New York living

In my regular New York teaching life, I am often so frazzled and stressed out that going anywhere to do anything, no matter how interesting or enjoyable it promises to be, provokes a near panic-attack on the subway platform as I fight the grip of the feeling that I should be at home working. I am making an effort to see that part of my sabbatical is spent refamiliarizing myself with the pleasures of the city, and on that note I saw a very good show last night at BAM, the Magnetic Fields. I love miniature things, and the songs are definitely along marzipan-museum Faberge-egg lines - occasionally it verges on depths of whimsy, but it is very lovely stuff, and they have an unparalleled sense of how to put together a set list with connecting banter.

A favorite: "The Nun's Litany" (sound quality not good, but it gives the flavor).

Postscript

Re: sabbatical plans, I am wanting to write two books and do vast amounts of triathlon training in preparation for IMWI!

4 more Mondays

I teach Mondays and Wednesdays this semester, but Monday is my heavy day: so, four more Mondays and then (it is a strange thought - I have a sabbatical coming up!) I will not teach again until January 2011; I would guess I can scrape through the next four weeks somehow?!?

Light reading around the edges: three books of true excellence, and all (curiously) very much the sort of thing I would have liked to write myself in a slightly alternate life: Geoff Dyer's Out of Sheer Rage, which is so funny I was actually regularly laughing out loud as I read it but which makes me also fairly glad I do not live in Geoff Dyer's head (but I am certainly now going to read D. H. Lawrence's book on Thomas Hardy, which David Bromwich was also praising recently); Denise Mina's The Dead Hour, which I do not know why I did not read much sooner (it has been hanging around here for some time, I have loved her previous books - especially the Garnethill trilogy - but had a spate a year or two ago of going slightly off crime fiction - however, it was a happy find on the shelf as I bounced off the walls Friday night with exhaustion and the mental insanity of mid-November in a very busy fall semester); and Daryl Gregory's Pandemonium, which is absolutely the sort of book I most perfectly love and wish I could write, only I am having - not a midlife crisis - a midlife acknowledgment that I will never write the books of Dick Francis, Lee Child, Charlie Huston, Mary Stewart, Charlaine Harris or indeed for that matter Daryl Gregory (the list is quite long, and includes my best-beloved practitioners of the Light Reading genre, with or without demons/vampires/zombies) - I highly recommend it, though...