Catch-up

I have been working pretty much at capacity; I had to sort of just skip my birthday on Saturday, it would have been too disruptive to switch over to human contact mode!  Finished my last-hundred-pages-from-third-to-first-person rewrite by midday Monday, got a round of comments by the end of the day and sent off a next version a few hours ago.  Will have one more chunk of work on it again tomorrow.  I know the ending isn't quite right, I have a tack to pursue...

I'm finding True Believers slow going; it feels too long, and the voice is unpersuasive in certain respects.  Impatient to get to the big reveal, but not so much so that I don't keep on putting it aside in search of a more immersive read!  It is locally enjoyable but cumulatively puzzling.

Lydia Netzer's Shine Shine Shine is just a hair too whimsical to be perfectly suited to my tastes, but I thought it was excellent: it definitely lives up to the advance hype.  Cheryl Strayed's Wild is also very immersive, though it seems to me that it's a good book because she's an interesting person rather than because of anything about the writing as such.  (It caused me to think with nostalgia for two other memoirs of self-examination and pilgrimage I have read recently that are written by people who clearly think much more as I do about life, the universe and everything, namely Tim Parks's Teach Us to Sit Still and Gideon Lewis-Kraus's A Sense of Direction!)  Strayed's book has interesting things in common with Lidia Yuknavitch's The Chronology of Water; I gather they are both in the same writing group, it would be an odd experience to be workshopping drafts with someone who had so much in common with oneself.  I am not sure it would be entirely enjoyable!  Other obvious comparables for Strayed would be Elizabeth Gilbert and Alice Sebold, whose memoir Lucky deserves the widest acclaim.

Then the other night when I truly was in the pit of absolute fatigue I downloaded and reread The Hobbit.  I have a stronger attachment to this book than to the Lord of the Rings trilogy as such; as a very small child, I had The Golden Treasury of Children's Literature, and I believe this was where I first encountered an excerpt from Tolkien's novel, though I don't have the volume to hand to check.  The narrative voice is perhaps less capably rendered than Lewis's in the Narnia books, but it is a delightful book regardless.

Tonight I am going to the theater with G. (we're seeing this).  We will undoubtedly have a good dinner afterwards, which will be a welcome reprieve from excessive computer time!  My back was doing quite a bit better, after swearing off yoga and boot camp, but I had a physical therapy appointment yesterday that has totally done it in.   That is counterintuitive...

Closing tabs:

Margaret Mahy has died.  (Read The Changeover if you don't know it already.)

Interview with a very young Neil Gaiman.

Bleed

Via former student Gabriel, Nathan Thornburgh's excellent piece on Nordic larp.  This is the world of my novel (only in Morningside Heights)!

Cat and mouse

Cat employees of the Hermitage!  This would make an amazing children's book...

(Via Dan Weiss.)

The literary treadmill

At the TLS, Geoffrey Wheatcroft has a great piece on Peter Clarke's new book about Winston Churchill's literary career (the tax details are especially fascinating!):

It was when installed in a government office that Churchill discovered the delights of dictation to a shorthand-typist, and thereafter all his work was dictated. This gave, as it happened, a kind of homogeneity to everything he produced “by tongue or pen”. His speeches were first dictated and then typed before being delivered in public, his books were dictated and set in galley proof to be endlessly amended at outlandish cost. And he also soon learned the value of enlisting the help of others: his first private secretary, at the Colonial Office, was (later Sir) Edward Marsh, who would follow Churchill from one ministry to another and then serve him with personal devotion, reading his proofs, ghostwriting his articles, and even compiling his tax returns.

FALSE STARTS

Have just read, in one sitting, an advance copy of Benjamin Anastas's extremely unsettling memoir Too Good to Be True.  It is a book about a true unraveling and an only partial reknitting; the parts about debt are too disturbing for me to excerpt here as I have a Dickensian horror of financial insecurity!  But here is an also very chilling description that will strike fear into the hearts of many of you:

I had a routine all that fall that I stuck to in a dogged search for regularity: I woke up on the early side, somewhere in the sevens, made a pot of coffee and a bowl of oatmeal in the kitchen, then I brought my laptop out on the screened-in porch and "wrote" for the next two hours.  I have put "wrote" in quotation marks because I didn't actually manage to do much writing--instead, I rewrote everything I had started on the computer screen over and over until the spark of life had been extinguished and the paragraphs had a perfect, sculptural look.  No uneven line breaks; no stacks of "the" or "and"; no repeated words.  It is a kind of obsessive polishing made possible only by the computer, and it burns the hours just like real work does, but in fact it is the opposite: a fail-safe system for killing off writing with maximum effort.  Once I had toggled the piece I was working on to death, I would file it away in FALSE STARTS and open up a new file in Word to begin the process all over again.

Everything's coming up roses

Just a quick post to say that I started my first-person rewrite of BoMH part III on Monday night and I'm incredibly excited about it!  It's totally turned around how I feel about the book: there's always been a claustrophobic hothouse-type aspect to the story that I have disliked, and this opens things up in a funny and interesting way that I am very much enjoying.  Haven't been so interested and engaged by something I was writing since a day I stole in February to reimmerse myself in a piece I wrote a while ago about the 'minute particular' in life-writing and the novel.  (It's one of my projects for August to get that out as a real article.)

