Because that’s what you get this summer, apparently. I’ve been working on Killingly and course prep and an eighteenth-century abstract this week, and I’m wiped.

The Hairpin has a great interview with Kate Beaton, who talks smartly about many things, including dramatizing history in comic form and why people reacted so weirdly to her calling-out of sexism in comics. And for your enjoyment, a recent Hark! A Vagrant strip sure to delight c18 nerds: Fop Gun.

Thriller writer Will Lavender describes his path from writing literary fiction he wasn’t satisfied with to writing what he loves.

A long piece in the Atlantic about the development of the current YA market.

And a lovely review in PW for my friend Merrie Haskell’s forthcoming middle-grade book, The Princess Curse.

That was a busy week! Two cross-half-the-country trips, both overnight, and I somehow managed to avoid the worst snarls of weather-related travel drama. But I’m very glad to be back in Austin, where it’s supposed to hit 70 this weekend. Texas, sometimes I love you a lot.

I keep tagging things to post here and didn’t even have the time to start a post until Wednesday — when I once again had to get the site taken down to address another security issue. Sigh. And once again, all is now fixed and fine. But I do wish whatever opportunistic bot has grown fond of my site would leave it alone.

Here are some of the things I’ve been wanting to link:

• Anne Sexton reading her poetry and being precisely as magnetic and dramatic as you’d imagine.
• On the topic of women writers, VIDA’s incredibly disheartening charts comparing the presence of women writers in popular print outlets to their presence as reviewers, etc.
• Contact your members of Congress and urge them to support the National Endowment for the Humanities (and NPR, and Planned Parenthood, while you’re at it).
• The text of Much Ado About Nothing, because something made me think of it while I was writing Killingly the other day. (The scene with Beatrice refusing Count Pedro, specifically.)
• Rice will be hosting THATCamp Texas in April.
• Are you female and anemic, and have you been told that you’re anemic because you’re female? Here’s an instructive study in how gendering health problems isn’t always a great idea.
• Francis Ford Coppola talks about being a director, creativity, and confidence.
• The Stanford Literary Lab publishes a report on studying computer analysis of genre; unsurprisingly, it’s complicated: “You take David Copperfield, run it through a program without any human input – ‘unsupervised’, as the expression goes – and … can the program figure out whether it’s a gothic novel or a Bildungsroman? The answer is, fundamentally, Yes: but a Yes with so many complications that it is necessary to look at the entire process of our study. These are new methods we are using, and with new methods the process is almost as important as the results.”

The other thing that’s been holding my attention this week while I should be working on more diss revisions is the uprising in Egypt. I’ve been to Egypt once, in the summer of 2000, just after my first year of college. The tourism industry there was still reeling from the attacks on tourists in the 1990s, and of course it would grow even worse after 2001. My experience of the country was entirely a tourist’s experience and fraught with all the troubling dynamics that accompany American tourism, plus a few extra twists to those dynamics introduced by the fact that I was blonde, barely eighteen, not a speaker of Arabic, and traveling with my parents. And it was also amazing, for all the reasons you’d expect given my history geekiness — the river, the temples, the star-painted ceilings, the Hellenistic-era graffiti, the little round bellies on the relief sculptures. The National Museum, which people on the street linked arms to protect after looting during the protests this week, just as they did the Library of Alexandria.

I remember our female Coptic Christian guide in Cairo — every time violence against the Copts is in the news I think about her — and the young man who guided our group on the Nile. I’ve been hoping that they’re safe. Now I also hope that they’re exhilarated. I’m so glad Mubarak has finally stepped down and has ceded power to the military, who seem, at least, to be more open to the people’s demands than he ever was. And I wish every bit of good luck in the universe to the Egyptians and their hard-won democracy.

The Blanton Museum Book Club meeting was really lovely — we met in one of the galleries while the museum was open for Third Thursday, next to some very fitting art. It’s been a little while since I’ve talked to a group about Alcestis, and I’ve been thinking so much about Killingly lately that it was fun for me to compare the two projects and consider, as I talked with the group about the book, what I’m doing differently this time.

