Sorrow at Sills Bend

little friends

2011-11-27T11:48:00.003+11:00

At least once a day I show Leonard my collection of animal salt-and-pepper shakers. He loves looking at them and seems to find them even more hilariously amusing than all the other things in the house that are funny. I call them the Little Friends. Look at the little friends, bubbie, look at those crazy little baby friends!

It's not clear to me whose friends they are, exactly. Are they his? Mine? Ours together? Each others'? Lenny loves his life but he hasn't really got any friends. I feel sad for him when I think about that. He'll get some when he's a bit older, though. I hope.

The friends are sitting on a shelf set into the fireplace stone surrounds about a metre off the floor. He used to just stare at them delightedly but lately he reaches out for them with the same urgent gesture that he reaches for everything that interests him; coffee cups, milk cartons, mobiles, lamps, and above all, iphones. But alas, Leonard's hands and these little porcelain figures can never ever meet. So I don't know why I keep showing him them. I guess it's probably going to end badly, like Hamlet.

back to Sills Bend...?

2011-10-09T12:06:00.003+11:00

Hello, it's been a while. Nearly six months, actually. Lenny is nearly six months old - most of it's been a blur for me, which to be honest is a good thing in a lot of ways. It hasn't been a walk in the park (although I've done my share of park-walking, like all new mothers).

I don't think it was entirely a matter of chance that I broke off writing about my life just at the point when I was going to have to write about having my stomach cut open and my life turned upside down and vigorously shaken. The cut has completely healed now but I still lie in bed almost every night and have a moment of complete horror at the thought of having that big hole in the middle of my body. It's only a moment, however, and who knows - maybe one intense but brief immersion each night just before falling asleep is not such an awful way of working through something that scares you.

It's never too late to mend.

Speaking of things it's never too late for, I have had a number of extremely kind and supportive emails, at different moments of crisis, from people I only know via the internet. I didn't manage to answer most of these, but believe me, they've helped a lot - both in terms of practical suggestions offered and as gestures of solidarity and recognition that other people have been through the hard moments, and survived them.

I also had an email not long ago from a person who's been a friend of this blog for years and who said that even though the blog now appeared to be over, it had been good to read. That was terrific to receive, so thank you for bothering to write and send it. I don't know whether the blog is finished or not. I suspect not? We'll see.

A few photos...

2011-05-19T19:22:00.004+10:00

I promise this blog isn't going to be consumed with baby baby baby forever after. Just bear with me for a little while though...

Head High and Mobile

2011-05-19T11:35:00.003+10:00

How Leonard was born is a story that begins two days before his birth date on the 30th of April. It was a Thursday and my last planned appointment with my obstetrician: I was 39 weeks and 4 days pregnant, and thus rapidly approaching the date when they do not let a diabetic pregnancy continue (because the placenta ages and ceases to do its job).

I was scheduled for induction on the Friday night, but the baby's head still hadn't moved down anywhere into my pelvis, which we'd been waiting anxiously for him to do for several weeks. A baby with a high and mobile head - not 'engaged' - can't be delivered by induction as there is a strong risk of the umbilical cord prolapsing. So my obstetrician sent me up the street for a pelvic x-ray to see what might be happening to keep him from engaging. What the x-ray showed her was that the bottom of my pelvis was was small and the baby might not fit through, so taking a risk on the placenta and waiting another week for engagement might not be worth it in the end - but it did produce this image - that arc in front of the spine is Leonard's skull:

So she left the decision to me and I decided a c-section would be safest, all things considered. The induction was cancelled and I was booked in for the following Friday, which was the earliest date the hospital could take me. But a plan was also formed, which I need to be a bit vague about the details of, for the birth to take place sooner, on the coming Saturday. So we went home with the knowledge and expectation that Leonard would be born on 30 April, though we didn't know exactly when.

The next day, Friday 29 April, I pottered around the house rearranging the baby's room and planting radish and snow pea seeds; I was eagerly looking forward to watching the Royal Wedding on TV that night to take my mind off the next day. And I did watch it, which turned out to be a good thing as you will learn later on. But it didn't really distract me as much as I'd hoped, and I didn't get a lot of sleep. The next morning we were on the road for the hospital before seven, cat fed and house spotlessly clean, all our bags packed and ready, I was feeling almost crazed with fear, nervousness and excitement, I asked Dorian if he felt nervous at all and he said he just felt excited. So that was good. The sun shone as we drove into the city through the early morning. I didn't know it at the time, but this was effectively the end of a glorious Autumn for me, as I would not leave the hospital building for five days and when I came out the season had changed to bitterly cold Winter.

We arrived at the delivery suite and I was hooked up to a foetal monitor, I had a bung put into my arm for a saline drip and for IV anti-nausea and pain medications. My blood was tested to ensure that if I needed a transfusion, there would be blood of the right type ready for use. My stomach was shaved - not very neatly, as I saw later - that part of my stomach hadn't been visible to me for months. I met and talked to the anethsetist and the obstetrician who would be assisting my own OB. I was put into a gown and cap and laid down on a trolley. After doing these things and waiting around for a couple of hours I was wheeled out and into the lift and taken up to the floor with the operating theatres, still feeling in a state of dazed wonder that this was all really happening.

I should say at this point that the next post will have illustrations, so just be prepared for a bit of gore.....

Leonard Elvis Jones

2011-05-09T08:22:00.004+10:00

Leonard E. Jones was born at 11.54 am on Saturday 30 April 2011.

Here he is coming home from the hospital. I'm afraid that in all the photos I have of him so far, he's either asleep or covered in gore. He's lovely to me in whatever condition, though.

Basil was pleased to see us. He's coping well with the changes.

My next post might also be a while coming; I'm going to write about his birth and will need to do it in small instalments.

Update

2011-04-28T09:47:00.000+10:00

Hello blog. I am afraid we used up all our Internet for the month several days ago ( I'm laboriously typing this on my phone) so I can't really blog until May which is poo; Mel's suggestion on the last post that we talk about the Sookie Stackhouse novels is a good one. I am now 39 werks and 2 days pregnant and haven't had the baby on my own so I will be going into hospital on Friday evening to start the induction process, clashing with the Royal Wedding, with actual action most likely to take place on Saturday morning. Last night in bed I was thinking it felt like the biggest run up to Chtistmas ever (if Santa beat you up first before handing over the most exciting present you could ever receive, I suppose.) Anyway if you kindly want to hear when I've had the baby I think Twitter will have the earliest intelligence. If you're not on there, theres a link to my twitter feed in the sidebar of the blog. Wish me luck.

the Miles Franklin syndrome

2011-04-21T09:40:00.002+10:00

Five of the last six novels I've read have been installments in the Southern Vampire Mysteries series. Since going on leave I've been indulging my readerly whims in a way I haven't had the luxury of doing for many years, and am both amused and a bit alarmed by what the results seem to say about what I opt for when left to my own devices. So the world of literary prizes, merit, representation and intense debate over these, of the kind that erupted a day or two ago on the announcement of the second woman-free Miles Frankin shortlist in three years, seems quite remote. Also, I haven't read any of the three shortlisted novels, nor actually any novel on the longlist of nine, which may actually be a more important omission given that the judges are on record as being very critical of the general quality of the other longlisted books. (If you think this general ignorance is a shameful admission from somebody who teaches and researches literature, you are entirely correct and you also aren't allowing for the effects of teaching about thirty different literary texts each semester. It used to freak me out, as an undergrad, that the tutors I had for Cinema Studies never seemed to go to the movies, instead watching La Règle du jeu over and over again. Now I know why.)

So I know basically nothing about the specific books involved and that makes it impossible to form an opinion about what's actually happened in this instance of what is, as Alison Croggon pointed out yesterday, an all-too-familiar pattern. (Don't read the comments on that piece, by the way.) And Kerryn Goldsworthy's comment on the ALR blog clearly and succinctly says all that needs to be said about the fundamental issue underlying the problem: it's a symptom of what the dominant culture holds to be valuable and what it regards as lesser.

No doubt they are the ‘best books’, but it goes deeper than that. The question is, as it always is when these issues come up, what the criteria are for literary value, and where those criteria come from. The answer is (and it’s the basis of all useful discussion about gender and literature) that they derive from the values of the dominant culture —which circumscribes what women, as well as men, can be, think, believe and say—and the dominant culture is still, well, a sausage fest.

