Acrobatic historians

Tim Adams interviews Simon Schama for the Observer. On self-doubt and big projects:

You are not thinking hard enough if you are sleeping well. And you would have to be unhinged to take on a subject like the French revolution, or Rembrandt, and not feel some trepidation. There is always the possibility that you will crash and burn and the whole thing will be a horrible, vulgar, self-indulgent mess.

The writing life

Why Steph Swainston wants a day job. I really liked the novel of hers that I read, and thoroughly endorse the notion that teaching and writing are for many a much richer mix than writing could be alone: it is truly not for everyone, the life of the full-time writer, even putting aside financial considerations...

Oh happy day!

Brent stopped at home mid-morning with a Book Depository package for me that had arrived at his post-office box (there is no home mail delivery in Cayman). Initial slight disappointment, after I ripped it open, that it was not the new Hollinghurst novel (but that should be coming in near future!), soon remedied as I immersed myself in one of the most lovely books I have read this year, something I had forgotten I'd ordered at the same time: Barbara Trapido's Sex and Stravinsky. Trapido is one of my favorite novelists, and it's a slight mystery to me why she's not better-known in the U.S. I couldn't put it down! Alas, it is now finished, but it was bliss while it lasted...

Still feeling somewhat ill, but definitely on the mend compared to yesterday. I would think it will be Monday before I can exercise again, I am resigned to it. Have spent most of these week lying on the couch feeling fairly languidly ill and reading some good books.

(Work proceeds in fits and starts on the style revision, but I think I got quite a bit done in the first half of the week before illness made me lose momentum. Will pick up again properly on Monday.)

Glen Duncan's The Last Werewolf really is very good indeed, I thoroughly enjoyed it. Also enjoyed Lydia Millet's young-adult novel The Fires Beneath the Sea.

At the very good local bookstore on Wednesday (I was putting in a special order for three books I 'need' for the style revision, they should be here in about two weeks: you will see the lines I am thinking along if I tell you that they are three particular favorites, Francis Spufford's The Child That Books Built and Thomas Bernhard's Wittgenstein's Nephew and David Markson's Reader's Block), I spotted a book that I had no idea existed: Ann Brashares' 10-years-later followup to the Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants (to which my lovely student Lynn Copes introduced me some years ago), Sisterhood Everlasting. I will slightly remorsefully add that I did not purchase it at the bookstore, but downloaded it onto my Kindle when I got home.

The other novel I read this week was a reread of something I liked very much when I first encountered it as an undergraduate (I don't think I read it for a class, either I just picked it up somewhere or possibly it was a recommendation from Marina Van Zuylen), Dostoevsky's Demons. I found the first third or so quite difficult to get into (I wasn't sure whether it might have something to do with the translation, or possibly reading on the Kindle), but after that it is highly immersive, and the last third or so is so propulsively written that it's pretty much impossible to put down: it is a strangely structured and narrated book, interesting, very modern in its topics and preoccupations (it is a genealogy of terror that recognizably links Dostoevsky's Russia to what happened last week in Norway). I think the next one to reread is Conrad's The Secret Agent, which also made a strong impression on me when I first read it (really it is the only novel of Conrad's I have a lot of time for, something about his writing is anathema to me elsewhere!).

Lagos faits divers

Teju Cole's small fates. (Via Sarang.)

Improvement of the breed

"If you’d like to call your pet Kubla Khan, King Kong or Kevin you can always move to Belgium. . ."

I'm in low spirits: I'm totally sick again! Very raw lungs on Monday the day following my long bike ride (heat and humidity exacerbate exercise-induced asthma), and now the predictable course into wheeziness and lung squeaking, phlegm, sinus congestion, etc. In short, another chest cold/bronchitis episode. The first thing I do when I'm back in New York will be to make another appointment with the pulmonary specialist I saw last year about six months after I first realized that I actually had asthma; I also need to find an allergist.

Retail therapy

One reason staying in Cayman is surprisingly frugal for me is that it prevents me from ordering things online: it takes forever for stuff to get shipped here, shipping costs are huge and customs duty must be paid on anything that comes in (books excluded, fortunately).

