The big news, the main reason I have not updated sooner--because I was going to the weekend of September 13th before this happened--is that my boss (? supervisor?) has left our company for Wiley.
Boo! Hiss!
Just joking, of course. I have no reason to think anything of Wiley except vaguely nice thoughts, since I've met some very nice people who work there, and I'm very happy for AM, because this is apparently the kind of opportunity you don't refuse and because she's one of those people who just deserve to have good things happen to them. I will miss her--it was great to learn from her, especially about wrangling those few but vocal difficult authors, and to have a woman as an editorial mentor. So many of the editors in the office are men, and it was nice to be able to talk to someone who could give advice about dealing with condescending, sexist comments with grace when you'd really rather not.
That said, my coworker, CC, got a much-deserved promotion to Associate Editor of Business and Economics, split AM's list with BF, who's now Editor of Business and Finance, and I...well, I did take the opportunity to ask for something, but it was a bit soon. Still, I'm proud of myself for asking because, as so many men who haven't had to fight 23 years of training to be insecure in themselves keep telling me, women just don't ask for enough and they get left behind.
But that brings me to other exciting points: I was working part-time for a third editor, DN, and was just starting to have to turn down extra responsibilities when she announced that she'd hired an Editorial Assistant for herself. Since I know a couple of DN's systems, I'll help train the newbie, which will itself be good training for me, since I'll soon be training the new Business, Economics and Finance list Editorial Assistant. Yes, I will have a mini-me! This is mostly because it's hard to find editors with AM's level of experience, and anyway, we've got CC and me to help pick up AM's slack.
I add myself to this--perhaps prematurely--because I have finally been recruiting some potential authors with books and ideas that are ready to go. BF said they could be my first projects. I still don't quite know what this means, but I'll be talking with him tomorrow and I'll ask then. I suppose I should say that the only bit that I don't know if I'd be handling myself is negotiating royalties.
On top of all this, our religion and philosophy editor is currently on paternity leave with his wife and first child. We've taken the opportunity to prank his desk: there are currently about thirty copies of Killing Jesus piled on his desk and tucked among his books. I'll be coming up with an excuse to hover by the water dispenser on Monday morning to hear his reaction... (Why Killing Jesus? A boatload of free copies were sent to the office. The donation shelf hasn't filled up so quickly since some misguided publisher sent us Man Repeller. If you want a copy of Killing Jesus, just send me your address.)
Anyway, to sum up, I'm sorry to see AM go but happy for her, really glad that CC got a promotion, excited to meet and train mini-me, and looking forward to working more with BF.
Out-Of-Office (O/O)
When I moved into New York right after I got this job, I figured that I'd meet someone soon enough who would make a good housemate and I'd move to somewhere a bit less expensive. Well, it's finally happened! I met her while volunteering at St. Francis--she's another regular. We hit it off well, and when she was asking if anyone was looking for housing, I leaped at the chance.
She had free tickets to a Mets game so we went, hung out and talked for, like, four hours instead of watching the game, and decided that we could probably live with each other without wanting to commit homicide. I exaggerate, of course--she reminds me a bit of Aundy, my college roommate, and Maggie, who lived across the hall from us in our Junior year. So we'll get on well enough.
We're looking for a two-bedroom apartment with a bit of a living room in Astoria, hopefully for less than $1600 a month. If you know of anything, please speak up! We're looking for a November move-in date--unless we fall in love with something sooner, of course.
I don't have as much to report for the past few weekends because I've been so tired because of work...or, if I did, I've forgotten.
Highlights:
- The building going up next door did not, in fact, stop at eight stories. Instead it started to have some fancy step-back balconies on the ninth floor. Pretty sure it's eleven stories. They're starting to put up the walls on the lower levels now, which means that the windows on the far side of my building's stairwell are slowly going dark, one by one. That side of the stairwell doesn't have lighting because it had big windows. Now it's really dark on that side in the morning, like walking in and out of a cave.
- Petsmart had an event in Union Square. I couldn't pet the cats, was encouraged to foster one without asking my landlord for permission, and felt bad petting the dogs when the people holding the leash wanted so badly for me to adopt them.
- The Petsmart event was my first sighting of Cat Man. He was walking around with a cat perched on top of his head--literally on top of his head. Even the cat-carrying tourist I saw in Morocco had his cat on his shoulders. I have since seen Cat Man again, no mean feat in a city of this size.
- Spent last Friday evening with some Editorial and Production Assistants at The Brooklyn Strategist, where one of our newest PAs works on the weekends. It's a board game shop, but instead of being set up just to sell games, it's designed for people to come in and play games. $10 gets you four hours of table time, and you can ask for instruction to learn new games. They organize D&D groups, among other things--I texted Kate a picture of the store's sign and told her I would be bringing her there when she teaches me D&D. Her response? "*drools* I come willingly!!!!!"
