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.

I spent most of Friday and Saturday at the third and final TILTS 2011 conference at UT. I’m not exactly a digital humanist by trade, though I’ve worked on digital humanities projects (like eComma). But I’m interested in humanities computing, to use the older phrase, and the breadth of this conference’s speakers was really wonderful — linguists, literary critics, anthropologists, bibliographers, librarians, and others. Intellectually and socially, it was a nice send-off.

Today I cleaned out — well, 95% cleaned out — the cube I’ve been sharing with T. since 2005, our second year in grad school. Then I stopped at the co-op and ran into Rita, who sold us Lahrs the Saab. I’ve been experiencing a lot of serendipitous meetings lately, even though many of my friends from graduate school have decamped for other cities. It’s strange to be getting ready to leave myself. I’ve been living here for seven years now, and I’m going to miss it terribly, excited as I am about my new job in Wooster.

And now, links to share!

First of all, the fabulous Malinda Lo recommended Alcestis (as well as books by Jacqueline Carey and Robin McKinley) in a short piece she did for NPR last week. This was up on NPR’s Facebook page, as well, which resulted in a number of my friends leaving “holy crap, I know her!” comments on the NPR post. Sometimes social media does give one a warm and fuzzy feeling!

On Thursday night, the 2011 Lambda Literary Awards were announced. Alcestis didn’t win its category, sadly, but it sounds like it was a great evening, and all the winners deserve many congratulations!

250 books by women all men should read. (Also all people, but this is a response to an unsurprisingly dude-dominated reading list from Esquire.)

The opening of Jeffrey Eugenides’s upcoming The Marriage Plot. I want it now.

A Times travel piece on Lake Geneva, emphasis on the Byron/Shelley/Polidori era of its history.

A super sensible piece on ebook piracy by Cecilia Tan.

A Q&A by lovely Austin bookstore BookPeople with Robin Black, primarily about her short stories.

The real origins of Memorial Day.

For some less-heartening news, “worst carbon emissions ever leave climate on the brink.” And Laila Lalami posts Tom Lutz’s open letter to his UC Riverside colleagues and students about the demolition of the UC system. I’m not sure which of those links is scarier.

I’m still finalizing my reading lists and syllabi, which means that I’m still reading post-apocalyptic novels, though now I’m back to some I’ve read before. At the moment I’m re-reading Riddley Walker. I’d forgotten just how virtuosic it is. I wish everybody who loved Cloud Atlas knew about this book, too.

Still finishing up some dissertation business, but I had to pop in here to share this: a printed collection of The Agony Column of the Times, 1800-1870, from 1881. These are amazing — half are written in code, and the other half are just mysterious and strange. Highly recommended if you want entertainment or inspiration for historical fiction.

This e-text is made available by the California Digital Library, which has a browseable and searchable index.

Also: don’t forget that my paperback Alcestis giveaway on Goodreads runs through March 15. Go here to enter and please do pass the link around.

The gorgeous cover to the right of this text belongs to Elizabeth Loupas’s The Second Duchess, a historical novel inspired by Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” Since Elizabeth’s book will hit shelves on March 1, I asked her if she’d mind writing up some thoughts about her writing and research process, and about fictionalizing real (and already fictionalized) events.

Elizabeth:

First I’d like to thank Katharine for inviting me to write a bit about the intersection between “My Last Duchess” and The Second Duchess, and how researching and writing the book changed my reading of the poem. Thank you, Katharine, and congratulations on the paperback release of your own beautiful, beautiful Alcestis.

I have loved “My Last Duchess” from the time I first read it in junior high. For junior-high-me, it had everything—the glamour of the Renaissance, a darkly brooding narrator, a beautiful and doomed heroine. At first I saw only the surface romance of it. Later, in university classes, I read it more carefully and followed the traditional interpretation—the duke as a madman who murdered his innocent wife out of pride and jealousy and sheer possessiveness. My focus was always on the duke and the duchess and I never really thought about the unseen character of the potential second wife.

Much later, when I was tutoring high school students through writing essays about the poem, it suddenly struck me that there was yet another level to the poem’s story. Who was this second wife? What would she make of her new husband? At that time I did not know any of the historical background, or even that Browning had based the poem on fictionalized versions of historical personages.

So I began to look things up—research! How I love it—and a whole new world opened up to me. The poem’s duke, Alfonso II d’Este, became less a one-note megalomaniacal villain and more a classic Renaissance prince in the mode of Machiavelli. His first duchess, Lucrezia de’ Medici, became less the innocent victim and more a willful seventeen-year-old. (She was only fourteen when she and Duke Alfonso were married, and seventeen when she died.) The duke’s second wife, Barbara of Austria, took on a face and a personality of her own as well—she was twenty-six, old for a first marriage at that time, and ambassadors’ letters are frank about her lack of beauty.

