I don't know why

I waste my time with this kind of stuff. OK, it wasn't truly atrocious (I'm talking about KJ Erickson's The Dead Survivors) but it's pretty poorly constructed, quite meandering, and vexed with a ridiculously overelaborate plot. Farfetched serial-killer premise. I've got two more of her books on loan, but think I will skip the next one and just go for the most recent, which I was told is quite good. Of course the truth is that I always need some pretty undemanding books to read on the side. I've got Alan Hollinghurst's Booker-winning latest from the library, but don't have the attention to spare for it; a few other volumes of light reading await; but mostly I just need to read for this week's classes.

In the drama course, we're doing Nahum Tate's adaptation of King Lear (many interesting things about this, but it's notorious chiefly for giving the play a happy ending--Cordelia lives to marry Edgar, etc. etc.), plus miscellaneous critics on Shakespeare in the eighteenth century, including Michael Dobson. In the graduate course, we're reading most of Rousseau's Emile, plus various thought-provoking extracts by Eve Sedgwick, Kate Soper and Thomas Laqueur.

I am currently enjoying Columbia's weird election day holiday--in compensation for not getting Columbus Day or any extra time at Thanksgiving, we get Monday and Tuesday off this week--working fiendishly hard to revise my novel. I'm on chapter 7 of 13 which is pretty reasonable. Must finish before Thanksgiving, preferably by Nov. 15 if humanly possible.

Tomorrow I'm going to vote for the first time. Isn't that awful? But I only got my citizenship in 2000, and moved to NY in August 2000 and didn't get it together to register in time for the last presidential election. I have an 8:30am voting date with my friend Nico. I am deeply pessimistic about the likely outcome but will be delighted if my predictions prove wrong.

A book or two

Coming back from Philadelphia on Saturday, I bought the hardcover edition of Tamora Pierce's Trickster's Queen. There is something curiously satisfying about young-adult fantasy novels. I don't think Pierce is particularly interesting in terms of prose style, and I don't know that this sequel is as good as the first (Trickster's Choice). But certainly a very enjoyable read--I finished it last night instead of doing any work.

And look out soon for my thoughts on Dan Brown...

I was in Philadelphia with a few colleagues to interview candidates for a position at Columbia. We couldn't get a hotel room in the conference hotel (it was the meeting of the North American Conference on British Studies) but Penn's Center for Advanced Judaic Studies kindly lent us a conference room. The building's right across from Independence Hall and really at this time of year the whole city is ridiculously pretty--the leaves turning, the "quaint" architecture, etc.

And a review due Thursday

of Earth : An Intimate History (by Richard Fortey, also author of the enchanting--and enchantingly named--Trilobite!) and O: The Intimate History of the Orgasm (by Jonathan Margolis). Witty choice of books by my editor. In return I am hoping he will let me call the review "The Earth Moved." (Obvious and cheesy but pretty much irresistible I think.) Other suggestions are welcome.

What I'm teaching

Shaw's Pygmalion in the drama course; and for the graduate seminar, a miscellaneous heap of writings on language and elocution by Samuel Johnson, Thomas Sheridan, Noah Webster, Tom Paulin and Tom Leonard with a bit of Gramsci thrown in for good measure. In other words, my interests have weirdly converged so that we've got language on the table in both classes on the same day. I am pretty excited....

As a non sequitur, I will also observe that I am proud of never having owned a single Norton Anthology of English Literature.

Call me sentimental

but I do really hate reading these stories about what happens when you separate baby monkeys from their mothers.

Writing habits

I was thinking about CAAF's post at Tingle Alley about how writing is hard. When I was drafting my new novel this spring, it all went pretty smoothly in the grand scheme of things but it still felt like very hard work--the image in my head for what I was doing was cutting a usable path through a sugar-cane field with an extremely blunt machete. (I'm not kidding, and this is not writerly affectation. Ten times a day I thought of this and struggled forward. Because even if it's slow and rather back-breaking, you have to do it. Or else there won't be a path, will there?) The writing tip I found most inspirational was one suggested by Garth Nix (see the "Keeping Motivated" section under "How I Write"); keeping a word count and setting sane daily word limits so that you can see the manuscript accumulating without any single superhuman feat of effort.

