Beginnin' to see the light

For too long now I've been struggling. My job, while wonderful in so many ways, is also really hard sometimes. Yes, I get to work on wonderful material; and yes, I get to travel around a bit; and manage my own time. And indeed, I get a great sense of achievement in my work when I finish big projects. I am also the first to admit that my path through the professional and intellectual minefield that is the modern university has been easier and more straightforward than that of many people. I've been wonderfully lucky in my students and colleagues, locally, nationally and internationally. I'm pretty well paid for what I do. I have excellent superannuation and health care in a country which is also providing my son with excellent health care and education through the state system. We are heavily mortgaged, but there are two of us on full salaries and our house, while badly run down and crumbling in places, is spacious and pleasant. We eat well; we are happy as a family; we are close to friends and family; and our lives are full of music, words and images. Even my own trajectory through breast cancer was relatively straightforward: the end of this year will mark the end of my five years' treatment and the point where I will have substantially reduced the risk of recurrence so that it will not be much higher than the risk a woman my age might face of first contracting the disease.

And yet too often these days I wake in the night and toss and turn about the always-unfinished, always imperfect and utterly invasive nature of my work. It goes on and on. It is never finished. It is never perfected. It is never complete. Instead, it feels partial, incomplete, unfinished. I can't control the endless emails; the online forms and processes; the constant requests to assess, grade, quantify and rank that eat into the time and concentration I have available to read and study medieval literature. I feel I have cleared the mental space to write this blog entry only because I've been working so hard to delete and file emails (I have processed over a thousand of them in the last few days in a concerted effort to control them) and have cleared most of the surface of my desk and home.

I try to give myself Saturdays off, so I had a "normal" day today: breakfast with Joel (Paul comes home from Europe on Monday); Italian class; gym workout; leftover pizza for lunch; made chocolate and cherry muffins. We introduced the kittens to my parents who came and sat and drank tea as we watched Wulf and Orlando taking turns to play with the toy mouse (Wulf tired first and climbed up on my father's lap, while Orlando knocked herself out leaping and tossing and chasing the mouse before climbing on Pa's lap to curl up with her brother). I then raked up about eight barrow loads of leaves, and raked the gravel paths before I came in to watch the last scenes of The Ghost Writer (I had fallen asleep on the couch watching it the night before), walked it back down to the video shop, then made mushroom and spinach risotto (secret ingredient? a big spoonful of creme fraiche right at the end) and watched Dr Who while we ate it.

But even a normal day like this feels less like a good balance of work and life and more like a day of respite snatched from the chaos and the lurching from task to task that seem to characterise every day — and the anxious reliving of that chaos that often characterises the hours between 2 and 4 am.

I'm sure I'm doing it all wrong. I'm sure I could be more disciplined (sigh) about being organised and prioritising stuff. I'm also pretty sure this feeling would be one clearly identified symptom of mid-life crisis. I'm pretty sure most folk in Australian universities - and elsewhere - will be feeling many of the same things. Even so, I'm hesitating to write this, as I feel I'm normally so upbeat about my work. And I guess that is also the professional persona I have cultivated. So it feels like something of a betrayal of all that.

And yet. And yet. I'm going to "publish post" in a minute, anyway. This is what I set up my blog for, in any case, to trace these vicissitudes. But can anything be done? Will it always be like this?  For now, I'm going to put the kittens to bed and read a chapter of the book I'm reviewing before I go to sleep.

Friday night is pizza night

Most Friday nights, for the past sixteen or so years, we have got together with our dear friends: our mirror family, as I call them. Two academic parents, one blond child, and a bunch of similar interests, politics and lives. When various family members are away, we meet anyway. We eat pizza (or sometimes cook), we drink an extra glass of red wine, we eat chocolates and lollies. We argue, we laugh, we tell jokes. We look forward to it from Thursday evening, sometimes. Joel has his last lesson (piano) at 5.30 on a Friday. Once we pick him up, the weekend begins as he starts to relax, too. And when visiting scholars come through town, we love to welcome them along and induct them into Friday night pizza.

Last night was a mega-version of this ritual. The six of us were there, plus two of Paul's research partners and their partners, plus our neighbour, plus a visiting Candian, her partner and their twin daughters. There's a head missing from this photo, but this was fifteen people sitting down to eat pizzas from Al Albero (tiny pizza bar down the road: ring ahead and given them plenty of time, and pick up from the shop; ask for thinner base than usual, if you don't like a light but turkish bread-style base; recommendation? slow cooked lamb, or marinara with giant prawns and scallops). We had the twins on the old piano stool at the end, and you can see Joel and Eva, his Friday night sibling, on the left. Friday night bliss!

Quick update

In Australia, we finish teaching around the end of October. And that's when it really starts to get busy.

The marking (though I'm not complaining here as I've had a very light teaching load this semester). The meetings. The planning. The exchange approvals (this program has exploded in popularity since I was last in charge of granting subject approvals, and I'm seeing or emailing about three students a day about this). The honours applications: my two weeks on fairy tales in Romancing the Medieval is generating lots of interest for honours thesis topics.

The meetings. Did I say that already?

