These are from the end of January

A few photos from June's trip to Ecuador.

This is a village in the coastal province of Esmeraldas.

Where I went swimming every day, the house where I was living, the fishermen and their phallic talismans.

Yesterday I went to the Keukenhof, the huge park/botanical garden in Lisse (about half an hour from Leiden). It is tulip season in the Netherlands right now.

Between winter ice-skating and the tulip extravaganza, it's been a seasonally appropriate Dutch year so far. I am not going to swim in the canals in the summer, though, because that's gross. But some people do it.

Yesterday I made the mistake of putting a piece of a honeycomb into my hot tea. I did not really think it through. The wax melted, and the top of the tea was covered with these soft filmy tidbits, rendering it undrinkable. In one of those fractal-universe things, as I walked home along the rapidly freezing canal (winter finally arrived), the surface, with tenuous, uneven, sporadic film of ice looked just like the top of my teacup.

I finished "The Magicians" and DAMN it was good. It falls into the category of books that reviewers describe as "cold" (which I think is different from just "bleak"--it's about affect)--and I always love those books. I think part of it is that the world in books like that appears indifferent in a way that is meant to suggest that it really exists above and beyond the narrative. I also loved most of the writing--some passages were so well-written, that as I was reading them, I was aware of both the pleasure of reading them and the skill that went into crafting them.

I started the sequel, "The Magician King" which is good but so far I am still feeling it out--the plot is only establishing itself, and I don't yet know what the central emotional story of this book going to be.

These are especially good books to read in front of the fireplace which we have going almost every day now. It is excellent to have a fireplace when it is so cold outside. It feels like such a luxury, like something out of a book itself.


Fionn and I on the winter beach.

1. Fionn, overheard writing a letter to Santa: "Dear Santa, I am a dinosaur."

2. After brunch at my colleagues' house where Fionn played with their son, on the way home I asked him if he had had fun. He said: "Yes, I had lots of fun. And did you and dada have fun?" I said that we did. Fionn then asked: "how could you have fun when all you did was sit on chairs and talk?"

After Claude by Iris Owens. Really dark and really funny. Unreliable narrator with full-blown Narcissistic Personality Disorder which does not prevent her from being really sharp about everything except herself. Early 1970s New York setting, bonus for the last section of the book being set at the Chelsea Hotel.

The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine by Alina Bronsky. This is funny—actually when I was reading this, the narrator (unreliable, with a full-blown NPD) reminded me of the narrator of After Claude, which I assumed was just because I had read them one right after the other, but then I saw someone else make the same connection on Goodreads. This book was kind of insane to read, for me, because on one hand, everything that goes on in it is so horribly fucked up, but on the other hand, it is so familiar—the behavioral pathologies and the horribly abusive family patterns are so much part of the Soviet/post-Soviet cultural textures that it is like reading about the family that lived next door (I had the same reaction to the Russian movie “Bury Me Behind the Baseboard” where the neurotic grandmother character is very similar in terms of her narcissism and hysteria, and the vocabulary, the ways of manipulating and controlling situations and people, the symbolic universe of it all is recognizable and familiar in the way that it can only be when you grew up in that culture). By the way, if anyone has read it ( spoilers )

Broken Glass Park by Alina Bronsky. After reading The Hottest Dishes I was interested to read her first book. It was okay but not nearly as good. Sort of an overdone bildunsgroman/Russian Immigrant Catcher in the German Rye. I was drawn in at first but then it just became kind of eh.

The Secret Life of CeeCee Wilkes by Diane Chamberlain. I've been reading novels by Diane Chamberlain intermittently even though that's totally not my genre, but I keep becoming intrigued by the plot blurbs and then the books are interesting enough to keep reading, although they make no lasting impact on me. Anyway, this book is about a woman living underground after an radical activist action gone very wrong, but it's very schmaltzy. Basically it's like a Lifetime Television for Women version of Marge Piercy's Vida.

Freedom by Jonathan Franzen. This was SO good. I loved it. Pretty much all the characters were so awful and tragic but also so compelling. Also I loved the whole nature conservancy/open pit mining plot, it has weird resonances with an academic project I am working on now, where reality is becoming more and more like Franzen's satire about that...

The Astral by Kate Christensen. I think this is my favorite novel of hers since her first, In The Drink which will probably be my favorite forever, since in addition to it being really good I also read it at an age where it really pierced me. I definitely liked this more than Trouble which seemed a bit half-baked and rushed to me. I also love how her books are love letters to the the New York that I experience and identify as "mine" (both in terms of its geography and the prism of her emotional affect); this one to Greenpoint, which book-ended my time in New York, as my first and last years in the city were spent there.

Girls in White Dresses by Jennifer Close—another “The Group” type book but more lighter with a whimsical fragmented structure and tone that reminded me of The Girls' Guide to Hunting and Fishing I breezed through it and enjoyed it more than I thought I would.

The Help by Kathryn Stockett—racist in the way that a million critiques in reviews and blog posts have already pointed out. Total “good” white ally self-actualizing through “giving voice” to black women who are alternately sassy or go to church.

State of Wonder by Ann Patchett—I really, really enjoyed it, sort of to my surprise, as I imagined a novel about bioprospecting in the Amazon with the main character working for a pharmaceutical company would make me agitated, but I actually couldn't put it down and thought it was pretty great—the only thing is, I think it's part of this particular representational trend in fiction about the Amazon but I can't decide whether this book perpetuates this trend or critiques it—I keep going back and forth.

This is the lake we went swimming in on our next-to-last day of vacation, east of Berlin, close to the Polish border.

This was a lake no one had been to. There was a map, but it was, as it turned out, not drawn to scale. Rumor had it that this lake was so clear you could see all the way to the bottom, which was made of stones, rather than the thick murky sand giving way to clusters of algae at the nearby lake.

To get to this lake we had to go to the end of the cornfield, then turn into the woods. At one point it seemed like we were walking for much longer than the ambiguous map seemed to indicate. Then in the middle of the wood a car appeared, with a German couple. We asked them about the lake. At first they thought we were talking about a very different lake 30 kilometers away, but after much discussion and map consultation they figured out what we were talking about.

There is a lake up there, they said. But it's not finished yet. It's a man-made large lake and they are still finishing it. You can swim there but the problem is, there is an electrical cable under it, and it is okay now, but it could break any day, and then all the water in the lake will be charged with electricity.

After a picnic in a sunny clearing in the forest we found the lake. It was large, blue, and beautiful, although the bottom was still sand, and there was algae, and also giant reeds that looked like velvet hot dogs. On the other side of the lake, an excavator and some other machinery idled. Old pipes in bleacher formation, heated by the sun, made for a perfect bench.

We went swimming in the cold water that contained occasional surprise warm stream stripes. There was just sun on the water, and old metal pipes that were so warm they almost lulled you to sleep. The guys read Hesse and Artaud. The kids climbed up and down a steep sandhill lined with twisted tree roots and yellow flowers, and broke apart the velvet reeds, which appeared to be filled with feathers. And maybe there was a subterranean electrical current somewhere deep below the lake, but there was no electricity in the water.

Busy busy busy but keep meaning to update. Placeholder.