Because that’s what you get this summer, apparently. I’ve been working on Killingly and course prep and an eighteenth-century abstract this week, and I’m wiped.

The Hairpin has a great interview with Kate Beaton, who talks smartly about many things, including dramatizing history in comic form and why people reacted so weirdly to her calling-out of sexism in comics. And for your enjoyment, a recent Hark! A Vagrant strip sure to delight c18 nerds: Fop Gun.

Thriller writer Will Lavender describes his path from writing literary fiction he wasn’t satisfied with to writing what he loves.

A long piece in the Atlantic about the development of the current YA market.

And a lovely review in PW for my friend Merrie Haskell’s forthcoming middle-grade book, The Princess Curse.

First: Ed Battistella of Literary Ashland just posted an interview with me about Alcestis, Killingly, my dissertation, and numerous other topics. I read from Alcestis at Ashland’s wonderful Bloomsbury Books in 2010 and was interviewed for Ashland’s “Open Books, Open Minds” TV program when I was in town. (My parents retired to Ashland, and it’s one of my favorite places on earth.) Many thanks to Ed for the insightful questions!

Second: Diane Havens, the wonderful narrator of Iambik’s audiobook of Alcestis, answers five questions, some of which make me blush. Iambik is offering Alcestis at a 50% discount in June — enter the code “#jiam2011″ at when prompted at checkout.

Third: #YAsaves. I wish I had time to write up a full and thoughtful post about this, but since I’m swamped with moving preparations, course prep, and writing, I’ll just direct you to this excellent overview at Publishers Weekly and to Sherman Alexie’s heartbreaking and inspiring piece in the WSJ in response to Cox Gurdon’s classist stupidity. (It’s not just that Cox Gurdon dismisses teen readers who aren’t sheltered and privileged — it’s that she doesn’t even seem to know that other kids, less lucky kids, read. Or exist, for that matter.)

Over the weekend, Diane Havens, the wonderful narrator of the Iambik audiobook of Alcestis, and Miette Elm of Iambik asked me excellent questions about the book, writing, and audiobooks, including some Proust-questionnaire-style inquiries about my favorite sounds. If you follow the Q&A link, you’ll see a discount code for all Iambik’s titles through the end of the month, too.

I’m in the last push toward finishing up my degree right now, but I’ve been saving up blog material. (And occasionally then deciding not to write a post on it because it was just too annoying to think about in any more detail, cf. Ginia Bellafante’s remarkably silly “girls can’t possibly like Lorrie Moore and The Hobbit at the same time!” review of Game of Thrones and her point-missing follow-up piece. Sorry, couldn’t resist.)

I have managed to go to a couple of readings lately, though — last night was Russell Banks, reading from his forthcoming Lost Memory of Skin, and I’m hoping to make it to Chimamanda Adichie’s reading on Thursday, also at the Joynes Reading Room at UT. A few weeks ago I was fortunate enough to attend the benefit reading for Dean Young held here in Austin. Dean has since received the heart transplant he needed, but he and his family still need support. If you haven’t (or even if you have), do donate here.

In the fall I’ll be teaching a first year seminar and an introduction to poetry and fiction course with some workshopping. I’ve been fascinated by the YA dystopia trend — as are the Independent, the New Yorker, and the New York Times, not to mention countless bloggers — and I’m planning to teach my first year seminar on a related topic. The title will probably be something like “Teenagers and Rebellion in Contemporary SF Dystopia,” or, as somebody shortened it recently, “Teenagers in Dystopia.” So far the book list looks like this:

1984, George Orwell
The Giver, Lois Lowry
Riddley Walker, Russell Hoban
The Knife of Never Letting Go, Patrick Ness
The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
Battle Royale, Koushun Takami (possibly the film version rather than the novel, or with only part of the novel, as the book is lengthy)
Feed, M. T. Anderson
How I Live Now, Meg Rosoff
Never Let Me Go, Kazuo Ishiguro
Moon, Duncan Jones (film)

The books are roughly paired: TKoNLG and Riddley Walker have a lot of similarities, as do The Hunger Games and Battle Royale, and the Anderson and Rosoff books make an interesting contrast (information overload vs. back-to-the-land fantasy). Never Let Me Go and Moon do some similar things investigating selfhood/individuality. Moon is a bit of a cheat since the main character’s not a teenager, but it’s very much about family and coming of age despite that. (Besides, in that scene in which the two characters mimic each other, they might as well be teenagers.) I still need to pick up Octavia Butler’s The Parable of the Sower, since I grabbed The Parable of the Talents by mistake during my last trip to the library to harvest all their YA dystopian fiction.

I’m not sure if I’ll include 1984 and The Giver or not. I’d like to have that context, but I don’t want to over-assign reading, even though these books are fast reads, since I’ll be adding some secondary material too. And there are so many other primary texts I want to include and won’t have time for, already. I hate not putting His Dark Materials on the list, since it is entirely about the process of becoming an adult, but it’s fantasy rather than SF, and it’s long. As it is we’ll be reading a number of first books in trilogies — and talking about domination of the trilogy model in YA fiction, for sure — but I don’t think it would work to read only The Golden Compass.

