The Blanton Museum Book Club meeting was really lovely — we met in one of the galleries while the museum was open for Third Thursday, next to some very fitting art. It’s been a little while since I’ve talked to a group about Alcestis, and I’ve been thinking so much about Killingly lately that it was fun for me to compare the two projects and consider, as I talked with the group about the book, what I’m doing differently this time.

Have to get back to dissertation revisions now, but here, a whole bushel of links:

• A rejection letter in kind, to Gertrude Stein.
• A border collie that knows more than 1000 names of objects (and is now working on grammar).
• Jubal Early doing his bit for the mode of self-defensive autobiography. (No, not that Jubal Early, the real Jubal Anderson Early [ouch at that web design]. Who is apparently one of Nathan Fillion’s ancestors. What.)
• Via Jessa Crispin, an Edith Wharton short story in which she snarks about book clubs… published, in PDF, by the Library of America. As they introduce it: “During Story of the Week’s first year, we have been gratified to learn (via e-mail messages, blog posts, and phone calls) that an increasing number of readers are using selections for reading groups, the classroom, and library events. And so it is with a bit of trepidation that we offer, in commemoration of Edith Wharton’s birthday on January 24, a story that makes fun of such gatherings by describing one of the more dysfunctional reading discussions in the history of literature.” Heh.
• Maud Newton “on creating the feeling you want the reader to feel“, which opens with the question “Do you think writers have to feel what they want the reader to feel when they’re writing?” What’s interesting here is that this isn’t a “write what you know” question — it’s not about whether or not writers need to feel what their characters feel, but about whether they need to be able to evoke the same state in themselves that they will evoke in their readers. I’m not sure that’s possible, exactly. I think the fact of being the writer of the work always tempers, even if just slightly, the feeling that will be fully accessible to readers — if you’ve done your job right.

A quick reminder that on this Thursday (the 20th), I’ll be leading a discussion of Alcestis at the Blanton Museum Book Club, at 7 pm. The book club will meet in the Susman Gallery on the second floor of the museum. Since it’s Third Thursday, the museum will be open till 9 pm. See the Blanton website for directions and more information on the current exhibitions.

The lovely people at Iambik Audio are producing an audiobook version of Alcestis. Even better: the audiobook will be DRM-free. I’m tremendously excited about this! For now, go take a look at Iambik’s growing (and very impressive) collection of already-available audiobooks.

I’m back from a conference and trying to get myself together. This takes more effort than you’d expect, when in the wake of cross-country trips and one of the Worst Migraines of All Time. Ugh. But I’m slowly making progress, and part of that progress involves posting some reminders here about recent and upcoming news.

Thing 1: I will be leading a discussion of Alcestis for the Blanton Museum of Art Book Club in Austin on January 20. (Tiny sidenote: I’m not actually a graduate of the Michener Program, as that link suggests — my creative writing master’s degree is from the UT English department. I am, however, replacing Ted Hughes as the subject of this book club meeting. No, I am not ever going to get tired of mentioning that.) This discussion is linked to the Robert Wilson Alceste print exhibition currently running at the Blanton. I believe we’ll start at 7 pm, but I’ll try to get confirmation of that this week and will update here. If you’re in the Austin area and want to talk about the book, about misbehaving gods, about historical fiction and adaptation — come by and chat!

Thing 2: Many thanks to the fabulous Karen Healey for including Alcestis in her list of favorite books of the year! (Karen’s novel Guardian of the Dead is awaiting me on my Kindle, to be read on my next trip — since I really can’t justify too much pleasure reading when I’m not traveling, this month.)

Thing 3: The delightful Hipster Book Club people asked me to contribute a top 5 list for their end-of-the-year collection. Go to page 2 of that index and you can enjoy my ramblings about my favorite works of the year featuring post-apocalyptic themes. (My original list was chock full of links, but apparently those got lost somewhere along the way. Ah well.)

Thing 4: I feel weird about doing this, but as I’ve seen a number of other writers mention their Hugo/Nebula eligibility lately — Alcestis is eligible for nomination in the fantasy novel category for both the Nebula Awards (for SFWA members) and the Hugos (if you’re a WSFS member).  I’m not sure if I’m Campbell-eligible this year, but I’ll let you know when I find out.

And a link to conclude: a short NPR piece on who really wrote the first detective novel. The tone of the piece is a little strange — oddly disparaging about mystery-novel clichés, considering that they weren’t clichés when the first one was written — but the information is interesting.

It’s been quite a year — one of the strangest and nicest in a while. Alcestis was released in February, an experience that really began for me when I returned from MLA a day or two before the new year and found my box of author’s copies awaiting me. They were so beautiful. I still can’t get over how lucky I’ve been with the design of this book and what a tremendous job Soho’s done; I’m very much looking forward to seeing the trade paperback, too.

