Links! Because my brain is turning into dissertation mush.

• A. L. Kennedy interviewed about her new short story collection. I laughed at the last question, as will you all.
• Dinosaur Comics on TERRIFYING ROMANCE STORIES. Whenever I want to post about romance in the future, I may do it with dinosaur clip-art. It just makes everything better.
• FDR’s Third Inaugural recorded. No sound, but it is in color.
• Matt Gross’s new travel column for the Times begins with an article about Tangier, a place I would really like to go, assuming I could find a way to feed myself there (couscous everywhere, I imagine).
• And on that note, today is Celiac Awareness Day. I don’t talk much here about having celiac disease, partly because all it really means for me is that I have to eat gluten-free forever and ever. But 97% of people who have it remain undiagnosed, and undiagnosed celiac means severely elevated cancer risks and more unpleasant stuff. (It was even the mystery illness on House once! I felt validated and also amused.) If you have ongoing health problems, do yourself a favor and get the blood antibody test, just in case.

Here’s what revising this dissertation chapter feels a little like, right now:

I’ve added some new material to the site this week — pages containing my CV and an overview of my teaching experience at UT. I’m afraid this site needs to be all things to all people: a useful source of information about Alcestis and about me for readers interested in the book, a professional web presence, a place to point search committees considering my applications for teaching positions.

And, also, you know, not boring.

In the interest of not being boring, I’ve also slimmed down the number of other pages on the site a bit. My old summer reading lists (from 2006 and 2007) have gone private, though you can still ponder my book preferences on Goodreads if that’s your thing — I never did manage to go back and add many books read before I joined the site, but I’m reasonably good about updating it because I love the idea of Goodreads so much. (And because I sometimes look at reader reviews of my book, fine, I admit it.)

I’m going to try to keep up the pace of posting I managed through most of the spring and early summer, or something approaching it. I’m officially on fellowship now, though, and my main goal needs to be to follow Dear Sugar’s advice. That means I really should not be spending time looking at beautiful fake Criterion DVD covers or watching Joseph Gordon-Levitt insist to the world that you make him feel like a natural woman. It also means that I may go quiet here occasionally. But I’ve really enjoyed blogging more regularly this year, and with the paperback release of Alcestis coming up in February, I hope to continue to have plenty to say.

The last two weeks of the fiction class I’m teaching are essentially solid workshop. We’ve had a few breaks to discuss general questions about writing and one very good discussion about “Hills Like White Elephants” (including a bit of a digression re: absinthe, the legality and appeal thereof), but it’s almost all student fiction at this point. We have one week left and they’re going strong; I’m really pleased.

It’s strange to feel September coming and not be preparing to teach or take classes. I do have a couple of interviews in the works, so expect more Alcestis-related posts here soon. And, of course, I have links:

• An interview with Jeffrey Kurland, the costume designer for Inception.
• A promo site for Inception with a mock-up manual for the PASIV device used to sedate dreamers.
• One of the most bizarre things I’ve read in a while: an account of the oral history and mythology of South African prison gangs.
• A new book on surprising Greek and Roman cultural practices, including Alexander the Great’s request to be embalmed in honey after death.
• A historical mystery about the disappearance of Joseph Force Crater, a New York State Supreme Court judge, in 1930.

I went to see Inception for a second time, in an IMAX theatre. Several things happened:

• I enjoyed it more this time than the first time. It really is a lovely-looking movie.
• I got to hear an even larger audience of people sigh frustratedly in unison at the final scene. I still don’t get this, by the way — once you see the REDACTED SPOILER THING, how can you not know what Nolan is going to do with that scene?
• I traumatized myself by thinking about what it would be like to watch Mysterious Skin in IMAX. (Giant hands on Joseph Gordon-Levitt’s skinny chest!) We watched that for the first time this week, and I’ll admit that I don’t understand its good reviews, either, much as I adore JGL; talk about movies structured as if they’re setting up surprising reveals when they aren’t.

