Sunday, June 09, 2013
Closing tabs
Iain Banks has died.
What is it like to be an octopus? (Via Mike Doe. I note that though I am not a vegetarian, the one creature I really cannot eat is octopus, though in the past I have found grilled octopus delicious. The problem: the part you eat is the part it thinks with....)
Adam Johnson on Kim Jong-il's sushi chef. (Still haven't read the novel - I am torn, often I buy books I suspect I will want to hand on to others in paper rather than electronically, only it makes me much less likely to read them myself - I might have to buy a second copy for Kindle!).
An interesting survey on women and clothes - go and fill it out if you have some spare minutes, I found it quite thought-provoking.
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: James S. A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes (I don't read a great deal of this style of science fiction, but I hugely enjoyed this one, and will definitely continue with the next installment soon); Jo Nesbo, The Redeemer (it's an earlier installment in the Harry Hole story, I suppose just now published in the United States - I liked it very much indeed, I think it's stronger than the last couple I've read, which lose a little steam compared to the early ones); Taylor Stevens, The Doll (I have been a huge fan of this series so far, but I'm a little worried about the direction it seems to be moving in - I will certainly read the next one, but the Mary Sue element is stronger and there's a bit of Patricia-Cornwellesque grandiosity in the international serial-killer plot - on the other hand, I think Stevens should be counted on a very short list of writers who could be considered to come close to beating Lee Child at his own game, and I still definitely would recommend the series); and Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls. Curiously extended similarities to Nos4A2 (neither author's fault, just in the DNA of this genre), and not I think as impressive to me as her previous novel, which is probably one of my favorite books of the last five years, but still very much worthwhile, with some really lovely stretches of writing.
Next two weeks: massive triathlon training (especially cycling) culminating in a 70.3 race in Syracuse (I'm not tapering, I'm just going to train through); style book revisions; revisions on the essay I wrote a couple years ago about the relationship between drama and the novel in eighteenth-century Britain. A couple plays - I don't have tickets yet to this, but I'm very keen to see it.
What is it like to be an octopus? (Via Mike Doe. I note that though I am not a vegetarian, the one creature I really cannot eat is octopus, though in the past I have found grilled octopus delicious. The problem: the part you eat is the part it thinks with....)
Adam Johnson on Kim Jong-il's sushi chef. (Still haven't read the novel - I am torn, often I buy books I suspect I will want to hand on to others in paper rather than electronically, only it makes me much less likely to read them myself - I might have to buy a second copy for Kindle!).
An interesting survey on women and clothes - go and fill it out if you have some spare minutes, I found it quite thought-provoking.
Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: James S. A. Corey, Leviathan Wakes (I don't read a great deal of this style of science fiction, but I hugely enjoyed this one, and will definitely continue with the next installment soon); Jo Nesbo, The Redeemer (it's an earlier installment in the Harry Hole story, I suppose just now published in the United States - I liked it very much indeed, I think it's stronger than the last couple I've read, which lose a little steam compared to the early ones); Taylor Stevens, The Doll (I have been a huge fan of this series so far, but I'm a little worried about the direction it seems to be moving in - I will certainly read the next one, but the Mary Sue element is stronger and there's a bit of Patricia-Cornwellesque grandiosity in the international serial-killer plot - on the other hand, I think Stevens should be counted on a very short list of writers who could be considered to come close to beating Lee Child at his own game, and I still definitely would recommend the series); and Lauren Beukes, The Shining Girls. Curiously extended similarities to Nos4A2 (neither author's fault, just in the DNA of this genre), and not I think as impressive to me as her previous novel, which is probably one of my favorite books of the last five years, but still very much worthwhile, with some really lovely stretches of writing.
Next two weeks: massive triathlon training (especially cycling) culminating in a 70.3 race in Syracuse (I'm not tapering, I'm just going to train through); style book revisions; revisions on the essay I wrote a couple years ago about the relationship between drama and the novel in eighteenth-century Britain. A couple plays - I don't have tickets yet to this, but I'm very keen to see it.
Monday, June 03, 2013
Sunday, June 02, 2013
Friday, May 31, 2013
Morning linkage
The last few days have been a little frustrating from the point of view of exercise: in short, I haven't done any, as I continued to feel completely knackered! (Didn't help that it was ninety degrees yesterday - after a morning spent doing interesting but demanding student meetings, and trekking around town all afternoon for a couple doctor's appointments [annual physical, allergist, nothing stressful], I realized I was due to go home and collapse rather than making it downtown for an evening spin class.) But I had a long sleep last night and now feel pretty much back to normal - looking forward to midday spin at Chelsea Piers.