I'm on two job selection committees: we did video interviews for one, this week, finishing 9.30 pm on Tuesday night. Another big one coming up, for which I want to read some of the candidates' work.

The emails.

Booking various tickets (Marriage of Figaro with Teddy Tahu Rhodes; Rigoletto with Emma Matthews; Ashes cricket with ... well, who knows, by then?).

Planning a little holiday in NZ around the ANZAMEMS conference.

Helping organise our School's Christmas party (with the Blue Manoeuvres).

Reading a re-submitted volume of essays for the Late Medieval and Early Modern Series.

Preparing project pro-formas for the first phases of my work in the Centre of Excellence (I'm already late with this: not a good way to begin, though we don't start till next year).

And finishing my book. I'm feeling more confident about being to wrap it all up as an intellectual project; now it's just a question of finding the time. Sadly, that's what my annual leave will be for, starting Wednesday week...

[Update: and while I wasn't watching, my counter counted its 100,000th visitor since July 2006. Go, little blog!]

Check!

Annual mammogram is clear: check!
Annual ultrasound is clear: check!
Annual physical exam is clear: check!
Annual interview with the goddess: brief, but clear! Check!

It's not that I was really worried: apart from a cold, I'm fit as a fiddle. But so I was when I first discovered the tell-tale dimple in the bathroom of the Chase Park Plaza Hotel in St Louis during a meeting of the NCS congress committee, almost exactly four years ago. So the possibility of a nasty surprise is always in the back of my mind. But as the years and treatment go on, it seems less and less likely I'm up for any kind of recurrence. I've just ridden home from this very reassuring set of appointments. I've also just ridden home again from the clinic wher I found, just where I parked my bike the first time, the hand-made copper earring Paul brought me from Lebanon, which must have slipped out of my ear when I was putting my helmet back on. All these things, on top of a gym session which included a lot of running this morning, have left me feeling extremely fit and healthy and pleased with myself today.

Searching back for that post about my surgeon, I also found this one about elementary meditation; a practice I have let go, rather. I feel I am moving too fast at the moment (the books I'm writing; the committees I'm attending; the plans I'm making) for such a slow activity. But of course, that's probably a sign I should think again about doing something slowly.

Rumination, depression and other emotions

The first day of the ASSA/CMEMS/IAS/ARC CHE (etc. etc.) interdisciplinary workshop on the emotions was suitably intense. We met in the beautiful wood-lined original old building of the UWA, which was at one time used as a cricket pavilion (I mean: just look at it). We are a bunch of about 20 psychologists, historians, literary critics and classicists. The workshop is called "Understanding Emotions" but it's really turning out to be about how psychology and the history of emotions can talk to each other.

As you'd expect, we all speak a rather different language — and I think this discussion should ideally have the disciplines of psychiatry and psychoanalysis here — but the format is great. It's mostly 15 minute papers with two ten minute responses and then the rest of the hour for discussion. 

Some amazing papers, but some stand-out moments, too.

A music psychologist described working with dementia patients. Singing provides an amazing restorative because music triggers various memory tracks in the brain — but the most moving thing was to think of the carers seeing their loved ones ... as they used to be. (OK, I shed a little tear here.

A psychologist's response to a paper on academic emotions described the difference between two kinds of thinking: one is the adaptive, perhaps process-driven one that helps surgeons and air-traffic controllers do their job; another is the ruminative, more open-ended kind of thinking that suits disciplines like literary studies. But it is the ruminative thinker who is apparently more likely to become depressed. (He also said there was clinical evidence to suggest that men lie "prolifically" about their emotions...)

The final session of the day was to be a 90-minute round table. We spent quite a while compiling a list of possible topics. A psychologist muttered good-naturedly, "why don't we just starting talking about one of these?" — to which I replied, "but we're ruminating..."

My paper — on various accounts of the Great Fire of London — is on today, just about as the AFL grand final is on. A dear friend is promising to stream the match in the background as I speak.

Since the poor old Bombers finished the season third from the bottom, I don't have much invested, really, in the outcome. But since Essendon is traditional rival with Collingwood, and since it is simply so much fun to have a team you hate —  Go Saints!!

How to mess up a job interview

In a couple of weeks, my School will be holding a workshop for graduate students on academic job interviews. It will involve a mock interview, for which we are currently preparing a kind of script, with a mix of "good" and "bad" responses.  In this country, we are usually pretty hamstrung in the questions we can ask, which are usually supposed to be the same for each candidate.

In a nutshell, the questions would normally be something like this:

·       Why should we hire you? i.e. what’s distinctive about you and why are you a good fit for this job? (code for "how will you fit in with us?")

·       Tell us about your current and future research plans?

·       Tell us about your teaching philosophy – and give an example of how you handle difficult situations.

·       What kind of graduate supervisor will you be? This is especially hard for recent graduates...

·       This job involves a fair amount of administration (i.e. convening a large first-year subject). How will you balance the demands of teaching and research?

·       What kind of courses would you like to teach?

·       Do you have any questions for us?

From your experience, on either side of the interview table, what are the most common pitfalls for job candidates in this situation? What kinds of answers work best? What are the golden rules of academic job interviewing? We have a very talented person who will be the "candidate" in this interview, but it would be great to have some specific examples. Any suggestions and advice are welcome. And then I'll undertake to post an account of the session, with the advice from our expert.