I still don’t think Inception is a perfect masterpiece or even much of a mystery, but I’ve enjoyed thinking about it. If you also enjoy thinking about it, you might be interested to know that Hans Zimmer’s score is based on a slowed-down sample of the Edith Piaf song that’s so important to the dreamers (via Merrie Haskell). This is extra interesting to me because the Crystal Castles song that I mentioned in my last Inception post — “Violent Dreams,” the one that Zimmer’s score reminded me of — is also based on a slowed-down sample of a different song (Stina Nordenstam’s “A Walk in the Park”), as I discovered when I was googling it after seeing the movie the first time. Intriguing that the auditory landscape of dreams is slowed-down music, and that somehow my brain recognized that before I knew that Zimmer’s score or the Crystal Castles song had used that technique.

Other interesting (and spoilery) Inception links: the one about Cobb’s wedding ring, and the one with a bingo card for Christopher Nolan movies.

They will come and speak to your fiction workshops! Last Friday, the fabulous Maureen McHugh visited my summer fiction class and spent about 75 minutes talking with my students. In preparation for her visit, they’d read a story from her currently in-development collection of post-apocalyptic short fiction, and they’d also read the first 25 pages of The Road as a counterpoint.

Maureen on the right, talking to one side of the table

We talked about Maureen’s ARG company No Mimes. She walked the students through the development of a typical ARG project and described the many ways that working in the ARG world is different from writing prose fiction, by yourself, at your computer — and the many sorts of knowledge she’s gained from writing in a fiction-adjacent field.

We talked about the story the students read, “After the Apocalypse,” which follows a mother and daughter trying to go north to Detroit — not south, like McCarthy’s father and son — after the world falls apart. Maureen explained how she viewed her story as existing in conversation with McCarthy’s novel, but not offering a direct response to it (though we did offer some direct responses to the novel in class!). She also noted which elements of the story had changed in response to workshop feedback.

We also talked about Twitter and about communities of writers; Maureen is @maureenmcq on Twitter, for reference. I first read one of Maureen’s books when I was in college (China Mountain Zhang, still one of my favorite books), but I got to know her personally after becoming friendly with a group of Austin writers I met through Twitter. One of my favorite things about the writing world on Twitter is how generous many established writers are with their time, with their RTs of former students’ excited announcements, with their enthusiasm about new books. Maureen’s visit to our class was just another instance of that kind of generosity, and we had a great time.

This week, my students are workshopping their first pieces of fiction (and doing an excellent job of it). After a week and a half of class every day, I think we’re all starting to realize that an intensive summer fiction workshop will, in fact, be intensive. For all of us. But with judicious applications of cookies and porcupines that think they’re dogs, I think we’ll manage just fine.

Anyway, I’m afraid it’s links all the way down today:

• Via Gwynne Garfinkle, this recap of a Readercon panel about New England horror that I so wish I could’ve attended. Killingly is New England gothic, I think, rather than horror, but after reading The Passage I’m more willing to think of horror as something that sneaks into many other genres. (I don’t have a blog category for Killingly stuff! This must be remedied at once.)
• Fabulous illustrations of characters from The Wire (though Snoop’s the only woman represented so far; odd). I like Freamon’s the best, but then I usually like Freamon best. (Via David Schwartz on Twitter.)
• Susana Daniel’s essay in Slate about the purgatorial decade she spent writing and not writing her first novel.
• The most charming interview with Bill Murray, who rarely gives them. It concludes with the interviewer asking Murray about the rumor that he likes to sneak up behind people in NYC, cover their eyes with his hands, and ask, “Guess who?” Murray’s answer: “[long pause] I know. I know, I know, I know. I’ve heard about that from a lot of people. A lot of people. I don’t know what to say. There’s probably a really appropriate thing to say. Something exactly and just perfectly right. [long beat, and then he breaks into a huge grin] But by God, it sounds crazy, doesn’t it? Just so crazy and unlikely and unusual?”

My first week of teaching is over! Or sort of over — my students just turned in their first assignments, so I’ll be reading those this weekend. We spent most of this week reading and discussing published short fiction and we begin workshopping their own work on Monday.

I am very sleepy this morning, not least because T. talked me into attending the midnight showing of Inception with him on Thursday night. Vaguely spoilery reaction below — skip if you’re not into that kind of thing. Non-spoilery reaction: it’s fun and you should see it.

