I spent most of Friday and Saturday at the third and final TILTS 2011 conference at UT. I’m not exactly a digital humanist by trade, though I’ve worked on digital humanities projects (like eComma). But I’m interested in humanities computing, to use the older phrase, and the breadth of this conference’s speakers was really wonderful — linguists, literary critics, anthropologists, bibliographers, librarians, and others. Intellectually and socially, it was a nice send-off.

Today I cleaned out — well, 95% cleaned out — the cube I’ve been sharing with T. since 2005, our second year in grad school. Then I stopped at the co-op and ran into Rita, who sold us Lahrs the Saab. I’ve been experiencing a lot of serendipitous meetings lately, even though many of my friends from graduate school have decamped for other cities. It’s strange to be getting ready to leave myself. I’ve been living here for seven years now, and I’m going to miss it terribly, excited as I am about my new job in Wooster.

And now, links to share!

First of all, the fabulous Malinda Lo recommended Alcestis (as well as books by Jacqueline Carey and Robin McKinley) in a short piece she did for NPR last week. This was up on NPR’s Facebook page, as well, which resulted in a number of my friends leaving “holy crap, I know her!” comments on the NPR post. Sometimes social media does give one a warm and fuzzy feeling!

On Thursday night, the 2011 Lambda Literary Awards were announced. Alcestis didn’t win its category, sadly, but it sounds like it was a great evening, and all the winners deserve many congratulations!

250 books by women all men should read. (Also all people, but this is a response to an unsurprisingly dude-dominated reading list from Esquire.)

The opening of Jeffrey Eugenides’s upcoming The Marriage Plot. I want it now.

A Times travel piece on Lake Geneva, emphasis on the Byron/Shelley/Polidori era of its history.

A super sensible piece on ebook piracy by Cecilia Tan.

A Q&A by lovely Austin bookstore BookPeople with Robin Black, primarily about her short stories.

The real origins of Memorial Day.

For some less-heartening news, “worst carbon emissions ever leave climate on the brink.” And Laila Lalami posts Tom Lutz’s open letter to his UC Riverside colleagues and students about the demolition of the UC system. I’m not sure which of those links is scarier.

I’m still finalizing my reading lists and syllabi, which means that I’m still reading post-apocalyptic novels, though now I’m back to some I’ve read before. At the moment I’m re-reading Riddley Walker. I’d forgotten just how virtuosic it is. I wish everybody who loved Cloud Atlas knew about this book, too.

So once again, here’s the current primary-source list for my post-apocalyptic and dystopian novels course (now titled “Coming of Age at the End of the World”). I dropped 1984, but reread The Giver this week — it really is the archetypal YA dystopian, Christ imagery and abrupt ending and all.

The Giver, Lois Lowry
Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Battle Royale, Koushun Takami (film)
Feed, M. T. Anderson
How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
Moon, Duncan Jones (film)

I’m trying to nail down the book list so that I can submit it to the Wooster college bookstore, but I’m stuck on one final decision — whether to take out The Knife of Never Letting Go, which pairs with Riddley Walker, and swap The Parable of the Sower into its place. There are elements of TKoNLG that I’d really like to discuss, the book’s engagement with gender and masculinity being the most obvious, and I wish Parable were a little shorter (and better edited). But I think the scope of Butler’s book matches up better with the scope of Hoban’s, and I’m leaning toward including it instead. Thoughts? Opinions?

Really what I need is another month in the course so I could teach TKoNLG along with His Dark Materials (and not just because they both have knives in their titles).

I didn’t mean to disappear for quite so long. First I had to finish the last few line edits on my dissertation and file it, officially; and then I wrote more Killingly, worked on finding a place to live in Wooster (and I finally have, after the house I thought I’d secured fell through), worked on course planning for fall, cut my hair short, flew to Oregon, and drove one of my family’s cars down to Austin, sharing the driving with my mother. Then I had a great book club meeting with a group of women in south Austin, for which I had to refresh my memory of all things Alcestis. May’s been quite the month.

Did you know that an early-2000s Toyota 4Runner and a late-80s Saab convertible have veeeeery different turning radii? Still getting used to that. I’d just achieved basic competence with manual driving in the Saab, enough that driving an automatic now feels strange (words I never thought I’d type!). Next I need to master the Toyota’s 4-wheel drive, before the Ohio winter, at least.

I thought I might be able to attend the Lambda Literary Awards this week, but the above circumstances and others conspired against it, so I’ll be cheering the ceremony on from Texas while my lovely editor Juliet Grames attends the actual shindig. And on Thursday, Friday, and Saturday, I’ll be spending time on campus again for the third and final TILTS conference of the year, which has an impressively varied lineup of speakers.

I’m back to working on Killingly, and I’m also back to course planning. Given all the noise about the goofy Family Radio apocalypse predictions, my post-apocalyptic & dystopian novel course feels trendier than ever — I’m excited to delve into those trends with my students and talk about their cultural underpinnings.

Soon, moving! And packing! Gah.