I love doing giveaways on Goodreads — there’s something delightful about watching the number tick up as more people enter. Right now the giveaway’s only actually been accessible for three days, I think, and more than 360 people have requested the book. (Last year’s ARC giveaway got up to over 1000, I think.) I’d rather like to hug them all.

This week has been full of dissertation, but I took a break on Thursday night to go see Robyn at ACL Live as part of her Body Talk tour. If you like electro-pop and have a chance to see her, I highly recommend it. Somebody’s uploaded a few short videos from the show to YouTube; this is the best one. If you think you hear an echo, that’s the entire venue singing along. (Also, see this interesting documentary clip about the “dynamic textile” liquid art used in Robyn’s “Indestructible” video.)

I’ll post again soon with more literary links. I’m working on my laptop right now, and, as always, half the things I’ve been meaning to mention here are open in tabs on my desktop. Someday I’ll develop the habit of tagging things on delicious right away rather than leaving them open for a few days first. For now, I’ll just point out that Paul Lisicky will be reading at the Joynes Reading Room on the UT campus on Wednesday, February 23, at 7:30, and that UT Theatre & Dance is currently staging The Threepenny Opera.

This is probably the second least holiday-ish holiday season I’ve had — I have no courses or teaching to take a break from, end-stage dissertations do not give you downtime unless you force them to, and for various family reasons I won’t be traveling. But that doesn’t mean I’m not still enjoying choosing gifts for people, and reading gift guides, like the ones I linked in my previous posts.

So! Here are a small number of books and other things I’d recommend if you’re still searching for last-minute presents:

• A Very Short Introduction to Biography, Hermione Lee. A nicely sized survey of the history of the genre. I’d probably use this as a text if I ever get to teach one of the classes on biography that I’ve designed syllabi for, and not just because it’s full of useful information — it’s also an enjoyable read.
• Georgette Heyer’s Regency World, Jennifer Kloester — for friends of yours who really want to know all the workings of the ton. (And I’m going to stop there with books or I’ll be adding to this entry all day.*)
• Qwirkle, a game marketed for children but hilarious when played by grown-up humanists. You want the cubes, not the tiles.
• Robyn’s Body Talk Pt. 1 and Janelle Monae’s The ArchAndroid, for people who need some good pop music.
• Small batch jams from Confituras, a local Austin business. (I believe all their offerings are gluten free.) They wouldn’t arrive in time for Christmas, by now, but would make a nice present later too.
• Pears from Harry & David. These are grown near where my mother lives in southern Oregon — we drive by their orchards on I-5. They’re actually kind of worth it as a splurge.

Plus a few links before I retreat back to the land of dissertation and other grad-school-related stress:

• An article title I could’ve written myself: Your Attacks on Genre Fiction Grow Tiresome.
• Lit Folks Are Hip. The captions say so.
• Sara Ryan’s interview with Jenny Davidson — I’m saving this till after I’ve read The Explosionist, but I’m actually also using one of Davidson’s academic books for diss research right now, so I was happy to see this, which focuses on her fiction.
• The Lapham Quarterly‘s fascinating piece on the dwindling and disappearance of Barbara Follett, child prodigy of letters.
• A Roman-era statue emerges from the sea on Israel’s coast.
• The Google Labs ngram viewer, if you haven’t played with it yet. There are apparently some questions about the reliability of its dating metadata, but it’s still a nice hint of the ways large-scale research in the humanities can evolve from here.

* You could also, if you were so inclined, pre-order the Alcestis paperback for someone you love! It’s out February 1 but will probably ship early from Amazon (the hardback sure did), and of course the e-book version (Kindle, Sony Reader) gets delivered instantly.

One of my favorite songs from their latest album:

Via coffeeandink, a music video recommendation: Janelle Monae’s Many Moons, an sf short film inspired by Fritz Lang’s Metropolis.

Amazingly catchy and beautifully clever.

Repetitive things usually annoy me: repetitive motions like finger-tapping, repetitive sounds, even spoken choruses in songs when the rhythm of speech fights the beat. (That’s not repetitive, exactly, I guess, but it bothers me in the same way.) One of the things I thought was most charming about WALL-E, though, was the way the animators lingered on the little repetitive motions their characters made — how the characters were given time to be entranced with the movements of their stubby hands or with the lighting of an old Zippo. It’s sort of babylike, sort of animal, that kind of fascination; I’ve seen my cat do the same thing.

Before the movie — which we saw at the Alamo Drafthouse in south Austin — we sat through a number of Pixar shorts, all of which I profoundly disliked. T. kept looking over at me and laughing because I looked miserable. This was mostly because I really hate slapstick, whether cartoon or live-action. I was the sort of kid who watched the first Home Alone movie through my fingers not because I was scared for tiny Macaulay Culkin but because I felt awful for the crooks he was knocking around. But also I think I disliked the shorts because they don’t have those graceful little moments of discovery. They’re designed for visual gags and broad, predictable humor. And transparent cuteness. WALL-E included some visual gags and predictable humor and transparent cuteness, too, but that wasn’t the whole joke. It wasn’t a joke. It was a good movie.

I tend to link nice things I find on the internet at del.icio.us rather than posting about them here, but today I’ll do both. This is a wonderful article about CocoRosie, who make fey, strange, compelling music (and seem, based on the article, to be fey, strange, compelling people).

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.

1. Gotten my head knocked into a doorframe by my landlord. (Accidentally! He was checking a smoke alarm, I ducked under him, it was a bad scene.) The lump is just about gone now.
2. Sold my first story (!) — a short-short, to the wonderful people at Lady Churchill’s Rosebud Wristlet.
3. Discovered that the dryer attached to my new apartment will function with a maximum load of two (2) pairs of wet pants. Total.
4. Read most of Eliza Haywood’s Love in Excess. It’s spectacular — particularly the scene in which the two main characters fall in lust over the deathbed of the female character’s father — but it still hasn’t topped the MONKEY FIGHT at the end of Evelina for absurdity. (MONKEY FIGHT. And people say c18 fiction is dull.) Then again, I haven’t quite finished it yet.
5. Saw Final Fantasy at the Parish, downtown. Final Fantasy is Owen Pallett, recently described in the Times as “the world’s most popular gay postmodern harpsichord nerd.” If you ever have a chance to see him, do. He does all his looping from his violin live onstage, including crazy percussive sounds made with bow and strings, and shouts into the violin’s belly; he has a strange lovely voice and a great little dorky Ralph Fiennes laugh; he wore a red headband that made him look like an anime character; and he ended the concert with a cover of Mariah Carey’s “Fantasy.” (His cover of “Peach, Plum, Pear” was excellent, too.) Definitely one of the best shows I’ve seen.

I have access to borrowed wireless in the apartment now, intermittently. We’re still counting down the days to our very own reliable connection, though.