Day Surge

A minor operation. A procedure I've had before, in the same hospital, with the same gynaecologist. The worst thing beforehand was fasting after an early breakfast, and missing my 11.00 coffee. I picked Paul up from the airport after two weeks away, we ran a few errands, and then he dropped me at the hospital at 1.30. The Women's hospital is a new building, and I'm in the private ward, Frances Perry House. Everything is clean and calm; and there are no televisions. The nurses introduce themselves by name. I put on my robe and climb into bed under my white cotton blanket. The pale teal curtains are drawn around me. After a while there's a bit of a bustle, a trolley is wheeled in, and it's clear there's a new baby. I don't catch its name but it's named after its maternal grandfather, I hear the father say. I don't hear the mother speaking, but the baby is learning to feed, just practising, the nurses say.

After a while it's quiet again — they have gone back to the ward, I suppose — and Olivia comes to tell me there's a bit of a delay. I'm re-reading Nice Work for a new PhD class starting this week, but after a while I put it aside and sleep. The lights are bright, but it's been easy to slip into the passive role of good patient. I can't email, or hold meetings; I can't write. So I curl up and sleep, for close to an hour, I think — there's no clock — and wake to a gentle touch on my arm. It's Deborah, wearing her scrubs and surgical cap, telling me we'll be going in soonish: there was an emergency caesarean ahead of us. She's the most recent in a long line of wonderful medical practitioners I've met in the last six years: dry and warm (speaking humorally, I see). She is kneeling at my bedside as she wakes me. What a simple thing to do: how little she loses in status by doing so; how much she gains my trust.

I love the feeling of being looked after by this team of competent calm professionals: male receptionist; female nurses; male orderly; female gynaecologist; male anaesthetist.

Graeme comes to take me into surgery, with a new white cotton blanket, which he has warmed up. I meet Andrew the anaesthetist and he and Deborah and I chat about the Melbourne model and the loss of the old Arts/Medicine degree. Another nurse deftly plants sensors on my chest, and before I know it, they have attached me to the drips. I have had almost no experience with hallucinogens in my modest life, and so am curious about the moments before unconsciousness. I keep my eyes open, looking at the white pipes across the ceiling, the lights above me, and hearing Andrew's voice. I think briefly about Michael Jackson. Then, I guess, my eyes roll back, and I'm gone.

I wake. Someone — is it Deborah? — is telling me everything went very well. I think I am back in the ward, but I hear someone telling me they are about to move me back into "day surge". I don't remember the journey, and it takes me a long time to wake up and sip some water. Later on, a cup of tea, some salty biscuits (bliss!) and a sandwich.

Another baby arrives, just with its father: the mother is still in surgery, I think. This baby is called Philip. The father is teacher at a boys' school and tried hard to find a name not shared by any of his students. The baby has a funny little cry, like a chicken... It's not at all disturbing to my calm, to hear the sounds of happy parents. The baby's big sister, five years old, has no idea, apparently, that a baby is arriving today.

I'm home by 7.30 and even manage to sit up for pizza night. Two days later, my legs still feel a bit wobbly, but it's much better than the last time I had a general anaesthetic, when I felt teary and miserable for nearly a week.

This was a diagnostic procedure, just to make 100% sure the observable and measurable after-effect of Tamoxifen on the endometrium isn't malignant. I'm expecting nothing but good news.

My Dinner with Carol, Julie, Lyn and Hannah - or How a highly-paid attorney hijacked a pleasant evening

Four of the five of us have birthdays round about the same time, and over the last few years we have developed a lovely tradition of having dinner together some time in March, and also a couple of other times a year. We sometimes exchange tiny presents or drink a glass of champagne to celebrate a promotion, send someone on their travels or welcome someone home.

Last time we met we decided to plan a special event. Julie and I had both read a wonderful account of a vegetarian degustation menu at Jacques Reymond, a much-awarded restaurant, so we booked months in advance, and had this treat to look forward to.