Nasty combinations

One. A lingering cough with a bruised rib after skidding off my bike at the weekend (on the bike path, just changing direction too quickly over wet leaves). Everytime I sneeze I yelp in surprise; everytime I cough I groan.

Two. Renato the dentist's scrupulous cleaning of my teeth with a windy day and a blocked nose. Riding the streets of Melbourne with the wind whistling through my scraped gums a mild kind of agony.

Three. The University's impossible demands of our essay marking: a tightly regulated bell curve of grade distribution, an inflexible average, a finely tuned characterisation of the standards of each grade, combined with an insistence on including in the averages those students who never turned up to class and never bothered to withdraw. Statistical hell for my two wonderful tutors who valiantly battled to do right by the students and the system today.

Following sport is HARD

I was about to give up on sport. I was so disappointed for Sam Stosur; then Essendon lost narrowly to Sydney and dropped out of the top eight; then Australia lost to the US at soccer (soccer!) in a World Cup warm-up. Well, but why did I tie my happiness to a woman I've never met who hits balls back and forth for a living? I told myself it was because I felt she was an ordinary woman who had recovered from serious illness and who was now about to make it really big. That's a pretty nice narrative to identify with. And she's not a prima donna. And she doesn't dress in chiffon to play tennis. And she is, after all, an Australian. But really, it's so arbitrary.

But we got home at midnight after seeing Richard III (run, don't walk, by the way, to get tickets for the last week of Ewen Leslie's extraordinary performance) and I turned on the TV to watch the second set. It was hard, for all my patriotism, not to be moved by Schiavone's late-career-blossoming, and her passionate kissing of the clay of Roland Garros, but I was all the same very disappointed for Stosur; and that feeling stayed with me much of the day (not improved by Essendon's last-minute loss to Sydney).

But I've just now seen Stosur on TV, saying how thrilled she was with her winning performances in Paris, and that while she was disappointed, she was still going to enjoy her success. So I'm somewhat reconciled, now, and reminded of all those truisms about sport; that it teaches you how to lose, as well as how to win.

I think with sport, I'm particularly fascinated by what looks like the purity of a good athlete's focus and concentration: evident, often, only when they have stopped competing and let go. I find it much harder to have the same kind of on-off switch with my own work. But could wish for it. And I think that's why I like vicariously switching on to see that kind of concentration at work. And surely, Sam's set up well for Wimbledon? No one will take her for granted, at least.

Two good talks

A busy night next Wednesday. First there is this seminar by one of our outstanding graduate students:

School of Culture and Communication Seminar

Wednesday 26, Lecture Theatre C, Old Arts, 4.30-6pm

David McInnis

(University of Melbourne, English)

“Lost Plays, 1580-1642”

Our picture of the English Renaissance theatre (c.1580-1642) has been shaped exclusively by the plays that were printed and have survived, but more than 550 plays have been lost, or exist only in manuscript fragments. Our conception of the Renaissance theatre is, therefore, a partially distorted one. This seminar will provide an introduction to a new, collaborative digital humanities project designed to address this problem: the Lost Plays Database. Edited by David McInnis and Roslyn L. Knutson, and hosted by the University of Melbourne, the LPD is a wiki-style forum for scholars to share information about lost plays in England. It provides a wealth of data for early modern scholars interested in repertory studies, the history of playhouses and playing companies, Renaissance audiences, and playwrights of Shakespeare’s day, and promotes an innovative alignment of technology and scholarly aims.

David McInnis is a PhD candidate in the English program at the University of Melbourne, where his thesis examines vicarious travel and the early modern English stage. His work has been published in such journals as Parergon, Notes & Queries, Ariel and Early Modern Literary Studies, and (with Brett D. Hirsch) he has recently co-edited a special issue of EMLS on the theme ‘Embodying Shakespeare’. He is currently co-editing a book on ‘Refashioning Myth’ for Cambridge Scholars Press, and has just been awarded a short-term Fellowship at the Folger Shakespeare Library in Washington DC to pursue research on lost plays.
http://www.culture-communication.unimelb.edu.au/seminars.html 

and then later that same evening, I'm off to a lecture for the Heraldry Society. I'm thinking of doing some work on Australian university coats of arms, but Stephen is the real expert here:

Stephen Michael Szabo will present a lecture titled "It's Academic: The Heraldry of Australian Universities and Colleges". Based on research done during 2006 (The Year of Academic Heraldry) and since, this will be an overview of arms, both granted and assumed, of many of Australia's universities and some of their associated colleges. Details are:
 
Date: Wednesday 26 May 2010

Time: Doors open at 6:00pm for 6:30pm start

Location
Meeting Room
Balwyn Library
336 Whitehorse Rd
Balwyn

Light refreshments will be available and a gold coin donation to assist with costs would be greatly appreciated. Please telephone 0431 701 055 or send e-mail to secretary@heraldryaustralia.org to advise if you will be attending.

bedding down

If things have been quiet around humanities researcher lately, it's not because I recently joined facebook (I can see how it might be addictive, but I hope I'm not going to be sucked in too deeply), but for these reasons:

(a) there is not much research being done around here lately. It's the pointy end of the teaching year for me, with two new subjects to bed down and a bunch of additional lectures; plus the whole getting-used-to-being-head thing and the business of bedding down our teaching for next year.