Among other assignments, I’m hoping the class might be able to work together to build an online taxonomy of contemporary YA dystopia. (Me and Propp again, I tell you.)

This is all still very much in development, so: thoughts? Suggestions?

I was sad to learn yesterday that Diana Wynne Jones had died — I remember, last year, seeing reports that she was quite ill. The Guardian’s obituary gives a lovely account of her writing and her life, which had a pretty rocky start — see her own autobiographical essay (thanks to Zen Cho for the link). Diane Duane also memorializes her in a blog post, here. I didn’t have a deep personal connection to DWJ’s books as a child, though I remember enjoying Witch Week and Charmed Life very much. But I’ve been meaning to read Howl’s Moving Castle ever since seeing the Miyazaki version (which I love as its own story; I’ve heard that it’s very different from the book). Many of the posts I’ve seen this weekend also rhapsodize about Fire and Hemlock. If you’d like to give her books a try, her official website includes a list of all her works.

Speaking of fantasy stories set in the UK, you should read Zen’s: “起狮，行礼 (Rising Lion—The Lion Bows).”

Just a quick set of links right now, because I am actually, gasp, working on Killingly — and therefore looking at things like this, the most perfect and lovely map of the Massachusetts train system in 1898 that you could imagine, and this account of the architectural changes in Pemberton Square in the late 1880s. And did you know that the Boston Police Department has digitized its annual reports back to 1885? I wonder if they were cooking the numbers even then.

So:

• Writers Malinda Lo and Cindy Pon have started DIYA, a site promoting diversity in YA fiction with an accompanying book tour planned. Very exciting!
• A more detailed NY Times article about the first mystery novelist, as a follow-up to the shorter NPR version of the piece I posted a few days ago.
• Two interesting essays about the current state of digital humanities research and digital humanities as a field: “The Meandering through Textuality Challenge” by Stephen Ramsay, and “The (DH) Stars Come Out in LA,” by Matthew Kirschenbaum (one of the most sensible and least defensive reactions to William Pannapacker’s article about a putative DH star system I’ve seen yet).

I’m back from a conference and trying to get myself together. This takes more effort than you’d expect, when in the wake of cross-country trips and one of the Worst Migraines of All Time. Ugh. But I’m slowly making progress, and part of that progress involves posting some reminders here about recent and upcoming news.

Thing 1: I will be leading a discussion of Alcestis for the Blanton Museum of Art Book Club in Austin on January 20. (Tiny sidenote: I’m not actually a graduate of the Michener Program, as that link suggests — my creative writing master’s degree is from the UT English department. I am, however, replacing Ted Hughes as the subject of this book club meeting. No, I am not ever going to get tired of mentioning that.) This discussion is linked to the Robert Wilson Alceste print exhibition currently running at the Blanton. I believe we’ll start at 7 pm, but I’ll try to get confirmation of that this week and will update here. If you’re in the Austin area and want to talk about the book, about misbehaving gods, about historical fiction and adaptation — come by and chat!

Thing 2: Many thanks to the fabulous Karen Healey for including Alcestis in her list of favorite books of the year! (Karen’s novel Guardian of the Dead is awaiting me on my Kindle, to be read on my next trip — since I really can’t justify too much pleasure reading when I’m not traveling, this month.)

Thing 3: The delightful Hipster Book Club people asked me to contribute a top 5 list for their end-of-the-year collection. Go to page 2 of that index and you can enjoy my ramblings about my favorite works of the year featuring post-apocalyptic themes. (My original list was chock full of links, but apparently those got lost somewhere along the way. Ah well.)

Thing 4: I feel weird about doing this, but as I’ve seen a number of other writers mention their Hugo/Nebula eligibility lately — Alcestis is eligible for nomination in the fantasy novel category for both the Nebula Awards (for SFWA members) and the Hugos (if you’re a WSFS member).  I’m not sure if I’m Campbell-eligible this year, but I’ll let you know when I find out.

And a link to conclude: a short NPR piece on who really wrote the first detective novel. The tone of the piece is a little strange — oddly disparaging about mystery-novel clichés, considering that they weren’t clichés when the first one was written — but the information is interesting.

Here’s a Christmas gift: this post, by the delightful Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown (recently the organizer of #mooreandme), which explains why and how Sei Shonagon‘s Pillow Book should seem familiar to contemporary readers:

But the book, despite being written from and about a way of life that ended centuries ago, reads as nigh-freakishly contemporary. In point of fact, it is not just contemporary, but (she said, causing every Japanese classical scholar in the entire world to simultaneously have an aneurysm and die, due to her massive lack of scholarship) bloggy. Reading Sei Shonagon is almost exactly like reading a thousand-year-old Tumblr. It’s about everything, it’s about nothing; it’s deeply boring, it’s riveting; it’s shapeless, it is its own shape; it’s catty, touching, lyrical, banal, witty, self-absorbed, indiscreet, pensive, gossipy, introspective, everything, held together only by the force of Sei Shonagon’s personality.

