Little penguin houses

The Penguin colony in Penneshaw live in little houses that have been
built for them. At night the baby penguins come out and stand on the
doorstep waiting to be fed. The parents all come out of the sea at
once and waddle up this miniature penguin highway. When the get tired
if waddling up the hill they all just stand there in a mob of tired
penguins. Meanwhile the baby ones stand outside the houses with their
mouths hanging open.

It never rains but it pours

It's raining now, which is a relief after the awful week of early February weather in late November. I will be doing my bit to contribute airplane emissions over the next three weeks - on Monday I'm going to Queensland to teach the Jane Austen summer school again. It's on Mansfield Park. I haven't had a lot of time to plan it - in theory I was going to finish my marking by last Monday, but I actually did the last piece at 3.30 on Friday - and I feel less prepared than I'd like. Just got to keep reminding myself that last year I found out that what the people wanted was just to read out bits and discuss them. And to look at pictures, of which I've collected a couple of hundred. Here's some. Let's see if I can think of (and quote) captions without checking them in the text:


Dr Grant "was a short neck'd, apoplectic sort of fellow, and plied with good things would soon pop off"



"unluckily that iron gate, that ha-ha, gives me a feeling of restraint and hardship" (this is the gate to the kitchen garden at Chawton manor)



"a woman can never be too fine while she is all in white"


It'll be fine, I'm sure. One day I will get entirely over this thing of feeling stressed before the doing of tasks that are totally within my capabilities.

I'm going to tell them on the first day that by the end we have to solve the Fanny Price issue once and for all.

I'm coming back on Saturday, spending a week at work finishing three essays and writing a conference paper, then on the following Sunday it's off to Kangaroo Island for the actual conference. Dorian is coming with me to that although I don't think he's going to any conference sessions, just walking around on beaches and that type of thing. After coming back from that I've got until 21 December to get everything ready for teaching next year - and then -


no work until next year.

beautiful words.

let the little blog live

(update - I only just realised the image below wasn't displaying. It's fixed now.)

Alright. Only eight days later. (Stephanie in comments was right - I didforget about marking the essays, all sixty x 3500 of them, plus the 3 x 12,000 ones. I did not however forget about the two unfinished articles, the one unbegun conference paper, or the four-day summer school I'm conducting the week after next.) I'm a bit rusty at this and I can see it's going to take me a while to warm up again. In the interests of doing so perhaps some random dot point commemoration of what happened during the extended lost weekend is in order:

* I did a better job than I knew picking the reading list for the Women Writing subject, which turned out to be an absolute joy to do, the few really hair-raising moments aside, and even though marking essays isn't fun, ever, it's been so good to see person after person writing wonderful things. An essay I marked last night finished with, among other things, the observation that the Doris Lessing novel we read was a work of 'extreme beauty' - and the writer wasn't just throwing that in there, she'd earned the right to that observation by the painstaking and patient reading she'd worked her way through. However, I am very glad that teaching is done for three months.

* The cats are well.

* Dorian bought a double bass and he plays it all the time.

* I gave a conference paper about the Jane Austen dressing up and dancing thing and as a result of the paper I am now going to write a book about it. There is a commission from a very good editor and publisher. I am incredibly overexcited about this work. I'm also happy because it means I'm a bit more likely to eventually get some kind of ongoing job. It also means research trips to Jane Austen beanos in various places: I'm thinking Canberra again and Bath again next year, and then, if I can manage it, California and Florence the year after. Sounds dreadful doesn't it. Also, inevitably, this will mean a great many more frocks about which I will of course keep you far too well informed at every possible opportunity.

* Our apple trees have got little apples on them, which is weird. Last week I ate the first piece of edible fruit from our garden - a mandarine. Verdict: not quite ready. But promising.

* I am considering throwing a Christmas party in my 2m x 3.5m office along the lines of the housewarming Jemaine in Flight of the Conchords had when he moved into a storage cupboard.

* This was the scene at a huge rockabilly dance we went to a few weeks ago. I didn't mind.

Get Rea-dy!!!!

I'm coming back to blog tomorrow, or possibly the next day.

In the meantime here's some music.



I can't believe I lived 37 years in this world before finding out that there is a song called 'get your cat clothes on'.

What's happening.

Here's the thing. I'm in the middle of a very difficult semester. The teaching workload is very high, the subject matter in my Women Writing course is proving to be emotionally exhausting for me and for my students, there's a lot riding on what research I can squeeze into sausage casings during the next few months, so I've committed myself to producing lots, and the university has just thrown some fairly amazing obstacles in the path of anybody teaching certain categories of subjects next year which requires a lot of thinking and planning for there to be any chance of dealing with them successfully. I don't mind telling you that my ability to deal with it all in a calm and reasonably psychologically healthy manner is being seriously tested. Physically it sucks, too - just now I've got this disgusting twitch in my right eyelid, and writing 8-12 thousand words a week is a pretty sure recipe for tendonitis.