We turned up on Thursday — the restaurant is in a beautiful and huge Victorian house, with high ceilings and perfect-sized rooms — and began our feast. Three of us went with the vegetarian menu; the other two went with the meat version. We began auspiciously with a light-as-air profiterole made with gruyère, and then began eight courses of perfectly balanced, delicate food. I am not a fan of over-fussy food, and at times this came close. There was rather a lot of foam, too, which doesn't thrill me at the best of times, though one serve of it, on one of the dishes, was absolutely divine. But I did really enjoy this meal. The service was excellent; the wine was good; and the vegetarian and meat courses somehow complemented each other perfectly, often just variations of each other. Here are a couple of photos: check out the truffle shavings over the egg-white omelette, and the gazpacho served in vegetable jelly rolls with buckwheat on top.

Conversation was going swimmingly: we laughed and chatted, and compared notes about our children, our work, our travels, our lives. Really, the food was amazing. We ate delicious things but didn't feel over-full, as the food was so light, with an emphasis on flavour and texture, rather than richness.

And then something happened that slowly began to unravel our happiness.

As we were waiting for the first of our two desserts, the waiter brought five small wine glasses to the table and starting to pour a late-picked riesling. Sometimes desserts do come with their own wine, but we asked, to make sure there had been no mistake. And we were told that two gentlemen sitting in the corner of the room had sent it over for us.

Well, what to do? None of us were really familiar with strangers buying us drinks in bars or restaurants before, so we were a little non-plussed. It was familiar to us only through the movies. In such a scene, what happens? You look around to the table and catch their eye and thank them. It was so clearly not a scene of seduction, so that didn't seem to be the issue. The waiter reported they had said it was a gentlemanly thing to do...

After what seemed a very long and uncomfortable time, but which was probably only a few minutes, I got up and went over to them. I certainly wasn't going to drink the wine without thanking them, and kind of wanted to close it all down. So I just said thank you very much, that they were very kind, and that we would enjoy the wine very much. I shook hands with them both, but didn't introduce myself, or ask why they had done it: I just wanted to close off the exchange.

But of course, that wasn't enough. One of the two men came over to our table later on and started to talk with us. There are a number of things I remember him saying: that he thought it was great that we were having dinner together; that he was gay; that he didn't eat sweets himself, and that he blamed his mother for that, because she had never let him eat sweets; that we should be doing something, as women, to support Julia Gillard; and that he was a highly-paid attorney. I guess he would be in his early forties.

This is where it really became difficult. We had drunk his wine, so couldn't be too rude, but Carol immediately picked him up on daring to give us his approval of eating without men at the table; and I said I thought it was really men who had the greater problem with Gillard, and who might have to work a bit harder.

On it went. And then off he went back to his table. But then he came over again, and said we had to give him six minutes before we paid our bill.

Now it was really getting awkward. Was it possible he was going to try and pay our bill? That would have been intolerable. So we didn't wait his six minutes, but finished our dessert, moved on to our tea and petits fours ...

... and then paid our bill, collected our coats, and left. As we were leaving, one of the waiters told Lyn the man was wanting to order another dessert for us, but that they had dissuaded him.

As we drove home (I'd driven straight from the airport, so had one glass of red, and just a taste of the reisling, so I drove us all back to the other side of the river, where such a thing would *never* happen!), we became angrier and angrier. It was a classic case of delayed reaction to sexual harassment, or in this case, the insidious attempt to patronise and disempower. Clearly the sight of five articulate women having dinner together is still an affront to some men. Blaming his mother, to a group of mothers in their fifties, was problematic enough, but it was so clearly a case of not knowing what to do with us, and not being able to leave us alone, either. So we could see what it was all about, and how foolish he was, but also how irritating it was that this "gentlemanly" behaviour was such a power play.

It's a tricky one, this one. Even the waiters struggled a little with how to manage us, and address us. I suppose the idea of the "ladies who lunch" sits behind this. We are supposed to giggle and flirt with the waiters, are we? and with the other guests? We weren't wearing suits and didn't look corporate enough to be forbidding? As we were leaving, the waiters presented us with tiny little white cardboard boxes which we weren't supposed to open till breakfast. So wicked, we didn't wait and in the car discovered there was one tiny rum ball in the box. Was this a token of restaurant apology for the unpleasantness? Was it the sense that a little more sugar would sweeten the evening?

I was exhausted by the time I got home. I'd been up early, gone to the hotel gym in Canberra and spent all day at a meeting, then flown back, and driven across the city before the dinner started. I was in bed by midnight, and in spite of my big meal, didn't feel I had over-eaten. And yet I barely slept, as the evening had kind of unravelled for me. The funniest thing, really, was his making sure we knew he was a "highly paid attorney" as it's a word that really isn't used in Australia. For us, it absolutely betrayed his own sense that he was acting out a scene from a movie.

