c. 1280, for a total of 6032 words.
(In The Explosionist and Invisible Things, I could follow the useful advice that if things seem to have gotten a bit boring, you can always blow something up; in this novel, it's not generically applicable as a solution, but on the other hand it is always possible to send one's characters to a party....)
Friday, December 10, 2010
Thursday, December 09, 2010
Deadwood legends
A cool bit at Wired Science about the afterlife of the Homestake gold mine as a physics lab: this is the mythology of my childhood, my father worked on that project for some years in the 1980s at Penn and had a stint actually living in South Dakota while they built the original neutrino-detection tank! The museum sounds as though it will be highly worthwhile; I have long had a yen to visit that part of the world due to the great impression Laura Ingalls Wilder's books made on me as a young child....
Production of quota
Significantly less painful than yesterday.
c. 1595 words, for a total of 4715 words
c. 1595 words, for a total of 4715 words
Wednesday, December 08, 2010
Better late than never
The whole afternoon got caught up in research, but I quailed at the notion of giving up on the quota system so early in the month, and buckled down in the early evening to produce the day's allotment....
c. 1160 words, for total of 3164 words
c. 1160 words, for total of 3164 words
Procrastinatory tidbits
At the NYRB blog, James Gleick ponders the OED's new and novella-length entry for the word "information."
At the LRB, Michael Wood reflects on linguistic similarities and differences between Lewis Carroll and James Joyce (the piece also quotes, appealingly, a pun from Walter Redfern's book, which I now covet but do not think I will be able to get electronically: "A person who has been given bits of greenery for her birthday instead of the colourful flowers she was hoping for decides to make the best of things. She says: ‘With fronds like these, who needs anemones?’").
At the LRB, Michael Wood reflects on linguistic similarities and differences between Lewis Carroll and James Joyce (the piece also quotes, appealingly, a pun from Walter Redfern's book, which I now covet but do not think I will be able to get electronically: "A person who has been given bits of greenery for her birthday instead of the colourful flowers she was hoping for decides to make the best of things. She says: ‘With fronds like these, who needs anemones?’").
As the world comes into its proper alignment!
Just one of those funny little moments....
Probably the thing I find hardest about being in Cayman is lack of near-instantaneous access to the wonderful Columbia library system. After twenty-plus years of having this kind of access at one library or another, I take it almost for granted; I am always running over in the hour before the library closes to grab an armful of books from the stacks.
This morning it suddenly came to me that Julius Chambers's journalistic expose of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum was the book I most wanted to get my hands on in all the world (at least vis-a-vis immediate research imperatives of TBOMS). I grumpily inveighed to myself against Google Books when it seemed that I couldn't get it there, regretted that there wasn't an electronic version in the Columbia Library catalog, was about to pay good dollars for an electronic copy elsewhere and then, magically, realized that I could get a scanned PDF copy of Chambers' A Mad World and Its Inhabitants for free at Kobo Books. I have now transferred it to my Kindle for easy reading in a reclining position, as the early stages of novel-writing always make me feel that I would be able to concentrate better if I were lying down with my eyes closed.
Yes, this search and acquisition process can be much streamlined - really I want to be able to do everything through the library homepage and/or Google and Amazon, I need a simplified interface and a real catalog that will integrate different sources into a single e-book source, but it is still very good, this is the world I thought I should be living in when I was a child in the 1970s dependent on others for physical access to libraries and with that terrible sense of literary scarcity best summed up in these lovely and painful words of Randall Jarrell's!
(Haven't yet written the day's quota, unfortunately - got diverted onto the more enjoyable and easy task of doing research. But it must be eked out before the hour of midnight, that is the rule....)
Probably the thing I find hardest about being in Cayman is lack of near-instantaneous access to the wonderful Columbia library system. After twenty-plus years of having this kind of access at one library or another, I take it almost for granted; I am always running over in the hour before the library closes to grab an armful of books from the stacks.
