Closing tabs

Kathryn Schulz on Andrew Solomon's new book. (With bonus citation for "hair-splitters and lumpers," which I was talking about the other day in class - Darwin!)

Cousin George Pringle: featured track of the day.

Marina Harss on flood damage to properties of the Martha Graham Company.

Erik Davis on psychedelic drugs.

Rachel Adams on contemplating the results of a child's IQ test.

Ben Anastas on how to rack up debt and ruin your life.

Closing tabs

Friday night I went to Doveman's Burgundy Stain session at LPR. It was magically good: here's the set list and here's a highlight.

On Saturday, dinner was infinitely better than the play, which was possibly the most abominably bad piece of theater I have ever had to sit through! I am currently having a minor obsession with the dessert known as affogato - both Esca and Petrarca have particularly good versions, though I think it's something you can't really go wrong with...

Had a cold all last week, which was depressing and necessitated woefully reduced exercise volume, but it's pretty much gone now. My class on "Plato's pharmacy" yesterday was highly enjoyable, but the afternoon Golden Bowl session was a little bit like the labors of Sisyphus! Must finish rereading the novel this afternoon and do a more dramatic retool of old lecture notes to see what can be done for the final discussion tomorrow. It is possible that it just suffered by dint of my having been up since 6am to revise a book review and make sure I had time to run before my first class; tomorrow I'll have more attention for that session exclusively.

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Diana Wynne Jones's Aunt Maria (reading her posthumous collection of essays on writing has given me irresistible urge to immerse myself in Spenser, Sidney, Tolkien etc., but I am also pleased to see how many more of her own novels are available on Kindle compared to the last time I checked - there are a couple I've never read, so I'm looking forward to those last few also); Thomas Enger's Pierced. About halfway through the fascinating The Secret Race, Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle's account of doping in the Tour de France (and more, via DC Rainmaker, whose lovely bride's new business enterprise makes me wish I could pay a quick visit to Paris!).

My former student Paul Morton interviews Katherine Boo at The Millions.

Dwight Garner praises Benjamin Anastas's Too Good To Be True.

Finally, unanticipated uses of the Fluksometer....

26 locations

Places Jami Attenberg slept over the first six months of this year.

(Reminds me slightly of some notes of Georges Perec in my favorite Species of Spaces and Other Pieces.)

For an even bleaker account of the financial woes of the forty-year-old novelist, read Benjamin Anastas's gripping and horrifying Too Good to Be True.

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.