10 x 50

1. My fiftieth birthday today.  

2. This year was a crucible! In the end I think I did come out stronger, but word to the wise, don't tell people they're resilient while they're still in the thick of crisis....

3. Stronger in my sense of purpose for sure.  Teaching, writing and advising/mentoring are my things.  There are a few issues I care a lot about and I would relax the "no higher admin" role to pursue them, but I did not thrive as chair of the A&S Policy and Planning Committee this year, my values aren't closely enough aligned with the present-day institution and I hereby pronounce that I will rule out any future path that points me seriously deanwards.  Wasn't sure about this a year and a half ago, am now, that's progress!

4.  I've only been department chair for a few weeks, but I think actually I quite like it, and certainly I consider it the normal responsibility of those who are in a position to undertake it, it's still effectively a faculty position rather than a position in university leadership.  I like helping people sort out the small things they need!  Also have hyper-competent DAAF who takes care of a lot of practical details I hate - i.e. I am surprised by how many people need forms signed, but Pam has already had a rubber stamp made and will do that or digital for anything I forward to her and get it back to the recipient.  Since anything that comes in an attachment or at a link that I have to deal with basically fills me with anxiety and dread, this is extremely helpful.

5. Two exciting birthday treats, obtained yesterday from Gelato & Co. at Camana Bay: fruit-of-the-forest "tiramisu" gelato with meringue; exquisite slice of sachertorte, which I know mostly from the novels of Eva Ibbotson.  

6. And a good run early this morning, and a good work day as well.  I had three biggish things and the one I cared about least was on the hardest deadline, I was aware that taking the whole summer OFF from work might be a good idea, but in fact my brain needs this kind of intellectual project to thrive so that wouldn't really have been a solution, not to mention just making me even unhappier about sitting on a big project I care about that was STUCK.  It is no longer stuck - the manuscript revision won't be done by the end of the summer (I have three more full weeks in Cayman with Brent, then two more before Labor Day, the latter will be I think mostly life reentry, full-on chairing set-up and writing the Norton Library Pride and Prejudice introduction that is due Sept. 1.

Pictured: use of new ReMarkable tablet to work on notes for new sections; working headings for the new preface and introduction for the book, which were the really crucial thing for me to work out this summer.  Drafted the new preface, now working on filling in bits and identifying holes in the new structure, this is good and I am committed to working on it steadily through fall and winter, if I do that I think it can be done in January and ready to send out (that is unless I decide I need to go down the rabbithole of Board of Trade archives...).

7.  Have decided I will join Chelsea Piers again in September - my back is so much better, I can ride my bike down there again and I really need access to that pool and more especially to masters swim.  Columbia pool did finally open a couple months ago but on an extremely limited schedule and I am not sure it's going to work for me.  ALSO realization of this year was that without being able to go physically to be with Brent I had absolutely no work-life separation, I live in a Columbia apartment 1 block from campus, working from home all the time.  Chelsea Piers was always my third place, I need that again!  (Good place to work on book too - contemplating how to fend off immersion in admin email till later in day - think this will help.)

8. This pandemic year was actually very good for my problematic back and my physical fitness in general - no human contact meant no bronchitis, so no illness-related layoffs; no travel prevented disruptions to daily routine; great yoga taught live online solved my NYC "can't easily get to the right studio" problem. Ramped things up when I got to Cayman, the yoga continues live and online, I run 4x and try to bike outdoors on Sunday (triathlon might be a gleam in my eye again) and at least one indoor ride (good new spin bike here, acquired because of quarantine needs, is helping this happen smoothly, plus Monday early am date with Lauren).  ALL GOOD.

9.  Still worse concentration than usual, I think. But much more functional than in May, I wasn't sure it would happen that quickly, the school year was so so so much more taxing even than it usually is.

10. OK that's all folks!

Closing tabs

Ah, I am long overdue some tab-closing and a light reading update, but life is complicated and Facebook continues to leach the energy out of blogging! I'm in Cayman for a couple more days, but my term isn't really over - flying back to New York Thursday for a couple more Friday tenure meetings and some end-of-semester teaching stuff. Can get through a couple more weeks without disaster I think....

Anyway, links first (I have upgraded to a new Kindle and will need to consult 2 different devices to get the full log):

How many eggs does a chicken lay in its lifetime?

On the subject of recreational zoology, read Jane Yeh's rhino poem in the NYRB!

At the New Yorker, Adelle Waldman on loving and loathing Samuel Richardson.

