Life reentry day: international travel wreaks havoc with exercise schedule and many other things. Yesterday was extremely demanding, and today I am paying the price!
Closing a few tabs in the meantime:
Brook Stevenson interviews Marlon James (his new book is on a pile here, but it's a tome - might have to buy a copy for Kindle as well, easier to hold while reading!).
David Gordon: doomed to read and write?
Chaucer's advice on how to survive the holidays.
For those who have been demoralized by having a journal reject an article! (And underlying link. This fits closely with my own experience as a referee for journals.)
A short history of the shipping pallet.
Perils of digital preservation.
The rise of livestreaming funerals.
Shane Gould on learning to swim.
Last but not least, Michael Hofmann really didn't like it....
Showing posts with label packages. Show all posts
Showing posts with label packages. Show all posts
Tuesday, December 23, 2014
Friday, December 12, 2014
One of those days
I am not super-prone to having "one of those days," as I am (though a victim to mood swings and melancholy like the rest of the world) of a relatively even temper, but I have to say that today started very badly - I got up shortly after 6 (that's never good!) to read electronic files for a 10am meeting, only to find I was locked out of the system. Spent almost an hour frenetically waiting/re-attempting password on two different devices, neither of which wanted to accommodate me - Facebook complaint garnered help from an extremely kind colleague, and by 8:30 I was at the office reading legitimately on a desktop there, but it was certainly not a good start to a long day!
The day ended well, though, with a meeting for my smallish group of eighteenth-century students and associates who need to think about job talks and how to prepare for them; and then I came home and was handed an absolutely delightful package by doorman Felix. It was clearly from its shape a tin of something delicious (hahaha, if it had been something like bicycle cleats instead it truly would have been devastating!), and as he knows I love sweets we were possibly equally excited; I came upstairs and tore it open and it was a really lovely present from my dear friend Helen's mother Becky Lewis, selector of treats par excellence!
With a nice note, too; it is Becky and my dear sister-in-law Jessi who read my style book and responded by sending me amazing boxes of chocolates! Thank you, Becky - what a lovely treat - THIS WILL AID MY PASSAGE THROUGH COMING DAYS!
The day ended well, though, with a meeting for my smallish group of eighteenth-century students and associates who need to think about job talks and how to prepare for them; and then I came home and was handed an absolutely delightful package by doorman Felix. It was clearly from its shape a tin of something delicious (hahaha, if it had been something like bicycle cleats instead it truly would have been devastating!), and as he knows I love sweets we were possibly equally excited; I came upstairs and tore it open and it was a really lovely present from my dear friend Helen's mother Becky Lewis, selector of treats par excellence!
With a nice note, too; it is Becky and my dear sister-in-law Jessi who read my style book and responded by sending me amazing boxes of chocolates! Thank you, Becky - what a lovely treat - THIS WILL AID MY PASSAGE THROUGH COMING DAYS!
Thursday, July 25, 2013
Running away to join the circus
In my ideal world, I live in a monastic cell with no housekeeping responsibilities and a divine disregard for all matters material. In practice, it is clear that at least every couple weeks, it is important to take a morning to catch up on business, alas. I haven't quite cleared the deck - I need to write a conference-paper abstract and put away some clean clothes - but I have usefully spent the morning doing things like consolidating large amounts of cardboard and taking it down to the recycling area (between Amazon, FreshDirect, etc. an extraordinary amount of packaging enters my apartment on a regular basis), booking catsitting for August travels, unpacking glassware from my adopted grandfather's house in NJ (soon to be sold - more boxes!), tidying up overflow triathlon bits and bobs, etc. etc.
Part of that kind of housekeeping is closing tabs here and logging light reading. Enjoyed Mira Grant's novella How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea and Ben Winters, Bedbugs (the latter didn't quite live up to the strength of its opening, and has given me a desire to reread Tana French's Broken Harbour - another recommendation in this vein is Kelly Link's strange and haunting story "Stone Animals.")
It has been a good week. It was my birthday on Sunday, and I saw a play I loved, Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy - amazing performances, and some of the best integration of music into a theatrical script that I have ever heard. An evening of cake and champagne afterwards with old friends and family: very nice indeed.
It's the time of year when various former students pass through town, and I've had lovely evenings with Adela and Wei, who was one of my very first students at Columbia (you can read his marathon-running guest post here) and whose beautiful wife and two-year-old son I was delighted to meet for the first time.
Last night, courtesy of Tanya (whose book is coming out soon - she answered some questions about it here), another extraordinary theatrical performance, really remarkable: Aurélia Thierrée's Murmurs.
At the beginning she is moving house, but then there are all sorts of other transformations, haunting and enchanting - amazing use of props and of a historically evocative set of circus and clowning techniques. My favorites were the transformations into anthropomorphic animals (a handbag that when A., kneeling, puts her head into it turns out to have eyes that make her into a cartoon quadruped, a suited man with an anteater head that has previously been seen in its incarnation as old-fashioned leather bellows), and also the phantom-limb dummy bits with real people as the dummies that seem to be alive - you can always see the seams of the illusion, but that doesn't make it any less uncanny. Here's another trailer for her previous show, which I don't see; and the amazing backstory of the performer's mother, co-creator of the show.
(On which note, I add that this is a book I read repeatedly as a child: it troubled me that under no stretch of the imagination could I imagine making a living as an acrobat, but I comforted myself with the fact that playing the clarinet in a circus band and taking care of performing animals would probably suffice in a pinch.)
