NYC day 31

I was a drowned rat this morning after my run! 80 as 3:1 along the river, quite rainy and cold, especially frigid once I turned around just shy of the sanitation pier and found myself running into a serious headwind (cold thighs!). Hair held back with a barrette (an internet-ordered coronaccessory) as hair is much too long; it will happen sooner or later that I will give myself an extreme haircut, though I am trying to resist the urge to go full Furiosa....

The sequel: a hot shower, this.

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....

Stormy romance

Taking sex to the gutters. (Via Tyler Cowen.)

The role cold plays

I would like to see this someday for myself. I might have to read the book....

Midweek brain fog

I feel that I am operating at only about 60% functionality due to fatigue - it is not good! My Friday meeting this week is canceled, which gives me a bit of a breather (usually I have a Wednesday morning deadline for initial round of reading and reports), but on the other hand I have to write up some thoughts for my other committee by late morning today, if I can pull myself together sufficiently. Hoping to fit in a run at some point, but it has been a disastrous winter for exercise, and it's not quite as warm today as I had hoped....

No Exit at the Pearl was thoroughly enjoyable (tasty dinner afterwards at Ktchn - it is bizarre that there should be a restaurant of that ilk on that block, times have changed!).

Two funny things later today: first of all, at three some people are coming to my apartment to film interview footage for Aaron Brookner's documentary about his uncle Howard Brookner, a documentary filmmaker and admirer of William Burroughs; Brookner did not live in my actual apartment while he was at Columbia in the 70s, but it was one with similar layout in the same building, and the notion is that it can be used to capture the flavor of life here at that time.

Then at 6:15 it's the Rape of the Lock reading! Hmmm, must not forget to prepare a few introductory remarks - I am speaking briefly beforehand then reading the opening stretch of lines.

Negative influences

Thomas Mallon and Daniel Mendelsohn on the books they didn't want to write.

Snowpocalypse! My late-afternoon pulmonary function test is canceled (rescheduled for Feb. 4, and not urgent, so that's fine). I am about to gear up and head in to the office to see if I can dig out the folders and files from the last time I taught my graduate seminar on the idea of culture; as always, I am bemoaning my lack of a beautiful filing system in which I would leave each semester's teaching stuff in meticulously organized and easily locatable form!

Mundanities, a.k.a. "Thursday is my weekend"

Thursday this semester was always my "weekend," unless I had complex meetings or a deadline, but the day after the last day of classes always brings particular relief!

I slept late (late enough that I am not going to hot yoga this morning - may hit a class in the early evening if I have the energy, but it's fine if not).

I finally made two phone calls that I've been meaning to take care of for weeks: scheduling a house call to get my two cats a proper checkup (they both had initial kittenage vaccinations, but I have been remiss about vet visits - this is long overdue!); scheduling an appointment with my asthma doctor to discuss ongoing exercise-induced asthma issues but more particularly to ask what I should do about the fact that my indispensable asthma control medication Flovent will no longer be covered by my prescription health coverage plan as of January. This is frustrating, it has worked very well - it would cost about $200/mo. if I am paying for it out-of-pocket, so really I need to find out what I can take instead, but I wish they weren't messing around with some solid basics!

And I have a haircut appointment at 2 and will go from thence to the allergy doctor for shots - missed last week due to Thanksgiving-related scheduling issues.

Not an exciting day, in short, but a very useful one, and the best part of it is that in half an hour or so I will head out for a lovely quiet run. The weather is foggy but very mild, with temperature in the mid-50s - short sleeves!

(I do have to write one more letter of recommendation, but that won't be too bad....)

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.

Closing tabs

Hot weather is not conducive to thought or activity! I did make the necessary additional pass through my style manuscript to reduce the length of selected block quotes - my editor gave me a very intelligent list of page numbers, nicely distinguishing between long passages that truly couldn't be cut and ones that would not suffer excessively from trimming or cutting....

Miscellaneous light reading: I read and loved Steve Hamilton's latest Alex McKnight novel, Let It Burn; its description of present-day Detroit is so amazing, it sent me back to a book I only dipped into when it first came out, Mark Binelli's Detroit City is the Place To Be, and also to the next-to-last book in the McKnight series, which I must have missed at the time, Misery Bay. Also, the second installment in Ben Winters' Last Policeman series, Countdown City

Closing tabs:

Martin Amis interviewed at the Telegraph.

My colleague Edward Mendelson on priestly language and the cathedral of Apple.

Digitization of the Board of Longitude archive.

Olga Khazan on drinking in Antarctica.

