Crazy days at the moment. Chaos at home, with dust and piles of furniture everywhere. The builders dug the holes for the new concrete stumps in two rooms on Friday: there was so much dust everywhere the smoke alarm kept going off, and clouds of black dust (the volcanic clay of the Merri creek bed) have filled the house, even upstairs into the beautiful new room.
We leave for a holiday in Alice Springs first thing Tuesday morning, and before then I have the usual pile of deadlines to meet. A tenure review for someone in the US; my Shakespeare review for The Age (done!); a job reference for someone that has to be done tomorrow if I'm not to miss their deadline; a conference proposal for NCS in Swansea next year (half-done: a grovelling letter to the panel chair promising a proper proposal when I get back). I'm also at a symposium, tomorrow, for most of the day, on philanthropy and the humanities. I should also be cleaning the house for the family members who are going to babysit the cat and the fish; and updating my publications on the university's research file.
Well; what gets done will get done. What doesn't, will have to be left behind.
Will be back in ten days, eyes filled with desert and sky, and looking forward to the symposium on October 12 on blogging and writing at UWS with Pavlov's Cat. I'm hoping she'll be posting about this before it happens; if not, I'll update when I get back.
Sunday, September 23, 2007
Friday, September 14, 2007
A Room - and a Bed - of One's Own
I spent the oddest morning chasing up bills and papers and receipts and passwords and forms. They were scattered all over the house — and that's after making sure I had gathered everything I needed from the office at work. OK, some people are good filers, and know where everything is. I admit I am always rather haphazard. But could someone who was a good filer experience a tenth of the joy and satisfaction that was mine when I did finally find the membership renewal form - in one of the dozen special piles of important papers around the house?
And in my defence, life is particularly chaotic at the moment: my work places are scattered between the dining-room table, the spare bedroom, the tv room and our bedroom. And why? Because I have no room of my own, temporarily, at least. Part of the house re-building we are doing involves my study:
you can see how deeply they have dug down below the level of the hearth. This is more than just re-painting; rather, proper re-stumping. These floors have been here a hundred years, and you can perhaps make out fragments of the original roof tiles that dropped to the floor as they were building.
I've also just now signed off on the upstairs room with builder and architect. Peter and Shannon have lifted the bed up the stairs and I'm about to spend a happy weekend, when I should be reading biographies of Shakespeare and his wife for a review I'm writing, moving our clothes and bedlinen and all that odd bedroom stuff upstairs. I have in mind a resolution to try and find a few things I no longer wear and no longer wish to keep. Paul is away, though, so I'll do it on my own and have a week up there before he gets home. How odd that seems; in that we have been sleeping for 14 years in a most ramshackle, run down old room with plaster falling off the ceiling, and yet he is not here for the big move. Upstairs is so grand I can't bear to move our random old bedside furniture up there.
Here are snaps of the ceiling in the old bedroom:
A serendipitous connection leaps to mind, though, between the work I'll be doing and the work I should be doing, in Shakespeare leaving his second best bed to Ann Hathaway. I'll try and find out more about this in between armfuls of clothes.
P.S. Here's what the other side of that pile of books looks like. Click to enlarge. What do you have on your bedside table?
And in my defence, life is particularly chaotic at the moment: my work places are scattered between the dining-room table, the spare bedroom, the tv room and our bedroom. And why? Because I have no room of my own, temporarily, at least. Part of the house re-building we are doing involves my study:
you can see how deeply they have dug down below the level of the hearth. This is more than just re-painting; rather, proper re-stumping. These floors have been here a hundred years, and you can perhaps make out fragments of the original roof tiles that dropped to the floor as they were building.
I've also just now signed off on the upstairs room with builder and architect. Peter and Shannon have lifted the bed up the stairs and I'm about to spend a happy weekend, when I should be reading biographies of Shakespeare and his wife for a review I'm writing, moving our clothes and bedlinen and all that odd bedroom stuff upstairs. I have in mind a resolution to try and find a few things I no longer wear and no longer wish to keep. Paul is away, though, so I'll do it on my own and have a week up there before he gets home. How odd that seems; in that we have been sleeping for 14 years in a most ramshackle, run down old room with plaster falling off the ceiling, and yet he is not here for the big move. Upstairs is so grand I can't bear to move our random old bedside furniture up there.
