I mentioned recently that the Chronicle had included the first line of Alcestis in their ongoing feature of “grabbers.” On Twitter a little while ago, someone (I forget who, argh) linked to this list at Flavorwire of their thirty favorite opening lines in literature. As usual, I liked some of them and boggled at others, and there are few lines I’d add to any list of that sort.

For example…

From Margaret Atwood’s Lady Oracle, which I taught for the first time in the fall:

I planned my death carefully; unlike my life, which meandered along from one thing to another, despite my feeble attempts to control it.

And, okay, from Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale:

We slept in what had once been the gymnasium.

(Totally beats The Road, I’m sorry.)

P&P always gets the most love among Austen’s openings, for good reason, but Emma’s is also brilliant:

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and a happy disposition seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her.

The History of Tom Jones, a Foundling:

An Author ought to consider himself, not as a Gentleman who gives a private or eleemosynary Treat, but rather as one who keeps a public Ordinary, at which all Persons are welcome for their Money.

A Sentimental Journey:

–They order, said I, this matter better in France–

And if we’re including plays, Rosencrantz & Guildenstern Are Dead, of course:

Heads.

Do you have favorite first lines you feel are always overlooked? I’m intrigued that the Flavorwire list is specifically about favorites, not just about lines that are particularly grabby. I think my own favorite first lines tend to be those that communicate a flavor of the book. I almost included the opening of The Portrait of a Lady here, but it’s an intentionally misleading first line, tonally; it’s breezy and somewhat superficial and it hides from you the depth of the drama within the book. That’s a respectable strategy, but it means that I don’t really think about the first line when I think about the book as a whole.

Speaking of great openings, here’s the beginning of Lydia Kiesling’s lovely post about Brideshead Revisited at the Millions:

Brideshead Revisited is one of my favorite novels.  I am prone to the use of superlatives, fits of florid enthusiasm, and weeping, so I have dozens of favorite novels, songs, and movies.  I also have a lot of mortal enemies (mostly from the parking lot) and several best friends.  Both my cats are my favorite.  There are so many things to love (and loathe).  Let’s say that I am catholic with my affections.

The people in Brideshead Revisited are also Catholic with their affections, but for them it means something different, namely that they are crazy.  Or not crazy, exactly, but capable of nuances of feeling, infinitely tied to a class and place and time, that seem no longer to be part of anyone’s emotional spectrum.  These feelings do not register on the brute psychic seismographs of today; they require some exquisite baroque device, ancient but extraordinarily sensitive, sitting under a drop cloth in a crumbling country estate.

Today’s my birthday! I’m officially 28 — I say officially because my brain decided I was 28 about four months ago, and I kept having to remind myself that I was, in fact, still 27. But no longer! So far it’s been a nice relaxing morning, though now I really need to get back to work on dissertation-writing. Eliza Haywood’s early poetry waits for no woman.

Nice things:

• Last weekend the SF Chronicle mentioned the first line of Alcestis in its ongoing series of “Grabbers.” That post also features the first line of Matt Beynon Rees’s new book The Fourth Assassin (published by Soho!).
• Alcestis is listed as a staff pick by Jennifer of the Doylestown Bookshop in Doylestown, PA, not far from where I grew up. Yay independent bookstores! Check out the other staff picks, too — some great historical fiction.
• The book also has a high score on a site called SFF Meta, which looks like a kind of Rotten Tomatoes for book reviews? What a neat idea.
• I’m finally just about over my two-week-plus cold and no longer sound like Batman when I talk!

And a reminder — I’ll be heading to Oregon in mid-March and am reading at Bloomsbury Books on March 18 at 7 pm. More about this soon.

