The obliteration room

This is amazing. (Via Josh; and more.)

Closing tabs

Benjamen Walker's theory of everything.

Hua Hsu on the rise of suburban Chinatowns.

Nice piece at the FT on the Hunterian Museum, an important location in my first novel.

Ode to a Shipping Label.

Mr. Men as social critique.

Last but not least, inside the London Pet Show.

Closing tabs

Sunday's interesting failure has predictably led to a respiratory ailment - I made it to Cayman safely, but unfortunately had to exit hot yoga this morning due to ongoing lung issues. Frustration!

Good linkage:

Renovating Freud's couch

Potato cannon muzzle velocities. (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Cheese paintings! (Via.)

Light reading around the edges: Christa Faust's Fringe tie-in novel and the first volume of Ian Tregillis's Milkweed series, Bitter Seed. The opening chapters are a bit overwritten and the characters feel rather thinly developed, but once I settled into it, I hugely enjoyed it - will read installments two and three immediately.

One-mouth play

Lisa Dwan describes being coached by Billie Whitelaw to perform Beckett's Not I according to the playwright's instructions. I saw Marian Seldes perform this play some years ago, it was unforgettable....

Footer and white mice

At the TLS, Paul Addison on Lucy Lethbridge's Servants:

Looking into the origins of Universal Aunts, an employment agency founded in 1921 to supply child minders and home helps of many kinds, she has discovered the card index in which its founder, Gertie Mclean, recorded the salient characteristics of applicants. Miss Charlotte Hedgecombe was “hefty, stern, stood for no nonsense, a stickler for etiquette and deportment. On borstal board of governors, Zoological Society’s certificate. Cope older boys, any number”. Miss Phyllis Beckett, on the other hand, “knows all about footer and white mice. Guaranteed not to nag. Can slide down banisters at a push”. Miss Pansy Trubshaw, she noted, understood cricket and foreign stamps, “but not much else”.

Closing tabs

I liked Stephen Graham Jones's All the Beautiful Sinners, although I wouldn't have minded it being a bit clearer at times - there are places where we are just confused rather than poetically oblique/ambiguous in our comprehension about what is going on. Similar DNA to Joe Hill's book, I think, though with different landscapes and long histories.

Have spent morning tidying and packing. I dislike the amount of organization required to leave town, but on the other hand my apartment would probably be an archeological tip of papers and books if I didn't regularly have to clean it up before travel. Trying to gear up for a run on this rainy day, but I fear I have missed my moment, it's absolutely pouring again - it might be I should take the cue from the heavens and have another rest day.

Miscellaneous linkage:

My old schoolmate Nathaniel Frank on Niall Ferguson and homophobia. (Via Katherine B.)

Young singers mangling the Great American Songbook.

"CSI: Monk Seal"?

Animals riding animals! (Via Sarang.)

Life is good

in a week where the two new novels I read are Knausgaard vol. 2 and Joe Hill's Nos4A2. Uncanny the extent to which that book both does and doesn't resemble a novel by Stephen King - it is at once intensely and allusively indebted and very much its own thing. I think Heart-Shaped Box is perhaps slightly more exactly to my taste, but this one is extremely good too (very appealing scene where iPad FBI agents are using to try and locate kidnapped child's iPhone eerily represents alternate universe!).

Also just as good as everybody said: Lawrence Wright's Scientology book, Going Clear. Gripping, indispensable; has also caused me to obtain a copy of Murakami's book about the Japanese subway attacks, which I've been meaning to read for a long time.

Strait is the gate

Octopus squeezes itself through small hole. (Via.)

Cat fancy redivivus

Subscriber-only, but Ariel Levy's New Yorker piece on cat breeders striving to create creatures that look wild but act tame is highly worthwhile. ("They like it mouse temperature"!)

Mud millionnaires

At the Independent, Richard Askwith on the rise of Tough Mudder and other adventure races.

The short list

For every author who ever lost a moment's peace of mind over an Amazon review!

First editions, second thoughts

At the FT, Liz Jobey on PEN's fundraising auction of first editions annotated by their authors (site registration required). Various bits of note, including Kazuo Ishiguro:

“I’ve always been drawn to the ‘diary entry’ way of narrating a story in which the timeframe keeps shifting as the book progresses and the narrator’s emotional and intellectual position keeps shifting with it. This method is particularly good for highlighting a character’s levels of self-deception, I find.”

My Struggle

Knausgaard vol. 2 is as riveting as vol. 1:

I returned the glass to the table and stubbed out my cigarette. There was nothing left of my feelings for those I had just spent several hours with. The whole crowd of them could have burned in hell for all I cared. This was a rule in my life. When I was with other people I was bound to them, the nearness I felt was immense, the empathy great. Indeed, so great that their well-being was always more important than my own. I subordinated myself, almost to the verge of self-effacement; some uncontrollable internal mechanism caused me to put their thoughts and opinions before mine. But the moment I was alone others meant nothing to me. It wasn't that I disliked them, or nurtured feelings of loathing for them, on the contrary, I liked most of them, and the ones I didn't actually like I could always see some worth in, some attribute I could identify with, or at least find interesting, something that could occupy my mind for the moment. But liking them was not the same as caring about them. It was the social situation that bound me, the people within it did not. Between these two perspectives there was no halfway point. There was just the small, self-effacing one and the large, distance-creating one. And in between them was where my daily life lay. Perhaps that was why I had such a hard time living it. Everyday life, with its duties and routines, was something I endured, not a thing I enjoyed, nor something that was meaningful or that made me happy. This had nothing to do with a lack of desire to wash floors or change diapers but rather with something more fundamental: the life around me was not meaningful. I always longed to be away from it. So the life I led was not my own. I tried to make it mine, this was my struggle, because of course I wanted it, but I failed, the longing for something else undermined all my efforts.

Back to normal

It's amazing having my real computer again - I went and picked it up a couple hours ago, and it feels like coming home! I live a good deal of my life via email and reading things on the internet: that little tablet was a good stopgap, but still.... In particular the Columbia webmail is hopeless, very happy to be using Thunderbird again.

New Kindle Paperwhite arrived yesterday, and I have just ordered a replacement watch (in the meantime I am wearing my other watch, a rather nice diving one - with a bezel! - that Wendy gave me after I got my scuba certification when she came to visit for Breakfast Near Tiffany's).

Saw an odd little play last night with G., Bull at 59E59. It is more of a scenario than a fully fledged play, and I thought only the sole female character had much depth - it's watchable but feels a bit purposeless. (I wasn't that keen on its predecessor Cock either.) Delicious dinner afterwards here - I had beef carpaccio (in my opinion this is the perfect dish - the combination of arugola, parmesan and raw beef is just ridiculously good), an amazing very simple branzino with lightly sauteed vegetables and a tiramisu I ordered after dimly recalling that we had eaten here once before and I had ordered what turned out to be the best tiramisu I have ever tasted. And it still is.

Iggy redux

"It was a lot safer to be in The Stooges than to be in the Army that year."