Naughty chickens

Something there is about a chicken that wants to climb high into a tree at dusk. That's all well and good;  but the danger for chickens is early morning, when the foxes come out for breakfast.

Tonight at dusk I left the party, changed my shoes and drove up to Ceres. By the time I got there it was pretty much pitch black, and the chickens were lined up quietly on their perches in their shed. I counted them, but came up two short, and I remembered that this morning I had found two black ones outside that had eluded capture the night before (the group is on a fortnightly roster). Determinedly, I went outside with my little torch and started scouring the runs, to no avail. Finally I saw two black chickens high up in the quince tree. By climbing a couple of feet into the tree, I could just about reach them with the end of the rake, but no amount of poking or prodding (in the dark, clutching my little torch, trying to keep my balance, trying not to poke my eyes out on the tree, trying not to wreck my clothes, trying not to hurt the chickens) would budge them. I then tried giving the branch a vigorous shake, but from underneath I could just see their little feet curling tightly around the branch. Finally — it's pretty much pitch black, remember — I had to climb up over bags of mulch, onto the wooden supports of the flimsy wire fence between the two runs. Standing five feet off the ground, propping myself against a quince tree in the dark, I had to reach into the tree and grab the two chickens, one at a time, then precariously lower myself down so I could drop them onto the ground. And then I had to jump down off the fence and run around to the gate into the other run so I could chase them inside before they took it into their heads to fly up into the tree again.

All this time I had an image of how funny it all was — except that I wasn't so much laughing as swearing. The funniest thing though was when I finally picked them up to put them inside, they both set up such a dreadful complaining squark. They really didn't want to go inside; they really didn't see why they couldn't stay up in the tree; they'd been all right the night before, so what was my problem? And then when I put them inside, all the other hens woke up and squarked about being disturbed. Not sure I'm spelling 'squarked' correctly: but I kind of like the look of its awkward q and k there.

I was very glad to get back to the party, I can tell you. Our boys had played beautifully for Peter's guests: Joel set the keyboard to the marimbah sound effect, and it blended perfectly with electric bass and drums. After most of the guests had gone, the band and its parents dined on a perfect pea and ham soup and orange and almond cake, and then the boys played again. As parents, we are simply in awe of our talented children. We are of a generation that learned to play music, but learned to play set pieces from scores. These kids experiment and improvise, and take the beat from each other, and watch each other to produce perfect, irregular rhythms together. Now that Joel's wrist is out of plaster and is gradually  becoming more mobile, the drummer, naturally, has a thumb in plaster; and was holding the brush between the second and third finger of his hand.  The poor boy had a blister developing on the inside of one finger from this unaccustomed use. But they weren't going to stop the music...

Cockatoos, creek, work

What with going to the gym these days, and gadding about in Europe, and then being sick, and finishing up a big semester, I've not spent much time along the Merri Creek the last few months. So for how long have there been black cockatoos there? I went for a walk on Friday afternoon, and at first thought there was a murder of crows in the tree on the opposite bank, but then I saw a flash of yellow. (And as I realise, the Australian ravens tend to go about in pairs, as I know from seeing them perching on the top of the huge Norfolk pine two houses down.)  Anyway, I think they were yellow-tailed black cockatoos. There were about a dozen of them, moving from tree to tree, hanging upside down and generally ... creating (scroll down this page and click to hear their call). And I've just seen a few more this morning when I rode up to let the chickens out at Ceres.

This creek is full of surprises. I've been living on its banks for sixteen years, as its vegetation has been improved and refined, and de-Europeanised. I hated it when they cut down the willow trees (J used to sing at them in his pram when we would walk along), but since then I've probably seen more birds; and apparently the willows were dreadful for erosion of the banks.

Normally P does the fortnightly morning run to Ceres, but once I'd got out of bed it was pleasant enough riding along the creek. And now I'm back at my desk, it's good to think of those cockatoos busily working their way through the trees along the water.

Now that teaching is over, and now that I have the all-clear from my editor to do the final revisions of my book (and write the last chapter) more or less as I see fit, I'm preparing to fire up the cylinders for a final onslaught. I have to hold all the ideas in my head at the same time, to ensure the balance and sequencing of the argument is right. I had a quick read through the other day. Having a few months' break from it was good (try telling that to the ARC!), and overall it's not looking too bad. Let's see how much I can get done before I leave for Siena in July.