Fascinating piece about similarities and differences between working at a tech start-up and a chocolate start-up. (Via BoingBoing.)
Rooms transformed into large-scale camera obscuras.
Photographic backdrops in prison waiting rooms.
Why Jordan Ellenberg has a quarter of a million friends of friends on Facebook.
The art of Houghton Hall comes home.
Fascinating piece about similarities and differences between working at a tech start-up and a chocolate start-up. (Via BoingBoing.)
Rooms transformed into large-scale camera obscuras.
Photographic backdrops in prison waiting rooms.
Why Jordan Ellenberg has a quarter of a million friends of friends on Facebook.
The art of Houghton Hall comes home.
Thursday, May 30, 2013
Morning edition
Slow start this morning. Got up very early but dragged heels to the point where I no longer really had time to make it out the door for a run. (Will just have to make the effort to do something serious later.)
I liked what Christopher Ricks had to say about Lydia Davis at the TLS.
Had a very good conversation with my editor yesterday over lunch to discuss style revisions. That's the priority: I'm hoping to be done with it by mid-June, which seems fairly realistic (depending on how much attention and time I have to devote to my least-favorite triathlon sport, the time-consuming and stressful CYCLING). Official due date of June 30, which I will certainly make - I'm flying to Cayman June 27, so that's my real effective deadline. It sounds as though the book will be out as early as May or June 2014, which I am excited about - I had imagined it might not be coming out till fall or winter.
I usually like Adam Mars-Jones's criticism, but I feel he really missed the point of Kate Atkinson's new novel (that is a LRB subscriber-only link). He doesn't seem to feel at all the deep emotional affective investment in the characters that dominated my experience of it, or the intensity with which we feel the entanglement of paths taken and not taken in individual women's lives (the fallout of a rape, an abortion, a murder, a choice about what sort of job to undertake or whether to have a child) with world-historical events (English-German relations, the Blitz, the arrival of the Russians). I really loved the book - that and Knausgaard are my two favorites of the year, very different from each other in obvious respects but sharing the qualities of being mesmerizing to read and also important in what they have to say. To talk so much about inconsistencies in the cosmology, as it were, without saving space for what Atkinson wants to do in terms of showing how people in families love each other and tug against the imperatives of necessity - I don't know, it's just a little obtuse! I think I might need to write an essay on counterfactuals and the novel: I have some of that work done already, an argument about novels and alternate lives that starts with the famous passage in Middlemarch and considers some obvious important aspects of that topic before going into a more extended reading of Clarissa's counterfactuals. Could write about Atkinson, the Ian Tregillis books and other paths-not-taken science fiction....
On a more frivolous note, I had cause to utter a rare and happy sentence to B. on Sunday evening: "I have had a sufficiency of cake"! A good friend of bride and groom is the proprietor of Meera's Cakes, and she really outdid herself. There were two enormous cakes at the party on Saturday night (I think I can only find a picture of one of them, a reproduction of the turntable P. was spinning the night he first met G. - I can't see/remember what it was, but the single is even accurately rendered! - the other was a ginormous blue-and-green globe, with red dots marking the places where bride and groom have traveled together - one chocolate, one vanilla, both delicious as well as beautiful to look at), and their remains made their way back to my aunt's house, where we gathered for family tea on Sunday. (Photo courtesy of Mark Pringle.)
I liked what Christopher Ricks had to say about Lydia Davis at the TLS.
Had a very good conversation with my editor yesterday over lunch to discuss style revisions. That's the priority: I'm hoping to be done with it by mid-June, which seems fairly realistic (depending on how much attention and time I have to devote to my least-favorite triathlon sport, the time-consuming and stressful CYCLING). Official due date of June 30, which I will certainly make - I'm flying to Cayman June 27, so that's my real effective deadline. It sounds as though the book will be out as early as May or June 2014, which I am excited about - I had imagined it might not be coming out till fall or winter.
I usually like Adam Mars-Jones's criticism, but I feel he really missed the point of Kate Atkinson's new novel (that is a LRB subscriber-only link). He doesn't seem to feel at all the deep emotional affective investment in the characters that dominated my experience of it, or the intensity with which we feel the entanglement of paths taken and not taken in individual women's lives (the fallout of a rape, an abortion, a murder, a choice about what sort of job to undertake or whether to have a child) with world-historical events (English-German relations, the Blitz, the arrival of the Russians). I really loved the book - that and Knausgaard are my two favorites of the year, very different from each other in obvious respects but sharing the qualities of being mesmerizing to read and also important in what they have to say. To talk so much about inconsistencies in the cosmology, as it were, without saving space for what Atkinson wants to do in terms of showing how people in families love each other and tug against the imperatives of necessity - I don't know, it's just a little obtuse! I think I might need to write an essay on counterfactuals and the novel: I have some of that work done already, an argument about novels and alternate lives that starts with the famous passage in Middlemarch and considers some obvious important aspects of that topic before going into a more extended reading of Clarissa's counterfactuals. Could write about Atkinson, the Ian Tregillis books and other paths-not-taken science fiction....