The new era of drone vandalism.

Should brand protection extend to paper offerings to the dead?

Top ten things junior faculty should know in order to get tenure. (There was a feminist rebuttal to this somewhere, but I have misplaced the link, and besides, it didn't invalidate the original points, just complemented them!)

What do Enid Blyton's school stories teach a reader about ethics?

Who will come with me to try this sour-cherry-pie sundae?

Finally, on a sadder note, Frederic Tuten interviewed Jenny Diski in 1999 and it's well worth a reread. I won't write more about Diski here, as I am attempting to write a proper piece about her for an online publication I admire, but I have been thinking very much of one of my favorite passages of hers, from On Trying to Keep Still (I think of it all the time and have certainly never read such an uncannily accurate description of why I have such a strong aversion to making plans to see even my favorite people!):

Being really alone means being free from anticipation. Even to know that something is going to happen, that I am required to do something is an intrusion on the emptiness I am after. What I love to see is an empty diary, pages and pages of nothing planned. A date, an arrangement, is a point in the future when something is required of me. I begin to worry about it days, sometimes weeks ahead. Just a haircut, a hospital visit, a dinner party. Going out. The weight of the thing-that-is-going-to-happen sits on my heart and crushes the present into non-existence. My ability to live in the here and now depends on not having any plans, on there being no expected interruption. I have no other way to do it. How can you be alone, properly alone, if you know someone is going to knock at the door in five hours, or tomorrow morning, or you have to get ready and go out in three days' time? I can't abide the fracturing of the present by the intrusion of a planned future.

Pairings

I think I will have the blackcurrant Eton mess - and the Marmite black velvet (FT site registration required).

Travels part III - Iceland!

By the time we got there, we were pretty much just due to collapse in the hotel room! (This was predicted in advance.) Fortunately it was an incredibly nice hotel.

(Our final two nights in Iceland were at the Geo Hotel in Grindavik - both of these hotels are pretty much brand new - I was initially a bit horrified that I had rashly taken us from lovely cosmopolitan city to isolated country location, but really it is good to see something a bit different - we had an interesting walk around small town and harbor, and the nearby restaurant was surprisingly good - I think this is it - we ate three meals there as options in walking distance were limited.)

Food in Iceland in general was ridiculously good. I don't have links for everything (or even most things), but we had fantastic Thai food here, very decent random local pizza, tons of good fish (with and without chips), a beer at Nico's favorite place, steak lunch here with my friend J. and his two older kids after an episode of puffin watching and delicious cocktails in the lobby at our hotel.

The Golden Circle bus tour was a little overwhelming (the landscapes are amazing, but there are too many people - tourist infrastructure really isn't up to current volume); I loved the small zoo in Reykjavik and the Blue Lagoon also exceeded expectations.

(We had two very fancy meals in Iceland, food on New Nordic lines: one at the Lava Restaurant at the Blue Lagoon, the other at Haust in our hotel lobby. The regular-place food is so good, the fancy food is slightly wasted on me & B. - but it was genuinely exceptional, and I would especially single out lovely desserts. Not so photogenic - subtle rather than flashy - but utterly delicious: at Haust, a rhubarb victoria with almond sorbet, roasted almonds and arctic angelica syrup, and at Lava a poached pear with ginger sorbet, praline cake and elderflower syrup. Divine!)

Pictures below are piecemeal: the final ones are only a small fraction of what was on offer at the glorious Saga Lounge at the airport on the day we left!

Icing delivery

A Facebook friend posted this birthday cake recipe; I can take or leave the cake and filling, but I am very tempted to mix up a batch of the icing....

(Ingredients: 25g/1oz cocoa powder, 300g/10½oz icing sugar, 50g/1¾oz butter, 50ml/2fl oz double cream!)

Two teas in London

This, this.

Closing tabs

It can't really be a week since I last posted here, can it?

Hmmm, yes, it can: because I foreswore any voluntary/frivolous forms of writing until I had cleared the desk of letters of recommendation (big round of due dates on Monday and Wednesday) and most of all this now-overdue tenure letter that was supposed to be finished by mid-September. Have just had a very nice quiet Saturday evening at home working on it, and have emailed the PDF to the relevant department chair with a sense of TRIUMPH!

