now having the traditional post-semester willpower collapse - having now slightly bored myself by watching the first two seasons of House as if under a compulsion, it is now preferable to write the essay, which I am hoping I might finish by the end of the day tomorrow so that I can get back to The Magic Circle for one more round of revision.

Update

Well, this has been about the grumpiest week in living memory.  I had a sinus infection and bronchitis during a week I'd hoped to spend doing large amounts of exercise; I was also hoping for clarity to emerge on a piece of work stuff that instead turns out to be enmired even more deeply in murkiness than I had hitherto guessed (in this case murkiness leads me to believe the outcome will ultimately be negative, and in fact the only thing to do now is completely detach from it emotionally!).  Foul mood only slightly dispelled by regular yoga.  Woke up at 4 this morning and couldn't get back to sleep at all; every few minutes, strove to unclench my extremely tightly clamped jaw muscles, but to little avail!

Flying back to NYC later this afternoon and feel that I have resoundingly squandered my week here; I dimly remember that I spent the weekend in a state of elation due to manuscript completion, but can no longer at all recapture the feeling....

Read a bunch of good crime fiction: Asa Larsson's Until Thy Wrath be Past; John Rector's Already Gone; Jorn Lier Horst's Dregs; and Johan Theorin's Echoes from the Dead.  All recommended, but the Theorin is particularly good, and I have downloaded his other book to read at the airport.

Also viewed: Hunger Games movie (in the theater, with popcorn!); The Lives of Others, which caused me to revisit this interesting piece by Timothy Garton Ash; the remaining portion of season 3 of The Mentalist, which seemed to me to go downhill in the last episodes (this show will not be to everyone's taste - I know my mother finds it unwatchable! - but I have on the whole enjoyed it); and several episodes of a very funny and charming program that B. dug out last night to distract me out of my bad mood, Wonderfalls.

I trust I will soon regain my equilibrium.  (Kill or cure: starting tomorrow and ending next Saturday, four massive sessions of Wagner at the Met!)

Retributional geology

So tired I can't do anything!  And have made no progress today on the couple of work things that stand between me and book revision.  But I just finished reading an amazingly good novel, Vanessa Veselka's Zazen: Richard Nash sent it to me some months ago, but somehow I never opened up the file on my Kindle.  Can't find the link now, but I must have seen it mentioned this past week on some indie-best-of-end-of-year list that described it as being set in a parallel universe; since I am still in a painful condition of wanting nothing more than to submerge myself in infinite as yet unaired and in some cases unmade episodes of Fringe, this seemed like a godsend.  I loved it.