I didn't quite hit the five-hour mark on my long ride yesterday, but almost - triathlon training is going well, if one concentrates on what one has accomplished rather than on omissions and shortcomings!
Miscellaneous linkage:
Friend and sometime catsitter Joanne McNeil on the Bradley Manning trial.
Two good links from B.: eradication of an enormous nest; telegraphic love!
How can you not want one of these as a pet? (Via Jane.)
For diagram purists, a New York City subway map in concentric circles.
Part of that kind of housekeeping is closing tabs here and logging light reading. Enjoyed Mira Grant's novella How Green This Land, How Blue This Sea and Ben Winters, Bedbugs (the latter didn't quite live up to the strength of its opening, and has given me a desire to reread Tana French's Broken Harbour - another recommendation in this vein is Kelly Link's strange and haunting story "Stone Animals.")
It has been a good week. It was my birthday on Sunday, and I saw a play I loved, Tarell Alvin McCraney's Choir Boy - amazing performances, and some of the best integration of music into a theatrical script that I have ever heard. An evening of cake and champagne afterwards with old friends and family: very nice indeed.
It's the time of year when various former students pass through town, and I've had lovely evenings with Adela and Wei, who was one of my very first students at Columbia (you can read his marathon-running guest post here) and whose beautiful wife and two-year-old son I was delighted to meet for the first time.
Last night, courtesy of Tanya (whose book is coming out soon - she answered some questions about it here), another extraordinary theatrical performance, really remarkable: Aurélia Thierrée's Murmurs.
At the beginning she is moving house, but then there are all sorts of other transformations, haunting and enchanting - amazing use of props and of a historically evocative set of circus and clowning techniques. My favorites were the transformations into anthropomorphic animals (a handbag that when A., kneeling, puts her head into it turns out to have eyes that make her into a cartoon quadruped, a suited man with an anteater head that has previously been seen in its incarnation as old-fashioned leather bellows), and also the phantom-limb dummy bits with real people as the dummies that seem to be alive - you can always see the seams of the illusion, but that doesn't make it any less uncanny. Here's another trailer for her previous show, which I don't see; and the amazing backstory of the performer's mother, co-creator of the show.
(On which note, I add that this is a book I read repeatedly as a child: it troubled me that under no stretch of the imagination could I imagine making a living as an acrobat, but I comforted myself with the fact that playing the clarinet in a circus band and taking care of performing animals would probably suffice in a pinch.)
I didn't quite hit the five-hour mark on my long ride yesterday, but almost - triathlon training is going well, if one concentrates on what one has accomplished rather than on omissions and shortcomings!
Miscellaneous linkage:
Friend and sometime catsitter Joanne McNeil on the Bradley Manning trial.
Two good links from B.: eradication of an enormous nest; telegraphic love!
How can you not want one of these as a pet? (Via Jane.)
For diagram purists, a New York City subway map in concentric circles.
Tuesday, June 14, 2011
Closing tabs
My eyes are almost completely better (those drops are a miracle cure!), but my lung ailment is lasting forever - it's making me very worried about whether I'll be better in time for my race on the 26th. All I can do, though, is lounge around and try and mend and hope for the best...
(Also I dug the little humidifier out of the closet and plugged it in, and purchased some new high-powered extra-strength Mucinex.)
Sat down with the Bacchae on Morningside Heights manuscript this morning and made a good start on editing; I am excited!
(I decided to switch the planned order and revise this one first and the style book second. This is the more interesting and ambitious revision - i.e. I guess much more work remains to be done - and I decided to give in to the impulse to treat myself with the interesting one first...)
I think it will take me three or four days to go through and do a decent copy-edit on the whole thing; in the meantime I'm making a list of places where new scenes need to be inserted to do more work of plot and character development. I want it to have more of a real thriller structure, so that's the main project; but first I'll clean up the prose that I have, type up corrections and then work with a clean version as I start in on the new writing.
Meanwhile, closing some tabs:
Synesthesia and swimming! (Courtesy of Brent, as is the next link also.)
Ways British usage tends to be misunderstood.
""You wouldn't think to read the pack because it looks so much like cookies"!
Good ones all over, but I especially enjoyed this obituary of Patrick Leigh Fermor by Artemis Cooper for the Independent.
(Also I dug the little humidifier out of the closet and plugged it in, and purchased some new high-powered extra-strength Mucinex.)
Sat down with the Bacchae on Morningside Heights manuscript this morning and made a good start on editing; I am excited!
(I decided to switch the planned order and revise this one first and the style book second. This is the more interesting and ambitious revision - i.e. I guess much more work remains to be done - and I decided to give in to the impulse to treat myself with the interesting one first...)
I think it will take me three or four days to go through and do a decent copy-edit on the whole thing; in the meantime I'm making a list of places where new scenes need to be inserted to do more work of plot and character development. I want it to have more of a real thriller structure, so that's the main project; but first I'll clean up the prose that I have, type up corrections and then work with a clean version as I start in on the new writing.
Meanwhile, closing some tabs:
Synesthesia and swimming! (Courtesy of Brent, as is the next link also.)
Ways British usage tends to be misunderstood.
""You wouldn't think to read the pack because it looks so much like cookies"!
Good ones all over, but I especially enjoyed this obituary of Patrick Leigh Fermor by Artemis Cooper for the Independent.
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