And then I had a book launch party in February. I went to Wiscon for the first time in May, and taught a fiction workshop this summer. I’ve been on fellowship all year and I still have six more months of fellowship funding to go.

I wrote a draft of my dissertation, and I started writing Killingly, just a little bit. I revised “The Former Hero,” which I started in 2000, during my sophomore year of college — I can even remember the unfortunate college futon I was sitting on while I typed up notes from my copy of Much Ado. I think it still needs more work, but sometime I’ll get it right. Maybe in another ten years. (This interview with Michael Chabon is a good reminder that even the stubbornest projects can yield something excellent in the end, even if it’s a completely different something from what you intend.)

Tonight I’ll be outside Austin, at a house where you can actually see stars. (The house with the Nubian dairy goats, for those of you who have heard me rhapsodize about them before.) I won’t be tipsy, because I’m driving, but I expect that I will be happy. There’s a lot I want to get done in 2011, starting with finishing the final draft of my dissertation, and it may be something of a rough year. But I hope it will be a good one, too.

Happy new year to all of you.

This is probably the second least holiday-ish holiday season I’ve had — I have no courses or teaching to take a break from, end-stage dissertations do not give you downtime unless you force them to, and for various family reasons I won’t be traveling. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still enjoying choosing gifts for people, and reading gift guides, like the ones I linked in my previous posts.

So! Here are a small number of books and other things I’d recommend if you’re still searching for last-minute presents:

• A Very Short Introduction to Biography, Hermione Lee. A nicely sized survey of the history of the genre. I’d probably use this as a text if I ever get to teach one of the classes on biography that I’ve designed syllabi for, and not just because it’s full of useful information — it’s also an enjoyable read.
• Georgette Heyer’s Regency World, Jennifer Kloester — for friends of yours who really want to know all the workings of the ton. (And I’m going to stop there with books or I’ll be adding to this entry all day.*)
• Qwirkle, a game marketed for children but hilarious when played by grown-up humanists. You want the cubes, not the tiles.
• Robyn’s Body Talk Pt. 1 and Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid, for people who need some good pop music.
• Small batch jams from Confituras, a local Austin business. (I believe all their offerings are gluten free.) They wouldn’t arrive in time for Christmas, by now, but would make a nice present later too.
• Pears from Harry & David. These are grown near where my mother lives in southern Oregon — we drive by their orchards on I-5. They’re actually kind of worth it as a splurge.

Plus a few links before I retreat back to the land of dissertation and other grad-school-related stress:

• An article title I could’ve written myself: Your Attacks on Genre Fiction Grow Tiresome.
• Lit Folks Are Hip. The captions say so.
• Sara Ryan’s interview with Jenny Davidson — I’m saving this till after I’ve read The Explosionist, but I’m actually also using one of Davidson’s academic books for diss research right now, so I was happy to see this, which focuses on her fiction.
• The Lapham Quarterly‘s fascinating piece on the dwindling and disappearance of Barbara Follett, child prodigy of letters.
• A Roman-era statue emerges from the sea on Israel’s coast.
• The Google Labs ngram viewer, if you haven’t played with it yet. There are apparently some questions about the reliability of its dating metadata, but it’s still a nice hint of the ways large-scale research in the humanities can evolve from here.

* You could also, if you were so inclined, pre-order the Alcestis paperback for someone you love! It’s out February 1 but will probably ship early from Amazon (the hardback sure did), and of course the e-book version (Kindle, Sony Reader) gets delivered instantly.

The Lambda Literary Foundation blog is also featuring a series of specialized LGBTQ gift guides, including a list “for your bisexual best friend” that features Alcestis. Here’s the guide in its entirety, with more than 75 books listed.

If you aren’t a supporter of Lambda Literary, now is an excellent time to join up and show some end-of-the-year love.

So! To make up for that brief absence, here’s a nice announcement: the Blanton Museum Book Club will be reading Alcestis and discussing it on January 20, 2011. I’ll be leading the discussion. This book club meeting is linked to the prints exhibition Robert Wilson in Four Acts, which just opened at the Blanton and runs through March 13, 2011. Here’s the Blanton’s description of the exhibition:

Artist Robert Wilson—a University of Texas at Austin alumnus, native Texan, and The Blanton’s 2011 Gala honoree—is best known for his video and theatre work. However, as part of UT’s 1986 Guest Artist in Printmaking Program, Wilson made two suites of prints. Alcestis is named for the wife of King Admetus from Euripides’ eponymous 438 BC Greek tragedy who offers herself as a sacrifice upon learning that her husband will die unless he can find another to take his place. Alceste illustrates Wilson’s stage design for Christoph Willibald Gluck’s 1767 opera of the same name, based on Euripides’ myth. Robert Wilson in Four Acts presents these suites alongside a study for Alceste and video documentation of Wilson’s production of Gluck’s opera.