One catch with all of this, the part that's making it harder than it probably needs to be, is that it's put my mind into a state that feels a bit like how bipolar disorder sounds in the descriptions of it that I've read. I can't turn it off when I've met my deadlines, and so I'm amassing a growing pile of scribbled notes for future critical writing which in each case I'm horribly excited by the thought of but I don't know when I will get an opportunity to return to any of them. Certainly not within the next six months. Well, work is very demanding in both bad and good ways at the moment and it's hard to write about it or about anything else. With the small pieces of time off that I do take (and which I can only have if I let something else slide) I don't want to be thinking about how to put experience into words (to quote DW Harding) - I want to be gardening, or sewing, or cooking, or communing with a cat, or doing thing siwht friends, or dancing (!! yes Dorian and I have taken up social dancing! inspired by various things including the aftermath of the Canberra trip, Dorian's jazz adventures, and all those yearsof reading Dogpossum blogging about lindy hop) - basically doing something that's not all in the head, in the head, in the head.

So anyway I thought I should accept and say that much as I would love to be putting these experiences into the record of my life that is this blog, I'm basically on blog-writing-in-any-meaningful-sense hiatus, at least until the end of semester.

That said, I did enjoy posting pictures from Europe and I will continue to do post pictures, although pictures of La Trobe tutorial rooms don't have quite the glamour of pictures of gondoliers drifting by the Rialto. That was another thing (that trip) which was just too full for me to be able to write it down, especially in the little bits and pieces of time I had available. Suffice it to say that it gave me plenty to think about, and in between scratching up lectures and what have you, I'm continuing to do just that....(think).

intimate publics

Though it really doesn't fit with my research agenda for the next year and a half (which is how far I can plan ahead, at the moment) I keep reading and mentally rereading this call for papers for a conference next year on life writing and intimate publics. It's the sort of meeting I'd like to take part in for personal reasons - to do some critical thinking and discussing about what this blogging thing is, does, means - as much as professional ones. If I was to try to go I'd be dabbling but that's all right.

But I'd like to try to send in a panel proposal, and to do it with 'friends', which is why i'm posting the CFP here. If anyone who reads this blog is interested in tossing a few ideas around, drop me a line. (Need to do it soon lol!)



Call for Papers
The 7th Biennial International Auto/Biography Association Conference University of Sussex
28 June-2 July 2010
Conference Topic: Life Writing and Intimate Publics

The Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research and the International Auto/Biography Association invite scholars and life writers to attend the 7th IABA conference, at the University of Sussex, Brighton, England.

Keynote speakers include Nancy K. Miller, Sidonie Smith, Jenny Diski, Liz Stanley, Alistair Thomson, Dorothy Sheridan, Nadje Al-Ali and Alessandro Portelli.

Late modernity has spot-lit intimate relations. Families, feelings and love lives have been opened to public politics through pressures of globalisation, digitisation, the mass media and social movements such as feminism. At the same time, traditional citizenships of public rights and responsibilities find new definition through trauma, consumption, identity and care. As boundaries between 'public' and 'private' multiply, new constituencies of belonging and claim are convened, from Fathers for Justice to flood survivors to Facebook. This conference begins from Lauren Berlant's term 'intimate public' to explore these new constituencies in relation to life writing and life storying across media, discipline and profession.

Life writing and life story construct intimate publics in autobiographies, biographies, diaries, oral histories, blogs, reality television, photography, letters, life histories, documentaries, graphic memoirs, quilts, exhibitions, mobile phone texts. They have also been crucial agents in constructing counter-publics. We welcome papers dealing with the following questions, and others which may be related to the conference

theme:
" How do life writings construct citizenship, civic relations and/or counter-publics? How is life history used in non-governmental public actions and activisms? And how have governmental organisations used life history and life writing?

" What intimacies are facilitated by life writings and life stories?

" How does life writing relate to life story, life history and oral history?

" How has life writing and life story participated in care contexts such as parenting, social work, health, education? What discourses of risk, claim, vulnerability, rights and responsibilities are revealed in life writings and their uses?

" What engagements do/should life writing and life history have with therapeutic cultures?

" How does the economy of life story production and consumption relate to the construction of intimate publics and who are its consumers and producers?

" In what ways can we compare ethical codes for life writing, oral history and life history? How do these manage the nature of intimate publics?

" How do life writing and life history contribute to public and private archives and to public history/heritage?

" How does life writing construct or obstruct cross-cultural or cross-linguistic relationships?

" As we understand more about the work of life writing, how is life writing making us work?

" What relationships persist between life writing as aesthetic and as social act?

Hello!

I did indeed get home to Australia safely, in case you were wondering. And the very next day after I got home (which involved four flights with about 14 hours of assorted transit stops wedged in between, so I didn't smell too delightful) I went straight back to work and I've been rather hard at it ever since. But tonight i'm having a lovely evening off - just how lovely may be imagined from the fact that I've just cracked the seal on the fourth Honey Murcott in a row, releasing as I did that stingingly rich puff of aromatic mandarine oil. I've got a cup of tea as well.

Now I am going to put the blog down and read a book or something, but tomorrow I will blog once more, and properly, about something interesting.

Talkative Ginger cat, Canareggio, Venice

Last cat till home. Leaving for the airport now. Will get home on
Sunday.

Our feet in Venice

Taken at about three pm, just before they began to ache and throb in
earnest.

Renaissance cat on lead (to stop it falling in water), Accademica, Venice