(b) there has been a lot of fussing (much of it on my part) about our large Centre of Excellence application (actually based at UWA). I have some excellence in some areas: budgets are not one of them. But finally the draft letter and draft budget of the Melbourne end of it are completed. It seems they all may have to be done again, but at least, now, there are some senior people in some senior research offices at two ends of the continent working together. It's working with an inadequate sense of what might be required that is very difficult.

(c) Finally, about two hours, on Wednesday, after the very successful inaugural recite-the-first-18-lines-of-the-General-Prologue competition (with appropriately Easter Lindten rewards [there's a good joke in there somewhere trying to get out], with first prize going to a beautiful solo rendition from memory; and second to a team effort, acted out with sun, winds, plants and birds, ending in a tableau of poor St Thomas with pilgrims kneeling at his side), I picked up a telephone message from my boy, rather apologetically saying he thought he had hurt his arm when he went over the top of the handlebars of his bike when braking suddenly, and might need an x-ray.

Thus began a two-day saga: I took him to emergency and after a couple of hours he was x-rayed; and then began the question of admitting him, and finding him a bed. Too young, really, for adult hospital, but unwanted by the Children's, he was in limbo (another incipient joke: if only I wasn't so tired) for several hours. It was becoming a political question, which would be resolved only by measuring the extent to which particular bones had finished growing. After P arrived, I left to attend my student's graduation: the hospital said they would send him home and admit him the next day. But because I went straight from hospital, after riding home, I was still in jeans, flat riding shoes; no make-up, and not even a hairbrush. I felt decidedly undistinguished sitting on the stage of Wilson Hall as a procession of beautiful shoes paraded in front of me to take out their degrees. I was very glad of my long robes. I was home by 10, but there was a note from P saying they had admitted Joel to St Vincent's, but because he was under 16, an adult had to spend the night with him.

I turned up at 8 the next morning to relieve P, who had an all-day meeting about his Centre of Excellence application (alas, we are rivals). They hadn't been admitted till 11 the night before; and had to wait and wait for a bed for P to sleep on. J was fasting since 6.00 am and was scheduled for surgery after 1.00. Well. He was bumped several times down the list as the afternoon went on (it's just a wrist fracture, but needed to be pinned), and so then it was my turn to stay overnight. At 3.00 this morning they were still planning to operate, so he had to remain fasting, while they put in a drip. At 5.30 am they wheeled him off to surgery, and nearly twelve hours later we are finally home. Everything went well enough, and apart from some nausea after the anaesthetic, he's feeling fine.

Oh. I forgot to say that the night before all this happened, I stayed up too late finishing the second Song of Roland lecture; and then after the graduation, came home to wrestle with the grant budget. I emailed it at 1.00 in the morning, and got a lovely personal message back from someone in the research office. The Perth people were up and on the case, too, but it was three hours earlier, there.

So while the doctors and medical staff lead odd hours (the orthopedic surgeon in particular often has to wait and wait for a free surgery while road trauma patients and knife victims are being treated), so too do scholars applying for research grants, and the research administrators who support them.

After three late nights and early mornings, then, I am just about counting the hours till I can go to bed again.

Twelve days later

Goodness! I wonder if being head of programme will mean I don't have time to blog... I can already see my days and weeks are going to be taking on a different rhythm from last year's leave, as you'd expect. So what have I been up to?

• wrote and delivered my paper for the Wollongong symposium, which (the latter) was truly amazing. 15 papers over 2.5 days, with maybe 24 people attending, all engaging, talking furiously and convivially. Papers on medievalism, medieval literature and its teaching and reception, papers by romanticists and Australianists and children's literature experts, all working together to set up some wonderful new lines of connection and inquiry. We hope to publish most of these papers in the next year and a bit. Watch this space!
• completed an Italian intensive course ("lower intermediate") and graduated into livello cinque, starting in a week or two.
• travelled to Sydney for a day with John and Bea before we went down to Wollongong. Highlights? Seeing Frank Woodley as Candide in a new production for the Sydney Theatre Company as part of the Sydney festival. We booked late, and got late-release front-row seats in the Opera House theatre. This is what you really want to do with visiting scholars: place them so they get to take part in a little audience participation in the theatre: how many visiting scholars can you say you have given the chance to yodel — solo, into the microphone — in the Sydney Opera House with Barry Otto (father of Miranda/Eowyn)? We followed this up with dinner in Potts Point and a stroll through the Cross.
• travelled to Geelong to see my boy perform in the grand concert that concluded his stay at the Geelong Summer Music Camp. He had five nights with his grandparents while I was away. It turned out to be more like an intensive training course than a camp. He had to practise and practise when he got home each day after a full day's playing, just to learn the parts and keep up. But the 250 kids who took part put on an amazing concert. Highlights? Seeing J playing in Sibelius' Finlandia, and, in the string ensemble, parts of Elgar's Serenade for Strings and the last two movements of Holst's St Paul's suite (sweeping renditions of Greensleeves against the sprightly Dargason, parts swapped around between cellos and violins). Maternal pride in buckets; though mostly because the whole camp was so much harder and more demanding than we thought, and he just stuck with it, and came through in the end.
• saw Nadal down Kohlscreiber last night at Rod Laver Arena, from the pleasant comfort of a corporate box (courtesy P's associate). Really very pleasant to be served a lovely dinner (esp. the crab salad), chilled drinks with ice, etc. It was a very hot night, but after dinner was served, our hosts opened up the spotless glass windows between us and the back row just in front, so we could cheer the players on and take part in the action (while still feeling the comfort of the air-conditioning, the freshly-brewed coffee and more chilled drinks with ice, etc.). An utterly sybaritic way to watch other people play sport, I must say. We are going again on Tuesday, and fully expect to be seated in the back row, just in front of such a corporate box. We will have to carry our own drinks up the stairs: can you imagine?
  