Will now segue to the couch for a glass of wine and the rest of the Wollstonecraft I'm teaching Monday: have finished all the reading for Tuesday's lecture already (had to do SOME work yesterday but was too tired to deal with this letter, even though it was more important), which means that my tomorrow is now clear for (a) a longish run and (b) a lovely day of reading and note-taking for the other (more enjoyable) thing on which I'm currently delinquent, the short paper on Swift and commentary that I am due to deliver in Dublin on October 18! We were supposed to send them to the respondent a long time ago, but this is one of those things that is difficult to feel as a hard deadline in such a flurry of other more concrete and consequential ones (sorry, Frank - if you are reading this, I promise I will get it to you at least a few days before the conference, and hopefully a full week in advance!).

Closing tabs:

Book historian Erik Kwakkel on some of the world's oldest doodles (utterly enchanting).

A must-read piece by my friend Marco Roth on the language of secrecy, a contribution to Alysia Abbott's new collaborative project recording the memories of the adult children of parents who died of AIDS.

Heard a great talk Thursday on Soay sheep - it put me in a good mood! (I went to another very good one on Tuesday, my friend and colleague Joey Slaughter talking about the literature of counter-insurgency. I find great academic talks absolutely exhilarating, while boring or bad ones make me want to stick a fork in my eye: I have never found the knack of tranquilly zoning out, I am more squirming in my seat in distress!)

Some good links at this Paris Review post, including a really fantastic poem called "Treacle" by Paul Farley that I urge you to go and read in its entirety. (Should be paired with the sugar section in The Rings of Saturn!)

Among other features of a very busy week, a fun meeting with rare-book curator Karla about what we will show students in the forthcoming library sessions: lots of great stuff there that I am too lazy to link to, but I cannot resist sharing my enthusiasm about this!

Finally, Lindsay Gibson makes me curious to read Joseph O'Neill's new novel.

Light reading around the edges: Seanan McGuire's latest October Daye book, The Winter Long (this kind of urban fantasy is not for everyone, but she is a writer of immense gifts!); Arnaldur Indridason, Strange Shores (a weak contribution by a strong writer, full of ridiculous things - I kept on saying to myself as I was reading discoveries just don't happen like this!, but on the other hand it passed an evening when I was too tired to do anything more productive!); and Sarah Waters' latest novel, The Paying Guests, which I absolutely loved.

Wollstonecraft calls: I need to get offline!

Reboot

Pretty grumpy at this end, thus lack of blogging (my general policy is to stay offline if I'm down in the dumps) - I have been mostly horizontal with a dreadful cold!

(At the end of last week I was still able to persuade myself that I was just having raw lungs of some minor description, but really I spent the weekend almost entirely in bed; managed to get one set of grades in today, but it left me feeling the need for more horizontality. I think it will be Wednesday at the earliest before I can exercise, which has a strongly negative effect on morale....)

Closing tabs:

Cat stars of the new Coen brothers movie!

"It glows when you lick it."

Mike Tyson, philosopher.

Standardization of the "last meal."

Resurgence of the Presto direct-to-acetate audio recorder. (It is a very cool project, and the Rosanne Cash bit is especially worthwhile.)

What's your OED birthday word? (Via Anne F.)

Powered by donuts

Incentivized comment-writing this morning with a donut. After today, only three more lectures and two more seminar meetings - it can be done, especially as (miraculously) I do not need to travel over Thanksgiving....

Last week was a bit too busy, and culminated in an enjoyable but demanding weekend trip to Philadelphia, but this week I have every evening at home: beneficial for mental health. B. arrives tomorrow, which is also good and will make me work less this weekend than I have over the last few days. Will either run or go to yoga this afternoon depending on some light/temperature/laziness calculus as yet to be determined, but more immediately am going to get into bed with my Kindle and start reading Joshilyn Jackson's new novel, which I have been eagerly awaiting.

(There is a whole next round of letters of recommendation coming up due, but I cannot face them until later in the week!)

Light reading around the edges:

Richard Kadrey's Dead Set (not bad, but I read it just after finishing The Goldfinch, an imperfect novel whose language is so rich and satisfying that anything else feels flat and monochromatic afterwards); Shawn Vestal's short memoir A. K. A. Charles Abbott; and Kate Maruyama's Harrowgate.

Closing tabs:

The utility of post-its, George R. R. Martin edition.

I want this pie! (Also to read a Sacksian essay on octopus consciousness.)

An interesting article by James Mallinson on the early history of hatha yoga.

Linkage!

I slept for twelve hours, seriously - today is the first day in well over a week when I didn't have to set an alarm - and am finally feeling as though I'm on the mend. Probably need to give it another day before exercising (lungs still with some junk), but this is a relief - amazing how poorly an ordinary cold can make you feel.