I really mean it; that's all that needs to be said, and if it could be repeated as often as necessary, in this brief way, perhaps the message would eventually begin to sink in. But perhaps it wouldn't; after all, Virginia Woolf said the same thing eighty years ago:

But it is obvious that the values of women differ very often from the values which have been made by the other sex; naturally, this is so. Yet it is the masculine values that prevail. Speaking crudely, football and sport are ‘important’; the worship of fashion, the buying of clothes ‘trivial’. And these values are inevitably transferred from life to fiction. This is an important book, the critic assumes, because it deals with war. This is an insignificant book because it deals with the feelings of women in a drawing-room. A scene in a battle-field is more important than a scene in a shop — everywhere and much more subtly the difference of value persists.

What I do want to write about then is not the specifics of the MF, or even the issue of women's writing and literary value at large, but the very strong feelings of mingled dread and passion that inform & propel my teaching of writing by women, and which come out in full flight whenever this messy issue surfaces.

A couple of weeks before I went on leave it became clear that the subject I teach called Women Writing is under threat of being cancelled due to low enrolments this year. That is partly my fault for offering the subject on a yearly basis instead of biennially, but it's also a reflection of the fact that a subject with that name is perceived by many students as a niche or special interest course; male students don't take it, and a very intelligent woman student I encountered in another subject spoke for many others when she explained to me that it wasn't for her because she didn't really like literature that was 'all from one perspective or all about one thing.' I think Women Writing will escape the axe this year because it's being taught at a regional campus as well as at the metropolitan one, thus it will have to go ahead so the country students have an English subject, but if that wasn't the case I'd be very upset: that subject is the thing I'm proudest of, in my pretty unstellar academic career so far, and it's also the thing I do professionally that makes the most important contribution to people's lives. Why can be summed up by a remark a student made last year at the end of the semester, to the effect that this subject had occupied her thoughts more than anything else she'd ever studied, once she noticed that almost every day there was something in the news that related to something going on in one of the books we had been reading.

I inherited the concept of a subject devoted to women's writing; if I have it right, a subject of that name has been offered in my department continuously since 1987. (I think the first convenor was Lucy Frost.) It's an anomaly. It assumes that there is a discernible thing that can be called women's writing, that it's different from writing by men in significant and meaningful ways, and that it's worth studying - a set of assumptions viewed as naive at best by many, since the entire notion that the category 'women' exists in any meaningful way is not one that academics should now persist with. I don't feel, with so many books out there urgently needing to be read, we have the time to debate this in the subject. We take 'woman' at face value and look to see what the books themselves have to say about what that actually means.

There is a structural parallel with the perennial debate about the 'Australian life in any of its phases' criterion of the Miles Franklin; one side regards that as an unfixably problematic relic of the discredited belief that Australianness is an idea with content, and another side thinks we can tell well enough whether any given instance fits the description without needing to state in the abstract and in advance what does and doesn't qualify as Australian. There is a distinct tang of the 1950s about the terms Franklin specified; studying, talking about and thinking about women's writing is likewise an idea that is decades old now. I don't quite know why this is taken to mean they're outdated notions. We haven't gotten past them. Au contraire, they are ideas that are durable; yes, mainstream literary culture is (still? or increasingly?) a sausage fest, and put simply, the steady, camouflaged masculine bias momentarily revealed in incidents like the Miles Franklin shortlists just goes to show why we still need to ask what women's writing is and how it is to be valued. I am in the second, muddle-on-with-our-messy-terms camp on these parallel debates, and I think Australian writing (like women's writing), in the actual and as an idea, does continue to matter and should continue to be thought about in an organised way, despite the problems and conundrums it raises.

What I do have very strong doubts about is the continued value of doing this sort of thinking within the very narrow framework provided by literary prizes. Honestly, I don't think I have this opinion just because I would prefer it if all the people who wanted to think about such questions did it by enrolling in one of my subjects rather than through methods like reading their way through (say) the annual Orange Prize shortlist and deciding which novel they thought should win. Actually it's an argument of Virginia Woolf's again, this time from that bleak bleak book Three Guineas, which I think my way towards at times like this: the idea that the only viable response to self-reinforcing patriarchal value systems - whether ones that glorify war or glorify books about manly concerns - is to refuse to participate in them, which also means refusing to take them seriously.

It appears that we can ask them to do nothing; they must follow the old road to the old end; our own influence as outsiders can only be of the most indirect sort. If we are asked to teach, we can examine very carefully into the aim of such teaching, and refuse to teach any art or science that encourages war. Further, we can pour mild scorn upon chapels, upon degrees, and upon the value of examinations. We can intimate that a prize poem can still have merit in spite of the fact that it has won a prize; and maintain that a book may still be worth reading in spite of the fact that its author took a first class with honours in the English tripos. If we are asked to lecture we can refuse to bolster up the vain and vicious system of lecturing by refusing to lecture.* And, of course, if we are offered offices and honours for ourselves we can refuse them — how, indeed, in view of the facts, could we possibly do otherwise?

Woolf acknowledges this is a 'lame and depressing' strategy, and doesn't pretend that it comes without costs - followed literally, this advice would see women writers refusing to accept the money that goes with winning a major literary prize, and that is ridiculous. But I think the point is more that we all need to reconsider the type and quantity of attention we mete out to contests and to prizewinning books, and to be much more aware of the very shallow media and marketing events that famous literary prizes have degenerated into.

I have more to say about this, but that'll do for now.

*awesome.

The Rules

2011-04-06T10:04:00.002+10:00

I have now had a full nine months to brood upon how I would like to bring up my son (who will be liberated from his aquatic pod in two or three weeks, so I had better hurry up and finish washing the inside of the linen closet) and I've more or less settled upon a core set of principles. These are as follows:

FORBIDDEN

plastic toys, brightly coloured ones in particular
voting Liberal
tv in bed
going to church (at the first sign of teenage experimentation in this direction I will say "here is $500, have a party with your friends instead.")
joining any sport which doesn't allow girls to play in the same contests as boys
especially, going anywhere near the local football club

NOT FORBIDDEN, BUT NOT ENCOURAGED EITHER

eating meat
drinking Coke
getting a dog
working at McDonald's
finding anything remotely amusing about Charlie Sheen
doing after-school activities (music lessons etc) which require me to drive him to the place of the activities or do anything else organisational

REQUIRED

table manners, including the ability to recognise implements of cutlery and use them for the purposes for which they are designed
not writing or saying singular 'they' indiscriminately

I am quite confident he will master all of these within a few days of being born: on Monday we had lunch in Daylesford and the lady who brought our food said the baby will be a Taurean Rabbit, which I knew already but hadn't considered the implications of, and will therefore be very creative and intensely good-looking, which as you may guess I was pleased to hear, since I've been trying to imagine what he'll look like and I never get any further than picturing a sort of Photoshop Disaster mashup of Dorian and myself. This despite having 'seen' him very regularly via ultrasound - I have now had seven of these, I think - at the most recent one yesterday there wasn't a lot to see because he's all curled up in a ball now, but he doesn't appear to be so monstrously huge any more. The ultrasonographer said he's in the 65th centile round the gut now, which sounds a lot better than 95th last time, and gives me a bit of hope that I will be able to avoid a Caesarian, which would be nice as getting better from a big cut in the belly is no picnic. I know the measurements and estimates arrived at by the scans are unreliable as predictors but if this is the info my obstetrician will be working from then she might be happier about letting me try to push him out. I'll find out what she thinks on Friday.

I have thought so very much about what sort of birth might happen, and about how I'll feel about what does happen. It is a fraught subject. I think women are encouraged to set very difficult goals for themselves, in terms of planning what sort of birth they'll have, and when things don't go to plan it seems to make recovery a great deal harder psychologically. On the huge pregnancy and baby forums there are sub-forums devoted to debriefing from disappointing birth experiences.

I am sad to say I think this over-planning is mostly instigated by people with the very best intentions aimed at returning some agency to women who are routinely divested of their autonomy by the medical system. Clearly there is a lot of evidence that a great many more women could very well be allowed to get on with it than are currently doing so. The hospital I am going into has a 40% Caesarian birth rate - a product of obstetrician-led care, plus the demographic of the mothers, their more advanced age and generally higher than average incidence of high-risk pregnancies - but even allowing for that this rate is much higher than it needs to be.

