I don’t always write on this deck — sometimes it’s too bright, and sometimes I need to stay inside with my father. When I do work here, though, I sit in one chair and put my feet on the other so I can balance my laptop comfortably. It’s usually quiet, a little dusty. Sometimes cars go by on the street to the right, or neighbors do, walking their dogs. I bring a mug of tea and my cell phone out with me, but I get a bad wireless signal, which is good for my productivity.
The day I took this picture, the first page of my outline got caught by a breeze and fluttered off the deck. I had to chase it down.
A whiplash-inducing reading experience: reading A Long Day’s Journey Into Night after a semester of reading Shakespeare. I haven’t bounced that hard off a text in a while.
I did finish the play, mostly because my grandmother mentions it several times in the course of her memoir. Her family life was nothing like the Tyrones’ in an emotional sense, but the superficial details of situation are similar: a mother with beautiful red-brown hair, a father who keeps throwing money into failed land purchases. She has a habit of making comparisons to works she must have read long ago — she also compares her mother to Isabel Archer at another point, and the only similarity there is that Isabel and her mother were both beautiful and stoic. I’m still tempted to use it as an excuse to re-read Portrait of a Lady, though.
For those of you who don’t visit my del.icio.us page:
This morning I spent a sunny hour picking sour cherries on a farm five minutes from my parents’ house. It was a stunning crop, the trees all thick with brilliant fruit, and almost all of it ripe. The clusters of cherries looked like Pop Art: stark, amazing, slightly translucent red. We picked nineteen pounds, and it wasn’t easy to stop — there were so many, and they were beautiful and so easy to pick.
Then we came home and I wrote while my parents pitted them. I think I got the better end of the deal.
I’m working on The White Silk Tent, my revision of my grandmother’s memoir. I’ve been reading biographical theory to try to situate myself and my strategies: what kind of voice did I want to use, what sort of other research did I want to do? I thought for a while, and then I started writing. And I’m still thinking, of course. But for now, my version contains three kinds of text:
- Sections of Louise’s original manuscript, very slightly edited for clarity
- Biographical sections based on her manuscript but substantially rewritten and edited, and recast in the third person
- Interpolations in my voice which allow me to comment on her memoir, to add information she didn’t have, to interpret things, etc.
And then, likely, documentary material — text and photos from the trunk of family memorabilia she left to accompany the manuscript, and maybe things from the HRC, as well.
My goal for the summer is to get three chapters completed and polished, so that I’ll have a sense of the process involved in writing the book and the amount of time I’ll need to complete it. And then I’ll need to get back to working on academic projects and thinking about my dissertation — which may also be related to biography. (I’m reading Paula Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography now with great interest. And on that note: you can find my new Goodreads page here.)
There’s a particular pleasure in reading an articulately written and deeply negative review of something you also despise.
For example, Momus reviews Pan’s Labyrinth:
I thought it was a terrible film, deeply impoverished both in imagination and in its moral vision, stale to the core, and brutal to boot. It actually saddens and infuriates me that this kind of thing is what passes for fantasy, humanity and imagination, and that no single critic, apparently, took the film to task for its great failings, which I’ll number here, as I see them …
YES. Gah.
Next week’s New Yorker contains a long article about the Harry Ransom Center, its collections, and its director, Tom Staley (with whom I had a lovely conversation when I interviewed there in April). Here’s the article’s introductory paragraph, which should give you some sense of why I’m so excited about interning at the HRC:
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron’s curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac’s spiral-bound journals for “On the Road”; and Ezra Pound’s copy of “The Waste Land,” in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: “For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E.” Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of “Comus,” containing corrections in Milton’s own hand? Or the manuscript for “The Green Dwarf,” a story that Charlotte Brontë wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of “Ulysses,” on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center’s archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.
Getting the internship there feels rather like Christmas, or a birthday, or perhaps a bit like getting zapped back in time to see the Library of Alexandria. You might say I’m looking forward to it.
