Showing posts with label house and home. Show all posts
Showing posts with label house and home. Show all posts

Thursday, July 25, 2013

Running away to join the circus

In my ideal world, I live in a monastic cell with no housekeeping responsibilities and a divine disregard for all matters material. In practice, it is clear that at least every couple weeks, it is important to take a morning to catch up on business, alas. I haven't quite cleared the deck - I need to write a conference-paper abstract and put away some clean clothes - but I have usefully spent the morning doing things like consolidating large amounts of cardboard and taking it down to the recycling area (between Amazon, FreshDirect, etc. an extraordinary amount of packaging enters my apartment on a regular basis), booking catsitting for August travels, unpacking glassware from my adopted grandfather's house in NJ (soon to be sold - more boxes!), tidying up overflow triathlon bits and bobs, etc. etc.

Part of that kind of housekeeping is closing tabs here and logging light reading. Enjoyed Mira Grant's novella How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea and Ben Winters, Bedbugs (the latter didn't quite live up to the strength of its opening, and has given me a desire to reread Tana French's Broken Harbour - another recommendation in this vein is Kelly Link's strange and haunting story "Stone Animals.")

It has been a good week. It was my birthday on Sunday, and I saw a play I loved, Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy - amazing performances, and some of the best integration of music into a theatrical script that I have ever heard. An evening of cake and champagne afterwards with old friends and family: very nice indeed.

It's the time of year when various former students pass through town, and I've had lovely evenings with Adela and Wei, who was one of my very first students at Columbia (you can read his marathon-running guest post here) and whose beautiful wife and two-year-old son I was delighted to meet for the first time.

Last night, courtesy of Tanya (whose book is coming out soon - she answered some questions about it here), another extraordinary theatrical performance, really remarkable: Aurélia Thierrée's Murmurs.

At the beginning she is moving house, but then there are all sorts of other transformations, haunting and enchanting - amazing use of props and of a historically evocative set of circus and clowning techniques. My favorites were the transformations into anthropomorphic animals (a handbag that when A., kneeling, puts her head into it turns out to have eyes that make her into a cartoon quadruped, a suited man with an anteater head that has previously been seen in its incarnation as old-fashioned leather bellows), and also the phantom-limb dummy bits with real people as the dummies that seem to be alive - you can always see the seams of the illusion, but that doesn't make it any less uncanny. Here's another trailer for her previous show, which I don't see; and the amazing backstory of the performer's mother, co-creator of the show.

(On which note, I add that this is a book I read repeatedly as a child: it troubled me that under no stretch of the imagination could I imagine making a living as an acrobat, but I comforted myself with the fact that playing the clarinet in a circus band and taking care of performing animals would probably suffice in a pinch.)

I didn't quite hit the five-hour mark on my long ride yesterday, but almost - triathlon training is going well, if one concentrates on what one has accomplished rather than on omissions and shortcomings!

Miscellaneous linkage:

Friend and sometime catsitter Joanne McNeil on the Bradley Manning trial.

Two good links from B.: eradication of an enormous nest; telegraphic love!

How can you not want one of these as a pet? (Via Jane.)

For diagram purists, a New York City subway map in concentric circles.

Wednesday, November 07, 2012

Closing tabs

Have had a bit of a breather in Cayman for a few days, with some important pieces of work finished and much exercise, but am on another plane tomorrow to another country! Then home on Sunday. I am ready, really, for the semester to be over: five more weeks, but two of them only with Monday teaching rather than Monday-Wednesday...

Closing tabs:

Vanessa Veselka on a truck-stop killer and the life of teenage runaways.

Chickens have to live somewhere too!

Note-taking habits of prior ages.

9 political poems to read now that the election's over.

An alluring excerpt from Nancy Marie Brown's Song of the Vikings: Snorri and the Making of Norse Myths.

Smallest man in the world dances with his cat.

Alos: my favorite local sports journalist Ron Shillingford profiles the Wednesday Night Run Club. (B.'s marathon relay team gets a mention!)

Miscellaneous light reading: Jacqueline Carey's Dark Currents: Agent of Hel (not bad, but not up to the standard of her best - she's working in a genre that Seanan McGuire has more of a natural gift for!); Ben Aaronovitch's Midnight Riot; Scott Jurek's Eat and Run.

Friday, September 07, 2012

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.

Thursday, June 28, 2012

Clutter, tethers

"Since this study, I can’t stop enumerating the contents of fridge surfaces."

(I was laughing as I read this: the suggested correlation between number of fridge magnets and total amount of stuff in household struck me as suspect, with the thought in my head being something like "my fridge has a fair number of magnets on it, but I don't have an excessive amount of stuff, especially if you exclude books."  Then I saw the actual picture in the article and flinched with horror - clearly I do not have a lot of magnets on my refrigerator!)

The illustration in the article:
My fridge:
The magnets themselves are a set of Andy Warhol cats my mother gave me, plus a few miscellaneous others; they are holding up gym schedules for Chelsea Piers and local yoga, a postcard a friend sent from Alaska and a snapshot of freesias at an English flower shop sent to me by Becky from Cambridge, a book of stamps and the mammogram referral that is for September and that needs to stay somewhere findable in the meantime.

(I have a fantasy of living in a monastic cell with no stuff!)

I am slightly at the end of my tether after two nights of very poor sleep on the quality/quantity front.  I will do a marathon novel revision session today, at least after I go to the allergist for shots, but I don't think I'm going to make my deadline.  Need to leave for the airport at 5:30am tomorrow and suspect that means I will just stay up all night.  Not feeling very good about this!

Friday, May 21, 2010

Story nature

The other night I read Jo Walton's Lifelode, and found it lovely. Quite unusual in terms of the form of narration (the model is Rumer Godden, someone I read very extensively when I was young and not at all since then), and extremely compelling. It is a NESFA Press book, and I am not sure I have read one of those before (I am happy to see it is now available from Amazon, as I think I had to order it directly from the press, which I always find less convenient); the introduction by the excellent Sharyn November compares it to Robin McKinley's Deerskin, a favorite book of mine, but to my ears the voice is perhaps slightly more reminiscent of Spindle's End. Anyway, a delightful little novel - Walton is certainly on my short list of favorite writers, as different as her books are from each other they all have that quality that will make me pick them up first and devour them before other available options...