Catch-up

I am safely home in New York, though so tired that I am eying the time and wondering whether I might possibly go to bed pretty much now!

That said, the JetBlue flight gets me home at a much more humane time than the Cayman Airways one - I was here before 5, not at all bad. Very happy to see little cat Mickey and also to find three finished copies of the novel.

Which also has its first post-publication review - Charles McNulty at the LA Times!

Someone who liked it less (I just saw this one last night, though I think it may have been up for a while): Walter Biggins at Bookslut.

In more alarming news, I think my Kindle is on the verge of giving up the ghost. I kept on having to reboot it last night and today on the plane, so that finally I had to give in and read my backup "real" book instead: Leonard Marcus's Listening for Madeleine: A Portrait of Madeleine L'Engle in Many Voices. I thought Katharine Weber's piece was one of the most moving in the entire collection, but I was very glad that the cooler and more critical essay by Christine Jenkins was included: the two most serious criticisms I have of L'Engle's writing concern (a) the intolerable smugness of many of the characters we are supposed to like and admire (when I was a child, I did not understand why my mother was not as enthusiastic as I was about L'Engle's books, but I think in retrospect this must have been at the root of it!); and (b) the distressing homophobia in novels like A House Like a Lotus and A Severed Wasp, and Jenkins is very good on both these counts. I think that I would have worshiped Madeleine L'Engle if I had met her between the ages of ten and fifteen, but that I would not have liked her very much at all if I had only encountered her in adulthood: there are some very unattractive elements mixed up with the parts that people rightly found so compelling. Cynthia Zarin's controversial New Yorker profile of 2004 is available online for free in its entirety.

Aside from the usual minutiae (it is difficult to explain how much time I seem to spend thinking about when I am going to get to the allergy doctor's office for my shots!), I really need to get down to business tomorrow morning and finish a good final version of this particular detail essay. I would like to send it out on Monday or Tuesday, and I also still need to write my paper for the ASECS conference in Cleveland next week: I am arguing against the utility of the term "experimental" to describe any eighteenth-century fiction, and then turning around and saying that if we do want to keep it, it fits Richardson's method better than Sterne's. Looking forward to lively conversation on this count and others!

Light reading around the edges: I love Charlie Williams' Mangel series more than almost anything else I can think of, and the latest installment Made of Stone is truly a gem - possibly my favorite one yet. I also greatly enjoyed Bridget Clerkin's Kindle Single Monster.

Bonus link: Jenny Diski on Buzz Bissinger and the shopping business.

I have ordered a new Kindle Paperwhite, but it probably won't arrive till Monday. I hope this current device will last until then. It is very good for all sorts of novel-reading, but particularly invaluable when I want to run down to Chelsea Piers with a tiny trail backpack containing a change of clothes, wallet, keys, asthma inhaler and reading material for lunch and subway home! I do have the Kindle app on my phone, I guess I could fall back on that if I have to....

Update

Have stopped work this afternoon just short of the long final scene, which needs significant revamping (it's not just that I'm moving it from Central Park to Morningside Park, but it's all going to go quite differently this time round).  So: one more editing session with pen and paper, and then I have a messy marked-up pile of manuscript that needs to be transferred to the computer.  I will do one further very thorough going-through, with some bits and pieces of new writing still to be interpolated here and there and hope to send a new version of the novel to my editor before the end of the month.

School starts next week, which is a mixed blessing (really in January I am often in low spirits and ready by now for the distraction of classroom time); I've got one big other work thing due at the end of next week, so I think that I'm going to have to put this aside for some days and organize myself for the beginning of classes before coming back to the novel revision.  However I should be able to make my way to the end first and force myself to undertake the slightly horrible job of typing it all up between now and Tuesday: that's the idea, anyway.

(NB The Young Unicorns stands up pretty well to rereading, and it is interesting for me to see now what I would not have noticed as a child, the fact of its being published in 1968 and written specifically in the shadow of the social transformations of the late 1960s; but A Severed Wasp is dreadful in ways I would not at all have been able to understand when I first read it at age twelve or thirteen, though I still find it grippingly readable in its embarrassing fashion!  Very interesting and appealing, of course, to read two novels set in the neighborhood I've lived in for more than ten years now.)

Morningside redux

Had a good couple of hours of work just now; have been revising steadily every day, and the first new take on the first section of the novel is starting to come together pretty well.  New stuff still to write, especially re: the 'missing game' whose real importance seems to have taken a long time to dawn on me. 

I remain optimistic that if I can really sort things out properly for the long opening section (which represents about a third of the book as it now stands), all my other revision choices will be pretty clear and easy...

Still can't believe the library's not open till Wednesday!  Fortunately I have been able to download nearly-free versions of Aristotle's Poetics and The Birth of Tragedy for my Kindle, with intention of rereading both this evening.  (One resolution for this revision is to make more obvious things that might have been clear to me as I was writing but won't necessarily have been clear to the reader; more generally, I'm just trying to pull at the threads of different thematic connections and make things feel more like a really suspenseful culminating sensible whole.) 

I am also meaning to reread Madeleine L'Engle's two quite different novels of Morningside Heights; A Severed Wasp is waiting for me at the Butler circulation desk, even if I can't get it quite yet, and I've just Amazoned myself a copy of The Young Unicorns as it doesn't seem to exist in the BorrowDirect consortium's collections (young-adult collecting is more spotty than adult fiction).

Still feeling pretty off-kilter because of my college friend's death.  Desperate situations call for desperate remedies: I have finally embarked upon the official George R. R. Martin reread!  When the latest installment came out this summer, I thought that it was long enough since I'd read the previous four that I might want to start over again at the beginning.  Put the first one on my Kindle (having long since given away the mass-market paperbacks I read years ago) and have been saving it for a rainy day.  I'm now about three quarters of the way through the first volume, A Game of Thrones, and finding it truly immersive.  The writing is often slightly embarrassing, but it's amazing storytelling, especially in the opening sequence; it is a good way for me to make sure that this week will pass by in a flash!

(Also still grumpy due to lingering cold.  Had to cancel a 5-6-mile run scheduled with a friend for this afternoon, it seemed too strenuous, but I might try for an easy half an hour on my own instead, with commitment to turn around and go home if lungs don't feel adequate to the task.)