I find it super-charming that the geeks behind Fallout New Vegas wrote Kate Beaton (patron comics saint of English and history geeks everywhere) into their game.

Tamil pulp fiction, now translated into English.

An interesting blog post on mechanical means of ensuring that more works of fiction and film pass the Bechdel test, written by a self-identified “registered Republican with a concealed-carry permit.” I don’t agree with everything in this post, but I do think that being aware of the context of your choices as a writer is always important, even when those choices seem as minor as deciding the gender of a parking attendant who makes a two-line appearance in your novel. And I think this sentence is worth thinking about in other contexts, too:

And if there’s one thing I’ve taken away from the discussions of feminism and queer politics and anti-racism that I’ve read, it’s that I don’t have to agree with people to learn how they would like to be treated.

On a related note: a collection of signs from the Stewart/Colbert Rally to Restore Sanity and/or Fear.

And also related (if you squint), in that they are a means of sharing comfort and support: the best damn gluten-free cookies I’ve baked in my two years as a diagnosed celiac. Mine weren’t vegan, and I made them with raisins instead of chocolate chips. Highly recommended, should you ever need to make GF cookies for yourself, or for a friend.

Kate Bernheimer and Maria Tatar have organized a petition to request that the National Book Foundation allow mythological and fairy-tale retellings to be eligible for the National Book Award. I hadn’t even realized they weren’t, but I think it’s silly, obviously — why cordon off a huge group of the narratives that influence all writers?

To add your support to the petition, email the organizers (contact info on the page above) or join the petition’s Facebook page.

And speaking of mythological retellings, there’s a Beckett-influenced play called “Penelope” currently onstage in Brooklyn. That review says it’s “like a dream you might have after too much neat whiskey at a tacky marina bar in the company of bookish Irish sots.” That’s… just about the polar opposite to my style of mythological retelling, which is more an “every angel is terrifying” kind of thing. But it sounds like a remarkable way to dramatize the bizarreness of Penelope’s long wait and the demise of the suitors.

A few more links! These are all related to women and writing. That’s sort of how I roll, especially on a Friday afternoon.

My dissertation is about antagonism between literary women in the early eighteenth-century, so I was amused to read this piece by Jessa Crispin about searching for positive depictions of female friendship in recent novels, which includes charming email correspondence with her own best female friend.

Slightly related: this flowchart of reductive characterizations of women in fiction.

One blogger’s thoughtful response to Lionel Trilling’s essay on Mansfield Park (which you can and should find in this book, if you haven’t read it — unsurprisingly, it’s delightful).

I try not to use my blog as a tumblr, but this seems just Alcestis-appropriate enough to squeak by: historical fiction from a different era. (It’s somewhat difficult to search for historical fictions about Amazons these days.) I don’t know enough about the evolution of the Amazon myth to know when it got this prettified. No “man-slayers” here, just a little light domination. Still, if that prettifying involves Katharine Hepburn in greaves, I guess I’m all right with it.

Found at this tumblr, with the following caption:

Katharine Hepburn as Amazon warrior princess Antiope & Colin Keith-Johnston as Theseus in stage production of The Warrior’s Husband (1932) (via corbis)

“Who is Katharine Hepburn? It took me a long time to create that creature.”

Apparently there was a film version of The Warrior’s Husband produced in 1933. It didn’t star Hepburn.

Did you wear purple today? I found myself looking around on campus for other people in purple shirts, and wondering if they’d worn them for Spirit Day or not. I hope they all did. I wish I actually owned rainbow gear, so I could’ve made my allegiance even clearer. I’m usually pretty skeptical of activism-lite color branding — I am really not interested in buying pink paraphernalia if I could be donating directly to cancer research funds — but I do believe in it as a way to show support. I hope a lot of kids across the country today saw people wearing purple and knew what it meant.

If you want to do more to help victims of anti-LGBTQ bullying, support the Trevor Project.

