Christopher Rowe

Book List, and a bit of news

As announced elsewhere already, I've just sold another short story. "The Contrary Gardener," which serves as a sort of companion piece to "The Voluntary State," will be in the next volume of Jonathan Strahan's Eclipse series of anthologies. I think the book will be out sometime in 2012, and I'll say more about it closer to publication time.

I'm spending most of my time this summer working on my next novel, but my first semester as a graduate student in Eastern Kentucky University's MFA program will start in a week or so. The two courses I'm taking (one of which is a fiction workshop) combine to yield this list of assigned books. I've read about half of them before, but look forward to reading or rereading all of them in an academic setting.

• The Plague of Doves by Louise Erdrich
• Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert, translated by Lydia Davis
• One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
• The Lacuna by Barbara Kingsolver
• The Unbearable Lightness of Being by Milan Kundera
• Let the Great World Spin by Colum McCann
• After This by Alice McDermott
• Beloved by Toni Morrison
• Hateship, Friendship, Courtship, Loveship, Marriage by Alice Munro
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov, annotations and other apparatus by Alfred Appel, Jr.

All but the García Márquez and the Kundera are available for the Nook (well, the Nabokov isn't quite available yet, it'll be out on the 16th, I think, and here's hoping that the notes &c. are hyperlinked) which brings up the point that I've lately learned to enjoy being a reader of screens. I've even been reading on my computer, just this week having read the first four of Elizabeth George's Inspector Lynley mysteries on my laptop. I like having other windows open with the OED and Wikipedia live so I can flip back and forth when I come across a word or something else I'm not familiar with. In the case of Elizabeth George, that means I now know what secateurs are (well, I guess I already knew what they were, just not their proper name), and now know a lot more about the furniture makers of England than I ever thought I would.

A Rationality of Teds

When our friend Ted was here over Thanksgiving, he pulled my copy of An Exaltation of Larks off the shelf and was surprised to see, as people usually are, that the James Lipton who wrote it (maybe "compiled" is a better word) is, in fact that James Lipton. The book is about terms of venery, collective nouns like gaggle of geese and murder of crows.

So, I was not surprised to see his contribution to the comments in an entry from a couple of days ago. I'd pointed out that three of the commenters on the post shared the name Christopher (the others, besides me, being Big-Headed Canadian Whiskey Man and the Shihan of Youngstown) and I wondered what the collective noun for "Christopher" would be. Ted wrote:

Since "Christopher" means "Christ carrier," I suggest "procession" as the collective noun.  Either that, or "apocalypse."

Clever, clever Ted.

Reader, I Disappeared

Y'know, I dig Ambush Bug fan fiction and pictures of other people's pets just as much as the next guy, but sometimes it takes the folks at a major academic research library to remind me just how crazy alltime everything these tubes are.

To wit, this afternoon I've been browsing through the electrified letters of Charlotte Brontë, and discovered that she did a meme even before This American Life came up with it. From a letter to George Smith, dated 26 December, 1849:

I think if a good fairy were to offer me the choice of a gift, I would say--grant me the power to walk invisible; though certainly I would add--accompany it by the grace never to abuse the privilege.

It's that second bit that gets you, eh?

First Day

Jose at MemeTherapy has put up one of his group interviews, in which a bunch of writers answer the same question. I answered several questions for him, and today's is about research. UnCommonwealth faves Terry Bisson and Catherine Shaffer join in the fun.

Today was my first day as an English major at the University of Kentucky. The classes on Baldwin and Chaucer were much larger than I expected, but I also expect that attendance will drop as time goes on. I'm also in a weekly poetry workshop that meets on Wednesday afternoons, but I don't expect to be writing much about that.

One thing that was kind of interesting, but has also led to some frustration; between classes I was reading Baldwin's "Sonny's Blues" in the collection Coming to Meet the Man. Early in the story, when the narrator is talking about Sonny's situation with another character, a sort of wastrel from their youth (Sonny and the narrator are brothers if you haven't read the story). The guy says something to the effect that he thought Sonny was too smart to get in the trouble he's in, to "get hung."

The narrator replies: "I guess he thought so too," I said sharply, "and that's how he got hung. And now about you? [...]"

Okay, contextually that "now about you" can make sense, but it jangles. The obvious thing was that it's a typo--it should be "And how about you?" (italics mine). I happened to be in the library while I was reading this so I went an dug up the Summer 1957 issue of Partisan Review in which the story originally appeared and sure enough, it's "how" there.

I can't find an info on whether the stories in the collection are "corrected" or "the author's preferred text" or whatever, so now I have to decide whether or not to ask the professor--a Baldwin scholar natch--if that's the case. Which will make me look like a jackass to the other students but I honestly am, in fact, interested in variant texts and how they impact meaning and, y'know, crap like that.

I already know how fly-specky/nit-picky this is, you don't have to tell me.

Go Wildcats! Go Tod Goldberg!

Today I mostly registered for classes at the University of Kentucky. ("Mostly" because I'm waitlisted--at the top of the list, so I'm pretty confident I'll get in--for one additional course I'd like to take.) I might be wrong about the exact numbers, but I believe that means I can now say I've attended the four largest colleges in the Commonwealth; UofL, Western, KCTCS, and UK. I can say it, but I don't expect to often. And that's not even mentioning the semester at my hometown college.

I was surprised to learn that I've actually busted 90 hours. So Gwenda is totally dating a senior. And not the kind that gets the discount at Cracker Barrel, even!

I'm happy to finally be taking classes that mostly involve people talking about, to take two of my courses for example, Geoffrey Chaucer and James Baldwin instead of classes that involve people talking about parking and how many visits twenty bucks will get at Tan Shack. (Fingers crossed.)