Here are snaps of the ceiling in the old bedroom:
A serendipitous connection leaps to mind, though, between the work I'll be doing and the work I should be doing, in Shakespeare leaving his second best bed to Ann Hathaway. I'll try and find out more about this in between armfuls of clothes.
P.S. Here's what the other side of that pile of books looks like. Click to enlarge. What do you have on your bedside table?
Monday, September 10, 2007
"It's brought out a strength in me I never knew I had."
Monday night. Normally time to prepare for class tomorrow. But tonight, as the kids sang and danced their way down the corridor to bed (Joel's oldest friend, Eva, has been staying with us since last weekend while her parents are a-conferencing), I flipped across the channels and realised Andrew Denton's Enough Rope was on. Tonight a "special", on three women with metastatic cancer, which had begun, in all three cases I think, with breast cancer. Paul is away, too, in Norway (Hi Meli!), and in any case, would probably have been working, if he had been here. So with a stomach full of tender roast lamb and home grown rosemary, and with these two beautiful young children safely tucked up in bed reading, I watched alone.
Here's a link to the website: I think transcripts and excerpts will be available there soon: Enough Rope
I don't think you would need to be a cancer patient or carer to be moved by this program, but the tears were certainly streaming down my face. These women were brave, and scared, and positive, and pragmatic, at different times. But I can't put a measure on the extent to which my story is their story. My medical prognosis is better, but at the same time I know myself touched and changed by the things that have touched and changed them. I don't put myself in their class, but on the other hand, to refuse to do so might be a form of denial, as I still must work out how I am to live; and I think their courage might help me.
One of the women said, "It's brought out a strength in me I never knew I had." It was said smiling under the eyebrows her husband painted on for her each day (that's their sex life now, they joked), and I realised how far cancer can take you beyond the normal vanities. Everywhere else on television are beautifully groomed faces and hair; here were bald heads and darkened eyes, confronting their own deaths; in one case, little more than a week away.
But I knew what she meant, about the strength. I have sometimes, myself, been surprised to find myself less distressed about things that normally would have worried me. (If I had had to, I think I probably would have been able to face the world without hair, for example.) But has it brought out a strength that was buried in me? Or did I grow it myself?
In the first half of last year I went to the physiotherapist complaining about pain on the outside of my right knee. He diagnosed a weakness of the muscle on the inside of the knee, and gave me what seemed like minimal exercises to strengthen the inner muscle so as to re-balance the whole knee. I realised, too, that I had developed a habit of riding my bike with my right leg slightly bowlegged (to protect my pants and shoes). One of my legs is very slightly longer than the other, too, as the dressmaker discovered when she made my long "wedding" skirt (scarlet silk chiffon over midnight blue peach satin, for the record). I've re-oriented my walking, running and riding habits, and now have no pain in the knee, and even a discernible bump where the strengthened muscle sits.
I think this is the kind of "strength" that cancer helped me grow, little by little as I got through the treatments and the sheer shock of being ill, last spring and summer.
At the same time, the program was a wake-up call for me. I feel so strong, physically, that it's been hard not to slip back into old ways of committing myself to lots of things. And yet I do get tired and wrung out by stuff; and I have to remind myself that while I'm nearly at the one year point since my diagnosis (with a mammogram and ultrasound to mark the event next month), it's a much shorter time since I was suffering considerable anxiety about re-entering the world of work. That world is particularly distressing at the moment, with the threat of job cuts in my faculty, and while I want to be involved, I'm finding it harder and harder. I'm not sure I do actually have enough strength for that.
I turned off the television, and could hear Herbert, our little frog, croaking into the balmy spring air, and was reminded of the ephemerality of it all. How hard it is to keep the balance between one's normal, human commitments to others, and the sense of stillness that mortality grants us.
Here's a link to the website: I think transcripts and excerpts will be available there soon: Enough Rope
I don't think you would need to be a cancer patient or carer to be moved by this program, but the tears were certainly streaming down my face. These women were brave, and scared, and positive, and pragmatic, at different times. But I can't put a measure on the extent to which my story is their story. My medical prognosis is better, but at the same time I know myself touched and changed by the things that have touched and changed them. I don't put myself in their class, but on the other hand, to refuse to do so might be a form of denial, as I still must work out how I am to live; and I think their courage might help me.
