Biscuits

Lucy Sparrow's world of felt. (Via Becca.) This is my favorite:

Cross-referencing: Alan Hollinghurst on "the Bourbon, the sugared Nice, the rebarbative ginger-nut". Also, though in general Icelandic hotel breakfasts are superb, there was an additional frisson at the Geo Hotel Grindavik to find that in addition to lavish spread of eggs, breads and rolls, ham, salami, pate, salmon-roe-in-a-tube (shades of this!), cheese, pastry, fruit, yogurt, etc., there were also two little canisters of biscuits next to the tea and coffee station: Bourbon biscuits and custard creams! Which remind me so much of my English grandmother....

Turtle soup

At the Guardian, John Mullan reviews Christopher Plumb's new book on exotic animals in Georgian London:

The Earl of Shelburne, later to be prime minister, kept an orangutan and a supposedly tame leopard in his orangery at Bowood House. The utilitarian philosopher Jeremy Bentham liked to stroke the leopard when he visited. Sir Robert Walpole’s pet flamingo warmed itself by the kitchen fire. Sir Hans Sloane was followed round his Chelsea home by a tame, one-eyed wolverine. He also owned an opossum and a porcupine.

Travels part III - Iceland!

By the time we got there, we were pretty much just due to collapse in the hotel room! (This was predicted in advance.) Fortunately it was an incredibly nice hotel.

(Our final two nights in Iceland were at the Geo Hotel in Grindavik - both of these hotels are pretty much brand new - I was initially a bit horrified that I had rashly taken us from lovely cosmopolitan city to isolated country location, but really it is good to see something a bit different - we had an interesting walk around small town and harbor, and the nearby restaurant was surprisingly good - I think this is it - we ate three meals there as options in walking distance were limited.)

Food in Iceland in general was ridiculously good. I don't have links for everything (or even most things), but we had fantastic Thai food here, very decent random local pizza, tons of good fish (with and without chips), a beer at Nico's favorite place, steak lunch here with my friend J. and his two older kids after an episode of puffin watching and delicious cocktails in the lobby at our hotel.

The Golden Circle bus tour was a little overwhelming (the landscapes are amazing, but there are too many people - tourist infrastructure really isn't up to current volume); I loved the small zoo in Reykjavik and the Blue Lagoon also exceeded expectations.

(We had two very fancy meals in Iceland, food on New Nordic lines: one at the Lava Restaurant at the Blue Lagoon, the other at Haust in our hotel lobby. The regular-place food is so good, the fancy food is slightly wasted on me & B. - but it was genuinely exceptional, and I would especially single out lovely desserts. Not so photogenic - subtle rather than flashy - but utterly delicious: at Haust, a rhubarb victoria with almond sorbet, roasted almonds and arctic angelica syrup, and at Lava a poached pear with ginger sorbet, praline cake and elderflower syrup. Divine!)

Pictures below are piecemeal: the final ones are only a small fraction of what was on offer at the glorious Saga Lounge at the airport on the day we left!

18th-century bits

Two nice eighteenth-century bits:

"Puzzle purse" a.k.a. love token at the Houghton Library;

Road maps! (Heyeresque....)

Tidal playgrounds

Swimming in the Thames.

Travels part II - Oxford!

In short, one of the best conferences I've ever attended. Incredibly stimulating and enjoyable: also, they treated us like kings and queens! (Unfortunately I came down with a sinus infection that turned into a chest cold, I was laboring with it the following week also and passed it on to B., but this is perhaps just the reality of international travel for me). Good times with friends old and new, including a dinner with Claude R. and co. at Gee's, sundry meals and drinks with a remarkable former student of mine and generally lavish hospitality. Here are some highlights:

We left Sunday after the final plenary talk (missing the college wine-tasting, alas, not to mention the staged reading of Irene!): traveled by car to LHR, where we killed some hours in the Aer Lingus lounge (reciprocal privileges with IcelandAir, which gives lounge access even with the Economy Comfort fare).

And thence to Iceland!

Travels part I

In Cayman, my mother and I saw blue iguanas and dined lavishly at Michael's Genuine and Casa 43 (not to mention Fidel Murphy's), with lots of visiting of Cayman friends.

