Just to get this out of the way: paperback giveaway! Go to it!
I have brain-drain from lots of dissertation chapter editing, so it’s mostly links tonight:
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.
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.
Today — before the migraine of the week hit, thankfully! — I did an interview with Alex C. Telander of BookBanter, a site with a wonderful and varied collection of book reviews and interviews with authors. My interview will likely run in the May 15 podcast, and I’ll post a link here when it’s live, but you should definitely go check out Alex’s reviews and podcasts now, as well.
I’m now pretty brain-drained from migraine medication, but I do have links to share:
- This video of a 99-year-old woman with glaucoma reading and typing on her new iPad is pretty heartwarming. I remember reading on another blog about somebody’s elderly mother having similar success with a Kindle. Accessibility is a good thing.
- Kabul nightlife (link via Lisa Brackmann on Twitter, I think?): just as crazy as it sounds.
- Time-lapse photography of the Milky way rising over Texas. If that doesn’t make you want to write science fiction, I don’t know what would.
- A brilliant new story by Maureen McHugh, about — you guessed it — zombies: “The Naturalist.”
A few links for today — I hope to be back later with video from the book launch party, too, assuming I’m capable of figuring out iMovie for the first time while suffering from cold-induced stupidity.
First, a story about ancient stone tools discovered on the coast of Crete — on a section of shore covered in soil deposited 100,000 to 190,000 years ago. The tools themselves may be as old as 700,000 years. Previously, the oldest stone tools on Crete were around 10-20,000 years old, so if the dating of these tools is accurate, humans (or pre-humans) were seafarers a lot earlier than previously thought. CRAZY.
New studies of King Tut’s remains reveal that he died of malaria and a broken leg — the hole in his skull was not the cause of death. I could not stop imagining Temperance Brennan speaking the text of this article while I read it, except she’d probably be pricklier and use larger words.
An excellent post about what makes a good title for a story, and how helpful bad titles can be.
It’s a bullet-point kind of day, I’m afraid. First up, Alcestis news!
- Earlier this week, I was interviewed by Kate Ergenbright of UT’s newspaper, the Daily Texan.
- Photos from the book launch party are here, in case you missed them.
- Don’t forget about the AuthorBuzz giveaway of five signed copies of the book: details here.
- I linked this guest post I wrote for Wonders & Marvels last weekend, but it may have gotten buried. If you’re curious about how I decided to afflict poor Hippothoe with asthma, that post is for you.
- This review, by Kelly Lasiter of Fantasy Literature, makes me VERY happy. (I found it on GoodReads. Did you know that it’s really hard to resist looking at your book’s page, even when you’ve logged on intending to add yet another book to your own TBR list? It’s an amazing feeling to see, for example, that people are reading the book at that very moment.)
And some Friday afternoon links:
Another recommendation today, this time for a piece of journalism by Paige Williams: Finding Dolly Freed, a profile of the author of the 1970s alternative-living screed Possum Living (now being republished by Tin House).
Partly due to the continuing pseudonymity of her subject, Williams couldn’t find a magazine willing to buy this article, so she decided to print it herself. She cites Radiohead’s In Rainbows experiment as an inspiration; everyone on Twitter is calling it “indie journalism.” I’d call it one of the best profiles I’ve read lately (between this and Rebecca Skloot’s book, it’s been a good week for nonfiction!).
Also: I’ll testify that an appeal from an individual author can influence me in ways a larger publication can’t — I gave a donation for this article, but I read the Times magazine online every week. (Then again, if Williams wanted a donation every week, I might grow less willing to contribute, too.) It’s an interesting concept, and I’ll be curious to see how well it works for her.
In my last post, I mentioned my recent trip to MLA, the big annual convention for languages & literature academics. It’s kind of an overwhelming experience: hundreds of panels, hundreds more nervous interview candidates, converging on a cold city during the worst possible travel week of the year (the week between Christmas and New Year’s). I’m reliably informed that this year’s MLA was pretty tame due to the poor economy — much smaller and quieter than conventions held even two years ago. There won’t actually be a 2010 MLA; the organizers have finally decided to move it to early January, so next year’s conference will skip right to 2011. (It will also be in LA, which will at least be warm.)
The most fun part of MLA is the exhibitors hall, where publishers set up giant displays, sometimes complete with wine and cheese. I didn’t buy anything — I try to travel light, and also, I’m a poor grad student — but I was lucky enough to snag an ARC of Rebecca Skloot’s The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks. I’ve been aware of this book for a while, thanks to having read some of Skloot’s science journalism and then stumbling across her Twitter feed months ago. Then Skloot herself was on the cover of the issue of Publishers Weekly that reviewed Alcestis – wacky. Anyway, I really love good science writing and hardly ever have a chance to read it these days, so I grabbed the offered ARC from the nice Random House booth person and started reading as soon as I got back to Texas.
This is a stunning book. The story itself is inherently fascinating, but Skloot also does a brilliant job of weaving together her own history with HeLa — the years of research, the frustrating, contentious, and ultimately rewarding relationships she developed with Henrietta Lacks’s family — with the narrative of Henrietta’s death and subsequent “immortal life” in biomedical research after a cluster of her cancer cells were taken by doctors in the “colored” ward at Johns Hopkins in the 1950s. Lacks’s adult children, still suffering the effects of poverty, discrimination, and abuse, struggle to comprehend the facts of the strange life of their “mother cells.” They’re simultaneously desperate for Skloot to publish her story and fiercely afraid that she intends to take advantage of them.
I can’t recommend this book highly enough (and as you can see on Skloot’s page about the book, I’m not the only one). This is the kind of work nonfiction writing is meant to do.
I’m just back from a conference and still stuck in the post-travel blahs — I was in Richmond at the annual meeting of the American Society for Eighteenth Century Studies and managed to get my flights screwed up by thunderstorms in both directions, sigh — but I wanted to share a few things:
Via my friend Elizabeth Scott (whose lovely Something, Maybe is now in bookstores!), a fascinating link about the cover design process for a new book about Columbine.
A New York Times article about a 40-foot clonal amoeba colony in a cow pasture near Houston.
In other news, I’ve started doing more in-depth research for my new novel idea. There’s nothing quite so giddiness-inspiring as walking around the library collecting an armful of books for a new research topic.