Browning chose one way to fictionalize the relationships of these three people—a way, I think, that reflects his own Victorian sensibilities, his admiration of the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites, and his taste for psychological drama. I wanted to choose a different way. I did. The Second Duchess is the result.

So for me now, there are two ways to read “My Last Duchess.” One is the way Browning intended, and which a million students and critics have expounded—that the duke is a madman and that he had his first duchess murdered. When asked what his meaning was, Browning himself said, “I meant that the commands were that she should be put to death, or he might have had her shut up in a convent.” So this is Browning’s story, and he’s sticking to it. There’s something to be said for it—it’s compelling drama.

The other way to read the poem is with the genuine historical personages in mind. Duke Alfonso was a soldier, a sportsman, a musician. He fought in the French army with his cousin Henri II of France. He was a world-class tennis player—the first written book of rules for tennis is dedicated to him. He was the patron of the first professional female singers in Europe, the Consort of Ladies. So although he was indeed vain, arrogant, and vengeful, he was a sixteenth-century prince and that was what was expected of him.

Young Duchess Lucrezia, so often characterized as an innocent victim of the Duke’s jealousy and madness, was the daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici; she and her sisters were not as sheltered as one might think. (Read the fascinating story of Lucrezia’s older sister Isabella in Caroline P. Murphy’s Murder of a Medici Princess. Isabella plays a critical role in my Lucrezia’s development, and she’s far from innocent.) Even Browning hints at the duchess having a mind of her own: “…and if she let / Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set / Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse…”

It changes everything. I think it makes the poem richer. Browning’s fictionalization, and a re-fictionalization based on the historical record, intertwine with each other for me now as I read, and make my experience of the poem all the more intricate and powerful.

(The Second Duchess, published by Penguin/NAL, will be released March 1, 2011. For complete details see www.elizabethloupas.com. Thanks, Elizabeth, for writing about it here!)

That was a busy week! Two cross-half-the-country trips, both overnight, and I somehow managed to avoid the worst snarls of weather-related travel drama. But I’m very glad to be back in Austin, where it’s supposed to hit 70 this weekend. Texas, sometimes I love you a lot.

I keep tagging things to post here and didn’t even have the time to start a post until Wednesday — when I once again had to get the site taken down to address another security issue. Sigh. And once again, all is now fixed and fine. But I do wish whatever opportunistic bot has grown fond of my site would leave it alone.

Here are some of the things I’ve been wanting to link:

• Anne Sexton reading her poetry and being precisely as magnetic and dramatic as you’d imagine.
• On the topic of women writers, VIDA’s incredibly disheartening charts comparing the presence of women writers in popular print outlets to their presence as reviewers, etc.
• Contact your members of Congress and urge them to support the National Endowment for the Humanities (and NPR, and Planned Parenthood, while you’re at it).
• The text of Much Ado About Nothing, because something made me think of it while I was writing Killingly the other day. (The scene with Beatrice refusing Count Pedro, specifically.)
• Rice will be hosting THATCamp Texas in April.
• Are you female and anemic, and have you been told that you’re anemic because you’re female? Here’s an instructive study in how gendering health problems isn’t always a great idea.
• Francis Ford Coppola talks about being a director, creativity, and confidence.
• The Stanford Literary Lab publishes a report on studying computer analysis of genre; unsurprisingly, it’s complicated: “You take David Copperfield, run it through a program without any human input – ‘unsupervised’, as the expression goes – and … can the program figure out whether it’s a gothic novel or a Bildungsroman? The answer is, fundamentally, Yes: but a Yes with so many complications that it is necessary to look at the entire process of our study. These are new methods we are using, and with new methods the process is almost as important as the results.”

The other thing that’s been holding my attention this week while I should be working on more diss revisions is the uprising in Egypt. I’ve been to Egypt once, in the summer of 2000, just after my first year of college. The tourism industry there was still reeling from the attacks on tourists in the 1990s, and of course it would grow even worse after 2001. My experience of the country was entirely a tourist’s experience and fraught with all the troubling dynamics that accompany American tourism, plus a few extra twists to those dynamics introduced by the fact that I was blonde, barely eighteen, not a speaker of Arabic, and traveling with my parents. And it was also amazing, for all the reasons you’d expect given my history geekiness — the river, the temples, the star-painted ceilings, the Hellenistic-era graffiti, the little round bellies on the relief sculptures. The National Museum, which people on the street linked arms to protect after looting during the protests this week, just as they did the Library of Alexandria.

