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.

This morning I spent a sunny hour picking sour cherries on a farm five minutes from my parents’ house. It was a stunning crop, the trees all thick with brilliant fruit, and almost all of it ripe. The clusters of cherries looked like Pop Art: stark, amazing, slightly translucent red. We picked nineteen pounds, and it wasn’t easy to stop — there were so many, and they were beautiful and so easy to pick.

Then we came home and I wrote while my parents pitted them. I think I got the better end of the deal.

I’m working on The White Silk Tent, my revision of my grandmother’s memoir. I’ve been reading biographical theory to try to situate myself and my strategies: what kind of voice did I want to use, what sort of other research did I want to do? I thought for a while, and then I started writing. And I’m still thinking, of course. But for now, my version contains three kinds of text:

• Sections of Louise’s original manuscript, very slightly edited for clarity
• Biographical sections based on her manuscript but substantially rewritten and edited, and recast in the third person
• Interpolations in my voice which allow me to comment on her memoir, to add information she didn’t have, to interpret things, etc.

And then, likely, documentary material — text and photos from the trunk of family memorabilia she left to accompany the manuscript, and maybe things from the HRC, as well.

My goal for the summer is to get three chapters completed and polished, so that I’ll have a sense of the process involved in writing the book and the amount of time I’ll need to complete it. And then I’ll need to get back to working on academic projects and thinking about my dissertation — which may also be related to biography. (I’m reading Paula Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography now with great interest. And on that note: you can find my new Goodreads page here.)

Farmer’s market

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

I was supposed to be flying to Oregon today, but I flew out Friday, instead — my father, who has cancer, also developed appendicitis. Thanks to airplane mechanical failure, my trip was pretty miserable, but it meant that I was here to help while Dad was in the hospital, and also here to go to the farmer’s market this morning, and to take this picture.

I have fiction-related and scholarly goals for this summer, but I’ll need to be flexible about them. I have started another summer reading list, though. More on that soon.

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.

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.

A view from Cape Perpetua

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

This is the view from the rock shelter built by the CCC atop Cape Perpetua, near Yachats, on the coast. We sat and read here for an hour or so, after walking up to it. (Other photos of the Eugene trip are up at flickr; I tried to post links here before I left for Portland, but dreamhost was having something of a conniption fit.)

Things we did in Portland:

–Went to the main Powell’s four times in four days, plus visits to the technical books store, the cookbook store, and the Hawthorne branch. My stack of books is taller than T.’s. Damn the c18 history section and its collection of Boswell- and Johnson-related items.

–Walked a lot, including a long trek around the west hills after missing the turn-off for the Japanese garden. Note to self: look at the map.

–Ate lots of good cheap food: the lunch buffet at Swagat on NW 21st; sushi happy hour at the Dragonfish bar; pizza and crepes and beer around Hawthorne; and a five-course lunch at the Western Culinary Institute’s Bleu, which is formal dining, but staffed by charming culinary students who function at varying levels of formality. Some of the dishes were only good; most of them were spectacular. The vanilla pot de créme with pink peppercorn flavoring was the best.

–Ogled neighborhoods: we liked the older brick apartments around Northwest near Macleay Park, but Hawthorne has a lively warm scruffiness that I liked more than the upscale blah-ness of 23rd St.

–Walked around the Reed campus, which is pretty and congenial.

–Saw A Scanner Darkly. I can’t remember the last time I was so bored during a movie.

I have no pictures from Portland, though I had my camera with me — I forgot to haul it out. Maybe I’ll take a picture of my stack of Powell’s loot — as it towers over T.’s, mwahahaha.

1. Chasing deer out of the backyard: a picaresque adventure, full of entertaining incidents, naughty language, and large-gauge plastic mesh fencing.
2. Briefly touring the coast of Oregon (between Reedsport and Newport) and spending two days in Eugene. If you’re wondering why I spent two days in Eugene — well, so am I. The actual town part of it isn’t much larger than Ashland, nor is it half as charming. Yachats, however, has one of the most wonderful coffeeshops in the world, a strange little wood-paneled place called Ye Olde Green Salmon, where we had the following lunch: egg, tomato, and mushroom sandwich; cream of onion and potato soup; raspberries, mascarpone, honey, and powdered sugar on little baguette slices; and a maté cocoa.
3. Reading A Room of One’s Own, and then Moll Flanders, which was rather like eating a tart lemon ice and following it with a huge sticky-sweet cloying cinnamon roll bought from a Cinnabon in a regional airport. I loved the Woolf unreservedly (more later on this, I hope), and pestered T. with sections read aloud; I loved Moll too, but it left my mental fingers sticky.
4. Finishing the text correction of my grandmother’s memoir. Now I need to figure out how to revise or alter it to make it work. Expect more posts on this front later. Other things to expect soon: photos from our coast trip and my presence in Portland some time in the next 2.5 weeks.

Today I’m down at the local university library with a pile of art books, as I’ve just started a small data entry project for a professor, labeling eighteenth-century-related images to be used in lectures at UT.

What have you been doing lately?

M. Thomas and I have put together an unofficial guide to Austin for those planning to attend World Fantasy in November. The WFC site has a small official guide to Austin for con-goers, but it’s focused almost entirely on the Arboretum, which is… well, it’s a mall. So: here’s a list of things to know, do, see, and eat in Austin that do not involve malls.

Most of the credit goes to M., who designed and is hosting the site — but be sure to click the link for the second page, wherein you can reap the benefit of my obsession with local restaurants. (Most restaurants have websites, which are easily found by asking Uncle Google.)

As M. notes, this site is in no way affiliated with the WFC, etc., etc. But it has a flying armadillo on it.

For future reference, you can also find the guide link on my sidebar (and my newly uploaded index page). Check it out — and let M. or I know if you have questions, suggestions, etc.