After a bit of friendly banter about Rhodesia, she tells him to bend over and whacks him on the bottom with a rolled up order-paper. As she walks away, she looks flirtatiously over her shoulder and mouths the words "Naughty boy". "I knew I had met someone rather impressive," he writes.
Sunday, May 30, 2010
Born polemical
I am unlikely to read Christopher Hitchens' memoir, but glad to learn this anecdote about an encounter with Margaret Thatcher shortly after her election as Conservative party leader: via Toby Young's review for the Observer:
Saturday, May 29, 2010
One better than the devil
"Academics are hedgehogs and I am a fox": Deborah Ross interviews Malcolm Gladwell for the Independent.
Tom Cox plays a round of golf with Judas Priest axman K. K. Downing (FT site registration required).
At the Guardian Review, Nicholas Lezard on the latest installment of David Kynaston's history of Britain in the twentieth century (lots of good snippets there).
Arthur Danto's post at the NYT site the other day tipped me off to the existence of MOMA's Flickr photoset from Marina Abramović's recent show. Jason Grote points me to the fact that one immediately recognizable sitter is Lou Reed!
Tom Cox plays a round of golf with Judas Priest axman K. K. Downing (FT site registration required).
At the Guardian Review, Nicholas Lezard on the latest installment of David Kynaston's history of Britain in the twentieth century (lots of good snippets there).
Arthur Danto's post at the NYT site the other day tipped me off to the existence of MOMA's Flickr photoset from Marina Abramović's recent show. Jason Grote points me to the fact that one immediately recognizable sitter is Lou Reed!
Friday, May 28, 2010
Wednesday, May 26, 2010
Memento mori
My beloved cat Blackie died on Monday. He was an affectionate friend and a stalwart companion. He lived with me for almost seventeen years, with the exception of two sabbaticals which he enjoyed in cat heaven a.k.a. my mother's house; I will miss him terribly.
Monday, May 24, 2010
"Blue light on their underside"
At the FT, curator James Maclaine contemplates five favorite species of unusual deep sea fish (site registration required): the stoplight loosejaw, the pelican eel, the black seadevil, the football fish and the Sloane's viperfish...
Sausage rights
Dachshund UN (?!?).
More details and pictures here and here. If I were in Melbourne, that is certainly where I would be next Saturday afternoon at 2pm...
More details and pictures here and here. If I were in Melbourne, that is certainly where I would be next Saturday afternoon at 2pm...
Sunday, May 23, 2010
Dwelling in pyramids
Martin Gardner lived life inside his own brain, and was fortunate enough to make a living playing all the time.
I have enjoyed many of Martin Gardner's books over the years, but the one that most profoundly influenced me was Aha! Gotcha. Someone gave me this book when I was young (I suppose I was eleven or twelve?) and it absolutely captivated me, I pored over its pages for many hours and with extraordinary enjoyment - the elegance and economy of its insights were absolutely delightful, and I think of it as being in the same conceptual universe as Sherlock Holmes and the stories of Isaac Asimov, other favorites of that era.
There is little evidence of it in my adult life, but as a child I was very much in love with mathematical things, and in an alternate universe somewhere I am a theoretical mathematician who does most of my work lying in bed and occasionally getting up to make a squiggle on a bit of paper. I had a very wonderful teacher outside of school - his name was Bill Cromley and he ran a sort of summer camp offering lessons in math, remedial work for those who needed it and magical work for those who wanted it for fun.
(It was odd, I later had him as a classroom teacher in high school and there was nothing magical about it at all - I thought even at the time that he should have been teaching younger children, something about drilling trigonometry into teenage minds really deadened his spirit, and he did not enjoy the give-and-take of the classroom.)
But in this funny basement room (was it in a church?) he showed those of us who liked such things some truly magical aspects of numbers and the way they work - I guess I was ten or eleven, I remember the utter delightfulness of realizing that AND and OR could be translated into columns of ones and zeros, and that the two languages were really and truly equivalent - and experimenting with ways of thinking about tetrahedrons and what other sorts of shape one might then be able to work out the volume of - and an ingenious way of doing mental multiplication in your head by visualizing the two numbers as forming the two adjacent sides of a rectangle and then adding the four different bits of it together - in any case, it was a very enjoyable and high-level form of play, and it is pretty much the spirit I hope to capture when I teach.
