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.

The wo that is in lecturing

Once a year I manage it. I work hard the night before a lecture, typing up bits of text I want to focus on onto the Powerpoint slides, uploading pictures and links to break up the sound of my voice (a 90-minute lecture slot to 80 students) ... and then I leave the disk or memory stick at home. Today I didn't even download it from my computer. So there I was at 9.30, with nothing. Zip. Talk about self-sabotaging behaviour.

As I was preparing the slides last night I was thinking it was a bit wasteful of time to be typing up or uploading text when the students have the books. But since I don't really have notes any more when I lecture (on medieval literature, at least), I have come to depend on the slides as an aide-mémoire. But when you don't have notes or slides, it is certainly that much harder.

I thought about jumping on the bike and racing home, but it would have been a bit tight, and the wise Annemarie counselled me against it. So I sat in my office, found a link to an online Chaucer edition and a couple of manuscript pages I wanted to look at, and made myself a few notes.

It was ok. It wasn't great; it was a little short (for which I'm sure everyone was grateful). It wasn't brilliantly organised. But it was on the Wife of Bath's prologue, and while it shouldn't really surprise me that this should happen, I found myself more than once just mentally reeling at the genius of this poetry, the play of voices and textual traditions. One line jumped out at me today, in particular.

But — Lord Crist! — whan that it remembreth me
Upon my yowthe, and on my jolitee,
It tikleth me aboute myn herte roote.
Unto this day it dooth myn herte boote
That I have had my world as in my tyme.
But age, allas, that al wole envenyme,
Hath me biraft my beautee and my pith.
Lat go. Farewel! The devel go therwith!
The flour is goon; ther is no more to telle;
The bren, as I best kan, now moste I selle;
But yet to be right myrie wol I fonde.
Now wol I tellen of my fourthe housbonde.

It's that second-last line, with its determination to be merry — the willed nature of the emotion here, that leapt at me.

I was pretty tired the rest of the day: a couple of meetings with students, a Faculty meeting, a talk I had to give (how's this for irony?) on teaching practice, and then a seminar to go to on Coetzee's Disgrace.

But now I'm home. I have prawns marinating in ginger and garlic and dollops of all kinds of delicious sauces in the cupboard. I'm going to fire up the rice cooker in a minute and then sit down with Joel for a couple of episodes of Scrubs.

Hey, maybe one of the reasons I'm so tired is the single parenting I've been doing for five of the last seven weeks. J is no trouble, and helps with cooking, etc. but there's no doubt the household runs more smoothly when there are two adults in it. Just a couple more days and P is back.

(There's some weirdly ironic thing going on here about marriage and the Wife of Bath and P being away, but I'm too tired to untangle it.)

Closing out the first week with a little poetry

The first week of semester is always tough. Even when everything goes smoothly there's a lot to manage; and lots of little details to sort. One of things I have to do these days, too, is make sure workloads are evenly distributed in the English program. We have a very elaborate system that counts everything; but no simple computer programme to which everyone has equal access. Our IT support seems to be slipping behind our needs.

Anyway, it was also the week for meeting my new 3rd year class (lecture on Sir Gawain, amongst other things), and my fourth year honours seminar (also Sir Gawain, but in a different context: next week, John Mandeville and Margery Kempe in Jerusalem, with Carolyn Dinshaw as tourguide); and my two new MA students. We had a talk from Stephen Knight for the Medieval Round Table (Celtic and Christian elements in English romance), and the Middle English reading group met for the first time this year. We are going to read Wynnere and Wastoure (it is SO bizarre to have people turn up with my edition: I "forgot" to bring in my own copy, as I always find it hard to return to work I have done in the past).

I was very nervous — as I am every single year — before actually meeting the people in my honours class (9 enrolments and two or three auditing: perfect numbers), and being in the room with the 80 3rd year students. But now I have crossed that bridge, the semester looks as if the teaching will be fun.

Last night three of my girlfriends came over for a glass of wine after dinner. Sometimes these four families all get together: our sons are all about the same age, and have shared different childcare, kindergarten, primary and secondary schools. In fact, three of the boys are currently forming a little jazz trio (bass, drums, piano), so our pride knows almost no bounds.

But last night was girls' night, and very pleasant it was too. Just at the end, after one had gone, another started talking about Robbie Burns. She's a Scot, and an actor and is learning "To a Mouse" as a Christmas present for someone in her family. With a little prompting, she slipped into character, accent and voice, and performed it for us: utterly mesmerising. What a lovely way to set us up for Friday.

I was in the office this morning wrestling with the software and the workpoints; and then some more cumbersome software for some last minute additions to the "publications workbench" for the online record of research, but now I'm home. I'm going to tidy my study; do a little Italian homework; then head down to the gym, and get ready for Friday night.

Slow teaching movement?

When we bought our piano, Leon generously offered to give Joel a couple of extra lessons, in the manner, I guess, of a personal master class. He had his first one on Wednesday and he was very very nervous. We had to drive way out into the depths of the south-eastern suburbs in peak hour — grey clouds and misty rain.