But I was finding myself in need of some retail therapy today, and have ordered some things to be sent to my New York apartment for retrieval in September: a down jacket on sale at Patagonia, which is immaterial for Light Reading purposes but may speak to fantasies of winter, and a great set of books and 'stuff' from Amazon. The latter set of stuff counts as a birthday present from my mother and my brother and sister-in-law, who sensibly sent me Amazon gift certificates when I couldn't suggest actual presents for my birthday!

The glorious list (it accumulated by way of me adding things piecemeal to the shopping cart over the last month or so, but I think it gives a good profile in miniature):

"The Fabric of Reality: The Science of Parallel Universes and Its Implications"
David Deutsch

(This one's more or less self-explanatory: Brent and I were talking about David Deutsch, and I realized that really I might want to read his book)

"Field Notes on Science and Nature"
Michael R. Canfield

(Saw an image from this one a few weeks ago online and realized it was a book I had to have)

"Dover Solo: Swimming The English Channel"
Marcia Cleveland

(Self-explanatory! I am not a fast enough swimmer, unfortunately, to undertake something as epic as the Channel swim - you have to start with considerably higher baseline speeds in order for it to be realistic. Not that I am not tempted...)

"Lobster: A Global History (Reaktion Books - Edible)"
Elisabeth Townsend

(Do not like lobster for eating purposes, but could not resist this book's title and the beautifully designed cover!)

"The Delighted States: A Book of Novels, Romances, & Their Unknown Translators, Containing Ten Languages, Set on Four Continents, & Accompanied by ... Illustrations, & a Variety of Helpful Indexes"
Adam Thirlwell

(Curious to see whether this might cast any light for me on what I want to do with the ABCs of the novel book)

"Humiliation (Big Ideas//Small Books)"
Wayne Koestenbaum

(Can't wait for this one - also, I like the idea of writing something for the big ideas/small books series...)

"Marpac 980A Sound Screen Sleep Conditioner White Noise Generator Dual Speed"

(The upshot of reading Farhad Manjoo's piece about sleep noise-canceling devices)

"Jimbo"
Gary Panter

(Gary is one of the most interesting people I know, but I have never read any of his comics - this should be remedied...)

"Gary Panter"
Robert Storr

(...and also perhaps it is worth seeing what others have to say about the stuff Gary makes.)

"City of Diamond"
Jane Emerson

(Same author as "Doris Egan," and another recommendation from Jo Walton: pretty much convinced that this will be more perfect light reading.)

This side whimsy

I thoroughly enjoyed Misha Glouberman's collaboration with Sheila Heti, The Chairs are Where the People Go, after an initial round of disappointment that came to an end when I realized that it was completely unreasonable of me to expect this book to be exactly like and as good as Georges Perec's "Species of Spaces". I think it was the book's title that made me feel I'd be getting something so much along those lines: and no, it is not as good as that paragraph I just linked to indeed or that whole work, but it is very much worthwhile nonetheless (Perec sets an impossibly high standard).

Most attractive to me were the thoughts on groups and their working dynamics; Misha has had an interesting and unusual career thus far teaching improvisation and doing odd and highly imaginative sorts of classes, and his descriptions of this stuff really spoke to me. Interesting things to be gleaned here by anyone in education or the arts, I'd say, with particular focus on the productive tension between verbal and non-verbal forms of art, the nature of collaboration in a group and a cluster of related topics, including ephemeral art forms, games and the relationship between participation and performance (games and group dynamics being central topics of interest to me in BOMH). (Sheila Heti has done an interesting and imaginative job shaping the material into a book.)