In my own case the decision to be looked after by an obstetrician privately rather than a team of midwives in the public system (where there are not so many interventions) has turned out to be absolutely the best one - my diabetes has been looked after so effectively because this one doctor has overseen my care all along, personalised it, and hasn't hesitated to move fast to fix problems as soon as they begin to appear. I like her, I feel very confident in her judgement and her experience, and this is why I grow impatient with sweeping dismissals of obstetrician-led pregnancy care on the grounds that it's taking too much control away from the mother. I know that it's also possible to assert or exert your authority over yourself by putting yourself completely into the hands of another. I haven't abdicated anything by deciding to do what my doctor recommends and not to make a birth plan. On the contrary I've decided to be consciously trusting in her ability to do what's best, and no less, to trust my ability to rise to the occasion, whatever it shall turn out to be.

The push to have mothers take control over birth within a context of increasing intervention doesn't seem good to me partly because alarm bells go off when I hear of women feeling emotionally devastated because they feel they've 'failed' at giving birth 'naturally', but also because it appears to be resulting in some extremely grotesque innovations which seem designed to get the mother playing an assertive role in proceedings at all costs. There is a procedure called a maternal-assisted Caesarean, available at at least one Australian hospital (PDF), where the cut in the abdomen is made by the delivering surgeon, and then the mother lifts the baby out herself. Does this sound like something you'd want to do? I don't find the prospect of putting my hands into my own belly all that enticing, in fact, it sounds like a nightmare scenario, and not a context in which I'd like to meet my child. But then, I will not be 'mourning the loss of being able to have a vaginal birth', and I think it's worrying that women for whom vaginal birth is dangerous or impossible are coming to feel that a c-section is anything but a blessed alternative we're extremely lucky to have.

Anyway, I said I would put a picture of the curtains I made so here it is, a bit dark sorry.

Somebody just isn't prepared to let this go

2011-04-01T09:23:00.003+11:00

Saw this in Target yesterday. Literate this time, but that doesn't make it right.

8 3/4 months

2011-04-01T08:58:00.003+11:00

Here I am sporting my huge lump. It is getting in the way a bit now, especially when I want to turn over at night, which is often. On one of the last days I spent at La Trobe I saw a colleague I hadn't seen for a while; by way of greeting he pointed at my stomach and said "Big." Yes, well observed - big.

Well, in the event, it didn't take me all that long to switch tracks from work to leave mode. Perhaps that is a trifle unfortunate since I still have three medium to large sized jobs that need doing. I'm now ignoring my work email, however, which is a very good thing.

I figure I've got about three weeks till the baby arrives and I can't wait, although at the same time I wish I had a bit longer to get ready. One thing I must make myself do is somehow acquire a couple of maternity bras. I attempted this yesterday at Northland Myer and didn't even get as far as the changing room thanks to a combination of a store policy which says you can't get help fitting a bra unless you've made an appointment in advance, combined with two staff members who thought it was a good idea to ignore the hugely pregnant woman standing on the other side of the counter for five minutes wanting to ask a question while they leisurely debated how to make the cash register do some administrative function. I wanted to know how you're meant to figure out how to allow for size changes when the milk comes in - do you just get a bra that fits around the ribcage with some space in the cup? At about $50 a pop I didn't feel like taking a chance and probably getting it wrong. In the end I just put the bras I'd picked out back on the rack and went away. It was a bit upsetting for a while but honestly it is going to take more than that to really disturb the very happy mood I'm in right now.

one of these days I'm going to get organ-azised

2011-03-25T17:33:00.003+11:00

Well, here I am at the end of the first week of maternity leave, I went to work every day except yesterday anyhow, and will probably go in again on Monday too. I'm trying to sneak around so nobody sees me, but within five seconds of walking up to my office door this morning I was loudly mocked by both the department admin officers. I am finding it very hard to mentally disengage, and although all the things I've been working on and the things I'm still fiddling with are personal projects, not teaching, it's because of having begun to teach the semester that I can't switch off. It's like trying to nerve yourself up to jump off a moving train. Ideally, somebody would throw me off so I wouldn't have to make the effort myself.

Back last year some time I did ask my obstetrician whether she thought I'd be able to stay at work until about 2-3 weeks before the expected delivery date (sorry, I think I might have mentioned this already) and she very quickly put the dampeners on that idea. Now that I am at the 34-and-a-bit weeks mark I can really see how right she was. Work is too much. I generally start about 9 and am half dead by 11. I've given several lectures over the last few weeks and at first I was very disconcerted by the sound of my own voice - it was quavery and nervous-sounding. After a bit I figured out this was because of the drastically reduced diaphragm and lung capacity; lecturing needs a lot of deep breaths and I only have shallow ones at present. It's better not to be teaching any more for other reasons too; the baby doesn't move as frequently as he was doing a month or so ago, but when he does wriggle now it's a major and highly visible undertaking, and he happened to roll right over while I was standing at the whiteboard in front of a room full of first years who all shrieked in horror at the sight and instantly lost whatever slight and flagging interest they'd had in learning the correct way to format a quotation.

Today is the day, though, that I'm considering myself *really* on leave from work and to mark the occasion I'm going out this evening to the bright lights of Doncaster to see Barry Morgan's World of Organs at the theatre Dorian programs. Dorian was saying last night that he is fairly sure many of the people who have bought tickets are not expecting comedy. I certainly hope this proves to be the case.

So next week begins the proper pre-baby leave period for me; I hope I'll be able to spend a couple of weeks at least in resting and doing the things I really want to do before he comes out. I envisage my days unfolding something like this:

7-8 Breakfast with Dorian, bit of house cleaning, wash and dress

8-9.30 write

9.30-10.30 bit of gardening, weather permitting

10.30-11 morning tea whilst fighting on the internet

11-1 sew

1-2 lunch, at home or out, and a walk

2-3 nap

3-5.30 cook or read, bit more internet fighting

5.30-6.30 talk to Dorian, eat dinner

6.30-8 walk or swim

8-10 play with baby's toys, generally potter around, maybe some more sewing or a bit of TV

10 go to bed

I know it doesn't look terribly restful. I might need more naps and more reading, I guess. But a lot of those things are things I've been hanging out to do, and will be fun.

I've got a lot of sewing lined up. A lot. Most for the baby, both clothing and general linen, some for me (hospital stuff and maybe some breastfeeding-friendly shirts and dresses) some dull household stuff as well. I did get the curtains made for his room and they look great. I'll take a picture on the next day that isn't overcast.

Winding things up...

2011-03-21T13:44:00.002+11:00

Officially I finished work and began my maternity leave on Friday afternoon, but of course I didn't get everything necessary done before then. So I am sitting at my desk at work, (feeling pretty stupid) taking a short break between a lecture on poststructuralist feminism, which I spent all day yesterday writing except for the parts where I fell asleep, and a meeting with a research group I'm involved with. There are still fifteen things on my work 'to-do' list. I'll get all of them done, bar three ongoing low-key projects, by Friday, and then my real rest period will start. I can't say how much I am longing to be able to put work aside for a while. I am convinced it'll help me sleep better. Last night I was so desperately sick of tossing and turning I got up and went and lay on the couch and read Lucky Jim for a couple of hours.

We bought a car on Saturday. It has air conditioning and electric windows and so forth. This is very nice but I am greatly relieved at a more basic level because our current car has broken down three times this year and is very small and not equipped to provide much protection if it gets in a crash. The dealer told Dorian that the previous owner was a member of the Exclusive Brethren. Is that supposed to be sort of like the 'little old lady who only drove it on Sundays' of yore, ie the ultimate in desirable previous owners because one who must surely have been nice to the car, not fanged it or covered up any damage? I suppose we will find out. The dealer himself was all you would expect him to be. I hate to stereotype people but honestly. Highly skilled in the fine arts of giving evasive answers to direct questions and pressuring you into doing whatever it is that will produce the highest commission for himself.

news in briefs

2011-03-09T17:08:00.003+11:00

Hello! Still pregnant. Eight months and one day, now. That makes the Event sound exceedingly imminent, but pregnancy is ten months, not really nine, so it's not too soon. Although I think my baby will appear earlier than the official due date of 3 May. Probably, knowing family luck, on ANZAC day. Would that be good or bad? Benefits of a public holiday birthday probably outweigh drawbacks of a war-oriented day birthday.