I sat down on the couch with the PhD I am examining (yes, this is what you do on long service leave if you don't finish it while on study leave), and half-read; and half-listened.

They started working on Chopin's Nocturne in E flat major, a piece J has only just started to learn. Over the hour, they worked through the right hand melody, but I was so struck by Leon's teaching, as they spent a good twenty minutes on the first phrase. There are some nice performances on YouTube, but the wikipedia page has a recording, plus the score of the opening (scroll down to Opus 9, No.2):



Those first two notes for the right hand feature an anacrusis, the unstressed B flat quaver, that reaches up to the (dotted crotchet) G, which is the first note of the first full bar. Leon described the relationship between these two notes in grammatical terms, as the article before the noun. Yes, it's common enough to think of music as a language, but his analogy has really stuck with me as a way of articulating the relationship between the unstressed and the stressed syllables (sorry; notes). They also did lots of analysis of the chord progressions. I'm sure Leon sensed Joel's nervousness (he normally teaches more advanced students), and was able to modulate his teaching as he worked out what Joel could and couldn't do.

But the slowness of the teaching reminded me of the beauties of close reading, a technique that is often reviled these days as apolitical, overly-formalist and privileging a certain aestheticist kind of writing and reading practice. Yet in medieval literature (and in other forms, too), it can be the best way to teach. I do remember feeling quite pleased, one time, that I had spent a good ninety minutes on the first two stanzas of Chaucer's Parlement of Foulys. Partly because this was the way I was taught, and partly because it was so satisfying to plumb so many depths of syntax, language, classical allusion, voicing, etc. Because I've quoted Chopin, I'm going to quote Chaucer, too.

The lyf so short, the craft so long to lerne,
Thassay so hard, so sharp the conquering,
The dredful Ioy, that alwey slit so yerne,
Al this mene I by love, that my feling
Astonyeth with his wonderful worching
So sore y-wis, that whan I on him thinke,
Nat wot I wel wher that I wake or winke.

For al be that I knowe nat love in dede,
Ne wot how that he quyteth folk hir hyre,
Yet happeth me ful ofte in bokes rede
Of his miracles, and his cruel yre;
Ther rede I wel he wol be lord and syre,
I dar not seyn, his strokes been so sore,
But God save swich a lord! I can no more.

But am I becoming hopelessly old-fashioned in my teaching? Is there such a thing as going too slowly? Or being too precious? Certainly in teaching for performance, as with the Chopin, it's hard to imagine rushing through at some global level. Conversely, in some subjects and contexts, I'm conscious of going very quickly, to make sure we can grasp the whole of a text, or a good chunk of it, as the full range of meanings aren't always evident — of course! — in the microscopic examination of two stanzas. But perhaps this kind of detailed explication de texte is not as satisfying to students as it is to me.

I realise, now, as I look at those stanzas, that Chaucer is at one level working through the same problem. Life (or love) is so short, like a text that passes quickly, but the skill of reading and negotiating one's way through it, takes years to learn how to do properly. And the text, like love, like life, that slit so yerne (slides away so quickly) under such examination? No wonder I spent so long on these stanzas: they were insisting I did so!

From Melbourne to Philadelphia ...

... is a very long journey indeed. Yes, I know: relative to C19 or earlier travel it's a breeze, but even at jet speed it's still pretty punishing. And that's when you have tail winds all the way, and when connections are easy and timely.

I was sitting in the midst of a bunch of US and Canadian fire-fighters, all on their way home after a month helping out in Victoria. I've never seen such a massed force of quietly gentle and politely heroic masculinity. They were modest about what they had done; and reticent about what they had seen. The man next to me wanted to show me pictures on his camera of his grandchild, and raced through his pictures of the campsite (he was a logistics specialist), apologising for the photograph of the dead wombat ("well, I'd never seen one"). They were all being very well looked after by the crew.

It's now the end of my first full day in Philadelphia. I've gone for several walks, cooked a meal in my little apartment (actually, it's quite a decent size, and beautifully fitted out, with its own laundry facilities and proper kitchen, and quieter than a hotel). Maybe it's the cooking? I don't feel too much of the horror homesickness that dogged my stay in London hotels last July.

I also lasted about two hours of David's graduate class this afternoon before the jetlag hit, when I gave up trying to make intelligent interventions, and just sat back and marvelled at his students: so well-read, engaged, and articulate. They are, of course, graduate students, so they have more experience than my honours students, but what really impressed me was the efficiency of their discussion. They are so articulate they can raise a problem or a question in such a way as to focus discussion for a few minutes — discussion that always seemed to be moving forwards, never back or around in circles — before another topic arose. David has won heaps of teaching awards, and it was great to observe his style first-hand. Jetlagged himself, he still directed and guided, while trusting the student presenters to do their work well, as they did.

I have a few little chores to do for home, but tomorrow morning I'm just going to stay here in the apartment and start knocking Chapter One into shape. As I always say to my students, you'll probably write the introduction several times before you write it for the last time. But it's time for that last re-write, now.