This is apparently the week of great in-depth reviews of Alcestis! (Not that I would object if it became, say, the month of in-depth great reviews. Or, hey, the year would work, too.) Finch Bronstein-Rasmussen at Open Letters Monthly wrote a beautiful review essay that ties the novel to Edith Hamilton’s version of the Persephone story and focuses on the primacy of the Alcestis/Persephone relationship in the book. I was particularly touched by this paragraph, which addresses the end of the novel:

Readers familiar with Miss Hamilton (or with the other source, some guy named Euripides) will know what to expect from the rest of the story: in the myth, Heracles comes upon the house of his friend Admetus deep in mourning, makes an ass of himself as usual, and to make amends, tromps down to the underworld intent of wrestling Hades for Alcestis, intent on bringing her back to the land of the living. In the ancient Greek plays of which Euripides was a master, the audience always knows the rest of the story – the genius of the writing arises from how skillfully the author can bend the path and pile on the ironies, so that the conclusion the audience knows is coming feels nevertheless strange or poignant when it arrives. The genius of Alcestis is that it flawlessly preserves this duality. In the underworld, surrounded by shades, fascinated by (and fascinating to) Persephone, Alcestis is on the verge of becoming more alive than she ever was in the daylight, so when we see Heracles lumbering through the drifting shades, intent on bringing her back to her feckless husband and her joyless life, we feel the exact opposite of what we might have expected: we don’t want this rescue to happen.

Writing about a myth places both reader and author in interesting positions — the skills required to retell an already-familiar story are slightly different from those required to create a believable new fiction, and readers expect different things from retellings, too. But it also means that the notion of “spoilers” becomes, as we say in grad school, “vexed.” Of course there are elements of the book that are unique to my version of Alcestis’s story, but can readers really be spoiled for them? In a retelling, the high-concept angle is the plot, in one sense. So I was very glad to read that this reviewer found the retelling effective not just as its own story but as a new version of the tale informed by the previous versions. In other words: yay!

A final reminder about the giveaway contest being run by Wonders & Marvels — the deadline for entering to win a copy is today, Sunday, February 28.

Yesterday, my day was made by this stunning and thoughtful review of the book, which places Alcestis in the context of Mary Renault’s historical fiction.  I can’t claim that my writing has been very directly shaped by Renault’s work — I’ve only ever read The Persian Boy — but I’m honored by the notion that Alcestis offers a similar reading experience to her novels, but one “centered in women’s experiences.” This is also one of the most beautifully written reviews I’ve read. “Giddy” would not be too strong a word for my reaction.

The fabulous historical blog Wonders & Marvels is giving away four copies of Alcestis! The deadline for entering to win a copy is this Sunday, February 28. To enter, visit the blog post linked above and post an answer to the following question as a comment:

What little-known character in history deserves to be in the spotlight and have his or her story told?

There are some great responses in the comments already. I would love to read a novel about Alcibiades and Socrates. I think some of the women writers I’m analyzing in my dissertation would make excellent subjects for historical fiction. I can’t believe that nobody’s written a novel about Laetitia Pilkington yet, and Delarivier Manley would also be a fine candidate for fictionalization, as long as you didn’t let the most boring lawsuit ever dominate the story, the way she does in her own fictionalized autobiography. But the delightful Charlotte Charke would top them all — probably literally, if that were possible.

That’s Charlotte as Damon, one of her popular breeches roles. Her Narrative is way funnier than her father Colley Cibber’s Apology, should you ever have the desire to read a mid-c18 autobiography about the life of a player.

Anyway, many thanks to Wonders & Marvels for hosting this giveaway! I look forward to reading everyone’s suggestions.

I’m offering a signed copy of Alcestis in the Con or Bust auction being run by the Carl Brandon Society. The money raised in this auction is available to fans of color who request assistance in order to attend Wiscon, the feminist SF convention held annually in Madison, Wisconsin. (I’ll be going for the first time this year!)

And some links!

• A great essay on modulating your responses when writing critiques.
• Urban legends from Meiji-period Japan.
• And something very close to my heart: Austin’s No Kill Coalition, which will be presenting a No Kill Resolution to the City Council on March 1. Join the coalition, email the council — do what you can.

Lessons I have recently learned: when people say that you should only go running while sick if your illness is above the neck, they’re not kidding. I went for a short run on Friday and my lungs are still in revolt. (I apologize to everybody who had to listen to me cough my way through part of a panel at the Harrington symposium at UT yesterday!)