Ridiculous. Irritating. Angry-making.

A quick word from Hypatia

Many thanks to all who've contributed suggestions to Hypatia's reading and listening list. She has emailed to say how grateful she is to everyone — "moved and cheered", she says. And she'll keep checking back, so if you think of anything else, please add it in.

She also says she is very happy for you to picture her as Rachel Weisz, though I must admit this film passed me by completely:

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.

In tears at her desk

I was recently at a meeting where various folk had to come in and talk to the committee at different stages of proceedings. At this meeting, there was a little delay, then a man walked in and said the woman who was supposed to come couldn't, because she was in tears at her desk.

I felt this was a little too much information, in a professional setting. I know we always like to hear about trauma and drama, but if I am ever discovered in tears at my desk, I'd prefer people didn't announce it, with my name, to a committee of strangers, thank you very much. I'm just saying.

They look happy, don't they?

Kym Smith of The Australian took this wonderful photo of members of the Liberal party witnessing their new leader's first press conference.

Good to see him uniting the party in a new era of joy and love so successfully...

For non-Australian readers: the Liberal opposition yesterday dumped the leader who was trying to force acceptance of the Government's piss-weak emissions trading scheme legislation. They've replaced him with a rearguard conservative who's "united" a divided party to vote down the legislation in the Senate today. What ho for the two female Liberal senators — Judith Troeth and Sue Boyce — who crossed the floor to vote with the government, though.

Another all-clear

The research assistant on the clinical trial, the nurse and the surgeon all said to me this morning, "it's going quickly, isn't it?" Yes, it's the third anniversary of my surgery for early stage breast cancer, and this morning I sailed through the annual mammogram, ultrasound and examination with Suzanne with flying colours. It was good to see the very reassuring initials NAD (nothing abnormal detected) going onto my files and x-ray reports.

But is it going quickly? Not really. Not when you examine every day closely as it goes by, as I do these days. This doesn't mean I always make the best use of a day: I rarely feel that. But I certainly do notice them as they pass.

One of the lovely things for me about this practice is the sense of these teams of women working so well together (surgeons, nurses, radiologists, receptionists, researchers). I did see Mitchell, my oncologist, striding into the waiting room to meet a woman wearing a long scarf — I think they adminster the chemotherapy in this clinic, too — but everyone who attended me today was a woman. It's peaceful there. No televisions, no piped music, just magazines, comfortable couches and white towelling robes to wear while you wait. Women come and go, and although there's always a level of anxiety on our faces, it's calm. We are being attended by kindly, efficient and skilled women who know exactly what they are doing, how best to manage our visit and our health. For a place that is closely associated with a deadly disease, it's remarkably serene.

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.

I'm not on Facebook or MySpace or Twitter, but

...but I can still upload the butterfly that accompanies my contribution to the Amnesty campaign on behalf of the so-called "comfort women" of WWII. If you follow the prompts at the link below, you can add your own butterfly to your site, and if it's on facebook, or myspace or twitter, Amnesty will then be able to track and count contributions.

This is the Amnesty message:

In the year 2009, you'd think governments would have well and truly faced the atrocities of World War II. But there remains a group of living, breathing survivors whose suffering has never been officially acknowledged; whose full stories remain buried under layers of shame and outright denial by those responsible.

Up to 200,000 women and girls were subject to repeated rapes and beatings in 'comfort stations' throughout much of Asia Pacific, including South Korea, Indonesia, the Philippines and East Timor. As the survivors near the end of their lives, time is running out.

Will you create your own beautiful message of solidarity and support for these courageous survivors? They have endured more than 60 years without so much as an adequate apology - let alone compensation - from the Japanese government.

Please click here to join Amnesty International's campaign:

http://www.amnesty.org.au/comfort/

Thanks,

Stephanie Trigg

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.

Woman returns to work after 25 years

Kate just sent me this as an email attachment. Naturally, I couldn't open it, but I found it on YouTube. As Kate said, anyone under 40 probably won't get it...