One of the women said, "It's brought out a strength in me I never knew I had." It was said smiling under the eyebrows her husband painted on for her each day (that's their sex life now, they joked), and I realised how far cancer can take you beyond the normal vanities. Everywhere else on television are beautifully groomed faces and hair; here were bald heads and darkened eyes, confronting their own deaths; in one case, little more than a week away.
But I knew what she meant, about the strength. I have sometimes, myself, been surprised to find myself less distressed about things that normally would have worried me. (If I had had to, I think I probably would have been able to face the world without hair, for example.) But has it brought out a strength that was buried in me? Or did I grow it myself?
In the first half of last year I went to the physiotherapist complaining about pain on the outside of my right knee. He diagnosed a weakness of the muscle on the inside of the knee, and gave me what seemed like minimal exercises to strengthen the inner muscle so as to re-balance the whole knee. I realised, too, that I had developed a habit of riding my bike with my right leg slightly bowlegged (to protect my pants and shoes). One of my legs is very slightly longer than the other, too, as the dressmaker discovered when she made my long "wedding" skirt (scarlet silk chiffon over midnight blue peach satin, for the record). I've re-oriented my walking, running and riding habits, and now have no pain in the knee, and even a discernible bump where the strengthened muscle sits.
I think this is the kind of "strength" that cancer helped me grow, little by little as I got through the treatments and the sheer shock of being ill, last spring and summer.
At the same time, the program was a wake-up call for me. I feel so strong, physically, that it's been hard not to slip back into old ways of committing myself to lots of things. And yet I do get tired and wrung out by stuff; and I have to remind myself that while I'm nearly at the one year point since my diagnosis (with a mammogram and ultrasound to mark the event next month), it's a much shorter time since I was suffering considerable anxiety about re-entering the world of work. That world is particularly distressing at the moment, with the threat of job cuts in my faculty, and while I want to be involved, I'm finding it harder and harder. I'm not sure I do actually have enough strength for that.
I turned off the television, and could hear Herbert, our little frog, croaking into the balmy spring air, and was reminded of the ephemerality of it all. How hard it is to keep the balance between one's normal, human commitments to others, and the sense of stillness that mortality grants us.
Thursday, September 06, 2007
Wednesday, August 29, 2007
A Spy in the House of History
The Melbourne Writers' Festival this year is host to eminent historian, David Starkey, and he's also giving several talks at the university this week. I first came across his work on the late medieval royal household many years ago when I was working on Wynnere and Wastoure, and was keen to go along and hear him now that I am once more working on English court culture.
On Monday night I felt a bit like a spy.
The talk was hosted by the History Department. Starkey gave an extraordinarily fluent and practised performance, without a single piece of paper in front of him. He is a celebrity Tudor historian in Britain and in Australia; his "Elizabeth", sold, he said, 500,000 copies in the Commonwealth (not sure if this was TV series or his book). The emphatic burden of his talk was that while history was flourishing in popular and public culture, academic history was destroying itself in post-modernism and textual scepticism. He drew attention to the relative novelty of history as an academic discipline, and to the various vogues (for example, economic history) that set trends in history at different times. In apocalyptic vein, he threatened the death of academic history, amid the continued flourishing of popular history.
Hmm. As if the two aren't now completely inter-dependent.
Anyway, the historians were very polite. In addition to the general seduction of an audience by clever asides, funny stories about the Queen, there was certainly a vocal chorus of approving murmurs and laughter, and a few Dorothy Dixers in question time. But I know that many of my colleagues in my sister-department weren't in agreement with him. And I know that most of them are not afraid to speak their mind. So I thought they were extraordinarily polite. And I began to wonder about the different social cultures between English and History. My own department-that-was (before our recent re-structure) would have shown no mercy. (One example: I remember a colleague asking a British Council-funded visitor who kindly explained semiotics to us in the early 1990s how he would account for his "neo-naïve" position.)
Starkey kept saying, provocatively, that he expected to be shot down in flames; and yet the discussion was really quite docile. It's true the talk was more in the nature of a polemic than a reasoned, argued academic paper; and so perhaps the historians felt there was no point engaging. Anyway, a fascinating glimpse into the meeting of two worlds: popular and academic history.
On Monday night I felt a bit like a spy.