Today will be a pleasant clean-up day: washing, ironing, running Joel to band rehearsal, sweeping up piles of bright yellow leaves from the garden, catching up on email, then the afternoon at a friend's retrospective art exhibition where J, the drummer (the artist's son) and the bassist will play, then a dusk trip up to Ceres to put the chickens away. Then tomorrow? Chapter Seven:

Two good talks

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

School of Culture and Communication Seminar

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

David McInnis

(University of Melbourne, English)

“Lost Plays, 1580-1642”

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

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

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

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

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

Location
Meeting Room
Balwyn Library
336 Whitehorse Rd
Balwyn

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

Two good stories

Home on Tuesday morning after fabulous conference in Berlin. The whole trip was rushed, but went smoothly enough, even down to the last minute escape from Heathrow on Sunday night before the airport was closed for six hours due to the volcanic ash cloud — they practically frogmarched us on to the plane to ensure an early push-back.

I'll blog the conference (and the surprise arrival of three Australians), and perhaps my paper, another time. I'm just waking up, late Friday afternoon, from two days asleep in bed with a horror cold (the price of international travel, perhaps). Am I well enough for Italian class tomorrow? Fingers crossed.

But it was a trip marred by my own forgetfulness. I left my ipod in the plane on the way to London (knowing that P had bought me a fancy i-pod dock with fabulous speakers that was waiting for me at home); I left my glasses at my sister's place when I went to stay in Bloomsbury for a night; I left my contact lens solution there when I went to Berlin (and had to beg some solution from another delegate as we were out in the suburbs on a public holiday...); and worst of all, when I got home, I couldn't find the little zip-up purse with a selection of favourite jewellery I'd taken with me. I know it's not a very practical vanity, to travel with precious items like this, but they are mostly gifts from P, as well as lovely in themselves, and I do enjoy very much having a small selection of coloured stones and shiny metals when I'm travelling and homesick. There's something so personal about jewellery: a connection to home, somehow. Anyway, an hour after I'd declared the loss at home, I went and checked again through every compartment of my travel bag, and there it was, with everything safe and sound. What a great relief.

Another great relief has come in the form of an email from my editor. We had had a bit of toing and froing about the two reports on the six chapters I'd sent. Both reports were generally favourable but both made lots of suggestions about doing things differently; but the Board has now agreed unanimously to contract the book; and they have said specifically that I should be given free rein to write the book as I choose. One of the board members said the only problem was the readers' reports; and that my ms. was elegant, independent, readable and insightful. Now that's more like it! I will take some of the recommendations and suggestions seriously, of course, but it's a wonderful feeling to know that the board as a whole likes the way I put the book together.

Semester ends in a week's time; I'll see how much I can do before I leave for Siena in July. I'm currently making some very sensible resolutions about trying to travel more lightly — and more efficiently.

The Day Before Leaving

... is always pretty bad. I realise I haven't written the essay questions for my students; my paper is too long and has no conclusion; I can't decide what combination of shoes and coats to pack for London and Berlin; suddenly there's an enormous pile of laundry to do; and there's no bread or milk in the house. I'm doing it all on my own, too, as P and J have gone off to Sri Lanka for a father-son-bonding-research-trip. Nor have I started my homework — i miei compiti — for tomorrow's Italian class, but I'm determined to go, as I'll miss the following one as well. Tomorrow, then, I'll wake up with a brilliant conclusion to my paper; then change the sheets and clean the house for the family members who will be here to minister to the cat and the fish (lucky we didn't go with the long-necked turtles and tree frogs that captured our hearts on the last visit to the aquarium) while we're away. I'll then nip into class, pick up my watch with its new battery, ride home, then call the taxi for the airport. But what will I read on the plane? Malory, Tennyson and Chaucer for the week's classes when I return. Or perhaps a novel...

I did the essay questions, but still have some reports to read and write while I'm away. Grr.

Right now I'm going to pack. Frankly, I'd be glad to hear the volcano has stopped travel again. But once I get going, I'll be okay, I suppose.

In which I play a little jazz

When I play the piano, which is not all that often these days, I need a score, a good light, and the right glasses. I dig out The Children's Bach, or more ambitiously, the English Suites and plod through material that's much too difficult for me, but loving the abstract form of a fugue, or Bach's Glass- and Nyman-like progressions through chords, patterns, keys and harmonies I can barely name.

Sometimes I've picked up J's introductory blues and jazz books, but my training doesn't really allow me to swing rhythms with any confidence at all. Something about the new piano I still find daunting, too, I think.