A most lovely present

I have been feeling physically rather low due to this cold - exercise deprivation is bad for the morale! - only it was a week with lots of good news concerning students and even my own fortunes (a work promotion that I will report here once it has cleared the necessary layers of bureaucracy), and now I have just received the best present EVER in the mail - a painting of my ideal bookshelf, a token of thanks from A. and O. for post-Sandy hospitality. This is amazing! I just laid it flat across the scanner to give you the impression, but it doesn't do justice to its lovely proportions. Click for a bigger bookshelf.

RIP

Site itself is not exciting, but the name is amazing: Rat Information Portal! (Via.)

Collation

Fifteen ways to file your cats. (Via Becky.)

Also, via Jane Y., knitting for reptiles!

I am having some satisfying work on my essay about minute particulars in life-writing and the novel. Also exercising up a storm and waiting for winter to stop.

Enchanted by a pair of novels and a novella originally recommended by some source now lost in the past of the internet; they are not of the highest literary genre, some people don't like reading stuff like this, but they are the kind of thing I particularly like, and so beautifully done I hardly can stand it! Appealing (gay) characters in fantasy world loosely based on seventeenth-century Holland, some magic but not excessive and narrative based on a crime detection plot rather than something more fantastical - they are absolutely delightful. A collaborative project by Melissa Scott and Lisa Barnett: Point of Hopes, Point of Knives, Point of Dreams. Must seek out more of Scott's novels and/or reread novels by Ellen Kushner!

Seeing Parsifal on Wednesday next week at the Met (this was a good teaser, but you may need a New Yorker subscription to access it) and 1 Henry IV on Thursday. Culture, sport, light reading - all good....

Catch-up

Tomorrow I am going to a big birthday blowout to celebrate G.'s 90th! His loft is the perfect place for a party, and it's going to feature a lavishly catered buffet, a live jazz band and possibly close to a hundred guests (shooting for eighty, but these things tend to escalate!). And tonight I am having a party at the opposite end of the scale, a Like a Fiery Elephant party for my fall-semester graduate students (we missed a seminar meeting due to Hurricane Sandy, and this was the book that got the axe - I promised I'd have them over at a later date to make up the missed conversation, and the day has now come). I scurried around this morning making preparations, and still need to tidy up, stow surplus triathlon equipment and get drinks in the fridge, but unlike tomorrow's party, this is a celebration of devastating simplicity: pizzas to be delivered at 7:45, wine, beer and a couple bags of half-price day-after-Valentine's candy to supplement the baked goods one student has offered to bring!

Light reading around the edges: an unusual novel by Stina Leicht, Of Blood and Honey. I loved it: particularly recommended to those with an interest in how urban fantasy elements can be hybridized with unexpected other genres. A brutal and amazing book!

Catch-up

Fruit stencils! This is an amazing piece, very much worth clicking through to....

Snoozed alarm for too long this morning and am trying to gear up to get out the door for my run. It is supposed to snow again later, so that's a good incentive to get it done now. Afternoon of grad student appointments and a rather overdue haircut, so I am not sure I will get in a second session later, though I might go to 6:30 hot yoga if I'm done at the hair place in time. (I like having quite short hair, only it's high-maintenance, and it always makes me grumpy to give up an early-evening exercise session in order to be sheared!)

I'm 90% ready to dig in on proper revisions for the two things I'm working on this month, a long-delayed essay on particular detail and the novel and the final revisions on the style book. Need one more session of preliminary work on style, then I will go for it and start really taking the particular detail piece apart and putting it back together in final form. Read enough of the remaining stack of Young Lions submissions last night to submit my rankings - we meet to decide the five-book longlist in early March. Job talks for the postcolonial search are now over; will need to read some materials before that meeting, also in early March.

Miscellaneous light reading: one more Imogen Robertson, Island of Bones; Erin Celello, Learning to Stay (I followed Erin's Ironman training blog obsessively in 2007, the first year I was really fixated on triathlon: on which note, I think this really is the year when I will be able to pull off my Ironman, having been derailed twice before by calamity and illness); Ann Leary's delightful The Good House; Chuck Wendig's Mockingbird, which I hugely enjoyed and which is exactly the sort of book I most wish I could write myself, only somehow I cannot; and my graduate school colleague M. E. Breen's lovely YA novel Darkwood, which has some minor unevenness in terms of introduction of worldbuilding and plot stuff but which is riveting in terms of character and storytelling.

Survival

I want to read this journal issue; even though I swore this spring I'd never write another novel again, that conviction has waned and I can't help but think there might be a zombie apocalypse travelogue (horror! survivalism!) in my writing future. Part of the appeal is that I wouldn't have to make up the characters or places, just the nature of the zombie apocalypse and the obstacles and dangers our party of adventurers would face. I have the full cast of characters and locations already, in my life....

