Saturday, July 31, 2004
NYT reviews Jonathan Ames
Just looked at this in the Sunday Book Review online: 'Wake Up, Sir!': Crying Jeeves When There Is No Jeeves. Ordered the book from Amazon earlier today; I've been looking forward to reading this for a while. I'll post once I've read it.
My obsession with Dick Francis
I spent some time the other day looking at The Life and Works of Dick Francis.
Dick Francis is a genius.
Seriously, if I could write a series of books this compelling, I would die happy. I love first-person novels, and these are ridiculously appealing.
I’ve been a fan forever. In seventh grade, when DF was touring the U.S. for The Danger, my mom actually let me take the day off school so that I could go to the bookstore in downtown Philadelphia (was it 18th and Chestnut? can’t remember now, but doubtless it was one of those 80s chains like Waldenbooks or B. Dalton’s). DF was delightful. I was hanging around for hours (because I had to wait for my mom to come and pick me up—yes, I know it’s pitiful…) and waited in line twice—once to get my gleaming new copy of the new novel signed, a second time sheepishly to ask whether he’d be willing to sign the stack of battered paperbacks I’d also brought. As if I wasn’t already excited enough, he was ridiculously nice to me and joked with the guy behind me in line, “That’s the age to catch ‘em at!”
I found the scandal around DF’s authorship of the books somewhat absurd. Yes, I well believe that his wife made very great contributions to them, but if they chose to collaborate and publish the books under DF’s name, who’s to criticize that? Whatever the allocation of authorship, the books are really unmatched, I think, in what they do so well: these lovely rather neutral young male protagonists used to introduce you to the “expert knowledge” associated with a particular walk of life: sometimes centered on the horse-racing world, sometimes not.
BTW my friend Emily W., also a DF fan, had the genius critical insight to observe (in response to me saying—I can’t IMAGINE how this came up!—that I wished I had a boyfriend who was like the hero of a DF novel) that one reason that he has so many female readers isn’t that you want to go out with the hero but that it’s easy to imagine you ARE him. This is compounded by the fact of how many of them are hungry all the time and worry about what they eat in order to make weight… I also like the slightly odd S&M undercurrent in some of the books….
The announcement last year that there wouldn’t be any more books (DF is still alive, but his wife died last year) was tragic! However, since I have already read all of his novels a million times, there is clearly nothing to stop me from reading them again and again. And here are my recommendations; I’ve taken the chronological list and regrouped them according to some basic categories, with stars next to my favorites (and double stars next to my favorite ones of those—he’s that kind of a writer).
So now for a show of true obsessiveness…
The great classic DF novels, pretty much unbeatable (these heros get beaten up left and right, and the language describing their pain is entrancingly lowkey…--the first two here are both spectacular, leading up to the geniusy Odds Against, and the last two not quite as good but still very enjoyable):
*NERVE 1964 Rob Finn
**FOR KICKS 1965 Daniel Roke
**ODDS AGAINST 1965 Sid Halley
*FORFEIT 1968 James Tyrone
ENQUIRY 1969 Kelly Hughes
Sid Halley sequels (addictive, but I actually think it was a pity to reintroduce him in recent years—he’s implausibly the same age as he was in the mid-1960s and some of his traits from the earlier books no longer fit, indeed he’s generically rather like all the other DF heros, which he wasn’t to begin with):
**WHIP HAND 1979 Sid Halley
COME TO GRIEF 1995 Sid Halley
The middle period (doesn’t quite reach the heights of the earlier, but consistently high quality—I think that High Stakes and In the Frame are my favorites in this group):
RAT RACE 1970 Matt Shore
BONECRACK 1971 Neil Griffon
SMOKESCREEN 1972 Edward Lincoln
KNOCK DOWN 1974 Jonah Dereham
*HIGH STAKES 1975 Steven Scott
*IN THE FRAME 1976 Charles Todd