On Saturday, August 1, B. and I flew to Miami and thence overnight to Heathrow (lie-flat beds!). Four nights at the Premier Inn Waterloo (slightly inferior to the companion hotel at County Hall, but still very good value for the money), the Mission Impossible movie at the nearby IMAX theater, mother's-side family meal at aunt's in Islington Monday night, father's-side family day in Greenwich (the queen's deer!) Tuesday (including a very convenient and pleasant but gastronomically undistinguished meal at Jamie's Italian - it is a great place to go with young kids, though I was suffering here as elsewhere with the English lack of air-conditioning - it was a warm week and everywhere inside was incredibly stuffy!), lunch meetup Wednesday at the Anchor and Hope with Jane and then on to Scootercaffe for a meetup with my cousin George before her shift started.

Thursday to Oxford! Part II to follow.

Closing tabs/light reading roundup

Life re-entry is always a bit overwhelming, especially when it's so hot in NYC and I've been away for many weeks. I have just spent a couple of hours responding to emails, making travel plans and to-do lists, etc. and feel a little calmer about my chances of getting everything I need to done before school is properly underway.

(I made an initial stab at laptop battery replacement effort on Monday, but the tech support call got cut off and I didn't have the time or psychological wherewithal to pursue further - must either get back at that tomorrow morning or hand it over to an office staff person if I really don't think I am going to be able to get it done myself!)

I'm planning to fight the Facebook creep by belatedly posting some catch-up vacation photos here, but first I'm overdue for a long light-reading roundup and some closing of tabs.

Tabs:

A good list of reading recommendations.

A non-embarrassing classical music scene in a blockbuster movie! (Via Nico, and I totally agree. B. and I saw this movie the day we arrived in London - movie-going is a good activity for the jet-lagged and sleep-deprived....)

Light reading, international travel edition (that's three weeks' worth, I guess, though I was still working pretty frenetically on Johnson and Shakespeare that week in England):

Max Gladstone's latest Craft book, Last First Snow (these books are extremely good - I found this one a little slow in opening, but I suspect it had more to do with poor attention on my part than anything to do with the actual writing).

A reread of Garth Nix's wonderful Abhorsen sequence, starting with the most recently published by chronologically earliest and then proceeding with the central trilogy - ah, if only there were way more books as good as these and in this vein!

Blake Crouch, Pines (NOT recommended - I skimmed through it with increasing incredulity and dislike!)

Sam Reaves, Mean Town Blues (not bad).

Maggie Mitchell, Pretty Is (I liked this a lot - the voices of the two main characters could be more clearly differentiated, and the ending is implausible, but the writing is extremely good, and the protagonist teaches Richardson!).

Then (ah, my Amazon recommendation algorithm is going to flog all sorts of unfortunate things for years to come - I was in Cayman still, I like digging in to a long book that is first in a series!) the first Dune (a mixture of appealing and silly) and then subsequent two installments, which become increasingly silly - I think I can do without reading any more of these!

By then I was in England, and took up a very good and suitable urban fantasy series set in many of the same places I was spending time: Benedict Jacka's Alex Verus series. These are extremely good, very appealing light reading: not quite as funny and original, I think, as Ben Aaronovitch's Rivers of London books, but certainly worth mentioning in the same breath.

A very silly book I regretted wasting my time on: the storytelling isn't bad, but I really just wish characters wouldn't stop to have sex in the middle of my nice suspenseful genre fiction, I wouldn't have picked it up if I realized it was more on the romantic suspense lines....

Two installments that I LOVED in a new series by Rachel Aaron (haven't read her others and brief sampling persuaded me I wouldn't necessarily like them as much, but these are delightful, whimsy notwithstanding): Nice Dragons Finish Last and One Good Dragon Deserves Another. Less "indie" in sensibility than Martin Millar's extraordinary Kalix the Werewolf books, but not totally dissimilar in sensibility and appeal.

Elizabeth Hand's Wylding Hall (quite good, and yet flawed by a deep romanticism that is not at all subjected to critique - I think I am tough on Hand's books in the way that one is overly critical of books that have a lot in common with someone one would want to write oneself - but I really prefer the Pamela Dean vision of such things).

By now I think I was in Iceland....

Peter Robinson's latest Inspector Banks book, In the Dark Places (not earth-shattering, but well-conceived and -executed - these books are always readable).