The talk was hosted by the History Department. Starkey gave an extraordinarily fluent and practised performance, without a single piece of paper in front of him. He is a celebrity Tudor historian in Britain and in Australia; his "Elizabeth", sold, he said, 500,000 copies in the Commonwealth (not sure if this was TV series or his book). The emphatic burden of his talk was that while history was flourishing in popular and public culture, academic history was destroying itself in post-modernism and textual scepticism. He drew attention to the relative novelty of history as an academic discipline, and to the various vogues (for example, economic history) that set trends in history at different times. In apocalyptic vein, he threatened the death of academic history, amid the continued flourishing of popular history.
Hmm. As if the two aren't now completely inter-dependent.
Anyway, the historians were very polite. In addition to the general seduction of an audience by clever asides, funny stories about the Queen, there was certainly a vocal chorus of approving murmurs and laughter, and a few Dorothy Dixers in question time. But I know that many of my colleagues in my sister-department weren't in agreement with him. And I know that most of them are not afraid to speak their mind. So I thought they were extraordinarily polite. And I began to wonder about the different social cultures between English and History. My own department-that-was (before our recent re-structure) would have shown no mercy. (One example: I remember a colleague asking a British Council-funded visitor who kindly explained semiotics to us in the early 1990s how he would account for his "neo-naïve" position.)
Starkey kept saying, provocatively, that he expected to be shot down in flames; and yet the discussion was really quite docile. It's true the talk was more in the nature of a polemic than a reasoned, argued academic paper; and so perhaps the historians felt there was no point engaging. Anyway, a fascinating glimpse into the meeting of two worlds: popular and academic history.
Tuesday, August 28, 2007
Malory on the Radio
Some time over the next week, while it's still available, check out David Wallace's BBC Radio feature on Malory. Alas, the segment we recorded at the College of Arms didn't make it into the final cut, even though Bluemantle Pursuivant was so wonderful.
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/sundayfeature/
The program begins and ends at Winchester College. Contributors include Helen Cooper (on the Winchester MS, BL), ASG Edwards (on the Caxton edn, Manchester), Richard Barber (House of Lords Robing room), Martin Biddle (Great Hall at Winchester), Anne Sutton (Mercers' Hall, Newgate), Geoffrey Day (Fellows' Librarian, Winchester College), Lawrence James (biographer), Tim Sutherland (battlefield historian, Towton), poet laureate Andrew Motion (as the voice of Malory), and poet Geoffrey Hill (as himself). Producer: Paul Quinn.
Love the sound effects of the footsteps and creaking door as they re-enact the discovery of the Winchester MS in the Warden's bedroom in 1934...
http://www.bbc.co.uk/radio3/sundayfeature/
The program begins and ends at Winchester College. Contributors include Helen Cooper (on the Winchester MS, BL), ASG Edwards (on the Caxton edn, Manchester), Richard Barber (House of Lords Robing room), Martin Biddle (Great Hall at Winchester), Anne Sutton (Mercers' Hall, Newgate), Geoffrey Day (Fellows' Librarian, Winchester College), Lawrence James (biographer), Tim Sutherland (battlefield historian, Towton), poet laureate Andrew Motion (as the voice of Malory), and poet Geoffrey Hill (as himself). Producer: Paul Quinn.
Love the sound effects of the footsteps and creaking door as they re-enact the discovery of the Winchester MS in the Warden's bedroom in 1934...
Sunday, August 26, 2007
The most amazing ... stuff
In line with our new post-cancer resolves, we have been making an effort to take time off to do things that don't involve books or computers or meetings.
A brief account of three such events over the last week.
Last Sunday we climbed on our bikes and rode the other (west) half of the Capital City Trail that rings Melbourne. In the past we've gone along the Merri and the Yarra down to Southbank; a ride of about 21 ks. We have then typically stopped for pancakes and icecream before putting the bikes on the train to come home. But last week we headed in the other direction, along the path Joel rides to school, across Princes Park, then Royal Park, past the Zoo (technically, the Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens: you'd never tell we were once an English colony, would you?), then down the new bike path that runs alongside the Moonee Ponds Creek, where Paul used to play as a kid, under the Citylink freeway and the Bolte bridge, and down to the Docklands. It's a shorter ride of about 8 or 9 k: check out a map here. By no means such a pleasant ride, since you ride under freeways and past concrete pylons, as opposed to leisurely gardens, boathouses, waterbirds, the Children's farm, the Abbotsford Convent, and the wide brown river. We didn't go all the way down to Southbank, but stopped for fish and chips at one of the rather soulless cafes at Docklands, a new settlement of fancy high-rise apartments, and watched small groups of people walking up and down wondering what they were supposed to be looking at. Pleasant to be by the water, though, and see the city from the west. We avoided the football crowds and rode home, fuelled by excellent potato cakes and fresh scallops.