I'm starting maternity leave at the end of next week. That means I have seven working days to go. Woo hoo! And only about seven hundred items left on my to-do list. Although, because I am a sucker, I am coming in to work and going to meetings and giving lectures on the Monday, Wednesday, and Friday of the first week of leave. And, not that personnel has actually approved my leave yet. But that's the date I applied to go, with a medical letter supporting my application, and I will indeed cease to turn up to my classes. In seriousness, working is getting much too hard now. I'm typing this at my desk at work just before I leave for the day, and my back and belly are very sore and tired. Teaching is too tiring and my whole body aches when I go home after a day of it. I really need the ability to sleep in the middle of the day now too. Also, pathetically, I am weeping little sooky tears whenever anyone says anything vaguely emotional to me, and I don't agree with that sort of thing in the workplace. Earlier on I had hoped to be able to keep working until about 37 weeks, my obstetrician very quickly put the kybosh on that. I was a bit taken aback at the time, but now I see that she was completely right, just as she's been about pretty much everything else.

I made the curtains, Dorian has painted the baby's room and put up shelves, and Basil tried out a selection of the baby's sleeping and traveling containers for comfort and size. I bought a chest freezer and have been filling it up with frozen dinners. We went to a childbirth education class where everyone went 'ewww' when the midwife got out the forceps and clanked them together. She had a doll baby for demonstration purposes which, when it wasn't being stuffed into a rubber pelvis or produced out of an organza amniotic sac, fixed its beady little creepy doll eyes on my husband and tried to freak him out.

Our car has broken down several times now and I'm getting very keen on the idea of acquiring a new one before, you know, my waters burst or something like that.

I'm now injecting myself with insulin thrice daily and it's helping keep my blood sugar in the proper range. I haven't gained any weight since i got pregnant and my obstetrician is pleased about that. At my last ultrasound, though, the ultrasonographer said my baby is almost topping the scale for largeness around the abdomen, and unless memory deceives, he said the baby is thus likely to get stuck halfway out, which, as A.R. said on Twitter, could get awfully awkward at parties. Although really, babies don't get stuck halfway do they? They get out somehow, by hook or by crook.

Along with a lot of sewing, house and garden pottering, and sleeping in the middle of the day, I plan to use the pre-birth part of my maternity leave to re-establish the habit of blogging every day, which I miss immensely and regret having fallen away from. I will try, though, not to make it all about pregnanty stuff, since that is beginning to be boring even for me.

So much fail for such a little t-shirt

2011-01-14T11:40:00.003+11:00

I saw this while shopping for Christmas presents for my cousin's little kids. Two comments:

- this is an excellent example of why I'm glad I can sew.

- However incompetent a parent I might turn out to be, I at least know enough to avoid inflicting this sort of sartorial, grammatical, and gender-role trauma upon a little infant.

six months pregnant

2011-01-14T11:08:00.003+11:00

Excuse the humidity hair. Melbourne is having a summer of monsoonal rains, which is nasty, but certainly preferable to the heartbreaking weather bringing devastation to large parts of Queensland. I'm glad from a purely selfish pregnancy perspective that it hasn't yet been a hot summer like last year's. The hottest day thus far was New Year's Eve when it got up to about 40. I was totally knackered. We had the nicest New Year I've had for a really long time, but our car broke down when I was driving it home on the Eastern Freeway at half past one in the morning. That was frightening.

I still haven't made the curtains, although we are slowly but surely getting a number of other household tasks of that sort done. We've both taken next week off work to knock off a few more jobs and to take a couple of days holiday, which I'm really looking forward to. We're going to the seaside and Dorian has booked us on a dolphin-swimming excursion. Apparently dolphins are very interested in pregnant women - they can detect babies with their sonar - so that'll be weird. I hope I don't come back a hippy, or obsessed with dolphins like Pat Mullins.

I'm doing OK with the gestational diabetes, I think. It's laborious, with the food prep, the exercise and the constant monitoring, and a bit pitiful with the dietary obsessiveness, but on the up side, I feel really well, and my various medical people say I'm controlling it well and things are progressing nicely. Between talking with my obstetrician today and generally putting two and two together, it seems inevitable that the baby will be born a week or two before the 40th week, so that's only three months off now. I've been able to feel him moving around in there for about a month now. The first movements were tiny little flutters but now it's like Plastic Bertrand is thumping around in my belly. Who'd have thought being kicked repeatedly in the guts could be so much fun?

Dorian misses out on this stuff of course but his unconscious finds ways to compensate. He dreamed that he was looking after the baby (who wasn't born yet) while I had to go somewhere, and he had the baby wrapped up in blankets inside a plastic bag. Dorian opened the bag to look at the baby and make sure he was ok and the baby spoke to him. What he said was, "I don't mind Basil." Which, as you may imagine, is a great relief to me.

Health

2010-12-05T16:09:00.003+11:00

I thought I would say some more about the nature of the whining mentioned in the previous post. I am very healthy. I have the same perfect blood pressure I've always had, very low cholesterol, excellent digestion, no illnesses or anatomical problems. But I'm in an extended phase (which I know is a familiar one to many people) of receiving extensive and fairly complex medical treatments, some of which themselves make you physically sick and all of which you get very very tired of, especially perhaps if you've had the luxury of robust good health for most of your life. It feels very stupid and spoilt to have anything complainy to say about all this because, first of all, it's entirely self-inflicted, and secondly because I'm very well aware that it's an immense privilege that I'm able to have this sort of treatment at all - my luck in being born now and not twenty years earlier, my luck at living in a country where universal health care makes it financially possible for most people to access excellent medical care, and everybody who is really ill. Nevertheless, with this good fortune there does come another set of different challenges to negotiate. 'First world problems' - sure. But problems just the same.

Our baby was conceived through IVF and this involved a cocktail of drugs and a regime of appointments and tinkering which I will try to write some more about properly one day soon, in part because I think it might be a good idea to keep a record for future reference of the medications I've received and partly because even while it was mainly pretty horrible to undergo there was a part of me found it all really interesting. The analogy that came to mind often was (don't laugh) the Apollo 11 moon landing - this immense technological achievement - and how that was achieved using what would in only a few years come to be seen as incredibly primitive tools. From my own very limited involvement with it I suspect fertility medicine is in a similar state.

It is now at a point where it can (sometimes) do something that for millennia was so far outside the realm of human possibility as to be the subject of myth. But it is achieving this by a sort of Heath Robinsonesque assemblage of ropes and pulleys. Yet the demand for what it offers is so urgent and the stakes are so high that we're steaming ahead regardless. Maybe - probably - the medicine will refine and streamline in coming years. But I suspect it will have a tough time keeping pace with pressures on fertility coming from elsewhere in the culture. It would be good if they could work on some of the techniques, though: I think the drug Crinone is an unjustifiably dangerous thing to give to women in the vulnerable state brought on by the latter phases of IVF and I'll be happy to hear when its use is discontinued.

All the same, I don't imagine that any improvements in fertility medicine will make much difference to the tendency it appears to foster in fertility specialists to view themselves as modern day Prometheuses set to outdo all the other arrogant doctors in the world. My fertility specialist, a very capable and intelligent woman who I hated deeply, was once in the middle of saying what she planned to do about something or other that my pituitary gland was doing without her permission when she actually said that she would change the treatment after she had 'made me pregnant'. She immediately corrected this to 'after you fall pregnant,' so clearly she knew it wasn't a view of her role in the proceedings that would be appreciated by her patient.

Anyway, after the IVF and some disappointment there I was of course delighted to at last have fallen pregnant with an embryo which seemed interested in sticking around for the long haul, and I thought the endless doctor visits would tail off for a while until we got nearer to the business end of things. But the doctor-visiting been pretty consistent and I accept now that it is going to stay that way. About a month ago my obstetrician diagnosed me with gestational diabetes. This affects about 8% of pregnant women - there is a genetic predisposition, but otherwise one has no control over whether one gets it or not - and is insulin resistance caused by a hormone generated by the placenta, so it tends usually to develop in about week 24 to 28 when the placenta is quite large and to peak around week 35, and to go away entirely once the placenta is gone. Glucose crosses the placenta so if I can't use the glucose I take in the baby cops it all, and grows too big and has health issues later. I am now nearly 19 weeks pregnant and so I have four to five months to go with the diabetes. Usually it is controllable with exercise and diet and I am able to keep my blood glucose levels under control this way when I'm awake. But I have not been able to reduce my pre-breakfast levels to an acceptable condition and so I've begun injecting myself with insulin - before bedtime for now, but it will eventually have to happen at every meal.

