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.

A brief list.

1. The CHOP chemo regimen, which has put my father’s cancer in remission, at least temporarily.
2. Paprika — T. and I saw it twice when we were in Portland.
3. Strawberry freezer jam with chevre on a toasted English muffin.
4. GoodReads: still addictive.
5. Pigma Micron pens by Sakura, to which T. introduced me last year. They’re the best ever for marking up books.
6. The fact that Nabokov finished the ms. of Lolita only a few miles from my current location. That house is gone now, replaced with some truly ugly new construction, but there’s a plaque to mark the spot — along with a tiny Japanese maple. I’m not sure what kind of symbolic message that little tree is supposed to send.
7. The area between, say, Division and Belmont in eastern Portland. Even though the Side Street bar near Belmont got rid of its Galaga arcade machine since last summer. Tragedy!
8. The Defoe Review project (based on the HRC’s editions of the periodical).
9. Swagat’s chicken makhani.

Where I work
Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

I don’t always write on this deck — sometimes it’s too bright, and sometimes I need to stay inside with my father. When I do work here, though, I sit in one chair and put my feet on the other so I can balance my laptop comfortably. It’s usually quiet, a little dusty. Sometimes cars go by on the street to the right, or neighbors do, walking their dogs. I bring a mug of tea and my cell phone out with me, but I get a bad wireless signal, which is good for my productivity.

The day I took this picture, the first page of my outline got caught by a breeze and fluttered off the deck. I had to chase it down.

This morning I spent a sunny hour picking sour cherries on a farm five minutes from my parents’ house. It was a stunning crop, the trees all thick with brilliant fruit, and almost all of it ripe. The clusters of cherries looked like Pop Art: stark, amazing, slightly translucent red. We picked nineteen pounds, and it wasn’t easy to stop — there were so many, and they were beautiful and so easy to pick.

Then we came home and I wrote while my parents pitted them. I think I got the better end of the deal.

I’m working on The White Silk Tent, my revision of my grandmother’s memoir. I’ve been reading biographical theory to try to situate myself and my strategies: what kind of voice did I want to use, what sort of other research did I want to do? I thought for a while, and then I started writing. And I’m still thinking, of course. But for now, my version contains three kinds of text:

• Sections of Louise’s original manuscript, very slightly edited for clarity
• Biographical sections based on her manuscript but substantially rewritten and edited, and recast in the third person
• Interpolations in my voice which allow me to comment on her memoir, to add information she didn’t have, to interpret things, etc.

And then, likely, documentary material — text and photos from the trunk of family memorabilia she left to accompany the manuscript, and maybe things from the HRC, as well.

My goal for the summer is to get three chapters completed and polished, so that I’ll have a sense of the process involved in writing the book and the amount of time I’ll need to complete it. And then I’ll need to get back to working on academic projects and thinking about my dissertation — which may also be related to biography. (I’m reading Paula Backscheider’s Reflections on Biography now with great interest. And on that note: you can find my new Goodreads page here.)

Farmer’s market

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

I was supposed to be flying to Oregon today, but I flew out Friday, instead — my father, who has cancer, also developed appendicitis. Thanks to airplane mechanical failure, my trip was pretty miserable, but it meant that I was here to help while Dad was in the hospital, and also here to go to the farmer’s market this morning, and to take this picture.

I have fiction-related and scholarly goals for this summer, but I’ll need to be flexible about them. I have started another summer reading list, though. More on that soon.

The reading meadow

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

I’m in Oregon, where it’s cold. Today is a little warmer, perhaps 40, which will mean less ice fog and also less beauty. My plane landed with no trouble on Sunday, despite the weather — we didn’t even need to make a second approach. Every day since then, I’ve pulled out a warmer coat: first the down vest, then the puffy red down parka, then the long, dark-eggplant-colored, serious down coat I used to wear in Massachusetts winters.

Yesterday morning my father and I went for a walk in the park downtown. This is a picture of the meadow where T. and I sat and read in the summer, now iced and bright. (There are other pictures from that walk up at my Flickr page.)

The frost, accreted over the last few days, has only just melted from the backyard. The deer are sleeping just beyond the garden fence and the trees are full of chickadees and robins. There’s one dim hummingbird that hasn’t fled south — he comes to the feeder several times an hour. Yesterday Dad had to keep bringing the feeder in to warm it up and the hummingbird hovered, confused, by the window. When Dad returned with the feeder, the little thing landed to drink before he’d even hung it up.

