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.

The reading meadow

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

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.

I ended up seeing The Prestige last weekend and thoroughly enjoyed it. (No spoilers here, just general comments.) It’s a big movie in some ways, grandiose, and still not quite as good as Memento — it’s not as sharp or strange or haunting, less disturbingly possible — but mean, tight, and clever. It mostly made up for the awfulness of Batman Begins.

I’ve seen some comments about the movie feeling hollow, or failing to earn its emotional resolution. If someone could point out to me what emotional resolution Nolan was trying to earn, I’d be intrigued. It’s a story about life-warping obsession; it’s hollow for a reason.

I wanted one more turn in the story, though. Or, rather, I wanted the movie itself to pull a final sly trick on me, something I’d only realize later. Did anybody else want that, too?

My life-warping obsession, these days, is the eighteenth century. Here’s what I’m working on now:

1. Charlotte Charke project.
2. Project for Lit. of Maritime Empire class — possibly Henry Neville, possibly Samuel Foote?
3. Teaching, as always. Lots of essays coming in tomorrow morning.
4. Label for small class-designed exhibit in the HRC: ellipses in Evelina.
5. Kelly Link’s upcoming reading! (November 6, 7:30 pm, the Joynes Reading Room at UT. More details very soon.) Wheee.
6. C18 interest group for the department? First idea: reading Clarissa in real time.

I’m writing this post from the courtyard in between the HRC and the English buildings, via the HRC’s wireless connection. Oddly enough, there’s no reliable wireless in the English building. This courtyard is one of my favorite places to sit on campus, though, so I don’t mind.

It’s been a crazy week. I had a presentation Monday, a class observation Tuesday, and a short paper due today, and I feel drowsy and slow. I’m looking forward to a relatively restful weekend full of sushi, reading for my paper project on Charlotte Charke and grading some short assignments — probably with my apartment windows open, as it’s finally cooled off. Perhaps we’ll go see a movie. Any opinions to offer on The Science of Sleep, The Prestige, or Marie Antoinette?

Someday, this blog will contain regularly-updated content. And by “someday” I meant “possibly in December, when I have a moment to think.” Right now, I have rather too much grading and reading to allow for original thought. So: here are a few lists. Some are hierarchical; some are not.

My favorite book-ogling experiences in the HRC thus far:

1. Chaucer, Cardigan manuscript of the Canterbury Tales.
2. Two of Oscar Wilde’s letters, which I transcribed for class earlier this week — both were just a sheet front and back, written from France, before his trial. In the first he asks a friend for a loan of ten pounds; in the second, to a different friend, he explains that he’s switched hotels because the previous one kept sending his bill up every morning with his coffee. Poor Oscar. He had lovely big messy handwriting, only a few words to a line.
3. Shakespeare, First Folio, Norton facsimile (as previously explained).
4. Emily Dickinson, Poems, 1891. Like a cracked whip on the page. One of the editions had a facsimile of a poem in the first few pages — and, shockingly, her dashes are just little dots! She had a big sprawly script, too — for some reason I’d always thought of her as someone who would’ve written in little cramped letters. I’m glad I was wrong.
5. Defoe, Colonel Jack: married FIVE TIMES to FOUR WHORES, says the long title, the capital letters rubricated. I think Defoe had some kind of rule for himself: the last phrase in a long title must contain a complete falsehood. (Crusoe does this, too — “rescued by pyrates,” my ass.)
6. Taylor’s Workes, with a triple dedication, and each dedicatee given his own delightfully obsequious epigram.
7. Hooke’s Micrographia — the illustrations!
8. Johnson’s Dictionary — the heft!

Noteworthy events of the last month or so:

• Having my first conference paper proposal — on the romance plot and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote — accepted for the ASECS conference in March. There was much rejoicing.
• Finding an excellent space (the Joynes Reading Room) for Kelly Link’s upcoming reading at UT. More on this as it approaches.
• Having another dissertation idea pop into my head. Er, hello.
• Follett opening their first new flagship bookstore, Intellectual Property, right next to campus. They have literary criticism in their clearance section! And they gave me a free tote bag. I’m easily won.

The best things I’ve bought at the farmer’s market recently:

• squash blossoms (which I cooked this way, with the addition of a bit of cornmeal to the batter — they were excellent over rice with teriyaki sauce)
• banana and cinnamon empanada baked by a local Brazilian restaurant
• local spinach — I was in spinach withdrawal
• blueberry bran muffin

With T.’s encouragement, I bought okra today — at the co-op rather than the farmer’s market, but it’s local stuff. I’ve only eaten it twice in my life. This must mean something about my level of Texas acculturation, but I’m not quite sure what.

Via Bookninja (I think), an interesting bit of Johnsoniana: New research indicates Johnson gave up on his dictionary. I haven’t read anything of Anne McDermott’s, so I don’t know how convincing her argument is, but she’s claiming that Johnson secretly stopped work on the dictionary for years. She says that this is reflected in the Rambler:

“Once you tune into this, it becomes inescapable,” she says. “The melancholy tone of the Rambler has often been commented on, and the early volumes are full of essays about idleness, indolence and guilt over work undone.”

I’m not a Johnson expert (yet), but isn’t everything the man ever wrote also full of angst about his idleness, indolence, and guilt over work undone? Every time Boswell includes a quotation from Johnson’s Prayers and Meditations on Easter, the theme is self-recrimination for laziness and a pledge to do better in the year ahead. I have no trouble believing that Johnson did stall out on the dictionary work for some time, but I’m not sure that Rambler essays on the evils of procrastination are a good proof of it.

Anyhow, I’ll be curious to see what sort of evidence McDermott produces for this. Could be exciting.

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.

This morning I finished reading Boswell’s Life of Johnson — all twelve hundred pages of it, which I’ve consumed in chunks between other books. The last five hundred pages I read in a long push. I have a nice old hardback Modern Library edition, bought in a used book store in Gold Beach last summer and now covered with my notes in blue pen. It has no index, so I’ve been tagging important pages with the relevant information, phrases and names running along the book’s upper margin. If the paper weren’t so thin you could read those notes like a flip-book: the scribbled stick-figure version of the Life.

Now I’m trying to imagine what a stick figure with a dropsy would look like. Bah.

Next I have about three half-finished Woolf-related books awaiting me; I went on something of a binge at Powell’s. And I still haven’t decided what to do with Louise’s memoir; or, rather, how to plan what to do with it, so I don’t end up with an even greater mess. I did manage to edit one academic paper into shape for submission as a conference paper. Two others — longer, of course, but in better condition — need the same treatment.

I feel as though I’ve swallowed down summer in a gulp, and now fall comes racing closer. I’m not ready yet.