Saki
Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

Une nouvelle chatte chez nous! She is delightfully funny and weird and precious. Before us, she lived in a house where she hid a lot, and she’s, er, enjoying her freedom; it’s kind of like living with a tiny Rosencrantz, who’s always discovering some law of physics by sheer accident. And then purring.

I could go on — approximately forever — but I won’t, since I have an annotated bibliography to polish up.

I’ll try to write more soon about my recent conference trip to SEASECS and some new developments with our digital humanities project.

To my very dear friend Elizabeth Scott, on the official release of her first novel, Bloom! It’s a wonderful, thoughtful, beautifully observed YA novel, and I cannot recommend it highly enough. Here’s Michele Jaffe’s blurb for the book:

Finely drawn, honest, sweet and charming, Bloom is like getting a beautifully wrapped gift — it’s lovely to start with and just gets better as you tear into it.

See? I’m telling you, it’s good stuff — and her forthcoming books are going to be just as good.

Elizabeth’s also been running book giveaway contests on her blog in preparation for the release, which is an excellent idea, and a very collegial thing to do, I think. Anyway, I’m so happy for her that I could burst, and I can’t wait to get my hands on my own copy. BookPeople has it in stock, so this weekend, it shall be mine. (Unless my work eats me first.)

Congratulations, E!

Recently, I’ve been wanting a cat. This is not new — I always want a cat, or three. It’s shocking, really, that I haven’t buckled and adopted one after more than two and a half years in Austin. (Of course, my apartment-mate B. got a kitten five months before she got her master’s and left, and R. has a wonderful, insane, hefty tabby, and then there were the three feral kittens I rescued and fostered while sharing a house with R.; but none of them were mine.) I stop and pet them whenever I can, and T. says, half-jokingly, that my superpower is seeing cats. I find them everywhere.

This is not the time to get a pet. We’re planning to move again this summer, and I may have to go to Oregon for a while at some point to help out, and who knows what emigrations may come, post-doctorate? Nonetheless: I want a cat.

So it was surprising, and pleasant, that the sweet silent little black cat who lives in the apartment across the parking lot — this is west campus; there is no other way to express proximal distance between buildings — decided to break into our apartment yesterday. She’s been friendly before, and it was cold out, but not that cold. I think she was just curious — and when the landlord showed up with the plumber to fix our hot water (sigh), she ran up the stairs ahead of them and bolted right in. I let her do that curious low creeping walk around the apartment for a little while, then took her out to the landing and held her on my lap. She purred a little, and twitched her tail, and it’s silly how happy I was then, sitting on our stairs with a borrowed cat on my lap, cold, thinking about nothing.

Icicles in bed

Originally uploaded by Katharine B.

It’s the first day of the spring semester, technically, and we’re having an ice day. I’ve been trying not laugh too hard about this, or be too much of a “snow snob,” as T. said, but I can’t help it — the last time Smith closed for weather, I think we had about three feet of snow, and the college hadn’t closed for thirty years before that.

So far this means hot chocolate with amaretto, reading the NY Times online, and a bit of Okami. No word on whether UT will close tomorrow, as well, though the forecast does contain more freezing rain.

I took this photo from my bed this morning; hence the upside-down icicle parade.

And it is, in fact, snowing. Just a bit.

I tried to post these as embedded YouTube clips, but they broke my formatting, so links will have to do.

As a follow-up to my post about this fall’s concerts, here’s Final Fantasy performing Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy,” and Joanna Newsom’s “Peach, Plum, Pear.”

Listen for the series of hoots when the audience recognizes the Mariah Carey song.

I’ve turned in my grades, which means that my semester is officially complete — a fact that has been celebrated with sushi, as all good things should be. I should be posting here more often over break, especially as I work on revising my first novel. (More about that soon.)

