Good enough to eat

Unseemly gloating, but - I just got the most amazing email from my editor at Columbia. This is going to be the cover for the style book! (Not yet available for pre-order, but it will be soon.) It is certainly the best book I have written to date, and I am pretty certain it is the best cover too....

Dental woes ongoing

Nothing calamitous, but still very painful!  I had to call the endodontist's office yesterday and get a prescription for amoxycillin, which is clearly a miracle drug and did wonders overnight (after I waited for two hours at the useless local pharmacy, missing all but the final hour of last night's meditation class); but at my appointment today, it was still infected enough that the doctor just recleaned it and put in another temporary filling.  By the end of the session, I had reason to contemplate the evocative nature of the cliche touched a nerve, and it is still very painfully jangling, although knowing that the antibiotics are working makes the pain considerably easier to tolerate than yesterday's throbbing.  I am away for the next two weeks, so we will let it settle and hope for the best (no chewing on that side obviously); I have another appointment on August 27, at which point we will see whether the permanent filling can go in or whether the infection is still unresolved.

But really I should not be complaining, as thanks to the kindness of Maggie Griffin I have in my possession the single thing most calculated to relieve Davidsonian woes, dental or otherwise!  Yep - it's the new Jack Reacher novel...

On procrastination

I should have fallen out of bed this morning, donned cold-weather running garb and headed straight out the door for my long run, but in truth it just seemed too gray and chilly to bear! I know I warm up quickly once I'm out there, but temperatures in the 20s do give me a problem with asthma, so it was not wholly rationalization that I decided coffee and breakfast and work would be preferable, and that I would run once it had warmed up a bit...

The crucial thing for me to have a productive morning is not to while away the hours on the internet, so I withstood the temptation to turn on the computer and instead had a morning of massive and useful productivity while lying flat on my belly in bed (I find the horizontal position more conducive to thinking than any other): I finished marking the assignments from my drama students (good thing too, as I also have a full set of papers from my other class to comment on for tomorrow), I finished reading a very good book (I have a 1600-word review of it and one other - finished that one earlier in the week - due on Friday), I finished rereading Dryden's All for Love and wrote my lecture for tomorrow.

Still have to reread The Sorrows of Young Werther and deal with that other set of essays, but I will have no time later for grading later as I am meeting my Texas brother and his family at a Brooklyn beer garden mid-afternoon. I can read Goethe on the subway, but an early morning of frenetic work will be in order tomorrow, I think, because the most important thing now is to get out the door for that run before any more minutes spill through my fingers...

The sigh of relief

I started writing the little book on style the last week in February in the grip of a delusion that it might only take me about three weeks; it is based on lectures I wrote (two a week) over the fall semester, and in another sense it's based on a lifetime of reading, so that I felt the hard part was already behind me.

In fact it took longer than three weeks, more like seven, but I have just sent the full manuscript to my agent: it is just under 40,000 words, about a hundred and fifty pages, with a grand total of 31 footnotes.

I really like this little book!

Now it is just a question of waiting to see what happens next, which is not really my forte, but I can get started in the meantime on the ABCs of the novel (formerly known as bread-and-butter of the novel) and also have some seriously grand triathlon training (I'm doing a half-ironman in May and - amazingly - my first full Ironman race in Wisconsin in September).

(It is so crazy, really I am on a mission to stop doing things so much as if under a compulsion, but I feel that by getting this little book done relatively early during my year of sabbatical I have bought myself a bit more breathing space than I usually have - it would be good, though, if I could write most of the other book this year too - I do not know why it should be so much so that I only feel OK when I am madly writing, planning, training, racing, but it is certainly strongly the case...)

"Extremely Verbal After Midnight"

A big profile in the Independent of my cousin George Pringle! You can download her brand new album Salon des Refusés from Amazon...

A thousand words

It goes against the grain with me to say it, but sometimes the picture really does get the point across more effectively...

(I think I am almost the only person in the world who still uses Pine - now Alpine - as my main e-mail program. I love it - it makes the keyboard feel typewriterly and like my utterly perfect writerly prosthesis - no interference, minimal interface of any kind - and fast!)

Symptomatic of the stress and chaos of the last few years was a disastrous accumulation of e-mails in my inbox.

It has dawned on me over the last few weeks, though, that there are honestly only a couple things I really genuinely still need to sort out to make life pretty much exactly as I want it to be.

(Well, there always are taxes, and various things of that sort - and library books that need renewing! - but this we cannot really do anything about other than respond as new demands arise...)

One of these two things is my new office in Philosophy Hall - it is still largely unpacked, and there are books and papers in boxes from pretty much every stage of my life, with some major sorting and organizing needed. (But help is on the way!)

The other was the e-mail inbox.

This morning there were 40,000 messages in it, give or take.

Now there are NONE!

Thrilling tales

I am going to Antarctica!

Backstory here.

Just five more words...

PENGUINS IN THEIR NATURAL HABITAT!

Real-estate confessionals

It's now sorted out for real - as of mid-December, I'll be in a new apartment. It seems like the window onto a new life!

I've lived in my current place for eight years, in other words for all of the time that I've been on the tenure track at Columbia. Now, I don't mean to grumble, I've been very lucky to teach here and to live in New York and so forth, but there is no doubt that beyond the already nerve-racking aspects of life on the tenure track when tenure is by no means a sure thing, the notion that one's housing is also entirely dependent on one's employment (almost all Columbia faculty rent from the university, because the housing stock is very nice and the rents are below market rates) represents another turn of the screw...

Now I have tenure, something that one of my colleagues (perhaps five years post-tenure) described as in her own experience working like a kind of IV of security, dripping reassurance and stability into her veins in a continuous and ongoing fashion. And I'm moving into a two-bedroom apartment - it's just round the block from my current place - so that I will finally be able to get my office out of my bedroom, an important development given that ninety percent of the time I'm working from home!

More room for triathlon equipment and bicycle, too.

I am still renting from my employer, so there remains a slight grace-and-favor aspect that I'm not crazy about, but given the realities of the New York housing market, that's just the way it's going to have to be, and I can definitely live with it!

I went over there this morning to take a few pictures, which I thought I would share here...

The floor plan, a classic instance of messy Davidsonian note-taking:

What you see when you first walk in (the view goes through to the south-facing bedroom/study at the front of the apartment):

The living room, which is the first room you come to after a short hallway (it's not super-bright, the windows look onto the building courtyard, but it's a gracious room, and the apartment has lovely high ceilings throughout):

Non-functional fireplace!

The kitchen (a dramatic improvement my current one, which has less counter space than you can quite imagine - I am going to get a counter-top coffee-maker, a novel idea!):

The sort of interstitial place that makes this type of apartment appealing:
The main bedroom, very bright (both bedrooms are south-facing and get a lot of light, a priority for me):

The study/second bedroom (corner door is a second bathroom - the other bathroom is in the hallway between kitchen and main bedroom):

The view from the study/second bedroom, which is what initially sold me on the apartment (I am a sucker for this kind of view - also, when I first saw it, there were still painters and workmen and dropcloths and ladders all over the place, it was too chaotic to get a really good sense of the space):

The feature that will change my life:
To the non-New York-dweller, it is inconceivable the extent to which a washer-dryer in the apartment is a luxury rather than a common feature - at my present place, I can do laundry in the machines in the basement, which is definitely a step up from the laundromat arrangement to which I became accustomed during grad school years, but there is something utterly lavish and decadent to me about the notion that I will shortly just be able to throw a few things in the wash without having to make a whole production of it!