I remember our female Coptic Christian guide in Cairo — every time violence against the Copts is in the news I think about her — and the young man who guided our group on the Nile. I’ve been hoping that they’re safe. Now I also hope that they’re exhilarated. I’m so glad Mubarak has finally stepped down and has ceded power to the military, who seem, at least, to be more open to the people’s demands than he ever was. And I wish every bit of good luck in the universe to the Egyptians and their hard-won democracy.

Bliss: not having a headache after days of lingering migraine. Of course, I made up for it by taking a fierce tumble while I was out running on an especially rocky trail this morning and whacking the hell out of my knee. I don’t even know what I tripped on. Sigh.

While I’m sitting on the sofa with an ice pack, here are some links:

A lengthy and fascinating interview with Cynthia Ozick at the Paris Review, in which Ozick typed her responses to the interviewer’s spoken questions. And here’s the Times review of Ozick’s new novel Foreign Bodies, a reworking of The Ambassadors. I really want to read this!

Maud Newton’s grandmother’s recipe to make you “the skinniest, shittiest, sexiest, drunkest, bastard in town.” In 30 days. In case you’re on a deadline or something.

Rachel Manija Brown on “what freeze/fight/flight” has felt like for her, as a resource for writers.

A forthcoming collection of essays about alternative academic careers in the humanities, to be published online and freely available. (Can anyone tell me why people use “#alt-ac” as the alternate academic tag even though Twitter doesn’t recognize hyphenated hashtags? Is there something wrong with “#altac,” or even “#alt_ac”?)

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.

Linky post! Because I’m a bit headachey again.

• Women studying anatomy, circa 1905, via Twitter, as usual; I’m definitely going to be using this as a reference for Killingly.
• This dog has been appearing at Greek demonstrations for the last two years. He has to belong to a protester — he is wearing a collar. But it’s awfully easy to think of him as some little god of protest — Eris as a mutt?
• And speaking of little gods, do read Sarah Johnson’s long interview with Guy Gavriel Kay, in which they discuss, among other things, writing historical fiction that treats the culture’s religion as real rather than symbolic (something I’m also interested in, of course).
• See also David Mitchell’s essay in the Telegraph about historical fiction. Tonally, this feels a little weird to me; it’s very cheery and flip. Mitchell has just published a historical novel, though apparently not on purpose, as he explains: “I didn’t set out to write a historical novel just for the heck of it – you’d have to be mad.” (You would? Also, who ever writes a novel “just for the heck of it?”) The breezy tour through the history of historical fiction also rang a bit false for me at times, though that’s partly because I love nothing better than nitpicking at other people’s generalizations about eighteenth-century literature. I also find his suggestion about “Bygonese” both accurate and, again, a little tonally weird; as with the whole piece, it’s written in a manner that suggests it’s more original than it is, especially since Mitchell then suggests a set of features common to historical-fiction dialogue (“Commonly, shall is used more often than will …”) and lists errors to avoid (using ahistorical vocabulary: “such as brinkmanship: duh, it’s a Cold War term.” As Omar would say: indeed). I’d love to see Mitchell write a piece about historical fiction intended for historical fiction writers and readers rather than a general newspaper audience.

From McSweeney’s, Death Metal Lyric or William Blake Quote? Examples:

1. “Drive your cart and your plow over the bones of the dead.”
2. “We are Satan’s generation.”
3. “As I was walking among the fires of hell, delighted.”

Indeed.

Also, George Washington has some major late fees.

Via Elizabeth Chadwick on Twitter, I found this lovely set of photos of an experiment in Greek hairstyles done by students at Fairfield University. A small group of women with hair of the appropriate length and thickness were given braids like those on the Erechtheion marble caryatids who support the South Porch of the Acropolis. The shot-by-shot demonstration of the braiding is pretty remarkable.

Alcestis lived earlier than the era of the Acropolis, but I always imagined her wearing fairly similar braids.

Regarding more modern research, here’s a neat blog post by Richard Oram of the Harry Ransom Center (where I worked as an intern for two years) about “decline letters,” including a few examples by Edmund Wilson and G. B. Shaw. I actually found one from Wilson in a collection while doing other research for a patron and made Rich a copy; in fact, I made a bunch of copies for the staff, because it’s such a great little document. I had my copy tacked up over my inbox for the duration of my job there.

And finally: a hilarious takedown of Twilight‘s prose style. Such as it is.