An amazing novel I've had on my Kindle for a little while but for some reason hadn't tackled (possibly due to the word "Love" in the title), Alaya Dawn Johnson's Love is the Drug. Highly recommended.

A reread of Nos4A2 because I couldn't find anything I liked and decided it would be better to have something good for the second time than something bad for the first, and then a reread of Lauren Beukes' The Shining Girls to see if the two had as much in common as I remembered (yes and no - definitely share the same DNA - Beukes' main characters are more fully individuated, but Hill's storytelling is perhaps slightly more gripping).

The first two-thirds of The Three-Body Problem, which I enjoyed very much but found too little character-driven to keep my attention during a day of travel (I will finish it tomorrow or the next day I expect).

On the plane back from Iceland, grippingly, a book I was excited for at the time but somehow never quite opened up (or maybe I did and found the opening pages bleak?), but it is GLORIOUSLY appealing and what I most like: Nicole Kornher-Stace's Archivist Wasp. Throw this book in the face of anyone who suggests that the dystopian YA genre is all tapped out!

Then a reread of the four Arnaldur Indridason books I had in my Kindle library, to get into the Icelandic frame of things (the most recent four, basically - there's a new one out in England but not yet in the US I think). These books are thoughtful in a way that rewards rereading: I like the way he gives different characters the detective role in different books (a good way to avoid the kind of series burnout that afflicts certain writers I will not name).

Then, last night, a really delightful novella by the superb Mira Grant (she is a genius of light reading), Please Do Not Taunt the Octopus.

That's it for now, I think....

"their most recreative & dulcet croaking"

At the LRB, Tom Keymer on the latest edited volume of Burney's court journals (subscriber only):

Burney’s writing process was highly self-conscious. There are what she calls her ‘alives’: brief letters to intimates, typically functional, often dashed off in lulls during attendance on the queen. Then there are her daily memoranda: candid, fragmentary but copious notes on court life – ‘memoranduming scraps’, she calls them at one point – which she then wrote up. The memoranda are intensely private, but dried up at times of emotional strain, such as the death of Delany. The missing experiences were reconstructed in retrospect: ‘a general sketch’, she calls her account of one month, ‘for I kept no journal, not even a memorandum’. She abandoned the memoranda when the king’s first bout of madness disrupted the life of the court. ‘I have now no more fair running Journal – I kept not now even a memorandum for some time – but I made them by recollection afterwards, & very fully, for not a circumstance could escape a memory that seemed now to retain nothing but present events.’ There’s something novelistic in the mismatch between tense and deixis (‘I kept not now … a memory that seemed now’). Often the journals were written up a year or more after the events they describe, then immediately sent to Susanna, who received the journals for November and December 1788, for example, in January and February 1790. The immediacy is still there in them: they often portray a writer grappling with unresolved experience, ‘tormented with a sort of indefinable perplexity’. But they also possess a layer of considered analysis; and though Burney always resists explicit prolepsis, sometimes they’re coloured by events that have taken place between the original memorandum and its revision. ‘Troublous Times’ (from the Book of Daniel) is her summary comment in the December journal on the king’s descent into madness, which was already destabilising state affairs. But the institution of monarchy was in much deeper trouble in 1790 when Burney wrote those words. The Gothic style of her response to George’s condition – ‘nothing before us but despair & horrour!’ – has an unmistakable, albeit implicit, political inflection.

"Can you cook an egg on a book?"

Meakin Armstrong interviews Etgar Keret at Guernica. Here's a bit that especially caught my eye (I want to read this book):

Hebrew is this unique thing that you cannot translate to any other language. It has to do with its history. About 2,000 years ago, people stopped speaking Hebrew because of the diaspora. So people who went to Rome spoke Latin, people who moved to the US spoke English, people spoke Yiddish, but they didn’t speak Hebrew. They knew the words, but it was a written language—they read prayers, they knew the language well, but it wasn’t spoken. I think the logic behind it would be that you don’t need to use the language of God to ask where the restrooms are.

Then somebody took this frozen language and defrosted it in the microwave of history, and people spontaneously started speaking it. And the thing that happened when people started speaking this language is it was kind of a miracle. If Shakespeare were to come here and hear us speak, he wouldn’t understand a word we were saying, but if Abraham or Isaac took a taxi in Israel, they could communicate with the taxi driver. He’d understand what they are saying because the language didn’t organically change. It was frozen, like frozen peas, fresh out of the Bible.