Then on Monday night Paula and I went to a concert in the Town Hall put on the University's Music Faculty. Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, Dvorak's Te Deum and the premiere of a new work by Tim Shawcross, "No Longer will the Ancient Souls Ascend", a wonderful meditation on the flight of the albatross and the fact that 19 out of 21 species are now endangered. Brilliant percussion section against resonant strings and triumphant brass. The Sir Bernard Heinze award was also presented to Graham Abbott, a Handel expert who spoke about music. He rhapsodised: "Music is really the most amazing ... stuff," and the whole town hall broke into applause. I was wondering how he was going to complete that sentence! I frequently listen to music as I work, but truly, it was wonderful, and quite a different thing, to sit very still and see and hear the orchestra and choir.
Yesterday we went off to the touring Pixar exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. This is what you see as you approach from Swanston St:
Then as you get closer, you see the big ball up on the steps, and remember those gorgeous animations of the parent and child light and the ball...
Inside is a wonderful exhibition of drawings and models, and interviews with animators and story-tellers. Lots of highlights for me, even though I've not seen Cars or The Incredibles. But I have watched Toy Story and Toy Story 2 many, many times with great enjoyment; and the installation showed the detail and care with which they put characters, dialogue and story-lines together. Some sequences on show were slide-show sequences showing how a pen-and-ink shape was gradually developed into a fully-painted scene. So at one level the show demystified the process and showed you all the work and labour behind the movies; and at another level made that magic all over again.
They had also made an amazing zoetrope on a grand scale. You enter a darkened room and stand around a glass enclosure with a display spinning round, with tiers of characters from Toy Story 2 moving: Jessie tossing her lasso, the toy soldiers parachuting out of their tub in the centre at the top, the aliens and Squeaky (?) Squeezy (?) the penguin playing on a see-saw and disappearing into a black hole in the ground. The strobe lights come on and you witness the full vision of repeated action; your eyes telling you that the characters are moving. Then the lights come on, and the display stops spinning, and only then do you realise that none of the figures is moving. It's a fixed display: thirty Jessies with her lasso positioned at different heights.
But still, it's the emotion that makes a good movie: I can remember seeing Toy Story 2 with Joel in Edinburgh when he was just 5, and him putting his fingers up to feel the tears running down my face when Jessie sang about the girl who grew out of cowgirl dolls... Waaahhh!!
We ate lunch in a cafe looking down over a courtyard into Flinders St; the top half of all the windows open to the north, with sun and warmth and spring streaming in, and picking up the luminescent green of a handful of leaves on the tree beneath us. So transfixed by it, I forgot to get out the camera.
A brief account of three such events over the last week.
Last Sunday we climbed on our bikes and rode the other (west) half of the Capital City Trail that rings Melbourne. In the past we've gone along the Merri and the Yarra down to Southbank; a ride of about 21 ks. We have then typically stopped for pancakes and icecream before putting the bikes on the train to come home. But last week we headed in the other direction, along the path Joel rides to school, across Princes Park, then Royal Park, past the Zoo (technically, the Royal Melbourne Zoological Gardens: you'd never tell we were once an English colony, would you?), then down the new bike path that runs alongside the Moonee Ponds Creek, where Paul used to play as a kid, under the Citylink freeway and the Bolte bridge, and down to the Docklands. It's a shorter ride of about 8 or 9 k: check out a map here. By no means such a pleasant ride, since you ride under freeways and past concrete pylons, as opposed to leisurely gardens, boathouses, waterbirds, the Children's farm, the Abbotsford Convent, and the wide brown river. We didn't go all the way down to Southbank, but stopped for fish and chips at one of the rather soulless cafes at Docklands, a new settlement of fancy high-rise apartments, and watched small groups of people walking up and down wondering what they were supposed to be looking at. Pleasant to be by the water, though, and see the city from the west. We avoided the football crowds and rode home, fuelled by excellent potato cakes and fresh scallops.