And here’s the amusing part: if you click the Book Club link above, you’ll see that it still lists the January 20 book selection as Ted Hughes’s translation of Alcestis (the Euripides version). But no, my friends — I have replaced Ted Hughes! I feel as though I ought to notify my alma mater about this. </Sylvia Plath jokes>

Also, here are a few links I’ve collected during the week:

• Ellen Ripley Saved My Life: a post by Sady Doyle of Tiger Beatdown. This is the third of three related essays, and speaking as someone whose notion of a strong woman was also unduly affected, in my teenage years, by Joss Whedon’s psyche — it’s amazing.
• A charming slideshow of doodles left on the whiteboards in the main library (the PCL) at UT.
• And another charming interview with Justin Cronin about The Passage, this one at Goodreads.
• Foxes playing in the London snow.

Today I come bearing a link to this fun Q&A, with very smart questions about writing process asked by Laura Maylene Walter and, er, answered by me, possibly in a less smart manner. Laura and I went to high school together, attended the PA Governor’s School for the Arts during the same summer, and worked on the high school lit mag together, as Laura mentions in her blog post. (I haven’t thought about that lit mag for so long. Oh dear. Layout flashbacks.) I wrote poetry back in high school, but Laura’s always been a fiction writer, and a very good one, too. She recently won the 2010 G.S. Sharat Chandra Prize for Short Fiction, and her first short story collection, Living Arrangements, is forthcoming from BkMk Press in 2011.

In the Independent, Arifa Akbar asks if “fictive sex” can “ever have artistic merit.” The context here is the annual Bad Sex Awards, given out by the Literary Review. Since I think the answer to that question is indubitably “yes,” I was particularly intrigued by this piece of information:

Ironically, the bad sex awards were originally conceived, in 1993, to celebrate good sex, before the editor, Auberon Waugh, was advised by co-founder, Rhoda Koenig, that this might be “less interesting” than plucking out the clichéd and the corny.

I would love to see a Good Sex Awards shortlist. (It could be a cute stunt for the Review, if nothing else.) I’m sure Koenig was right that Bad Sex Awards get more attention — pointing and laughing usually does — but I’m not sure that mocking poorly-written scenes is automatically more interesting than celebrating good ones would be. Good sex in literary fiction is probably rarer than bad, and sex that many readers can agree is good might be even more uncommon. For example: I totally don’t agree that writing good sex is reducible to Geoff Dyer’s claim, quoted in Akbar’s essay, that descriptions of sex must “be absolutely explicit — no metaphors, no hyperbole.” (Then again, I do remember some of the horrifying metaphors cited in previous Bad Sex Award lists, so maybe that’s not a bad place to start.)

And I think Akbar’s onto something, here:

The most interesting writing about sex in the past two decades has arguably come from gay and lesbian novelists – Hollinghurst, Jeanette Winterson, Edmund White – who have touched ground where there has still been sensibilities to disturb and imaginative barriers to break down.

I’d also be interested in a broader conversation about sex in genre fiction, if we’re discussing the breaching of imaginative barriers.

Finally, Akbar covers the point that writers usually make when talking about sex in fiction: the “so what?” question.

Koenig casts doubt over this rationale: “I do think writers should ask themselves ‘is this sex scene necessary?’ In other words, what will we learn from following the people into the bedroom that we will not learn from simply being told that they have gone to bed together and liked it or disliked it or felt guilty about it or whatever?”

There are three sex scenes in Alcestis and one almost-sex-scene that dissolves into chaos thanks to some god-conjured reptiles. (Seriously. Drawn straight from the myth.) In my opinion, these scenes are all necessary for plot and character development, but their existence has made me squirm on occasion. I remember copy-editing one of the sex scenes while sitting at the laundromat — the scene with dubious consent, of course, because what else would you end up copy-editing at the laundromat? — and hoping that the bored middle-aged lady next to me wasn’t peering over my shoulder at the manuscript.

I don’t really feel that way about the published book; I think I’ve become comfortable with the idea that the book is, in large part, about desire. But giving public performances where I read about desire can still make me blush a bit. In a talk last spring, I read the almost-sex-scene along with a few other sections of the book. Even though I’d practiced the reading in advance, I hadn’t quite realized what it would be like to read in front of an audience a scene that sounds like it’s about to include sex. There was definitely an anticipatory and slightly uncomfortable feeling in the room, right up until the snakes appeared and the audience realized I wasn’t actually about to read a detailed account of the main character’s deflowering. I haven’t yet decided whether or not to include that scene in any future talks I give. Maybe I’d be able to enjoy the slightly uncomfortable vibe, now that I know to expect it. Or — maybe not.

Anyway, to sum up, here’s Seanan McGuire posting on Twitter, just a few hours ago:

… though I should add that the eighteenth century proved that even books full of nuns aren’t necessarily sex-free. (I’m looking right at you, Monk Lewis.)