Talks, Tears and More Travels

I spent most of today at the Vice-Chancellor's Colloquium for Teaching and Learning. Presentations to the university's teaching award winners (my Grimshaw award is gorgeous: the colour and luminosity of a bottle of Bombay Sapphire); short presentations from the award-winners; and from teams of people who've taught the university's new multi-disciplinary breadth subjects; and a panel of a journalist, school principal and the CEO and founder of seek.com.

It was a most passionate day all round. The unofficial theme was passion in teaching and in one's choice of vocation.

We were welcomed to country by Auntie Diane of the Wurundjeri people, who called on the land to bless us from the tips of the trees down to the earth on which we stood. The Vice-Chancellor presented her with a big bouquet of flowers as a thank-you. She turned away from the audience and whispered at some length in his ear. He told us later during one of the photo-shoots that she had said her husband died six years ago, and that since then, no one had brought her flowers. And then burst into tears.

When Glyn spoke, the text of his talking (not a prepared speech) was flashed above him through Live Remote Captioning. A scary thing, to think that one's speaking could be transcribed and transmitted so quickly (and really pretty accurately), for the hearing impaired. Testimonials from profoundly deaf students reinforced how marvellous this would be. Imagine the tedium of attending lectures and watching while your assistant took notes? And what a difference this would make.

Matthew Brett then spoke about this invention, and about his motivation for devising this technology. Both his parents are profoundly deaf, and he grew up with Auslan (sign language) as his first; and English as his second language. Because their educational and employment opportunities were so limited, he grew up in difficult circumstances, able to afford only two textbooks over the course of five years' study. He choked up a bit as he was speaking; and I think we all did, too.

The other ALTC winner, Catherine Bennett, told me over morning tea that she too was the first member of her family to go to university, and that her own parents, now deceased, would have been so proud of her today. This day was really for them, she said.

When it was my turn, I wanted to speak about the experience of being a medievalist in a country that does not always value the study of the past. I also tried to talk about the problem of mentoring when university policies and practices don't always fit the career trajectories of students who have babies through their PhDs, who are caring for aged or sick parents and can't travel overseas, or who are working on major research monographs that are poorly rewarded in the "points" system that is now driving our policies for promoting and even retaining staff.

I don't think my talk would have been very popular with some folk, but enough people came to talk to me afterwards in agreement (and not just from the humanities) to make me feel that there is a considerable tide of resistance to recent developments.

I also talked about this blog, and the experience of writing through breast cancer; and then over lunch found out about a number of other women with breast cancer; or men whose partners had also gone through its rigours.

All this emotion was draining. But also makes me think that once I've finished with some of the current projects, it's time to think more carefully about the literature of affect.

Last night Ruth Evans gave a wonderful talk to the Medieval Round Table about Chaucer's affective understanding of memory: it'll be a great starting-point.

Now, time to pack and finish my talk for Hobart. I arrive at my B&B after 11.00 tonight; and they are going to leave the key by the front door. Fantastic!

More Momentous Days

This is a horrid time of year, really. We finished teaching weeks ago, but are still up to our necks in papers, meetings, graduate applications for next year, accounts to reconcile, reports to write, and all the rest of the end-of-year stuff that drags on and on. But today we started organising our Christmas lunch, so that felt a bit better.

It's also conference season, too, so I really must get down to writing the paper I'm giving in Hobart next week. I'm part of a panel on Bruce Holsinger's Premodern Condition (more on this in another post).

But I think a brief report on the trip to Canberra is called for. Suse and Pav have kindly asked for photos, but while a thousand official ones were taken, I forgot to take my own camera, so we might have to wait till I can persuade Joel and myself to dress up again...

We flew up with Deirdre, my wonderful new(ish) colleague: how I adore having another senior woman in the department, especially one so energetic and passionate and generous. We checked into the hotel, changed into our finery, then got a cab up to Parliament House.

From this perspective, you can actually see two Parliament Houses: first, the old one (wedding-cake style) then further up the hill, the surprisingly and charmingly modest new one, set, hobbit-style, under the slopes of grass. Well, modest from the outside: inside, it's all marble and quartz and wood, and corridors and courtyards filled with light. Quite beautiful, I think.

We had lunch and then queued up to sit in on Question Time. We ended up sitting in the gallery above the Gov't side, but had fun spotting the familiar heads and faces. Rudd was on his way back from Peru, so Gillard was acting PM, and very dignified and determined she was, too. Peter Garrett was easy to spot with the bald head, and we picked out lots of others. Tanya Plibersek took a great dorothy dixer and spoke movingly about domestic violence white ribbon day, and then Malcolm Turnbull made his only speech of the session we saw, saying, in effect, "me too". The real fun, though, was looking over to see Nelson, Costello, Abbott, all looking rather subdued, though Abbott was querulous in his challenges to the Speaker for his failure to reprimand Albanese, I think it was, who dared to suggest providing a cushion for Fran Bailey, I think it was, who seemed to be falling asleep. Well, then it was on for young and old...

After a while, Joel suggested we nip round to the other side, so we could see "our people", but by the time we got round, Question Time was over, and there was a steady emptying of the chamber.