I haven’t gotten much done since I arrived here. There are so many little things to occupy us: baking, putting lights on the tree (to be left outside for the first time this year, as we don’t have time to hassle with sweeping up dropped needles), making dinner. And there are bigger things, too. My father will, we hope, have a stem cell transplant in early spring, and he has another round of chemo coming up just after Christmas, which was just determined today. So it’s hard to focus on anything but spending time with my parents. I’ve been reading Jane Austen and eating cookies and playing with the cat, and trying to work a little on revising my first novel. More about that soon.

I flew back to Austin on Thursday, the Day of No Liquids, and am settled in the new apartment. No internet till Aug. 28, though, which means I’ll be posting here rarely and reading my blogroll even less frequently. On the 28th, however, I’m going to roll around in my wireless signal like a puppy.

A view from Cape Perpetua

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

This is the view from the rock shelter built by the CCC atop Cape Perpetua, near Yachats, on the coast. We sat and read here for an hour or so, after walking up to it. (Other photos of the Eugene trip are up at flickr; I tried to post links here before I left for Portland, but dreamhost was having something of a conniption fit.)

Things we did in Portland:

–Went to the main Powell’s four times in four days, plus visits to the technical books store, the cookbook store, and the Hawthorne branch. My stack of books is taller than T.’s. Damn the c18 history section and its collection of Boswell- and Johnson-related items.

–Walked a lot, including a long trek around the west hills after missing the turn-off for the Japanese garden. Note to self: look at the map.

–Ate lots of good cheap food: the lunch buffet at Swagat on NW 21st; sushi happy hour at the Dragonfish bar; pizza and crepes and beer around Hawthorne; and a five-course lunch at the Western Culinary Institute’s Bleu, which is formal dining, but staffed by charming culinary students who function at varying levels of formality. Some of the dishes were only good; most of them were spectacular. The vanilla pot de créme with pink peppercorn flavoring was the best.

–Ogled neighborhoods: we liked the older brick apartments around Northwest near Macleay Park, but Hawthorne has a lively warm scruffiness that I liked more than the upscale blah-ness of 23rd St.

–Walked around the Reed campus, which is pretty and congenial.

–Saw A Scanner Darkly. I can’t remember the last time I was so bored during a movie.

I have no pictures from Portland, though I had my camera with me — I forgot to haul it out. Maybe I’ll take a picture of my stack of Powell’s loot — as it towers over T.’s, mwahahaha.

1. Chasing deer out of the backyard: a picaresque adventure, full of entertaining incidents, naughty language, and large-gauge plastic mesh fencing.
2. Briefly touring the coast of Oregon (between Reedsport and Newport) and spending two days in Eugene. If you’re wondering why I spent two days in Eugene — well, so am I. The actual town part of it isn’t much larger than Ashland, nor is it half as charming. Yachats, however, has one of the most wonderful coffeeshops in the world, a strange little wood-paneled place called Ye Olde Green Salmon, where we had the following lunch: egg, tomato, and mushroom sandwich; cream of onion and potato soup; raspberries, mascarpone, honey, and powdered sugar on little baguette slices; and a maté cocoa.
3. Reading A Room of One’s Own, and then Moll Flanders, which was rather like eating a tart lemon ice and following it with a huge sticky-sweet cloying cinnamon roll bought from a Cinnabon in a regional airport. I loved the Woolf unreservedly (more later on this, I hope), and pestered T. with sections read aloud; I loved Moll too, but it left my mental fingers sticky.
4. Finishing the text correction of my grandmother’s memoir. Now I need to figure out how to revise or alter it to make it work. Expect more posts on this front later. Other things to expect soon: photos from our coast trip and my presence in Portland some time in the next 2.5 weeks.

Today I’m down at the local university library with a pile of art books, as I’ve just started a small data entry project for a professor, labeling eighteenth-century-related images to be used in lectures at UT.

What have you been doing lately?

The sky across the valley
Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

My parents live in Ashland, Oregon, a beautiful little town tucked into the pine fur of the Rogue Valley. I forget, when I’m away from here, how stunning it is to be walking down the street in the middle of town and see mountains all around. My parents have lived here for three years and they still, while driving to the grocery store, burst into raptures over the beauty of the place. “I love Ashland,” my mother says. The last time she said it I laughed, because the most recent time I thought to myself “I love Austin” was after I biked back from Café Mundi feeling tired and blah and a one-armed homeless man told me I was looking fine. City living versus small-town living, I guess. In other particulars, though, Austin and Ashland aren’t so different; very hippieish and wacky and sweet. They both have lovely farmer’s markets, so you know I’m happy.

This is one view from our deck in early evening.