I'm back from another trip to New Zealand, this one a swift one. After arriving at 5:30 AM on a Sunday morning, I gave a short reading at the Ladies' Litera-Tea that afternoon. This was a very enjoyable event, not least because of the emphasis on tea:


This is what the lamington plate looked like after everyone (led by me) decimated it:

Another good thing about big events like this: you get to meet and talk with actual readers, ie people who don't know you but still buy/read your books. A bad thing: you run into people who are still seething with rage about critical reviews you wrote for the Listener. Oh well!
I'm not reviewing at the moment, and it's quite a relief - not for the reason above (damage already done, innit), but because I can choose what I want to read for a while. This means reading a number of travel books, including the new Colin Thubron book, Shadows of the Silk Road. Thubron is one of my favorite travel writers, the sort of brainy, articulate, daring, polyglot author I'd love to be. At Auckland airport, I bought A Year in the World by Frances Mayes to read on the plane, and while it's pleasant enough, the book reads like a series of benign and predictable magazine articles. I guess I don't want my travel writers eating from the same buffet breakfast table as a coachload of other Americans - as Mayes does in Portugal - without finding any comedy in it.
Saying I can read what I want right now is disingenuous of course, because the new semester is underway, and whatever my students are reading, I must read as well. My advanced fiction class is a novel-writing class, and all the students are reading three novels, plus at least two short novels from a list of about twelve I provided. In addition to this group, I have three independent studies and two honors theses to supervise, all of which have fairly ambitious reading programs. And then there are short stories for my intro class and the "Exploring Literary New Orleans" class that T. Middy and I are co-teaching. I tell myself that this short-fiction reading helps me in one of my side ventures, editing an anthology of short fiction for Penguin New Zealand. (By the way, if you've sent me a story to read for this and think I've forgotten you - I haven't. I'm still reading, reading, reading.)
Back to New Zealand: when I wasn't scoffing afternoon tea at a public event, I was with my niece, eating morning tea at Smith & Caughey's, both of us disguised in scarves and other accessories:


She will complain, probably, about me posting this picture. But at least I didn't post the one of her taken before school one morning, when she was in uniform and wearing her big blue-and-white heart slippers. You know, these slippers:

Today, in still-steamy New Orleans, it's raining outside; there are short stories to read, e-mails to return, dinner to cook. This morning we went to Finn McCool's in Midcity to watch the All Blacks crush Scotland. The match was at a civilized hour, unlike the game against Romania next Saturday, which takes place at 6 AM. T. Middy may have to venture forth in the dark alone.