To begin, a recap of the shows I’ve seen this fall, in chronological order:

1. Final Fantasy at the Parish: by far the best show of the fall (though T. might argue for Asobi Seksu or Man Man), and probably one of the most technically impressive performances I’ve seen. I wrote about it briefly here, and I’m not sure what else to add, except maybe little glittery hearts around Owen Pallett’s name. I loved this show.
2. Sufjan Stevens at the Paramount. This was just — not affecting, I guess. Beautiful, though the visual elements of the show were silly at times, but not beautiful in any way that surpassed the experience of listening to his most recent album. Not dynamic. I felt somewhat the same way about Sigur Rós, which we saw in a similar venue last year, though their music suited the opera-hall style space better.
3. Man Man at Emo’s. This was an anniversary present for T., who’s wanted to see them again since we saw them open for Okkervil River last fall. They were, uh, still mustachioed and crazy? Just as crazy as their music video, in fact, except with fewer images borrowed from Married to the Sea. I liked their show a lot when we saw them first, but found them less charming as a repeat concert experience, and I don’t think Emo’s was as good a venue for them as the Stubb’s indoor stage was. They had more room to play and less matter to fill it up.
4. Beirut/Voxtrot at Emo’s. We didn’t catch all of Voxtrot; it was late, and I was tired. Plus, Voxtrot was not so great. I was there for Beirut, who were marvelous and energetic.
5. Asoki Seksu/Mates of State at Emo’s. This concert was outdoors and FREEZING. Asobi Seksu sounded lovely, and were very — professional? I’m not sure if that’s quite the right word, but their lead singer had a delightfully no-nonsense air and a wonderful stylized voice. Mates of State were somewhat dull, or maybe that was just their song structures. Repetition annoys me, and I really don’t go for the verse/chorus/verse/chorus mode, especially when the rest of the song’s not complex. The onstage flirting between wife and husband was sweet, though I kept thinking of Oscar Wilde’s line about airing one’s clean laundry in public. They had a cute bit about encores, though, which seemed somewhat ironic after…
6. Joanna Newsom at the Parish, just this Wednesday. Disappointing — I’d been really excited about this, because I adore Ys and much of The Milk-Eyed Mender. But the opening act (Smog) was dreadful, the show wasn’t terribly well-run, and Joanna herself wasn’t so professional. She’d already done an earlier show, and began our show by begging that she not be videotaped because she was losing her voice and she was going to be “bad.” She kept repeating this throughout the show, excusing herself for skipping songs or singing roughly (to her own ears, I guess), and then left without an encore. Aside from some hoarseness on the first two songs and a few moments in which she didn’t reach for the high notes, I wouldn’t have been able to tell, and her anxiety just made it seem as if she wanted to be elsewhere. Not the most pleasant kind of stage banter. As with Sufjan Stevens, I didn’t feel that being present for the show added much to the music as recorded.

I find this approximately tri-weekly schedule of concerts both fun and odd, considering that I went to about six shows during my entire college career. Austin has me trained.

Last Monday night, Kelly Link gave a wonderful reading at the Joynes Reading Room at UT. It was followed by one of the most interesting Q&As I’ve ever attended, pleasant chatting over food (provided by the Joynes Reading Room, hurrah), and then an even more delightful dinner at El Chile. Kelly read a story called “The Wrong Grave,” which will be published next year. I think it set the tone for the evening — when we weren’t talking about publishing, at dinner, we mostly told creepy stories (of ghosts and of brains, which can be just as scary). It was, in fact, a lovely night.

Tomorrow morning I present a paper on Charlotte Charke in my bibliography class, and then it’s grading, more paper-writing, and more grading until mid-December. I promise to post at least once more before Christmas.

WFC is happening in Austin this weekend! I’ll be there on Friday and Saturday. I have no idea what to expect, as this is my first con, but I’m looking forward to it (and to meeting lots of people I’ve only corresponded with before!). If you’re coming to town for WFC and haven’t yet checked out the unofficial guide to Austin that M. Thomas and I put together, do!