Two good mouth links:

I've been following the fortunes of this endeavor for a long time now, and am absolutely delighted to see this great news about Bertie's Cupcakery! Bobbie is a very good athlete, wife of triblogger DC Rainmaker, and an extraordinarily gifted and imaginative baker - she created these nautical cookies to send to my brother and sister-in-law to congratulate them on the acquisition of their first boat....

Another thing I'm keen on: anchovy taste test!

"Blobbed by hand"

Roald Dahl on the golden age of British chocolate. (Via.)

"Egg"

I have to go to this restaurant when it opens and eat the "egg"!

A few weeks ago, in the temporary test kitchen, Mr. Richard was working on a pastry “egg.” It was made with a white chocolate shell filled, with Italian meringue for the white and lemon curd for the yolk. “I dropped an ice cube in melted chocolate by accident,” he said, “and voilà, I had a shape. So I started playing with it. I froze water in empty egg shells, removed the shells and used the egg-shaped ice cube to make my chocolate eggs.”

No pictures at the website yet, but I hope there will be....

Crazy golf

These really do look good enough to eat. (Underlying link also worthwhile.)

"Candy is dandy"

Impressionist portrait of Michael Douglas as Liberace - composed entirely of Mike & Ike candy.

Self-promotional

So thoroughly knackered and in need of bed that I will not write at length about light reading or anything else, except to say that the Book Culture event last night was absolutely lovely (a dream evening, and it was particularly nice to see so many former students!); I am writing now from a hotel in Cleveland for my eighteenth-century studies conference, Cleveland is extremely nice (we had a great dinner here - my dessert was the best key lime pie EVER!).

But the main news is that I am doing a Reddit IAMA chat tomorrow, Thursday, at noon - come and ask me a question if you have an idle moment!

On a darker note, this is truly dispiriting. (Via Jonathan L.)

Closing tabs

The world's first cake hotel. (Pictured below: meringue rug.)

Vacations for cat lovers.

I really cannot get it out of my head that the swimming pool at B.'s condo would be the perfect capybara habitat (dachshund extension optional).

Skulls on stage.

This piece produced in me the sensation that I must read this novel instantly! Fortunately it was available in a Kindle edition....

Miscellaneous other light reading: Peter Dickinson, Shadow of a Hero; Becky Masterman, Rage Against the Dying; Denise Mina, Gods and Beasts (I think that texturally there is almost no crime writer I would rather read than Mina, and I enjoyed this book a great deal - I wanted it to go on forever! - but there is no doubt she's less strong on putting together a coherent plot than on establishing character and mood in language, partly because she thinks in series/stream format rather than in terms of single books); Ian Rankin, Standing in Another Man's Grave (not bad, but perhaps didn't benefit from me reading it right after Mina); the second installment of Seanan McGuire's newest series, Midnight Blue-Light Special; and a very appealing collection of short stories by a college friend of mine, Uli Baer: Beggar's Chicken: Stories From Shanghai.

Closing tabs

Friday night I went to Doveman's Burgundy Stain session at LPR. It was magically good: here's the set list and here's a highlight.

On Saturday, dinner was infinitely better than the play, which was possibly the most abominably bad piece of theater I have ever had to sit through! I am currently having a minor obsession with the dessert known as affogato - both Esca and Petrarca have particularly good versions, though I think it's something you can't really go wrong with...

Had a cold all last week, which was depressing and necessitated woefully reduced exercise volume, but it's pretty much gone now. My class on "Plato's pharmacy" yesterday was highly enjoyable, but the afternoon Golden Bowl session was a little bit like the labors of Sisyphus! Must finish rereading the novel this afternoon and do a more dramatic retool of old lecture notes to see what can be done for the final discussion tomorrow. It is possible that it just suffered by dint of my having been up since 6am to revise a book review and make sure I had time to run before my first class; tomorrow I'll have more attention for that session exclusively.

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: Diana Wynne Jones's Aunt Maria (reading her posthumous collection of essays on writing has given me irresistible urge to immerse myself in Spenser, Sidney, Tolkien etc., but I am also pleased to see how many more of her own novels are available on Kindle compared to the last time I checked - there are a couple I've never read, so I'm looking forward to those last few also); Thomas Enger's Pierced. About halfway through the fascinating The Secret Race, Tyler Hamilton and Daniel Coyle's account of doping in the Tour de France (and more, via DC Rainmaker, whose lovely bride's new business enterprise makes me wish I could pay a quick visit to Paris!).

