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:

• Paul Ford on the fundamental question of the Internet: why wasn’t I consulted?
• Advice about writing workshops from USC professors.
• The last unknown victims of the Triangle Waist Company fire have been identified.
• Memory palaces: the extreme sports version.
• A long and interesting interview with Alison Bechdel about memoir, memory, fiction, and narrative structure.
• One of the Stockett family’s maids files suit against Kathryn Stockett, author of The Help.
• Jesse Eisenberg’s Marxist-Socialist jokes and “manageable tongue-twisters” at McSweeney’s.

I love doing giveaways on Goodreads — there’s something delightful about watching the number tick up as more people enter. Right now the giveaway’s only actually been accessible for three days, I think, and more than 360 people have requested the book. (Last year’s ARC giveaway got up to over 1000, I think.) I’d rather like to hug them all.

This week has been full of dissertation, but I took a break on Thursday night to go see Robyn at ACL Live as part of her Body Talk tour. If you like electro-pop and have a chance to see her, I highly recommend it. Somebody’s uploaded a few short videos from the show to YouTube; this is the best one. If you think you hear an echo, that’s the entire venue singing along. (Also, see this interesting documentary clip about the “dynamic textile” liquid art used in Robyn’s “Indestructible” video.)

I’ll post again soon with more literary links. I’m working on my laptop right now, and, as always, half the things I’ve been meaning to mention here are open in tabs on my desktop. Someday I’ll develop the habit of tagging things on delicious right away rather than leaving them open for a few days first. For now, I’ll just point out that Paul Lisicky will be reading at the Joynes Reading Room on the UT campus on Wednesday, February 23, at 7:30, and that UT Theatre & Dance is currently staging The Threepenny Opera.

I have a nice big box of Alcestis paperbacks from my publisher, so I’ve decided to give away three copies on Goodreads.

To enter to win a copy, just log on to Goodreads and click the “enter towin” button. And please spread this link around! I’m happy to sign the copies before I send them to the winners.

Also, if you haven’t checked out Elizabeth Loupas’s guest blog post from earlier this week on her forthcoming The Second Duchess, please do!

The gorgeous cover to the right of this text belongs to Elizabeth Loupas’s The Second Duchess, a historical novel inspired by Robert Browning’s “My Last Duchess.” Since Elizabeth’s book will hit shelves on March 1, I asked her if she’d mind writing up some thoughts about her writing and research process, and about fictionalizing real (and already fictionalized) events.

Elizabeth:

First I’d like to thank Katharine for inviting me to write a bit about the intersection between “My Last Duchess” and The Second Duchess, and how researching and writing the book changed my reading of the poem. Thank you, Katharine, and congratulations on the paperback release of your own beautiful, beautiful Alcestis.

I have loved “My Last Duchess” from the time I first read it in junior high. For junior-high-me, it had everything—the glamour of the Renaissance, a darkly brooding narrator, a beautiful and doomed heroine. At first I saw only the surface romance of it. Later, in university classes, I read it more carefully and followed the traditional interpretation—the duke as a madman who murdered his innocent wife out of pride and jealousy and sheer possessiveness. My focus was always on the duke and the duchess and I never really thought about the unseen character of the potential second wife.

Much later, when I was tutoring high school students through writing essays about the poem, it suddenly struck me that there was yet another level to the poem’s story. Who was this second wife? What would she make of her new husband? At that time I did not know any of the historical background, or even that Browning had based the poem on fictionalized versions of historical personages.

So I began to look things up—research! How I love it—and a whole new world opened up to me. The poem’s duke, Alfonso II d’Este, became less a one-note megalomaniacal villain and more a classic Renaissance prince in the mode of Machiavelli. His first duchess, Lucrezia de’ Medici, became less the innocent victim and more a willful seventeen-year-old. (She was only fourteen when she and Duke Alfonso were married, and seventeen when she died.) The duke’s second wife, Barbara of Austria, took on a face and a personality of her own as well—she was twenty-six, old for a first marriage at that time, and ambassadors’ letters are frank about her lack of beauty.

Browning chose one way to fictionalize the relationships of these three people—a way, I think, that reflects his own Victorian sensibilities, his admiration of the Romantics and Pre-Raphaelites, and his taste for psychological drama. I wanted to choose a different way. I did. The Second Duchess is the result.