More scarily — and in a way that is completely inappropriate for a list of things that have been finished or completed — I'm starting to see just how many emails are starting to flood my in-box, and how many things there are to do in my job, in addition to the writing of books and the teaching of students.  I'm making lots of resolutions about how to manage it all. We'll see.

My New Phase and a Wishlist

Over at In the Middle, Jeffrey is posting about the new phase in his professional life, as he steps down from being head of department. Almost to the day, I am stepping up to a new phase in mine, as I take on the role of head of programme (English and Theatre) within a large school (Culture and Communication), within a large Faculty (Arts).

I haven't moved offices, but last week I did go in and start cleaning it up. It wasn't too bad, as I'd cleared some shelves and obvious surfaces because other folk were using my room while I was on leave. But I managed to fill a big paper recycling bin; and there's another pile waiting for the confidential recycling bin. And that's without really tackling the big piles of photocopies I should file properly. I'm finding it hard to throw away the files of Chaucer material I used for the Chaucer book. And I have lots of files left over on Gwen Harwood and Wynnere and Wastoure, too. Perhaps I'll just do this a bit at a time. All the Garter stuff is at home, as I never really do any research or writing in my office at work.

Jeffrey says he likes to position his desk at a bit of an angle, and seems to like the way it throws people off-guard. In my girly way, I'm making different kinds of resolutions, about keeping my office clean and tidy so it looks reassuringly calm, and sometimes putting fresh flowers in there. Or at least having a plant of some kind. Or perhaps a fish?

The emails have already started coming in, along with what I think I'll like least about this job: the regime of bureaucratic compliance. I'm also hoping not to do bureaucratic emails at night or over the weekend (though I've just now received one...).

I think there'll be lots of fun things, too, but the biggest challenge was made crystal clear to me when I went to talk to our manager about our budget. Our program is short-staffed, but our budget is school-based. So even though our Old English specialist has just left, and even though our C16/C17 person left last year to move full-time into administration, so that I am the only researcher working prior to the eighteenth century, our program, as such, is in debt, because we don't run any lucrative masters coursework programs. We have fabulous theatre people, and others who can also teach Shakespeare, but it would be wonderful to make a dedicated teaching/research appointment in early modern literature.

This state of affairs isn't so much the result of the "Melbourne model" — the dramatic reform of the entire university's curriculum — as it is a result of the funding model (the result of the progressive reductions in federal funding), and the move from departments into larger schools. As a result, although "English" used to be closely linked to other programs (Media and Communication; Cultural Studies; Creative Writing; and Publishing), we are all now disaggregated into discrete units in the larger school, which also includes cinema, art history, arts management, etc. etc. The funding model we inherit from Faculty breaks us up into smaller units, and so our challenge, as a School, is to find fair and equitable ways to think about cross-subsidising. Just as we expect the medical faculty to subsidise arts, for example...

There has been a bit of a shift, over the last ten years, in Australia, for universities to work much harder at attracting private donations. Areas such as medieval and renaissance literature have been the target of a number of donations in the past, donations that go to fund small postgraduate scholarships, for example.

My dream scenario? Some wonderful benefactor to endow a chair in Shakespeare/early modern studies at the University of Melbourne. I'm just saying...

International Educator of the Year

... is a title to which I have never aspired. But it seems I have been nominated for this "hand-crafted and prestigious Award". Sounds odd? Read on.

My mail box — email and pigeonhole — regularly receives notice of such nominations. Some of them seem legitimate. I've never checked the Who's Who of Australian Women but apparently I'm in it — or will be soon. I've certainly never forked out the money to the various organisations with more or less prestigious signifiers in their title — Princeton, Guinness — though I do know one colleague who very soon regretted giving her credit card details to one such. And in these days where your grant application is measured by your citations, who can blame him/her?

But this one takes the cake, I think. It's from the International Biographical Centre in Cambridge, England, and features an outline of King's College Chapel on its letterhead. It doesn't say how many people have been nominated, or when the award will finally be made; just that I've been selected as "one of a very limited number of individuals" to receive this accolade which "is bound to raise your status significantly in the international community."