Girly pleasures: or why I love my moisturiser

I'm into the second week of this headcold now (apparently it lasts a good two or three weeks, with the possibility of a re-run later). I'm back cycling and playing tennis, though the combination of an hour's tennis and twenty minutes cycling home in a cold wind tonight nearly did for me. A little work tonight, then an early night for me.

Since I've been sick, I've felt constantly on the verge of dehydration, and had run out of my moisturiser, but have since been down to Klein's, and stocked up on my magic jar.

I open the black screw top lid on the little dark brown glass jar, and breathe in the aromatic scents of rosemary, sage and lavender. A fingertip full of soft white cream, and my skin suddenly feels normal again. I'm on the road to recovery.

It's spring, but I'm sick

There is a very nasty cold doing the rounds of my family, friends and workplace, to which I have now succumbed. It's described as having a kick in the tail, as it tends to come back and back. Joel's gone a couple of rounds with it; and I have spent much of the last week in bed. For the first few days I must have been a bit feverish, as my skin felt it was made of hot paper. I still feel I have to drink gallons of water a day just to stay three-dimensional.

On Thursday I managed to get out of bed and assembled myself to go to the Lyceum club, to give a talk on Women and the Order of the Garter. I excused myself from the lunch, fearing I would use all my voice up in conversation, and have nothing left for the lecture, but this was such a shame, as the women I did meet after the talk were all really interesting. It's a beautiful club. I'd been there at night, but during the day the lounges were flooded with natural light. I was speaking to the History Circle, but there are lots of other groups and activities within the club. I can see all kinds of reasons for having a women's club; and this one has an extraordinary location tucked away in the heart of the city. Its walls are covered with original artworks; its tables with fresh flowers; and its plates with lovely food.

I was sorry I wasn't feeling better, though. I would have liked to make more of an effort with my ... toilette: the best I could do was make sure I had an embroidered handkerchief instead of a clutch of tissues. My friend Paula came along for support and I was so pleased she did, but again, I was sorry I wasn't in a more performative mode. Adrenaline got me out of bed and onto the tram, and up behind the lectern, but I would have loved to have been able to present my talk with a bit more oomph, especially for Paula to see. We have a mutual friend who's been much in the news lately through his leadership of the Australian team working on the Large Hadron Collider, and so I've been thinking again about what happens when our research meets the community, and how hard it is to explain technical research to a general audience.

And I might have anticipated something of this kind in such an environment, but after my talk, I was introduced to the wife of a Garter Knight! A reminder I must try and set up an interview with the man himself.

Anyway, the talk just about did for me, and I spent most of yesterday back in bed. This morning I determined to start building up energy again, and pushed myself to do about half of my usual walk along the river. When I got to Ceres, though, I was feeling a bit faint, so I lay down on the bench to recover my strength. I was nearly home again when I realised my keys had dropped out of my pocket, so I had to go back for them, and ended up doing a huge walk. The trouble is, my cold has now gone down to the bottom of my lungs, which now make a dreadful crackling sound when I cough. It also hurts, as I think I've pulled a muscle in my coughing. I've said I'll be back at work next week, but that might be a bit optimistic. I'm a great believer in not spreading disease around the workplace...

How this face-blindness thing works

Ok, so this is what happens.

I'm in the changing room on campus, about to head out to my weekly tennis game with Alison, Denise and Clara. I hear two women come in, and identify them from their voices as Denise and Alison. Two women come around the corner and I greet Denise cheerily and smile politely at the unknown woman. 'Oh!' I think, 'Denise has brought someone new to play with'. And then of course I realise it is Alison.

There are some reasons for this misrecognition, however. Before her chemotherapy, Alison used to have gorgeous long, shiny, straight dark red hair. After her hair fell out, she wore a wig that looked exactly like her hair, but for tennis she wore a little cap over her slowly re-growing hair. So I knew it had grown out curly, though no longer shiny dark red in colour. But she had, as she explained, 'come out' as a cancer patient, and was now wearing her curls clipped and coloured a beautiful pearly blonde, and so I did not recognise her, even though (a) I was expecting to see her; (b) I had heard her voice; and (c) I knew she had short curly hair. To cover my embarassment, I found myself explaining the concept of face-blindness. It was only a second or two of misrecognition, but it was obvious that I was greeting one woman as a friend and the other as a stranger. Awkward, especially as the attention should have been on Alison's new look, not my mild cognitive impairment.