Because it's something normally dealt with by diet and exercise, you can imagine there is a significant amount of body-related guilt and failure-feeling associated with having to be treated with insulin, so early on especially. I would, however, be pissweak indeed if, with all my education and so forth, I allowed this to matter to me for very long.

And to be very, very, truthful, I don't think the FAIL part of it does matter to me very much now. Giving myself an injection is still one of my least favourite parts of my day, but when it pays off, as I know it will, and my blood glucose levels return to normal, I'll be happy about it. Nobody wants to have to give birth to a baby who requires a two-person lift. It would be nice not to have to go to the doctor twice a week, but this too shall pass.

Sundayfunday

2010-12-05T15:50:00.002+11:00

Last night was the latest night for a long time - got home around about midnight and was so exhausted I actually slept right through till late morning, consequently waking up with a much too full bladder and sore tummy. (Get used to the new, frequently whining Me, by the way. A great many of the silver linings connected with the Miracle of Birth have their own attendant clouds, not usually of the bows and flows of angel hair variety either.)

Dorian took me into the city to see This Is Spinal Tap at the rooftop cinema. I did enjoy it despite having seen the film probably more than ten times now. It was a perfectly lovely evening weather-wise and the roof space on top of Curtin House is nice, but thanks to choosing to sit maybe a little bit too close to the vent pipes it was more often a case of being able to smell the sewage rather than smelling the glove. But it was fun and also educational to discover that so very many people leave their homes on Saturday evenings! Get dressed up and walk around in the city! I don't know what exactly is the matter with them all, but it must be severe.

birthday week '10

2010-12-03T13:59:00.003+11:00

Well Birthday Week is beginning at the other end than usual this year. Yes it's my birthday today so Week celebrations will continue right through until next Friday. I'm 38. I'm sitting at the kitchen table here on a lovely sultry tropical Melbourne day looking admiringly at the sort-of present which an Australia Post worker just brought to my door: 6m of Marimekko fabric with which to make curtains for the rather dark unoccupied bedroom on the south side of the house. How I will prewash six metres of fabric I don't really know. It's a sort of present because actually I bought it myself, online from the US, a couple of weeks ago. Thanks to sales and the exchange rate it was only $20 a metre.

I just went and draped it over the curtain rod in there to see how it looked:

Nice and bright, yes. Actually the walls, which are off-white, looked a bit grey next to it. That's OK. The room needs some painting done on it too. Not much, but some.

The design dates from 1971. Who'd have thought. Actually the reason I'm putting up new curtains in there is because I'm going to have a baby in a little while and it does seem crucially important to me that a child receives new curtains upon entering the world, most particularly curtains which come very precisely from the childhood of his own parents. I say 'his' because the baby is a boy, as we learned a couple of weeks ago. I haven't written about being pregnant on my blog until now because I would have had to use singular they in alluding to the baby, or called him 'it', which I don't mind personally but which does seem to disturb some people.

The sex of the baby is the thing pertaining to it/him that people have asked me about most of all. They ask me how I'm feeling (OK, but more of that later perhaps) and then they ask me if I know what I'm having. 'A baby' is what I am tempted to say sometimes, or perhaps 'a little Chinese man' or maybe 'we don't know but we are hoping for a gay.' Ultrasounds and genetic testing have confirmed that he is a human baby, interestingly, given the number of times I dreamed early in the pregnancy that I had just given birth to a litter of lovely kittens. For a while I thought this was a dreaming habit specific to ladies who like cats, but I went to a health lecture run by the hospital I'm having the baby in and the midwife said 'you will have strange dreams' and yes, having kittens was the example she gave. She didn't say though whether this is usually the very happy dream it was for me. I suppose if you don't like cats then it wouldn't be that enjoyable.

But why wouldn't you like cats? I go for a walk every evening after dinner and there's always a few cats sitting in their driveways, just at the fence line, waiting for someone to come along and pat them.

I am past the kitten litter dreaming phase though and onto the boring prophetic dream phase. Last week I dreamed Sam and Dave came to visit us - and the next day they did! (not entirely unexpectedly.) On another occasion I dreamed that Optus cut off the phone because we hadn't paid the bill, and guess what, this one came true too.

I said this would happen.

2010-12-03T13:37:00.004+11:00

9 May 2006: (speaking of the choking surfeit of Da Vinci Codes in bookshops) -

Can you picture how depressingly uniformly yellowy-brownish the op-shop book shelves of tomorrow are going to look?

Then in Savers last night, I saw this:

the one on the top shelf is trade paperback size.

the chooks died

2010-09-24T21:31:00.003+10:00

While I was not writing blog posts our chooks were all killed by a fox. The two old ones, and a new one we'd only had for about six weeks and who hadn't even started laying eggs yet, the poor baby. It was the middle of the night and we heard nothing and knew nothing until the morning. Dorian went out the back door to go to work and came back in immediately. He told me to sit down on the bed because there had been a disaster. My first thought was of Basil but I had seen him in the kitchen just a minute before so I thought it couldn't be him. Dorian said all the chooks had been killed. We went outside and it was horrible. There were feathers all over the yard and some spots of blood on the concrete. There was a torn-off wing half-buried in a flowerbed, and worst of all, around the corner of the house there was a headless chicken corpse just dropped there. Presumably the fox had dropped it as it ran to jump over the low brick wall.

Dorian buried the headless one under a china flat peach tree. I think it was the boss chook, judging by its weight. The poor old thing. Although the chook I really feel sad for was the new one, which we were calling No.3, because she never had the fun that the others did. They had only just stopped being mean to her, pulling her feathers and so on. I don't know if we'll get any others.

Let's enjoy ourselves, shall we.

2010-09-17T17:34:00.001+10:00

I'm 37 and a half! Just thought I should mention that. I've had this blog since I was 32, which is a long time ago now - Sherlock Holes was still living in Banker Street, people used to smoke in cinemas and there was a law that when women got married they had to leave the public service. Anyway, I am growing up and becoming a real adult.

I can almost type without looking at the keyboard.
I have not once yet lost a whole stack of student record sheets this semester, and what's more, I don't think I'm going to either.

what makes a good teacher?

2010-08-24T20:13:00.003+10:00

About six months ago I wrote an essay that thought about teaching (and learning) literature and teaching (and learning) dancing - what they do and don't share, what you can learn as a teacher when you are taught stuff that is new and difficult, how important bodies are even when what you're studying is something cerebral.

I should finish it and try to get it published somewhere, because unless you do that, you are a worthless academic. (ie it's no good to just write about this stuff for the purpose of understanding it better yourself. Also you have to publish your publishings in a journal that is "A*", which means exactly as much as you'd imagine it means, and if you only publish it in a journal ranked "A", well, you might as well give it to a drunk, violent, stinking, incontinent leper to wipe his bottom with.)

But considerations of brownie points aside, I've found it very interesting to see how different dance teachers do their teaching. How they explain something new; how they break it down; crowd control; when they drill and when they let you play; when they show you what to do and when they describe what you should aim for. I've also seen effective demonstrations of how to *not* teach. The less said about those here the better, maybe.

You can't predict what's going to work and what's not until you see it done. It was the good teacher last night who, after making us spend about six months learning a stupid, boring, stratospherically daggy line dance that I hate, suddenly decided, at quarter to ten on the first weeknight after a more than usually painful election weekend, to switch styles and introduce a new and pretty complicated rock and roll move, which he couldn't quite remember himself, but he knew he'd nearly busted a girl's shoulder doing it. It sounds pretty bad, huh. But he's a good, effective educator, able to help 40 adults learn and be comfortable trying new things, and able to have nearly everyone keep up with the group.

Well, that was stupid....was it?

2010-08-24T19:40:00.003+10:00

Have you recovered yet from the election? I think I may be beginning to. It was quite the traumatic day, from turning up to vote bright and early at the local P.S. and having the official who gave me my ballot papers tell me "a one above the line will suffice on that one, thanks", and having a pierced-lipped baggy-arsed teenager try to hand me a Family First how to vote card, to finally stumbling confusedly and miserably into bed just before T. Abbott came out to make his "I don't know whether I've won or lost but I'm still going to be as big a knobbish troglodyte as possible" speech. It was really the shock of watching those numbers painfully inching their way forward up to 70 -- back to 69 -- back to 72 -- the other side is on 74 -- no, it's down to 71 again -- and knowing that of the four or five possible outcomes, almost all would see Abbott governing within days. That was a pretty foul feeling.