Blah blah blah... I guess there must really be individuals or institutions for whom this would work the required social magic of authority. But what I really love about this is that for a mere US $325 each, I can buy (1) a full colour pictorial testimonial; (2) an official gold-gilt medal of excellence; and best of all (3) a "hand-finished official sash of office."

This silken sash, with golden tassels, has been commissioned by the IBC and is hand-finished by Toye, Kenning and Spencer, makers of Official Regalia worldwide. It is woven in a luxurious Blue and has the Legend of the IBC along with the words INTERNATIONAL EDUCATOR OF THE YEAR embroidered in a golden thread. The recipient's name will be added to the Sash below the Legend.

Oh yes, I can just see me turning up to the Vice-Chancellor's Christmas lunch wearing my sash. Sorry, my sash of office.

But don't you think it's a little uncanny this is sent to the person who writes on Wynnere and Wastoure, Sir Gawain and the Green Knight and the Order of the Garter, when all these texts feature sashes or girdles or belts and embroidery in gold and blue or green? Oh, and Ned Kelly, who wore the green and gold sash he received as a boy, for saving a drowning boy, to the fatal siege at Glenrowan? Or is it just that the symbolism and textile luxury of a sash of honour are further examples of the afterlife of conspicuous medieval consumption? Wonder if the girls in the Miss Universe contest have to pay $325 for their sashes?

The clink of beans

Not so long ago, I was blogging here, here, here and here about an essay I was writing on stained glass windows in medievalist film. Thanks again to everyone who chimed in with comments and suggestions: many of them found their way into the final essay, which has now been refereed and given the thumbs up by the two readers. That was very quick, wasn't it?

I guess I can now reveal the journal is Screening the Past. I have to get the final version back to the editor by mid-September, and I think they are still planning to publish this special issue on medievalism this year. That's a very fast turnaround. In the final version I'll be adding in a couple of acknowledgements to readers, so do let me know if you would prefer me not to use the name you used when you signed in to my comments box, ok? The final title is "Transparent Walls: Stained Glass and Cinematic Medievalism." I'll post a link when the essay finally appears.

It's always lovely to see one's work published. And in addition to the intellectual and social satisfaction of finding people think one's work is worthy of an audience, there's also the satisfying clink of another bean falling into the jar for one's annual appraisal.

I just had my interview with head of school last week to discuss my performance in 2008 (it had been delayed while I was on leave, and away, and all). Our previous, somewhat impressionistic system has now been replaced by a detailed schema of things you have to do to climb above "satisfactory" and be classed as good, very good or outstanding (in both teaching and research). It's also graded according to where you sit in the hierarchy. It's so detailed you can practically assess yourself.

At my level, I have to keep producing an average of two articles a year over five years to be graded satisfactory, then in a given year, produce more such, plus have a grant, plus a higher degree completion, plus a senior editorship, or win a Nobel prize or something, to reach "outstanding." Which I did.

There is also a little discussion of one's future career plans, etc. — and it's a nice chance to sit down with one's Head and talk, in any case. But there's no doubt it's become as regimented as this to make sure everyone really is producing enough publications to keep them research active. And as we saw last year in my Faculty, if you don't keep those beans falling into the jar, things can become very unpleasant indeed.

Given that the university has now announced there'll be more job cuts across a range of faculties, and given a contentious review of the school of historical studies, and the full-page spread in the Age today on the arts faculty, and Friday night's Stateline coverage, too, my workplace is still pretty much in crisis mode. Sigh. I'm now on long service leave, though, so I'm hardly going in to the office. And no. While I'm going to have a bit of a holiday soon, my days are pretty much the same as when I was on study leave. Lucky I enjoy my research!

Anyway, this will be my third essay to appear this year, which puts me safely over the line in terms of my productivity. Did I mention my other two essays for this year? I don't believe I did.

An essay in antiTHESIS, our wonderful fully refereed postgraduate journal (special issue on Exhibitionism): "Medievalism, the Queen and the Dandy" — Garter stuff, Annie Liebovitz's encounter with the Queen and her Garter robes, and Max Beerbohm's Zuleika Dobson.



An essay written with Tom Prendergast, "The Negative Erotics of Medievalism" in The Post-Historical Middle Ages, edited by Liz Scala and Sylvia Federico.









Of course, what I really want to do is finish this book. Back to it tomorrow. Now, I must hang out the washing, go to the gym (!), go to the Medieval Round Table, then cook dinner and do Italian homework.

Dame Eleanor's Lessons for Girls

Dame Eleanor Hull was a fifteenth-century English woman who translated psalms, amongst other things, into English.

These days, she writes an excellent blog.

She has recently put up a wonderful discussion on social grace in academic circles, with neat hints on negotiating the extremes of righteous anger and good girly compliance. Or, how to behave like a professional adult without being a manipulative, instrumentalist networker.

I particularly like the idea of practising these scripts on the cat.

Dumb Things

Check out this terrific article by Melissa Gregg in yesterday's Australian. It tells you many of the things that are wrong with the Australian research sector. In a nutshell, you are encouraged to do research that will assist Australia's "national interest" (10% of points on our national grant scheme are allocated on this criteron); yet it's almost impossible to publish such research outside Australia (and pretty hard within Australia too, for that matter). Yet without "international" publications, it's almost impossible to get strong rankings on any of the myriad indicators of research success; and also almost impossible to be successful in the same national grant scheme.

