First, read this interview with Ana Menendez at The Rumpus. Ana taught the first workshop I took in graduate school, which guided the revisions of the first three chapters of Alcestis. Her new book sounds delightfully odd.
Then read Kari Kraus’s op-ed in the Times about digital preservation and archives, which opens by discussing Bruce Sterling’s donation of his archive to the Ransom Center.
I also liked this post by Molly Wizenberg, talking about the kind of writing-avoidance we all practice sometimes. (You can tell me that you don’t, but I won’t believe you.)
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.
See accompanying image for an illustration of what the oncoming semester feels like.
I’m just about done prepping a new class — an intro English lit class, “Women’s Popular Genres” — and I’ve finished my wonderful two-year internship at the Harry Ransom Center, where I worked in the Public Services department. I’m finishing up my first dissertation chapter, trying to stay on top of the book world, writing fellowship applications, and awaiting a galley copy of my first academic publication, which needs marking up. Among other things. Have I mentioned how hot this summer has been in Austin? Only twelve million times? Sorry.
The other thing I’ve done recently is race through Tana French‘s first two books, In the Woods and The Likeness. My mother sent me the first one and I stayed up till one-thirty on the night before my last day at the Ransom Center in order to finish it and read so fast I gave myself a headache. I actually enjoyed The Likeness even more, though, and not just because of French’s marvelously well-done homage to Donna Tartt’s The Secret History (which French names as “both my favorite literary novel and my favorite crime novel” — oddly enough, the reading guide for The Likeness includes not a single mention of The Secret History). Highly recommended.
Here’s a news story that wouldn’t be at all out of place in one of French’s books.
And, to conclude, a surprisingly pleasant and edifying back-and-forth between Matthew Cheney and Tonaya Thompson, an assistant editor at Tin House, about Tin House’s standards for genre material.
Now: back to my to-do list.
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.
This will probably be a recurring feature, because… yes.
- The scuzzy salmon-pink Chucks Robert De Niro wore in Great Expectations.
- Knopf rejection sheets for works by Joyce Carol Oates, V.S. Naipaul, Italo Calvino, Salman Rushdie.
- David Mamet’s (extremely detailed) baby book, complete with report cards from pre-school–apparently he handled scissors very safely.
- Houdini’s collection of magic-related manuscript materials.
- Ms. for a minor Beckett work, which I needed to measure in order to answer a patron’s query.
- A rather accomplished landscape sketch by Charlotte Brontë, with a title written in by her mother.
- Publicity photographs of a famous blackface performer, in and out of costume and paint.
- Ink on paper self-portrait by Henry Miller. T. was disappointed to learn that the self-portrait was not at all pornographic.
- A small model concept car designed by Norman Bel Geddes that looks far more like a spaceship than like an automobile.
Not much to report otherwise; I’m studying French like a fiend, doing dissertation-related reading, and working up grant proposals for an exciting new digital humanities project in our department. More on that once we have a good demo up, I hope.
So, a little while ago, I said that I wanted to go paw through the Knopf rejection letters.
I went into work the next day and my boss asked me (and another intern) to — you guessed it — paw through the Knopf rejection letters. We’re putting together a mini-exhibit to highlight the NY Times article, which means that we’ve looked at the letters and records Oshinsky mentioned and picked the ones that’ll work best on display. The exhibit will probably be up by the end of the week.
Have I mentioned that I love my new job? I love my new job.
Not long before I began my new HRC job, I discovered (thanks to my father’s internet sleuthing) that the HRC held a query letter from my grandmother to the Alfred A. Knopf publishing company. She wrote to them in the mid-1950s to ask if they’d want to publish a novel based on her life — a kind of “female Tom Sawyer story,” as she put it. They didn’t. Twenty-five years later she wrote the memoir manuscript I’m currently adapting; twenty-five years after that, I got the HRC internship.
On our first day of orientation, I had just enough time to glance at the letter and to laugh a little at how Louise-ish it is, how her style hadn’t really changed much in twenty-five years. The rejection letters are filed in a different set of manuscript boxes and are uncataloged. There’s a binder in the reading room, I think, that lists their contents. I’m planning to look for their response to Louise soon, though if it was a form letter, it may not have been saved, I suppose.
This morning the NY Times Book Review ran a story (by a UT professor) about the rejection letters and reader reports in the Knopf collection. Now I just want to sit down and look through all of them.
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.
Next week’s New Yorker contains a long article about the Harry Ransom Center, its collections, and its director, Tom Staley (with whom I had a lovely conversation when I interviewed there in April). Here’s the article’s introductory paragraph, which should give you some sense of why I’m so excited about interning at the HRC:
The Harry Ransom Humanities Research Center, the literary archive of the University of Texas at Austin, contains thirty-six million manuscript pages, five million photographs, a million books, and ten thousand objects, including a lock of Byron’s curly brown hair. It houses one of the forty-eight complete Gutenberg Bibles; a rare first edition of “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland,” which Lewis Carroll and his illustrator, John Tenniel, thought poorly printed, and which they suppressed; one of Jack Kerouac’s spiral-bound journals for “On the Road”; and Ezra Pound’s copy of “The Waste Land,” in which Eliot scribbled his famous dedication: “For E. P., miglior fabbro, from T. S. E.” Putting a price on the collection would be impossible: What is the value of a first edition of “Comus,” containing corrections in Milton’s own hand? Or the manuscript for “The Green Dwarf,” a story that Charlotte Brontë wrote in minuscule lettering, to discourage adult eyes, and then made into a book for her siblings? Or the corrected proofs of “Ulysses,” on which James Joyce rewrote parts of the novel? The university insures the center’s archival holdings, as a whole, for a billion dollars.
Getting the internship there feels rather like Christmas, or a birthday, or perhaps a bit like getting zapped back in time to see the Library of Alexandria. You might say I’m looking forward to it.
