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.

This will probably be a recurring feature, because… yes.

• The scuzzy salmon-pink Chucks Robert De Niro wore in Great Expectations.
• Knopf rejection sheets for works by Joyce Carol Oates, V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie.
• David Mamet’s (extremely detailed) baby book, complete with report cards from pre-school–apparently he handled scissors very safely.
• Houdini’s collection of magic-related manuscript materials.
• Ms. for a minor Beckett work, which I needed to measure in order to answer a patron’s query.
• A rather accomplished landscape sketch by Charlotte Brontë, with a title written in by her mother.
• Publicity photographs of a famous blackface performer, in and out of costume and paint.
• Ink on paper self-portrait by Henry Miller. T. was disappointed to learn that the self-portrait was not at all pornographic.
• A small model concept car designed by Norman Bel Geddes that looks far more like a spaceship than like an automobile.

Not much to report otherwise; I’m studying French like a fiend, doing dissertation-related reading, and working up grant proposals for an exciting new digital humanities project in our department. More on that once we have a good demo up, I hope.

So, a little while ago, I said that I wanted to go paw through the Knopf rejection letters.

I went into work the next day and my boss asked me (and another intern) to — you guessed it — paw through the Knopf rejection letters. We’re putting together a mini-exhibit to highlight the NY Times article, which means that we’ve looked at the letters and records Oshinsky mentioned and picked the ones that’ll work best on display. The exhibit will probably be up by the end of the week.

Have I mentioned that I love my new job? I love my new job.

I had good intentions this summer, I swear. I was going write regularly here and talk in some depth about the memoir project, maybe about my academic work. Instead I wrote three-plus chapters of the memoir and rewrote one conference paper into an article-length piece; I thought about my dissertation project; I read seven hundred pages of Clarissa and a fair number of other books both academic and non-; I picked raspberries and blueberries and strawberries in my family’s back garden; I washed a lot of dishes. Now the semester’s begun and tomorrow is my first full day of work at the HRC.

It’s strange not to be teaching, especially since my classmates are all preparing for their own classes. I feel a bit like I’m getting away with something, even though I’ll be working twenty hours a week at the HRC and four at the Undergraduate Writing Center. I hope I will have the chance to teach my planned class on the rhetoric of popular fiction some time, but I’ll have plenty to do this semester, between my dissertation reading and my exciting new French class. I’m a complete beginner with French, though it’s the fifth language I’ve studied. So far, I can say sophisticated things like “Look at the window” and “Susie is wearing a red blouse,” and I sound like an idiot when I try to make the guttural R, but I still love it (even the funny numbers). I do have to stop thinking “wo” when I mean “je,” though. Zhongwen =/= Français, though in a perfect world I’d be studying both right now.

I still have way too much to do today, considering that it’s the last day of a three-day weekend, so I’m off to work. (”Work” here includes studying French, thankfully.) But I will try to be better about writing here this semester.

A brief list.

1. The CHOP chemo regimen, which has put my father’s cancer in remission, at least temporarily.
2. Paprika — T. and I saw it twice when we were in Portland.
3. Strawberry freezer jam with chevre on a toasted English muffin.
4. GoodReads: still addictive.
5. Pigma Micron pens by Sakura, to which T. introduced me last year. They’re the best ever for marking up books.
6. The fact that Nabokov finished the ms. of Lolita only a few miles from my current location. That house is gone now, replaced with some truly ugly new construction, but there’s a plaque to mark the spot — along with a tiny Japanese maple. I’m not sure what kind of symbolic message that little tree is supposed to send.
7. The area between, say, Division and Belmont in eastern Portland. Even though the Side Street bar near Belmont got rid of its Galaga arcade machine since last summer. Tragedy!
8. The Defoe Review project (based on the HRC’s editions of the periodical).
9. Swagat’s chicken makhani.

Ruth Franklin, Slate, 8 May 2007, reviewing Michael Chabon’s newest book:

Michael Chabon has spent considerable energy trying to drag the decaying corpse of genre fiction out of the shallow grave where writers of serious literature abandoned it.