Have to get back to dissertation revisions now, but here, a whole bushel of links:

• A rejection letter in kind, to Gertrude Stein.
• A border collie that knows more than 1000 names of objects (and is now working on grammar).
• Jubal Early doing his bit for the mode of self-defensive autobiography. (No, not that Jubal Early, the real Jubal Anderson Early [ouch at that web design]. Who is apparently one of Nathan Fillion’s ancestors. What.)
• Via Jessa Crispin, an Edith Wharton short story in which she snarks about book clubs… published, in PDF, by the Library of America. As they introduce it: “During Story of the Week’s first year, we have been gratified to learn (via e-mail messages, blog posts, and phone calls) that an increasing number of readers are using selections for reading groups, the classroom, and library events. And so it is with a bit of trepidation that we offer, in commemoration of Edith Wharton’s birthday on January 24, a story that makes fun of such gatherings by describing one of the more dysfunctional reading discussions in the history of literature.” Heh.
• Maud Newton “on creating the feeling you want the reader to feel“, which opens with the question “Do you think writers have to feel what they want the reader to feel when they’re writing?” What’s interesting here is that this isn’t a “write what you know” question — it’s not about whether or not writers need to feel what their characters feel, but about whether they need to be able to evoke the same state in themselves that they will evoke in their readers. I’m not sure that’s possible, exactly. I think the fact of being the writer of the work always tempers, even if just slightly, the feeling that will be fully accessible to readers — if you’ve done your job right.

I’m back from a conference and trying to get myself together. This takes more effort than you’d expect, when in the wake of cross-country trips and one of the Worst Migraines of All Time. Ugh. But I’m slowly making progress, and part of that progress involves posting some reminders here about recent and upcoming news.

Thing 1: I will be leading a discussion of Alcestis for the Blanton Museum of Art Book Club in Austin on January 20. (Tiny sidenote: I’m not actually a graduate of the Michener Program, as that link suggests — my creative writing master’s degree is from the UT English department. I am, however, replacing Ted Hughes as the subject of this book club meeting. No, I am not ever going to get tired of mentioning that.) This discussion is linked to the Robert Wilson Alceste print exhibition currently running at the Blanton. I believe we’ll start at 7 pm, but I’ll try to get confirmation of that this week and will update here. If you’re in the Austin area and want to talk about the book, about misbehaving gods, about historical fiction and adaptation — come by and chat!

Thing 2: Many thanks to the fabulous Karen Healey for including Alcestis in her list of favorite books of the year! (Karen’s novel Guardian of the Dead is awaiting me on my Kindle, to be read on my next trip — since I really can’t justify too much pleasure reading when I’m not traveling, this month.)

Thing 3: The delightful Hipster Book Club people asked me to contribute a top 5 list for their end-of-the-year collection. Go to page 2 of that index and you can enjoy my ramblings about my favorite works of the year featuring post-apocalyptic themes. (My original list was chock full of links, but apparently those got lost somewhere along the way. Ah well.)

Thing 4: I feel weird about doing this, but as I’ve seen a number of other writers mention their Hugo/Nebula eligibility lately — Alcestis is eligible for nomination in the fantasy novel category for both the Nebula Awards (for SFWA members) and the Hugos (if you’re a WSFS member).  I’m not sure if I’m Campbell-eligible this year, but I’ll let you know when I find out.

And a link to conclude: a short NPR piece on who really wrote the first detective novel. The tone of the piece is a little strange — oddly disparaging about mystery-novel clichés, considering that they weren’t clichés when the first one was written — but the information is interesting.

So! To make up for that brief absence, here’s a nice announcement: the Blanton Museum Book Club will be reading Alcestis and discussing it on January 20, 2011. I’ll be leading the discussion. This book club meeting is linked to the prints exhibition Robert Wilson in Four Acts, which just opened at the Blanton and runs through March 13, 2011. Here’s the Blanton’s description of the exhibition:

Artist Robert Wilson—a University of Texas at Austin alumnus, native Texan, and The Blanton’s 2011 Gala honoree—is best known for his video and theatre work. However, as part of UT’s 1986 Guest Artist in Printmaking Program, Wilson made two suites of prints. Alcestis is named for the wife of King Admetus from Euripides’ eponymous 438 BC Greek tragedy who offers herself as a sacrifice upon learning that her husband will die unless he can find another to take his place. Alceste illustrates Wilson’s stage design for Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1767 opera of the same name, based on Euripides’ myth. Robert Wilson in Four Acts presents these suites alongside a study for Alceste and video documentation of Wilson’s production of Gluck’s opera.

And here’s the amusing part: if you click the Book Club link above, you’ll see that it still lists the January 20 book selection as Ted Hughes’s translation of Alcestis (the Euripides version). But no, my friends — I have replaced Ted Hughes! I feel as though I ought to notify my alma mater about this. </Sylvia Plath jokes>

Also, here are a few links I’ve collected during the week:

• Ellen Ripley Saved My Life: a post by Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown. This is the third of three related essays, and speaking as someone whose notion of a strong woman was also unduly affected, in my teenage years, by Joss Whedon’s psyche — it’s amazing.
• A charming slideshow of doodles left on the whiteboards in the main library (the PCL) at UT.
• And another charming interview with Justin Cronin about The Passage, this one at Goodreads.
• Foxes playing in the London snow.