We import words from other languages and we put them in Israeli verb form. Like for cocaine, we say in Hebrew, lesniff. We have many words like this from Russian, from Arabic. What happens when you speak colloquial Hebrew is you switch between registers all the time. So in a typical sentence, three words are biblical, one word is Russian, and one word is Yiddish. This kind of connection between very high language and very low language is very natural, people use it all the time.

Hedgehog life

The Big Hedgehog Map. Also (via Tyler Cowen) Day of the Hedgehog!

Dill battalions

Ah, I continue to fight the battle against the easy allure of Facebook and the way it saps blogging vim - it has been compounded, on this trip, by the fact that my lovely brand new computer (it arrived the day before I left, I hastily met with an IT guy who set it up for me), which is in every way great and weighs about one-quarter what my previous laptop did, has a non-functional battery (CURSE OF DELL). Given travels in places needing plug adaptors, and often a system where power shuts down in the room when you take the keycard out of the slot by the door, I have avoided having it plugged in at all, as it goes into automatic shutdown if it's in sleep mode and the power goes off. The iPad is much more suited to quick Twitter/Facebook posts than to more elaborate ones, further compounding the unwanted transition....

(Will pursue battery replacement as soon as I'm home properly on Monday.)

So lots of blogging to catch up on. For now, just one funny piece that COULD HAVE BEEN WRITTEN BY ME (via Bronwyn). One of the things that's very nice about food in Iceland versus other Scandinavian countries and Russia/Eastern Europe: I have not encountered a single bit of dill, it is chives for the most part instead which is a much more humane alternative! My aversion to dill knows no bounds....

Anyway, Shaun Walker at the Guardian on the "spindly menace" of dill in Russia:

It’s one thing when dill blankets traditional Russian dishes like the emptied contents of a lawnmower bag, but quite another when it shows up on pizza, sushi, quiches: occasions when you naively hadn’t even thought to request a dill-free meal from the waiter. It is a sabotage apparently borne of a grotesque, atavistic culinary longing, like some deranged Brit on the Costa del Sol lacing a paella with brown sauce.

More anon - we are off shortly (it is our last full day in Iceland) to soak in the Blue Lagoon....

Of verbal criticism

[David Mallet], Of Verbal Criticism: An Epistle to Mr. Pope. Occasioned by Theobald’s Shakespear, and Bentley’s Milton (London: Lawton Gilliver, 1733).

See, in the darkness of dull Authors bred,
With all their refuse lumber’d in his head,
Long years consum’d, large volumes daily turn’d,
And Servius read perhaps, while Maro burn’d,
In error obstinate, in wrangling loud,
Unbred, unsocial, positive, and proud;
Forth steps at last the self-applauding Wight,
Of points and letters, chaff and straws, to write;
Sagely resolv’d to swell each bulky piece
With venerable toys, from Rome and Greece;
How oft, in Homer, Paris curl’d his Hair;
If Aristotle’s Cap were round or square;
If in the Cave where Dido first was sped,
To Tyre she turn’d her Heels, to Troy her head.
Such the choice Anecdotes, profound and vain,
That store a Bentley’s and a Burman’s brain:
Hence Plato quoted, or the Stagyrite,
To prove that flame ascends, and snow is white:
Hence much hard study without sense or breeding,
And all the grave impertinence of reading.
If Shakespear says, the noon-day sun is bright,
His Scholiast will remark, it then was light;
Turn Caxton, Winkin, each old Goth and Hun,
To rectify the reading of a pun.
Thus, nicely trifling, accurately dull,
How one may toil, and toil---to be a fool! (4-5, ll.15-40)

Bright in its proper station

From Samuel Johnson, A Journey to the Western Islands of Scotland:

[O]ne generation of ignorance effaces the whole series of unwritten history. Books are faithful repositories, which may be a while neglected or forgotten; but when they are opened again, will again impart their instruction: memory, once interrupted, is not to be recalled. Written learning is a fixed luminary, which, after the cloud that had hidden it has past away, is again bright in its proper station. Tradition is but a meteor, which, if once it falls, cannot be rekindled.