I have enjoyed many of Martin Gardner's books over the years, but the one that most profoundly influenced me was Aha! Gotcha. Someone gave me this book when I was young (I suppose I was eleven or twelve?) and it absolutely captivated me, I pored over its pages for many hours and with extraordinary enjoyment - the elegance and economy of its insights were absolutely delightful, and I think of it as being in the same conceptual universe as Sherlock Holmes and the stories of Isaac Asimov, other favorites of that era.
There is little evidence of it in my adult life, but as a child I was very much in love with mathematical things, and in an alternate universe somewhere I am a theoretical mathematician who does most of my work lying in bed and occasionally getting up to make a squiggle on a bit of paper. I had a very wonderful teacher outside of school - his name was Bill Cromley and he ran a sort of summer camp offering lessons in math, remedial work for those who needed it and magical work for those who wanted it for fun.
(It was odd, I later had him as a classroom teacher in high school and there was nothing magical about it at all - I thought even at the time that he should have been teaching younger children, something about drilling trigonometry into teenage minds really deadened his spirit, and he did not enjoy the give-and-take of the classroom.)
But in this funny basement room (was it in a church?) he showed those of us who liked such things some truly magical aspects of numbers and the way they work - I guess I was ten or eleven, I remember the utter delightfulness of realizing that AND and OR could be translated into columns of ones and zeros, and that the two languages were really and truly equivalent - and experimenting with ways of thinking about tetrahedrons and what other sorts of shape one might then be able to work out the volume of - and an ingenious way of doing mental multiplication in your head by visualizing the two numbers as forming the two adjacent sides of a rectangle and then adding the four different bits of it together - in any case, it was a very enjoyable and high-level form of play, and it is pretty much the spirit I hope to capture when I teach.
UNLESS HE JUSTIFIES HIMSELF
The story of an abusive psychoanalyst. This is an incredible piece - it is like reading a small and wonderful novel! Via Helen DeWitt.
[Addendum: Wynne Godley's obituary, which perhaps relies a bit too heavily on the LRB piece itself. An amazing line, though: "He also introduced roulette as an entertainment after certain college feasts." It seems to me on the basis of this that he never wrote the promised autobiography - but perhaps the LRB essay stands on its own as a more unusual and striking self-portrait than a full-length book could have done. Another good link: Alan Macfarlane interviews Godley in 2008.]
[Addendum: Wynne Godley's obituary, which perhaps relies a bit too heavily on the LRB piece itself. An amazing line, though: "He also introduced roulette as an entertainment after certain college feasts." It seems to me on the basis of this that he never wrote the promised autobiography - but perhaps the LRB essay stands on its own as a more unusual and striking self-portrait than a full-length book could have done. Another good link: Alan Macfarlane interviews Godley in 2008.]
Friday, May 21, 2010
A time of stagnation
From Marina Van Zuylen, Monomania: The Flight from Everyday Life in Literature and Art:
The feeling of control that accompanies the act of locking oneself up to write, the pride in having unsuspected resources, reinforces the notion that creating has set one in a world apart. It is strengthening, both despite and because of its ability to isolate. When Mondrian or Flaubert discusses the relationship of their straight line or perfect phrase to a sense of ontological security, they are splitting the world between the rigid (with its connotations of self-discipline, rigor, and control) and the arabesque, the overly lyrical I -- all things that might well lead them out of their invulnerable worlds. To these artists, but also to those individuals whose bouts with obsession will traverse this book, there is a real terror involved in the unrestricted, the potentially mutable.
...
Do not show your passion, but sublimate it into style. We are reminded of Hobbes's proclamation: madness is a matter of "too much appearing passion." It is not the actual emotion itself that is unsettling to Flaubert, but the temptation to be dragged down by it and the sickly need to exhibit it to others. The heart must never speak and the artist must assume a god-like self-sufficiency; it is the only way he will be protected from the danger of others. The same detachment that Flaubert requires of his narrators, he mercilessly exacts from himself. He is willing to renounce all human contact for the price of peace of mind.
...
