If you tried to visit this site over the weekend and got an “attack site” or “badware” warning from Google or Firefox, my apologies — somebody managed to sneak an iframe into a couple of pages on the site. But now everything is shiny, new, and clean, just in time for Alcestis to launch in paperback on Tuesday (thank goodness, and especially thanks to my heroic and long-suffering tech support). I can’t believe how fast December and January have raced by, and I really can’t believe it’s been a year since the hardback launch.

I’ll be running a giveaway sometime in February, possibly through Goodreads. More on that soon!

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).

I’ve added some new material to the site this week — pages containing my CV and an overview of my teaching experience at UT. I’m afraid this site needs to be all things to all people: a useful source of information about Alcestis and about me for readers interested in the book, a professional web presence, a place to point search committees considering my applications for teaching positions.

And, also, you know, not boring.

In the interest of not being boring, I’ve also slimmed down the number of other pages on the site a bit. My old summer reading lists (from 2006 and 2007) have gone private, though you can still ponder my book preferences on Goodreads if that’s your thing — I never did manage to go back and add many books read before I joined the site, but I’m reasonably good about updating it because I love the idea of Goodreads so much. (And because I sometimes look at reader reviews of my book, fine, I admit it.)

I’m going to try to keep up the pace of posting I managed through most of the spring and early summer, or something approaching it. I’m officially on fellowship now, though, and my main goal needs to be to follow Dear Sugar’s advice. That means I really should not be spending time looking at beautiful fake Criterion DVD covers or watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt insist to the world that you make him feel like a natural woman. It also means that I may go quiet here occasionally. But I’ve really enjoyed blogging more regularly this year, and with the paperback release of Alcestis coming up in February, I hope to continue to have plenty to say.

My brief jaunt out of town turned into a slightly longer jaunt out of town, thanks to the snow and ice storm that hit the mid-south this week. But I’m back, just in time for the official launch of Alcestis! Expect a longer blog post tomorrow, but for now, check out this Washington Post article on the comparatively tiny sales of classical recordings required to break into the top ten. Interesting to compare with small press expectations for literary fiction, I think.

This site now has a shiny new WordPress theme — many thanks to T., my in-house web designer/tech support!

I’ve also added two new pages to the site: one contains an excerpt from Alcestis, and the other features extra bits of material related to the book. If you have any other questions, comments, or suggestions about material for the site, please let me know.

My blog is called “Anecdotes” because of Hester Thrale Piozzi’s Anecdotes of the late Samuel Johnson, L.L.D. When I named it that, I never really thought about the traffic it might generate. But I get a continuous stream of hits from search strings about anecdotes. Around May and June, “anecdotes about graduation” is always a popular one — I guess it’s really hard to write a graduation speech without borrowing some stories? But I think my favorite of all time was: “anecdotes about me.”

…

I don’t think that person really understands how search engines work.

You can also find me on Twitter now, far more frequently than here. Turns out that prospectus-brain can easily manage tiny “what are you doing?” posts. Prospectus-brain can also handle: fussing with new WordPress installations for the digital humanities project update blog (link soon!); googling gluten-free places to eat in Austin; reading NY Times articles. Prospectus-brain needs to get back to the actual prospectus, however.

It turns out that if one forgets to update one’s WordPress installation, saucy little link-farmers running exploit scripts will look upon one’s mostly-dormant blog as fertile ground. I’ve just gone back and peeled hidden links out of half my old posts. Feh. (If you read this blog via RSS, you might still be able to see the “hidden” links at the bottom of the post that appeared earlier this morning, which was also generated by the link-farmers, not by me. I’ve deleted that post on the blog.) All should be fixed and safe now, I hope.

I guess this is a sign that I ought to update more regularly. (And remember to upgrade WordPress on occasion.) I haven’t been doing much writing lately; hardly any fiction or non-fiction that isn’t graduate-school-related, and only a short paper for a class, in addition to work on my prospectus notes. Mostly I write email: to patrons at the Ransom Center, answering research queries, to other eComma team members, to my parents and friends. I wrote the short paper last week, and it was the hardest paper I’ve written in a while — not because the topic itself was difficult to tackle (although that’s true) but because, as I’d just discovered, the migraine preventative drug I’m taking was affecting my ability to write and to speak. It was weird. “Difficulty finding words” doesn’t express the strangeness of losing the word for “roof tile” when you’re trying to describe your house to a friend on the phone. By a week and a half ago, the verbal block was happening at least ten times a day.

By next Wednesday, I’ll be off that preventative completely. I can find a lot of words to describe how happy I feel about it, but most of them are dirty.

Anyway, I promise — promise! — to be back soon to write about what I’m doing this summer and why I’ve added links to the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and HASTAC to my blogroll. Also, there will be probably be cat pictures. Just fair warning.

After an exciting discovery — namely, that my five-year-old PowerBook Titanium was giving me a small but constant electric shock — I’ve left the Mac world for Linux, at least for now. I’m typing this on my new Ubuntu-running desktop, which T. built for me last week. It took me a few days to get used to the look, for which I received some gentle mockery about anti-aliased fonts and Mac brainwashing, but I’m very happy with it now. I’m not quite sold on Thunderbird yet, though. My Gmail indoctrination is apparently still in effect.

A few good things to report: I’m planning my trip to the 2008 SEASECS meeting in Auburn to give a paper on Charlotte Charke; I’ll be seeing Jerome McGann speak next Friday (more than once!); Thanksgiving approaches, which means a much-needed trip to Oregon to see my parents. The HRC has been incredibly busy for the last several weeks, and so have I. I’m reading Laetitia Pilkington’s memoirs and drilling the irregular future tense stems in French.

Speaking of Oregon, here’s a sad but quirky-sweet tribute to the store cat at Powell’s Technical Books, Fup, who recently had to be put to sleep at the age of 19. I’ve been to that store two or three times and never saw her, which is kind of amazing, since T. claims that my superpower is seeing cats wherever I go. Fup was also the star of an ongoing mini-adventure serial in the Powell’s newsletter, apparently; you can read them here.

Apologies for the 404 error messages that have been popping up today — T. and I were playing around with the stats admin stuff yesterday and goofed something up. But we have fixed it now. Carry on!

More posting later, when I am not stricken with post-migraine fragility. Bah.