We had a largish party here on Sunday for Dorian's birthday. As guests came in they said things like "it could still be worse" and "it still hasn't happened, and it may never happen", which was true then and is true now.

On the other hand, many good things came of the election. Wilson Tuckey had his face rubbed in a pile of cat vomit! That counts as about six good things, surely. I'm happy for the Green candidate who now represents Melbourne, although I still think he looks like he should be a contestant on Big Brother. I think Wyatt Roy, the 20 year old robot elected in Longman, may go on to provide us with a second Barnaby Joyce in the future if he's managed properly by his elders and betters in the LNP.

It's funny how long and complicated the mental adjustment to this strange state of affairs is turning out to be. So many unknowns. Dorian came to collect me from work last night - we go to a dance class on Monday evenings - and he said he was enjoying the election. Enjoying it, though! I'm sort of starting to know what he meant. It's not the same as that pro-democracy optimism some people seem to have about the prospect of a government which is not identical with a party, and which I suspect is making some observers develop wishful notions about the goodness of the three independents. Bob Katter is never going to be any different than what he's always been, I'm afraid. But there is a sense that the reality of what a government is has suddenly leapt back into the equation. We know that the vicious cycle of parties/spin/branding/image was ruining politics, and especially it was ruining good politicians. (I still think Julia Gillard could be a first-rate leader. Maybe we need to demand she shows us the 'real' Real Julia.) So perhaps it's a good thing that there are makers or breakers in the parliament now who have built their political careers on thumbing the nose at party politics. Maybe they'll break the circuit and force everyone else to rethink how they do government.

Or not.

When I read about Paul Oakeshott's suggestion of a 'unity cabinet' my first thought was awww bless. Just a bit too cute, just a bit too like the idea of one who's still high on adrenaline. It would be good if it was actually a supersonic whistle that only Malcolm Turnbull's ears can hear. I would like to see Malcolm collect his things and relocate them to the other side of the chamber.

Well, I had better go and find out whether Antony Green has decided yet who will be in charge.

FOUR POINT ACTION CONTRACT

2010-08-10T20:09:00.003+10:00

1. ARSE
2. FECK
3. DRINK
4. GIRLS

What tears my heart most about the Liberal party is that people will vote for them and their racist, sexist, homophobic, godbothering, normal-family worshipping, smallminded greedy stupid venal and narrow policies. Unsuspecting people who really aren't too bad in themselves will vote for them above the line in the QLD senate and direct preferences to Wendy Francis of Family First, who thinks gay parents are child abusers and sees nothing wrong with saying so.

As for the economic policy issue, well, by heavens, this is the team that brought us Barnaby Joyce as financical brains trust spokeschairman. Should any person be seriously contemplating voting for the Liberals on account of how they're going to "STOP THE WASTE" (which sounds terribly constipating to me) well that person had better do the right thing and give back their $950 stimulus. That's all I can say. Actually, I can say a great deal more, but frankly, I have nicer things to do, while I still live in a country that isn't ruled by fascists.

Dystopia rising

2010-08-10T09:18:00.000+10:00

Just think, in less than two weeks, Tony Abbott could really and actually be the Prime Minister of Australia. Bringing with him Chris Pyne as minister for Education! Eric Abetz, Workplace Relations! Kevin Andrews, Human Services! And there's many more awesomely clever, thoughtful and humane prospects where those came from. I haven't been sleeping too well lately, and the night before last I had RN on at about 2am and the lead item in the news was that Labor had edged ahead by one percentage point in the polls. Can't express the comfort, the relief this brought.

Well, in a couple of hours I am teaching Gentlemen Prefer Blondes, the novel. It was my pleasure in yesterday's lecture to introduce a lot of young people to the movie, and if I understood them right, for several it was their first exposure to Marilyn Monroe outside of posters, photographs, soundbites etc. Not all, of course, but surprisingly many. I like to think that students who come to this subject expecting it to be about Seriose Womens Issues are discovering that my definition of that includes talking about what our culture thinks about blondes.
Later on today, three hours teaching the 1993 film of Richard III with Ian McKellen as a gleefully perverted fascist king. I'm not so enthusiastic about that one.

We have a big, big problem

2010-08-04T17:27:00.001+10:00

Come ON Gillard! Get it together woman.

Brilliant idea for a television show

2010-08-03T21:38:00.002+10:00

Masterlawyer. A whole lot of cute-looking burnt-out young chefs compete on tasks such as conveyancing, writing wills, defending mobsters, and drafting federal legislation in the battle to become Australia's no.1 amateur lawyer.

Therapy

2010-08-03T20:16:00.007+10:00

After I remembered that I had a blog I spent a number of days trying to remember what it was called and where on the internet it was located. Then, aha!, I found it. Right here. All just as it used to be: the 750 posts, the Bali-bellynese colour scheme Fyodor was so insulting about, the Howard-era joke that I really meant in the header image, and which now prompts me to say that the dawning prospect of a too precipitate return to a Liberal government made up of the dregs of the old one, only crueller, madder, and more evil, is one of many reasons I feel the need of a place to vent.

I stopped blogging partly because I didn't have a lot to say, and (illogically) partly because I thought the best way of avoiding blurts that might somehow weaken my always tenuous grip on my academic job would be to shut up altogether. However, I no longer understand this thinking. I don't see why I shouldn't say whatever I like, it can't possibly make any difference at all, and oh golly, I have a six month backlog of unwritten blog posts to clear, of cat videos, confused sarcastic remarks, ideas for television shows, and passionate complaints about tiny and obscure issues of interest to very few people alive, dead, or yet to be born, which, because I have not blogged them out in the normal way, are churning turgidly in my innards like the eleven servings of bone marrow and saffron risotto which Matt Preston is reported (by Woman's Day) to have consumed in a single sitting.

Indeed, I think you can actually see the effect that not blogging has had upon my brain:

It looks pretty bad in there!!1 but the specialist's letter that came with the scans was reassuring. I quote:

The pituitary fossa is of normal size with normal posterior pituitary bright spot. No pituitary mass lesion is seen and there is no microadenoma. The suprasellar cistern, optic chiasm, infundibulum and cavernous sinus are within normal limits. No abnormality is demonstrated in the remaining brain apart from prominent neurovascular spaces in the right basal ganglia of no significance. There is minor mucosal thickening seen in the floor of the left maxillary antrum.

The left maxillary antrum is the part of the brain which deals with long division, so no great loss there if it's full of mucus, I guess.

As well as having my brain scanned, for no actual reason as it turned out, over the last half year I have done many great and mighty feats such as:

in the name of research, endured another Jane Austen fest in the nation's capital; well, I got through most of it although I did wag half a day and spent that with Zoe and Caren and at the Lifeline Book Fair which is even better than the Canberrans make it sound, and they always sound as if they are bullshitting about how good it is. Back to Jane. Here I am, in April in Canberra, sporting the fruits of the 1.5 hour Regency turban-tying workshop: Ahem, just remember this is a SCHOLAR doing SCHOLARLY RESEARCH. It turns out that turban tying is pretty much what you would think it is - flop a bit of material around your head a few times, stick a few feathers or a brooch in if you're wearing your turban somewhere fancy.
hung out a lot with my mate Basil who doesn't know much about art but he knows what he likes, and isn't afraid to do whatever makes him feel good.
I got an iPad. I may have played my way through a zillion levels of Plants vs. Zombies but on the other hand I also wrote a 24 page essay about what it's like reading Mansfield Park in electronic editions, so there you go (if you want to know what it is like I'm afraid you'll just have to buy the book.)
Number 4 I shall blog about tomorrow, because this post is long enough already.

Living the dream

2010-03-08T22:48:00.005+11:00

image is from Father Ted naturally

I just had about half a chocolate cake for dinner, doused in a lake of cream. The cake was made from a 75c Coles packet mix and it was good. You can do whatever you like after a two hour dance class, I think. Basil is licking the bowl now.

