In which I feel myself about to undergo an ugly transformation

There are large white tents being erected on the lawns of the campus. The schedules have been drawn up. The powerpoints from last year are being updated. Yes, it's Open Day again.

For the last couple of years I've done the little presentations to prospective students: this year I'm just on one of the desks on Sunday. They are predicting a mild and sunny day, which is a great relief as it is often cold and miserable in the tents (I don't know why they put us in a tent: there are some perfectly nice buildings on campus...).

When we sit behind the desks (and sometimes, we have to stand in front of desks because there are no chairs; or stand at naff little high bar-style tables, though without a spicy Victorian shiraz for company), we are often highly amused at the pushy parents who march their reluctant children up to talk to us. "She's very interested in creative writing, aren't you, Susie?" they say. Or "And what jobs can he do with an Arts degree?" We like it when the students come along by themselves, actually.

Undeterred, however, I have said I can only do a late afternoon shift on Sunday because I am going down to the Victorian College of the Arts with Joel. I will try very hard to stay in the background and not ask questions at the information session. I will try very hard not to speak for my son and will try not to tell them how talented he is and how hard he works. But it's going to be tough. I have already perused the various music webpages, and came perilously close to logging in as if I were Joel to the "Customize your Open Day" experience page.

In my mind I am almost reconciled to acknowledging he is ready to make his own decisions about his future; and to manage his own path through these last eighteen months of school. But it is still hard to let go. I'm going to try not to blog too much about this other person's life here, but it does also feel like a transitional moment in mine, too! Let's hope it doesn't get too ugly on Sunday.

Life, death, book

How weird is this? Two lovely bloggers on my not-very-long blog feed (Northern Lights and Sorrow at Sills Bend) are having or have been having pregnancy dreams about kittens. Not wanting to bring them down, at all, but these dreams remind me I am so much in a different stage of the life cycle. My boy is growing up; has been offered two days full work next week at the funky grocery store in Brunswick where he did work experience in July; has just finished year 10; and patiently sat through the first half of the third Twilight movie with me last night in a mother-son ironic indulgence. (We'll watch the other half today: it's not too bad, but what I really loved were the long atmospheric scene-setting scenes and the soundtrack of the first.)

And I am still thinking about my poor beloved Mima. Especially when I come home, I still catch myself looking forward to seeing her, and am still liable to a little sob now and then. We talk about building an inside/outside enclosure for the next cat, to protect the birds, frogs and lizards in the garden, but in a rather abstract way. Truly, I'm far from ready. And my own body? Just feeling and looking a little older, at various points, and the various medical staff I've seen over the last few weeks have only confirmed this, with various philosophical and comforting remarks. So that's ok, really.

But the maternal impulse is still there somewhere. My hatchlings are growing up so fast (will take photos today and update later). And now that's it warm, it's possible to sit outside and watch the fish in the sunlight. The other day I saw a couple of inchlings, one dark, one a splotchy shubunkin. And then I saw some more that were half that size. And then I saw some more that were even smaller, no bigger than mosquito wrigglers, but very clearly fish. I've never seen any that small. Does that mean they have just come out into the open earlier than normal? If they all survive, we'll have an overcrowding problem. I love to think, in an earth-motherish way, about the chickens and the fish and the frogs and the birds in the garden, to say nothing of the bats we seeing fly overhead now it's summer.

But I have almost run out of social energy, and to preserve some for next week, which is very busy, I skipped the Vice-Chancellor's lunch and the Academic Board lunch and final meeting, and the Arts Faculty end-of-year party last week. But that's also partly because I am now working like a demon on my book, pulling it together tighter and tighter. It feels like the difference between an elastic going three times loosely around a ponytail, so it drops down; and going four times around, so that it stays firmly in place. This revision process doesn't feel at all like maternal labour; it's more like the physical work of toning muscles, or the core stability of a Pilates class. Finally, it's feeling good.

Maternal Pride

Work is still crazy busy. There is much to do, still. I'm messing about with our horrible online system for uploading lecture notes that doesn't seem to work very well; email keeps crashing; I've much to do on the grant application; and I must soon wrastle in a serious way with the two reports that have now come in on the six chapters of the Garter book I sent to my wonderful editor.