On a more frivolous note, I had cause to utter a rare and happy sentence to B. on Sunday evening: "I have had a sufficiency of cake"! A good friend of bride and groom is the proprietor of Meera's Cakes, and she really outdid herself. There were two enormous cakes at the party on Saturday night (I think I can only find a picture of one of them, a reproduction of the turntable P. was spinning the night he first met G. - I can't see/remember what it was, but the single is even accurately rendered! - the other was a ginormous blue-and-green globe, with red dots marking the places where bride and groom have traveled together - one chocolate, one vanilla, both delicious as well as beautiful to look at), and their remains made their way back to my aunt's house, where we gathered for family tea on Sunday. (Photo courtesy of Mark Pringle.)
Wednesday, May 29, 2013
Tuesday, May 28, 2013
Composition
Great interview with Sam Amidon (and check out this link for a taste of his genius):
You know, I’m not a folk-song expert. If we were sitting around and people started singing ballads and songs, I could do the songs from my albums, but I couldn’t sing you a stock of amazing old ballads. I’m not a “folk singer” in that sense. I’m learning these songs as part of my own compositional process. I’m a fiddle player — if we sat down at an Irish session, I could play you a thousand Irish tunes. I could sit here and play you Irish tunes all day. But I’m definitely not an expert in ballads or folk singing, and I’m not a folklorist. I love this world, but I listen to old ballads as an outsider. I listen to it the same way I listen to Miles Davis or something like that — it’s a deep listening experience, but it’s not something that I know a lot about.
Monday, May 27, 2013
Homecoming
Very happy to be safely home in New York with little cat Mickey. London was excellent, but extremely tiring; my cousin P.'s wedding was lovely in every respect, but my favorite part was pretty certainly seeing the bride and groom ride on camels down the Kings Road! (Picture courtesy of Georgina.)
Kate Atkinson's new novel is stunningly good, but I am too tired to write more about it now (but read it!); the flight home passed very quickly, too, as I was able to get Mark Billingham's new Thorne book (not out yet in the US) and Mo Hayder's Poppet (which I see now I could have had on US Kindle after all, but it is traditional to acquire a few large-format UK crime-fiction paperbacks at Heathrow), which carried me very nicely through the journey.
Kate Atkinson's new novel is stunningly good, but I am too tired to write more about it now (but read it!); the flight home passed very quickly, too, as I was able to get Mark Billingham's new Thorne book (not out yet in the US) and Mo Hayder's Poppet (which I see now I could have had on US Kindle after all, but it is traditional to acquire a few large-format UK crime-fiction paperbacks at Heathrow), which carried me very nicely through the journey.
Saturday, May 25, 2013
Friday, May 24, 2013
Thursday, May 23, 2013
Prime meridian
On Tuesday we went to Bletchley Park, which was highly worthwhile (I think the Colossus rebuild is the most amazing thing, but it's very cool seeing so many bombes and Enigma machines after having read much about them); on Wednesday, we rode a fast boat to Greenwich and saw among other things precision timekeepers at the Observatory and the Maritime Museum. Visiting these places on consecutive days, one is especially struck by the implicit continuities between two different periods of brilliant technical innovation and superb precision manufacturing in British history.
Yesterday evening, a delicious gin sour and smoked mackerel latkes at Mishkin's with my dear old friend Orion and his partner Harvy, a hatter whose recent creation made a big hit this week. Later this afternoon we'll walk over to see my cousin George at her day job, then meet up with another dear friend of mine for dinner.
Light reading (planes, trains, etc.): Michael Sears, Black Fridays (not sure the autistic son plot was really successfully integrated with the trading skullduggery one, but not bad overall); Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs; Andre Aciman, Harvard Square; Gene Kerrigan, The Midnight Choir (I thought this one was fantastically good, even better than the other book of his I read recently); Melissa Scott, The Empress of Earth (I don't think volumes 2 and 3 lived up to the promise of the opening volume, but the trilogy is a pretty good read); Gordon Dahlquist, The Different Girl (another standout - it is a really lovely YA novel, science-fictional in its affinities and most beautifully written, with something of the strange haunting quality that I found as a child in the novels of John Christopher).
Old but good: basset hounds vs. gravity.