In nicer news, I recently received my first copy of the Historical Novels Review, the review publication of the Historical Novel Society. The February issue contains a review of Alcestis and a mention of me and the book in a short feature on debut historical novelists, as well as articles on magic in historical fiction and Jane Austen and the new gothic, interviews with writers, and more. It’s a great publication and I’m sad that I put off joining the HNS for as long as I did — my grad student poverty notwithstanding, it’s basically an organization devoted to everything I like. I’m delighted that Alcestis appears so prominently in the Review.

Speaking of fascinating historical information, check out Kathryn Hughes’s write-up in the Guardian of this book about arsenic in Victorian England (not yet released in the US, but coming in March). Hughes calls it “a lovely book, a near-perfect blend of rigorous scholarship and jaunty storytelling,” but even more remarkable than that praise is Hughes’s summary of the perniciousness and pervasiveness of arsenic in Victorian material culture:

Perhaps most sinister of all, though, was the way that arsenic insinuated itself into the very fabric of the Victorian home. The poison was used in the production of green dyes, which were incorporated into everything from ribbons to playing cards. The scene was set for a neo-Websterian tragedy in which beautiful maidens and society bucks crumpled to their deaths following a gift of haberdashery or quick game of whist. Even more fateful was the craze for deep green wallpaper, which led to thousands of families meeting their deaths as a result of their taste in home furnishings. Not that they actually licked their walls: the dye was very unstable, so the slightest breeze could dislodge a puff of toxic dust. Queen Victoria herself was so appalled by the homicidal tendencies of green wallpaper that she ordered every room in Buckingham Palace to be stripped of the stuff.

Makes you wonder which ubiquitous chemicals in our daily lives might be looked at this way in hundred years, no? Creepy.

I’ve just uploaded the video Travis recorded at my book launch party to Vimeo, so you can now watch and listen as I read the prologue to Alcestis and talk a bit about the content of the book. Feel free to share this video, too!

ALCESTIS reading — Katharine Beutner from Katharine Beutner on Vimeo.

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.

Things I am really tired of seeing knee-jerk GET OFF MY LAWN responses to from authors:

1. The Times article about the German novelist who “remixed” (her word) or “plagiarized” (lots and lots of outraged posts) a novel published by another German writer, in a novel about remix culture. Do I think she should have credited the first writer if she wanted to remix his material? Absolutely. Do I think she should have asked him first? Probably, but it depends on how much material she actually lifted — if it was fair use, maybe not. (The extent of her borrowing seems to be under debate at the moment.) This particular author may indeed have made some stupid decisions, and some of that bad decision-making may certainly be related to the fact that she’s seventeen and in the public eye. Do I think that many, many professional writers in the US should read Lawrence Lessig’s Free Culture — available as a free PDF at that site — before they go off on rants about plagiarism and these kids today? Hell, yes. Spell-check helps, too.
2. The Google Books settlement. I didn’t have to choose whether or not to opt out, and based on the limited amount of reading I did before the deadline, it sounds like the Authors’ Guild’s response was almost as problematic as the settlement itself. I don’t currently have a strong opinion on this issue either way and would be willing to be swayed by persuasive arguments that honestly acknowledge what a horrible mess the current system of orphaned works really is. I haven’t seen many of those.
3. Piracy. I understand that it’s a major problem for some writers. I also think that responses to piracy — or to the “remixing” author, etc. — that demonize a whole generation of readers are just not useful, even if they’re accurate. If you, as an author, can avoid that kind of demonization and can explain to your readers why piracy hurts you, in particular, more power to you. (Elizabeth Scott wrote a post that accomplishes this well a few weeks ago.) I think it’s important for readers to understand that their choice to torrent an author’s work can hurt that author’s future career. Based on my experiences teaching undergraduates, many of them genuinely do not know that. But my experience with these kids, and my own membership in Gen Y, makes me pretty certain that emulating the RIAA is SO not the way to go.

And now I’m going to flounce off and write some more dissertation. Happy Valentine’s day, everybody.