David Barnett has a great blog post at the Guardian today entitled What’s wrong with being a hack? Since my academic work focuses on professional women writers of the early eighteenth century — the era of Grub Street, paper wars, and slipping emetics into your literary enemies’ drinks, if you happened to be Alexander Pope — I spend a lot of time thinking and writing about hackery.
Some of the writers I study are refreshingly honest about their status as hack writers; Laetitia Pilkington, in particular, details down to the shilling the amount of money she receives for hastily written-up poems offered to the great. Once, she receives two guineas for her troubles and is so thrilled that she tosses them up in the air in glee. One promptly slips into a crack in the floorboards of her rented room, and her landlady won’t let her pull up the boards to get it out. Poor LP. (If you ever have the time to read a three-volume memoir by a mid-eighteenth-century woman writer, go for hers. And read Woolf’s essay about her, too.)
Anyway, I like the message of Barnett’s piece, and as I’m currently in the season of funding applications, it feels pretty applicable to academia as well. I only hope I can hustle half as well as Mrs. Pilkington.
The DNB offers one entry free to the non-paying public daily, and today it’s my BFF Dr. Samuel Johnson, born on 18 September 1709. If you haven’t read his Preface to Shakespeare, I highly recommend it — it was one of the first things that got me hooked on eighteenth century literature.
(Did you know that Johnson, Hester Thrale and Boswell all have Twitter accounts?)
I’ve been teaching my intro English class on the history of the romance for a week now and so far everything is sunshine and roses. Seriously, I’m very happy with this class and I think we’re going to have a great time, partly because many of the students chose the class because they want to read the books we’re reading.
I am looking forward to getting the last bits of my schedule settled — those of us who teach in the shiny computer-stocked classrooms also work as proctors in the computer labs, and that schedule gets revised after a week or two of term — so that I can figure out how to shove some fiction writing into my schedule, along with my teaching prep and dissertation work.
A few links for today:
Sarah Eve Kelly on “the matter of detail” in writing historical fiction.
Megan Crewe posts on the results of her survey of writers who recently sold their first books. Short version: the majority of writers sell their first book not because of connections but through a cold query.
The Telegraph reviews a new book on Waugh and the Lygons, the family who apparently inspired Waugh when he created the Flytes.
My favorite Kate Beaton comic (which I will be sharing with my class).
The New York Times (Magazine, in this case) produces a sweet, celebratory, nicely written piece about a genre writer that takes the writer’s work seriously. Not a single mention of “transcending genre,” just a brief portrait of Jack Vance and the writers who admire him. I was really happy to see this.
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.
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.
