On serendipity

After boot camp this morning at Chelsea Piers, I had a delicious coffee with Lauren at Chelsea Market and then headed to get the uptown train at 14th St. But it was all chaos and disarray there, with no information available other than that no 1, 2 or 3 trains were running uptown; if I didn't want to take the bus, I was informed by an unsurprisingly grumpy MTA employee, I had better walk over to 8th Avenue for the uptown C.

(Reading the paper later, I realized it was because of this; the only information available at the time was that there had been some sort of police action in Times Square.)

A very elegant middle-aged lady, an out-of-town visitor, was asking for directions, and I invited her to follow along with me as we were going more or less the same way (in fact it turned out she was going to Barnard, so it was really exactly the same sort of thing).

We fell into conversation and it turned into one of those truly lovely interactions with a stranger, where you can't believe quite how much it is like talking to someone you know very well already: she had done a master's degree in English at UCLA, she was a runner training for the Boston Marathon (something I have not yet qualified for, but which is one of my bucket list aspirations), etc.

It turned out that she had been in town for the Athena Film Festival to screen her documentary Out of Infamy: Michi Nishiura Weglyn. As we parted, she generously gave me a copy, and I have just watched it; it is a fascinating story, quite beautifully made, about the Japanese-American costume designer who left her job in order to write one of the first books exposing the true history of America's internment of Japanese-Americans during WWII.

In short, the day brought me something genuinely beautiful, important and altogether unexpected!

Here's a piece about the film at the Huffington Post, and I've embedded the trailer below. Some of the most lovely things glimpsed in the full-length version: the colored sketches Michi made as a biology student at Mount Holyoke and as a costume designer on the Perry Como Show.

Many thanks to Sharon Yamato for making my day so much richer than it otherwise would have been!

The pleasures of neurasthenia

Gideon Lewis-Kraus on reading Thomas Bernhard in New York.

"Women, Willie. Women"

Two good things in the weekend's Times from Toni Schlesinger, author of the superlative Five Flights Up: thoughts on cruising the Caribbean aboard a behemoth and an interview with a much-loved Norwegian cruise-ship captain.

Also: I have rather a yen for a cube of this ilk!

Franciscan themes

Nicholson Baker, speaking at Dodge Hall, as reported by Ed Park:

Dick Francis is an inspiration to me: First person. About horses. Every single book.

Mescal and sympathy

Oliver Sacks has luxuriant eyelashes. (Courtesy of Dave Lull.)

My favorite bit of the exchange:

How often do you prepare your own meals?

Once or twice — in my lifetime. Usually I subsist on cereal, sardines, and tabouli. Sometimes I have food delivered by Tea & Sympathy, or my local sushi place.

Have been very busy this week. Insane amounts to get done in next 10 days or so. That said, have found time for minor extracurriculars: an odd play at the Flea (weirdly chronologically unanchored play about nuns and priests leaving their orders, with disconcerting moment in which a cellphone appears & thoroughly disrupts peculiarly timeless ambience - why weren't they talking about the molestation scandals and the difficulty of recruiting high-quality young nuns if it really is set in the present day as opposed to the 1960s?), a fun show by Titus Andronicus courtesy of my good friend and triathlon training partner Lauren whose sister Amy is in the band and was kind enough to put us on the guest list. Tomorrow I am going to see Nico's thing at St. Ann's Warehouse. New York life: very stimulating, very tiring....

Subcontinental, uncomplimentary

This Wikipedia entry for English words with uncommon properties will repay further attention at some more leisurely moment. (Prompted by Brent's sending me this link!)

The catalog of things that must get done in the next week and a half is busting my brain! However it is all good, I am very happy to be back in my teaching life and with all sorts of other appealing obligations of a more or less optional kind; only I had better activate my superpowers, I think...

(Among other things I am reading lots of novels as a member of the judging committee for a fiction prize and tantalizingly can't really say anything about them, good or otherwise, until the awards have been given and the prize is over and done with, at which point I don't see why I can't say some good things about the ones I have particularly enjoyed...)