The simultaneous cowering from and craving for the void, for a time of stagnation, is a constant in the monomaniacal imagination. Many of the characters in this book are attracted and repelled by free time, drawn to and squelched by obsessive activity. Movement, while it fends off the demons of introspection and provides temporary relief from anxiety, does not satisfy the soul's craving for a higher order; it is a mere temporary solution. Idleness, however, richer in existential possibilities, can breed an intolerable sense of dread.
Bugs Britannica
Folk names for the woodlouse: tiddy-hog, God’s little pig, monkeypede, Billy button.
Gun with occasional music
Lev Grossman on what you say when you're asked whether you write fantasy or literature.
Not really related, but I've been keeping the link open on my browser and perhaps will insert it here, with tongue in cheek: Maddie Chambers' year-long project to build a miniature model of Bag End!
Not really related, but I've been keeping the link open on my browser and perhaps will insert it here, with tongue in cheek: Maddie Chambers' year-long project to build a miniature model of Bag End!
"Every execution is a carnival"
A very lovely and striking piece at the NYRB by Jose Manuel Prieto on translating Osip Mandelstam's "Epigram Against Stalin" from Russian to Spanish (subscriber only).
Not related, but one of my other favorite things in the NYRB recently was Theo Cote's amazing photograph of Lydia Davis and her extraordinary black cat!
Not related, but one of my other favorite things in the NYRB recently was Theo Cote's amazing photograph of Lydia Davis and her extraordinary black cat!
A long musing on light reading
As longtime readers of this blog may remember, it was a seminal experience of my life when my mother let me take the day off school to go to a Dick Francis book-signing. I am not a great attender of signings in general (I do not altogether dissent from Brent's observation as to how odd it is that people should value a scribbled-in book more than a pristine copy of the same book!), but when I received an invitation last week from Lee Child's web maven Maggie Griffin to come to the book launch at Barnes and Noble near Lincoln Center on Tuesday night and join the party for dinner and a beer (it turned out to be Dom Perignon, though!) afterwards, I really could not resist.
In fact after my last ruminations on the topic I did pre-order 61 Hours; the doorman in my building handed the box to me on Monday night around ten as I came in feeling very fatigued, and so it was an absolute gift to be able to flop down on the couch and devour it.
It is difficult for me to imagine a book I'd rather be reading than the brand new Jack Reacher novel (well, a new novel by Peter Temple would be at the very top of the list, and I was certainly unable to keep my hands off that Diana Wynne Jones book the other week) - there is a short list of writers whose books are especially dear to my heart, let's say, and Lee Child is certainly one of them. It is a delightful book! You know you have come home when Reacher picks up the book's first cup of coffee ("The coffee was an hour old, and it had suffered in terms of taste but gained in terms of strength"); it is a priceless mixture of familiarity and surprise.
One of the things I've always liked about this series is the way it plays around with the variations possible on a set of constraints - the constraints are tight, but it is actually very unusual to see (as one does with this series) the author switching between first- and third-person narration in different books, or successfully integrating the "prequel" mode (and I was happy to learn that there will almost certainly be a "prequel sequel").
By far the most striking thing about the book event itself is that it is perfectly calibrated to audiences. I've been thinking a lot recently about book publicity, more in its online incarnations than concerning the in-person version, but I feel that any author about to undertake a bout of publicity should go and see one of this handful of authors who really know how to pitch and work the crowd. Lee Child is one of the best I've ever seen at this (his writing is nothing like Neil Gaiman's, and they make very different choices about what sorts of project to prioritize, but I think of them as the two clear undoubted masters of the new world in which authors reach readers through the internet and through a sort of personal charisma that can be scaled up very effectively at quite large book events) - his manner and his verbal intelligence are also very well-suited to this sort of event, but it's the format he used that really struck me.
He said that he would offer up six facts about the novel and then turn things over to the audience for questions, and proceeded to do just that - an economical and appealing solution to the problem of what to do at a so-called 'reading' (I did actually 'read' when my first novel came out, but in retrospect it is a mistake, Q&A or some other play-within-constraint-type structure is really the way to go). The repertoire of questions that will be asked is obviously finite, so the answers to those are appealingly sharp, economical and funny; all in all, most interesting and edifying.
(I also note that the questions were much more coherent than the ones I hear at academic talks that are open to the public - abstraction is less likely to lead to readerly clarity than vivid concrete action!)