- I learned and played three simple and fun games at The Brooklyn Strategist. Zombie Dice is very easy and mostly a matter of luck (I almost won with a bizzare rolling streak that won me 14 brains...until someone else had an even longer streak!). Snake Oil was the hit of the evening: one player draws a card describing who they are (cheerleader, priest, gravedigger, millionaire, etc.) while everyone else draws five noun cards and has to put two together to create a "product" that they then have to pitch to the customer, who picks their favorite. We rounded out the evening with Schmovie, similar to Snake Oil in that one player rolled a die to determine a genre and flipped a noun and a verb card to determine the subject of a movie that the rest of the players then had to name; the first player would then chose the best name.
- I made sweet Moroccan couscous for an office potluck lunch. People mostly liked it, but I had a good bit left--several commented that it was almost a dessert! Ah well, I'm looking forward to next week's dinners! Just wish I could have absconded with some other peoples' leftovers. Editorial is quite a talented bunch of cooks!
- Gotta love New York. After a massive headache with my work-approved credit/debit commuting card, I tried to buy my usual monthly Metro pass in Union Square after work. First subway entrance had the usual two Metrocard kiosks. Both were cash-only. Okay, I'd never seen both be cash-only before, that was annoying and inconvenient, but I'll let it go. Next subway entrance in Union Square: I stood in line for ten minutes before I realized that the two kiosks there were cash-only as well, because the stupid blinking lights above were too busy providing messages about soon-to-increase PATH fares. (The station didn't even have a PATH stop!) Next subway entrance had three kiosks, and while two were cash-only, one was designed to be credit- and debit card only. I had to insert my Metrocard and do all my selections before the machine told me it wasn't working. Finally I crossed the street to the big Union Square station, which has at least six kiosks, two of them credit- and debit-only. At least all of these said, very obviously, "Not accepting credit or debit at this time." Astounded, I asked the station agent in the booth if any of the Metrocard kiosks around Union Square were accepting credit cards. Were they? Nope! Not a single one. And at the height of rush hour! I ended up walking to the nearest non-Union Square subway station to get my Metrocard refilled, and by that point I was almost a quarter of the way home, so there really wasn't much point catching a bus.
- On my way home from Port Authority, there was a young man begging/performing by levitating dollar bills in the palm of his hand and in a glass jar full of singles. Pretty nifty trick--I couldn't figure out how he was doing it, though I did notice that he handled the bills he used a lot before and after "levitating" them.
What I've Been Reading
After Golding's To the Ends of the Earth series, I read Patrick O'Brian's Master and Commander. I found a few instances of the annoying was/were conundrum but did not collect them as I before. I'm satisfied simply to know that Golding wasn't the lone crazy writer sprinkling weird weres and wass around. Honestly, it's mostly the fact that I've read so much early-, high-, and late-Victorian literature and never picked up on this kind of were/was usage that annoys me so much. If it does exist, how the heck did I let it slide? If not, was it a verbal-only thing? If that was the case, how many court proceedings did Golding and O'Brian read to pick up on that? Because from what I've heard, that's the closest we get to oral history from that time period. Anyway, I think I enjoyed Master and Commander, though the mix of a dearth and surplus of characterization between characters and within single personalities drove me up the wall. I joked to my dad that I'd read a Cliffs Notes version, but I didn't think I could handle reading more. Maybe when I was Kate's age and easily obsessed, but right now it's a bit much to decide to sit down and read twenty books that I'm not absolutely in love with.
Next was Neil Gaiman's latest, The Ocean at the End of the Lane. Much slimmer than I expected, first of all. I feel like I need to reread it before passing judgement, which probably means I like it less than the other bits of his writings I've read, which I loved right away. I guess I felt a bit like some of his weird fantasy ideas were almost...cliche. Cliche Neil Gaiman. Is that an oxymoron? I don't know, it didn't stretch my brain quite as much as other things he's written. Maybe it's because the main character was a child--a wonderful thing, but kids are also more willing to accept things as they are and move on, which is both a blessing and a curse. It's a blessing for writers and a big part of why some of my favorite books are still children's books.
Next I bombed through Kazuo Ishiguro's The Remains of the Day, inspired in part by my viewing of Alfred Nobbs. I can't remember whether Rosenwasser or Scott recommended I read it. I didn't really know what it was about, and it was a pleasant surprise, even if the book's primary twist is now so overdone that it wasn't a surprise at all. It still unfolded beautifully, with an unreliable narrator that I could never dislike even if I rarely related to him. It was painful to read him rethinking decisions he'd made in his life, decisions that seemed like the right, the best thing to do at the time.
Next was a Strand street purchase: Equal to the Sun by Anita Amirrezvani. I picked it up because it promised to be a historical novel about an Iranian princess like the many historical novels about the Tudor queens. Alas, not quite. It was told from the point of view of a fiction eunuch. I kind of understand why--a eunuch was really the only person who could traverse the divide between the women's world of the harem and the men's world of, well, everywhere else. But aside from the fact that the character was underdeveloped (and I don't mean physically), it might have been interesting to see the story told from a viewpoint as restricted as a woman's house and the palace harem. The politics were a bit disappointing: every one of Pari's missteps was obvious to me, and she was supposed to be great, influential politician. I feel like Amirrezvani could have trusted her readers a bit more. Anyone who can keep track of all the politicians' names required to appreciate a decent historical novel can probably understand a Persian-specific faux pas. That said, this was a rare non-Eurocentric book, did not just drop the fact that the main character was noncisgendered, and is vaguely around one of the time periods I'm considering for Goodgrass's setting, if several cultures removed.