Alison also told me one of her students complimented her on her hair, and said, 'Did you have that done for cancer?' Alison hadn't been particularly public about her illness, but thinking she was going to have to face lots of these queries, said, 'yes'. But then it became clear that the student thought Alison had cut or coloured her hair in support of cancer research.

And so we all go on, half-understanding each other, half-recognising each other, and only half thinking about other people.

Rivalries: Cities, Nations, States and Genders

My favourite gag about Sydney-Melbourne rivalries goes like this: "If someone in Sydney has an idea, they throw a party; in Melbourne, they start a journal."

Further grist to this particular mill is provided with UNESCO's announcement that Melbourne is to be the new City of Literature, following up on Edinburgh's achievement in 2004.

Of course this is all falling into the background behind the Olympics, and especially behind Sally ("Oh my God, is this real? You've got to be kidding me, right? Did you see me? Did you see how pumped I was? I was more pumped than I've ever been in my life. Shit, I could see a girl passing me but kept running my own race. Amazing. I can't believe it.") McLellan's unexpected (she was supposed just to be getting some experience) silver medal in the hurdles, but how these things do chase each other around the world.

England and Australia have always had tremendous sporting rivalries, most notably in cricket, and our sports minister, Kate Ellis, was foolish enough to bet we would do better than the UK in Beijing, vowing she would wear the union jack colours to the next sporting event if the Brits did better than we did. They are creaming us! But of course, our coaches have been poached by China and the UK, paying them more than Australia can or will afford for their expertise. I gather, too, that the UK has been diverting lottery money away from the arts and into their sporting programmes. Yeah, but we've got a city of literature now!

Amid all the talk of international rivalries, and the new country of Phelpsville (which on the medal-per-head-of-population chart would look pretty incredible), a number of commentators here are talking about the brilliant success of Australian women, compared to our men. It's also the case that most of them come from Queensland. So I'm proposing a new state of Femenye (I'm teaching The Knight's Tale this morning). They don't even have to change the name: just enter women from the northern state in their own right. Problem solved!

Our Sisters, Our Selves. R.I.P. Jane McGrath

Can't help but be moved by the death of Jane McGrath this week, after complications from surgery for secondary cancers. If it's easy, sometimes, to mock the WAGs of international football and cricketing stars, here was a woman who faced breast cancer and its ghastly aftermath with courage and grace.

When I was given my passport to the country of illness, it was inevitable to look around me and acknowledge my travelling companions. Over the months of waiting in doctor's rooms, I read more than enough trashy mags, but always poured over stories about Kylie, Belinda, Jane. Of course all these accounts are heavily mediated, but the McGrath story always moved me, because the two of them just seemed so matter-of-fact about it all. And it was fascinating to get a glimpse of the non-cricketing side of Glenn McGrath. Sports gossip says he has a tremendous temper, but there was no sign of it in their dignified accounts of their struggle. Jane McGrath was only 42 when she died, but she and her husband established a foundation which raises money, very practically, for specialist breast care nurses, especially in regional areas.

I shuddered when I first heard the news this afternoon, and when we were watching the tv news tonight, I had to hold in a little sob. She leaves behind a loving husband and two young children. Requiescat in pace.

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.

On not being over-modest...

I'm taking courage from Dr Virago's recent comments on the teaching award she won, to say how pleased I am to have been given an award, too. The University has decided this year to honour the work of mentoring, with two awards, one for academic and one for general/professional staff. They are both named after Pat Grimshaw, who recently retired as professor of history, and who continues to be a brilliant mentor, teacher and advocate. I've seen her being so courageous in some difficult times in the university, most notably speaking up against the development of the university's private branch that turned out to be so disastrous and has now been disbanded. So I'm honoured to try and follow in her footsteps of kindness and courage.

It is particularly delightful to me that the other winner is my friend Margot, who works in the Science Faculty. We had a funny exchange two weekends ago. We each knew the other had been nominated (well, I should confess that her staff nominated her; I asked my head of program to nominate me...), and had each received the call from the Provost, but the results hadn't been made public yet, and neither of us wanted to be the one to ask if the other had won! But Margot, generous as always, was the first to break the ice, and so now we are extremely pleased with ourselves and each other. In fact we are going out with a group tonight to a Turkish restaurant for her son Nick's 13th birthday (he and Joel were at childcare and primary school together), with a promises of a callipygous belly dancer. This is another reason I love Margot, for introducing me to the word callipygous!

