1. Gotten my head knocked into a doorframe by my landlord. (Accidentally! He was checking a smoke alarm, I ducked under him, it was a bad scene.) The lump is just about gone now.
2. Sold my first story (!) — a short-short, to the wonderful people at Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
3. Discovered that the dryer attached to my new apartment will function with a maximum load of two (2) pairs of wet pants. Total.
4. Read most of Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess. It’s spectacular — particularly the scene in which the two main characters fall in lust over the deathbed of the female character’s father — but it still hasn’t topped the MONKEY FIGHT at the end of Evelina for absurdity. (MONKEY FIGHT. And people say c18 fiction is dull.) Then again, I haven’t quite finished it yet.
5. Saw Final Fantasy at the Parish, downtown. Final Fantasy is Owen Pallett, recently described in the Times as “the world’s most popular gay postmodern harpsichord nerd.” If you ever have a chance to see him, do. He does all his looping from his violin live onstage, including crazy percussive sounds made with bow and strings, and shouts into the violin’s belly; he has a strange lovely voice and a great little dorky Ralph Fiennes laugh; he wore a red headband that made him look like an anime character; and he ended the concert with a cover of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.” (His cover of “Peach, Plum, Pear” was excellent, too.) Definitely one of the best shows I’ve seen.

I have access to borrowed wireless in the apartment now, intermittently. We’re still counting down the days to our very own reliable connection, though.

I flew back to Austin on Thursday, the Day of No Liquids, and am settled in the new apartment. No internet till Aug. 28, though, which means I’ll be posting here rarely and reading my blogroll even less frequently. On the 28th, however, I’m going to roll around in my wireless signal like a puppy.

This morning I went back to Cafe Mundi — probably my last visit for a while, since I won’t be living on the east side when I come back to Austin in August — and had a waffle and finished John Dos Passos’s The 42nd Parallel, the first book in his U.S.A. trilogy. It’s the first failed modernist novel I’ve ever read.

I’ve mostly read canonized modernist novels, by Joyce and Woolf and etc., which use fragmentation and stream-of-consciousness narration and image-laden prose to excellent effect. Dos Passos tries to employ those techniques, and occasionally manages a great phrase or a haunting juxtaposition of words, but on the whole it just doesn’t work. The 42nd Parallel has four main streams of narration — three fragmentary and lyrical and one more straightforward and chronological prose — and the straightforward prose sequences, which make up perhaps 2/3 of the book, are by far the most successful and gain little from the fragmentary bits of newsreel lyric, biography, and autobiography jammed in around them. The novel as a whole doesn’t fail, or doesn’t fail entirely; the narrative sections are gripping at times, and consistently interesting, and I’m intrigued enough to pick up the next two volumes of the trilogy when I have a chance. But I think it would’ve been a better book without the self-consciously experimental sections, where Dos Passos attempts to use a particular set of trendy techniques — and does fail, despite his talent as a writer.

M. Thomas and I have put together an unofficial guide to Austin for those planning to attend World Fantasy in November. The WFC site has a small official guide to Austin for con-goers, but it’s focused almost entirely on the Arboretum, which is… well, it’s a mall. So: here’s a list of things to know, do, see, and eat in Austin that do not involve malls.

Most of the credit goes to M., who designed and is hosting the site — but be sure to click the link for the second page, wherein you can reap the benefit of my obsession with local restaurants. (Most restaurants have websites, which are easily found by asking Uncle Google.)

As M. notes, this site is in no way affiliated with the WFC, etc., etc. But it has a flying armadillo on it.

For future reference, you can also find the guide link on my sidebar (and my newly uploaded index page). Check it out — and let M. or I know if you have questions, suggestions, etc.

1. For a lesson in how to take a perfectly decent series and ruin it in the last installment, see X3. Or, rather, DON’T. Ugh.
2. Last night we went with some visiting friends to the Paramount Theatre, where we saw The Maltese Falcon. I hadn’t seen it since I was little, and I’d forgotten how funny it is and how purely great Bogart is in it. T. thinks Peter Lorre’s Joel Cairo must have partly inspired Andy Serkis’s Gollum.
3. I’ve added Perfect Stars to my blogroll, because everyone should appreciate its delightfulness. I like the Dorian Grey and Oscar Wilde strips the best, though they’re all lovely and weird.
4. Via T.: Cate Blanchett is going to play Bob Dylan in Todd Haynes’s next movie. A Todd Haynes film is probably one of the only things that could lead me to be interested in Bob Dylan — plus, you know, Cate Blanchett.

And finally, a book question: help me list novels set during the Great Depression in the US? So far we’ve come up with books by:

1. Steinbeck
2. Faulkner (As I Lay Dying, Snopes trilogy)
3. Cormac McCarthy, part of the Border trilogy
4. Philip Roth, The Plot Against America
5. Frank Norris (whom I’ve never read)
6. John Dos Passos, maybe? (again, I’ve never read him)

And, in light of my botheration about the NY Times list several weeks ago: can you point me toward any good novels set in the US Depression written by women?