I did read a good book last night that it will not contravene the embargo to mention: Jessie Sholl's Dirty Secret: A Daughter Comes Clean About Her Mother's Compulsive Hoarding. The content is excellent, and I am sure it will find a very wide audience; I did feel that it could have been an essay-length piece of absolute long-lived brilliance, and that something was sacrificed in the writing in order to make it a book-length piece, but it is still a very good book. Two paragraphs I particularly liked:

In June, I'm walking along the Hudson River as I sometimes do, when I notice that my iPod is sounding utterly fantastic. Because of the times I helped my dad test out his new audio gear, I can easily tell the difference between a crap stereo and a good one. And suddenly my iPod sounds as good as one of my dad's best systems.

I take out my earbuds. Did I buy new ones and not remember? They look the same. Besides, I would remember. And my iPod certainly hasn't changed. I put the earbuds back in and switch from the Lemonheads to Outkast. Again, the music sounds excellent. I try Radiohead, the Rolling Stones, PJ Harvey. I'm hearing individual parts to the songs that I haven't noticed, or at least appreciated, before. And these parts are coming together to create a vastly wider spectrum of sound. I continue walking, blown away by what I'm hearing, still baffled as to why. And then I realize: It's the Wellbutrin. I'd become so depressed that everything had gone flat, including music. Now it's round again.

Bonus link to my favorite PJ Harvey song:

Larry, Curly and Moe

I could not resist this headline; original story here.

(Photo credit: Saundra Sovick for the Jonesboro Sun.)

"It's all supposed to be embargoed"

An interesting long piece about Michael Moorcock by Hari Kunzru at the Guardian. (Strange to say, I have never actually read a book by Moorcock, though obviously his influence is everywhere; please offer recommendations in the comments if you feel that there is a particular one I can't live without reading!)

A couple of bits I especially liked:

In a recent introduction to The Dancers at the End of Time, which is set in a decadent far future, Moorcock claims to have sported Wildean green carnations as a teenager, not to mention "the first pair of Edwardian flared trousers (made by Burton) as well as the first high-button frock coat to be seen in London since 1910". Elric, much less robust than his creator, who admits his dandyish threads gave him "the bluff domestic air of a Hamburg Zeppelin commander", is part Maldoror, part Yellow Book poseur and part William Burroughs; within a few years of his first appearance in 1961, British culture suddenly seemed to be producing real-life Elrics by the dozen, as Keith Richards, Jimmy Page and others defined an image of the English rock star as an effeminate, velvet-clad lotus-eater. Moorcock was very popular among musicians, and it's tempting to see him as co-creator of the butterfly-on-a-wheel character, which still wanders the halls of English culture in guises ranging from Sebastian Horsley to Russell Brand. I ask him whether he felt at the time that the 60s rockers were living out a role he'd imagined. He's too modest to agree, but tells an anecdote that seems to sum up psychedelic London's openness to fantasy of all kinds. "I'm in the Mountain grill on the Portobello Road, where everyone used to meet to get on the tour buses. I'm sitting there, and this bloke called Geronimo is trying to sell me some dope. He says 'have you heard about the tunnel under Ladbroke Grove?'. He starts to elaborate, about how it's under the Poor Clares nunnery, and you can go into that and come out in an entirely different world. I said to him, 'Geronimo, I think I wrote that'. It didn't seem to bother him much."
...
The literary culture in which Moorcock, Ballard and their peers could make a living from magazine serialisations seems as distant now, in the era of the internet, as the Grub Street of the 18th century to which it bears a more than passing resemblance. I ask Moorcock about his famous 15,000 daily word-rate. How on earth is it possible to produce so much? "It's all planning. I'd have been in bed for three days, during which I've had time to sketch out the story. Then I spring out of bed and I've got a straight nine to five – or nine to six or seven – regime, which frequently includes taking the kids to school, then I just sit down and go through with an hour break for lunch." He makes it sound deceptively simple, though not without its side-effects. "When you write that fast the book really does start to write you, you get high on the book. It's partly lack of sleep, it's partly the sugar – in my case I only had strong black coffee because it kept me going."