(Random fact, not one of the initial six: this novel was written in 79 working days - I think I am recalling the number correctly - but the Child doctrine is that unfortunately even if one works on every available day, days like Christmas will necessarily intervene, so that work time must be preciously guarded. There is no substantive rewriting or revising, only polishing; he says that he can tell as early as two or three words into a sentence that things are going wrong, and backtracks rather than going through the inefficient process of writing and then revising/cutting! I am a draft-writer myself, but the sense of the time-frame required to produce an initial draft fits with my sense from Invisible Things, though that then underwent 2 significant further revisions - but then that is what happens if the book is composed over eight months that also include a semester and a half of teaching. There were lots of funny moments/good laughs, but one of the ones I privately most enjoyed was the shudder - I think it is a mixture of awe and shock! - that greeted the revelation that a typical Childean working day begins when he gets up at 11!)
I got my copy inscribed for my nephew Jack (it is my understanding that Reacher is at least in part his namesake!), the youngest person in this picture. I also set to thinking hard about what I can do to get this next novel of mine out there, but even more about what sort of choices I need to make about the books I am writing.
The style book (which should go out shortly to publishers) and the ABCs of the novel book that I'll be working on this year are not novels, but neither are they academic books. I hope that they will both be interesting and intelligent books of interest to anyone who likes to think about how sentences and paragraphs and novels as a whole work. My life would be easier if I just stopped writing novels - but I have been writing a novel, one way or another, since I was about nine years old, and I think it may be a necessary part of my life!
What kind of novels to write, though? That's the tricky thing. I am temperamentally a "try everything once" person rather than a "find a good thing and stick to it." This comes with advantages, but also some significant downsides. With novel-writing in particular it is by far easier to find readers if you start doing a good thing and then keep on doing it.
If I could just choose, I would definitely be writing crime fiction of some sort; it's the genre I've been reading in most faithfully and most extensively for many years. I have absolutely no yen to be a 'literary' novelist and have to play the associated games, it is not appealing to me (if I were writing that sort of book, I would gravitate to the experimental small-press world rather than the higher-prestige end of it, because then you really and truly are pleasing yourself in your writing). I have been and always will be an enthusiastic reader of young-adult fantasy, and to a lesser extent non-fantastical young adult fiction more generally and non-young-adult fantastical fiction - but I don't think it's a good fit for me commercially, when it comes down to it.
The crime fiction community is smart and adult and welcoming, and so many good books are being written (Lee Child was mentioning his peer group - i.e. they were the new kids around the same tie - being Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman - the list speaks for itself); I guess my readerly identity is pretty strongly in crime fiction; and yet, as I have said several times recently, I just don't think I can write good crime novels!
I'm not a minimalist, I can't keep out the copious and wayward other stuff that creeps in, I don't know any criminals or any homicide detectives or any men or women of action, I don't truly have the journalist's skill set/set of interests (you see this differently in Lippman and in Peter Temple, or Sara Paretsky, but it is part of what makes much crime fiction so appealing).
I don't have the puzzle/game-like feel that makes Lee Child's books so successful or that Dick Francis worked so well in his best books. I am too lazy to look up the link, but Francis said in an interview that when he was about to start writing Enquiry, he cast about for what would be the very worst thing that could happen to a jockey, and it seemed to him that it would be losing his license - and you can see that the first sentence of the book is indeed "Yesterday I lost my license." There is an elegance and forcefulness to this sort of approach that I admire immensely but that is not at all congruent with my own temperamental and story-telling strengths!.
I do think that I could write some kind of thriller. Stieg Larsson's books are interesting to me partly because they strike me - I am not saying I could have international success, just that the mode is better suited to my strengths! - as much more the kind of thing I could write. They're a bit baggier and more rambling, they're set in a milieu of journalism and computer hacking and corporate private investigation that is much more what I could successfully research and bring to life, they are stuffed with research and integrate history as well as the present and altogether just give me (more than many other works of my favorite light reading do) the sense that I could pull off something like that.
I was thinking recently, after reading Dorothy Dunnett, that I should try my hand at full-on historical fiction, as it would play so much more to my strengths (I love doing research, I am knowledgeable about the past), but my ardor has slightly cooled for that idea, partly because of how much I enjoyed Tomalin's Pepys biography. Like, might as well write a true book if you are going to delve so deeply into the 1660s....