I always used to really enjoy hearing about and admire all the latest discoveries from the Brendan Nelson mental universe, but Tony Abbott makes Brendan look like a snivelling amateur in the WTF stakes. Who would ever have guessed that Abbott would be quite such a reliable source of the very finest of bizarre overshares? We've all seen him posing in the nude more times than I need to remind you about; he does all manner of daredevil stunts in the desert and on the freeway; he's told us what he thinks about virginity (precious gift, in favour of) specifically that of his daughters; about sex with his wife (also endorses, doesn't get to 'do it' as much as he would like to); it seems that all it takes is for some enterprising journalist to ask him some question any normal politician would shake off in a second and his mouth just falls open and all sorts of misshapen things come tumbling out. Just the other day he was asked on 60 Minutes for his views on homosexuality (good one), and he said "I probably feel a bit threatened, as so many people do... (but) it's a fact of life." Is this not in actual fact the basis of the scene in Bruno where the karate instructor teaches Bruno how to defend himself against a gay man who is attacking with three or four dildos? People criticised that film for picking on improbably soft targets, but if Tony saw it he probably thought it was a documentary and you could get some good tips from it for fending off the threatening homosexuals.

If you were a journalist, how could you possibly resist asking Abbott what he thinks about a whole lot of important issues?

"Hey Tony, what do you think of ladies on their periods?"
"Tony, why are Black people such good dancers and basketball players?"
"What is the difference between Elves and Midgets, Tony?"

Boding well

2010-03-05T19:53:00.002+11:00

I got a lovely Bazlotto. Thank you, My Blog, for welcoming me back.

I know I have been horrible to you (I forgot your fifth birthday, for instance - this is not really forgivable is it? I recollect my own fifth birthday as if it was yesterday. There was a large party with party games and much satisfactory crying on the part of those who lost at the party games, and I received a toy yacht which really sailed and a rag doll made by my mother) but in the last analysis, we have to pick up the pieces and try to go on, best as we can.

I do wish I hadn't let the end of year tiredness trick me into neglecting my blog for three months. Often, this last three months, I've wanted to come back but couldn't figure out how. It's been borne in on me how useful it is in so many ways to have a kind of diary / archive of what's happening in one's life, or attracting one's attention. For instance, if you've been reading here for a long time you might remember I once did a course training academics how to teach. At the time that was voluntary but now, four years later, it's becoming something one must do if you want to be considered for any kind of benefit or privilege on offer. I think I might have lost the certificate I got then, but if push comes to shove and I have to prove i've done the jolly thing, I will print out the commemorative post I wrote at the time and present it as evidence.

Hello

2010-03-05T19:24:00.002+11:00

Well, I have finally recovered from the little penguin houses, although perhaps not wholly. Does one ever. I find it's for the best if I don't dwell too long on thinking about them as relapses begin to loom threateningly on the horizon. So speak to me not of little baby fairy penguins which come out of their houses at sunset, standing stupidly on their ridiculously stumpy penguin legs, waiting for someone to come and vomit something yummy into their mouths.

My life would feel empty without the little penguin houses if I didn't take steps to fill it. Steps like acquiring my first ever pair of glasses (late December.) It was like being born again - as a defective nerd, admittedly - but I learned that actually, trees have leaves on them and clouds are not really that cloudy. For about two weeks I was rediscovering the world. It's a lot to take in when you are 37. That distant building perched mysteriously on a hill across the valley from the rooftop carpark on Greensborough plaza, which I had so often squinted curiously at, wondering if it was a distant farmhouse or a lonely Xanadu-type mansion, turns out to be only a big tin shed with three roller doors. The world of the poorly sighted is more romantic, but on the other hand it is rather nice to be able to read signs on the road at night when you are driving somewhere and don't know the way.

Another thing which has happened is that the visitor cats are gone. Albie went home without his voice, strange to say - when we came home from Kangaroo Island he'd lost his meow and it's never come back. I didn't know whether I'd be sad to not have them with us any more. In the event, when I took them back to their owner and their old home, they seemed to recognise it, and her, and straight away seemed happy, which made it much easier to walk away them. Plus it was not as if they'd died or anything. I felt a little disoriented the first few days without them - I kept looking toward Albie's chair before remembering he had left - but, if I'm truthful, I hardly missed them at all. Basil certainly doesn't. He's gone back to being an ecstatically happy cat.

Little penguin houses

2009-12-07T22:49:00.000+11:00

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

2009-11-21T22:27:00.004+11:00

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

2009-11-11T21:09:00.004+11:00

(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!!!!

2009-11-03T12:33:00.002+11:00

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.

2009-09-08T19:24:00.005+10:00

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

2009-08-29T11:40:00.002+10:00

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!

2009-08-18T20:13:00.003+10:00

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

2009-07-31T19:55:00.001+10:00

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

Our feet in Venice

2009-07-30T03:33:00.001+10:00

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

2009-07-30T03:29:00.001+10:00

Stray cat, Arsenale, Venice

2009-07-29T05:20:00.001+10:00

Stuffed cat in German pavillion exhibit, Giardini, Venice Biennale

2009-07-29T05:19:00.001+10:00

I have not been able to find out how this poor creature met its end.
The only thing in Venice I do not like.

Briefly interrupting world tour of cat features to acknowledge existence of other interesting items

2009-07-28T06:22:00.002+10:00

Kittun poster on the Rialto, Venice

2009-07-28T05:59:00.000+10:00

Sinister surrealist cat, Musee d'Orsay, Paris

2009-07-26T21:40:00.000+10:00

Poor orphaned cat in Pere Lachaise cemetery, Paris

2009-07-26T02:11:00.000+10:00

Seriose cat locked up alone overnight in icecream and waffle shop, Jordaan, Amsterdam

2009-07-26T01:15:00.002+10:00

they love the tuxedo cats here.

There was also a cat locked in the basement of our hotel - I could see it through the little window at footpath level.

I'm not sure it's a good idea to have cats in a place where they are in constant danger of falling in the canal.

17th century arseholes picking on cat, Rijksmuseum, Amsterdam

2009-07-26T01:13:00.001+10:00

Cross cat in Amsterdam wine bar

2009-07-24T07:43:00.000+10:00

Somewhat happier cat, victoria and Albert museum

2009-07-20T22:36:00.000+10:00

Another unhappy cat in Bloomsbury

2009-07-20T18:03:00.001+10:00

Morrissey in Mile End on Saturday night

2009-07-20T18:00:00.001+10:00

Old stuff

2009-07-18T00:06:00.004+10:00

As you can see Stonehenge is actually only twelve inches high, so Spinal Tap were not as far off the mark as has previously been supposed.

Special "screen out the forty thousand other people there" camera was used in the taking of this photograph.

You are given an audio tour thing to listen to as you walk around (which is good because then you stay for more than the five seconds necessary to take in a heap of old rocks standing in a field) and they kept speculating on what Stonehenge was for. Obviously, it was for the same thing 'then' as it is for now, which is staring at and wondering what it's for, and paying six pounds for the privilege.

Did You Know: Grand Designs has a whole magazine? I read the July issue from cover to cover and am hoping to see the August one before we leave Britain. It's great. At the conference whenever I got a chance I asked English people about housing and heritage stuff. One thing I liked was what a nice woman from Edinburgh told me about making repairs to listed buildings. There is a rule of thumb you must observe that repairs should blend in from four feet away, but from two feet away it should be clear what is old and what is new.

Although the definition of 'old' and 'new' here is something I'm yet to fathom or feel I understand.

I took this picture at the Roman Baths, at Bath. Bath Abbey on the left there was founded in the 7th century, put up in the 12th century and tizzed in the 16th; there's a nice piece of Georgian building on the right, I was standing on a rather kitschy nineteenth century mezzanine around the excavated Roman pool below, which was constructed in the first century. The hot, sulphur-smelling water from the springs fell as rain ten thousand years ago. And it tastes like it too.

I doubt I will grasp how to think about age before we go on to places where it's just the same only considerably more so.

Pebbles

2009-07-17T23:57:00.002+10:00

Pebbles lives in Bath.

We're in London now (Bethnal Green, great place) and staying here until Tuesday. Have been doing Londony kinds of things, going to galleries etc. The pub on the corner used to be owned by the Kray twins. People are very friendly and polite. I wish I had taken more of an interest in cricket. It's been raining buckets and buckets, and not specially warm - topping out at about 23c - but I can actually see why 28 and over is considered a heatwave. PT seems to have heating that can't be turned off and windows don't open.

Effy

2009-07-16T01:24:00.000+10:00

Effy lives in the house we're staying in in London.

