Lurid icing

Sugar icing and cucumber abuse (I would eat the eclair!). FT site registration required.

Encyclopedia of genetic modification

Robert Zhou Renhui's pictures of genetically modified organisms (FT site registration required). These are incredible!

Red pants

At the NYRB blog, Adam Hochschild on a new book of color photographs of WWI.

Adelie love

Penguinscapes!

Closing tabs

Trying to get school-related tasks done this last two weeks has been like wading through marmalade - that always happens at the end of the semester. I have two more minor tasks to finish this morning before I can guiltlessly (a) go to midday hot yoga [ED. This did not happen - I was interrupted in my post by the need to visit a friend in the hospital, and we ended up staying with his wife for a bit while she waited for scary tests to be conducted] and (b) write the luxuriantly copious blog post about summer writing thoughts that has been percolating for many days now. But before any of that, I think, some tabs to close....

A good Knausgaard interview by Scott Esposito (scroll down and click the link to open).

It really was bound in human skin! (More here and here.)

Documenting the last living Chinese women whose feet were bound in childhood.

Blue squares

Swimming pool photography. (Via.)

Posteriority

The cuteness of hamster bottoms in Japan. (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Pratfalls

The piece Geoff Dyer filed from hospital. (Via Leo Carey.)

"Meat Service"

Unnecessary quotation marks. (Via Alix.)

Red in tooth and claw

Action sequence!

Explore everything

Bradley Garrett, serial trespasser.

Closing tabs

Sleeping subjects.

5000-year-old games.

Unremarkable men walk 40 miles for no particular reason. (Via Liz.)

Like Colleen, I'm excited for Sara Ryan's upcoming graphic novel!

Live art

These really are demented. (Scroll down for lemurs and orangutans.) (Via Colleen.)

Also, this! (Via William Gibson's twitter feed.)

Morning linkage

The last few days have been a little frustrating from the point of view of exercise: in short, I haven't done any, as I continued to feel completely knackered! (Didn't help that it was ninety degrees yesterday - after a morning spent doing interesting but demanding student meetings, and trekking around town all afternoon for a couple doctor's appointments [annual physical, allergist, nothing stressful], I realized I was due to go home and collapse rather than making it downtown for an evening spin class.) But I had a long sleep last night and now feel pretty much back to normal - looking forward to midday spin at Chelsea Piers.

Fascinating piece about similarities and differences between working at a tech start-up and a chocolate start-up. (Via BoingBoing.)

Rooms transformed into large-scale camera obscuras.

Photographic backdrops in prison waiting rooms.

Why Jordan Ellenberg has a quarter of a million friends of friends on Facebook.

The art of Houghton Hall comes home.

Chicken chicken

Championship chickens! (I might have to get the book....)

Prospective

It is ironic that the only thing that gets me to do massive and thorough tidying-up at home is the prospect of an imminent departure! However certainly my apartment will be nice and orderly to return to in early February: there is always room for further improvement in the matter of books and papers, but I've gotten a lot of stuff cleared away and effected the traditional end-of-semester expurgation. (If you wait long enough, all papers ultimately can be thrown away!)

I have had a not onerous but fairly long list of things to sort out before leaving, but the mail has been put on hold, prescriptions refilled, cat supplies replenished etc. etc. Will pick up the bicycle from the store this afternoon. Have assembled a lovely pile of books to bring with me: it is my general resolution for 2013 to write less, and though I am hoping January will let me finish two revisions (the style book and an article on the particular detail in life-writing and the novel) and get some work done on a secret project (Moby-Dick is involved!), mostly I will just be exercising and reading, reading on a vast and ambitious scale. It should be glorious!

I have misplaced my real digital camera and my phone camera doesn't provide the click-to-enlarge option, so titles may be obscured, but this will give the flavor of my coming weeks:

Also: next Saturday, bioluminescence!

Closing tabs

Very tired! Mondays are demanding; it is my preference to schedule it that way, but it leaves me somewhat flattened at the start of the week....