We then headed off to the reception before the awards ceremony. There was tea and coffee and cheese and biscuits, and much checking-out of name tags and fashions. There was a fair amount of taffeta and tulle and lace, given that the note just said "smart or business dress", and one Islander and one Indian woman wearing beautiful long dresses and saris (ok: one each). But also some beautifully tailored suits and jackets.

We took our seats and the chair of the council announced that Julia Gillard would not be able to present the awards, as she was too busy being acting PM. I swear, there was an audible groan of disappointment, particularly among the women. We had been given our instructions, so it was pretty well run, as we lined up, moved forward, shook hands with Brendan O'Connor and received our surprisingly heavy trophies and certificates.

The big award, the Prime Minister's Award, was split this year by Marnie Hughes-Warrington, an historian from Macquarie, and Stephen Barkoczy, from Monash, who teaches tax law. Both gave fabulous impromptu speeches, and you could see instantly that they would be great teachers. I have to make a 12 minute presentation at the Vice-Chancellor's Colloquium on Tuesday (and accept my Grimshaw award: hey, another chance for my new dress, I think!), and I was inspired by both of these addresses not to make a powerpoint. I'm just going to talk. Well, I was also persuaded by the fact that they wanted the powerpoint by this morning...

We then walked down the hill to the old Parliament House, and sipped champagne and snacked on smoked salmon on melba toast, little pies and other nibbles, before proceeding into the old members' dining hall for enormous prawns or peking duck; baked salmon or lamb cutlets; rich chocolate pies or miniature tartes tatin.

In the morning, Joel took full advantage of the sumptuous breakfast buffet, and then we walked across the lake and then along past the National Library and the High Court to the National Gallery, where we paid appropriate homage to the Sidney Nolan Ned Kelly series, and pedantically corrected a tour guide who was explaining how Kelly's armour was now in Melbourne Gaol.

We then met Deirdre and Mary, another Melbourne colleague up at ANU for the day, for lunch at the National Library, in the coloured lights of the Leonard French windows there, before heading home.

It was a really lovely occasion. In the humanities, teaching awards are not regarded very highly. I think it's assumed we can all teach, and that good teaching is incommensurate with good research. If you're getting good "quality of teaching" scores, you're seen as putting time into your teaching that should go into your research. But I'm all in favour of them. There's no reason why the two should be mutually exclusive; in fact, most of us would argue that in fact, they depend on each other. Good researchers make good teachers; and vice versa. Anyway, any colleagues who are reading this: I'm going to be encouraging folk in my area to apply for these awards next year.

The other momentous thing this week was watching Joel in the Year 8 production of Midsummer Night's Dream last night. He has chosen drama as one of his elective subjects this year, and they clearly have very talented teachers at this school, who brought out some very good performances from these 13-year old kids. The play had been abridged, and there was lots of playground-style physicality amongst the rival lovers and the mechanicals. Of course Joel's parents, aunt and grandmother all thought his Demetrius was excellent. At least he didn't rush through his lines (a common enough mistake, to race through the metaphors to the principal verbs, whereas it's often the metaphors that carry the meaning). An excellent Helena, Lysander, Bottom, Titania and Puck (and Demetrius!) carried the play. There were some wonderful musical moments too: this school somehow makes it possible for even youngish kids just to get up and sing unaccompanied.

So it's been a big week chez nous. We are just now about to commence our weekend in the time-honoured way: doing the grocery shopping while Joel has his piano lesson; then catching up with our mirror family for pizzas, red wine, and lollies. Happy weekend, everyone!

Reasons to be cheerful

Ahem.

I was checking my email at the airport in Sydney last week when I picked up a message from the Australian Learning and Teaching Council, saying I had won one of their awards for university teaching. I've been sitting on this news for a couple of days, but there are reasons (beyond the usual narcissistic bloggy ones) for posting about it here.

The Council (formerly known as the Carrick Institute) has given 22 such national awards this year, just two in the Arts and Humanities area, though there are some awards dedicated to indigenous education, etc. The prize is $25,000(!) some of which I'll use to fund a little symposium on the teaching of medieval and medievalist literature, probably in 2010, when I return from my year's leave next year. There's a presentation dinner in Canberra at the end of November, when they'll announce one of these 22 winners to be the Prime Minister's Australian University Teacher of the Year. Ooh the suspense! I'm thinking of taking Joel as my guest, so he can get to see the Ruddster in his full glory.

Apart from the general loveliness of winning something you apply for (the Centre for the Study of Higher Education at Melbourne helped me re-shape my application for the mentoring award), I'm really chuffed about this award for four reasons:

• the Humanities Researcher blog played a big part in the application, so it's nice to see blogging being taken seriously in a pedagogical context
• it's good for medieval studies, which is often under threat in this country, to be given this profile
• it's good for English studies, which is often ridiculed as over-theorised in this country, to be given this profile
• it's good for the Arts faculty at Melbourne, which is increasingly being written about for its budgetary difficulties and its current programme of job-shedding. We are indeed about to enter a round of involuntary redundancies, so times are grim. Of course my award doesn't help those who are facing up to this brutal process, but it might be a reminder that the faculty is filled with dedicated teachers and researchers, who work hard to preserve that very delicate nexus between teaching and research.