Then on Monday night Paula and I went to a concert in the Town Hall put on the University's Music Faculty. Sibelius's Fifth Symphony, Dvorak's Te Deum and the premiere of a new work by Tim Shawcross, "No Longer will the Ancient Souls Ascend", a wonderful meditation on the flight of the albatross and the fact that 19 out of 21 species are now endangered. Brilliant percussion section against resonant strings and triumphant brass. The Sir Bernard Heinze award was also presented to Graham Abbott, a Handel expert who spoke about music. He rhapsodised: "Music is really the most amazing ... stuff," and the whole town hall broke into applause. I was wondering how he was going to complete that sentence! I frequently listen to music as I work, but truly, it was wonderful, and quite a different thing, to sit very still and see and hear the orchestra and choir.
Yesterday we went off to the touring Pixar exhibition at the Australian Centre for the Moving Image. This is what you see as you approach from Swanston St:
Then as you get closer, you see the big ball up on the steps, and remember those gorgeous animations of the parent and child light and the ball...
Inside is a wonderful exhibition of drawings and models, and interviews with animators and story-tellers. Lots of highlights for me, even though I've not seen Cars or The Incredibles. But I have watched Toy Story and Toy Story 2 many, many times with great enjoyment; and the installation showed the detail and care with which they put characters, dialogue and story-lines together. Some sequences on show were slide-show sequences showing how a pen-and-ink shape was gradually developed into a fully-painted scene. So at one level the show demystified the process and showed you all the work and labour behind the movies; and at another level made that magic all over again.
They had also made an amazing zoetrope on a grand scale. You enter a darkened room and stand around a glass enclosure with a display spinning round, with tiers of characters from Toy Story 2 moving: Jessie tossing her lasso, the toy soldiers parachuting out of their tub in the centre at the top, the aliens and Squeaky (?) Squeezy (?) the penguin playing on a see-saw and disappearing into a black hole in the ground. The strobe lights come on and you witness the full vision of repeated action; your eyes telling you that the characters are moving. Then the lights come on, and the display stops spinning, and only then do you realise that none of the figures is moving. It's a fixed display: thirty Jessies with her lasso positioned at different heights.
But still, it's the emotion that makes a good movie: I can remember seeing Toy Story 2 with Joel in Edinburgh when he was just 5, and him putting his fingers up to feel the tears running down my face when Jessie sang about the girl who grew out of cowgirl dolls... Waaahhh!!
We ate lunch in a cafe looking down over a courtyard into Flinders St; the top half of all the windows open to the north, with sun and warmth and spring streaming in, and picking up the luminescent green of a handful of leaves on the tree beneath us. So transfixed by it, I forgot to get out the camera.
Thursday, August 23, 2007
"Connecting to International Academic Communities"
A fun gig today, addressing the PhD Colloquium at the School of Graduate Studies. My topic? Connecting to International Academic Communities.
Easy, then, to talk about the need and desirability of attending conferences, hosting conferences, asking questions, meeting folk, writing to them and such. Blogging, of course, featured prominently in my remarks, and I talked about the generosity of Jeffrey Cohen in encouraging his blog to become such an excellent exercise in collaborative work and community-building.
I talked a bit about how things had changed since an eminent US medievalist visiting Sydney, many years ago, said to me, "you've got to get on the map." She meant it kindly, I'm sure, but it was pretty devastating to think how far off the map I might be, not just as a very junior scholar, but as an Australian. These days, I am more likely to hear and use the phrase "being part of the conversation", and this is something that blogging makes so much easier.
I also talked about the difference between networking as a way of treating people instrumentally and competitively, and networking as community-building. I have very little time for the practice of brown-nosing academic celebrities (or star-f———ing, as we call it in Australia) or gratuitously attacking scholars of a different generation just for being of a different generation. But I am all in favour of graduate students and early career researchers building bridges with each other (rather than competing, all the time, for every little bit of symbolic capital the academy has to distribute), and making connections with other scholars in their field in different countries.
The ARC Network for Early European Research maintains the Confluence website, where you can look up the profiles of over 300 medieval and early modern scholars, and post comments on their sites. It is a lovely example of an online structure that democratically enables networking between postgraduates, early career and established researchers, and it is here. Hmm; perhaps you have to register with the Network to be able to comment? not sure about that.
