Closing tabs

A very good day in many respects, but tiring.

In the morning I had a gorgeous short run along the river (excessive humidity, though).

In the afternoon I taught my first class of the semester, in a strikingly beautiful third-floor room at the Union Theological Seminary. Lots of familiar faces, which is always nice, and a syllabus full of books I particularly enjoy - this one should be good.

Four exciting pre-ordered books appeared on my Kindle, and one of them is the new Lee Child novel.

I have printed out final versions of all course materials for tomorrow's lecture.

Now I am going to shut down my computer and go and read Never Go Back!

(The only other thing I have to do tonight is my back stretching exercises, or I will regret it come Sunday evening, and perhaps a spot of meditation: but all other minor bits and bobs can wait till tomorrow, things like allergy doctor visit - I haven't been for way too long, I need to get back on the weekly habit of shots! - and booking a car for the airport trip Thursday and writing a conference paper abstract and getting various start-of-semester logistics sorted out and finishing the utterly complex triathlon organizing and packing that must be done before I leave.)

Also:

Secret fore-edge book paintings!

Philip Pullman is a yeoman. (Via Monica E.; FT site registration required.)

A dispiriting but fascinating story about the U.S. demographic changes that have led to a huge drop in life expectancy for poor white women lacking a high-school diploma.

The lost sausages of WWI.

Steamrollered

Tired, sad.

Closing a few tabs:

An amazing story from Oliver Sacks' forthcoming book, about a novelist whose stroke cost him the ability to read but who learned to circumvent the visual cortex and 'read' letters by shaping them with his tongue. (Link courtesy of the tireless Dave Lull; I can't wait to read The Mind's Eye, Oliver Sacks is more truly my writerly hero than anyone else I can think of.)

Three things I liked at the Independent this weekend: the Anthony Burgess archive opens in Manchester (here was my post a few years ago on Biswell's wonderful biography); the beauty of the periodic table of the elements; an interview with Terry Pratchett.

I have nothing much to say about War and Peace except that it is an outrageously good book; I was mesmerized by it when I read it for the first time at age 17, and was absolutely captivated by it again as soon as I opened the first page last week. Not enjoying Anna Karenina so much: it might be that it is not so much my sort of novel. (Just as one is an Iliad or an Odyssey sort of person, one also has a strong preference for the one or the other of Tolstoy's big novels? I am strongly Iliad, strongly War and Peace...)

Will save more detailed thoughts on Tolstoy's narration for the novel book, whose thunder I will steal if I blog all of it here in advance. But I did like Matthew Engel's dispatch from Waterloo in the FT this weekend (site registration required).

How Cadburys fought the war

"A specially prepared chocolate which gives extra nutrition and does not increase thirst."

Waterloo

I am almost painfully in love with Sebald's The Rings of Saturn. Its bits are woven together in a silkwormish net-like quincunx, but this is a passage I find particularly evocative, not least because I spent part of Sunday morning wandering around the fields on which the first battle of Manassas was fought (coincidentally, it took place on the day of my birthday, July 21):

Why I went to Waterloo I no longer know. But I do remember walking from the bus stop past a bleak field and a number of ramshackle buildings to a sort of village, which consisted solely of souvenir shops and cheap restaurants. There were no visitors about on that leaden-grey day shortly before Christmas, not even the obligatory group of schoolchildren one inevitably encounters in such places. But as if they had come to people this deserted stage, a squad of characters in Napoleonic costume suddenly appeared tramping up and down the few streets, beating drums and blowing fifes; and bringing up the rear was a slatternly, garishly made-up sutler woman pulling a curious hand-cart with a goose shut in a cage. For a while I watched these mummers, who seemed to be in perpetual motion, as they disappeared amongst the buildings only to re-emerge elsewhere. At length I bought a ticket for the Waterloo Panorama, housed in an immense domed rotunda, where from a raised platform in the middle one can view the battle - a favourite subject with panorama artists - in every direction. It is like being at the centre of events. On a sort of landscaped proscenium, immediately below the wooden rail amidst tree-stumps and undergrowth in the blood-stained sand, lie lifesize horses, and cut-down infantrymen, hussars and chevaux-legers, eyes rolling in pain or already extinguished. Their faces are moulded from wax but the boots, the leather belts, the weapons, the cuirasses, and the splendidly coloured uniforms, probably stuffed with eelgrass, are to all appearances authentic. Across this horrific three-dimensional scene, on which the cold dust of time has settled, one's gaze is drawn to the horizon, to the enormous mural, one hundred and ten yards by twelve, painted in 1912 by the French marine artist Louis Dumontin on the inner wall of the circus-like structure. This then, I thought, as I looked round about me, is the representation of history. It requires a falsification of perspective. We, the survivors, see everything from above, see everything at once, and still we do not know how it was. The desolate field extends all around where once fifty thousand soldiers and ten thousand horses met their end within a few hours. The night after the battle, the air must have been filled with death rattles and groans. Now there is nothing but the silent brown soil. Whatever became of the corpses and mortal remains? Are they buried under the memorial? Are we standing on a mountain of death? Is that our ultimate vantage point? Does one really have the much-vaunted historical overview from such a position? Near Brighton, I was once told, not far from the coast, there are two copses that were planted after the Battle of Waterloo in remembrance of that memorable victory. One is in the shape of a Napoleonic three-cornered hat, the other in that of a Wellington boot. Naturally the outlines cannot be made out from the ground; they were intended as landmarks for latter-day balloonists.

Fustian!

Not recommended.

States of emergency

Sheri Fink's NYT Magazine piece about what happened at Memorial Hospital in the days after Katrina is essential and horrifying reading. It is easy to think that we would each have made different - better - choices, but it is hardly clear. I have just put War Hospital in my Amazon cart, with a sense of shame at the frivolity of much of my reading!