I’m having a pretty busy week, so I leave you with links:

• A great interview at the Paris Review blog with Michael Cunningham. I find him so charming in interviews and am really looking forward to picking up By Nightfall. (Hat tip to Michael Fauver for linking the interview.)
• Alexander Chee on teaching the graphic novel.
• A very sensible piece about how many copies books usually sell.
• A petition to tell Silsbee High School (in Texas — oh, Texas) that it’s really not okay to kick a girl off the cheerleading squad when she refuses to cheer for her rapist individually by name. Based on the information in that article, the high school’s action was supported by a truly bizarre court decision, which claims that cheerleaders are only “mouthpieces” for the school and cannot refuse to cheer. It’s like a creepy sf novel.
• And a palate cleanser: Scottish wildcats, and one British scientist getting very excited about them (check out the embedded videos).

Last Thursday I did my first author visit. My dissertation director is teaching Alcestis in one of his courses this fall, which has led to a lot of delightful things — seeing the book get linked to Robinson Crusoe and The Tempest on Amazon, first of all, when a number of his students bought them together. We did a Q&A and they had great, insightful questions. (Lance is an amazing teacher and they are obviously careful readers.) They’d read the novel just after reading the Odyssey — how’s that for pressure? I didn’t ask them how the two compared. But we did talk about books that inspired the novel, about what Admetus really feels when Alcestis stood up at the banquet table, why Hades reacts the way he does to Persephone’s interest in Alcestis, and why Hermes has a tattered cloak. On that last question I had to resort to the frustrating artistic answer and admit that he just does.

It felt a little weird, honestly, to be in a literature classroom as a writer and a source of information about my writing. As a creative writing teacher, of course, I’ve talked about my writing, but in that case I’m usually talking with students as fellow writers. Normally when I’m in a classroom discussing books with students my role is not to impose my viewpoint, though of course I have topics I’d like address and readings that I consider more or less valid depending on the textual evidence. But this time I was there as Author, complete with Intentions. And I was definitely not dead (though I was a little migrainey).

Lance also tells me that some students in the class may be writing papers on the novel. It’s probably my years of academic conditioning talking, but I find that ridiculously exciting, and also kind of reassuring. As delighted as I was to answer questions about what I was thinking while I wrote the book, I’m glad they’ll be developing their own interpretations of it, too.

I love this short essay by Charles Yu about how all family stories are time travel stories, particularly this bit:

Science fiction allows a writer to selectively question assumptions about the world, about ourselves, to fiddle with this dial, tweak this parameter or that one, then run the simulation, boot up a cosmos and see what happens. For me, it is about possibility more than probability.

I know I always bring up Johnson’s line about Shakespeare approximating the remote and familiarizing the wonderful, but it’s applicable once again — Yu enjoys SF because it allows him to play out a trial to which a person (or a family) could not really be exposed, “and see what happens.” Yes, I say. Yes! Really looking forward to reading Yu’s book.

And on an entirely unrelated note, this book about perfume is worth a look even if you, like me, know nothing about the topic. The reviews are beautifully detailed, crisp, cutting, and wittily allusive. For example, here’s a bit from Luca Turin’s review of Guerlain’s “Quand Vient l’Été,” a “dry floral” that gets three stars out of five:

I’m of two minds about this fragrance: on the one hand, I am not fond of this style, a slightly sour, metallic (helional) floral accord that smells like a sucked silver spoon. On the other hand, this one is beautifully executed and has a prim, starchy prettiness that suggests Edwardian TV drama and passions corseted to the bursting point. It brings to mind Ambrose Bierce’s definition of garters: “An elastic band intended to keep a woman from coming out of her stockings and desolating the country.”

One of the things I love most about the internet is the way niche interests become more accessible to clueless outsiders. Like I said, I know nothing about perfume or its history, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take pleasure in watching people who do deploy their knowledge.

Alcestis will be going back to print soon — the trade paperback edition will be published in February 2011. I’ve been asked to submit any necessary changes for the reprint. So: if you’ve read Alcestis in hardback or e-book form and noticed any typos or other weird artifacts, would you be so kind as to comment here or email me at katharinebeutner at gmail dot com?

In return, I’ll give you. Uh. A link to a very good article at the Huffington Post about why we need to teach programming in schools? Not that there’s any relation between the two; it’s just one of the more interesting things I’ve read in the last week, and I’m pretty short on content yet again. (I know I’m on fellowship this year and am supposed to be a lady of leisure, but I don’t think my workload has gotten the memo.)