Argh! Blog silence, blog silence, and yet more blog silence!

Things just get more and more labyrinthine in their franticness chez Sycorax Pine, until I feel just barnacled over with endless work. The job search gallops apace (I have a couple of interviews now, which means I have made it past the first two rounds of cuts for a few schools, which will now live forever in my affection), the dissertation is moving into turbo-drive, and another semester of teaching is winding down.

But meanwhile, I had to make a brief bloggy appearance to tell you about another delight that LibraryThing has brought into my life: SantaThing.

SantaThing is a program that LibraryThing is inaugurating this year, a program that allows you to send books off to a total stranger and receive some in return this holiday season. It is like an even more surprising BookMooch, a gift economy that is entirely speculative and thus a good bit more thrilling and adventurous (and you know how I love the idealism of BookMooch).

Here's what happens: before this Thursday, prospective SantaThingers should go to the SantaThing site and pay $25 via PayPal. Then you will enter in some basic words of guidance: how would you describe your literary interests? The types of books you would like to receive? Hate to receive on the level of cataclysmic disaster? After this you provide your name and address to LibraryThing, which will keep this info private. They will pick a Secret Santa for you on Thursday, and you will submit gift ideas (based on the info you have about your SantaThingee) that are worth up to $20 (on Amazon) to LibraryThing. They arrange and pay for the shipping, and your gifts should arrive at their destination by Christmas Eve.

I have to say, the prospect of getting not just book recommendations, but actual books from a total stranger is thrilling to me. For that matter, the idea of getting to send some of my favorite books on to people who have never encountered them is oddly pleasing as well. Delightful! If it interests you, go and check it out at the links above.

Meanwhile, my apologies for my blog-sluggishness (bluggishness?) - things are just so crazy here that I feel guilty every time I even contemplate writing a blog entry. I will try to pop in for an update whenever I can, but I hope to be back to my full bloggy splendor (ok, perhaps it would be better to say my full bloggy devotion) in February or March. Meanwhile, my love to you all!

Ah no! Blog silence! What a terrible fate my blog has met amidst an unprecedentedly all-devouring work schedule....

Well, I will try to pop in now and again with a brief note on what I am up to. Lately it has been a non-stop roller-coaster of job applications (which, in the academic job market, are stunningly time-consuming), teaching prep, grading and dissertation-worrying (in the double sense of a terrier's attitude towards a bone and a mother's attitude towards an absent child as the curfew nears).

What have I been up to this weekend? Friday and Saturday were mad theatrical whirlwinds. On Friday I went to see a staged reading of John Gay's 18th C ballad opera, Polly, the sequel to his better known The Beggar's Opera. Only at Yale, eh? Although perhaps there is a wild ballad opera subculture somewhere in the world that performs little known three hundred year old works in charmingly dank, dilapidated cabaret basements - who knows? This reading was given by a combination of professors, grad students and undergrads and was terribly lively, as only a tale of racial masquerade, cross-dressing, piracy, bigamy, and sexual slavery -- with songs! -- could be.

Yesterday I went off to a graduate production of Brecht's early play Baal - for a change of pace, you know - and witnessed several rapes in ragged, almost-fully-naked-a-few-feet-away-from-me detail. It was a production that reveled in the squalor of bodily existence, shall we say. At one point, I must admit, I was spattered (in the second row, mind you) with fake urine from a character who was relieving herself onstage. Yeah.

Then, in the evening, I headed off to a former student's senior project: a very judiciously edited and rollickingly staged version of the two parts of Shakespeare's Henry IV. Most striking about the production, perhaps, was that a college-aged actor managed to embody Falstaff with such skill and gusto. The tavern scenes, which I normally find rather tedious (since they are filled to the brim with opaque and archaic wordplay), were played with particularly infectious vigor - actors spraying their drink on the audience out of laughter and surprise.

And as I dabbed at my rather damp self I thought: "Ah, the theatre.... When else do I get the opportunity to be peed on in the afternoon and spat on at night?"