Closing tabs

Honeybees trained to detect land mines in Croatia.

Alberto Manguel on why it's so difficult to capture the texture of dreams in writing.

An interview with Mary Karr.

Jordan Ellenberg on primes.

Prime meridian

On Tuesday we went to Bletchley Park, which was highly worthwhile (I think the Colossus rebuild is the most amazing thing, but it's very cool seeing so many bombes and Enigma machines after having read much about them); on Wednesday, we rode a fast boat to Greenwich and saw among other things precision timekeepers at the Observatory and the Maritime Museum. Visiting these places on consecutive days, one is especially struck by the implicit continuities between two different periods of brilliant technical innovation and superb precision manufacturing in British history.

Yesterday evening, a delicious gin sour and smoked mackerel latkes at Mishkin's with my dear old friend Orion and his partner Harvy, a hatter whose recent creation made a big hit this week. Later this afternoon we'll walk over to see my cousin George at her day job, then meet up with another dear friend of mine for dinner.

Light reading (planes, trains, etc.): Michael Sears, Black Fridays (not sure the autistic son plot was really successfully integrated with the trading skullduggery one, but not bad overall); Claire Messud, The Woman Upstairs; Andre Aciman, Harvard Square; Gene Kerrigan, The Midnight Choir (I thought this one was fantastically good, even better than the other book of his I read recently); Melissa Scott, The Empress of Earth (I don't think volumes 2 and 3 lived up to the promise of the opening volume, but the trilogy is a pretty good read); Gordon Dahlquist, The Different Girl (another standout - it is a really lovely YA novel, science-fictional in its affinities and most beautifully written, with something of the strange haunting quality that I found as a child in the novels of John Christopher).

Old but good: basset hounds vs. gravity.

Sent!

I've been quiet here this week, and the week's included rather less exercise than I'd hoped - but that was for the very good reason that I've been working fiendishly on the style book. It's not really finished finished, I will have one more pass through it in June before submitting the final version, but I have just emailed my editor a provisional final draft (with a few missing references and some patches of rougher prose than I'd usually be willing to share); he'll give me notes when I see him in New York at the end of the month.

It will sound immodest, but I think this book really is amazing, it is the book I was born to write! I have a very hard time publicizing my novels - it's not that I don't think you would enjoy them if you are a novel-reader, I am happy saying something like "If you want a novel to while away an hour or two, this one will be pretty well suited to that need, and I hope it will make you feel and know things a bit differently than you did before you read it" - but really I am much more comfortable passionately recommending someone else's novel than my own! This style book (the final title is Reading Style: A Life in Sentences, and it will be published by Columbia University Press) really does do something that is interesting and useful and not quite like any other book about reading and writing. I am excited to shepherd it into the world - I imagine it will be on the fall 2014 list, though I'm not certain.

Flying tomorrow late afternoon from Cayman to the UK for my cousin's wedding. I won't take any work with me, I think, given that I've finished up everything I can do on the manuscript without library access. The extent of obligations to see family and friends will really make it fairly tight even getting in a minimum of exercise, though I'm hoping for a couple civilized runs and at least one visit to the Central YMCA to swim and spin. Back home in New York as of the evening of Memorial Day, and looking forward to what I hope will be a highly satisfactory first block of training for IMWI. Intend to minimize internet time in London, so posting here will probably continue to be very light through to the end of the month.

Miscellaneous linkage:

What Gary Panter doesn't know. (This one really is fantastic.)

What Hilary Mantel's been reading.

Just say no!

Light reading around the edges:

Installments two and three of Ian Tregillis's Milkweed trilogy, The Coldest War and Necessary Evil.

Two crime novels by Viktor Arnar Ingolfsson, Daybreak and House of Evidence.

Daniel Friedman's funny geriatric noir Don't Ever Get Old.

The obliteration room

This is amazing. (Via Josh; and more.)

Closing tabs

Benjamen Walker's theory of everything.

Hua Hsu on the rise of suburban Chinatowns.

Nice piece at the FT on the Hunterian Museum, an important location in my first novel.

Ode to a Shipping Label.

Mr. Men as social critique.