But tonight J asked a favour. Still with his left arm in its heavy cast, he had written out a little four-bar melody in 6/8. Could I play it, so he could test out whether the chord progression he had devised would work?  I am sorry to say it took me a long time as he patiently took me through what will become the saxophone part till I could play it in a loop while he tried out his chords, playing what I would have thought of as the left-hand part with his right hand. And very sweet it sounded, too. By about the fiftieth time round my little loop J was off in full flight, and I had just added one little grace note, one time, and was starting to see how, yes indeed, it might be possible to improvise while playing, when he had thanked me and was off to start scoring the parts.

But I did get to play jazz, just a little.

Speaking faces

To Troilus right wonder wel with alle
Gan for to like hire meuynge and hire chere,
Which somdel deignous was, for she let falle
Hire look a lite a-side in swich manere
Ascaunces, "what, may I nat stonden here?"
And after that hir lokynge gan she lighte,
That neuere thoughte hym seen so good a syghte.

I am currently writing a paper for a very cool-sounding conference in Berlin in a couple of weeks. It's called "Performing the Poetics of Passion – Chaucer’s “Troilus & Criseyde” and Shakespeare’s “Troilus & Cressida” (just look at the list of papers below and see what an incredible treat is in store for me).

I'm worrying away at this stanza from book I, trying to think about the performative elements of Criseyde's expression, which she "let falle" ... "a lite a-side", as if to say "what, can't I stand here?" I love the defensivess of this facial expression. Boccaccio's is more direct, "E non ci si può stare" (None can stand here). His Criseida holds out her mantle to make space for herself: Chaucer's has only to cast a downward glance and she finds room for herself.  Chaucer's Criseyde's sideways look is followed by the lightening of her glance, as if she is relieved somehow to have silently spoken her anxiety on what may be her first public appearance after being welcomed by Hector.

According to OED and MED, this Ascaunces, "as if to say", while obscure in origin, is quite separate from modern "askance" (obliquely, or with disapprobation). However, influenced by the "let falle hire look a lite a-side", I find it hard not to see both senses in Chaucer's use here.

My question to all you rhetoric buffs out there is whether there is a name for this figure by which Chaucer and Boccaccio describe their heroines' faces as speaking. I guess it's a form of prosopopeia or enargia, but even this wonderful website, Silva Rhetoricae doesn't give any specific examples.

And what other medieval examples are there? There's the Book of the Duchess, of course ("By God, my wratthe is all foryive"), and even Troilus's appeal, equally ascaunces, to the heavens, "loo, is this naught wisely spoken?"

I must say it is lovely to be working so closely on a little bit of text. It's particularly lovely to think of other ways of reading faces than through physical features, which some of us find excruciatingly difficult. We have just started a five-week sequence on the Troilus in my honours class today, and I took them through some of the problems here. 

Here's the list of papers: what an amazing couple of days it will be:

Thursday, May 13
15.30 – 16.30 Welcome Coffee and Registration
16.30        Welcome Address
17.00    Paul Strohm ‘As for to looke upon an old romaunce’: Looking and Overlooking in Chaucer’s and Shakespeare’s Troy
18.00        Conference Dinner

Friday, May 14
9.30 – 11.00    Wolfram Keller Passionate Authorial Performances: From Chaucer’s Criseyde to    Shakespeare’s Cressida
                         Andreas Mahler Potent Raisings: Performing Passion in Chaucer and Shakespeare
11.00 – 11.30    Coffee Break
11.30 – 13.00    David Wallace, Changing Emotions in Troilus: the Crucial Year
                          Kathrin Bethke, Value Feelings: The Economy and Axiology of the Passions in Troilus and Cressida
13.00 – 14.30    Lunch
14.30 – 16.00     Robert Meyer-Lee Criseyde’s Precursor: Dido, Emotion and the Literary in the House of Fame
                          Hester Lees-Jeffries ‘What’s Hecuba to him?’ Absent Women and the Space of Lamentation in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida

Saturday, May 15
9.30 – 11.00    James Simpson ‘The formless ruin of oblivion’: Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida and Literary Defacement
                         Stephanie Trigg Public and Private Emotion in Chaucer’s Troilus and Criseyde
11.00 – 11.30    Coffee Break
11.30 – 13.00 Kai Wiegandt ‘Expectation whirls me round’: Hope, Fear and Time in Troilus and Cressida
                       Richard Wilson ‘Like an Olympian wrestling’: The Pause in Troilus and Cressida
13.00 – 14.30    Lunch
14.30 – 15.15    Ute Berns Love and Desire Delineating Selves in Shakespeare’s Troilus and Cressida
15.15 – 16.00    John Drakakis ‘No matter from the heart’: Passion, Value and Contingency in Shakespeare's Troilus and Cressida and Chaucer's Troilus and Criseyde

