First of all, I was nowhere near campus earlier this week when the shooter opened fire — I was still in Oregon, on the last day of a nice long visit with my mother, who turned 60 this week. I was, however, emailing back and forth with my dissertation director, who was stuck in his office while the SWAT teams searched our building and who, earlier, saw the shooter fire into the pavement near the Dobie Mall building across the street. Another former colleague from the Ransom Center was also quoted in the local news because she was out in that courtyard when the gunshots started. It’s terrible that the shooter died and mystifying that he chose this way to die, but I’m so glad he didn’t actually shoot anyone else in the process.
Anyway: I’m still in catch-up mode right now — I did work a fair amount while I was in Oregon, but this semester continues to be more hectic than I expected. So here, have a big list of links:
- Ann Patchett on plot in the WSJ (outliners represent!).
- Laura Miller on Elaine Showalter’s A Jury of Her Peers: American Women Writers From Anne Bradstreet to Annie Proulx in Salon.
- Elizabeth Chadwick on writing historical fiction about real people.
- A recap of the Margaret Atwood/Ursula K. Le Guin conversation about SF recently held in Portland. I am so sad to have missed this! I was even in Oregon when it happened, but about six hours away and being stomped by a migraine, so.
- Sarah Prineas guest-blogging against authorial self-promotion online.
- An earth-like planet that may sustain life has been found, about 20 light-years away.
And finally, two links relevant to my plans for the evening:
- An interview with Paul Harding, the author of Tinkers.
- Cocorosieland. (They’re playing at Emo’s tonight! I’m so excited.)
Thank you for the reference to my Harding interview, Katharine. Elizabeth McCracken said she’s going to be introducing him tonight. Enjoy!
http://www.beyondthemargins.com
You’re very welcome — it’s a great interview! And yes, Elizabeth’s tweets about the reading tonight prompted me to go, and I’m really looking forward to it.
I actually saw Ann Patchett speak. I think her advice is interesting, but you know a lot of works of literary fiction are focused heavily on sentence to sentence prose and the language is a critical part of the experience. They also focus so much on it that the plot kind of unfurls that way so this approach might not work for them, at the outset. I suppose you could do something about that in revision. One opening that caught a lot of readers’ and critics’ attention is Ian McEwan’s Enduring Love. He changed the order in revision.
On the Laura Miller article, I have two intertwined comments. First, it might be UK judgment of novels that helps women. There were merely two women in the NYT poll on great works of American Fiction from 1980-2005. A British counterpart had a higher proportion of women if you combine the shortlist and the highest vote getters.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2006/oct/08/fiction.features1
http://www.nytimes.com/ref/books/fiction-25-years.html
Though I’m guessing you’ll probably have issues with the British poll, given what you’ve espoused to be your favorite reads.
Ironically, in an Observer ranking, Housekeeping came out ahead of several books that got more votes in the NYT survey. Very chronology oriented, though.
http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/2003/oct/12/features.fiction
The key to these contrasting trends might be something Miller highlights–the focus on size in American literary criticism. But that bias may not be a good one. I really like this essay by Meghan O’Rourke praising small novels. http://www.slate.com/id/2142095/
I’d add to her argument that favoring size is misguided that the Western canon includes many finely honed works. If you look at say the Modern Library 100 or its Radcliffe Rival list, there are many works under 300 pages.
Thank you for all those great links! Interesting that that Observer poll concludes by bluntly asking “Should we have included more women on this list?” and rattling off a bunch of names that I’d certainly agree should have been on the list. (Especially A. S. Byatt, because Possession means that she should go on every best-of list ever, according to me.)
Envious that you got to hear Ann Patchett speak!