I also like this in the article:

When marketing decisions have direct power over career advancement, scholars are rewarded for producing palatable research that appeals to a preconceived audience. Those who choose not to pursue original research about their own country are actually rewarded.

Meanwhile, the time that junior scholars could spend writing original articles to improve their prospects is increasingly invaded by administrative requests.

Hours are spent wading through spreadsheets to correct journal rankings amassed by bureaucrats, and compiling lists to prove the "impact factor" of one's writing.

The situation is nothing short of alienating. The highlight of the job - getting published - has become an exercise in minimising losses from poor odds.

This reminds me of the first many eye-opening things I learned when I did the HeadStart leadership programme a few years ago. We were asked to share an "ethical" issue with the group; and the economist among us raised precisely this problem: he wanted to give something back to the Australian community by studying national issues, but if he did so, his department would suffer in the national rankings. How could he best serve his community if he was to be penalised by serving his community?

So it's not just junior scholars and early career researchers who are experiencing this disenchantment, although I can see that having a degree of job security does diminish the anxiety. But I have certainly spent far more hours and resources than I care to name, wading through bureaucratically-generated spreadsheets and unwieldy databases trying to account for myself and my field.

Yes, I have no problem with accountability. But it would also be good to feel trusted, too.

The latest dumb thing we have been presented with is a proposal for all student essays to be submitted electronically, so that staff can either mark online (l'horreur! l'horreur!), or spend their time printing out student work; and then putting the assessment back on line. One more example of a relentless drive to bureaucratic uniformity, developed in isolation from professional or pedagogical concerns, and that pays no attention to the way we work in the humanities.

Sigh. Luckily, I've had a lovely morning at home, on research leave, sorting out the jumble of Garter stories in the C16 and C17 to the glorious accompaniment of Keith Jarrett's Köln concert. My aim? to try and preserve something of that freedom and passion in my writing.

The Blossom of Parting

Much to blog about from the last week, getting to the big Medieval Studies congress at Kalamazoo: over 3000 medievalists all doing their thing. It was my first time, and judging from last year's blogs, it's not unexpected to blog several times, as reflections and patterns emerge.

My first foray into Kalamazoo blogging is conditioned by what I did last night. I landed at La Guardia, jumped into a cab and dumped my bags at the apartment, and then we headed down to 27th street, the Jazz Standard, to hear the Branford Marsalis quartet. We queued early, so were sitting right down the front. We watched a young man emerge from the curtains and present bouquets of Mother's Day flowers to the women at a side table; and someone told us this was Marsalis's 18 year old drummer, Justin Faulkner, who, for legal reasons, has to have his parents in the room whenever he plays in clubs. (He's still a high school student in Philadelphia.) When the quartet appeared ten minutes later, everyone clapped and cheered, and Marsalis said, "how're you doing?" to Joel, who was sitting within three feet of the stage.

The music was extraordinary. They had played the club all week, two shows a night, and Marsalis sounded a bit tired as he introduced the band, but when they started to play, the fatigue dropped away. Most of us were mesmerised by Faulkner, in any case, who watched Marsalis and the others obsessively, while also putting out the most complicated rhythms imaginable, driving, fighting with, and fighting for the music, every step of the way. I watched his foot tapping the cymbal pedal in one rhythm, while his hands pounded and flew across the drums and cymbals, several other rhythms chasing each other around the kit. He would grin wildly, or concentrate with his tongue sticking out. His dialogues and flytings with Joey Calderazzo on the piano were utterly engrossing. Marsalis was great, too, but this review explains precisely my sense of the relation between the leader and the other players.

The most bittersweet thing they played was second on the list, a composition by Calderazzo called "The Blossom of Parting." Reminding me a little of the poignancy and complexity of a riff on "Autumn Leaves", the music is sweet and low, setting up the movement of loss and parting and reunion between drums and piano, with the sax sailing across like the movement of clouds over water on a sunny day. Many of us were in tears.

Not the second time for me that day. Tom dropped me at Detroit airport, and though I'd managed my other partings from dear friends (some of whom I had not seen since before I had had to face my own mortality through illness), this one, with the one I will probably see again soonest, threatened to dissolve me. The final blossom of parting.

The previous night I was seriously thinking of not going to the dance. I was exhausted, and feeling I could imagine the sweaty crush of scholars quite well from the peace of my hotel room. But in fact, it didn't take much persuading. The others in my dinner party were equally ambivalent and when various denizens of Babel threatened not to speak to us again, and when JJC said I would not be able to blog about Kalamazoo if I didn't go, then the decision was made.

We got there, and in five minutes were on the dance floor, throwing ourselves into the crush with abandon, as that's the only way to do it. I did observe that I was not among the 80% - or even the 90% - of the youngest on the dance floor, but didn't care, really, about that. I was even doing well enough in the high heels I was still wearing, and was able to twist down the ground and stay there a long time in "Shout". The fact that my knees then locked and that I had to be helped up to my feet by a former editor of Studies in the Age of Chaucer, I record here for posterity and my own shame, just to get in before any camera or iphones that might have recorded this event. Shudder.