And here's CAAF's original post. Kevin Wignall says in the comments that he doesn't think writing is hard; I take his point (and his own writing certainly makes it look lovely and easy...), but I still say that this has a lot to do with your temperament. Personally, I find it comforting to think of writing as hard work. Imagine writing and revising a novel as a job like any other big one: building a house, cleaning out a house that somebody lived in for seventy years, raising a child from its first to its second birthday; training to run a marathon, etc. etc. If you think you could do a decent job with any one of these, there is no reason you can't write a perfectly good novel.

And by the way

I don't know why this NYT story on "Big G.O.P. Bid to Challenge Voters at Polls in Key State" struck me as so particularly horrendous--after all there has been something outrageous/tragic/horrifying/unbelievable pretty much every day in the news for the past, what, 4 years--but this one really takes the cake:

Republican Party officials in Ohio took formal steps yesterday to place thousands of recruits inside polling places on Election Day to challenge the qualifications of voters they suspect are not eligible to cast ballots.
Party officials say their effort is necessary to guard against fraud arising from aggressive moves by the Democrats to register tens of thousands of new voters in Ohio, seen as one of the most pivotal battlegrounds in the Nov. 2 elections.

A few novels

Finished Jim Fusilli's latest novel, Hard, Hard City. Enjoyed it very much. Look forward to reading the first two in the series. Also read an absolutely minor Agatha Christie novel (I'm not sure I'd ever read it before, but the stock "anonymous-letter-writer-in-a-village-with-plot-twist" is such a familiar theme that I may well be wrong), The Moving Finger.

I have a ton of work-related reading this weekend, so I don't anticipate reading many more books, but I must say that two novels by Dan Brown finally passed into my hands and I am having horrible enjoyment of Digital Fortress! Will post more thoughts when I'm done, but I must say it is ful of wonderfully awful sentences. Quite enjoyable to read, though. Certainly much, much higher quality than Grisham.

I caught the Stephen Elliott reading on Thursday night in Brooklyn. It was excellent. I must get a copy of Looking Forward To It: the parts Steve read were hilarious. Also made a mental note to acquire a copy of The Confessions of Max Tivoli by Andrew Sean Greer, which sounds very good if not exactly my cup of tea.

Winding down

After the classic 14-hour Wednesday work-day, I came home and luxuriated in a lovely novel, Jim Fusilli's Tribeca Blues. I am too wiped out to produce any opinions other than that it is a great treat to read a well-written first-person novel about a guy who often takes the 1-9, which has curiously been my train in all my best NY living experiences (the bizarre Hell's Kitchen sublet, which isn't worth going into here but which involved a life-size Hulk Hogan cutout, a plexiglass-topped table full of jellybeans in which living cockroaches could often be seen to walk around as if in a super-sized sugar-lover's ant farm, an oven that just SEETHED with roaches when you opened it up [there were tons of roaches even in the fridge], and a bizarre main tenant who used a red-light, green-light system in the window of the living room to signal to his curious "friends" whether or not it was appropriate to come up; the air-shaft-looking-out studio in the Carteret at 23rd and 7th, a building known to my friends at the time [it was 1991 or so] as "Lobster Palace" due to an injuduciously placed restaurant sign; my current apartment on Riverside Drive, only a few blocks away from one of the murder locations in this novel). Anyway, this book was great, and I've just started on the next one, both loaned to me by my friend M. Either I will rashly stay up and finish it tonight or else I will fall into bed for some much-needed sleep.

"Tojo. Petain. Batista. De Valera. Arias. Quezon. Camacho. Litvinov. Zhukov. Hull. Welles. Harriman. Dies. Heydrich. Blum. Quisling..."

Finished The Plot Against America : A Novel last night. I don't like it when novels have the subtitle "a novel"! And I wholly disapprove of Roth's decision (or his publishers', who knows, but I suspect it originated with the author) to print the historical appendix at the end of the book. There are many structural reasons never, never to do this with historical novels--surely a brief note would have been enough, if he wanted to clarify, but I think it would be more genuinely chilling without those pages at all.