Blackberry as signalling device

At Wired Magazine, Sudhir Venkatesh on the new economics of prostitution in gentrified New York. (Via Bwoglines.)

Aerial running

Ptarmigans on ptreadmills (via Marginal Revolution).

Lost reputations

An interesting profile of Max Mosley by Lucy Kellaway for the Financial Times (site registration required).

Amazing presents

It is funny, really I feel showered with good things - but I received two truly excellent presents in the last two days.

My father has sent me a Roku box...

And my mother has sent me Green's Dictionary of Slang!

Linkage

Laura Hillenbrand's Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. (Her essay on the illness was extraordinary.)

Only the introductory blurb is given online, but check out the Believer interview in which Lawrence Wechsler talks with Christine and Margaret Wertheim about hyperbolic crochet.

Still pretty much flattened by the week's accumulated fatigue; I swore I would not get on such a boom-bust parabola this semester, but it is difficult not to...

School year tidbits

The beginning of the spring semester always kills me; I don't think I'm really breaking any confidences when I say that we've had three candidates for each of two different junior faculty positions come to give talks in the last two weeks (the final candidate of the group is coming on Tuesday), and of course they must also be lunched and dined and so forth (I am drawing the line at dining this year, lunching is less overwhelming to my schedule!), and their talks subsequently chewed over with colleagues in offices and corridors; it is most tiring for them, and I do not mean to make light of their plight, but it is ultimately rather tiring for the visited as well as for the visitor!

There are a lot of regular talks at this time of year, too: good ones I've heard in the past week include Columbia instantiations of this and this. I wanted to go to this one this evening, but I was so tired that I instead took to my bed!

(Yesterday started very early, with 7am boot camp at Chelsea Piers, and ended late, sitting down around 11:15pm for a very pleasant and satisfying if nutritionally unsound dinner at the Penny Farthing; I had - I am slightly ashamed even to name it - buffalo chicken macaroni and cheese, and G. had fried chicken of evident deliciousness. We had come from the highly satisfactory though perhaps not absolutely stellar - it is such a good play, though! - production of Three Sisters at the Classic; the only thing I didn't care for was the translation, which struck me as obtrusively colloquial in a rather dated way, but many of the performances are very good, and Juliet Rylance was superb as Irina.)

My classes are both well underway, I think; I'm really enjoying being back in the classroom. Yesterday: the last half of The Country Wife, a play which continues to perplex and intrigue me ("Write as I bid you, or I will write whore with this penknife in your face").

Some bits of light reading around the edges: Dinaw Mengestu's How to Read the Air (superb in parts, less compelling in others, but the voice is at its best spectacular); Roger Smith's Wake Up Dead, which I loved. It was a recommendation via The Big Dime, a list that also sent me to Stuart Neville's Belfast thrillers; near the end of the first one now, and finding it very good, though perhaps a bit more conventional/not as much to my taste as Roger Smith's Cape Town thriller.

My only plans for tomorrow are to reread Robinson Crusoe and do a great deal of exercise.

CABOB: "a loin of mutton roasted with an onyon betwixt each joint"

At the TLS, James Sharpe on Jonathan Green's dictionary of slang and one of its early precursors:

Slang relating to sex, of course, figures prominently. Taking a non-exhaustive list from the first two letters of the alphabet, we find the penis being referred to as Aaron’s rod, Adam’s arsenal, arse-wedge, augur, bacon bazooka, bald-headed bastard, and bayonet.

Alas, there is not yet a copy of Green's Dictionary of Slang in the Columbia library system, I suppose it is not yet actually released in the U.S. - I will have to console myself with The A-Z of Nuclear Jargon for now...

(Really I want my own copy!)