Katharine Beutner's Blog, page 5

There and back again

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.

Paperback birthday

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.

Drama!

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!

Fictionalizing life & contextualizing ebook piracy

The problem with having two computers you use regularly is that you end up with loads of tabs open in one browser, things you mean to post links to — and then you (or at least I) switch to the other computer for a week and forget about them. I have an Ubuntu desktop machine and a Macbook Pro; I do most of my dissertation work on the desktop because the screen is bigger, and most of my fiction writing these days on the Macbook, because I've been using Scrivener for Killingly. (I love Scrivener, by the way. I usually write in order, but Killingly is challenging that habit a bit, since I keep realizing I need to go back and add a scene, etc. The corkboard/notecard system is perfect for keeping track of what I'm doing.)

Anyway, there were a few things I'd intended to include in my link roundup post this weekend that were lurking on my laptop. The first is this response by David Simon to criticism from the current Baltimore police commissioner about the effect of The Wire on the city. Makes an interesting comparison with this article about Portugal's decriminalization of drug possession. (As the person who posted the Portugal link on Twitter said, "Portugal is Hamsterdam.") I don't buy the argument that the commissioner is making, either — the notion that a fictionalized portrayal of real problems in a city somehow harms the city more than the actual problems do. Or that fictionalizing real life makes the fictionalized version untrustworthy, as if the only thing art were good for was creating documentation.

And speaking of complicated things, I've been meaning to link to this post about ebook piracy, by a writer who grew up in Malaysia and has been living in the UK recently. But I'm glad I hadn't yet, because Karen Healey, who was involved in the original Twitter discussion (? maybe not quite the right word) about pirating ebooks, has also made a sensible and apologetic post owning up to the fact that she hadn't really considered the points brought up in Zen's post, or in colorblue's post, which focuses on (in colorblue's words) "the underlying hierarchies & inequalities in the both the current concept of IPR and the ways that it is used and enforced." Seriously, read all of these. For a number of reasons, including the fact that I taught Lessig's Free Culture a few years ago, I'm not ever likely to go off on Twitter about how kids on BitTorrent are ruining my career — though it's entirely possible that that would change if I were trying to make a living solely off my writing, or if I were in striking distance of a bestseller list, which I am totally not. But I can't say I had considered the points made in these posts as fully as I should have either. The conversation authors often have on the internet about intellectual property rights and piracy is lamentably American-centric, but it doesn't have to be.

Catching up

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.

Blanton Museum Book Club on Thursday

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.

Alcestis audiobook on the way

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.

Some genre & digital humanities links

Just a quick set of links right now, because I am actually, gasp, working on Killingly — and therefore looking at things like this, the most perfect and lovely map of the Massachusetts train system in 1898 that you could imagine, and this account of the architectural changes in Pemberton Square in the late 1880s. And did you know that the Boston Police Department has digitized its annual reports back to 1885? I wonder if they were cooking the numbers even then.

So:

Writers Malinda Lo and Cindy Pon have started DIYA, a site promoting diversity in YA fiction with an accompanying book tour planned. Very exciting!
A more detailed NY Times article about the first mystery novelist, as a follow-up to the shorter NPR version of the piece I posted a few days ago.
Two interesting essays about the current state of digital humanities research and digital humanities as a field: "The Meandering through Textuality Challenge" by Stephen Ramsay, and "The (DH) Stars Come Out in LA," by Matthew Kirschenbaum (one of the most sensible and least defensive reactions to William Pannapacker's article about a putative DH star system I've seen yet).

New year round-up

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.

2010 in review

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.