RISK 1977 Roland Britton
Depressive heros travel to foreign countries (a variation on the usual theme, not wholly successful):
BLOOD SPORT 1967 Gene Hawkins
SLAY-RIDE 1973 David Cleveland
TRIAL RUN 1978 Randall Drew
The least memorable of the older books, in which the protagonists are reasonably appealing and it’s definitely a decent novel by DF and therefore worth reading, but that aren’t necessarily the very best:
DEAD CERT 1962 Alan York
*FLYING FINISH 1966 Henry Grey
*REFLEX 1980 Philip Nore
The “new series” DF (I have no idea if there was any actual change in either his life circumstances or his book contract at this point, but there’s a distinct shift—it all becomes much more international, i.e. the heros are living a far more privileged life and we’re no longer in that still-slightly-grungy-and-postwar-feeling Britain [a feeling that lasted well into the 1970s, judging by fiction at any rate]). I love these books, but I don’t think they’re really as good: I’ve marked a few of the ones I like most with stars. What I always wished was that DF would decide to write a book with the main character/narrator being closer to himself in age—i.e. say late 60s as a compromise. Because the problem with these later ones is that the narrators, while reasonably appealing, no longer give you that great sense of being realistic, psychologically appealing characters very much the product of the circumstances in which they were raised. This relates to my pet peeve, about not having a series detective age as years go by. Superficially, you avoid this problem by having a new character with every book, but the problem remains that you have, say, a 28-year-old who no longer feels like a “real” person that age but is instead too clearly a convenient fictional construct:
TWICE SHY 1981 Jonathan & William Derry
BANKER 1982 Tim Ekaterin
THE DANGER 1983 Andrew Douglas
*PROOF 1984 Tony Beach
*BREAK IN 1985 Kit Fielding
BOLT 1986 Kit Fielding
HOT MONEY 1987 Ian Pembroke
THE EDGE 1988 Tor Kelsey
STRAIGHT 1989 Derek Franklin
LONGSHOT 1990 John Kendall
COMEBACK 1991 Peter Darwin
*DRIVING FORCE 1992 Freddie Croft
DECIDER 1993 Lee Morris
WILD HORSES 1994 Thomas Lyon (I must say I think this is probably a low point—I have not dignified the short story collection Field of Thirteen with a listing at all, I’m afraid)
*TO THE HILT 1996 Alexander Kinloch
10LB PENALTY 1997 Benedict Juliard
SECOND WIND 1999 Perry Stuart (these last couple feel pretty thin, unfortunately—I think To the Hilt is the last really good one)
SHATTERED 2000 Gerard Logan
In sum, if you have never read a novel by DF, you are missing out on one of the GREAT PLEASURES IN LIFE.
Dick Francis is a genius.
Seriously, if I could write a series of books this compelling, I would die happy. I love first-person novels, and these are ridiculously appealing.
I’ve been a fan forever. In seventh grade, when DF was touring the U.S. for The Danger, my mom actually let me take the day off school so that I could go to the bookstore in downtown Philadelphia (was it 18th and Chestnut? can’t remember now, but doubtless it was one of those 80s chains like Waldenbooks or B. Dalton’s). DF was delightful. I was hanging around for hours (because I had to wait for my mom to come and pick me up—yes, I know it’s pitiful…) and waited in line twice—once to get my gleaming new copy of the new novel signed, a second time sheepishly to ask whether he’d be willing to sign the stack of battered paperbacks I’d also brought. As if I wasn’t already excited enough, he was ridiculously nice to me and joked with the guy behind me in line, “That’s the age to catch ‘em at!”
I found the scandal around DF’s authorship of the books somewhat absurd. Yes, I well believe that his wife made very great contributions to them, but if they chose to collaborate and publish the books under DF’s name, who’s to criticize that? Whatever the allocation of authorship, the books are really unmatched, I think, in what they do so well: these lovely rather neutral young male protagonists used to introduce you to the “expert knowledge” associated with a particular walk of life: sometimes centered on the horse-racing world, sometimes not.