An excerpt from Ursula Le Guin’s response in Ansible, July 2007:

God damn that Chabon, dragging it out of the grave where she and the other serious writers had buried it to save serious literature from its polluting touch, the horror of its blank, pustular face, the lifeless, meaningless glare of its decaying eyes! What did the fool think he was doing? Had he paid no attention at all to the endless rituals of the serious writers and their serious critics — the formal expulsion ceremonies, the repeated anathemata, the stakes driven over and over through the heart, the vitriolic sneers, the endless, solemn dances on the grave? Did he not want to preserve the virginity of Yaddo? Had he not even understand the importance of the distinction between sci fi and counterfactual fiction? Could he not see that Cormac McCarthy — although everything in his book (except the wonderfully blatant use of an egregiously obscure vocabulary) was remarkably similar to a great many earlier works of science fiction about men crossing the country after a holocaust — could never under any circumstances be said to be a sci fi writer, because Cormac McCarthy was a serious writer and so by definition incapable of lowering himself to commit genre? Could it be that that Chabon, just because some mad fools gave him a Pulitzer, had forgotten the sacred value of the word mainstream?

The sheer awesomeness of this requires a *\o/*! Do go read the whole thing — the whole Le Guin piece, that is. The snooty anti-genre rhetoric in Franklin’s review is a derivative waste of time.

A whiplash-inducing reading experience: reading A Long Day’s Journey Into Night after a semester of reading Shakespeare. I haven’t bounced that hard off a text in a while.

I did finish the play, mostly because my grandmother mentions it several times in the course of her memoir. Her family life was nothing like the Tyrones’ in an emotional sense, but the superficial details of situation are similar: a mother with beautiful red-brown hair, a father who keeps throwing money into failed land purchases. She has a habit of making comparisons to works she must have read long ago — she also compares her mother to Isabel Archer at another point, and the only similarity there is that Isabel and her mother were both beautiful and stoic. I’m still tempted to use it as an excuse to re-read Portrait of a Lady, though.

For those of you who don’t visit my del.icio.us page:

• The origin of the Etruscan people discovered (in the Guardian)
  
• A weird, interesting little sf music video done by Hayao Miyazaki
• A used bookstore that’s also a nonprofit devoted to improving literacy
• What would likely happen to the earth if people vanished
• A road map to street food in NYC

Next week’s New Yorker contains a long article about the Harry Ransom Center, its collections, and its director, Tom Staley (with whom I had a lovely conversation when I interviewed there in April). Here’s the article’s introductory paragraph, which should give you some sense of why I’m so excited about interning at the HRC:

The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron’s curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac’s spiral-bound journals for “On the Road”; and Ezra Pound’s copy of “The Waste Land,” in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: “For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E.” Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of “Comus,” containing corrections in Milton’s own hand? Or the manuscript for “The Green Dwarf,” a story that Charlotte Brontë wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of “Ulysses,” on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center’s archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.

Getting the internship there feels rather like Christmas, or a birthday, or perhaps a bit like getting zapped back in time to see the Library of Alexandria. You might say I’m looking forward to it.

I’m reading Julie Phillips’s biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr. It’s excellent and I’m entranced.

In the beginning I was merely interested, because I found it tough to relax into the biographical form as Phillips practices it. Having spent this semester working on (among other things) Austen’s use of modal verbs, I was struck and a little annoyed by Phillips’s use of “must” and “should have,” her reliance on conditional forms to buttress psychological claims about Sheldon. That choice reminded me, not pleasantly, of the more biographical bits of the Gilbert-and-Gubar style of feminist criticism — another critical mode I view with sympathy and support but can’t help quibbling with, either. Phillips’s “musts” seem, at times, to push too hard to nail down the unknowable:

She also acquired a .38 revolver, which she either bought or was given by Bill at a time when a sensational carjacking and murder had made the New Mexico roads seem unsafe. It was this gun, acquired for self-defense, that Alice claimed Bill had used against her. (She also once suggested that she had used it for a game of Russian roulette.) Nonetheless, she kept it. Later in life, whenever she was depressed enough to think of killing herself, she always pictured doing it with the .38. The gun must have given her a sense of power over death. [James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, 96]

That pithy last sentence! Why? It’s a shove from drama into banality. It flattens an ambivalent and interesting and totemic-seeming fact.

I’m quibbling, as I said — the book is just wonderful, and the psychologizing conditional statements either grow fewer, or integrate more smoothly into Phillips’s thoughtful and careful treatment of Sheldon/Tiptree, or both. (I’ll have to reread it to tell; right now I’m too grabbed by it.) But I wish that, in the early chapters, Phillips had allowed more of Alice’s ambivalence to remain unencapsulated.

More on this later, when I’m done with the book.

ETA: I read the last half of the book in a happy rush yesterday and this morning, and while I stand by my quibbling, I think the whole thing’s delightful. The primary sources make up a great portion of the book’s brilliance — Sheldon/Tiptree wrote wonderful letters — but Phillips does a beautiful job, too.