Saw a couple of plays at the end of last week, both quite enjoyable: Job, at the Flea (actually the Book of Job was one of two things I taught in Lit Hum that made me want to write some kind of adaptation, the other of course being The Bacchae - Richardson's Clarissa is a take on Job...); An Enemy of the People, in a new adaptation. 

Went to Philadelphia on Saturday to eat cake in honor of my niece's third birthday. 

Read and taught Leo Marx's The Machine in the Garden and Madame Bovary.

Did a lot of exercise here and there (great running weather!) and read a few novels on the side: one more Peter James novel (it was very affordable and there are a lot of them, but I do not think I will read any more, they have a curious air of unreality despite being seemingly well researched); an excellent crime novel called The Eyes of Lira Kazan; the first half of Victor Lavalle's The Devil in Silver, which begins with a sequence that makes me wonder whether it is possible that Lavalle is as obsessed with Lee Child's Jack Reacher novels as I am (I will finish it later in the week when I'm less tired, but it's strangely flat in the writing, and it's not gripping me hard like his last novel did).  Now immersed in Arnaldur Indridason's Outrage, which I will finish reading later this evening once I detach from the computer.

During a quiet office hours this afternoon, I read a couple fascinating chapters in Andrew Solomon's Far from the Tree (I was tipped off that Nico features in the chapter on prodigies, and couldn't resist obtaining to read at my earliest convenience); interesting stuff, from a writer I much admire.  Another book I'm looking forward to rereading in its final version is my friend Marco Roth's The Scientists, which I couldn't put down when I saw it in manuscript.

Other links of interest:

Jessamyn West on how not to write about libraries.

Teju Cole on the trouble with Instagram  (includes immortal line "your pug wasn't born in 1979"!).

Charlie Jane Anders on the possibility that science fiction might bring back the epistolary novel.

Levi Stahl on what is possibly my most-favorite novel of all time.

Chysalids!

Amazing Wyndhamesque link via Brent.  All of the pictures are amazing, but the one I've given may be my favorite.

Closing tabs

It has been an unproductive day thus far in the sense that I have neither exercised nor done any 'real' work, but it was hugely beneficial in terms of mental health and tidying and organizing just to have a day at home sorting things out.  B. is arriving in an hour or so from the airport, and the apartment is ready for a visitor; the kitchen table (a.k.a. desk: it is actually an old drawing table bestowed on me by a neighbor in Cambridge c. 1993) is covered with neat piles of work and manuscripts; I have my Boston hotel reservation for the week immediately after Thanksgiving and have called in prescription refills and done a host of other minor errands of that sort.

I'm about halfway through John Jeremiah Sullivan's essay collection Pulphead, and finding it completely mesmerizing.  His essay on Michael Jackson sent me last night to this uncanny clip.  

Life vicissitudes of A Very Young Dancer.

The uncanny red landscapes of Kodak Aerochrome.

Bret McKenzie of Conchords fame has written three songs for the new Muppets movie (the piece is by Adam Sternbergh).  Writing for Disney has its constraints:

For example: At one point, McKenzie wrote a lyrical joke for Kermit, in which he would sing, “I remember when I was just a little piece of felt.” That didn’t fly. “I was told: ‘You’re not allowed to do that. The Muppets have always existed. You can’t break down their world.’ ” Another rule: Frogs and bears and pigs can talk, but penguins and chickens can’t. They can cluck or squawk musically, but they can’t say words. “So I was like, ‘Can we get the penguins to sing?’ And they’d say: ‘No. Penguins don’t sing.’ ”

Last night I saw the slight but charming She Kills Monsters at the Flea; afterwards, the place we usually eat at after a show at the Flea was closed for a private party, so we checked out White & Church.  The menu is quite limited and the space and set-up give the feel more of a bar than a restaurant as such, but the food is superb.

Postscript

Artist Susan Lenz's post on the actual Florestine dresses as they made their presence felt this weekend. Here is her Flickr set, which includes photos from the 2008 show of the dresses at the McKitterick Gallery; I look very large in this one, alas, but it is nonetheless a nice picture of me (green dress, sunglasses) and college friend Ariane (blue). (Those dresses are a little like the Traveling Pants - they will fit almost anybody, within reason...)