BTW my friend Emily W., also a DF fan, had the genius critical insight to observe (in response to me saying—I can’t IMAGINE how this came up!—that I wished I had a boyfriend who was like the hero of a DF novel) that one reason that he has so many female readers isn’t that you want to go out with the hero but that it’s easy to imagine you ARE him. This is compounded by the fact of how many of them are hungry all the time and worry about what they eat in order to make weight… I also like the slightly odd S&M undercurrent in some of the books….
The announcement last year that there wouldn’t be any more books (DF is still alive, but his wife died last year) was tragic! However, since I have already read all of his novels a million times, there is clearly nothing to stop me from reading them again and again. And here are my recommendations; I’ve taken the chronological list and regrouped them according to some basic categories, with stars next to my favorites (and double stars next to my favorite ones of those—he’s that kind of a writer).
So now for a show of true obsessiveness…
The great classic DF novels, pretty much unbeatable (these heros get beaten up left and right, and the language describing their pain is entrancingly lowkey…--the first two here are both spectacular, leading up to the geniusy Odds Against, and the last two not quite as good but still very enjoyable):
*NERVE 1964 Rob Finn
**FOR KICKS 1965 Daniel Roke
**ODDS AGAINST 1965 Sid Halley
*FORFEIT 1968 James Tyrone
ENQUIRY 1969 Kelly Hughes
Sid Halley sequels (addictive, but I actually think it was a pity to reintroduce him in recent years—he’s implausibly the same age as he was in the mid-1960s and some of his traits from the earlier books no longer fit, indeed he’s generically rather like all the other DF heros, which he wasn’t to begin with):
**WHIP HAND 1979 Sid Halley
COME TO GRIEF 1995 Sid Halley
The middle period (doesn’t quite reach the heights of the earlier, but consistently high quality—I think that High Stakes and In the Frame are my favorites in this group):
RAT RACE 1970 Matt Shore
BONECRACK 1971 Neil Griffon
SMOKESCREEN 1972 Edward Lincoln
KNOCK DOWN 1974 Jonah Dereham
*HIGH STAKES 1975 Steven Scott
*IN THE FRAME 1976 Charles Todd
RISK 1977 Roland Britton
Depressive heros travel to foreign countries (a variation on the usual theme, not wholly successful):
BLOOD SPORT 1967 Gene Hawkins
SLAY-RIDE 1973 David Cleveland
TRIAL RUN 1978 Randall Drew
The least memorable of the older books, in which the protagonists are reasonably appealing and it’s definitely a decent novel by DF and therefore worth reading, but that aren’t necessarily the very best:
DEAD CERT 1962 Alan York
*FLYING FINISH 1966 Henry Grey
*REFLEX 1980 Philip Nore
The “new series” DF (I have no idea if there was any actual change in either his life circumstances or his book contract at this point, but there’s a distinct shift—it all becomes much more international, i.e. the heros are living a far more privileged life and we’re no longer in that still-slightly-grungy-and-postwar-feeling Britain [a feeling that lasted well into the 1970s, judging by fiction at any rate]). I love these books, but I don’t think they’re really as good: I’ve marked a few of the ones I like most with stars. What I always wished was that DF would decide to write a book with the main character/narrator being closer to himself in age—i.e. say late 60s as a compromise. Because the problem with these later ones is that the narrators, while reasonably appealing, no longer give you that great sense of being realistic, psychologically appealing characters very much the product of the circumstances in which they were raised. This relates to my pet peeve, about not having a series detective age as years go by. Superficially, you avoid this problem by having a new character with every book, but the problem remains that you have, say, a 28-year-old who no longer feels like a “real” person that age but is instead too clearly a convenient fictional construct:
TWICE SHY 1981 Jonathan & William Derry
BANKER 1982 Tim Ekaterin
THE DANGER 1983 Andrew Douglas
*PROOF 1984 Tony Beach
*BREAK IN 1985 Kit Fielding
BOLT 1986 Kit Fielding
HOT MONEY 1987 Ian Pembroke
THE EDGE 1988 Tor Kelsey
STRAIGHT 1989 Derek Franklin
LONGSHOT 1990 John Kendall
COMEBACK 1991 Peter Darwin
*DRIVING FORCE 1992 Freddie Croft
DECIDER 1993 Lee Morris
WILD HORSES 1994 Thomas Lyon (I must say I think this is probably a low point—I have not dignified the short story collection Field of Thirteen with a listing at all, I’m afraid)
*TO THE HILT 1996 Alexander Kinloch
10LB PENALTY 1997 Benedict Juliard
SECOND WIND 1999 Perry Stuart (these last couple feel pretty thin, unfortunately—I think To the Hilt is the last really good one)
SHATTERED 2000 Gerard Logan
In sum, if you have never read a novel by DF, you are missing out on one of the GREAT PLEASURES IN LIFE.