I was unusually frenzied in my work life from December through May, and then in the aftermath of that I was uncharacteristically grumpy from May pretty much right up until now.  I'm hoping this marks a real turning point. 

I had one of those days yesterday where everything just seems to go right (clearly this follows in the psychological aftermath of  near-magical Monday-night and Tuesday-morning writing sessions).  I walked down a block I don't usually traverse and found myself in the amazing surrounds of the flower market, which is really like something out of a fairy story; I had an amazing lunch (best conversation ever!) with my editor at the hyper-palindromic Ilili (the space is beautiful and the food is very good; I recommend the prix fixe lunch - we shared grape leaves and hummus for appetizers, then I had the grilled chicken salad and the "Ilili candy bar" for dessert); I generally avoid crosstown buses, as they are often slower than walking, but heat changes the equation and the M23 - I had known this but somehow forgot it - actually goes all the way to Chelsea Piers; I had an enjoyable run workout on the indoor track at Chelsea Piers followed by a dip in the pool; then I took the M23 again to the first meeting of a mindfulness-based stress reduction class I found online and that seems exactly what I've been looking for.

Nine red herrings

Via Alice, two good Encyclopedia Brown links: Tom Scocca on nine red herrings; Kathryn Schulz on the desire to be Encyclopedia Brown.

Postscript

Following "Encyclopedia" Brown-related thoughts, I am reminded that as a young person I thought this book a pinnacle of human literary ingenuity - I am surprised to see the Amazon reviews are all so negative!...

Closing tabs

Amazing interview with Ed Park, who is basically currently serving as the angel on my shoulder coaxing me not to stop until the novel is as good as it possibly can be!  I have a slightly insane project now for the next week, which is to rewrite the final hundred pages in the first person and see if that solves various lingering difficulties...

In loosely related news, the perpetrator of the "'Encyclopedia' Brown" books has died.  (I do not endorse the punctuation of the series title in that obituary.)

Why Pauls Toutonghi uses a wireless keyboard when he writes.  (This piece and the interview with Ed both contain a good amount of useful advice for writers.)

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: on the plane home, James Meek's forthcoming The Heart Broke In, which I enjoyed a good deal but which made me wonder how any author can stand to write in this present day and age a novel so thoroughly indebted to George Eliot in its basic approach (same slight problem with Franzen and Eugenides!); Deborah Harkness's Shadow of Night, which I am sorry to say I found much weaker and less enjoyable to read than the first installment (that first one fell on the right side of silly, but this one does not); Eva Ibbotson's One Dog and His Boy, which I loved though it is designed for younger readers than myself and which I will send on to my young nephew in Austin (it is sorrow-inducing to think of Eva Ibbotson and Diana Wynne Jones both being dead).  Halfway through Kurt Anderson's True Believers, which I like quite a bit (teen spies!) although it strikes me as a fact-checker's nightmare - and I am still not altogether convinced that the narrator is actually female....

Two links

Nico on orchestra as zoo (courtesy of Jane Y.); Tino Sehgal's "These Associations" (courtesy of I.H.D.).

Hobson-Jobson

Words of Asian origin used by the British in India.  (Via Jessica Treat.)

Banana beta-blocker

At Boston Magazine, Jennie Dorris on one professional percussionist's attempt to survive the audition process for the Boston Symphony.

Bonkbuster redivivus

At the LRB, Andrew O'Hagan on Fifty Shades of Gray.

The ecstatic lash

I must confess that I was a little nervous about reading Maureen McLane's My Poets: it is roughly commensurate with my style book in many respects, and I was afraid I was going to find myself so thoroughly preempted and outdone that I might lose heart for my own project!  However I am very happy to report that it is a lovely and intriguing book, beautifully well written and quite unlike anything I ever would or could write myself. 

I found the chapters on Marianne Moore, Louise Gluck and Shelley particularly satisfying (and slightly lost patience with the one on H.D., though it is full of interesting observations), but there is much here that will interest anyone who's keen to make and chronicle an inner life of words.  Am shortly going to Amazon some volumes of verse that I now have a yen to steep myself in (I especially recommend the chapter "My Impasses: On Not Being Able to Read Poetry," which made me realize I have never owned a volume of Frank O'Hara!)....

In other news, two good swim bits: portrait of the swimmer as a young writer; Britain's paralympic swimmers (FT site registration required).

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Lavie Tidhar's steampunk The Bookman, which aficionados of nineteenth-century British literature will especially enjoy; Justine Larbalestier and Sarah Rees Brennan's delightful Team Human; Rae Carson's appealing The Girl of Fire and Thorns.

(The timing of publication of Deborah Harkness's Shadow of Night is opportune with a view to fast passage of my airport and flight time later on this afternoon and this evening!)

Cryptic zoology

Two markedly different book-naming protocols.