And starting midway through the conversation:

ME: That’s a filthy lie!
NICK: Oh no! I’ve been j’accused.
ME: No, you haven’t. That would be grammatically improbable.
NICK: So it goes.
ME: Are you just going to cobble together a series of phrases from languages you don’t speak and quotations from books you’ve only read once and didn’t care for then, and call it conversation?
NICK: It’s what I normally do, so—yes.

Please bear in mind that I am a nineteenth-century scholar before you read further in this one . . .

ME: Ack!
NICK: What’s that?
ME: My new notebook! It has a picture of spooning teenagers inside!
(Pause)
ME: Actually, spooning teenagers probably haven’t been much of an issue since the 1890s, have . . . oh.
NICK: Yes.
ME: So, it’s a whole different kind of spooning these days, isn’t it?
NICK: Yes. Now it’s a lot closer to forking.

You know, this blog post almost certainly isn’t going to be as interesting as that title suggests. Especially since the man in question is dead.

But yesterday, as I was moving a fabulous but rather disturbing picture of Hansel (as in “Hansel and Gretel”) interrogating two suspected witches (bless you for making that exist, James Jean), I realised that it had been hiding a volume of Casanova’s memoirs (volume four of an 1894 unabridged reprint in six volumes) that I’d forgotten I owned.

[I do own another set of Casanova’s memoirs, from Johns Hopkins University Press (also incomplete: I have only three of the six volumes). I have no intention, however, of posting a picture of their cover. It’s beautiful cover art, but it’s beautiful cover art focusing intently on a naked figure, and this isn’t that kind of blog, despite what the odd Google search suggests.]

No, it’s the cover of this solitary volume that makes me suspect that Giacomo Girolamo Casanova de Seingalt, had he not inconveniently died in 1798, might be having stern words with his publicist once this arrived on his doorstep:

I’ve slightly distracted myself, now, by wondering just how Casanova might fit into modern society. (He would have a publicist, wouldn’t he? And would probably be just another person famous for nothing more than being wealthy and leisured.) But leaving that aside for the time being, do you think he’d be pleased with this cover?

He doesn’t really look like a man whom—assuming, for the purposes of the argument, that you eye men speculatively—you’d be likely to eye speculatively, does he?

I think it’s the hideously magnified eye.

Well, once we ignore the fact that he appears to be largely two-dimensional, and whatever it is that’s going on with his lips there, and the fact that his cheekbones and chin look like they could cause some serious damage to the bed linen if he rolls over in his sleep—once you move past those issues, I think it’s the hideously magnified eye that’s the most disturbing factor.

I understand that enormous eyes are part of the reason why baby animals are appealing—and I’ve heard the argument (somewhere, many moons ago) that the appealing, exaggerated facial features of young mammals are helpful in triggering the protective instincts of the adult of the species.

But surely that doesn’t apply to Casanova, does it?

Maybe that’s the true secret of his success: perhaps eighteenth-century women were irresistibly attracted to men who looked like bush babies?

It’s one of the great mysteries of my bookshelves.

What happens when you combine a lack of sleep with instant messaging?

This:

ME: Oh, it’s going okay. Not as motivated to work today as I was yesterday. Life is odd like that.
NICK: Yes, it sure is. I’m having more motivation today than yesterday, oddly enough.
ME: You sucked my motivation away while I was sleeping?!
NICK: Not deliberately!
ME: You’re admitting it?
NICK: Erm, no!
ME: I think you just admitted it . . . Plus why would you “have motivation”? Why do you need that verb plus a nominalisation? Why not just “motivated”?
NICK: Because it is a thing that may be extracted from others when they sleep.

I can see why uploading a series of photographs of a mysterious fungus that I found in the garden doesn’t quite look like I’ve had a productive day, but I have.

This morning, I mapped out the basic structure for a projected journal article on advertising and Victorian periodicals.

See?

(I realise the fact that the outline is pinned to my bookcase with a cocktail umbrella doesn’t really make it look professional, but I’ve yet to find a decent cork-board. For that matter, I don’t really have room for a cork-board. The cocktail umbrellas allow me to pin things against the bookcase without damaging the books themselves.)