Ghostwriting
I was staggered by the excerpt from Jennie Erdal's memoir Ghosting published in the most recent Granta, and this piece at theBookseller.com confirms my feeling that I must get hold of a copy of the book as soon as possible. The part I've read is really, really funny and yet psychologically peculiar and gripping in an almost gothic way. A tale of doubles, for sure.
Occasionally I fantasize about making a decent living as a ghostwriter, but Erdal's piece doesn't make it sound like a very good idea... though surely not every employer would ask you to ghostwrite a novel for him in which the only condition is that the two young female cousins that are the romantic protagonists are so close to each other that when one of the girls has an orgasm, so does the other, even if she's thousands of miles away.
Occasionally I fantasize about making a decent living as a ghostwriter, but Erdal's piece doesn't make it sound like a very good idea... though surely not every employer would ask you to ghostwrite a novel for him in which the only condition is that the two young female cousins that are the romantic protagonists are so close to each other that when one of the girls has an orgasm, so does the other, even if she's thousands of miles away.
Thursday, July 29, 2004
Saturday, July 24, 2004
Summer reading
Check out this great little essay by Jake Arnott about how he came to be a "paperback writer." I am back from my so-called "holiday," which had its moments but was on the whole rather depressing. I consoled myself by reading many novels while I was away. Some of the high points (I'm not going to link to them all, they're easily enough found on Amazon):
Elizabeth Young's collection of essays titled Pandora's Handbag (a work of complete genius; criminal that it's not better-known in the US; BUY THIS BOOK)
Jake Arnott's truecrime
Lee Child's latest (this man's thrillers are far superior to the competition, if you like ever-so-slightly tongue-in-cheek fast-paced international action. this one is appealing because it gives Jack Reacher's back-story)
Eva Ibbotson's The Star of Kazan (I love her books, they are a major guilty pleasure)
Edward P. Jones, The Known World (this book lives up to every ounce of hype--it's both a remarkably satisfying read and one of those books that makes you shake your head in amazement at how he ever thought of such a thing--he really makes up a WORLD and the book just happens to exist as a chronicle of it--I love the way he jumps ahead and tells you how a character's life will end thirty years later, then goes back to whatever he was saying before--must read his short-story collection too, though generally I avoid those like plague--last really great one I read was Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges)
All right, that's enough. I did read a whole bunch of others, including Monica Ali's Brick Lane (technically v. impressive but slightly dull, I can see why it didn't end up winning any of those big prizes though it certainly deserved nomination--but Mark HAddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night was about a hundred times more delightful and memorable... sorry, Monica... it wasn't that I didn't like your book, but it was just a little too much like Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star--like someone who would turn the clock back to the nineteenth-century French novel if it were possible). Also some pretty funny eighteenth-century books at the British Library--the best ones were about livestock.