Yesterday evening, a delicious gin sour and smoked mackerel latkes at Mishkin's with my dear old friend Orion and his partner Harvy, a hatter whose recent creation made a big hit this week. Later this afternoon we'll walk over to see my cousin George at her day job, then meet up with another dear friend of mine for dinner.
Light reading (planes, trains, etc.): Michael Sears, Black Fridays (not sure the autistic son plot was really successfully integrated with the trading skullduggery one, but not bad overall); Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs; Andre Aciman, Harvard Square; Gene Kerrigan, The Midnight Choir (I thought this one was fantastically good, even better than the other book of his I read recently); Melissa Scott, The Empress of Earth (I don't think volumes 2 and 3 lived up to the promise of the opening volume, but the trilogy is a pretty good read); Gordon Dahlquist, The Different Girl (another standout - it is a really lovely YA novel, science-fictional in its affinities and most beautifully written, with something of the strange haunting quality that I found as a child in the novels of John Christopher).
Old but good: basset hounds vs. gravity.
Friday, May 17, 2013
Sent!
I've been quiet here this week, and the week's included rather less exercise than I'd hoped - but that was for the very good reason that I've been working fiendishly on the style book. It's not really finished finished, I will have one more pass through it in June before submitting the final version, but I have just emailed my editor a provisional final draft (with a few missing references and some patches of rougher prose than I'd usually be willing to share); he'll give me notes when I see him in New York at the end of the month.
It will sound immodest, but I think this book really is amazing, it is the book I was born to write! I have a very hard time publicizing my novels - it's not that I don't think you would enjoy them if you are a novel-reader, I am happy saying something like "If you want a novel to while away an hour or two, this one will be pretty well suited to that need, and I hope it will make you feel and know things a bit differently than you did before you read it" - but really I am much more comfortable passionately recommending someone else's novel than my own! This style book (the final title is Reading Style: A Life in Sentences, and it will be published by Columbia University Press) really does do something that is interesting and useful and not quite like any other book about reading and writing. I am excited to shepherd it into the world - I imagine it will be on the fall 2014 list, though I'm not certain.
Flying tomorrow late afternoon from Cayman to the UK for my cousin's wedding. I won't take any work with me, I think, given that I've finished up everything I can do on the manuscript without library access. The extent of obligations to see family and friends will really make it fairly tight even getting in a minimum of exercise, though I'm hoping for a couple civilized runs and at least one visit to the Central YMCA to swim and spin. Back home in New York as of the evening of Memorial Day, and looking forward to what I hope will be a highly satisfactory first block of training for IMWI. Intend to minimize internet time in London, so posting here will probably continue to be very light through to the end of the month.
Miscellaneous linkage:
What Gary Panter doesn't know. (This one really is fantastic.)
What Hilary Mantel's been reading.
Just say no!
Light reading around the edges:
Installments two and three of Ian Tregillis's Milkweed trilogy, The Coldest War and Necessary Evil.
Two crime novels by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson, Daybreak and House of Evidence.
Daniel Friedman's funny geriatric noir Don't Ever Get Old.
It will sound immodest, but I think this book really is amazing, it is the book I was born to write! I have a very hard time publicizing my novels - it's not that I don't think you would enjoy them if you are a novel-reader, I am happy saying something like "If you want a novel to while away an hour or two, this one will be pretty well suited to that need, and I hope it will make you feel and know things a bit differently than you did before you read it" - but really I am much more comfortable passionately recommending someone else's novel than my own! This style book (the final title is Reading Style: A Life in Sentences, and it will be published by Columbia University Press) really does do something that is interesting and useful and not quite like any other book about reading and writing. I am excited to shepherd it into the world - I imagine it will be on the fall 2014 list, though I'm not certain.
Flying tomorrow late afternoon from Cayman to the UK for my cousin's wedding. I won't take any work with me, I think, given that I've finished up everything I can do on the manuscript without library access. The extent of obligations to see family and friends will really make it fairly tight even getting in a minimum of exercise, though I'm hoping for a couple civilized runs and at least one visit to the Central YMCA to swim and spin. Back home in New York as of the evening of Memorial Day, and looking forward to what I hope will be a highly satisfactory first block of training for IMWI. Intend to minimize internet time in London, so posting here will probably continue to be very light through to the end of the month.
Miscellaneous linkage:
What Gary Panter doesn't know. (This one really is fantastic.)
What Hilary Mantel's been reading.
Just say no!
Light reading around the edges:
Installments two and three of Ian Tregillis's Milkweed trilogy, The Coldest War and Necessary Evil.
Two crime novels by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson, Daybreak and House of Evidence.
Daniel Friedman's funny geriatric noir Don't Ever Get Old.
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