M. Thomas and I have put together an unofficial guide to Austin for those planning to attend World Fantasy in November. The WFC site has a small official guide to Austin for con-goers, but it’s focused almost entirely on the Arboretum, which is… well, it’s a mall. So: here’s a list of things to know, do, see, and eat in Austin that do not involve malls.

Most of the credit goes to M., who designed and is hosting the site — but be sure to click the link for the second page, wherein you can reap the benefit of my obsession with local restaurants. (Most restaurants have websites, which are easily found by asking Uncle Google.)

As M. notes, this site is in no way affiliated with the WFC, etc., etc. But it has a flying armadillo on it.

For future reference, you can also find the guide link on my sidebar (and my newly uploaded index page). Check it out — and let M. or I know if you have questions, suggestions, etc.

1. For a lesson in how to take a perfectly decent series and ruin it in the last installment, see X3. Or, rather, DON’T. Ugh.
2. Last night we went with some visiting friends to the Paramount Theatre, where we saw The Maltese Falcon. I hadn’t seen it since I was little, and I’d forgotten how funny it is and how purely great Bogart is in it. T. thinks Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo must have partly inspired Andy Serkis’s Gollum.
3. I’ve added Perfect Stars to my blogroll, because everyone should appreciate its delightfulness. I like the Dorian Grey and Oscar Wilde strips the best, though they’re all lovely and weird.
4. Via T.: Cate Blanchett is going to play Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s next movie. A Todd Haynes film is probably one of the only things that could lead me to be interested in Bob Dylan — plus, you know, Cate Blanchett.

And finally, a book question: help me list novels set during the Great Depression in the US? So far we’ve come up with books by:

1. Steinbeck
2. Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, Snopes trilogy)
3. Cormac McCarthy, part of the Border trilogy
4. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
5. Frank Norris (whom I’ve never read)
6. John Dos Passos, maybe? (again, I’ve never read him)

And, in light of my botheration about the NY Times list several weeks ago: can you point me toward any good novels set in the US Depression written by women?

A young Latino man standing at the corner of MLK and Guadalupe in a white t-shirt covered with black-marker writing, holding a handmade cardboard sign. At first he had his back to me, and when I squinted I could see that his back said: I LOVE ROSARIO / MARRY ME [unreadable] the 24th! He was about seventy feet away from me, right near the intersection. He ducked his head a little when cars passed, as if he were embarrassed, but he looked proud, too. He seemed to be waiting for someone: Rosario, I assume. He wasn’t smiling. I waited for the bus for about ten minutes, and just before it came, the man walked toward me. The front of his shirt said: MORE THAN FRIENDS — LETS GET MARRIED! I LOVE YOU HONEY! And his sign had two copies of the same posed studio photo pasted to it, one larger than the other, like the statues in Egyptian tombs. Rosario, and consort Rosario. Under the photos, he’d written: THIS IS THE YOUNG WOMAN I LOVE.

I’ve seen this all over the internets since yesterday, but it can’t hurt to pass it on once more. Barbara Bauer, one of the agents named on Writer Beware’s list of the twenty worst literary agents, has managed to get Absolute Write temporarily shut down; see Teresa Nielsen Hayden’s explanatory post on Making Light, and Miss Snark’s two most recent posts.

I’m not an Absolute Write regular, but I think it’s idiotic that the ISP pulled the site, and Bauer’s attempt to use the (equally idiotic) DMCA as a weapon is beyond mind-boggling.

Here’s hoping for the quick recovery of Absolute Write and all its messageboards.

Technorati tag: BarbaraBauer

Pedernales

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

Things I saw at the Pedernales River:

• a water snake of undetermined species
• a tarantula, briefly captured by T. and his brothers
• more cardinals than I’ve ever seen in one location
• the skeletons of large fish trapped in potholes along the river
• small bleak towns near the park (Johnson City, Dripping Springs)
• vultures circling the campground
• minuscule but still extremely gross leeches on the rocks of the broad falls you see in the picture
• a tiny olive-colored soft-shelled turtle
• lizards of various types
• a small green bird
• a lot of beer

I slathered myself in SPF 50 and only got a bit pink on the end of my nose, which is a minor miracle. Also, no sun headache! Shocking. I credit the beer.

A few more pictures are up at flickr.

***

Over the weekend, I read David Liss’s A Conspiracy of Paper, one of relatively few mystery novels set in eighteenth century England. (I can state this with some confidence because my mother loves mystery novels and sent me a list of mystery novels with historical settings.) I enjoyed it, and I think it makes a pleasant and very readable introduction to the culture of paper credit in the 1710s-20s; not necessarily an easy thing to accomplish in fiction. Interesting to read it not long after reading Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin and Life Mask, and to compare the ways in which the authors manage worldbuilding and exposition — something which varies even between Donoghue’s two books. Liss’s historical explanations are foregrounded in a way that startled me at first, as I’m much more accustomed to the naturalistic seamlessness of, say, Slammerkin or Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Some of that is authorial choice, of course, but some of it is also generic variation — the appeal of a mystery relies on the reader’s ability to understand the dramatic situation and the web of social relationships in which that mystery takes place. And that, I think, is why many mystery novels seem more given to straightforward first-person explanation than are many literary novels: because the social relationships need to be explained quickly and clearly so that the mystery can begin. I found the tactic surprising because I’m out of practice at reading mystery novels, and it’s very good to be reminded that my default way of thinking about historical fiction is in fact a particular kind of literary model.