JMD for IHD

I have taken a long time to get around to writing this up, partly I think out of reluctance to contemplate the whole question but also partly because it's much more troublesome to write a blog post with lots of links than to paste in simple text! But it is overdue, I need to send the link to a few people and here goes: these are some of the words I said for my father at the memorial we held at Penn in April.

First, some words a few friends of his sent via email.

Co-worker Chris Mustazza:

I used to stop by his office once per week or so just to chat about the wide range of topics that he knew about, from chemistry through technology through the history of sound recording. I respect him very much as a model of what a person can strive to be: massively knowledgeable, while also being so kind and humble.

Longtime friend and correspondent Paul Gould:

He would come to stay with us on many of his UK trips, tolerating the various futons and sofa beds we had to offer and the varying standards of accommodation, from the cold rooms we rented on the ground floor of a Victorian house in Liverpool (you had to put on additional layers of clothing when going inside in the Summer) to our current house in Halifax. When I was leaving my job at the University of Liverpool and mentioned feeling rather sad as I handed back my office keys, ID card, etc. his response was to send a cheque and tell us to go out and have a really good meal to cheer me up.

As time progressed, the gaps between our emails grew longer for reasons I can’t fathom. Looking back, I don't think we've been in touch since he came over in October 2013. We used to discuss the opera performances we’d attended (I do remember smiling when he dismissed a season at the Met one year as “too Italian”) and I was thinking of him recently when considering whether to book tickets to the Opera North Ring Cycle concert performances next year. Shelley flatly refused to accompany me, and I thought that asking him to make the trip over every Saturday for a month would have been a bit too much! I’m sure he would have enjoyed the idea, though. Coincidentally, Shelley and I were watching a TV programme this morning from the Jodrell Bank radio observatory in Cheshire, which we visited with him one time he was over while we were still living in Liverpool. We were laughing about the fact that he would always zip around museums and exhibitions in what seemed like 5 minutes, and yet still take away everything he wanted from them.

For me, my father was most of all an intellectual interlocutor, a person with whom I shared a great many sensibilities and interests. We were both in some sense more than is usually true "people of the internet": my father had a good deal of early involvement in the world of computing (he worked at HP in the late 1960s), but he really came into his own, I think, in the last ten or fifteen years (think about how Netflix lets you obtain obscure German films...).

For as long as I can remember, my father had captivating ideas and things: the gigantic spool with a mile of thread on it; the stint working on the neutrino detection project at the Homestake Gold Mine (I remember a conversation that must have happened when I was about eight in which my father sketched out the tank and explained why it was filled with dry-cleaning fluid!).

In high school, when I was obsessed with the works of Anthony Burgess and had read every book of his I could get my hands on, my father brought me with him into the stacks at the Penn library (my eyes were like saucers!) so that I could check out the other ones (ever the completist). He was not a great expresser of affection, but during a spell of working near a Pepperidge Farm outlet store, he used to bring home huge hauls of slightly damaged goods (cakes with a nub bitten out of the side, catering-size cartons of goldfish), and I also remember his purchase on the grocery run of the occasional box of Froot Loops as falling under the heading of affection as well!

When I was writing my undergraduate senior thesis on the electric telegraph and theories of language, he explored all sorts of archives and museums in the UK. Ditto when I was researching the life and work of Alfred Nobel for my second novel.

One way to convey something of the relationship is to search my Light Reading blog for all the links my father sent me over the years. It is an amazing catalog! He sent things that fell at the intersection of his interests and my own; he had a keen an eye for what I would find amusing or delightful.

Here are a few of them.

Under the heading of "recreational zoology":

“The faster, fiercer and always surprising sloth”

Urban falconry

A video clip of fisherman in West Flanders riding horses into the ocean to catch shrimp

An amazing Orion Magazine piece about the “deep intellect” of the octopus

History:

Newly digitized images from Scott’s Antarctic expedition

Journalist Ben Fenton’s account of how he exposed a set of forged letters smuggled into the Public Records Office at Kew in an attempt to prove that Winston Churchill commissioned a British intelligence officer to murder Heinrich Himmler

What the Sampson archives revealed about life in the corridors of power

Education:

A Wall Street Journal spring stunt in which college presidents were invited to submit college application essays in response to a question their own institution offered to prospective students

Computing and the history of science:

A correspondent’s letter noting that a rebuild of the “Colossus” can now be seen in the museum at Bletchley Park (I was later able to go and see the museum of computing there with my own eyes!)