Now I'm trying my hand at reading two books at once. Christopher M. Schroeder's Startup Rising is a Palgrave book and is my commuting read. It's about "The Entrepreneurial Revolution Remaking the Middle East," as the subtitle says. Subtitle, you took away my schpiel! By my bed is The White Castle by Orhan Pamuk, a book I saw someone at Columbia University Press reading during my internship. Found it at the Strand and picked it up. It sounds interesting, though it's felt like rushed situation-setting-up so far. But I'm only a chapter in.
What I've Been Watching
Orange is the New Black :: The potential of the supporting characters kept me on board past the mediocre opening episode...and I am so glad it did! I'm really enjoying this series. How often do we get shows with the male-female proportion reversed? The writing is excellent and the ensemble cast steals the show, thank goodness--I can only put up with so many revelations from the perpetually perky main character. She has toned down a bit by about halfway through the season, making her more bearable as her attachment to the outside world thins and her connection to her present reality strengthens. My favorite part of the series are the episodes with flashes following a single secondary character throughout a particular conflict, whether in jail or in their life leading up to their sentence. To my delight, just when the flashback stories started to feel gimmicky, they were dropped for an episode to focus on the present. The show writer really seems to know their stuff!
Alfred Nobbs :: I can't say Mr. Nobbs gets any points for subtlety. I guess when s/he picked the name s/he thought it would make up for what s/he lacked physically? Maybe? I can't be the only one with a dirty mind, can I? The movie was an excellent chance to peek into corners of life so often ignored in entertainment: working-class women who made lives for themselves instead of waiting for a man to do it for them. Or, rather, finding that the best man to do it for them was themselves. Glenn Close was spectacular. I tried to explain once that I've noticed men and women walk differently, and was generally laughed at. She nailed it--not just the men/women divide, but the class divide with the posture of a perfect, respectable servant. One of the best things for me was that, when Nobbs found another woman disguised as a man, s/he didn't just shake off the male persona: s/he was still a socially awkward man with very male notions of life, expectations, women, and other men. Gender truly is environmental. I mean, I'm not going to use a fictional movie as an argument, but that's where that paragraph led me. Ahem. Moving on...
Richard II (The Iron Crown) :: I've been on Tumblr too long...I didn't even know that this play was being included with the rest of the Henriad because everyone was fawning over Tom Hiddleston as Hal/Henry V. Not that I can complain until I've seen him do his job (with Jeremy Irons as Henry IV!), but Richard II took me completely by surprise. Ben Whishaw, who got some attention in my corner of Tumblr when he played Q in Skyfall, played the title role of a king so wrapped up in his divine right to rule that he's become disconnected from reality--something not terribly surprising to any amateur historian, really, but when Richard's downfall is wrapped up in glorious Shakespearean imagery and played out in gorgeous lighting, costume, locations and sets by people who seem to breathe the play... I did have a few moments of, "Wait, that wasn't the climax?", but by the end I don't see how it could have concluded any other way. So now I'll read the play and find out that it did. But that's the sign of good Shakespeare, to me: if I haven't read it, it makes me want to go read it; if I have, it makes me want to research it.
Wreckers :: The commercial was well done, one of those rare ones that made me start playing with stories that might match the images, so I was intrigued...but with a name like Wreckers, I wasn't exactly jumping at the gun to see it right away. I tend to watch movies at the end of the week, when I want to relax, and depressing movies like that title promised to deliver are never high on the list, even for classics. But along came a weekend when I just needed a break and I had time to potentially watch something else afterwards, so watch I did. It's far from perfect, but I still really enjoyed it. It's quiet, lifelike, realistic, and not the downer that the title suggests. Yes it has Benedict Cumberbatch in it, but I forgot about the actors while watching it, which rarely happens these days. Maybe I felt such a connection to the movie because bits of it reminded me of things in my own life. For that reason, I don't think I can write about Wreckers in detail. My life is too wrapped up in other people to be entirely my own, something I've struggled with in my Morocco blog and my epic emails (albeit for two very different reasons).
The End
I wasn't quite sure where to end this, and since time slows down for no one, I'm going to go ahead and post this, such as it is. I've found that waiting for a proper end just means I end up cramming more in, and this is already a weekend overdue. So, until next time...
P.S. That annoying naming thing is going to keep up. I wouldn't dignify it to call it a code, but I don't want to name people who don't know what they're getting into with me. If you see me mention you and want me to stop, just let me know and I'll assign you an initial.
No comments:
Post a Comment