![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
Stuff from London
Nov. 26th, 2006 05:40 pmLondon felt very much like Paris to me this time around, which I attribute to two causes:
1. The hotel room was teeny, just like the one we had in Paris.
2. I was reading Adam Gropnik.
Those of you who haven't read Adam Gopnik should. Really. I fell in love with him over his novel, The King in the Window. The plot of this book is too complicated to relate here (it involves, among other things, 12 year-olds, or maybe 9 year-olds, who behave like 19 or 20 year-olds). Part way through the book, the older lady who is acting as mentor to the hero asks him how he plans to tackle the (very complicated) central problem. The hero spouts a piece of George Lucas tripe about trusting his instincts and trying not to think. The old lady rips a considerable piece off of him for this bit of idiocy, and the hero takes care not to repeat it.
As it happens, Gopnik has also written a bunch of essays about Paris (he has also written a bunch of essays about New York, but I havent read those). They are lovely. I cannot say sufficiently emphatic good things about them. Reading Gopnik is revalatory and delightful, even though afterwards I feel uncomfortably certain that my greatest flights of wit are nothing more than semi-artistic bad temper. (It is true of revelation that revelation will nearly always make a human feel like an asshole. This is why so many people resist. I try not to do that.) (Gopnik is doing a signing at HBS on December 5th, which is why I won't be at the Diesel that night. Some things trump.)
London was loud and delightful and literary, the way it is supposed to be. We took the train out to Cambridge today, through a number of places mentioned in The Foundling (Georgette Heyer). I don't know if the towns Belinda's friend might live in were deliberately plucked from the names on the Cambridge rail line, but there they are - Hitchin and Baldock and so on. I am easily amused. The Waterstones here has so many Heyer novels that I couldn't pick one. I'll have to go back tomorrow. I am accepting recommendations.
Schrodinger has either reached that stage, or reached a pitch of anglophilia thoroughly unexpected in one so young. Either way, Schrodinger has been kicking, hard, since we arrived. This is kind of nice. Pregnancy is pretty dull work most of the time (you get bigger thrills knitting), with only the occasional illusion that you're learning something about the kid's personality to string you along through the uncomfortable bits.
1. The hotel room was teeny, just like the one we had in Paris.
2. I was reading Adam Gropnik.
Those of you who haven't read Adam Gopnik should. Really. I fell in love with him over his novel, The King in the Window. The plot of this book is too complicated to relate here (it involves, among other things, 12 year-olds, or maybe 9 year-olds, who behave like 19 or 20 year-olds). Part way through the book, the older lady who is acting as mentor to the hero asks him how he plans to tackle the (very complicated) central problem. The hero spouts a piece of George Lucas tripe about trusting his instincts and trying not to think. The old lady rips a considerable piece off of him for this bit of idiocy, and the hero takes care not to repeat it.
As it happens, Gopnik has also written a bunch of essays about Paris (he has also written a bunch of essays about New York, but I havent read those). They are lovely. I cannot say sufficiently emphatic good things about them. Reading Gopnik is revalatory and delightful, even though afterwards I feel uncomfortably certain that my greatest flights of wit are nothing more than semi-artistic bad temper. (It is true of revelation that revelation will nearly always make a human feel like an asshole. This is why so many people resist. I try not to do that.) (Gopnik is doing a signing at HBS on December 5th, which is why I won't be at the Diesel that night. Some things trump.)
London was loud and delightful and literary, the way it is supposed to be. We took the train out to Cambridge today, through a number of places mentioned in The Foundling (Georgette Heyer). I don't know if the towns Belinda's friend might live in were deliberately plucked from the names on the Cambridge rail line, but there they are - Hitchin and Baldock and so on. I am easily amused. The Waterstones here has so many Heyer novels that I couldn't pick one. I'll have to go back tomorrow. I am accepting recommendations.
Schrodinger has either reached that stage, or reached a pitch of anglophilia thoroughly unexpected in one so young. Either way, Schrodinger has been kicking, hard, since we arrived. This is kind of nice. Pregnancy is pretty dull work most of the time (you get bigger thrills knitting), with only the occasional illusion that you're learning something about the kid's personality to string you along through the uncomfortable bits.
