I’m sitting in a coffeeshop in downtown Santa Cruz, waiting out the day until my evening flight back to Austin after attending the Dickens Universe on the Santa Cruz campus. My university sends two students every year, and the professor who accompanied us has been going for more than twenty years. This year’s books were Hard Times and Gaskell’s Mary Barton. The grad-student Dickens experience involves three lectures a day, a seminar for grad students, and some sort of other work — a pedagogy workshop, a writing workshop, presentation training, or co-teaching Elderhostel/undergrad/local students. I co-taught — it was wonderful. We had a small class of involved, well-read, interested students, and even after five days of discussing the same novels, they were still talking after our last class session ended on Friday.

Yesterday afternoon a group of the remaining grad students took the bus down to Natural Bridges State Park and sat on the beach. We left behind a sand-castle version of Coketown, which really looked more like a castle than a mill; but it was a really good castle. I wasn’t a castle-builder. My biggest accomplishment yesterday was not getting sunburned.

I’ve also been trying to think about new fiction-writing projects, probably in reaction to having spent the last month writing dissertation prospectus material just about every day. I found a nice little idea while I was looking through microfilm reels of the NY Journal American for a patron’s order at work last week. I really hate microfilm because it makes me feel so seasick and headachey — I wish I could skim through the JA archive in my brain somehow, because it’s so full of strange, vivid, violent stories. Death all over the pages, but interesting early c20 deaths, reported in the lurid house style: “Woman Shot by Woman,” that kind of thing. We’ll see if or when I have time to write this one. It still needs to grow.

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.

You can also find me on Twitter now, far more frequently than here. Turns out that prospectus-brain can easily manage tiny “what are you doing?” posts. Prospectus-brain can also handle: fussing with new Wordpress installations for the digital humanities project update blog (link soon!); googling gluten-free places to eat in Austin; reading NY Times articles. Prospectus-brain needs to get back to the actual prospectus, however.

It turns out that if one forgets to update one’s Wordpress installation, saucy little link-farmers running exploit scripts will look upon one’s mostly-dormant blog as fertile ground. I’ve just gone back and peeled hidden links out of half my old posts. Feh. (If you read this blog via RSS, you might still be able to see the “hidden” links at the bottom of the post that appeared earlier this morning, which was also generated by the link-farmers, not by me. I’ve deleted that post on the blog.) All should be fixed and safe now, I hope.

I guess this is a sign that I ought to update more regularly. (And remember to upgrade Wordpress on occasion.) I haven’t been doing much writing lately; hardly any fiction or non-fiction that isn’t graduate-school-related, and only a short paper for a class, in addition to work on my prospectus notes. Mostly I write email: to patrons at the Ransom Center, answering research queries, to other eComma team members, to my parents and friends. I wrote the short paper last week, and it was the hardest paper I’ve written in a while — not because the topic itself was difficult to tackle (although that’s true) but because, as I’d just discovered, the migraine preventative drug I’m taking was affecting my ability to write and to speak. It was weird. “Difficulty finding words” doesn’t express the strangeness of losing the word for “roof tile” when you’re trying to describe your house to a friend on the phone. By a week and a half ago, the verbal block was happening at least ten times a day.

By next Wednesday, I’ll be off that preventative completely. I can find a lot of words to describe how happy I feel about it, but most of them are dirty.

Anyway, I promise — promise! — to be back soon to write about what I’m doing this summer and why I’ve added links to the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and HASTAC to my blogroll. Also, there will be probably be cat pictures. Just fair warning.

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.

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 whiplash-inducing reading experience: reading A Long Day’s Journey Into Night after a semester of reading Shakespeare. I haven’t bounced that hard off a text in a while.

I did finish the play, mostly because my grandmother mentions it several times in the course of her memoir. Her family life was nothing like the Tyrones’ in an emotional sense, but the superficial details of situation are similar: a mother with beautiful red-brown hair, a father who keeps throwing money into failed land purchases. She has a habit of making comparisons to works she must have read long ago — she also compares her mother to Isabel Archer at another point, and the only similarity there is that Isabel and her mother were both beautiful and stoic. I’m still tempted to use it as an excuse to re-read Portrait of a Lady, though.

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.

I’m doing some research on Anglo-Dutch relations in the mid-seventeenth century. This means, among other things, paging through EEBO results. At the top of the sixth page of results, I found this:

The Dutch-mens pedigree or A relation, shewing how they were first bred, and descended from a horse-turd, which was enclosed in a butter-box. Together with a most exact descripton of that great, huge, large, horrible, terrible, hideous, fearful, … prodigious, preposterous horse that shit the same turd; who had two faces on one head, the one somwhat resembling the face of a man, the other the face of a horse, the rest of his body was like the body of an horse, saving that on his shoulders he had two great fish finns like the finns of whales, but far more large: he lived somtime on land, but most in water; his dyet was fish, roots, … A very dreadful accident befel him, the fear hereof set him into such a fit of shiting, that he died thereof: … Also how the Germans following the directions of a conjurer, made a very great box, and smeared the in-side with butter, and how it was filled with the dung which the said monstrous horse shit: out of which dung within nine days space sprung forth men, women, and children; the off-spring whereof are yet alive to this day, and now commonly known by the name of Dutchmen; as this following relation will plainly manifest.

And that’s just the title.