Dear Lord, Sei Shonagon’s personality. One does not get introduced to it; one ENCOUNTERS it, and hopes the experience leaves no lasting scars. Ivan Morris, the translator of the version I own, sums her up as follows: “A complicated, intelligent, well-informed woman who was quick, impatient, keenly observant of detail, high-spirited, witty, emulative, sensitive to the charms and beauties of the world and to the pathos of things, yet intolerant and callous about people whom she regarded as her social or intellectual inferiors.” Now, there are two things to notice about this passage: First, that Ivan Morris is not so great at summing up (those are a lot of adjectives, Ivan!) and second, that it is absurdly reverent and polite. In fact, Sei Shonagon was not “impatient” or “intolerant” or anything so socially acceptable as those adjectives would imply: Girlfriend was, in a word, fucking mean. She hated children, poor people, ugly people, people in bad outfits, people with an inadequate number of servants, their servants, her servants, servants in general, and everyone else in Japan who had the misfortune to be less intelligent, well-connected, and sophisticated than Sei Shonagon — which, in her view, was everyone, with a few necessary exceptions being made for the Royal Family. She really did love the Royal Family, however!

Shonagon was both bloggy and poetic. Her longer prose entries can be striking and evocative, but her lists do something else, something finer and more unique, something that reminds me of modernist poetry. (The slippery prose-poetry nature of her work seems to be catching if you only borrow her style, too; I wrote something I thought was a piece of flash fiction, after Shonagon, and LCRW published it as a poem.) Maybe the most tumblr-ish of all are the pieces that aren’t quite prose scenes or lists, just opinions, boldly stated. For example:

19. Oxen Should Have Very Small Foreheads

Oxen should have very small foreheads with white hair; their underbellies, the ends of their legs, and the tips of their tails should also be white.

I like horses to be chestnut, piebald, dapple-grey, or black road, with white patches near their shoulders and feet; I also like horses with light chestnut coats and extremely white manes and tails — so white, indeed, that their hair looks like mulberry threads.

I like a cat whose back is black and all the rest white.

[The Pillow Book of Sei Shonagon, transl. and ed. Ivan Morris, 52]

Why should oxen have very small foreheads? They simply should, and Shonagon will tell you about it if you let her. And you should.

I love this short essay by Charles Yu about how all family stories are time travel stories, particularly this bit:

Science fiction allows a writer to selectively question assumptions about the world, about ourselves, to fiddle with this dial, tweak this parameter or that one, then run the simulation, boot up a cosmos and see what happens. For me, it is about possibility more than probability.

I know I always bring up Johnson’s line about Shakespeare approximating the remote and familiarizing the wonderful, but it’s applicable once again — Yu enjoys SF because it allows him to play out a trial to which a person (or a family) could not really be exposed, “and see what happens.” Yes, I say. Yes! Really looking forward to reading Yu’s book.

And on an entirely unrelated note, this book about perfume is worth a look even if you, like me, know nothing about the topic. The reviews are beautifully detailed, crisp, cutting, and wittily allusive. For example, here’s a bit from Luca Turin’s review of Guerlain’s “Quand Vient l’Été,” a “dry floral” that gets three stars out of five:

I’m of two minds about this fragrance: on the one hand, I am not fond of this style, a slightly sour, metallic (helional) floral accord that smells like a sucked silver spoon. On the other hand, this one is beautifully executed and has a prim, starchy prettiness that suggests Edwardian TV drama and passions corseted to the bursting point. It brings to mind Ambrose Bierce’s definition of garters: “An elastic band intended to keep a woman from coming out of her stockings and desolating the country.”

One of the things I love most about the internet is the way niche interests become more accessible to clueless outsiders. Like I said, I know nothing about perfume or its history, but that doesn’t mean I can’t take pleasure in watching people who do deploy their knowledge.

First of all, I was nowhere near campus earlier this week when the shooter opened fire — I was still in Oregon, on the last day of a nice long visit with my mother, who turned 60 this week. I was, however, emailing back and forth with my dissertation director, who was stuck in his office while the SWAT teams searched our building and who, earlier, saw the shooter fire into the pavement near the Dobie Mall building across the street. Another former colleague from the Ransom Center was also quoted in the local news because she was out in that courtyard when the gunshots started. It’s terrible that the shooter died and mystifying that he chose this way to die, but I’m so glad he didn’t actually shoot anyone else in the process.

Anyway: I’m still in catch-up mode right now — I did work a fair amount while I was in Oregon, but this semester continues to be more hectic than I expected. So here, have a big list of links:

• Ann Patchett on plot in the WSJ (outliners represent!).
• Laura Miller on Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx in Salon.
• Elizabeth Chadwick on writing historical fiction about real people.
• A recap of the Margaret Atwood/Ursula K. Le Guin conversation about SF recently held in Portland. I am so sad to have missed this! I was even in Oregon when it happened, but about six hours away and being stomped by a migraine, so.
• Sarah Prineas guest-blogging against authorial self-promotion online.
• An earth-like planet that may sustain life has been found, about 20 light-years away.

And finally, two links relevant to my plans for the evening:

• An interview with Paul Harding, the author of Tinkers.
• Cocorosieland. (They’re playing at Emo’s tonight! I’m so excited.)