My former student Paul Morton interviews Katherine Boo at The Millions.

Dwight Garner praises Benjamin Anastas's Too Good To Be True.

Finally, unanticipated uses of the Fluksometer....

Everything's coming up roses

Just a quick post to say that I started my first-person rewrite of BoMH part III on Monday night and I'm incredibly excited about it!  It's totally turned around how I feel about the book: there's always been a claustrophobic hothouse-type aspect to the story that I have disliked, and this opens things up in a funny and interesting way that I am very much enjoying.  Haven't been so interested and engaged by something I was writing since a day I stole in February to reimmerse myself in a piece I wrote a while ago about the 'minute particular' in life-writing and the novel.  (It's one of my projects for August to get that out as a real article.)

I was unusually frenzied in my work life from December through May, and then in the aftermath of that I was uncharacteristically grumpy from May pretty much right up until now.  I'm hoping this marks a real turning point. 

I had one of those days yesterday where everything just seems to go right (clearly this follows in the psychological aftermath of  near-magical Monday-night and Tuesday-morning writing sessions).  I walked down a block I don't usually traverse and found myself in the amazing surrounds of the flower market, which is really like something out of a fairy story; I had an amazing lunch (best conversation ever!) with my editor at the hyper-palindromic Ilili (the space is beautiful and the food is very good; I recommend the prix fixe lunch - we shared grape leaves and hummus for appetizers, then I had the grilled chicken salad and the "Ilili candy bar" for dessert); I generally avoid crosstown buses, as they are often slower than walking, but heat changes the equation and the M23 - I had known this but somehow forgot it - actually goes all the way to Chelsea Piers; I had an enjoyable run workout on the indoor track at Chelsea Piers followed by a dip in the pool; then I took the M23 again to the first meeting of a mindfulness-based stress reduction class I found online and that seems exactly what I've been looking for.

Closing tabs

Trying to stay off the computer so that my back (some sort of minor muscle strain, an inconvenience rather than a true pain) can get better!  Currently have laptop propped on a plastic file box, and think I will keep it that way for a week or two: it minimizes internet time-wasting if I have to stand up whenever I want to use the computer....

Delicious things: a super-enjoyable dinner hosted by my new publisher at Public on Tuesday night; a surprise arrival in the mail from Becky in England.

Adorable things: synchronized kittens (via Jane); some pig!

Literary things: Zadie Smith on the Willesden library blues; Lev Grossman on why people in Narnia don't read books.

Uncategorizable things: first-person crop circles.

Miscellaneous light reading around the edges: (1) in the matter of concluding installments of trilogies, Holly Black's Black Heart and Mira Grant's Blackout; (2) a book I seized upon at the Ottawa airport and read hungrily as I traveled home (it seems not to have been published in the US?), Mark Billingham's Good as Dead; (3) in a free electronic publicity copy that hasn't been well formatted for Kindle, Martyn Waites's Born Under Punches (I enjoyed this quite a bit, but am not sure it really has aged well: it was first published almost ten years ago, and so many others have now been mining this vein of anti-Thatcher noir that some of the techniques here seem a little clumsy or crude - I'm keen to read Alan Warner's new novel, which also doesn't seem to be published any time soon in the US but which sounds excellent and which can of course be obtained from the US Amazon site in some more or less illicit fashion). 

Dug in deep now on Hilary Mantel's Wolf Hall sequel: I still think her gifts lie in the way of intellectual things and the depiction of characters rather than in the language as such, but it is an extremely engrossing book, there is no doubt.

Spool...

Perfect play, perfect performance.  (Only I wish people would not cough so much in the quiet parts!)  Afterwards we took the subway from BAM to Chambers St. and had a beautiful dinner at Odeon.  (I had a pan-roasted cod special, with nicoise olives and tomatoes and soft-baked baby onions, then macerated berries with mascarpone for dessert - delicious.  The dessert list there is amazing: there are two lists, and I was mighty tempted to get a root-beer float in honor of a recent episode of Fringe although really that is the sort of sweet that is better on an empty stomach as a full-on snack.  I was hemming and hawing over whether to get the berries or the warm doughnuts with jam dipping sauce - I asked the waiter for his advice, he looked stymied and said he would eat both - dining companion G., with a wicked twinkle in his eye, said "Get both!"  Of course really it would be both unseemly and nutritionally unsound, but it is a beautiful idea that one could actually do that in a restaurant!)