I quite enjoyed this--there are some great moments, and the setting of Newark in the late 30s is excellent--but I didn't think it was nearly as good as some of his others in the last ten years: I still think that Sabbath's Theater is the best of the ones I've read, and I loved The Human Stain too (but I haven't read the other two in that trilogy, American Pastoral and I Married a Communist--must check them out, though). I think what put me off this one a little was the curious flatness of the tone. It's written in the voice of the adult, not the boy who's described, and the language is really quite sterile. I found myself thinking several times of Pelecanos' Hard Revolution and noting that there is no detail quite so memorable in Roth's novel as Pelecanos' quiet observation about the ordinary Greek diners of the 1960s that the Heinz bottles on the tables are full of a cheaper ketchup that is sugarier and saltier and more vinegary than the label would suggest. (I wish I'd taken this quotation out while I still had the book, it stuck with me for some reason.)

(NB I can now say having read Roth's novel that Stanley Crouch's criticism of the book for excluding black people and the problem of race is actually just totally misguided. The book's really a fable rather than a realist novel, and the way the point-of-view is set up--little Philip Roth all grown up--it would be wholly out of keeping with the character formed by the milieu he describes to talk more than occasionally about race relations. Which come up briefly, but which just aren't central to this particular book, and that's the way it is...)

This week's teaching

Susanna Centlivre's A Bold Stroke for a Wife and Oliver Goldsmith's She Stoops to Conquer in the drama course; Jefferson's Notes on the State of Virginia plus criticism by Leo Marx and Anthony Appiah for my class on the idea of culture.

Alan Garner in the Guardian

An excellent profile of Alan Garner in the Guardian. I loved this guy's books when I was younger--they really are special--this reminds me to get them again now. I reread a couple a few years ago and they are still truly excellent. I think there may be a few later ones that I haven't read before. And the article included mention of another book I read a little while ago and really liked:

Francis Spufford, in his memoir of childhood reading, The Child that Books Built (2002), praises Garner's achievement in 'reintroducing myth into the bloodstream of daily life'. He saw Garner as part of an amazing generation of talent at work as the 1960s ended and in the 1970s, citing William Mayne, Peter Dickinson, Jill Paton Walsh, Joan Aiken, Diana Wynne-Jones, Rosemary Sutcliffe and Leon Garfield.

Spufford's book took me back into the world of my childhood reading in the 1970s--he must be just a few years older than I am, and I read a lot more English stuff than American, so it was like reading a book written by myself in some altered state. It is true that Dickinson, Aiken, Wynne-Jones, Sutcliffe, Garner et al. really transported me, then and now. It would be amazing to write books like that.

A little light reading

I've got a monumental amount of work to do this weekend--and have been crazy busy all week, too--but of course there's always time to squeeze in a few novels. On the recommendation of my friend M., who lent it to me, I read KJ Erickson's Third Person Singular. Quite good, but marred by various implausibilities. Will check out further ones in the series--the Minneapolis setting isn't bad. And rather better, I think, was Carol Lea Benjamin's Fall Guy. I was wary of this one--somebody should tell the publicity folks at William Morrow that describing this woman's first novel on the flap copy as "elevating the canine mystery novel out of the lighthearted realm of cozy" is NOT a very good recommendation. However a better way of describing it would be to say it's PI NY noir--the dog is a very fully realized character (and certainly a far more plausible one than the eight-year-old son in Erickson's book, who serves a similar function), the narrator is an attractive character, and it thoughtfully treats the post-9/11 NY thing. I would strongly recommend this one to anyone who likes, oh, Sara Paretsky and Dick Francis. It's very well-written. (Though it's true that reading all those novels by Ken Bruen and those other guys I got tipped off to from Sarah Weinman's website (Charlie Williams and Kevin Wignall and such) has spoiled me for a normally good crime novel and impossibly raised my expectations...)

Halfway through The Plot Against America. I wish there hadn't been quite so much hype--I love Philip Roth in general, and I'm certainly enjoying the book, but I'm finding there to be something a bit sterile about the writing. I'll see what I think when I'm finished.

Must get to work now. I've had two rather exciting invitations--of completely different kinds--in the last two days; one of which will involve some work in December and January, the other of which plunged me into a frenzy right now. And wreaks further havoc with my weekend work schedule. However, I'm not complaining, it's all good and also I've had many years of life where I was tempted to laugh in the face of people who say things like "Oh, there aren't enough hours in the day" or "Life's too short." If you are rather depressed, there are always too many hours in the day and it is impossible to imagine feeling that life's too short! So this last year or two has been a great improvement.

Derrida in n+1

My friend Marco Roth has a rather lovely two-part essay up at n+1.

Secret histories

My psychoanalysis review is up at the Voice Literary Supplement. (And thanks to Maud for linking.)