From today’s New York Times article on the Clintons, an excerpt from their aides’ official response to queries about the state of their relationship:

She is an active senator who, like most members of Congress, has to be in Washington for part of most weeks. He is a former president running a multimillion-dollar global foundation.

… together, they fight crime!

Apologies for my absence this week; I’ve been working on writing and watching lots of movies, two important summer occupations. And I’m about to head off to Pedernales Falls State Park for a few days of camping (with a backpack full of sunscreen, bug spray, and Benadryl cream), so things will be quiet here through Sunday.

After Sunday I need to start sorting out my belongings in preparation to move, yet again — expect lots of procrastinatory posting.

An interesting post by Laura Miller at the National Books Critics Circle blog explaining why she chose not to participate in the recent NY Times survey on the best American novel of the last twenty-five years (and why she thinks a shortlist is generally preferable to naming a single “best” work). In the comments, people also discuss the gender imbalance of the Times list — twenty male authors, several with multiple books or multiple entries, and two female.

My school just gave out a really huge student literary prize, also aimed at fiction that somehow encapsulated the American experience. (I have such an urge to put every other word in that last clause in scare quotes.) It was judged, this time, by a panel of five men. There were five finalists; every one was male. Those I’ve read are talented writers, and I don’t mean to impugn their work at all, but there are also a hell of a lot of talented female writers in the two writing programs on campus, and it strikes me as strange that none of them were named as finalists. I think Miller is on to something when she connects the drive to identify a “best American work” with a nostalgia for the supposed (white male) American monoculture. And boy howdy, is it interesting to be reading Blood Meridian while thinking about these things.

At flickr, I’ve posted the photos T. took at my graduation reading. Here you can see me from a T.’s-eye view, as I gesture toward my clip-on microphone to ask if it’s working. Doing two readings in two weeks reminds you just how weird your own voice sounds when projected to an audience. But doing the readings was more fun than I’d anticipated, and it makes me wish I had more stories suited in length and content to reading aloud. I’ll have to work on that.

***

Stories that do not read well aloud: documentary/epistolary stories.

Stories I am revising right now: “Selected letters …”

Things that are helpful: having a housemate who works as an intern at one of the best research libraries in the world. I had a question about how letters are catalogued at the HRC and all I had to do was pop down the hall to her room and ask. And now, if I can chase off the last bits of this headache, I’ll put the answer to good use.

I’m taking a quick break from the Boswell to read T.’s copy of Blood Meridian, so going back to work on my story of letters written by fairly genteel late-nineteenth-century American women will produce serious whiplash. If my blog entries suddenly feature lots of long, violent run-on sentences, you’ll know why.

I thought I was done with the Opal Mehta issue, but this Times opinion piece by Whitney Otto, plus Malcolm Gladwell’s earlier but similarly-themed blog post, have got me a little annoyed. (Gladwell’s 2004 New Yorker article on plagiarism, on the other hand, is a wonderful nuanced read.) Both Otto and Gladwell say, essentially, that it’s no surprise that a genre writer too lazy-minded to come up with an original idea would also stoop to stealing sentence-level language. Gladwell, for example:

But once we have conceded that in genre fiction its [sic] okay to borrow themes, why do we get so upset when genre novelists borrow something a good deal less substantial—namely phrases and sentences? Surely an idea is more consequential than a sentence.

I won’t spend too much time whining, as Otto might say, about the dismissal of genre fiction in both pieces; Kelly Link refutes this point beautifully in her comment to Gladwell’s blog post. (Though I would be overjoyed never to have to read this sentence from Otto’s piece, or a variation on it, again: “At its best, genre writing can transcend its given genre.” Talk about predictable.) But I think the conflation of two different kinds of plagiarism is sloppy and disingenuous.

If Opal Mehta had merely been a book similar in plot, content, and overall tone to other chick-lit books, then it would have been derivative and perhaps unremarkable — but it wouldn’t have been recalled by its publisher. The problem with Opal Mehta is that it includes passages copied nearly word-for-word from previously published books. Specific books, with specific authors, who did, in fact, “write their own books,” whether or not those books are works of deathless prose. Just to restate: copying passages verbatim from other texts is not the same thing as borrowing ideas from other texts. It may be that Viswanathan did both, but it does not follow that someone who chooses to write in a marketable and conventional genre is therefore also a thief of ideas and language.

(And that’s leaving aside entirely the issue of derivative use and literary inspiration most recently discussed at Making Light.)

Also, Whitney Otto sure has some odd ideas about what writers are like:

Overachievers don’t generally become writers because the skill set is so different.

Has she heard of Joyce Carol Oates?