Anyway, that is quite enough rambling for now. I guess I grudgingly have to admit that yes, I will write more novels, and no, I am still not sure what sort of novel they will be; I am a slow learner in this respect, I have not yet discovered my vocation as a fiction-writer! But I do think that whatever it is, I should partly let my blog tell me; it is the steadiest and most continuous record of my day-to-day thoughts and interests that I have. Might spend some time later this summer looking back through the archive - perhaps it will tell me that I should be writing a high-concept series of thrillers with journalists, scenes set in research labs, Big Pharma scandal and genetic engineering - this is more the sort of thing I feel I can write about convincingly than people beating each other up in a bar!
(I mean, I could have one or two bar fights, but it would be a very poor use of my resources to write a book that was mainly set in that sort of milieu...)
In fact after my last ruminations on the topic I did pre-order 61 Hours; the doorman in my building handed the box to me on Monday night around ten as I came in feeling very fatigued, and so it was an absolute gift to be able to flop down on the couch and devour it.
It is difficult for me to imagine a book I'd rather be reading than the brand new Jack Reacher novel (well, a new novel by Peter Temple would be at the very top of the list, and I was certainly unable to keep my hands off that Diana Wynne Jones book the other week) - there is a short list of writers whose books are especially dear to my heart, let's say, and Lee Child is certainly one of them. It is a delightful book! You know you have come home when Reacher picks up the book's first cup of coffee ("The coffee was an hour old, and it had suffered in terms of taste but gained in terms of strength"); it is a priceless mixture of familiarity and surprise.
One of the things I've always liked about this series is the way it plays around with the variations possible on a set of constraints - the constraints are tight, but it is actually very unusual to see (as one does with this series) the author switching between first- and third-person narration in different books, or successfully integrating the "prequel" mode (and I was happy to learn that there will almost certainly be a "prequel sequel").
By far the most striking thing about the book event itself is that it is perfectly calibrated to audiences. I've been thinking a lot recently about book publicity, more in its online incarnations than concerning the in-person version, but I feel that any author about to undertake a bout of publicity should go and see one of this handful of authors who really know how to pitch and work the crowd. Lee Child is one of the best I've ever seen at this (his writing is nothing like Neil Gaiman's, and they make very different choices about what sorts of project to prioritize, but I think of them as the two clear undoubted masters of the new world in which authors reach readers through the internet and through a sort of personal charisma that can be scaled up very effectively at quite large book events) - his manner and his verbal intelligence are also very well-suited to this sort of event, but it's the format he used that really struck me.
He said that he would offer up six facts about the novel and then turn things over to the audience for questions, and proceeded to do just that - an economical and appealing solution to the problem of what to do at a so-called 'reading' (I did actually 'read' when my first novel came out, but in retrospect it is a mistake, Q&A or some other play-within-constraint-type structure is really the way to go). The repertoire of questions that will be asked is obviously finite, so the answers to those are appealingly sharp, economical and funny; all in all, most interesting and edifying.
(I also note that the questions were much more coherent than the ones I hear at academic talks that are open to the public - abstraction is less likely to lead to readerly clarity than vivid concrete action!)
(Random fact, not one of the initial six: this novel was written in 79 working days - I think I am recalling the number correctly - but the Child doctrine is that unfortunately even if one works on every available day, days like Christmas will necessarily intervene, so that work time must be preciously guarded. There is no substantive rewriting or revising, only polishing; he says that he can tell as early as two or three words into a sentence that things are going wrong, and backtracks rather than going through the inefficient process of writing and then revising/cutting! I am a draft-writer myself, but the sense of the time-frame required to produce an initial draft fits with my sense from Invisible Things, though that then underwent 2 significant further revisions - but then that is what happens if the book is composed over eight months that also include a semester and a half of teaching. There were lots of funny moments/good laughs, but one of the ones I privately most enjoyed was the shudder - I think it is a mixture of awe and shock! - that greeted the revelation that a typical Childean working day begins when he gets up at 11!)