Last but not least, inside the London Pet Show.

Closing tabs

Sunday's interesting failure has predictably led to a respiratory ailment - I made it to Cayman safely, but unfortunately had to exit hot yoga this morning due to ongoing lung issues. Frustration!

Good linkage:

Renovating Freud's couch

Potato cannon muzzle velocities. (Via Tyler Cowen.)

Cheese paintings! (Via.)

Light reading around the edges: Christa Faust's Fringe tie-in novel and the first volume of Ian Tregillis's Milkweed series, Bitter Seed. The opening chapters are a bit overwritten and the characters feel rather thinly developed, but once I settled into it, I hugely enjoyed it - will read installments two and three immediately.

One-mouth play

Lisa Dwan describes being coached by Billie Whitelaw to perform Beckett's Not I according to the playwright's instructions. I saw Marian Seldes perform this play some years ago, it was unforgettable....

Footer and white mice

At the TLS, Paul Addison on Lucy Lethbridge's Servants:

Looking into the origins of Universal Aunts, an employment agency founded in 1921 to supply child minders and home helps of many kinds, she has discovered the card index in which its founder, Gertie Mclean, recorded the salient characteristics of applicants. Miss Charlotte Hedgecombe was “hefty, stern, stood for no nonsense, a stickler for etiquette and deportment. On borstal board of governors, Zoological Society’s certificate. Cope older boys, any number”. Miss Phyllis Beckett, on the other hand, “knows all about footer and white mice. Guaranteed not to nag. Can slide down banisters at a push”. Miss Pansy Trubshaw, she noted, understood cricket and foreign stamps, “but not much else”.

Closing tabs

I liked Stephen Graham Jones's All the Beautiful Sinners, although I wouldn't have minded it being a bit clearer at times - there are places where we are just confused rather than poetically oblique/ambiguous in our comprehension about what is going on. Similar DNA to Joe Hill's book, I think, though with different landscapes and long histories.

Have spent morning tidying and packing. I dislike the amount of organization required to leave town, but on the other hand my apartment would probably be an archeological tip of papers and books if I didn't regularly have to clean it up before travel. Trying to gear up for a run on this rainy day, but I fear I have missed my moment, it's absolutely pouring again - it might be I should take the cue from the heavens and have another rest day.

Miscellaneous linkage:

My old schoolmate Nathaniel Frank on Niall Ferguson and homophobia. (Via Katherine B.)

Young singers mangling the Great American Songbook.

"CSI: Monk Seal"?

Animals riding animals! (Via Sarang.)

Life is good

in a week where the two new novels I read are Knausgaard vol. 2 and Joe Hill's Nos4A2. Uncanny the extent to which that book both does and doesn't resemble a novel by Stephen King - it is at once intensely and allusively indebted and very much its own thing. I think Heart-Shaped Box is perhaps slightly more exactly to my taste, but this one is extremely good too (very appealing scene where iPad FBI agents are using to try and locate kidnapped child's iPhone eerily represents alternate universe!).

Also just as good as everybody said: Lawrence Wright's Scientology book, Going Clear. Gripping, indispensable; has also caused me to obtain a copy of Murakami's book about the Japanese subway attacks, which I've been meaning to read for a long time.

Strait is the gate

Octopus squeezes itself through small hole. (Via.)

Cat fancy redivivus

Subscriber-only, but Ariel Levy's New Yorker piece on cat breeders striving to create creatures that look wild but act tame is highly worthwhile. ("They like it mouse temperature"!)

Mud millionnaires

At the Independent, Richard Askwith on the rise of Tough Mudder and other adventure races.

The short list

For every author who ever lost a moment's peace of mind over an Amazon review!

First editions, second thoughts

At the FT, Liz Jobey on PEN's fundraising auction of first editions annotated by their authors (site registration required). Various bits of note, including Kazuo Ishiguro:

“I’ve always been drawn to the ‘diary entry’ way of narrating a story in which the timeframe keeps shifting as the book progresses and the narrator’s emotional and intellectual position keeps shifting with it. This method is particularly good for highlighting a character’s levels of self-deception, I find.”