Dropping in quickly to recommend Kelly Link’s new collection of short stories, Pretty Monsters. I got to hear Kelly read a wonderful story from this collection — “The Wrong Grave” — when she came to the UT two years ago during a visit to Austin for World Fantasy. If you click the link, you can read that story online, to get a sense of how lovely, weird, and thrilling Kelly’s stories are. And then, of course, you should buy the book!
I’m reading Julie Phillips’s biography of Alice Sheldon/James Tiptree, Jr. It’s excellent and I’m entranced.
In the beginning I was merely interested, because I found it tough to relax into the biographical form as Phillips practices it. Having spent this semester working on (among other things) Austen’s use of modal verbs, I was struck and a little annoyed by Phillips’s use of “must” and “should have,” her reliance on conditional forms to buttress psychological claims about Sheldon. That choice reminded me, not pleasantly, of the more biographical bits of the Gilbert-and-Gubar style of feminist criticism — another critical mode I view with sympathy and support but can’t help quibbling with, either. Phillips’s “musts” seem, at times, to push too hard to nail down the unknowable:
She also acquired a .38 revolver, which she either bought or was given by Bill at a time when a sensational carjacking and murder had made the New Mexico roads seem unsafe. It was this gun, acquired for self-defense, that Alice claimed Bill had used against her. (She also once suggested that she had used it for a game of Russian roulette.) Nonetheless, she kept it. Later in life, whenever she was depressed enough to think of killing herself, she always pictured doing it with the .38. The gun must have given her a sense of power over death. [James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice B. Sheldon, 96]
That pithy last sentence! Why? It’s a shove from drama into banality. It flattens an ambivalent and interesting and totemic-seeming fact.
I’m quibbling, as I said — the book is just wonderful, and the psychologizing conditional statements either grow fewer, or integrate more smoothly into Phillips’s thoughtful and careful treatment of Sheldon/Tiptree, or both. (I’ll have to reread it to tell; right now I’m too grabbed by it.) But I wish that, in the early chapters, Phillips had allowed more of Alice’s ambivalence to remain unencapsulated.
More on this later, when I’m done with the book.
ETA: I read the last half of the book in a happy rush yesterday and this morning, and while I stand by my quibbling, I think the whole thing’s delightful. The primary sources make up a great portion of the book’s brilliance — Sheldon/Tiptree wrote wonderful letters — but Phillips does a beautiful job, too.
Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet, the delightful magazine that published my short-short “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster,” was just nominated for a Hugo in the semiprozine category. Congratulations to editors and all-around fabulous people Gavin Grant and Kelly Link!
My short-short entitled “Things That Make One’s Heart Beat Faster” — a riff on Sei Shonagon’s style — was just published in Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet 19, the tenth anniversary issue of Small Beer’s beautiful zine. I’m listed in the poetry section of the masthead, which startled me, then made me laugh at myself for being startled. The piece is a prose poem, it’s true, but somehow I’d never thought of it as anything but a short piece of fiction. I spent most of my adolescence writing poetry — and now I think of myself only as a fiction writer. Brains are odd!
The contributor’s copies are in the mail, so I’ll report on the contents of the issue in more detail when they arrive, but it looks lovely and I’m proud to be in such company.
The order page for the issue is here.
I have access to borrowed wireless in the apartment now, intermittently. We’re still counting down the days to our very own reliable connection, though.
The practice reading was marvelous fun, even though we had no functioning lights for the outdoor stage and everybody after the first reader ended up reading by penlight. We had a good audience — maybe thirty, forty people, mostly friends and other writing students (who are also friends). I read “Daphne,” and it was easy and pleasant and fun; I’d forgotten how much I enjoy the act of reading aloud.
Our theses are due on Friday, but everyone was happy and relaxed, talking about parties planned for the next few weeks, looking forward to the official graduation reading next weekend and the excellent Michener-catered outdoor dinner that’ll follow it. It’s summer here already, but early summer, when the air still cools to the seventies at night and the evening breezes feel like cotton. I’ll be swearing at the heat and humidity soon, and then fleeing it for hot-but-dry southern Oregon, but for now I’m enjoying it, remembering how lovely last summer was, anticipating another.
But there are still a few things to accomplish before school ends — so tomorrow I figure out thesis formatting, and try to finish as much of my final revisions as possible. ‘Night, all.
I’ve made a page describing my current fiction projects. The piece I’ll probably read tonight is “Daphne” — I did rewrite the ending of “The Former Hero” last night, and I like it much better, but now it’s too long to read tonight, as we were told to aim for ten minutes, with a maximum of fifteen. If I read “The Former Hero” quickly, it takes seventeen minutes — so I’ll only read that one if everyone else’s times are running extremely short. And if I feel like the mood is right for a weird Shakespearean ghost story. But really, when isn’t the mood right for that?
I think the tagline for my blog, if I had one, would have to be something like “Literature for dorks.”
Projects for the rest of the day: working on the final novel edits; baking a spinach quiche; finding something to wear to the reading; not being nervous. I haven’t read my writing in public since my first year of college, and that was in my poetry days, unfortunately for the audience. My mother said, “Remember, you read at the Library of Congress!” I did, it’s true; and it sounds impressive until you discover that I was in seventh grade at the time. (Much love to the Scholastic Writing Awards.)
Before I go, a few links:
Sherwood Smith shares excerpts from the diary and letters of Agnes Porter, a governess in the late eighteenth century.
A transcript of Stephen Colbert’s remarks at the press corps dinner (via BoingBoing).
More clarification about how book packaging works in the world of teen fiction, by the Harvard Independent here and Lizzie Skurnick here.
In other news, I have a reading to prepare for — the graduating students in my writing program are doing a practice reading tomorrow night (at Club DeVille on Red River, 7:30 p.m., if any Austinites are reading this). I’ve been waffling about what to read all week: the novel prologue, which I’ll read at the official graduation reading next weekend? The four-page piece I wrote last spring? The Much Ado story, with its not-quite-right ending? But T. read the Much Ado story this morning and helped me figure out how to write the ending I wanted, and now I’m tempted to rewrite that last page this afternoon and inflict the story upon my captive audience tomorrow. More on this as it develops.
This morning I slept in a little and then went to Café Mundi, our favorite eastside coffeeshop, only a short bike ride away. I ate a Belgian waffle with fruit and whipped cream and scuffled with the Much Ado About Nothing story, which has been extremely recalcitrant. I have to whip it into shape by Wednesday for workshop — I’ll probably spend most of the day working on it.
The coffeeshop got progressively noisier as lunchtime approached, so I left a little after noon and biked home, stopping to take several pictures. Only a few people out in their yards today; most were either inside, avoiding the humidity, or in church. I had to bike around fleets of Cadillacs parked along the curbs.
I put a few other photos on flickr, but here’s the House of Elegance, a local beauty parlor, which I’ve been meaning to take a photo of since I moved in last spring:
