Saga City

Hi all!

I haven't updated in a while, and I'm sorry about that. The major reason seems to be that I'm doing a lot better, and thus don't have a lot of processing to do at the moment.

I turned in the second whole draft of the dissertation last week, and promptly found a localish job that I desperately want. No more details on that front, I think. I don't want to jinx anything. We'll just say that my plan of attack is to construct the Best Teaching Portfolio Evar!

I finished a total watch of Alias in the spaces between my weekly Fringe watching with kass. IDK, like I need a JJ Abrams source at all times? I liked it a lot, though it got a little sloppy with the plotty sometimes. I wanted to nominate it for Yuletide, but I guess it had too many old stories to qualify. Guess I'll just have to go read them all, now that I'm done.

I also just gobbled up Gone Girl, after reading just enough of a movie review to spoil myself for the big twist. But I wanted to watch it get pulled off, and I enjoyed it immensely. I want to see the movie, but I expect to be disappointed. It seems like an even more difficult twist to pull off on screen, tonally.

I hope that was vague enough.

Finally, I need some help signal boosting a friend's Kickstarter. With the recent success of SF anthologies of stories of the diverse margins, I would have hoped that this one might have been picked up with more enthusiasm, but the problem is that my friend Matt, the editor, has no online presence to speak of. So he needs some help.

The project is Latino/a Rising, and it's an SF anthology of U.S. Latin@ SF. He already has a bunch of great writers and artists on board, including Junot Diaz, and he's running the kickstarter in order to be able to pay his contributors.

Matt was a colleague of mine at UMass. He graduated last year and followed his wife (also one of our CompLit grads) to Penn for her post-doc. He's been working on Latin@ science fiction, especially with themes of immigration and alienation, for a long time--it was the topic of his dissertation. I know that the anthology is going to be fantastic. I just wish it were getting more buzz.

If you could help me signal boost it; maybe get some of the bigger SF names to tweet the link to the kickstarter, that would be fantastic. If you'd like to contribute too, and get a copy of the anthology, that would be amazing.

I just finished Madeline Miller's Song of Achilles, which is a lovely rewrite of Homer (and much that falls outside of Homer) from Patroklos's POV. I have quibbles, but then I always do. It is in many ways a very similar take to my own, and any differences I have are minor.

There is an interview with the author in the paratext of my edition, by Gregory Maguire (he of another well-received rewrite), who asks, basically, how she gathered up the nerve to rewrite Homer.

The last paragraph of her answer:

"I will say that at some point a friend of mine--let's be honest, an ex-boyfriend--referred to the story as 'Homeric fan fiction." That was fairly dampening. But I decided: so be it. If it's fan fiction, it's fan fiction. I'm still going to write it."

I kind of just want to pat her on the head and say, "It's okay honey. You're in really good company."

In related news, I'm writing the Vergil chapter right now. Back to it!

History is a funny little creature. Do you remember visiting your old Aunt that autumn when the trees shone so very yellow, and how she owned a striped and unsocial cat, quite old and fat and wounded about the ears and whiskers, with a crooked, broken tail? That cat would not come to you no matter how you coaxed and called; it had its own business, thank you, and no time for you. But as the evening wore on, it would come and show some affection or favor to your Aunt, or your Father, or the old end-table with the stack of green coasters on it. You couldn’t predict who that cat might decide to love, or who it might decide to bite. You couldn’t tell what it thought or felt, or how old it might really be, or whether it would one day, miraculously, decide to let you put one hand, very briefly, on its dusty head.

History is like that.

Go read it, right now. (And then buy the book, if you haven't already. I was reading it bit by bit to Cassie, but I want to gulp it all down right now. So gorgeous.)

Okay, I don't review books all that often on this LJ, and I sure as hell don't normally review books written by people I know, but I definitely wanted to share the awesomeness of this one, now that I've devoured it whole.

If you seen the blurbs, you've seen the basic plot outline: Evie Scelan is a bike messenger and sometime sort-of PI, using her preternatural sense of smell to track people and things in a Boston that flows with an undercurrent of magic. Her high school lover shows back up in her life and drags her head-deep into that undercurrent, where she never wanted to be.
( Mild spoilers may follow. )

It's a heck of a story, and only the first in a series. I'm very excited to read more about Evie and this version of Boston, almost as excited as I am for my friend. Check her out at her serious author blog: here. And tell your friends.

Posting frequency will be down until I can figure out how to post from my email (which shouldn't be hard, I know).

I'm back at work, and LJ's still blocked. Which is probably just as well.

Curriculum's set up, and here's the text list for the year:
Heart of Darkness, Joseph Conrad
Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe
The Poisonwood Bible, Barbara Kingsolver
(I've been teaching this trio for several years know, and the unit is solid and a success every time.
I figure it's a good way to start; last year I did it in the middle of the year).
selected Grimm's Fairy tales (Zipes' translation)
selected world folk tales from Africa and Mesopotamia
selected Bible stories
Euripides' Bakkhai (my translation; I'm still testing it out as a student text)
selected tales from Arabian Nights (Haddawy's translation)
selected picture books: Where the Wild Things Are, Curious George, Emma's Rug
The Neverending Story, Michael Ende
Tuck Everlasting, Natalie Babbitt
Bridge to Terabithia, Katherine Paterson
Haroun and the Sea of Stories, Salman Rushdie
Demian, Hermann Hesse
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi
The Kite Runner, Khaled Hosseini

I'm excited. What do you think?