We left at the perfect moment for leaving - just after the call for last drinks - so I didn't get a chance to bid goodbye to Tiny. But he knows how I feel.

One day to go

Just taking a moment after another day's scattered running around: just time enough to start the usual pre-flight routine of wondering of why I would leave my loved ones and my home and my files and my books, let alone why I would submit myself to the horrors of a long-distance flight.

There are good reasons, I have to remind myself. A sabbatical from a workplace is a good idea, both for those going away, and for the ones you leave behind. And even though I increasingly get homesick, I do usually work very productively when I am away, and there will be fewer distractions than at home. I will also get to give talks in some fantastic university communities, and I know I'll get really helpful feedback and lots of ideas as I pull the book together. Leaving all my archives and specific Garter material behind will help, I hope, in the process of looking past these wonderful, seductive trees to see the wood, getting past the weird and wonderful anecdotes to pull an argument together. I'm going to read and read. I'm going to contact my publisher soon and arrange a meeting in the next few weeks. I'm going to do some work with Tom on the medievalism book as well (I spent the morning sketching out the first part of our talk for Penn). I'm going to hang out with David's graduate Chaucer class at Penn; I'm going to see friends in Philadelphia, New York, Boulder, Washington and Kalamazoo. And then for the second month I'm away, I'm going to be doing all these things with my beloved man and boy, including a trip to Amelia Island in Florida, we hope, to see Paul's "American father" from his AFS year, when he was 16 (goodness, just two years older than Joel will be in a week's time).

Given all this richness, it seems silly to be fretting about what coat to pack, or how terrible I'll feel on the Dallas-Philadelphia flight after 19 hours in planes or airports. I have a new ipod (blue, if you must know), and think I might read Sense and Sensibility on the plane, while thinking about how Samuel Dundas was such a compelling Don Giovanni last night in one sense (devilishly attractive in his white boots and silk shirt and long white brocade coat), but strangely weak in the final scene. The first time I saw this opera — I think it was an Australian Opera production — the final scene showed the progressive degeneration of Giovanni's household, as one of the attendants lazily smoked a cigarette, his arm describing a slow arc, up and down, with the smoke and the little red dot. This production did a similar thing with red curtains and cushions, but couldn't muster the same horror of the final descent. Must see the Joseph Losey film again before too long.

Anyway, one day to go, then I will be blogging from Philadelphia...

What It Feels Like for a Girl

Today, over at In the Middle, is a discussion initiated by Eileen Joy on an essay in New Medieval Literatures. So far, nothing surprising, except that it's an essay by me and my friend and collaborator, Tom Prendergast, with an afterword by Carolyn Dinshaw.

It's always terrifying to read a discussion of your own work. When you write, you imagine people being completely blown away and utterly convinced by your compelling arguments; and so it's always an awful shock when they start talking about the things you got wrong, or didn't understand, or the book you should have written instead. I know we are supposed to be interested in debate and dialogue, but it's also true that most of us have so much of our personhood invested in our work that we find it hard to put the ego aside when we read such discussions.

My own response is to scan quickly, looking for the worst-case scenario, and to breathe a sigh of relief if it doesn't come: "Oh good," I think, "I've come through ok." That's the old academic fraud syndrome, whereby we all think, at heart, we really don't know enough to be doing our jobs. Having got through that first step (and I haven't, always: but that's another story), I then re-read looking for the brilliant Oscar-winning praise. Such moments of unadulterated ego-boosting don't come along very often, of course, and so I then settle back into the middle way, back struggling with ideas, doing the best I can, and hoping it'll be enough next time.

At the moment I am engaged in a gargantuan struggle with Chapter Two of my book on the Order of the Garter, which, hydra-like, will not stay put in whatever sequence or disposition of ideas and arguments I try and impose on it. Being on sabbatical leave is lovely in terms of how the day pans out (working from home; eating lunch in the garden; starting to play piano again), but brings immense pressure, too. I really do have to finish this book this year, but am struggling to organise the material.

I have also been struggling immensely, I am now willing to confess, with my concentration and attention. I'm blaming the hormonal roller-coaster of drug-induced menopause. Levels of anxiety are higher than they used to be, but at the same time I also care much less than I used to about a whole lot of things (that's one of the lovely things about getting older). But finally, over the last couple of days, I've been working better, so I am optimistic I might be starting to come out of the fog.

Pepys' Diary

Thanks to Hannah at mony wylsum way, I've found a wonderful website based on The Diary of Samuel Pepys. It's updated daily to correspond to what Pepys was doing on that day — they are now up to 1665/66. I haven't explored the site comprehensively, but its annotations and resources look excellent.

What a clever idea! I know there are a thousand differences between an online blog and a diary, but there is something about the daily updating of this old diary that captures the immediacy, and what I will call the provisionality, of a blog. Provisionality? the sense that the blog is never the last word on anything. This is what makes it such an attractive medium for academics, perhaps. And do we think Pepys might have had a sense of a reading public? Or anticipated future publication?

Anyway, I'm going to be checking it daily, I can tell. I'm going to see if the experience of readingthis diary is at all similar to the experience of reading other familiar blogs.