The wonderful Angela Woods, who would be my inspiration if I were just starting a PhD, tells me the recording of my talk will be available on line. I certainly won't be listening to it (who needs to hear their own garbled sentences and scattered paragraphs preserved for posterity?), but in the interests of general community-building, here's a link to the SGS Colloquia page, where a link to the talk will shortly appear.
But here's a question: is it true, as I was suggesting today, that most folks of eminence (whether academics, writers, or famous people in your own sphere of cheese-making or frog-watching) don't mind being approached by folks who are just starting out in the field? What's been your experience? And... is the star/celebrity analogy a bit too far-fetched for the academic sphere? Aren't we just fooling ourselves??
And... I've just realised I've set up the label "univerisites". That's rather a nice typo, I think.
Easy, then, to talk about the need and desirability of attending conferences, hosting conferences, asking questions, meeting folk, writing to them and such. Blogging, of course, featured prominently in my remarks, and I talked about the generosity of Jeffrey Cohen in encouraging his blog to become such an excellent exercise in collaborative work and community-building.
I talked a bit about how things had changed since an eminent US medievalist visiting Sydney, many years ago, said to me, "you've got to get on the map." She meant it kindly, I'm sure, but it was pretty devastating to think how far off the map I might be, not just as a very junior scholar, but as an Australian. These days, I am more likely to hear and use the phrase "being part of the conversation", and this is something that blogging makes so much easier.
I also talked about the difference between networking as a way of treating people instrumentally and competitively, and networking as community-building. I have very little time for the practice of brown-nosing academic celebrities (or star-f———ing, as we call it in Australia) or gratuitously attacking scholars of a different generation just for being of a different generation. But I am all in favour of graduate students and early career researchers building bridges with each other (rather than competing, all the time, for every little bit of symbolic capital the academy has to distribute), and making connections with other scholars in their field in different countries.
The ARC Network for Early European Research maintains the Confluence website, where you can look up the profiles of over 300 medieval and early modern scholars, and post comments on their sites. It is a lovely example of an online structure that democratically enables networking between postgraduates, early career and established researchers, and it is here. Hmm; perhaps you have to register with the Network to be able to comment? not sure about that.
The wonderful Angela Woods, who would be my inspiration if I were just starting a PhD, tells me the recording of my talk will be available on line. I certainly won't be listening to it (who needs to hear their own garbled sentences and scattered paragraphs preserved for posterity?), but in the interests of general community-building, here's a link to the SGS Colloquia page, where a link to the talk will shortly appear.
But here's a question: is it true, as I was suggesting today, that most folks of eminence (whether academics, writers, or famous people in your own sphere of cheese-making or frog-watching) don't mind being approached by folks who are just starting out in the field? What's been your experience? And... is the star/celebrity analogy a bit too far-fetched for the academic sphere? Aren't we just fooling ourselves??
And... I've just realised I've set up the label "univerisites". That's rather a nice typo, I think.
Thursday, August 16, 2007
Thinking bloggers meme
Hey, I got tagged! Thanks, Meli, for my
It's taken me a while to get around to responding, but I am now doing so on my NEW COMPUTER! I'm sure there are faster ways of going through the university system to purchase a laptop, but at any rate, I now have this pristine, pearly white object sitting on my desk, full of promise like a big oyster shell, just waiting to channel my books and essays into life. I haven't connected it up to the big screen and the mouse and keyboard yet, since I thought I would trial out its clicky little keyboard first. I find I haven't loaded up my files yet, either. I'm making all kind of resolutions about managing files, emails and back-ups better, and am just going to wait till I'm confident I can do this properly.
But what blogs make me think?
First up, Pavlov's Cat, though I think I've actually seen her tagged by this meme before, so she doesn't have to respond. [Actually, no one has to: I think in the end a meme looks a bit like chain mail: I'm probably not following all the meme rules, and .... I don't care.] The Cat is brave and tough, and has the capacity to push me into uncomfortable territory. We have so much in common, but she can still often surprise and shock me.
Liz Conor Liz's blog is rather formal, for a blog, in that all the entries are like feature essays or articles. I love her take on aboriginal and feminist issues; and on bringing up children, especially on bringing up girls. When I was young, I always imagined a child of mine would be a girl, and was completely — and pleasantly — surprised to find myself the mother of a boy. Though perhaps I am now conflating Liz the blogger with Liz my friend. Still, the blog is great, too!
