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.

I’m thankful for Stephen Fry, who really is quite lovely:

Via Justine Larbalestier, Elizabeth Gilbert’s TED talk on genius, inspiration, and “mulish” work. It’s a beautifully presented talk, though I’m not sure that I agree with her final premise of talent as a kind of transitory gift. I do agree, and I’m pretty sure I’ve gone on about this before, that the post-Romantic (Gilbert says post-Renaissance) conception of the artist has led to an absurd cultural insistence that all writers be damaged in order to create. (See this great New Yorker article on writer’s block and the invention thereof.) But I also think that placing “genius” or “inspiration” entirely outside oneself is a little sad. We are human, and we do create beautiful things. Inspiration is the work of our brains, and that’s worth celebrating, even if we don’t understand how it functions.

But I do agree with both Justine and Elizabeth Gilbert that the most important thing you can do as a writer is keep doing your work, or, as Justine says, make it the best book you can.

Now I’m off to make the best dissertation chapter outline I can. I hope.

Repetitive things usually annoy me: repetitive motions like finger-tapping, repetitive sounds, even spoken choruses in songs when the rhythm of speech fights the beat. (That’s not repetitive, exactly, I guess, but it bothers me in the same way.) One of the things I thought was most charming about WALL-E, though, was the way the animators lingered on the little repetitive motions their characters made — how the characters were given time to be entranced with the movements of their stubby hands or with the lighting of an old Zippo. It’s sort of babylike, sort of animal, that kind of fascination; I’ve seen my cat do the same thing.

Before the movie — which we saw at the Alamo Drafthouse in south Austin — we sat through a number of Pixar shorts, all of which I profoundly disliked. T. kept looking over at me and laughing because I looked miserable. This was mostly because I really hate slapstick, whether cartoon or live-action. I was the sort of kid who watched the first Home Alone movie through my fingers not because I was scared for tiny Macaulay Culkin but because I felt awful for the crooks he was knocking around. But also I think I disliked the shorts because they don’t have those graceful little moments of discovery. They’re designed for visual gags and broad, predictable humor. And transparent cuteness. WALL-E included some visual gags and predictable humor and transparent cuteness, too, but that wasn’t the whole joke. It wasn’t a joke. It was a good movie.

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.

Via boingboing, an odd, beautiful series of photographs of derelict Soviet bus stops.

I’m thinking about stealing this one for the novel I’m revising.

Friday I looked at a fourteenth-century manuscript of the Divine Comedy, with marginal notes in Latin. Tiny, spidery, beautiful pale blocks of notes, accompanied by sketched “manicules” — also known as digits, hands, fists, or indices, apparently — pointing out important passages in the main text. At least two different annotators had worked on the text; I’m sure there were more, but I could see two definite unique scripts (and drawing styles). Some of the manicules had sweet petal-like sleeves. Some had wrists like pretzels.

For another class, I pulled several copies of Friedrich Rehberg’s Drawings faithfully copied from Nature, at Naples (1794) — Piroli’s engravings of Rehberg’s drawings of Emma Hamilton’s Attitudes, that is. They’re more striking than they were in the modern reprint I first saw, and I still can’t understand why so many modern critics call them “failed” drawings. (More on that whenever I get my paper on visual representations of Emma worked up as an article.) Two of the copies are printed entirely on bright orange paper, which is odd.

I looked at The Waste Land, ostensibly to study its notes & glosses — but, being a stereotypical literature geek, I’ve been obsessed with that poem since my freshman year of high school, and those notes are so familiar that I can hardly see them as paratext any longer. They’re like a little friendly murmur under the melody. A professor I TA’d for several years ago called the tone and apparatus of the poem elitist, and, while my students seemed to sympathize with his complaint, I couldn’t. Whatever Eliot meant to impart, those notes were a promise, when I read them first. This is how much I know, how much I’ve read and understood of the world; you can read and know and understand this much, too.