Squamous!

Paris was absolutely lovely, but I am very happy to be back at home with two funny cats and a real computer (the technology conspired against "real" blogging - there is a very complex and roundabout way to post pictures taken on my iPad in entries here, but the device kept crashing and I gave up and posted to Facebook instead - will put some of that stuff up here later on at a quiet moment, though life re-entry is now slightly daunting).

I really might have to read this book, though it's a minor splurge (and too new to be available yet at the library) - have pasted in the bizarrely steampunk (of course colonialism really did produce this kind of effect, it's not a novel observation) photograph of a nineteenth-century New Zealander with pet tuatara.

Jonathan Losos' Anole Annals blog is one of my great internet pleasures. I cannot really say that in another life I am an anole specialist, as really I do not have the eye or temperament for a natural historian (in a near alternate life, I am writing about Melville and Dickinson, and in a further-away but still plausible one I am an epidemiologist!), but I do really love 'em, and I like the styles of looking and writing on display here - makes me think of another book I very much liked, Richard Fortey's Dry Storeroom No. 1.

My morning's first meeting has been rescheduled from 10:45 to 12:45, buying me an extra hour before I need to be on campus at 11:30: that is good, I must just now try not to waste it all delightfully on the internet....

"Winter is coming"

One sort of reason why we should be suspicious of the claim that people don't have time to read.  (Courtesy of Al.)

"The truth was that he wasted time!"

Because I basically am now a monomaniac concerning everything to do with swimming, the great revelation for me of Zadie Smith's NYRB piece on Louis Begley's Kafka book was that I might find some good swimming bits in Kafka's diaries and correspondence...

I am not sure I agree with all of Smith's conclusions, but I liked this bit:

Begley is particularly astute on the bizarre organization of Kafka's writing day. At the Assicurazioni Generali, Kafka despaired of his twelve-hour shifts that left no time for writing; two years later, promoted to the position of chief clerk at the Workers' Accident Insurance Institute, he was now on the one-shift system, 8:30 AM until 2:30 PM. And then what? Lunch until 3:30, then sleep until 7:30, then exercises, then a family dinner. After which he started work around 11 PM (as Begley points out, the letter- and diary-writing took up at least an hour a day, and more usually two), and then "depending on my strength, inclination, and luck, until one, two, or three o'clock, once even till six in the morning." Then "every imaginable effort to go to sleep," as he fitfully rested before leaving to go to the office once more. This routine left him permanently on the verge of collapse. Yet

when Felice wrote to him...arguing that a more rational organization of his day might be possible, he bristled.... "The present way is the only possible one; if I can't bear it, so much the worse; but I will bear it somehow."

It was Brod's opinion that Kafka's parents should gift him a lump sum "so that he could leave the office, go off to some cheap little place on the Riviera to create those works that God, using Franz's brain, wishes the world to have." Begley, leaving God out of it, politely disagrees, finding Brod's wish

probably misguided. Kafka's failure to make even an attempt to break out of the twin prisons of the Institute and his room at the family apartment may have been nothing less than the choice of the way of life that paradoxically best suited him.

It is rare that writers of fiction sit behind their desks, actually writing, for more than a few hours a day. Had Kafka been able to use his time efficiently, the work schedule at the Institute would have left him with enough free time for writing. As he recognized, the truth was that he wasted time.

The truth was that he wasted time! The writer's equivalent of the dater's revelation: He's just not that into you. "Having the Institute and the conditions at his parents' apartment to blame for the long fallow periods when he couldn't write gave Kafka cover: it enabled him to preserve some of his self-esteem."