OK, stepping down from soapbox now.

I found a bottle of vintage Yarra Valley Chandon, and chilled it to drink with our friends on Friday night. Not to be outdone, Paul descended into the cellar (which he dug himself), and pulled out a bottle of St Henri (cousin to "the Grange"). Perfect accompaniments to ... pizza!

Cheers, everyone.

Teaching. You're doing something right ...

... when your students leave the room singing.

This week in my honours seminar I taught several extracts from Froissart's Chronicles of the 100 Years' War: the battle of Crécy and the siege of Calais. It came in between The Knight's Tale and Troilus and Criseyde, which we start next week — four or five weeks that are usually the highlight of my teaching year.

We were all horribly struck, though, by Froissart's comments about Edward wanting to re-populate Calais with English blood. (I don't have my text in front of me, so can't quote.) I hadn't really thought of Edward as engaged in ethnic cleansing, but there it was.

However, even after this gruesome thought, as we were all packing up and leaving the ridiculously large room (there are nine enrolled students and one auditing/co-teaching graduate student), I distinctly heard one, and possibly another, singing.

I always associate singing with good cheer. It's typically a sign that Joel is better after being sick, for example, when I hear him singing around the house. At that sign, my mother's heart just releases that locked-up anxiety that surrounds a sick child.

He is home today, as it happens, with a barking cough; looking unaccustomedly pale and wan. So it'll be soup for lunch and lots of tea. I'll just put the kettle on now.

Literature, corruption, institutions, blogging

A few cool links from today's papers.

First up, a satirical contribution to the usual debate about literature, and its teachers, corrupting the minds of the young in an op-ed piece in The Age by a Year 12 teacher at the excellent high school just north of the university campus: yay for public education!

And second, a link to the blog of Macquarie University's Vice-Chancellor. Chaucerians will be pleased to know the motto of this university is And gladly teche. But this is what he says in the article about his blog in The Australian:

"To be frank, a great logo and a stirring motto mean little in these digital days when people can set up a blog or chat site and ask: "What is X university really like?"

You know that blogging has really hit the mainstream when the V-Cs are taking it up.

Is it a bit disturbing, though, that he admits he tracks when comments come from his own campus? Or is this just the reality of blogging? If we have time, it's possible to use a tracker to guess the identity of readers from their location (though it's also very easy to get this wrong!). I wonder if institutional blogs like that should really be using a tracker.

And there's the link back to Tony Thompson's article, since he also writes about 1984.

The Hour of Our Death

When I "went public" with my cancer diagnosis in October 2006 on this blog; and when I wrote two "op-ed" pieces on cancer and blogging and the consumerism of the pink ribbon campaigns ("Shop for the Cure" -- urrghh) for the Sunday Age, I was unprepared for the correspondence that ensued.

My blog was only a few months old and was only just starting to expand beyond its intended readership, when I suddenly had to start thinking of myself as a sick person, when I became a somewhat different person from the woman who had begun the blog. Moreover, I don't think I fully understood the nature of blogging; or rather, the engagement with readers that would follow.

So in addition to comments on the blog, I received many letters, emails and phone messages, because of course I have never been a pseudonymous blogger, and am easy to find. Most people who made contact were very sympathetic. Some were less so, especially after my criticisms of the schmaltzy, sentimental marketing of unhealthy or infantilising products to women in the name of "breast cancer awareness".

Most were simply heartfelt messages, from people who were similarly struggling with cancer, or who had nursed partners who had died, or were living in fear of the disease with mothers or sisters who had been ill. I am by nature, I think, a person who finds it very easy to empathise with others, and so I found these stories very moving. But I also found that being ill had shaken me up completely, so that I had very little emotional strength, many days, to hold myself together.

Going back to work last year, re-appearing in public, was immensely difficult. There was only one day when I got as far as the car-park, sat there for ten minutes then drove home again, but there were many other days when I felt the same way.

So while I might have wanted to help others, I felt pretty much unable to do so.

One of the things about sickness is that one develops a very sensitive antenna to one's disease. You see it everywhere. And when that disease is a very common and highly publicised one, like breast cancer, the problem is magnified. So the death of people like Jane McGrath and Belinda Emmett strikes hard. And you know pretty clearly that other people with cancer will be feeling the same shudder, asking the same question of how much time we'll have left, and what will be the nature, and the hour of our death. And yes, even people like me, in (relatively) excellent health.