(And they look festive.)

It may not look like much, this outline. But it’s the culmination of a fruitful morning’s thinking, shaping, and re-shaping—and a sign of good things to come.

When I started my Ph.D., I found that my writing process had leaped up a step while I wasn’t looking, so that some of my old writing habits were no longer apparent: I was producing fewer drafts, writing much better first drafts, composing more smoothly at the sentence level.

Of course, this just revealed more flaws in my writing, which had been hidden under the more obvious problems, but that’s the nature of writing.

One thing I did notice with the Ph.D., though, was that I’d developed a much better sense of when I was ready to write. I was no longer pushing myself to write early and become frustrated by and disgusted with the results. Instead, I’d read around my sources, write extensive notes, and obsessively cross-reference everything on index cards until a switch flipped somewhere in my head, and I sat down to write a chapter.

This unexpected shifting of my writing process—a legacy of, among other things, an earlier, much less pleasant degree—was one of the things that made my Ph.D. such a dream from beginning to end.

And I’m pleased to see that it’s hanging on. I’ve been letting the idea for an article on advertising and Victorian periodicals simmer in the back of my brain for some months now, while finishing another article (on mid-Victorian suburban theatre) and (slowly and painfully) writing a conference paper. And now it feels as though this paper is ready to be taken seriously.

It’s not yet ready to be written. I still need to complete a great deal of research, not least among the advertisements themselves. But I can see the shape of the article in my head, now. And that gives me a focus for my reading.

Random photography of fungus aside, it’s been a productive day indeed.

ME: Give us a cuddle.
(Spying something over Nick’s shoulder)
ME: Though why I would cuddle a man who completely disarranged my canisters is a mystery.
NICK: The pixies did it.
ME: The pixies.
NICK: The band.
(Pause)
ME: Frank Black. Frank Black was in my kitchen, rearranging my canisters?
NICK: Yes. I couldn’t stop him!
ME: But why?
NICK: I don’t know, Treen. They’re crazy! College-rock crazy!

ME: Nicholas!
NICK: Yes! Oh my god! What?
ME: What is that on the floor?
NICK: Oh, that’s just shaving foam.
(Pause)
NICK: I didn’t want to bother wiping it up.
(Pause)
NICK: Because it’s on the floor, and with the bending . . .
(Pause)
NICK: It’ll dry up and flake away eventually.
(Pause)
NICK: I’ll clean it up now.

Things you should not assume about geeks: just because your geek/former Goth boyfriend spent his formative years painting tiny models of orcs doesn’t mean that he’s either willing or able to help you manage the perfect French manicure on your right hand.

ME: Could you grab my some tissues? I think I’m going to need to strip this.
NICK: I’m sorry.
ME: No, that’s fine. It’s a little tricky. And you were working with an unfamiliar medium. It’s not like you’re used to dealing with the viscosity of nail polish.
NICK: Well, I did used to use black nail polish.
ME: Well, you should have done a better job, then!
NICK: It was about ten years ago!
ME: That’s not the point. Applying nail polish is like riding a bicycle. Margaret Atwood says so.
NICK: What?
ME: You know how to ride a bicycle?
NICK: Well, I used to do it. I wouldn’t vouch for being able to do it now.
ME: But that’s the whole point of a bicycle! That you don’t forget how to ride it! It’s a proverb and everything.
NICK: Proverbs have never really worked for me, Treen.
(Slightly sputtering pause)
ME: Fine. But that’s going on the blog!
NICK: Fair enough.
ME: And I’m going to ret-con it to make it look as though I included a reference to Margaret Atwood while we were actually having the conversation.
NICK: What?
ME: Well, in The Handmaid’s Tale. Where, even though she’s been living in this post-revolutionary society where women are used as breeding machines, she mentions that the little things come back to you easily. Like how you can’t put the second coat of nail polish on too soon, or the first coat will wrinkle. I’m going to work that in. Then I’ll look intellectual.
NICK: Yeah!

And I did work it in. Seamlessly.

But I still don’t have a French manicure.