Douglas Hofstadter’s quest to build computational models of human intelligence

Random things he knew I would like:

A record-breaking chocolate bar (6 tons, if you are interested, manufactured by Thornton’s with dimension of 4m x 4m)

The amazing cakes featured on the website of Philadelphia’s “Night Kitchen” bakery (he’d been to a birthday party featuring one)

Literature:

Wardrobe choices of Lee Child’s Jack Reacher character

Morbid things:

The exhumation of the remains of Cardinal Newman

A rather fantastic Wikipedia biography of British doctor and mass-murderer John Bodkin Adams (convicted, among other things, of the wonderfully named offense "lying on cremation forms"!) (this came to his eyes as a consequence of reading D. R. Thorpe's Harold Macmillan biography and delighting in the way Macmillan's life seemed to intersect with all sorts of unexpected figures)

Kebabs made as corpse lay nearby:

Flies were landing on food in the shop and there was an "awful smell."
A fast food shop owner was found preparing food while an employee's corpse lay nearby.
Police called to the Pappu Sweet Centre in Wolverhampton in August discovered the man's body on a sofa near the kitchen, magistrates in the city heard.
The business, owned by Jaswinder Singh, 45, was shut down immediately.
The council said it was one of the worst cases environmental health officers had seen. Mr Singh has been banned from running any food business.
The man's death was not suspicious, police said.

Oddities:

A promotional video for a fundraising 5K race organized by a public library that combined 2 of my favorite things (as I noted on my blog) – libraries and the Vibram five-finger “toe shoes”

The private lives of public bathrooms

The difficulty of building a full-scale replica of Noah’s Ark in modern-day Netherlands in compliance with EU fire safety standards

Madeleine Albright's fondness for "symbolic brooches":

A poem appeared in the papers in Baghdad comparing me to many things but, among them, “an unparalleled serpent”. So I decided to wear an antique snake brooch when I talked about Iraq. Some camera zeroed in, and the press asked, “Why are you wearing that snake brooch?” I said, “Because Saddam Hussein compared me to an unparalleled serpent.”

A first-person account of a Portuguese citizen who bought a small island and founded his own country:

I have both a Portuguese passport and a passport for Pontinha (where my passport number is 0001). There are four citizens: me, my wife, my son and my daughter. I am the police, the gardener, everything. I am whatever I want to be – that’s the dream, isn’t it? If I decide I want to have a national song, I can choose it, and I can change it any time. The same with my flag – it could be blue today, red tomorrow. Of course, my power is only absolute here, where I am the true sovereign.

The Portuguese gastronomic speciality is bacalhau. But we are running out of cod in our oceans now, and we buy it from another country. So my gastronomy, my country’s speciality, is takeaway.

We both particularly enjoyed the Lunch with the FT feature, most of all when there is also some sort of drama concerning the food! (Gideon Rachman Here's a good example, in which Gideon Rachman interviewed the Prime Minister of Thailand in a "jollied-up" basement room at the Davos resort where the World Economic Forum is held: "Abhisit, immaculately dressed in a grey suit and waistcoat, with a pale blue shirt and black tie with white stripes, looks slightly doubtful at the array of lurid pastries and curled sandwiches placed before him. I explain that our conversation is meant to take place against a background of eating and drinking. “OK. I will comply,” he says. But he makes no movement towards the food.")

Things my father liked: sushi, oysters, rare beef. Wagner! Cars.

He followed very closely all sorts of things I was involved with: the artist Tino Seghal’s “situations” (this was another link he sent me), my friend and former student Nico Muhly’s career as a composer.

We often saw a film together: the last one we saw before he died was the Russian film Leviathan; other memorable excursions featured Werner Herzog's Encounters at the End of the World, the Jackie Stewart documentary Weekend of a Champion and the Robert Downey, Jr. Iron Man.

He had a stint in hospital last spring, and it was a great relief to me and to him that he was able to regain enough mobility to get back to work, and even to get to New York earlier this year for food and culture.

Work was his lifeline. He died unexpectedly of a heart attack at home, and though I miss him acutely, I am glad for his sake that he didn't live a diminished life in his final years. Let us now eat and drink in his memory!