From the preface to “The Female Wits,” a 1696 play anonymously published in 1704, satirizing Delarivier Manley, Mary Pix, and Catherine Trotter. The (also anonymous) writer of the preface describes Trotter and Pix as:
… two Gentlewomen that have made no small Struggle in the World to get into Print; and who are now in such a State of Wedlock to Pen and Ink, that it will be very difficult for them to get out of it.
I’m thinking about stealing that for my “about” page.
Another semester, another long stretch of blog silence. I haven’t got much to say or much time to say it in; this year is one of those strange larval periods, I guess, for my academic work and my writing and my family life. Editors are reading a novel I wrote, I’m starting to write a dissertation prospectus — and all the while we’re keeping an eye on my father’s health, as we have been since I graduated from college in May of 2003. It’s my five-year college reunion this May, and that means it’ll also have been five years since my father’s cancer was diagnosed.
By the end of the summer or beginning of the fall I should be beginning to write my dissertation. I’m hoping it’ll give me a new clarity of purpose.
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.
A brief list.
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.
Some news, as I surface briefly between end-of-semester projects:
I’ll be working at the Harry Ransom Center as a public services intern for the next two years. I’m thrilled about it — everyone I’ve met through the interviewing process has been wonderful and I’m terribly excited about the work I’ll get to do. Expect many more posts gushing about the wonder of its books and manuscripts.
This means I won’t be teaching for those two years, at least not as my main source of support. I won’t be teaching this summer, either, despite my plans to. Instead, I’ll be in Oregon for much of the summer, spending time with my parents, who are heading back to Ashland themselves this weekend from the Stanford Medical Center. My dad’s stem cell transplant has been going well, but his cancer is back, too, and we’re all in limbo waiting to see what his new immune system will do, and what can be done oncologically. I’m going home to see them and to work on The White Silk Tent, my next novel project, which my father is eager to see.
But now I’m in the middle of a project on Austen’s modal verbs, and another on Aaron Hill’s King Henry the Fifth, and another on English perceptions of Dutch in the late Restoration. And grading. I’ll be done around May 16.
Some days I think I should just call this blog “Genre Snootinesswatch.” In an otherwise interesting, if a bit overly cute, article on annotated editions of novels in (yet again) the NY Times, William Grimes writes:
Extreme devotees of Austen do not simply enjoy the novels, they want to sit in the living room at Longbourn with the Bennet sisters, drinking tea and analyzing Darcy’s behavior. An entire subliterary genre, the Regency romance, exists to satisfy this desire.
Uh, a “subliterary genre”? Not, say, a “literary subgenre”? Or even, perhaps more accurately, a “marketing subgenre”?
Sigh.
Our Clarissa reading group met for the first time Friday night. About twelve of us, mostly students and a few professors, are reading the book in something approaching real time, with a bit of shifting between now and mid-April to even the reading load from week to week. We have different prior experiences of the text: some have read it before, some have taught it, some have abandoned it after valiant past effort. Some have read (shudder) the abridged version — including me. (It was assigned when I was a callow first-year in my very first college English class.) Some of us have examined the HRC’s editions last semester, looking illustrative ellipses for our exhibit. We’re all excited about reading it, because we’re dorks. The reader-response consensus to date: Clarissa is saucier than one might expect, and everybody is impatient for Lovelace’s letters to begin.
I brought lemon poppyseed cookies, baked at the last minute from a recipe I’d never made before. They’re a bit of work, but they turned out to be delicious — light, sharp with lemon and crumbly-sweet. (I used another teaspoon of lemon zest in the dough, which does require a few more spoonfuls of flour, at least at Austin levels of humidity.) I’d been thinking about making oatmeal raisin cookies, but, as one of the professors attending said, those are too comforting. This book needs something a little acidic to suit it.
I’m in Oregon, where it’s cold. Today is a little warmer, perhaps 40, which will mean less ice fog and also less beauty. My plane landed with no trouble on Sunday, despite the weather — we didn’t even need to make a second approach. Every day since then, I’ve pulled out a warmer coat: first the down vest, then the puffy red down parka, then the long, dark-eggplant-colored, serious down coat I used to wear in Massachusetts winters.
Yesterday morning my father and I went for a walk in the park downtown. This is a picture of the meadow where T. and I sat and read in the summer, now iced and bright. (There are other pictures from that walk up at my Flickr page.)
The frost, accreted over the last few days, has only just melted from the backyard. The deer are sleeping just beyond the garden fence and the trees are full of chickadees and robins. There’s one dim hummingbird that hasn’t fled south — he comes to the feeder several times an hour. Yesterday Dad had to keep bringing the feeder in to warm it up and the hummingbird hovered, confused, by the window. When Dad returned with the feeder, the little thing landed to drink before he’d even hung it up.
I haven’t gotten much done since I arrived here. There are so many little things to occupy us: baking, putting lights on the tree (to be left outside for the first time this year, as we don’t have time to hassle with sweeping up dropped needles), making dinner. And there are bigger things, too. My father will, we hope, have a stem cell transplant in early spring, and he has another round of chemo coming up just after Christmas, which was just determined today. So it’s hard to focus on anything but spending time with my parents. I’ve been reading Jane Austen and eating cookies and playing with the cat, and trying to work a little on revising my first novel. More about that soon.
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.