But in the meantime, how is this as an occasion for maternal pride? Four young musicians, all of 14 years, playing up a storm at a jazz club on Tuesday night. Joel's school sponsors a regular jazz evening at Dizzy's in Richmond. Three of these boys (piano, drums, bass) have known each other since they were at kindergarten, and here they are, performing their first gig together. They are the Blue Manoeuvres, and even though this video, shot by the saxophonist's uncle, has bass, sax and drums all lined up in front of each other so you cannot see the drummer's wonderful, intense face, you do still get a pretty good look at the flying hands of the pianist (how did my son learn to *do* that? I mean, I hear him practising and all, but there is something about an audience, perhaps, and the clank of plates and glasses that produced something quite new). Nor can you see the faces of the four mothers beaming with pride at our clever boys, but it was truly a watershed event for the boys and their families.



After this we took them off to hear Branford Marsalis, by coincidence on the same night, giving them a taste of other things that are possible with this combination of instruments. Highlights were a Joey Calderozzo composition, "Hope", and an extraordinary adaptation, for soprano sax, of Henry Purcell's "O Solitude", as performed by the counter-tenor Alfred Deller, and heard by Marsalis on late-night radio. But unsurprisingly, the tune I remember best from the evening is this passionate performance from our boys.

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.

That Lonesome Road

A school concert is always a mixed bag. It started with an ambitious rendering of two segments of Vivaldi’s Gloria: a work in progress, as they will be working on this over the next few months. Played slow enough for the strings to keep it up, it became, I have to admit, somewhat turgid in the voices of the singers who themselves are mostly instrumental players doing some compulsory ensemble work.

Once they got going, however (and this was just the chamber music concert: jazz and band performers get a chance later in the year), we heard a number of phenomenal VCE students performing solos and duos, with some pretty wonderful accompanying, too. The concert was held in St Michael’s church, so the acoustics, resounding off the wooden roof, were lovely. So was the warm atmosphere of proud parents, grandparents and friends.

We are in the privileged position of living close enough to an excellent government school that is academically strong, while also taking its music and arts programme very seriously. A number of its students go on to the Victorian College of the Arts, and come back to help out, as did the brilliant guitarist accompanying a somewhat introverted solo performance of Leonard Cohen’s Allelujah. The school is pretty well resourced, so there was a harpsichord for the Vivaldi, and the announcement of some excellent results in the recent Flute competitions. A highlight was a wonderful performance of Ros Bandt’s Meditation for recorder, with Ros sitting in the audience.

The highlight for me, though, were the choral performances: two groups of Year 7 and 8 girls; and the mixed vocal group. All were great, but the vocal group (it needs a name!) was the most heart-wrenching for me, as my boy was singing. Six girls and three boys sang James Taylor’s That Lonesome Road a capella. It’s a most beautiful song, perfect for adolescents. As it happened, Joel is the only tenor in the group, and so he sang the first phrase and two lines later on as a solo (as sung by Taylor in this recording below). He sang with composure and strength, as the line of his parents and grandparents held their breath, as the tears pricked his mother’s eyes, and as shivers of mortality and pride criss-crossed her heart.

Venus and Adonis

... is the title of a short masque by John Blow, written in 1683 for Charles II. According to the Rough Guide to Opera, it is "full of quirky and unpredictable shifts in harmony", and was one of the inspirations behind Purcell's much better known Dido and Aeneas.

You wouldn't necessarily expect such a work to feature in a school concert, but Joel and I have just come home from hearing most of this performed by a group at his school. The student cast and orchestra were assisted by a few staff performers (on harpsichord, for example), but generally these year 8-12 students did a terrific job with some very difficult music. There are some really lovely sopranos at this school, though all soloists did well; and the chorus was brilliant. I'm so thrilled Joel has, or will have, the opportunity to make music of this kind.

He wasn't in the Venus, but the Year 7 and 8 strings played three Handel minuets to start out the concert. Just a small event, in the school's main music rehearsal studio, but honestly, what a testimony to the enthusiasm and confidence of this school's music programme, to tackle such a work, and to play with such panache.

This is what a well supported state school can do; and I'm just so proud to be part of this community of musicians.

The Drawing Gene

I do not exaggerate when I say I don't have any visual or design skills. My talents in this area go only so far as experimenting with a larger size of Times New Roman as a header. And even my stick figure drawings are laughable (seriously: they make people LOL). So you can imagine my delight when I realised my son had inherited my partner's talents in this regard, which are not inconsiderable. Here's a drawing Joel did yesterday of the little cat Mima, now approaching her eighteenth birthday.





Long-time readers of this blog may remember the drawing he did of the radiotherapy machine, back in January last year.

And here is another self-portrait, drawn from the digitally enhanced photograph on his computer desktop:



I'm off to the picture framer's tomorrow...