Elizabeth Young's collection of essays titled Pandora's Handbag (a work of complete genius; criminal that it's not better-known in the US; BUY THIS BOOK)
Jake Arnott's truecrime
Lee Child's latest (this man's thrillers are far superior to the competition, if you like ever-so-slightly tongue-in-cheek fast-paced international action. this one is appealing because it gives Jack Reacher's back-story)
Eva Ibbotson's The Star of Kazan (I love her books, they are a major guilty pleasure)
Edward P. Jones, The Known World (this book lives up to every ounce of hype--it's both a remarkably satisfying read and one of those books that makes you shake your head in amazement at how he ever thought of such a thing--he really makes up a WORLD and the book just happens to exist as a chronicle of it--I love the way he jumps ahead and tells you how a character's life will end thirty years later, then goes back to whatever he was saying before--must read his short-story collection too, though generally I avoid those like plague--last really great one I read was Nathan Englander's For the Relief of Unbearable Urges)
All right, that's enough. I did read a whole bunch of others, including Monica Ali's Brick Lane (technically v. impressive but slightly dull, I can see why it didn't end up winning any of those big prizes though it certainly deserved nomination--but Mark HAddon's The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night was about a hundred times more delightful and memorable... sorry, Monica... it wasn't that I didn't like your book, but it was just a little too much like Alan Hollinghurst's The Folding Star--like someone who would turn the clock back to the nineteenth-century French novel if it were possible). Also some pretty funny eighteenth-century books at the British Library--the best ones were about livestock.
Saturday, July 03, 2004
Nils Bohr Institute
i'm off tomorrow to London and then Copenhagen, the latter to do research for the next volume of my trilogy. My heart's desire is to get inside the buildings of Nils Bohr's Institute for Theoretical Physics; fortunately the Bohr Archive has a really excellent website that includes instructions for visitors: NBI Today and previously. Even in a worst-case scenario, I should be able to go and walk around and take a look at the buildings from the outside; and it's possible I'll actually be able to get in and look around.
Saturday, June 26, 2004
NYT says: For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi
In an almost-too-good-to-be-true tale, the Times reports that For Liars and Loafers, Cellphones Offer an Alibi. I hate cellphones but I can't say I think stories like this will make anyone give theirs up. There's a big cop-out in the story, too. As these cellphone users blithely enlist strangers to help them lie to their nearest and dearest, they also claim the moral high ground. Consider this passage, about the founder of one web-based service for liars in need of helpers: "These days, Ms. Logan spends much of her time overseeing the e-mail traffic and watching her club grow. It now has 3,400 members, with hundreds of new members signing up each week. One member recently used the club to fool his wife so he could stay at a sports bar to watch the N.B.A. finals. Another member � the wife of a soldier stationed in Iraq � sent out a message asking for help to conjure up an excuse after becoming pregnant by another man. But in that case, many responders urged the woman to tell her husband the truth, according to club members."
Convenient attack of patriotism!
BTW, as the title of my book Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness may suggest, I am extremely interested in what happens when you make a serious case for hypocrisy (or its more attractive affiliates, manners, politeness, self-control and so on). But this is not it!
Convenient attack of patriotism!
BTW, as the title of my book Hypocrisy and the Politics of Politeness may suggest, I am extremely interested in what happens when you make a serious case for hypocrisy (or its more attractive affiliates, manners, politeness, self-control and so on). But this is not it!
Friday, June 25, 2004
Gene mutation makes tot super strong
A fuller version of the superbaby story at CNN.com. Less entrancing headline; better details. And a picture!
Thursday, June 24, 2004
A Very Muscular Baby Offers Hope Against Diseases
When this truly demented NYT headline caught my attention, I thought, "Surely the story won't live up to the billing?" But indeed it is truly as hilarious and bizarre as it sounds: The New York Times > Science > A Very Muscular Baby Offers Hope Against Diseases. I still have never thought of Gina Kolata the same way since I read a story (possibly in the Health section of the Times--can't be bothered to look it up) in which she revealed she and her ENTIRE FAMILY go and do marathon spinning classes together.
Tuesday, June 22, 2004
Strindberg's Miss Julie
Last night I saw an excellent production of Strindberg's Miss Julie at the Cherry Lane Theatre. I'd only read the play before, not seen it; it is much sexier and much funnier than I'd thought. I was especially impressed with Michael Aronov, who was ridiculously good as Jean. My only quibble: why did they bother with the whole contemporary-Middle-East setting?