Beyond that, I think A. O. Scott’s review is right on:

… though there is a lot to see in “Inception,” there is nothing that counts as genuine vision. Mr. Nolan’s idea of the mind is too literal, too logical, too rule-bound to allow the full measure of madness — the risk of real confusion, of delirium, of ineffable ambiguity — that this subject requires. The unconscious, as Freud (and Hitchcock, and a lot of other great filmmakers) knew, is a supremely unruly place, a maze of inadmissible desires, scrambled secrets, jokes and fears. If Mr. Nolan can’t quite reach this place, that may be because his access is blocked by the very medium he deploys with such skill.

I had the same reaction to the movie that Scott did — I really enjoyed it and admired the caper-plot machinery, but I felt slightly unsatisfied at the end. I think the problem is that the plot is designed, like just about all of Nolan’s plots, to turn on a series of reveals. Except that these reveals aren’t really surprising. You can see them coming from at least a few minutes away, if not more. T. and I were both perplexed at the critical habit of describing the movie as confusing or hard to follow — it’s complex but incredibly regular, and I don’t think I ever got confused about what was happening or where/when the action was occurring. (Roger Ebert’s review, which is very positive and definitely worth reading, does this a bit; he also points out, interestingly, that Nolan was working on this script while he filmed Memento. [Obligatory mention here of how much I enjoy Ebert's Twitter feed, if you aren't familiar with it!])  I found The Prestige‘s reveals more satisfying, and its moral sense more resonant, too. You would think that a movie that is explicitly about the very foundations of reality would have higher stakes than a movie about magicians, but it seems to me that Nolan might be better at approaching ethical questions sideways rather than head-on. (Do not get me started about the question of ethics in relation to the dreadful The Dark Knight.)

The other weakness of the movie, for me, was the lack of development of the relationships among the characters, especially in comparison to the character-driven drama of The Prestige. This is maybe a flaw inherent in the caper plot, though I think even Ocean’s 11 did a better job of creating real people to fill out its team (and there were, as you’ll note, eleven of them). I liked all the team members just fine — I think I will always adore Joseph Gordon-Levitt, even though I couldn’t get through (500) Days of Summer — but their interactions are shallow. The movie also wastes a chance to do something really interesting, which I won’t discuss much here because it would be super-spoilery, by eliding one large chunk of time that would have allowed it to investigate the relationship between DiCaprio’s character and Watanabe’s character, and to be weirder. I liked Marion Cotillard a lot, which was a nice change from Public Enemies in which she just seemed like a pretty but bizarre casting choice and reminded me that I really do want to see her Piaf movie. (Okay, one spoilery side note regarding her character: Nolan is really obsessed with giving his main male characters idealized wives who died in ways they may be culpable for.) And the movie also made me want to look up a few of the other actors, especially Tom Hardy, who is delightfully smirky.

In sum: not perfect, but it is a gorgeous movie. It will make you clutch the arm of the person sitting next to you, and it may make you think about it after it’s over. And if you have a partner who likes Crystal Castles, you will definitely be unable to get this song out of your head after the movie, as it’s very like the movie score in some ways:

Watching a room full of students busily writing fiction, in response to a writing exercise given on the first day of class.

I’m bogged down in dissertation-land this month, trying to finish a chapter before I start teaching in mid-July.

Things I have been doing lately, in addition to writing my dissertation:

• Pondering the confluence of events that leads pets to get sick immediately before one’s partner leaves on a scheduled trip.
• Washing a lot of bedding. See previous point.
• Watching season 1 of Leverage and pondering the caper plot. It’s a silly, fun show with a ridiculously sentimental frame story, but it’s also surprisingly ambitious — a caper a week?
• Preparing teaching materials for my fiction workshop, including a basic website. (Not totally complete yet.) Wondering why Drupal is so much more annoying than WordPress.

Links to recommend:

• Alexander Chee’s great series of posts on MFA programs: when an MFA degree is a good idea, how he chose his own program, etc. Start with this post — the others are linked from it, including this brief FAQ about MFA programs, which is worth a look.
• This NPR story on a neurologist who studies the brains of psychopaths — and who found his own brain scans somewhat unnerving. (Not dissimilar, in a sense, to the book by Jessica Stern that I mentioned last week, in which she connects her own traumatic history to her study of terrorism.)
• The formation of a new continental rift valley in Africa.
• Tuscany via Henry James.
• Ernesto Neto’s installation at the Hayward Gallery at the Saatchi in London. A friend posted photos on Facebook; just beautiful.
• The sweetest story of a marriage I’ve read for a while.