A culinary digression

I was captivated by the name when I saw the tin at the supermarket the other day, and I just had it for lunch - cullen skink! I am not sure I have ever had it before, but my Scottish grandfather used to make Finnan haddie for breakfast, and it was delicious (I think it was just the fish poached in milk, perhaps with a small knob of butter and some pepper, maybe potatoes as well?) - this perhaps not quite as good, but only in the way that something out of the tin is not as good as homemade...

Jump!

Jilly Cooper has a new book coming out next month! It is hard to explain why her books are so delightful, but this blog entry does give a little bit of the flavor - hmmm, I wish I had that book right now...

Monday round-up

Ghosts of the Leningrad siege (via my father).

Bits and pieces of light reading: Richard Kadrey's Sandman Slim, a recommendation from Brent that I enjoyed quite a bit (I've read other books rather like it - it is along Dresden Files lines - also we are in the thick of an angel-demon zeitgeist, and I was struck by similarities to the TV series Supernatural - but it is really appealingly well-written, with a fresh and lively and distinctive first-person voice); and Tom Rob Smith's Child 44, which seems to me flawed in various respects but so energetic and interesting and engaging that I was willing to forgive various implausibilities and awkward handlings of narrative point of view.

I got a good haul of books on Saturday at the Hobbies & Books store in Grand Harbour, which is unfortunately closing - but all books were discounted 30%, with an additional free fourth book for every three purchased. A few of the ones I walked away with are true local curiosities, which I will perhaps post about anon...

I'm looking at a funny situation vis-a-vis work. I'm very tempted to plunge straight into drafting the new novel, but have decided it is impractical and that it will be better for me to leave it on the boil for a little while and come back to it later in the fall. I'll be in Ottawa for ten days or so in September, and then I'll be in New York for about four weeks in October, with side trips to Maine (for a friend's wedding) and Buffalo (for a conference).

The talk for NEASECS will be a preview of the ABCs of the novel project in the form of an argument about Laurence Sterne and novelistic conventions for the transcription of human movement and expression, and I'm also giving a talk earlier that month at the Fordham 18th-century seminar on Richardson's Clarissa; so that's two high-quality talks to write.

I also have two tenure letters to write this month, the first ones I have done (I turned down a few before I had tenure and I also turned down one or two in the first year I had tenure, but at this point I really have no good reason to say no, it is an important part of service to the profession); so I think that really my goal for the rest of the month is to write those two letters and get to work on Sterne and Richardson so that when I leave for Ottawa I at least have something down on paper in the way of draft. I may only have a week or so in Cayman between the return from Ottawa and the departure for New York, and it will be foolish to count on getting a lot of work done then; and my notion for the work I'll do during the New York weeks, aside from school catch-up stuff and the seasonal flood of letters of recommendation, is that it will be a good time to give the style book a wholesale going-over...

Martial artists

Cat armor at BoingBoing (the underlying link is also worthwhile).

Darkness falls

Tony Judt has died; here is a link to his stunning piece "Night".

Lydia Davis in Flaubert-time

Emily Stokes lunches with Lydia Davis for the FT (site registration required).

Miscellinkage

Philadelphia ghost sign project (via Blue Montakhab).

Frame backs at the Beinecke.

At the LRB, Steven Shapin on the decline of French haute cuisine.

At the TLS, Claire Harman on a new biography of H. G. Wells.

Pushpins, nanobots, unwanted fringes

Files of a fictional architecture.

Today in culture

More good gaming links from Ed Park: the germ of a novel; Adventure Generator!

I had three books of high research priority Amazoned to the hotel in Miami last week, as shipping to Cayman is either very expensive or very slow; Access All Areas is interesting and relevant to TBOMS and deeply charming, but Pervasive Games: Theory and Design is UTTERLY BRILLIANT! In fact (I am laughing, it is implausible, but somehow my research interests always converge across genres/modes and centuries) I am wondering whether I could somehow assign a chapter or two of it in my spring lecture class on Restoration and eighteenth-century drama, which is going to have a "presentation of self" theme and include tons of Erving Goffman and theories of moral sentiments and so forth - isn't it possible that Garrick's Stratford Jubilee was one of the world's first LARPs?!?

In other news, I enjoyed the first part of J. D. Daniels' "week in culture" (I am a Daniels fan - I want a book! - but here are a couple shorter bits you can read for free online), even though the name of the feature slightly makes me laugh...

Good enough to eat?

Adorable sandwich art (courtesy of Brent).

"Box 58 is Death"

The game of Nim and other ruses (via literary Eds).

Helen DeWitt: "A-free, C-free and G-visited".

It has been another odd week - I was only in Cayman for a few days before we went ahead and scheduled a trip to Miami for a nuclear stress test. There was no true worst-case scenario, I was pretty sure everything would be fine or (if not) eminently fixable (a term my more precise traveling companion corrected to "treatable!"), but I was nonetheless rather discombobulated and on tenterhooks until late Thursday afternoon, when the cardiologist declared him in the pink of health (not his exact words, but that was the gist of it). This is good!

So it was a week of airports and hotels and junk food and highway travel; we saw Inception and The Karate Kid at the mall opposite our hotel, and had a very good (but hot!) trip to the Miami Zoo on Saturday (the Amazon exhibits are particularly recommended - delightful venomous frogs and slinky snakes and lizards! - but I also particularly enjoyed the cotton-topped tamarins, always a favorite of mine, and a comical series of interactions between a bunch of lemurs that clearly demonstrated the dominance of the ringtailed over the red-ruffed when they share a single enclosure).

Had a bunch of light reading to while away the hours: first of all some fairly trivial stuff from the Humane Society Book Loft (it is not an infinitely renewable resources, alas, despite its excellence), Amanda Craig's Love in Idleness (very glad I am not the sort of English person she describes!) and Eileen Dreyer's Head Games (not as good as early Patricia Cornwell) and Lynda LaPlante's Red Dahlia (highly formulaic) and a pair of novels by Tonya Huff (the first of which it turned out I had read before, and the second of which mildly displeased me by failing to satisfy the obligations of a crime novel as opposed to "romantic suspense").

It was with delight that I then buried myself in another Humane Society find, Donna Tartt's wonderful novel The Little Friend. I loved it - the use of language is so much more vivid and interesting and appealing than everything else I've been reading recently - not to knock the other stuff - but really, it is something very special! Very funny in parts - and now I cannot stop using the word chunking - I chunked my duffel bag into the back of the SUV in the airport parking lot when we got back to Cayman a few hours ago...

And I had a bookstore splurge at the mall in Florida too (it was the slightly dubious-sounding Books-A-Million), and got a few things I've been coveting that made today's travels pass fairly quickly: Tana French's Faithful Place (not perhaps quite as good as the first two, and I was still expecting one more twist when the book quite abruptly came to an end, but still very good) and Joe Hill's Horns, which I am enjoying very much indeed and will finish as soon as I put a period to this excessively lengthy post.

When did I miss this?

Mona Simpson and Steve Jobs are brother and sister?!?

Animal crossing

Savegames of the deceased, courtesy of Ed.

Bevvies

Squirrel or stoat?

The dead speak

Alex Abramovitch visits the Strand.