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.

This week, my students are workshopping their first pieces of fiction (and doing an excellent job of it). After a week and a half of class every day, I think we’re all starting to realize that an intensive summer fiction workshop will, in fact, be intensive. For all of us. But with judicious applications of cookies and porcupines that think they’re dogs, I think we’ll manage just fine.

Anyway, I’m afraid it’s links all the way down today:

• Via Gwynne Garfinkle, this recap of a Readercon panel about New England horror that I so wish I could’ve attended. Killingly is New England gothic, I think, rather than horror, but after reading The Passage I’m more willing to think of horror as something that sneaks into many other genres. (I don’t have a blog category for Killingly stuff! This must be remedied at once.)
• Fabulous illustrations of characters from The Wire (though Snoop’s the only woman represented so far; odd). I like Freamon’s the best, but then I usually like Freamon best. (Via David Schwartz on Twitter.)
• Susana Daniel’s essay in Slate about the purgatorial decade she spent writing and not writing her first novel.
• The most charming interview with Bill Murray, who rarely gives them. It concludes with the interviewer asking Murray about the rumor that he likes to sneak up behind people in NYC, cover their eyes with his hands, and ask, “Guess who?” Murray’s answer: “[long pause] I know. I know, I know, I know. I’ve heard about that from a lot of people. A lot of people. I don’t know what to say. There’s probably a really appropriate thing to say. Something exactly and just perfectly right. [long beat, and then he breaks into a huge grin] But by God, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Just so crazy and unlikely and unusual?”

I’m bogged down in dissertation-land this month, trying to finish a chapter before I start teaching in mid-July.

Things I have been doing lately, in addition to writing my dissertation:

• Pondering the confluence of events that leads pets to get sick immediately before one’s partner leaves on a scheduled trip.
• Washing a lot of bedding. See previous point.
• Watching season 1 of Leverage and pondering the caper plot. It’s a silly, fun show with a ridiculously sentimental frame story, but it’s also surprisingly ambitious — a caper a week?
• Preparing teaching materials for my fiction workshop, including a basic website. (Not totally complete yet.) Wondering why Drupal is so much more annoying than WordPress.

Links to recommend:

• Alexander Chee’s great series of posts on MFA programs: when an MFA degree is a good idea, how he chose his own program, etc. Start with this post — the others are linked from it, including this brief FAQ about MFA programs, which is worth a look.
• This NPR story on a neurologist who studies the brains of psychopaths — and who found his own brain scans somewhat unnerving. (Not dissimilar, in a sense, to the book by Jessica Stern that I mentioned last week, in which she connects her own traumatic history to her study of terrorism.)
• The formation of a new continental rift valley in Africa.
• Tuscany via Henry James.
• Ernesto Neto’s installation at the Hayward Gallery at the Saatchi in London. A friend posted photos on Facebook; just beautiful.
• The sweetest story of a marriage I’ve read for a while.

Yesterday’s launch party was just wonderful. My friend Kristin Ware kindly volunteered to photograph the event and did a marvelous job — I’ll have photos from her soon to share with you. T. also recorded a video of me reading. Hopefully I’ll have a chance to edit that and get it posted quickly as well.

In more Alcestis news of the visual sort, the lovely Realm Lovejoy interviewed me for her blog. Realm is a videogame artist, an author, and an illustrator, and she creates beautiful illustrations to accompany her author interviews. For my interview, she painted a gorgeous portrait of Alcestis. Please go check it out and leave her admiring comments!

And finally, one more photo of Alcestis in the wild, from, of course, my mother:

This is Alcestis at Bloomsbury Books in Ashland, OR, where I will be reading on the evening of March 18.

A quick link to an article in the Guardian about a new Athenian exhibition of Greek visual art depicting all sorts of sexuality. The author notes that Aristophanes “devis[ed] 106 ways of describing the male genitals and 91 those of the female,” which I feel is remarkable all on its own. Even more remarkable, maybe, is the sensible age limit imposed for viewing the exhibition. Museum visitors under 16 are encouraged not to enter the most graphic section of the gallery without accompaniment by an adult:

“We felt it prudent for children under the age of 16 to be warned,” said the professor. “By the age of 16 they’ve heard about everything that they see here and read about it in magazines or on the internet.”

Indeed.