If you’re hanging around Austin after the con, or if you’re local, please also come to Kelly Link’s reading at the Joynes Reading Room (on the UT campus) on Monday, November 6, at 7:30 pm. Kelly will be reading from recent work and answering questions about writing and publishing — and I personally guarantee that it will be a fabulous event.

One thing to note: The Joynes Reading Room is located in room 007 of the Carothers building on the UT Campus, which is essentially in the basement of the building. Visitors must enter through the east (courtyard) entrance.

Hope to see some of you there!

I’m writing this post from the courtyard in between the HRC and the English buildings, via the HRC’s wireless connection. Oddly enough, there’s no reliable wireless in the English building. This courtyard is one of my favorite places to sit on campus, though, so I don’t mind.

It’s been a crazy week. I had a presentation Monday, a class observation Tuesday, and a short paper due today, and I feel drowsy and slow. I’m looking forward to a relatively restful weekend full of sushi, reading for my paper project on Charlotte Charke and grading some short assignments — probably with my apartment windows open, as it’s finally cooled off. Perhaps we’ll go see a movie. Any opinions to offer on The Science of Sleep, The Prestige, or Marie Antoinette?

Someday, this blog will contain regularly-updated content. And by “someday” I meant “possibly in December, when I have a moment to think.” Right now, I have rather too much grading and reading to allow for original thought. So: here are a few lists. Some are hierarchical; some are not.

My favorite book-ogling experiences in the HRC thus far:

1. Chaucer, Cardigan manuscript of the Canterbury Tales.
2. Two of Oscar Wilde’s letters, which I transcribed for class earlier this week — both were just a sheet front and back, written from France, before his trial. In the first he asks a friend for a loan of ten pounds; in the second, to a different friend, he explains that he’s switched hotels because the previous one kept sending his bill up every morning with his coffee. Poor Oscar. He had lovely big messy handwriting, only a few words to a line.
3. Shakespeare, First Folio, Norton facsimile (as previously explained).
4. Emily Dickinson, Poems, 1891. Like a cracked whip on the page. One of the editions had a facsimile of a poem in the first few pages — and, shockingly, her dashes are just little dots! She had a big sprawly script, too — for some reason I’d always thought of her as someone who would’ve written in little cramped letters. I’m glad I was wrong.
5. Defoe, Colonel Jack: married FIVE TIMES to FOUR WHORES, says the long title, the capital letters rubricated. I think Defoe had some kind of rule for himself: the last phrase in a long title must contain a complete falsehood. (Crusoe does this, too — “rescued by pyrates,” my ass.)
6. Taylor’s Workes, with a triple dedication, and each dedicatee given his own delightfully obsequious epigram.
7. Hooke’s Micrographia — the illustrations!
8. Johnson’s Dictionary — the heft!

Noteworthy events of the last month or so:

• Having my first conference paper proposal — on the romance plot and Charlotte Lennox’s The Female Quixote — accepted for the ASECS conference in March. There was much rejoicing.
• Finding an excellent space (the Joynes Reading Room) for Kelly Link’s upcoming reading at UT. More on this as it approaches.
• Having another dissertation idea pop into my head. Er, hello.
• Follett opening their first new flagship bookstore, Intellectual Property, right next to campus. They have literary criticism in their clearance section! And they gave me a free tote bag. I’m easily won.

The best things I’ve bought at the farmer’s market recently:

• squash blossoms (which I cooked this way, with the addition of a bit of cornmeal to the batter — they were excellent over rice with teriyaki sauce)
• banana and cinnamon empanada baked by a local Brazilian restaurant
• local spinach — I was in spinach withdrawal
• blueberry bran muffin

With T.’s encouragement, I bought okra today — at the co-op rather than the farmer’s market, but it’s local stuff. I’ve only eaten it twice in my life. This must mean something about my level of Texas acculturation, but I’m not quite sure what.