It’s been a weird fall and winter.

Lots of exciting things occurred, not all of which will be written about here. The book deal you know about, and the dissertation prospectus exam. The biggest thing in my life for the last few years, though, has been my father’s illness. He was diagnosed with non-Hodgkins lymphoma in 2003, just after he retired (and just before I graduated from college). He had loads of chemo, a stem cell transplant, treatment with monoclonal antibodies. In the end, nothing worked — or rather, nothing worked for long enough. The cancer always came back. He died on December 23, 2008, at home in Oregon.

He was an amazing man and an amazing father. If you’d like to read his obituary, you can do so here.

And in December — I had a book to revise. I know that sounds strange; how could I, while Dad was so sick? And the answer is, really, that I could because I wanted to and because I had to; that’s how we’ve managed everything for the last three years, the years when he was really sick. I spent a lot of time at home whenever I could, but my parents felt strongly that I should not abandon my graduate work, and I did what I had to in order to manage both responsibilities. My father kept going, despite feeling like crap most of the time, because there were still things he wanted to do. My mother kept going, which in her case meant “kept taking wonderful care of my father and being an awesome human being.” You just keep going, and you do what you can to be happy.

It made my father tremendously happy, by the way, to know that this novel was going to be published.

I turned in the revised manuscript of Alcestis this last Sunday and then promptly thought of about eight other things I wanted to add to it. So this week I wrote up an acknowledgments page, toyed with and then discarded the idea of adding a note about why I chose to use Romanized Greek names (which I guess should really be called Anglicized Romanized Greek names), and fixed one weird naming choice I’d made — and now I think I’m done, at least until my lovely editor lets me know if she wants any other last-minute changes. Soon there will be page proofs, and I’ll need to ask some of my very favorite writers if they might be willing to look at the book and say kind things about it. And oh god there are so many other things I have to do this semester. One of those things is to post here more often. I know I say that all the time, but I really will do my best. I’m hoping it’ll be a better spring.

Saki
Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

Une nouvelle chatte chez nous! She is delightfully funny and weird and precious. Before us, she lived in a house where she hid a lot, and she’s, er, enjoying her freedom; it’s kind of like living with a tiny Rosencrantz, who’s always discovering some law of physics by sheer accident. And then purring.

I could go on — approximately forever — but I won’t, since I have an annotated bibliography to polish up.

I’ll try to write more soon about my recent conference trip to SEASECS and some new developments with our digital humanities project.

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.

Not long before I began my new HRC job, I discovered (thanks to my father’s internet sleuthing) that the HRC held a query letter from my grandmother to the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company. She wrote to them in the mid-1950s to ask if they’d want to publish a novel based on her life — a kind of “female Tom Sawyer story,” as she put it. They didn’t. Twenty-five years later she wrote the memoir manuscript I’m currently adapting; twenty-five years after that, I got the HRC internship.

On our first day of orientation, I had just enough time to glance at the letter and to laugh a little at how Louise-ish it is, how her style hadn’t really changed much in twenty-five years. The rejection letters are filed in a different set of manuscript boxes and are uncataloged. There’s a binder in the reading room, I think, that lists their contents. I’m planning to look for their response to Louise soon, though if it was a form letter, it may not have been saved, I suppose.

This morning the NY Times Book Review ran a story (by a UT professor) about the rejection letters and reader reports in the Knopf collection. Now I just want to sit down and look through all of them.

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.