I got my copy inscribed for my nephew Jack (it is my understanding that Reacher is at least in part his namesake!), the youngest person in this picture. I also set to thinking hard about what I can do to get this next novel of mine out there, but even more about what sort of choices I need to make about the books I am writing.
The style book (which should go out shortly to publishers) and the ABCs of the novel book that I'll be working on this year are not novels, but neither are they academic books. I hope that they will both be interesting and intelligent books of interest to anyone who likes to think about how sentences and paragraphs and novels as a whole work. My life would be easier if I just stopped writing novels - but I have been writing a novel, one way or another, since I was about nine years old, and I think it may be a necessary part of my life!
What kind of novels to write, though? That's the tricky thing. I am temperamentally a "try everything once" person rather than a "find a good thing and stick to it." This comes with advantages, but also some significant downsides. With novel-writing in particular it is by far easier to find readers if you start doing a good thing and then keep on doing it.
If I could just choose, I would definitely be writing crime fiction of some sort; it's the genre I've been reading in most faithfully and most extensively for many years. I have absolutely no yen to be a 'literary' novelist and have to play the associated games, it is not appealing to me (if I were writing that sort of book, I would gravitate to the experimental small-press world rather than the higher-prestige end of it, because then you really and truly are pleasing yourself in your writing). I have been and always will be an enthusiastic reader of young-adult fantasy, and to a lesser extent non-fantastical young adult fiction more generally and non-young-adult fantastical fiction - but I don't think it's a good fit for me commercially, when it comes down to it.
The crime fiction community is smart and adult and welcoming, and so many good books are being written (Lee Child was mentioning his peer group - i.e. they were the new kids around the same tie - being Michael Connelly, Robert Crais, Dennis Lehane, Laura Lippman - the list speaks for itself); I guess my readerly identity is pretty strongly in crime fiction; and yet, as I have said several times recently, I just don't think I can write good crime novels!
I'm not a minimalist, I can't keep out the copious and wayward other stuff that creeps in, I don't know any criminals or any homicide detectives or any men or women of action, I don't truly have the journalist's skill set/set of interests (you see this differently in Lippman and in Peter Temple, or Sara Paretsky, but it is part of what makes much crime fiction so appealing).
I don't have the puzzle/game-like feel that makes Lee Child's books so successful or that Dick Francis worked so well in his best books. I am too lazy to look up the link, but Francis said in an interview that when he was about to start writing Enquiry, he cast about for what would be the very worst thing that could happen to a jockey, and it seemed to him that it would be losing his license - and you can see that the first sentence of the book is indeed "Yesterday I lost my license." There is an elegance and forcefulness to this sort of approach that I admire immensely but that is not at all congruent with my own temperamental and story-telling strengths!.
I do think that I could write some kind of thriller. Stieg Larsson's books are interesting to me partly because they strike me - I am not saying I could have international success, just that the mode is better suited to my strengths! - as much more the kind of thing I could write. They're a bit baggier and more rambling, they're set in a milieu of journalism and computer hacking and corporate private investigation that is much more what I could successfully research and bring to life, they are stuffed with research and integrate history as well as the present and altogether just give me (more than many other works of my favorite light reading do) the sense that I could pull off something like that.
I was thinking recently, after reading Dorothy Dunnett, that I should try my hand at full-on historical fiction, as it would play so much more to my strengths (I love doing research, I am knowledgeable about the past), but my ardor has slightly cooled for that idea, partly because of how much I enjoyed Tomalin's Pepys biography. Like, might as well write a true book if you are going to delve so deeply into the 1660s....
Anyway, that is quite enough rambling for now. I guess I grudgingly have to admit that yes, I will write more novels, and no, I am still not sure what sort of novel they will be; I am a slow learner in this respect, I have not yet discovered my vocation as a fiction-writer! But I do think that whatever it is, I should partly let my blog tell me; it is the steadiest and most continuous record of my day-to-day thoughts and interests that I have. Might spend some time later this summer looking back through the archive - perhaps it will tell me that I should be writing a high-concept series of thrillers with journalists, scenes set in research labs, Big Pharma scandal and genetic engineering - this is more the sort of thing I feel I can write about convincingly than people beating each other up in a bar!
(I mean, I could have one or two bar fights, but it would be a very poor use of my resources to write a book that was mainly set in that sort of milieu...)
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