But today I heard of the death, earlier this month, of Graham, from another faculty at Melbourne. He had written to me after one of the pieces I wrote in The Age, and we exchanged a few emails. Graham was suddenly diagnosed with a brain tumour; and seemed to be doing ok, until he collapsed with another inoperable one. He wrote to me in April:

After a couple of days they moved me down to a general ward, as the risk of another seizure diminished, but I'll probably not be allowed to drive for the rest of my life. I'm currently having daily radiation therapy to my brain to try and slow these down a bit, but it looks like I have only months to go. This is upsetting, obviously, but I'm ok - I'm cherishing every day with my family, as much as they'll let me, you know how it is! ;-) I'm still enjoying a bit of work, you know, replanning the entire university's strategy, solving all the world's environmental problems, that sort of thing! ;-)

I'm going to fight this hard - I believe in benefits of faith, and have it by the truckload. Sometimes I get weak, and falter, but most of the time I'm strong. You know, its about being there for the kids, being strong for the kids, so they remember me that way. I don't want to falter too much in front of them - they need to learn something from this about life, but sometimes its inevitable to break down and look weak.

I never met this man, but his death reminds me that in addition to the high profile deaths around us, there are hundreds of people like Graham who face death with quiet dignity and courage, still teaching, even in their dying. I couldn't do anything for Graham. I could have made an effort and gone to visit him, but I didn't. There was an instant ease and camaraderie about our correspondence, an instant recognition, if you like, but there were also huge limits to what I felt I could do, by way of reaching out. Tonight, though, I'm holding his spirit here for a moment.

This is how you make stuff

Check this out: a card made by one of my students in the Medievalism class, who is not deficient in the designer's gene: the day they are handing in their essays, no less. In addition to the real ribbon tied on the bottom, it's complete with picture from the blog, and Marion and Belle from our Robin Hood and fairy-tale lectures. I discreetly won't mention her name, but thanks so much. You know who you are!!

On Being Observed

Graduate students often want to do sessional teaching at my university, and I can see why. It's fun; it makes you feel part of the department; it's a good component of your professional development; it forces you to learn things and develop new forms of expertise; it introduces you to staff and other students; and it pays ... a little.

But the payrates are wildly incommensurate with the work involved; the timetable spreads your teaching over a couple of days; there is no guarantee that having developed your classes in one subject that you'll ever get to teach it again; and the inevitable nervousness about teaching out of your comfort zone means that teaching absorbs disproportionate amounts of preparation time, as well as nervous, social and intellectual energy.

People's needs vary, of course; and while it suits some graduates to do as much teaching as they can, there is a powerful argument that says you should do a little teaching, do it well, and fully, and develop a teaching portfolio, and then go back to your thesis.

This is what one of my students is doing this semester, and today she took up my invitation to observe her tutorial, so that I can write a reference about her teaching practice. She was terrific, though she said later my presence made her a little nervous. You would not have known, though: this was a large group of 20 students, and she was organised, responsive, full of ideas, while letting them also develop their own thoughts. She kept the pace and the topics of discussion varied, too. I was quite inspired, watching her. For various reasons I haven't taken tutorials for a couple of years, but often used to struggle to keep this wonderful sense of order and calmness I saw today. I was so impressed that she was willing to let me come along: not sure I would ever had had the courage to do that when I was a graduate student. The tutorial room is such a private space, though I bet my colleagues and I would all love to be a fly on the wall and get a chance to observe each other!

Then this afternoon, Joel had a rehearsal for his cello exam, with Charles, his piano teacher, working as his accompanist. He was a little disconcerted to find I was going to be in the room (I often go for a walk, or nip to the supermarket), but all three of them (student, cello teacher, accompanist) worked brilliantly, in spite of my presence in Charles' studio. I'm so impressed with these young women, his teachers. Lauren and Charles are both so patient, but also so serious with Joel and his music. I felt quite privileged to observe the three of them working so hard.

It's one thing to lecture — and I have really loved lecturing in the Medievalism subject this semester — but tutoring, and teaching in smaller groups, or one to one, is a different challenge altogether. What a rare pleasure to see it being done, and done so well today.

Pride

Sometimes in academic life there are moments of great pride.

I had a minor triumph over the last twenty-four hours when I got the scanner to work to make images of different picture-book illustrations of Beauty and the Beast for my lecture on fairy-tales this morning. In 80 minutes I covered Apuleius' Cupid and Psyche, Aarne and Thompson's classifications of fairy tales, the C18 Beauty and the Beast by Jeanne-Marie de Beaumont, brief allusions to Marie de France (Bisclavret, Yonec), and Wife of Bath's Tale, a bunch of C19 and C20 images of the story (Beardsley, Walter Crane etc.), lightly or heavily pornographic images, Disney's movie, some holiday snaps of the Beast from our trip to Disneyland a couple of years ago, and YouTube comments on the opening song from the Disney movie, e.g.

• "I am like Belle in so many ways";
  
• "Belle reminds me so much of myself; Want more out of life, and I love books. Daydreaming of adventure";
  
• "I wonder if people sing about me when I'm not looking";
• "If Belle was real, I would marry her in a heartbeat";
• "I really agree with all of you. how freakin' kick ass would it be if we lived in singing towns?!"

Also some stuff from Jack Zipes, a clip from Cocteau's extraordinary film from 1946, an extract from Carter's Sadeian Woman on the "moral pornographer"; and a discussion of her "Tiger's Bride". We are using Maria Tatar's terrific Norton Anthology of Fairy Tales for our 3-week segment.

