We couldn’t swing AWP this year, sadly — sometimes it feels as if we will never make it back to NYC (this year! I vow!). Too much other recent travel, too many other obligations, etc. But my school is throwing a little party, and y’all that are going should stop by and rub shoulders with some of my classmates and faculty:

Vermont College Gathering at the Pig & Whistle
Friday, February 1, 2008, at 7:00
The Pig & Whistle
Times Square
165 West 47th Street
Vermont College welcomes all alumni, students, faculty, friends, staff, prospective students and curious passers-by to a social gathering at The Pig & Whistle. Hunger Mountain contributors and subscribers are also welcome to attend. The gathering will be upstairs; we will have exclusive service so that food and drinks will be readily available for attendees to purchase from the restaurant. The Pig & Whistle is in Times Square, approximately 1/3 mi. walking distance from the Rockefeller Center Hilton. To walk there, head south on 6th Ave (against traffic), and take a right on W 47th St. The Pig & Whistle is at 165 West 47th Street across from the Quality Inn.

Trust me, they know how to throw a to do.

The NYT has the story of an illicit party gone wrong at the Robert Frost farmhouse:

Over the next several hours, more than 30 teenagers and young adults toasted their post-adolescence with liquor carrying the added kick of illicitness. By early morning they were gone, leaving a wounded house watched over by winter-stripped birches and sugar maples.
…
Imagining still, as all poets invite us to, you can almost see Frost observing the vandalism and aftermath from that cabin above, wondering briefly whether these youths were, say, acolytes of Carl Sandburg, exacting revenge because Frost considered their hero poet second-rate. Sipping his tea, he rummages through his mind’s deep storehouse for the metaphors that would provide context, that would find renewal in this destruction.

Seems a bit of a stretch, but then the whole piece has that tone. And in the end justice was served. I used to know someone who had done a stint working at one of the Laura Ingalls Wilder houses, and she swore the staff routinely found underwear and beer bottles on Monday mornings. I wonder what Robert Frost would have thought of that.

Julie Phillips, the brilliant biographer behind last year’s NBCC winner James Tiptree, Jr.: The Double Life of Alice Sheldon, has been busy writing fabulous reviews and essays, but mostly they’ve been published in Dutch translation in a daily newspaper there. Lucky for us, she’s now put versions in English up at her site:

• "Mothers and Daughters on the Circle Line" (a review of Jeannette Winterson’s Stone Gods, Doris Lessing’s The Cleft, and Ninni Holmqvist’s The Unit: Almost any serious literary writer with a little fantasy is liable, at one time or another, to stray into genre territory. To scorn science fiction for its supposed lack of literary qualities is to ignore what it can do better than any other literature: explore alternatives, rethink relationships. Women especially need it. Women have reasons to want political change, while in space there’s plenty of room to start over.
• "Explorer, Archeologist, Librarian, Spy" (an essay about The Dangerous Book for Boys and The Daring Book for Girls): In fact, almost any of these activities could have been in the boys’ book, or vice versa. And that, it seems to me, is the real trouble: to put a fence around one set of things and mark it "boys," and another fence around "girls," may be restful for a while—and it will certainly sell more books. But there’s always going to be someone who doesn’t fit. And then what? "It’s not bad to say girls and boys are different," my husband commented. "But if you glorify or wallow in those differences, you’re in danger of undoing 40 years of feminist work."
• "Out of Milk? Live With It" (a review of Harvey Mansfield’s Manliness): It’s a sign of the need for a book like this that it’s been so popular, because there’s not much enlightenment to be gained from actually reading it. Between the brief definition of manliness at the beginning (aloofness, authority, “confidence in the face of risk.”) and its defense at the end, there lies, like the meat of an unappetizing sandwich, a long discussion of philosophy and literature that is vague, tedious, self-contradictory and occasionally wrong.
• "Beyond the Ball and Chain" (a review of Germaine Greer’s Shakespeare’s Wife): The roles of gadfly and Shakespeare scholar might seem difficult to combine, but the resourceful Greer has found a way. The wives of famous men, she points out, do not always receive kind treatment from posterity. Biographers prefer stories about an artist whose brilliance went unappreciated by a difficult or foolish spouse. So Greer—who is the kind of writer who thinks in disagreements—has decided to write a biography of her own. Her goal in “Shakespeare’s Wife” is to rehabilitate the much-maligned Ann Hathaway.
• "Jewish Detective Stories" (an interview with Michael Chabon and Daniel Mendelsohn — which yielded a shorter interview with Chabon for The Washington Post): What constitutes a cultural identity? Is it connected to home, to language, to being part of a group, to being on TV? Is it tied to history? Can history be rewritten? Novelist Michael Chabon and culture critic Daniel Mendelsohn have both published books in which they look at identity and its representation through the lens of an Eastern European Jewish heritage. In Amsterdam last week, the two friends agreed to a joint interview.

Happy reading!

I love this story (although I can’t remember where I spotted it!):

A prize-winning novelist has won a settlement of more than £100,000 after she claimed to have become so intoxicated by fumes from a nearby shoe factory that she was reduced to writing thrillers.

Joan Brady, who beat Andrew Motion and Carol Anne Duffy to win the Whitbread Prize in 1993 with her book The Theory of War, has received £115,000 in an out-of-court settlement after she suffered numbness in her hands and legs allegedly caused by solvents used by Conker, a cobbler based next to her home in Totnes, Devon.

She told The Times that the fumes were so bad that she was unable to concentrate on writing her highbrow novel, Cool Wind from the Future, and instead wrote a brutal crime story, Bleedout, which she found easier. The violent plot of the book also allowed her to vent her frustrations on the factory and South Hams District Council, which failed initially to detect the smells. According to Nielsen Book-scan, Bleedout has sold a respectable 10,000 copies.

If only some similar theory could be used to explain the quality of my first drafts…