This morning it suddenly came to me that Julius Chambers's journalistic expose of the Bloomingdale Insane Asylum was the book I most wanted to get my hands on in all the world (at least vis-a-vis immediate research imperatives of TBOMS). I grumpily inveighed to myself against Google Books when it seemed that I couldn't get it there, regretted that there wasn't an electronic version in the Columbia Library catalog, was about to pay good dollars for an electronic copy elsewhere and then, magically, realized that I could get a scanned PDF copy of Chambers' A Mad World and Its Inhabitants for free at Kobo Books. I have now transferred it to my Kindle for easy reading in a reclining position, as the early stages of novel-writing always make me feel that I would be able to concentrate better if I were lying down with my eyes closed.
Yes, this search and acquisition process can be much streamlined - really I want to be able to do everything through the library homepage and/or Google and Amazon, I need a simplified interface and a real catalog that will integrate different sources into a single e-book source, but it is still very good, this is the world I thought I should be living in when I was a child in the 1970s dependent on others for physical access to libraries and with that terrible sense of literary scarcity best summed up in these lovely and painful words of Randall Jarrell's!
(Haven't yet written the day's quota, unfortunately - got diverted onto the more enjoyable and easy task of doing research. But it must be eked out before the hour of midnight, that is the rule....)
Tuesday, December 07, 2010
The magic circle
I have to warn you that it is a PDF, but Johanna Koljonen's description of the production by "larpwrights" Martin Ericsson and Christopher Sandberg of the last three acts of Hamlet as a three-day live-action role-playing game in Stockholm in 2002 is a fascinating read.
(On a lighter note, I am still disappointed and mildly outraged that the Clydesdale Hamlet does not feature a redacted performance of Shakespeare's play with gigantic horses in the lead roles!)
As I've researched the topic, the three games I've found myself most intrigued by and attracted to are (from simplest to most complex) the Japanese location-based game Mogi, the Swedish game Momentum and the aforementioned Hamlet; I am not for the most part a gamer myself, though I suspect that if I hadn't taken part in Tino Sehgal's "This Situation" I might not be writing this novel about games.
Day 2: c. 1200 words, 2058 words total.
(On a lighter note, I am still disappointed and mildly outraged that the Clydesdale Hamlet does not feature a redacted performance of Shakespeare's play with gigantic horses in the lead roles!)
As I've researched the topic, the three games I've found myself most intrigued by and attracted to are (from simplest to most complex) the Japanese location-based game Mogi, the Swedish game Momentum and the aforementioned Hamlet; I am not for the most part a gamer myself, though I suspect that if I hadn't taken part in Tino Sehgal's "This Situation" I might not be writing this novel about games.
Day 2: c. 1200 words, 2058 words total.
Monday, December 06, 2010
December resolutions
Non-momentous, but I've just written the first 1,109 words (I am typing straight onto the computer, contrary to my usual practice of drafting with pen or pencil on paper) of my new novel.
I am determined to claw back some sense of accomplishment out of the month of December; I am setting a very modest daily quota of 1,000 words, starting today, and I would like to return to New York on Jan. 5 with something on the order of a third of the book drafted.
If I could keep up the daily momentum and plough on forward with the draft (this will depend partly on how clearly I see the novel's through-line but also on the extent to which other things overwhelm me once I'm back 'in school,' including an essay for the Oxford Companion to the Novel on theater and eighteenth-century fiction - this one's due sometime in February, though I have conveniently forgotten exactly when - and the long-deferred revision of the little book on style), I could have a complete version of the story by the beginning of the summer, with a good chunk of time in July and August to revise it and get it ready to send out before the beginning of the school year?
Not at all certain about this (the whole thing might evaporate and turn out not to be worth executing in the first place!), but I think it is worth trying for....
I am determined to claw back some sense of accomplishment out of the month of December; I am setting a very modest daily quota of 1,000 words, starting today, and I would like to return to New York on Jan. 5 with something on the order of a third of the book drafted.
If I could keep up the daily momentum and plough on forward with the draft (this will depend partly on how clearly I see the novel's through-line but also on the extent to which other things overwhelm me once I'm back 'in school,' including an essay for the Oxford Companion to the Novel on theater and eighteenth-century fiction - this one's due sometime in February, though I have conveniently forgotten exactly when - and the long-deferred revision of the little book on style), I could have a complete version of the story by the beginning of the summer, with a good chunk of time in July and August to revise it and get it ready to send out before the beginning of the school year?