And as I packed up my tapes and my powerpoint CD, and unplugged myself from the lectopia recording mike, I played this clip of Carrie Underwood's "Ever After" from Enchanted:

Utterly exhausting, these lectures! I sometimes feel as if I have actually sung my way through them. But a ninety minute lecture needs to be broken up somehow, and these tales (and medievalism generally) just cry out for this kind of discussion and range.


But the real excitement this week came from the work of my students. Anne has had an article accepted for Exemplaria, and Lisa's book is out! My copy arrived yesterday and it looks wonderful: it's a terrific study of performativity, heterosexuality and speech-act theory in historical fiction (Heyer, Fowles, Byatt and others). Here's the blurb from Ashgate. And to anticipate, another student, Helen, has her book coming out with Boydell and Brewer in a few months, Desire by Gender and Genre in Trouvère Song. No image, yet, but here's her blurb. How very satisfying and rewarding it is to see these clever women producing this wonderful work.

How to make beautiful pictures

I don't understand why I can't save and post the beautiful picture I made of myself lecturing to the students on the Bayeux Tapestry, but here's one that Radha, the senior tutor, made for our multi-disciplinary course from the wonderland site. I've tried downloading another version of Flash, but to no avail. Maybe I'll have more time to play over the Easter break...

Bayeux down; Roland to go

One lecture down ... twice.

It's 39 in Melbourne today: people are moving rather slowly around campus. But a respectable number of first-year students turned up to hear a lecture about the Bayeux Tapestry (Ok, I know: it's really an embroidery) as the first of two lectures on medieval romance warfare. This is one of our new interdisciplinary subjects, called Homer to Hollywood. They have already looked at the Iliad, for example; while my lecture on Wednesday is on The Song of Roland.

Today's lecture couldn't help but frame its discussion with the problem of medievalism that occupies me these days: how can we tell the medieval thing from the medievalist contexts and frames around it?

It was also fun to think about the difficulties of actually observing the tapestry, short of heading off on a field-trip to Bayeux. I had access to a good CD-Rom, but I couldn't easily download jpeg files for a powerpoint presentation. There are lots of good pictures in books, but they cannot give anywhere near an idea of the scope and scale of the thing.

One picture I got onto the powerpoint, but can't translate into a format blogger will recognise is a photograph of the tapestry hung around the walls and arches of Bayeux cathedral, too high for the eye to read comfortably, suggesting the tapestry's commemorative and possibly civic function: "look what a big tapestry belongs to this town!"

But there are lots of great web resources. For anyone interested in how technology facilitates the study of the middle ages, here are three great sites.

Images of discrete panels, in terrific colour and detail.

A panoramic thread, which you can scroll backwards and forwards.

And the YouTube link. This animates (only minimally, and that's all it needs to do), the second half of the narrative.

I also found a great drawing of the winch the linen used to be stored on, with a big handle. Presumably when curious visitors asked, it could be rolled out for inspection, then rolled up again.

There's no doubt in my mind that our modern mediated digital images make it easier to study and read the images, though they do tend to flatten out the textual/textile "thatness" of the thing as object.

And thanks to Wombat World, and the link to it I found at In the Middle, here's a recent example of many appropriations of the tapestry. What I love about this version of the Simpsons' couch gag is that it reinforces my argument about the tapestry commemorating a war almost between families, rather than nations. And it's certainly nothing like the situation in the Song of Roland, where "Christians are right and pagans are wrong". The Normans and the Saxons don't really look all that different, except for the Normans' tonsured haircuts. William's and Harold's families were related by marriage; hence William's claim to the throne. They were about as different from each other as the Flanders and the Simpsons.

And of course, I also held up my Bayeux tapestry teatowel. And weirdly, actually used it this morning to mop up the mess I made when I spilt my waterbottle over my desk on the way to the second delivery of the lecture. How's that for appropriation!

And a postscript: as I write, it's 39 degrees, and the weather pixie has sensibly put on her bathers (this is, I think, a Melbourne usage: what do you call the garments you wear to go swimming where you are?), and I don't mind at all....

Writing lectures ...

... has changed completely.

The very first lecture I ever gave was on the poetry of Sylvia Plath (and Adrienne Rich, I think) to first year Modern Literature students. There would have been several hundred of them, and it would have been about 1985. I wore a long-sleeved purple cotton shirt. This was back in the days when women, though present in my department, were more likely tutors than lecturers, and certainly not senior lecturers or professors. I'm sure it was the surprise of seeing a young woman lecturing, and the astonishing poetry of Plath, or perhaps just kindness at seeing someone inexperienced making it through to the end of the lecture without falling over, but I received a round of applause and was instantly, thoroughly hooked.

The writing of lectures, and the nervous anticipation of presenting them, is upon me again this semester. I'm writing new lectures for my own medievalism subject, and next week I will also give two lectures in one of our new multi-disciplinary subjects, Homer to Hollywood. So on Monday I lecture on the Bayeux Tapestry at 10.00, then repeat the lecture at 12.00; then on Wednesday it's the Song of Roland at 10.00, then 45 minutes on Malory and the myth of Camelot to the medievalism students. One of my tutors will then give his first half-lecture in the course on Tennyson's Lady of Shalott (this is a ridiculous 90-minute lecture spot for the 118 students in this course), while I dash back to repeat the Roland lecture at midday.