In the Middle This blog makes me think too hard! It's a marvellous group blog co-ordinated by a leading scholar in my field. Sometimes the discussions test the limits of blogspeak in that they are so detailed and rich they can't be read as quickly as other blogs, but you know that you can always go back to it. It's like overhearing a serious conversation at a conference that you're too shy to join in, and having the luxury of replaying it again later.
And a collective thinking bloggers award to Ancrene Wiseass, Quod She, and Sorrow at Sills Bend. These are three early career women academics whose energy, inspirations and struggles remind me how hard it is to establish an academic career, but also just what a wonderful job teaching literature is.
And the blogger I think about most often? As the Tumor Turns because as much as I tell myself I know I'm conscious of my relative prosperity and the excellence of the health care I receive for breast cancer, this blog makes me think — angrily — about the dreadful inequities of health care and the shocking distribution of resources in our two countries. And that's not to mention the Third World.
Well, these are the blogs I would tag if I were to pass on the meme as the instructions Meli links us to suggest I should. Dreadfully unpublically spirited of me, I know, not to pass it on, by actually tagging these other bloggers. One of the chief motivations from the original blog post was to see how far the meme would travel. And... I think I'm just too boringly old to want to play by those rules. So I'm not going to pass on the meme, though I thank Meli warmly for tagging me, and giving me a reason to think about these terrific blogs. I know a blog meme isn't really like chain mail, but even so, sometimes it's ok not to play by the rules.
It's taken me a while to get around to responding, but I am now doing so on my NEW COMPUTER! I'm sure there are faster ways of going through the university system to purchase a laptop, but at any rate, I now have this pristine, pearly white object sitting on my desk, full of promise like a big oyster shell, just waiting to channel my books and essays into life. I haven't connected it up to the big screen and the mouse and keyboard yet, since I thought I would trial out its clicky little keyboard first. I find I haven't loaded up my files yet, either. I'm making all kind of resolutions about managing files, emails and back-ups better, and am just going to wait till I'm confident I can do this properly.
But what blogs make me think?
First up, Pavlov's Cat, though I think I've actually seen her tagged by this meme before, so she doesn't have to respond. [Actually, no one has to: I think in the end a meme looks a bit like chain mail: I'm probably not following all the meme rules, and .... I don't care.] The Cat is brave and tough, and has the capacity to push me into uncomfortable territory. We have so much in common, but she can still often surprise and shock me.
Liz Conor Liz's blog is rather formal, for a blog, in that all the entries are like feature essays or articles. I love her take on aboriginal and feminist issues; and on bringing up children, especially on bringing up girls. When I was young, I always imagined a child of mine would be a girl, and was completely — and pleasantly — surprised to find myself the mother of a boy. Though perhaps I am now conflating Liz the blogger with Liz my friend. Still, the blog is great, too!
In the Middle This blog makes me think too hard! It's a marvellous group blog co-ordinated by a leading scholar in my field. Sometimes the discussions test the limits of blogspeak in that they are so detailed and rich they can't be read as quickly as other blogs, but you know that you can always go back to it. It's like overhearing a serious conversation at a conference that you're too shy to join in, and having the luxury of replaying it again later.
And a collective thinking bloggers award to Ancrene Wiseass, Quod She, and Sorrow at Sills Bend. These are three early career women academics whose energy, inspirations and struggles remind me how hard it is to establish an academic career, but also just what a wonderful job teaching literature is.
And the blogger I think about most often? As the Tumor Turns because as much as I tell myself I know I'm conscious of my relative prosperity and the excellence of the health care I receive for breast cancer, this blog makes me think — angrily — about the dreadful inequities of health care and the shocking distribution of resources in our two countries. And that's not to mention the Third World.
Well, these are the blogs I would tag if I were to pass on the meme as the instructions Meli links us to suggest I should. Dreadfully unpublically spirited of me, I know, not to pass it on, by actually tagging these other bloggers. One of the chief motivations from the original blog post was to see how far the meme would travel. And... I think I'm just too boringly old to want to play by those rules. So I'm not going to pass on the meme, though I thank Meli warmly for tagging me, and giving me a reason to think about these terrific blogs. I know a blog meme isn't really like chain mail, but even so, sometimes it's ok not to play by the rules.
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