Not at all certain about this (the whole thing might evaporate and turn out not to be worth executing in the first place!), but I think it is worth trying for....
Monday miscellany
Death at age 98 of a Danish actor said to have been a model for Tintin.
The desk of Oliver Sacks (thanks to Dave Lull).
An Explosionist review, an Invisible Things review.
Suggestive excerpts from Jonathan Franzen's "art of fiction" interview in the forthcoming Paris Review.
A mighty appealing essay by Alexander Chee about book surpluses, e-readers and a life of reading.
The desk of Oliver Sacks (thanks to Dave Lull).
An Explosionist review, an Invisible Things review.
Suggestive excerpts from Jonathan Franzen's "art of fiction" interview in the forthcoming Paris Review.
A mighty appealing essay by Alexander Chee about book surpluses, e-readers and a life of reading.
Friday, December 03, 2010
The diplomatic bag
Andy Martin does a hilariously good interview with Lee Child for The Independent, including a moniker origin-story that I'd never heard before:
(Given how few novel ideas there are out there about how to publicize good books, this seems to me an excellent one - give away an earlier installment in the series to hook new readers who will purchase or at least obtain all the others. I don't think the first installment in the series is as good as the later ones - I liked it very much when I read it, but it didn't exude that crack-like addictive aura that the few-volumes-later ones did, and I don't know that it would be the best choice for the give-away - but I see why this one was chosen out of recent installments. I think I would have picked Die Trying, personally; my favorite two are Persuader and The Enemy, but each is slightly anomalous in its way and probably wouldn't have been the best choice.)
(Apologies for the flash - I was too impatient to remind myself properly how to turn it off...)
Also: Jack Reacher recently made my list of the fifteen most memorable fictional characters that I could think of off the top of my head who had notionally influenced me (why, though, didn't I think of Sherlock Holmes?).
The origin of his name goes back to a mid-1970s train ride in the US. He and his wife fell into conversation with an American who told them that he owned a "European" car. It turned out to be a Renault 5, marketed in the US – to give it a certain Parisian chic – as "Le Car". But the friendly American said: "Lee Car". After that, "Lee" became their surrogate definite article: "Can you pass lee butter, please," and so on. When he and his wife had a baby, the kid was inevitably nicknamed "Lee Child". "I was looking for a name that was short, crisp and memorable," he says. Lee Child (Snr) was born.It is well known to regular readers in these parts that I think Lee Child is a genius of light reading; he is also a genius of (or at least signal innovator in) publicity, witness the recent Reacher Ambassador campaign! I was invited by Lee's longtime publicist Maggie Griffin to become a "Reacher Ambassador," and seized the opportunity; in my office at Columbia is a box full of copies of the book pictured below (one of those slightly-unsightly-in-its-handling-proportions elongated mass-market paperbacks), and if you see me in New York in coming months (I have a plane ticket from Cayman to JFK on January 5) you should ask me for one...
(Given how few novel ideas there are out there about how to publicize good books, this seems to me an excellent one - give away an earlier installment in the series to hook new readers who will purchase or at least obtain all the others. I don't think the first installment in the series is as good as the later ones - I liked it very much when I read it, but it didn't exude that crack-like addictive aura that the few-volumes-later ones did, and I don't know that it would be the best choice for the give-away - but I see why this one was chosen out of recent installments. I think I would have picked Die Trying, personally; my favorite two are Persuader and The Enemy, but each is slightly anomalous in its way and probably wouldn't have been the best choice.)
(Apologies for the flash - I was too impatient to remind myself properly how to turn it off...)Also: Jack Reacher recently made my list of the fifteen most memorable fictional characters that I could think of off the top of my head who had notionally influenced me (why, though, didn't I think of Sherlock Holmes?).
"I am sensitive about the word glue"
They invented the Post-It note! (FT site registration required.)
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