Well, we don't get our awards till December, when they will be presented by the Vice-Chancellor at his annual Teaching and Learning Colloquium. I think we'll have to have some champagne to celebrate.

But the main reason I wanted to mention this on the blog is that my application said a few things about the Humanities Researcher blog, and Peter's nomination also made mention of it. This is what he wrote:

My second example of Stephanie’s skill at providing support and sharing knowledge with mentees is her now long-running, extensive, and widely read blog. We sometimes think of mentoring as involving face to face activities, but of course the WWW offers a dizzy range of new opportunities for being role-model and mentor to others. I won’t detail here the widening-circles of Stephanie’s blog, from its initial concern with ARC grant writing, to its rapid accumulation of additional narrative and thematic threads when Stephanie was diagnosed with cancer, to the blog (with its history) that we have today, which offers a unique exploration of the interactions between thought, life, friendship and family, the contexts from which intellectual work springs. In work such as this there is enormous scope for disaster as well as success. The undoubted, truly remarkable success of Stephanie’s blog, the extent to which it has touched people’s lives, is a profound testament to her skills as a mentor. The blog makes me realize anew the degree to which mentoring and being a role-model are central although often not acknowledged planks in “knowledge transfer”.

I should explain that "knowledge transfer" is the awkwardly-named but excellent idea that the university should be working in close contact with city, society, community, industry, etc. There are some tricky issues, here, but it's hard to disagree with the general principle here. But isn't this a lovely paragraph for Peter to write? I thought about over-modestly not blogging about the award, but then thought it would be nice to quote Peter's comments for anyone who's thinking about the social/pedagogical function of blogging. And after all, it looks as if Humanities Researcher played its part in the award, and the blog would have no life if it weren't for its lovely readers.

I can feel myself gearing up soon for a final onslaught on the first draft of my book, and sometimes wonder whether I will have time to keep blogging. But I reckon I will. I think it'd be good if I spent a little less time checking my sitemeter stats, but I also think that when the book insists on being written, as it is starting to, then everything will fall into place anyway.

The new G-G

Australia has a bit of a recent history of being embarrassed about its Governors-General. The office itself is a bit embarrassing, of course: the incumbent represents the Queen, as our head of state, and tends to make the news only when things go horribly wrong. Kerr dismissing Whitlam's parliament, disgracing himself at the Melbourne Cup; Peter Hollingworth having to resign after the mess left by his handling of church sex scandals. Even my most abiding memory of William Deane, who is widely regarded as the best and most popular G-G in recent times, is a picture of him standing with an expression of utmost compassion next to the parents of some Australian kids who had died in a canyoning disaster somewhere in Europe, having brought branches and sprigs of wattle to throw into the rushing waters.

But overnight the office seems to have been renewed, with Rudd's announcement that Quentin Bryce will take over from Michael Jeffrey in July. I don't know all that much about her, but her CV is impressive, and the appointment has been widely praised. It's as if no one can imagine how Howard could possibly have overlooked her unless he had been an old patriarchal retrograde....

It's also fun to see someone of such extraordinary elegance in the role:


But I'm even more struck by her remarks:

"I grew up in a little bush town in Queensland with 200 people, and what this day says to Australian women and Australian girls is that you can do anything, you can be anything. ... It makes my heart sing to see women in so many diverse roles across our country in Australia."

"It makes my heart sing." Wonderful! I think this is discourse that belongs to the second-wave feminism that Bryce grew up with, and stands for. It's probably still women's language — do men in public office speak like this? — and what a buzz to hear it spoken from this position.

There's a fair bit of speculation around this morning that Bryce might be our last governor-general. The buzz seems to be that Australia might be happy to serve under Elizabeth, but that Charles' accession might push the republican movement along a bit faster. I'm not so sure: I suspect we would be so enthralled by the public mourning and the public celebration of a coronation that we would forget to be republicans. And then I suspect we would fall in love with William. So if we're going to become a republic, we should disconnnect the movement from the question of the personality of the monarch. What about Quentin Bryce for President? Huh?

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.