Closing tabs

I'm slammed with work just now: lingering post-semester/post-travel fatigue and lots of exercise are at odds, alas, with the monstrous productivity I otherwise desire!

Two dissertation defenses this week, and a host of other student meetings. I have also rashly agreed to write four tenure letters this summer - it was three, the first two I automatically say yes to as a matter of principle and the third is someone I know quite well and would like to help in any way possible. But then I couldn't say no to the fourth, either - though I now have declined #5, as that is genuinely too many.

Happy to be back at home with cats, but a little dismayed at how fast the summer is slipping through my fingers - hopefully if I can really have a productive week, I will get myself back in a good work groove?

Closing tabs:

Tiny Dubliners. (Via Becca, if memory serves, though that tab has been open for a while now....)

And an additional bit of Joyceana from Anthony Burgess (via Andrew Biswell).

Enjoyed The Gloaming at LPR last night.

Have had some very decent light reading (airports, planes, subways, etc.): a teaser for Taylor Stevens' forthcoming Vanessa Michael Munroe novel, The Vessel (this is the only other series I know of that approximates the pleasures of Lee Child's Jack Reacher books - I really like 'em); Stephen King, The Shining and Doctor Sleep (will save thoughts on this for elsewhere, as I am blogging this week to celebrate publication of the style book at the Columbia UP site and still have four more posts to write!); Rachel Howzell Hall, Land of Shadows (unfair of me to single this out, there's really nothing wrong with it other than a pervasive air of unreality, but I am now officially swearing off the police procedural for a while, I'm sick of 'em!); and James S. A. Corey, Cibola Burn. I loved it - this series is amazing, though I do wish that they would stop having so many different characters have the gift for MacGyveresque engineering problem-solving - it is plausible that one or two would have that sort of imagination, but once you bestow it on everyone, the whole thing starts to seem remarkably fictitious!

Closing tabs

“A body-temperature wallet is a petri dish.” (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Also: the private lives of public bathrooms (via I.H.D.).

Snails.

Upcoming: Little Women/Girls mashup - see it while you can!

Good but busy week upcoming (still have slightly implausible amount of work to do between now and Wednesday morning): a dissertation defense, an oral exam, the regular weekly meetings and seminars, but also tickets to various friends' artistic enterprises (this, this and this).

I am sad to have finished all three books of Jane Gardam's Old Filth trilogy! And surprised I didn't read them sooner. They are perhaps not quite as much to my taste as Susan Howatch's Church of England books (I prefer a novel's span to be defined by a period of crisis rather than the entirety of the character's life), but they are very good indeed - I will certainly read her other ones. Have been reading a lot of top-secret books for the Tenure Review Advisory Committee - I suppose at the end of the year I could make a few recommendations, as committee membership is public and so is fact of tenuring, once it's gone through final stages of approval.

Highlight of the week: IMAX 3D Island of Lemurs: Madagascar! Only was able to stay for the first two segments of The Mysteries on Thursday evening (I got home at 11pm and still had a couple more hours of work I had to do before Friday morning meetings, really couldn't face getting home a couple hours later than that with remaining work ditto!); not sure it is quite as transcendent as the Sophocles marathon a few years ago (there is unevenness in the switch from one playwright to another, also too many of them want to make the same sophomoric jokes), but many great aspects, and I definitely recommend it.

Balancing

Via Kirsten Anderson, a very good piece by Radhika Nagpal about how to balance family and life in general with the obligations of a tenure-track job at a research university.

The view from the trenches

Undoubted air of faculty glumness in Philosophy Hall today, the first day of classes! 

Those of you who are my 'friends' on Facebook will have already heard me bemoan the fact that Village Copier does not seem to have kept the original master for my History of the Novel I course reader, and as I seem to have had call to say frequently in recent weeks, desperate situations call for desperate remedies: the only thing to do was clean out my office....

(I got tenure two and a half years ago, and it was thus in the nature of life timelines that I was given a new office and a new apartment within a matter of weeks.  I devoted all my attention to packing and settling in at the new apartment, which is underfurnished but tidy; the new office, on the other hand, pretty much stayed in boxes, so this massive unpacking and cleaning is overdue by at least two years.)

I haven't found the missing master - I think they really must have thrown it away as they said - but I have found the marked-up old lecture notes and two copies of the bound course reader, one with teaching notes in it and one clean one that I can disassemble and use to scan a new master.  I think I may experiment for the first time this semester with providing critical readings online rather than in xeroxed form: for a seminar, I hold to the old-school method, because I want students to have a physical copy of the readings in class to look at while we discuss them and because student print quotas and notions of ecological soundness do not encourage generous use of paper, but I think in the lecture course I can afford to try it the other way.

(Have thrown away three or four contractor's bags of paper, mostly printouts of PDFs from ECCO and clean and marked-up drafts of my last academic book.  NB I am in need of another massive project like that one: something that will make me scan and engulf a huge new body of material that I'm not already acquainted with.  My most recent two book projects - style, BOMH - are both relatively small-scale, something that has disadvantages as well as benefits.  Also NB if you leave papers in boxes for a pretty long time, they become very easy to throw away once they are opened back up again....)

Not much to report otherwise.  Still ploughing through the novels of George R. R. Martin, which really are not enough to my taste (too much lopping and cropping, stylistic infelicities, switching back and forth between multiple viewpoint characters frustrating - I would rather have a whole novel following one character, then a whole novel following the other) but which are making the time pass.