Postscript

No sooner had I posted my favorite reading of 2014 list than I realized that I had left out my latest favorite discovery, the books of Elizabeth Wein. Both the WWII ones and the Arthurian-Ethiopia ones are superb. I am sure there are a few other important things I omitted, but this is the key one.

(In case you are curious for a glimpse into my working method, it is no wonder that I missed it - I just skim through the blog and jot down notes in this format, with things loosely grouped together in categories, then type it up in a new post, ticking things off as I proceed. Although I am characteristically very accurate in terms of proofreading and copy-editing, my tendency is to be extremely messy - I guess I like the environment to be the right balance of austere and chaotic - and it has been suggested that I might have a mild undiagnosed case of ADD, symptoms of which include the inability to wake up easily in the morning and the desire to stab myself in the eye with a fork when I have to listen to a boring talk or lecture.)

On near misses

It all worked out fine in the end, but I had a highly unpleasant half-hour this morning around 9:30am when I went to the TriBike Transport site to check the exact address and time window for Friday's bike drop-off, only to find that the drop-off deadline had been changed to YESTERDAY at 7pm!

Utter panic ensued - I couldn't get through to TriBike, and I started thinking about the various dreadful alternative methods of getting a bicycle to Wisconsin, and how horrible it would be if I had to pursue any of them. Fortunately I soon had a productive chat with a TriBike employee who informed me that the truck wasn't scheduled to pick up bikes from the store until 11am this morning, that she would call the truck's driver and that as long as I could get there by 11:30 it should be fine.

So I threw a few things into the gear bag (no time to pack it properly, just aero helmet and wetsuit and one or two other obvious bits and bobs), grabbed my bicycle and dumped everything in the trunk of a taxi - there was a lot of traffic (I was glad I wasn't riding across town!), but I was in the East Village by 11 sharp and dropped off my stuff with HUGE relief at having dodged a bullet. Acquired a pedal wrench to replace the one I'm not sure where to find and also paid for store mechanic to replace rear tube with broken valve.

Took subway home and found email notification that bike and bag were now safely on route. I will pick them up a week from Friday in Madison: it's a very good service, much better than having to have bike unpacked and rebuilt (capable mechanics do this themselves, but I really prefer to pay a professional to do it properly - especially the reassembly!) and paying airline extortionate fees to slam it around for me. (Not to mention my bike case is in Cayman still.)

(Needless to say, I was having considerable self-reproach at not having checked online over the weekend - they say to check a week or two in advance in case details have changed, but I suppose I didn't imagine it would be more than one day in one direction or another. This sort of lapse is partly just the inevitable consequence of life complexity - I am reasonably on top of life details, I would say, in a general sense, but I am also good at staying focused on getting one thing done at a time. I had to do my 112-mile ride on Sunday, I had to fly home to NYC on Monday and also finish reading and preparing comments on a dissertation for first thing Tuesday morning. It is neither pious nor defensive, I hope, to say that my students' dissertation defenses take priority over Ironman logistics! The rest of yesterday was a wash, with a long nap and a celebratory dinner with dissertation student and colleagues at Le Monde; it was only when I got up this morning that I let my mind shift back to Ironman. A very lucky thing that I saw the change in time to remedy the situation - I have been very pleasantly feeling that the obligations of the new school year have been happily stopping me from obsessing about my race next week, but now I am thoroughly rattled and am going to be a lot more diligent about getting everything I can sorted out in next day or two. Have just made my MASTER LIST of things for different bags. Tomorrow will retrieve tri bike from Sid's Bikes and do some actual exercise - I've had three days off due to travel and fatigue and notional taper, but really I need to do S/B/R over next few days, and hopefully a hot yoga class somewhere in there too.)

Selection and juxtaposition

I linked to this piece some years ago, but it bears repeating, I think; at the TLS, Alan Hollinghurst on the novels of Ronald Firbank:

where Proust, at just the same time, was expanding the novel to unprecedented length to do justice to his narrator’s complex world and his complex consciousness of it, Firbank had arrived at an aesthetic which required almost everything to be omitted. Where Proust, a fellow observer of upper-class society and sexual ambivalence, worked by the endlessly exploratory and comprehensive sentence, the immense paragraph, the ceaselessly dilated book, Firbank laboured to reduce – not merely to condense but to design by elimination. “I am all design – once I get going”, he wrote. “I think nothing of filing fifty pages down to make a brief, crisp paragraph, or even a row of dots.” He constructed in fragments, juxtaposed without any cushioning or explanatory narrative tissue. Both Proust and Firbank loved describing parties, but where Proust’s parties are occasions for infinitely fine analysis and profound digression, Firbank’s are an abstract mosaic of impressions, in which human intercourse is enacted as a kind of coruscating nonsense. One of his most striking inventions was the depiction of a party as a montage of unrelated fragments, picked up as if by a roving microphone: “Her dull white face seems to have no connection with her chestnut hair!” “ . . . with him to Palestine last spring. Oh, dear me, I thought I should have died in Joppa!” “You mix them with olives and a drop of cognac.” [. . . .] “The only genuine one was Jane.” “. . . poison.” “. . . fuss . . . .” “My husband was always shy. He is shy of everybody. He even runs away from me!”.

[...]

Firbank worked in fragments all the way through, amassing phrases in notebooks, and supposedly compiling his early novels on narrow horizontal strips of paper, which could be shuffled and rearranged in a way that sounds prophetic of much later experiments with the cut-up. Everything depended on the instinct for selection and juxtaposition. The Jamesian challenge of “free selection – which is the beautiful, terrible whole of art” has not been abandoned, but the terms that govern that selection have been radically revised. There is a paradoxical feeling, especially in his earlier and more experimental novels, that almost everything on the page is irrelevant and yet that nothing could be omitted. The exclamatory inconsequence of social conversation is deployed as a kind of screen, through which the attentive reader will discern hinted patterns, the intermittent unfolding of an anecdote or a joke. As a means of depicting social life in which any contact is transient and any shared understanding unlikely, the technique is wittily appropriate. Had James read Vainglory, when it came out on his seventy-second birthday, he would have found it to infringe almost every canon of Jamesian law – no centre of consciousness, no unity of effect, no “action” – though he might have hesitated to call it loose and baggy when it was so agile, so indirect, so evidently if so mysteriously “designed”.