Wednesday, June 16, 2004
Smoking cigarettes
I wholly endorse Inigo Thomas's Slate diary entry about smoking, particularly this paragraph, which echoes something my narrator says in Heredity:
You know that when you do give up smoking, you'll think about cigarettes for the rest of your life: There's no such thing as an ex-smoker, just a smoker not smoking (which for a smoker may be the hardest, simplest idea to comprehend). A couple of years ago, in a nonsmoking phase, a friend of mine commended me on breaking the habit. "I haven't stopped smoking," I replied indignantly. "I'm a smoker not smoking: That's all."
(That's him speaking, not my narrator.)
I am a smoker not smoking. I am also a smoker not smoking who has smoked six (yes, that's three x two) cigarettes in the last month after not smoking a single cigarette since August, when I realized not only that my chronic bronchitis had become mortifyingly embarrassing but that while I didn't care if I ended up a sixty-five-year-old with lung cancer, I would have an awful lot of explaining to do as an upper-middle-class thirty-some-year-old toting around an oxygen tank for my emphysema. The first two cigarettes I smoked in early May under quite peculiar circumstances that involved me drinking beer and baking 100 luridly iced cupcakes at 1am at home alone in my apartment after a former beau (then and now an out-of-towner) left his pack of cigarettes behind when he went out on the town for the night with another old friend. He was staying with me in theory but still hadn't gotten home when I left at noon the next day (to go and get ready for the cupcake-related party). Both the cigarettes and the visit were quite enjoyable. As was the party. The cupcakes in particular were a great hit.
I am in a frivolous mood today because at around 3:15 this afternoon I printed out the final final draft of the last chapter of my novel. Then I fedexed it to my agent. So all is well.
You know that when you do give up smoking, you'll think about cigarettes for the rest of your life: There's no such thing as an ex-smoker, just a smoker not smoking (which for a smoker may be the hardest, simplest idea to comprehend). A couple of years ago, in a nonsmoking phase, a friend of mine commended me on breaking the habit. "I haven't stopped smoking," I replied indignantly. "I'm a smoker not smoking: That's all."
(That's him speaking, not my narrator.)
I am a smoker not smoking. I am also a smoker not smoking who has smoked six (yes, that's three x two) cigarettes in the last month after not smoking a single cigarette since August, when I realized not only that my chronic bronchitis had become mortifyingly embarrassing but that while I didn't care if I ended up a sixty-five-year-old with lung cancer, I would have an awful lot of explaining to do as an upper-middle-class thirty-some-year-old toting around an oxygen tank for my emphysema. The first two cigarettes I smoked in early May under quite peculiar circumstances that involved me drinking beer and baking 100 luridly iced cupcakes at 1am at home alone in my apartment after a former beau (then and now an out-of-towner) left his pack of cigarettes behind when he went out on the town for the night with another old friend. He was staying with me in theory but still hadn't gotten home when I left at noon the next day (to go and get ready for the cupcake-related party). Both the cigarettes and the visit were quite enjoyable. As was the party. The cupcakes in particular were a great hit.
I am in a frivolous mood today because at around 3:15 this afternoon I printed out the final final draft of the last chapter of my novel. Then I fedexed it to my agent. So all is well.
Monday, June 14, 2004
Smurfs in French
I have just read a truly excellent essay by Luc Sante in the latest issue of The Threepenny Review, French Without Tears. The whole thing is well worth reading, but anyone who lived through 70s and 80s TV in the US will find the following passage (about one of the stories in the Belgian comics Sante read as he grew up in America) especially fascinating:
"The most internationally famous characters in Spirou were Les Schtroumpfs, known in the English-speaking world as the Smurfs, small blue elfin creatures who lived in a toadstool village. In their English-language animated appearances they could be cloyingly cute, but in French they were spared this fate by their language, marked by an incessant use of the (invented) word schtroumpf, employed as noun, verb, adverb, adjective, and interjection. Every reader, no matter how young, understood this usage without a gloss, because it parodied the French conversational trope of substituting catch-alls such as truc, chose, and machin for words that cannot immediately be called to mind, in any grammatical position. What schtroumpf highlighted was the ability of such dummy words to suggest words prohibited from writing or speech, regardless of the fact that the actual words schtroumpf was substituting for were always clear from context. Truc or chose became neutral from exposure, but schtroumpf subliminally spoke to the unconscious; its surface strangeness could make it mean things that the child's mind does not yet know but can imagine with tantalizing vagueness."
