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.

Before the movie — which we saw at the Alamo Drafthouse in south Austin — we sat through a number of Pixar shorts, all of which I profoundly disliked. T. kept looking over at me and laughing because I looked miserable. This was mostly because I really hate slapstick, whether cartoon or live-action. I was the sort of kid who watched the first Home Alone movie through my fingers not because I was scared for tiny Macaulay Culkin but because I felt awful for the crooks he was knocking around. But also I think I disliked the shorts because they don’t have those graceful little moments of discovery. They’re designed for visual gags and broad, predictable humor. And transparent cuteness. WALL-E included some visual gags and predictable humor and transparent cuteness, too, but that wasn’t the whole joke. It wasn’t a joke. It was a good movie.

… two Gentlewomen that have made no small Struggle in the World to get into Print; and who are now in such a State of Wedlock to Pen and Ink, that it will be very difficult for them to get out of it.

I’m thinking about stealing that for my “about” page.

View from Hobart Bluff

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

Grizzly Peak was still closed by snow when we went to Oregon earlier this month, so we hiked at Hobart Bluff instead. It’s not as beautiful a hike as Grizzly, but the view was all right. It was about forty degrees on the top of the bluff and windy as hell; it’s ninety-eight in Austin now. I’m wilting.

I’ll be going to Santa Cruz for the 2008 Dickens Universe in late July. I hear the mornings are cool there.

I guess this is a sign that I ought to update more regularly. (And remember to upgrade Wordpress on occasion.) I haven’t been doing much writing lately; hardly any fiction or non-fiction that isn’t graduate-school-related, and only a short paper for a class, in addition to work on my prospectus notes. Mostly I write email: to patrons at the Ransom Center, answering research queries, to other eComma team members, to my parents and friends. I wrote the short paper last week, and it was the hardest paper I’ve written in a while — not because the topic itself was difficult to tackle (although that’s true) but because, as I’d just discovered, the migraine preventative drug I’m taking was affecting my ability to write and to speak. It was weird. “Difficulty finding words” doesn’t express the strangeness of losing the word for “roof tile” when you’re trying to describe your house to a friend on the phone. By a week and a half ago, the verbal block was happening at least ten times a day.

By next Wednesday, I’ll be off that preventative completely. I can find a lot of words to describe how happy I feel about it, but most of them are dirty.

Anyway, I promise — promise! — to be back soon to write about what I’m doing this summer and why I’ve added links to the NEH Office of Digital Humanities and HASTAC to my blogroll. Also, there will be probably be cat pictures. Just fair warning.

Une nouvelle chatte chez nous! She is delightfully funny and weird and precious. Before us, she lived in a house where she hid a lot, and she’s, er, enjoying her freedom; it’s kind of like living with a tiny Rosencrantz, who’s always discovering some law of physics by sheer accident. And then purring.

I could go on — approximately forever — but I won’t, since I have an annotated bibliography to polish up.

I’ll try to write more soon about my recent conference trip to SEASECS and some new developments with our digital humanities project.

By the end of the summer or beginning of the fall I should be beginning to write my dissertation. I’m hoping it’ll give me a new clarity of purpose.

A few good things to report: I’m planning my trip to the 2008 SEASECS meeting in Auburn to give a paper on Charlotte Charke; I’ll be seeing Jerome McGann speak next Friday (more than once!); Thanksgiving approaches, which means a much-needed trip to Oregon to see my parents. The HRC has been incredibly busy for the last several weeks, and so have I. I’m reading Laetitia Pilkington’s memoirs and drilling the irregular future tense stems in French.

Speaking of Oregon, here’s a sad but quirky-sweet tribute to the store cat at Powell’s Technical Books, Fup, who recently had to be put to sleep at the age of 19. I’ve been to that store two or three times and never saw her, which is kind of amazing, since T. claims that my superpower is seeing cats wherever I go. Fup was also the star of an ongoing mini-adventure serial in the Powell’s newsletter, apparently; you can read them here.