Here's one of my favorite bits, a list of "some hard Charades clues" that emerged from years of teaching a workshop on charades (this is the sort of counterintuitive class in which Misha has specialized):

the Symbionese Liberation Army
Sum 41
"The more things change, the more they stay the same"
Guam
Being and Nothingness
Sometimes a Great Notion
the Dutch tulip craze of the seventeenth century
Fletch
Soren Kierkegaard
Bob and Carol and Ted and Alice
the Koran
"Bootylicious"
"The square of the hypotenuse is equal to the sum of the squares of the two adjacent sides"
E Pluribus Unum
Vinnie Barbarino
Koyaanisqatsi
Troilus and Cressida
the lambada
1984
Radical Chic & Mau-Mauing the Flak Catchers
Mr. Snuffleupagus
"It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a good fortune, must be in want of a wife"
"Que Sera, Sera"
Eine Kleine Nachtmusik
Godel, Escher, Bach
Soylent Green
shock and awe
The Metamorphosis
"'Twas brillig, and the slithy toves did gyre and gimble in the wabe"
trickle-down economics

Also, some very wise thoughts on conferences and why it is a pity that their current structure "doesn't just ignore the existence of the Internet, it ignores the existence of the printing press":

It's a medieval idea about how information should be disseminated--to imagine that if you want to know what someone thinks, you have to go sit in a room with them while they read out loud to you their thoughts. But at a lot of conferences that's the primary thing that happens.

Finding out what someone has to say in their paper isn't a reason to travel across the country and stay in a hotel room. A reason to travel across the country is to have conversations with people and actually form human relationships. Most of the stuff that happens at a conference not only does not help create that, it hinders it.

"Slightly, no, no, NO"

Martin Gayford's 130 hours sitting for Lucian Freud.

Five-year planning

I did indeed email BOMH to my agent at the end of the day yesterday. Very glad to have it off my desk for a while! It will inevitably need further rounds of revision, this is the way of book-writing, but I'm pretty happy with it for now and will be interested to see what comes of it.

(When I was first starting out, I fantasized about big offers and huge corporate publishers, but now that I have published one novel with a small independent press and two with a corporate behemoth, the small-press option is looking pretty good to me again! What I am most hoping for, with this book, is an editor who loves it and who will be able to follow through on that commitment by securing strong in-house support: the book will then have to take its chances in the world, of course, and I think it is too intellectual and peculiar a tale to end up with monstrously large sales, but one of the most painful things about publishing The Explosionist was that my absolutely brilliant and wonderful editor - from whom I learned a huge amount about novel-writing and story-telling as we worked together on revisions - was laid off a couple weeks before the official publication date. The marketing group saw a bunch of lay-offs at the same time, and I don't think I'm breaching any secrets when I say that though the subsequent editor I was assigned is herself an extremely talented and inspiring editor, someone I'd be very happy to work with again in future on a project of her choosing, the in-house support and marketing for that pair of books was basically negligible! I will very much hope not to end up in that sort of situation again on either of these next two books I've got in the pipeline [i.e. BOMH and style].)

Every time I write a novel, by the way, I say I will not write another one! I don't know that I feel it quite so strongly this time as I felt it after the last one (that time I was mostly suffering from tenure-related fatigue plus the dispiriting knowledge of the likelihood of little support from the publisher as far as selling the book went). Novel-writing remains a uniquely interesting way for me to work out a question or problem and think through a set of issues, and ever since childhood I have secretly felt that there is no other worthwhile activity than novel-writing, or at least that there is no substitute for it in my life.

And yet everything to do with publication and book promotion seems deeply unsatisfactory and uninteresting to me, and there is an increasing suspicion in my mind that it is hardly worth writing the book if one is not going to put some decent further additional chunk of energy and dollars into promoting it. This is what I don't know that I really have time and vim for: surely that time and energy are better spent doing perhaps unstimulating but more deeply necessary work like writing student letters of recommendation, evaluating manuscripts for journals and presses, writing tenure review letters, etc.?

In other words, I have a strong inner need to write and to teach, and will always be doing both of those things for love rather than primarily for money (of course one must earn a crust!), but when it comes to the less immediately gratifying set of secondary responsibilities, I have some pretty time-consuming ones that arise from my 'real' job, and the book promotion stuff is always going to feel to me (let's say) tertiary rather than even merely secondary!

My promotional energies, this next time round, are really more likely to be centered on the little book on style than on BOMH. I've been thinking a lot over the last year or so about longer-term career stuff (I think it is a natural process of post-tenure reexamination), and it's come clearer to me what my priorities really will be over this next stretch.

I have a major and ambitious academic (or rather let's call it intellectual) project in its early stages, the ABCs of the novel book. Pushing that forward will be a priority, and I'll probably try and get outside funding for a year-long sabbatical of the residential-fellowship sort sometime in the next couple of years.

I'll continue to do bits and pieces of professional reviewing as they come my way, but I won't seek out a huge amount of it: it's not particularly lucrative, the short-term deadlines kill me when they fall during a busy teaching semester and the enjoyment-to-stress ratio is deeply unfavorable!

What I'd really like to do more of is speaking engagements. Guest lectures (distinguished or otherwise) at colleges and universities of course, but also speaking on literature to a wider range of different kinds of audiences: it would take a while to build this up as an actual income stream, lots of that sort of engagement doesn't necessarily come with dollars to speak of, but I think it is better suited to my core interests and concerns than trying to do a lot more reviewing.

(I have had some fun invitations in the last couple weeks: I'll be lecturing on Gulliver's Travels to the students in BU's core class at the end of November, and on Defoe's Journal of the Plague Year to the students in Siddartha Deb's Introduction to Fiction class at the New School in the spring. Both will pay honorariums, plus travel expenses in the case of the BU one, and I have a deep sense of the rightness of this sort of activity as fitting well with my core values and priorities! I think I am only an average reviewer, I bring to it fluency as a writer and a fully developed critical voice and of course a wide knowledge of literature but I do not feel it to be my particular metier, just a sort of side competency that arises from other things that are my true core strengths. But speaking about literature to an audience, bringing what's on the page really alive in terms of language and ideas and cultural contexts: that's my real thing!)

Anyway, I do have a simple and I think quite effective plan to help some of this happen: even if I only get very meager dollars for both books, I am going to do whatever it takes to retain the excellent Lauren Cerand in her capacity as independent publicist! With the style book and the notion of building a broader audience for literary speaking engagements as the primary mandate, and the novel as part of the bigger picture but not the central priority.

I am teaching two new classes in the fall, one an undergraduate seminar on Swift and Pope that I know will be huge fun (it's a new rubric for a class, but I've taught a lot of the individual works before, especially the Swift stuff), the other my own version of the MA seminar we require of all of our incoming graduate students. That was an interesting chance to think about what I assume as the fundamentals of my own discipline; I'll probably write a separate post on that, or perhaps even paste in the readings I ended up choosing.

I find myself with little desire to get extremely strongly engaged in the professional organizations for my discipline (MLA) and subfield (ASECS), though some presence in both is a basic component of my responsibilities as a faculty member at Columbia; I am more interested, I think, in questions about education as they affect my home institution, and I would guess I would be much more likely to move in the direction of dean of undergraduate or graduate education than to be the editor of a major journal in my field or the head of a professional organization like ASECS. Surely it will be the case at some point during the next stretch of my career, too, that I will serve as Director of Graduate Studies for my home department! Now I am in the realm of indiscretion, but I am currently protected against huge institutional service requirements by the fact that my salary is so low that I cannot in good faith take on a job like that without a significant raise, and raises are not traditionally given in academia as a consequence of that sort of a commitment (it is assumed that some release from teaching is a sufficient compensation); raises only come from outside offers; QED if someone asks me to do something huge and I say "I only can say yes to that if you raise my salary at least 20K," it is effectively the same thing as saying no!

It is one of the great benefits of getting older that one comes to know oneself much better than is possible at age eighteen. If I assess what I've done in the last ten years, I would say that I have done well on the count of working hard and getting a lot done, but that my own impatience to be always doing something has led to inefficiencies and often wasted effort (i.e. a preference for writing the next book rather than sinking additional resources in trying to get people to read the previous one): the notion for the next few years (it is a project of midlife!) is to consolidate and build, not so much to forge out in completely new directions.

(That said, if interesting new opportunities present themselves, I am there!)

Robopocalypse redux

Roomba art!