I did manage to write the lecture (on the first of St. Aubyn's Patrick Melrose novels, truly a work of genius) and also the letters of recommendation. Had an extremely strenuous and rather glorious run in the late morning, in short sleeves - temperature was in the mid-50s, perfect running weather. Class went well, but by the time I got home from work I was ready to collapse.

Finished reading the most recent Phil Rickman Merrily Watkins novel, The Secrets of Pain. Will go to bed shortly.

I have the luxury, for the first time in many days, of not setting an alarm, and I hope to take maximum advantage of the fact that my first actual engagement tomorrow is boxing class at 2pm! A long night of sleep is in order.

In a good cause

The YA for NJ fundraiser is raising money post-Sandy for the New Jersey Community Food Bank. Lots of good stuff on their auction site, including a 50-page manuscript critique from my lovely Invisible Things editor Zareen Jaffery. I think they are not the plum prizes on the list, but you could bid on my two YA novels here!

Closing tabs

Kathryn Schulz on Andrew Solomon's new book. (With bonus citation for "hair-splitters and lumpers," which I was talking about the other day in class - Darwin!)

Cousin George Pringle: featured track of the day.

Marina Harss on flood damage to properties of the Martha Graham Company.

Erik Davis on psychedelic drugs.

Rachel Adams on contemplating the results of a child's IQ test.

Ben Anastas on how to rack up debt and ruin your life.

Hurricane update

Well, I have been lucky, Morningside Heights is high in elevation and I never lost power, but it has been a discombobulating and curiously stressful week! Obviously I couldn't fly out from LaGuardia yesterday. I'm on a direct flight to Cayman on Sunday instead; I will miss the triathlon, but it seemed the best of the available alternatives, and I'm now just trying not to worry neurotically about whether gas shortages will make it difficult to get a cab to JFK early on Sunday morning. I have two human evacuees and one feline in the living room; the younger human and I have had some good runs in Riverside Park and are enjoying massive amounts of Firefly/Big Bang Theory/Fringe to make the time go by. They have a good shot at getting back into their place Sunday morning, I think: fingers crossed that all these transitions go smoothly.

It now seems about a million years ago, but The Tempest at the Met last weekend was great. (Strange sense, during first two acts, of composer deliberately and rather perversely not writing the ravishing music of which he is capable, and moving towards difficulty or stringency instead, but the third act is emotionally much more forthcoming and draws everything back together. The orchestra sounded fantastic.)

Hurricane reading, appropriately and postapocalyptically: Justin Cronin's The Twelve. I enjoyed it, though it's not altogether to my tastes: a bit metaphysical/theological in its priorities, and the cast of thousands makes it sometimes difficult to differentiate one character from another. I thought this review was truly grossly unfair! Not my style of reviewing, anyway: if I hated it that much, I probably just wouldn't write about it.

Yoga today was beneficial!

Jane Yeh's The Ninjas is fantastically good. Separate post to follow at some less distracted juncture.

Irrelevant but interesting: the popularity of Clarks shoes in Jamaica.

Also, someone needs to send me a review copy of Swimming with Dr. Johnson and Mrs. Thrale: Sports, Health and Exercise in Eighteenth-Century England! (Courtesy of Steve B.)

Chysalids!

Amazing Wyndhamesque link via Brent.  All of the pictures are amazing, but the one I've given may be my favorite.

Momentous

Seems like novel is really finally off my desk for a while!  Will come back at copy-edit and proof stages, no doubt further tinkering will be in order, but this is a huge relief.

Finished rereading In the Woods last night.  There are some tonal instabilities (plus implausibility of narrator being so literary in his tastes), but it really was an unbelievably good debut.  Next up: The Likeness.  I vaguely think I read this one first, the first time around (order is non-essential).  In the tradition of Brat Farrar and The Ivy Tree, but quite different in tone.  Much looking forward to it.  (And also to Megan Abbott's Dare Me, whose official release is tomorrow but which I am hoping will appear magically on my Kindle at midnight, as preordered ebooks are wont to do.)

Much to do in next week and a half.  Revisions on Austen essay, a book review for a new venue (I know I said I wasn't going to do any more reviewing, but I'm doing this one as a test to see if I enjoy it more when it's a nonfiction book during a non-teaching time of the year!), course books to order (delinquency - this should have been done already), some work to read for students and colleagues.  Most significant task is beginning to delve back into the style book and finding what library stuff I need, as I'll be in Cayman for a couple weeks in mid-August and need to bring whatever books I might want with me. 

Seem to be quite busy, too, with physical therapy for my back, the meditation class and ongoing triathlon training.  Summer is not infinite!  (Really this is a good thing.)