In which I make myself cry

Through the course of the various re-structures of our syllabus and curriculum reforms we've undergone over the last few years, I struggled to find the right balance of medieval literature and medievalism in the one subject I offer in second and third year. I'm glad to say I think I might have got the balance just about right. The subject is called Romancing the Medieval, and we have 75 students reading Chaucer and Malory in Middle English, Sir Gawain and Margery Kempe in modern translation, amongst a few other things, while I gave a lecture last week on medievalist poetic tradition (OE translations by Tennyson, and Heaney; and thanks to Chris Jones who is expert in this stuff, a sonnet by Borges on Old English; and Chaucerian extracts from Lydgate, Spenser and Dryden, as well as Ted Hughes' poem about Sylvia Plath declaiming Chaucer to the cows, etc.). We will move, soon, to Tennyson's Lady of Shalott and some of the Idylls, The Lord of the Rings, and a week on medieval fairy tales.

But today it was the Prioress's Tale. We are moving into the second half of the course, and now that they have had a pretty solid introduction to medieval literature, I wanted to start thinking about scholarly medievalism. I got them to read Michael Calebrese's essay (the one Eileen had a bunch of us respond to for one of BABEL's sessions at Kalamazoo last year) for its uncompromising scrutiny of the easy absolutist ethics the Prioress seems to encourage amongst readers.

Anyhoo, in thinking about this tale of blood libel against the Jews, who are said to have murdered the little Christian boy so devoutly singing his Marian hymn, I also told the story of St Hugh of Lincoln, and remembered my visit to Lincoln Cathedral, where next to the remains of his shrine, the cathedral has framed this notice and prayer:

Trumped up stories of "ritual murders" of Christian boys by Jewish communities were common throughout Europe during the Middle Ages and even much later.  These fictions cost many innocent Jews their lives. Lincoln had its own legend, and the alleged victim was buried in the Cathedral in the year 1255.

Such stories do not redound to the credit of Christendom, and so we pray:

Lord, forgive what we have been,

amend what we are,

and direct what we shall be.

Perhaps it's because I'm overtired, and frankly, a little up and down in spirits at the moment, I couldn't read this prayer to the class with choking up a little. It's the sheer simplicity of the acknowledgement of wrong that gets me. Yet this often seems such a hard thing for the church to say...

But of course, in the context of Calabrese's critique of emotional absolutism, and my discussion in the lecture of affective piety, I don't really trust my emotional response here. Was it too easy?

In thinking about the Prioress, though, I kept returning to the description of her in the General Prologue, where we are told she "peyned hire to countrefete chere/ Of court, and to been estatlich of manere." So here's my question to the Chaucerians amongst you: has anyone ever suggested that the Prioress's sentimentalism is part of this performance of courtly demeanour? Do we know anything about a self-conscious fashion for this kind of piety in the Ricardian court? Is there something blindingly obvious I'm missing here? Yes, I promise I will do my own research on this soon enough, but in the meantime, what do you reckon?

To break one wrist is unfortunate; to break two...

No, not J (though I have been hearing many stories about people breaking both wrists in bike accidents). J's going ok; and able to make surprisingly rich sounds on the piano with one hand. But the band was booked into a recording studio next Saturday to make an audition recording for a week-long jazz intensive — run by the Juilliard jazz school — at Trinity college in July. Unfortunately, the drummer is also a rugby player, and has strained a ligament in his left arm. P took a photo of the band after rehearsal on Saturday — now with two boys concealing their slings and bandages of outrageous fortune.

There is something about being adolescent and male and feeling invulnerable, on the bike or the rugby field, that's not all that compatible with having musical ambitions at the same time... They've deferred the studio booking for a few days, but they are losing percentage all the time, so I doubt this will be their best performance.

New suggested names for the band?

The Band Who Hurt Too Much (Melbourne ref: The Band Who Knew Too Much).

Any others?

Comment moderation begins.

It's not that I get a huge number of spam comments. But one of them today was of an obscene nature. And I don't have to take that, or have it sitting on my blog until I can get to it and delete it.

So from now on I'm moderating comments. I don't think there'll be much of a delay between your posting and my releasing it. And a little delay is better than your reading filth in this place.

That is all.