A sense of accomplishment

The silver lining to the dark thunderhead that is having too much to do is that, when you do get a moment, it helps you to seize that moment fluently, and dispatch something which could have taken ages under normal conditions. I wrote the bulk of my book on St Margeret's Gospels longhand either at St Mary's Abbey Malling (where it was a displacement activity for praying and Thinking Hard about Things) or in the pews of the medieval church of Edington, where the services are so popular during the Festival of Music in the Liturgy that you have to turn up about ninety minutes early if you want somewhere to sit. This dead time seemed like such a gift that it became strangely easy to write. Today has been my first day of my own work in ages because of flat-clearing panic, and I managed to go down to London and spend an hour transcribing an important fragment as well as finishing off my book on calendars. Hurray! No doubt there are still some things wrong with it, but the editor has shown no desire to read it, so at least he won't be demanding tedious revisions. It should be out in the spring, apparently, though I'm not quite sure I actually believe that.

(By the way, I should really point out that when I say I have too much to do I mean that I have more to do than I myself feel able to handle, but it's nothing compared to what some people in this intense university manage. I have no idea how people do it when they have other commitments -- let alone children, even a partner seems like a sort of unaffordable digression of resources to me these days. Cambridge has "I don't know how she/he does it" disease.)

Anyway it's been a while since I said anything about books. My advice is, read things by Antal Szerb: the Pendragon Legend is good, and so is Oliver VII, but the first is funnier so better. He died in a concentration camp in 1945, but has only recently been available in translation, I think largely due to the Pushkin Press, which is usually just a tad too worthy for me. The Secret History of Moscow by Ekaterina Sedia is very good in a respectable sci-fi, Neil Gaiman kind of way; it has some excellent rats in it, which always endears a book to me. I'm reading the Amalgamation Polka by Stephen Wright; it's very good so far but amazingly Pynchon-y, with a hint of Thomas Guane. Consider this sentence:

One clear summer day, utterly absorbed in following the track of some clawed, padded animal the consequences of a possible encounter with he had not given a single thought, Liberty happened by chance to notice, sprouting in the shadow of a large rock, a strange bushy plant of no recognizable species, a heap of gray, stringy tendrils and leaves that seemed, as he approached, to be exhibiting a slight quivering movement curious on such a windless afternoon.

Either he'll continue to pull it off and it'll be a great book, or I'll start to find it really annoying.