Over the years I have become more economical in the preparation of lectures. My Plath lecture was a pretty complete script, written well in advance. These days, if I prepare too soon, or too comprehensively, I feel the lecture falls flat. I must also admit, even though I once made a speech about how Powerpoint was not a necessary component of good teaching, I do use it now, as a way of organising my thoughts and concentrating my preparation. So I'll prepare an outline on one slide, load up any images or text I want to analyse, add in a few notes at the bottom of some slides ... and just start talking.

It's a bit risky, this method. It's possible to spend too long finding good images and playing with the powerpoint designs, and forgetting about the actual points you want to make, though it's easier if, like me, you have no design imperatives or skills: default settings usually work just fine. I still find it a little hard to make the best use of powerpoint. It's great for images, and for close textual analysis, and that makes it great for teaching medieval culture, but it does tend to reduce everything down to dot points, when we know - and when we want our students to know - that things are usually a lot more complicated than that.

So while the hot northerly winds bluster around the house*, I'm uploading images of the tapestry, and re-reading the poem, and thinking about Malory, and trying to judge that perfect balance between preparedness and freshness that will see me through those 4.75 hours of lectures next week.

* Thank goodness the weather pixie hasn't put her bikini on, though. I had to think long and hard before choosing this model, because of the swimsuit option that came with it. What if people thought she was me? Worse than wearing the wrong frock to a lecture...

Brisbane distractions

Back from Brisbane on Saturday night, after attending the symposium of the Australian Humanities Academy. Brisbane was gorgeous, though I took my customary approach to a conference — fly in at the last minute and leave early — so I didn't see that much of the city. Why do I do it this way? To fend off that awful feeling on the first day away, of wondering why in the world one would want to leave one's home, and hang around airports and burn up greenhouse gases, and sleep in a hotel. So I try and minimise the pain by not really committing to the city. Paul and I never seem to manage to go on such trips together, so that's another reason not to hang around.

I did manage to get in a couple of walks, though, along the boardwalk along Southbank. Restaurants, cafes, a Nepalese pagoda, and the little sandy beach built into the riverbank (where I swam, 11 years ago), though it was closed for renovation, with all the sand piled up under tarpaulins, while they sealed the base. It was mild for Brisbane, I think; a balmy 26, which made sitting outside in the evening extremely pleasant. The first evening saw me and two companions sharing a bowl of succulent mussels in a rich tomato and chili broth, sopped up with an excellent sourdough.

The theme of the conference was the nature of e-research in the humanities. There were some terrific papers showcasing wonderful projects and resources; and also some reflections on the nature of this work, too, so it wasn't just "show-and-tell".

One remark struck me, though, when a prominent Vice-Chancellor commented that the era of the lecture was dead; that students simply wouldn't tolerate being lectured to in the old way. I guess that's true, that our attention span has been horribly reduced. My companion at the conference dinner on the second night told me how Pascale had anticipated the "distractions", like email, that break up our concentration span into bits and pieces. But it was odd to speculate on the irony that the symposium was presented in a conventional lecture theatre, that had been adapted to take powerpoint, etc. So when speakers presented their sites and applications, they were in darkness at the side of the stage, while the screen was lit up. Most of these applications were text-intensive, too, so if you were sitting up the back, it was pretty hard to see what was on the screen, much of the time. Nor were the speakers miked up, so that when they were answering questions, you couldn't always hear very well. No wonder some of the academicians were seen nodding off. And in truth, it is hard to concentrate for a day of such presentations. It might have been an idea for the conference to be held in a lab, where we could have interacted with these resources ourselves.

In fact, the organisers had made several laptops available, and I got used to seeing people surfing around sites that were being discussed in front of them. Some were also checking their email, too... But if that's the best way of presenting this material, either to a conference, or to a class, then it's no wonder that the connection between audience and presenter is diluted. I'm not a luddite in such things: I do use powerpoint when I teach, for example, and I have offered minimal online sites for larger subjects; but I do also love the human connection it's possible to make in a lecture, and the way that quite unexpectedly, sometimes, the group goes completely quiet and you realise that something has struck them, collectively, and you had no way of anticipating what it would be. The symposium wasn't really concerned with teaching, though.

Oddly, it's the idea of the "distraction" that has stayed with me. I'm determined to try and exert some discipline over my own. I wonder if reading Pascale would help. Or is that just another distraction?

And the Award for Most Backhanded Compliment in the School Report Goes to...

... the woodwork teacher at Joel's school, who comments: "He has made excellent progress with a number of hand and machine tools with varying degrees of accuracy." Fantastic!!

Almost topped, though, by the radio commentator calling the Melbourne-Essendon game last night, which Essendon stole from the beleaguered Demons in the last few moments: "the Melbourne demons have crawled out of the grave they've dug for themselves only to fall back in." Zombie football! Where's Buffy when you need her?