"The most internationally famous characters in Spirou were Les Schtroumpfs, known in the English-speaking world as the Smurfs, small blue elfin creatures who lived in a toadstool village. In their English-language animated appearances they could be cloyingly cute, but in French they were spared this fate by their language, marked by an incessant use of the (invented) word schtroumpf, employed as noun, verb, adverb, adjective, and interjection. Every reader, no matter how young, understood this usage without a gloss, because it parodied the French conversational trope of substituting catch-alls such as truc, chose, and machin for words that cannot immediately be called to mind, in any grammatical position. What schtroumpf highlighted was the ability of such dummy words to suggest words prohibited from writing or speech, regardless of the fact that the actual words schtroumpf was substituting for were always clear from context. Truc or chose became neutral from exposure, but schtroumpf subliminally spoke to the unconscious; its surface strangeness could make it mean things that the child's mind does not yet know but can imagine with tantalizing vagueness."
Maud Newton interviews Stephen Elliott
Maud Newton's interesting interview with Stephen Elliott reminds me that I must buy a copy of Happy Baby. The interview is full of interesting observations, but I single out for attention the closing lines, which really could be my motto:
"I do know that there aren't many good reasons for writing a novel except that you really want to. It's a very lonely pursuit, but when the urge hits it's strangely difficult to deny it, especially if you're childless, single, and lack material ambition."
"I do know that there aren't many good reasons for writing a novel except that you really want to. It's a very lonely pursuit, but when the urge hits it's strangely difficult to deny it, especially if you're childless, single, and lack material ambition."
Tenure and the Ivy League
An informative and (to me) highly relevant article on internal promotions at Ivy League universities has just appeared in the Chronicle: Hello ... I Must Be Going.
There's much I could say about this, but my main comment is that I more-or-less agree with the guy who says it's silly to feel abused when you get great leave, relatively light teaching load and so on. I think the load is heavier at Columbia than at Princeton, where the quoted assistant professor taught; also, the article doesn't mention salaries at all, and I think they're an important part of the equation.
There's much I could say about this, but my main comment is that I more-or-less agree with the guy who says it's silly to feel abused when you get great leave, relatively light teaching load and so on. I think the load is heavier at Columbia than at Princeton, where the quoted assistant professor taught; also, the article doesn't mention salaries at all, and I think they're an important part of the equation.
Sunday, June 13, 2004
Helen Back and the Str8 Razors
So I took off and spent the weekend in Philadelphia. It would have been even better if I'd finished my novel before I left, but while I printed out the final-final version of chapters 1-12 on Friday afternoon, Chapter 13 still needs some work. But I steeled myself to leave it behind and went for an idyllic rock-n-roll weekend in Philadelphia. Drove down from NY with my brother, who is now an honorary Texan after a long Texas visit in May (one of many innovations he's adopted is keeping a cooler of beers in his pick-up; he brought back the MGD tall-boys with the state of Texas on them and also Lone Star beers, both a great hit in Philadelphia). Block party yesterday afternoon in the Northern Liberties, quite lovely. Late-nite show (1am) at Pontiac's on South Street, Helen Back and the Str8 Razors, the band my brother a.k.a. Jon Doe's been playing in for several years now. See their website: Helen Back and the Str8 Razors. And they played again this afernoon at the Philly Pride festival, where there was (rightly) much griping about the fact that Sandra Bernhardt was paid $7,000 plus limo/hotel/etc. to play. Anyway, last night's show was great, this afternoon very good too but the show's not so much geared to playing outside. I got roped into selling merchandise and felt very smug when I could actually hand over $100 for t-shirts and CDs. Also got an intense sunburn.
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