Natal update

It is my birthday today; I spent yesterday afternoon thinking intermittently of the fact that while I was sure I wouldn't be finished with BOMH today, it was strangely difficult to predict whether there would be one further day of work on it remaining or one further week of work. Very happy to be able to report twenty-four hours later that it really is only one more day I need; I've just finished an edit all the way through (including a couple of new scenes drafted for the final section), I'll type it all up tomorrow morning and then read through a hard copy with pen in hand for final corrections. Truly if everything goes as it should, I will be able to email it to my agent by the end of the day tomorrow and enjoy a guilt-free weekend...

(All this sense of urgency is largely self-created, as it is most likely that then nothing at all will happen with it for some weeks or months, but it will make me feel good to have it off my desk, and it frees me up to get back to the neglected little book on style, which I am eager to revisit. I have made a slightly wrenching but very sensible decision not to go to Ottawa after all in August; I need to stay here and concentrate on getting that other revision done before school starts.)

Light reading: Karin Slaughter's Fallen (quite good, despite a strangely unmemorable ending: I got sick of this series at some point, but it is a good example of an instance where killing off one of the main characters breathed new life into the series as a whole!); Karen Marie Moning's Bloodfever (many good things going for it, especially the lively narrative voice, but I think that may be it for me for the series: the proportion between content and pacing is off for me, so that I am basically reading the pages almost as fast as I can turn them over trying to increase the density of 'stuff' I'm getting from them, can't quite explain it but it is a strong subjective sensation I get with certain kinds of popular fiction); Megan Abbott's superb The End of Everything, which I loved; Robert J. Sawyer's pleasant enough but lightweight Frameshift, another Ottawa Chapters discount purchase.

Currently halfway through Glen Duncan's excellent The Last Werewolf: how come I never heard of this guy before?!? He has written a lot of novels, now I can get them all and while away an hour or two....

"Books do furnish a room"

At the LRB, Alan Bennett's life in libraries. Interesting reflections, too, on the problem bookshelves pose for set designers in the theater:

Books and bookcases cropping up in stuff that I’ve written means that they have to be reproduced on stage or on film. This isn’t as straightforward as it might seem. A designer will either present you with shelves lined with gilt-tooled library sets, the sort of clubland books one can rent by the yard as decor, or he or she will send out for some junk books from the nearest second-hand bookshop and think that those will do. Another short cut is to order in a cargo of remaindered books so that you end up with a shelf so garish and lacking in character it bears about as much of a relationship to literature as a caravan site does to architecture. A bookshelf is as particular to its owner as are his or her clothes; a personality is stamped on a library just as a shoe is shaped by the foot.

That someone’s working library has a particular tone, with some shelves more heterogeneous than others, for example, or (in the case of an art historian) filled with offprints and monographs or (with an old-fashioned literary figure for instance) lined with the faded covers and jackets of distinctive Faber or Cape editions, does not seem to occur to a designer. On several occasions I’ve had to bring my own books down to the theatre to give the right worn tone to the shelves.

'Muggletonians and animals'

Good piece at the Telegraph about naturalist Charles Davies Sherborn and his 'little slips of paper'. (Link courtesy of Brent, who saw it here.)

A related bit, loosely speaking: Ann Blair at Rorotoko on her new book Too Much to Know: Managing Scholarly Information Before the Modern Age. (Via Bookforum. Here Blair describes her own favorite chapter in the book:

For the most committed note-takers one German professor, Vincent Placcius, published in 1689 instructions for building a large closet in which to store one's notes taken on slips of paper: when opened out the closet could store up 3,000 topical labels, each with a hook onto which to stick the slips that corresponded to that topic.

If you missed it the first time I linked to it, take a look atthis lovely LRB piece by Keith Thomas on his own reliance on little slips of paper.

(I seem to write regularly here about indexing...)

Bits and bobs

Alexis Madrigal on the invention of the modern corrugated cardboard pizza box.

Also: Brent's condo makes the news!

"Well done the biscuit"

"Tabloid readers love pink wafers."

(Peek Freans made an appearance on an episode of Fringe we watched in the last day or two and prompted much mouth-watering on my part: really they make all sorts of cookies, but the one I used to be particularly addicted to in my youth was the classic "fruit creme"....)