So for me now, there are two ways to read “My Last Duchess.” One is the way Browning intended, and which a million students and critics have expounded—that the duke is a madman and that he had his first duchess murdered. When asked what his meaning was, Browning himself said, “I meant that the commands were that she should be put to death, or he might have had her shut up in a convent.” So this is Browning’s story, and he’s sticking to it. There’s something to be said for it—it’s compelling drama.

The other way to read the poem is with the genuine historical personages in mind. Duke Alfonso was a soldier, a sportsman, a musician. He fought in the French army with his cousin Henri II of France. He was a world-class tennis player—the first written book of rules for tennis is dedicated to him. He was the patron of the first professional female singers in Europe, the Consort of Ladies. So although he was indeed vain, arrogant, and vengeful, he was a sixteenth-century prince and that was what was expected of him.

Young Duchess Lucrezia, so often characterized as an innocent victim of the Duke’s jealousy and madness, was the daughter of Cosimo I de’ Medici; she and her sisters were not as sheltered as one might think. (Read the fascinating story of Lucrezia’s older sister Isabella in Caroline P. Murphy’s Murder of a Medici Princess. Isabella plays a critical role in my Lucrezia’s development, and she’s far from innocent.) Even Browning hints at the duchess having a mind of her own: “…and if she let / Herself be lessoned so, nor plainly set / Her wits to yours, forsooth, and made excuse…”

It changes everything. I think it makes the poem richer. Browning’s fictionalization, and a re-fictionalization based on the historical record, intertwine with each other for me now as I read, and make my experience of the poem all the more intricate and powerful.

(The Second Duchess, published by Penguin/NAL, will be released March 1, 2011. For complete details see www.elizabethloupas.com. Thanks, Elizabeth, for writing about it here!)

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.

Today is the official release of Alcestis in paperback!

In the year since the hardback release, I’ve:

• had a book launch party (photos here)
• read at a college
• read in Ashland, Oregon, met with a book club there, and filmed an interview/reading with a local book TV program
• read at Wiscon
• read at ArmadilloCon in Austin
• met a huge number of amazing writers on Twitter
• taught an intensive summer fiction workshop at the University of Texas
• spoke to a UT honors class after they read the book
• learned that the book will be available in a Turkish edition and in audiobook form from Iambik
• led a discussion about the book in the Blanton Museum, for their book club
• written a bunch of blog posts for other sites, including the always fabulous Hipster Book Club and Small Beer’s Not a Journal (see the Alcestis page for more guest blog posts, interview, and reviews from sites like Open Letters Monthly and Lambda Literary)
• written more blog posts here than I ever expected to!

I continue to be amazed that people want to read my book. I mean, obviously that’s what I hoped for when I wrote it, though I also wrote it because I wanted to read it. But the fact of the book being in the world, of going into a room for a book club meeting and seeing fifteen people who have all spent at least a few hours of their lives reading something I wrote and are now eager to talk about it — there’s nothing quite like it. Thanks to my time as an English grad student, I’m well aware of just how far back the English-language literary tradition stretches, and how very many books have been produced since print became widespread. I like knowing that Alcestis is among them, and that it’s reached some readers who have really enjoyed it. I hope the paperback edition will allow it to reach even more.

The book is available in paperback via IndieBound, Amazon, B&N, Chapters/Indigo, Powell’s, Borders.com — and of course it’s still available in hardback and ebook form on those sites, too. If you buy and read the book, please do take the time to leave a review on the site where you bought it and/or at Goodreads, if you can. It means a lot to me and will especially mean a lot to other potential readers who want to know what you thought of the book.

If you tried to visit this site over the weekend and got an “attack site” or “badware” warning from Google or Firefox, my apologies — somebody managed to sneak an iframe into a couple of pages on the site. But now everything is shiny, new, and clean, just in time for Alcestis to launch in paperback on Tuesday (thank goodness, and especially thanks to my heroic and long-suffering tech support). I can’t believe how fast December and January have raced by, and I really can’t believe it’s been a year since the hardback launch.

I’ll be running a giveaway sometime in February, possibly through Goodreads. More on that soon!

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.