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As I do with every link she posts, I followed a pointer off G's blog and found this essay by Tod Goldberg questioning whether writing can be taught. I don't know why, but I find this sentence hysterical:

You can tell a person what makes up strong dialog, but that doesn't mean they'll ever figure out how to write it without it sounding like two people pumping each other for information.

Subverting some norms

A "norm," of course, is a culturally expected or accepted behavior that's not technically a rule or a law, and so has way different enforcement methods. Turns out that, at my school at least, food norms are quite powerful.

Yesterday morning, I ate a piece of fruit between my first and second classes, as I usually do. Unusually, instead of it being an apple, I had an orange. I've gotten into the habit lately of eating oranges whole; that is, like an apple, complete with peel and pulp (try it! not only is most of the nutritional value of an orange locked in the peel and pulp, but the contrasting flavors and textures of the peel, pulp and flesh make for a much more complicated and nuanced experience--just remember to wash 'em real good first). Wow! People pointed. People stared. More than one person came up to me to confirm that it was, in fact, an orange. And I'm talking about people I don't know. One young woman literally stopped dead in her tracks as she was approaching me on a sidewalk, pointed at me, and said to her invisible companion (another norm I frequently subvert at my school is not talking on my cel phone very much), "Oh my God! There's a guy eating an orange with the peel still on it coming right at me!"

In other news, the long-running Italian cycling team Amore e Vita has announced they have a new co-sponsor. So now they're sponsored by the Pope and McDonalds. I'm really not making that up.

Le Petit Chaperon rouge

According to babelfish, this is the English translation of the composition I'm turning in to my Elementary French II prof tomorrow.

The Little Red Riding Hood

A small girl lived with her mother in a large forest. She not did not have of father but his/her grandmother lived in a small house on other side of the forest. One called this small girl the Little Red Riding Hood because it always carried a red hood.

One day, his/her mother asked Small the red Hood to bring things to eat her grandmother. The small girl left immediately and it crossed the forest when a large wolf left behind a tree. It was very hungry and it wanted to know where the Little Red Riding Hood went with all these things to eat. The Little Red Riding Hood explained that it brought them in her grandmother. The wolf left in the forest and the small girl carried on her way.

But the wolf took a shorter way to go in the grandmother and it arrived it first. As the not closed door, it entered the house. It ate the very whole grandmother and took its place.

A few minutes later, the Little Red Riding Hood entered the room of his grandmother. There was very little light and the Little Red Riding Hood not could not see very well. The small girl started to speak to her grandmother:

- What a large eyes you have, grandmother!

- It is for better seeing you, my small darling!

- What a large ears you have, grandmother!

- It is for better hearing you, my small darling!

- What a large teeth you have, grandmother!

- It is for better eats you, my small darling!

At this time, the wolf jumped of the bed, it ate the entire Little Red Riding Hood and it left the house. By chance, a hunter passed in front of the house at this time. It saw the wolf and it killed it. When it opened the belly of the wolf, the small girl and her grandmother left alive because the wolf had eaten them all whole.

The last paragraph brought back fond memories of the June, 1999 issue of F&SF, and the fine Rick Bowes story, "A Huntsman Passing By." Un chasseur passant près...

Finals

I'm preparing for final exams and will be scarce in the electroverse for the next ten days or so. Y'all behave.

Greetings from the Past!

Today, Gwenda and I took a short trip up US 68 to the Blue Licks Battlefield State Resort Park. Located in a formerly strategic bend of the Licking River, the salt springs in the area have made the area kind of a white hot focal point in Kentucky history. What this has to do with late 19th century safety bicycles is a bit of mystery, but hey, they had one leaning against the wall in the unattended basement of the museum.

In addition to being the sight of the "Last Battle of the Revolutionary War (in Kentucky)," which occurred, natch, about ten months  after Cornwallis' surrender at Yorktown (nobody ever tells us anything), Blue Licks was where the incident with Daniel Boone and the Saltmakers occurred, with the death of Israel Boone and the "turncoat" Boone being adopted by the Shawnee of Ohio and being renamed "Big Turtle" and all that stuff. The Battle of Blue Licks was after Boone had turned his coat back again and he was present there for the sound thumping the Brits handed the Kentuckians. Boone escaped the carnage by swimming downstream and then hightailing it out of the area along a path right around where Gwenda took this picture of a birch tree.

Later the Blue Licks became a popular spa area, and at some point people started digging up the bones of giant sloths and mastodons, so with the battle and the fossil teeth and period advertisements for "taking the cure" all taken together, the museum at the park is quite the weird, dusty little treasure trove.

Oh, and it turns out Cthulu was from Kentucky. Who knew?

Well put!

Today in my literature class ("Kentucky Masters of the Short Story") we were discussing Robert Hazel's challenging "White Anglo-Saxon Protestant." Hazel is probably best known outside the Commonwealth for his poetry, but within it, he's most often mentioned for the years in the late fifties he spent teaching writing at the University of Kentucky, where he mentored people like Ed McClanahan, Gurney Norman, Wendell Berry and Bobbie Ann Mason. (Here's a good article about that particular spike on the Kentucky literary timeline).

Hazel's story is a troubling look at racism and sexism among leftist Village intellectuals in the sixties, so naturally, the conversation turned to category romance novels. (Don't ask me, I couldn't track it and I was there, taking notes even.)

One young lady in class was very emphatic in expressing her view of Harlequins in particular. As she put it, "Nothing in them slut novels is true!"

I can't think of anything to add to that, really.