A young Latino man standing at the corner of MLK and Guadalupe in a white t-shirt covered with black-marker writing, holding a handmade cardboard sign. At first he had his back to me, and when I squinted I could see that his back said: I LOVE ROSARIO / MARRY ME [unreadable] the 24th! He was about seventy feet away from me, right near the intersection. He ducked his head a little when cars passed, as if he were embarrassed, but he looked proud, too. He seemed to be waiting for someone: Rosario, I assume. He wasn’t smiling. I waited for the bus for about ten minutes, and just before it came, the man walked toward me. The front of his shirt said: MORE THAN FRIENDS — LETS GET MARRIED! I LOVE YOU HONEY! And his sign had two copies of the same posed studio photo pasted to it, one larger than the other, like the statues in Egyptian tombs. Rosario, and consort Rosario. Under the photos, he’d written: THIS IS THE YOUNG WOMAN I LOVE.

Pedernales

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

Things I saw at the Pedernales River:

• a water snake of undetermined species
• a tarantula, briefly captured by T. and his brothers
• more cardinals than I’ve ever seen in one location
• the skeletons of large fish trapped in potholes along the river
• small bleak towns near the park (Johnson City, Dripping Springs)
• vultures circling the campground
• minuscule but still extremely gross leeches on the rocks of the broad falls you see in the picture
• a tiny olive-colored soft-shelled turtle
• lizards of various types
• a small green bird
• a lot of beer

I slathered myself in SPF 50 and only got a bit pink on the end of my nose, which is a minor miracle. Also, no sun headache! Shocking. I credit the beer.

A few more pictures are up at flickr.

***

Over the weekend, I read David Liss’s A Conspiracy of Paper, one of relatively few mystery novels set in eighteenth century England. (I can state this with some confidence because my mother loves mystery novels and sent me a list of mystery novels with historical settings.) I enjoyed it, and I think it makes a pleasant and very readable introduction to the culture of paper credit in the 1710s-20s; not necessarily an easy thing to accomplish in fiction. Interesting to read it not long after reading Emma Donoghue’s Slammerkin and Life Mask, and to compare the ways in which the authors manage worldbuilding and exposition — something which varies even between Donoghue’s two books. Liss’s historical explanations are foregrounded in a way that startled me at first, as I’m much more accustomed to the naturalistic seamlessness of, say, Slammerkin or Margaret Atwood’s Alias Grace. Some of that is authorial choice, of course, but some of it is also generic variation — the appeal of a mystery relies on the reader’s ability to understand the dramatic situation and the web of social relationships in which that mystery takes place. And that, I think, is why many mystery novels seem more given to straightforward first-person explanation than are many literary novels: because the social relationships need to be explained quickly and clearly so that the mystery can begin. I found the tactic surprising because I’m out of practice at reading mystery novels, and it’s very good to be reminded that my default way of thinking about historical fiction is in fact a particular kind of literary model.

Apologies for my absence this week; I’ve been working on writing and watching lots of movies, two important summer occupations. And I’m about to head off to Pedernales Falls State Park for a few days of camping (with a backpack full of sunscreen, bug spray, and Benadryl cream), so things will be quiet here through Sunday.

After Sunday I need to start sorting out my belongings in preparation to move, yet again — expect lots of procrastinatory posting.

At flickr, I’ve posted the photos T. took at my graduation reading. Here you can see me from a T.’s-eye view, as I gesture toward my clip-on microphone to ask if it’s working. Doing two readings in two weeks reminds you just how weird your own voice sounds when projected to an audience. But doing the readings was more fun than I’d anticipated, and it makes me wish I had more stories suited in length and content to reading aloud. I’ll have to work on that.

***

Stories that do not read well aloud: documentary/epistolary stories.

Stories I am revising right now: “Selected letters …”

Things that are helpful: having a housemate who works as an intern at one of the best research libraries in the world. I had a question about how letters are catalogued at the HRC and all I had to do was pop down the hall to her room and ask. And now, if I can chase off the last bits of this headache, I’ll put the answer to good use.

I’m taking a quick break from the Boswell to read T.’s copy of Blood Meridian, so going back to work on my story of letters written by fairly genteel late-nineteenth-century American women will produce serious whiplash. If my blog entries suddenly feature lots of long, violent run-on sentences, you’ll know why.

Michener graduation dinner, 2006
Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

Marla, Michener administrator extraordinaire, took this photo at last night’s graduation dinner — I’m the one in pink, diving for the baked goods. I look pretty relaxed, yes? I was, and not only because of the tasty bread. Our graduation reading went well — I read a short-short and the novel prologue, and really enjoyed my classmates’ readings, since nearly all of us read different material this time. Adam Zaby, in particular, read a brilliant story about Stieglitz and Georgia O’Keeffe. There were post-reading drinks at El Chile and then a trip to Carmen’s house to see the kitten she adopted from me months ago, now a sleek, scrappy, adorable teenager. After the obligatory cat visit we went to the dinner, which was, luckily, not rained out. ‘Twas a nice afternoon, though it didn’t feel much like graduation to me, as I’ll be back in class in August. But I’m tremendously glad I’m staying.

Today I turned in my last master’s form, and T. finished his grading, so summer has officially begun. I celebrated it in the dorktacular way I often do: by making a quick summer reading list, which you can find on the sidebar. I’ll update as I go. But now I’m off to re-read a short story that needs revision and to work on my novel synopsis, that joy of joys.