Banksy show at Bristol museum yesterday

2009-07-16T01:22:00.001+10:00

Outside the house the austens lived at in Bath

2009-07-13T21:46:00.001+10:00

The conference is over

2009-07-12T17:23:00.003+10:00

It’s a quarter past six on Sunday morning and I’m sitting up in my bed at the halls. In a while I’ll get up and perform a series of complicated manouevres to find the wireless network, get breakfast, put my laundry into a washing machine (I’m going to wash my clothes with soap flakes shaved off my bathroom soap using the edge of my drivers’ licence, do you think that will be alright?), put it into a dryer, clean my teeth, pack my bag and get it down the seven hundred stairs. And then I’ll wait around until Dorian gets here from London, in a car, hooray! No more public transport! (Which is actually incredibly excellent here, but I’m sick of it.)
Did I say this already? The conference was at Chawton House Library and while the conference bit was good in all sorts of ways, the location was definitely something out of the ordinary, both because of the present beauty of the place and its past, for which I can’t seem to summon up an adequate comment.

It’s the manor house – built in the 13th century (?) but with plenty of additions and alterations since) owned by Jane Austen’s brother Edward Knight (he was adopted by a rich cousin when he was a kid), and he didn’t live there permanently. I don’t seem to have taken any pictures of the inside of the house, which is not inhumanly big (the room called the Great Hall is about the size of our rumpus room) but what it irresistibly reminded me of is the house in The Lion, The Witch, and The Wardrobe – there’s that exact magical quality of corridors and staircases that wind and turn and lead you to rooms you weren’t expecting and which don’t seem to relate spatially to the other rooms you were in before. It’s been very simply renovated – the floors are mainly bare oak boards or stone flags, the fireplaces are stone as are the window frames, walls are dark oak panelling to just above head height and the plaster is off white. At different times in the nineteenth and twentieth century the plaster walls were decorated variously with red and gold Spanish leather, with green William Morris wallpaper, with trompe murals, and with bright pink paint. I’d have liked to see it when it was a lived-in house. But by all accounts it was on the point of falling over before it entered the current phase of its existence.
It’s just as nice outside. On either side of the gravel drive up to the house are paddocks full of sheep, edged with big oaks, limes, yews and damson hedges.

There’s a converted stables building on the left and a thirteenth century church on the right.

Behind the house is an Elizabethan terrace and herb garden, a group of outbuildings, another big rolling lawn, then right up the back is a fantastic walled kitchen garden (again, very C.S. Lewis with the flint walls and iron gates) and a Wilderness.

Jane Austen’s own house is ten minutes’ walk away in the village itself (which is like everything else around here – so strictly regulated that there are no signs, no big developments, no shops really, nothing newer or flashier than about 1800. Even the private houses either are or look about four hundred years old. It’s weird glancing at the little leadlight windows of a thatched cottage and seeing a huge plasma screen telly inside. The house itself is a bit underwhelming – so museumy that there is not really any sense of it having been where the Austen women lived or Austen wrote. I saw the alleged table, the patchwork quilt, the bit of George Austen’s hair etc – boring. (Well, actually the quilt was pretty nice, much better than it looks in pictures.)

Well I have lots to say about the conference itself but I had better get on with soap-flake-shaving etc now.

No wireless in the airport at Dubai

2009-07-10T15:39:00.002+10:00

Ok, so here I am in Winchester. The first day of the conference was yesterday and it was very good. Chawton House is amazingly lovely although I am having difficulty mentally separating it from Grand Designs when I look at the stonework, flagstones etc (it was recently restored.) The papers yesterday were good and it's a very friendly meeting, plus whenever the attention wanders (as its its wont when sessions start at 9am and finish at 6.30pm. Today goes to 10.30pm.) you can look around the dark oak panelled room you're sitting in and think that Jane Austen used to have dinner in here or whatever. I even enjoyed tripping over the uneven stairs yesterday because the Austens would have tripped over them before me. Dorian and I have swapped phones temporarily (he's gone to a jazz festival in Lyon) so I'm taking pictures with his phone and I don't know how to get them onto this computer. But there will be photos soon. Also, I have finished my paper, you will be pleased to learn. It's on tomorrow morning, the last day, which is a bit sad because I'd much rather get it over and done with.

It's Friday now and we got to England on Tuesday afternoon. Being dutiful Australians we headed straight to Earls Court, spent a night in a hotel there, and sorted out the rest of our train tickets and suchlike. The next day we wandered around looking at english things, Trafalgarsquarenelsonscolumnhydeparkwestminsterabbeycoventgardenstjamessparkbuckinghampalace etc etc etc, then went our separate ways for more good long doses of public transportation. By the time I arrived here at the halls of residence where I'm staying I couldn't do more than dump my bags and stumble across the road to the pub for a "meal" and a read of The News of the World, which was still all about Michael Jackson. (I appear to have missed MJ's funeral, was it good?)

Dorian is coming to get me on Sunday and were going to some other English places. I shall blog again soon. Flying business class is the best thing ever.

Here we go

2009-07-06T20:06:00.003+10:00

Well we finally got the house clean, bags packed, conference papers half written, and now I'm sitting in the gate lounge at the airport. Dorian has wandered off and I don't know whether he'll be back in time to get on the plane. But it doesn't matter because WE GOT UPGRADED yaaaay.!!!

See you in London. Or possibly in Dubai if they have wireless in the airport.

paint a vulgar picture

2009-06-27T10:40:00.000+10:00

At the record company meeting
On their hands - a dead star
And oh, the plans they weave
And oh, the sickening greed

At the record company party
On their hands - a dead star
The sycophantic slags all say :
"I knew him first, and I knew him well"

Re-issue ! Re-package ! Re-package !
Re-evaluate the songs
Double-pack with a photograph
Extra Track (and a tacky badge)

A-list, playlist
"Please them , please them !"
"Please them !"
(sadly, THIS was your life)

But you could have said no
If you'd wanted to
You could have said no
If you'd wanted to

BPI, MTV, BBC
"Please them ! Please them !"
(sadly this was your life)

But you could have said no
If you'd wanted to
You could have walked away
...Couldn't you ?

I touched you at the soundcheck
You had no real way of knowing
In my heart I begged "Take me with you ...
I don't care where you're going..."

But to you I was faceless
I was fawning, I was boring
Just a child from those ugly new houses
Who could never begin to know

Who could never really know
Oh ...

Best of ! Most of !
Satiate the need
Slip them into different sleeves !
Buy both, and feel deceived

Climber - new entry, re-entry
World tour ! ("media whore")
"Please the Press in Belgium !"
(THIS was your life...)

And when it fails to recoup ?
Well, maybe :
You just haven't earned it yet, baby

I walked a pace behind you at the soundcheck
You're just the same as I am
What makes most people feel happy
Leads us headlong into harm

So, in my bedroom in those 'ugly new houses'
I danced my legs down to the knees
But me and my 'true love'
Will never meet again ...

Another test mobile post

2009-06-21T17:00:00.000+10:00

I wish Basil could come with us

2009-06-21T12:38:00.003+10:00

Thanks to everyone that contacted me on blog or off with ideas about housesitting: we've got the very best possible person in the world lined up to do it. With just about anyone else I'd certainly be worried, at some point while we're away, about managing and putting up with three cats, but this person won't have the slightest problem with that.

So we're leaving in two weeks' time: first to England for a fortnight, then to Amsterdam for a few days, then Paris likewise, then Venice for the rest, getting home on a Sunday and off to work on the Monday for me. Dorian's got a couple more days off.

Nearly all the travel and accommodation is booked now and we've booked or put in the diary a heap of excellent things to do. I'm going to try to blog it as we go. I've got an iphone and I think I can work out how to make it blog from afar.

Meanwhile I need to finish my marking which is as usual taking far longer than it should, finish getting two subjects ready to roll, write and prerecord the first two lectures, do the next phase of my dance/costume research, with luck squeeze in a book review, fix up my conference paper, clean the inside of the microwave and pack my bags.

I've already put two things into my bag: perhaps a trifle optimistically one of them is a floppy sunhat. The other is A.S. Byatt's The Children's Book. Bit of a brick but in every other way just right for a travelling companion.

Find the lady who is responsible and SACK HER!

2009-06-10T21:30:00.003+10:00

That's what you do when seven adult men make total dickheads of themselves on the television. Obviously.

Housesitter

2009-06-07T19:07:00.002+10:00

We are looking for a housesitter to stay in our place for most of July. It's a nice comfortable house in the outer northern suburbs, five minutes walk from the train station. Local real estate agents would add that it's the same distance from a good shopping street with 'cosmopolitan' cafes. You can also walk to the local RSL and they have a cover man (solo cover band) playing there on Friday nights and Sunday afternoons.

Must not be afraid of chickens and must be able to cope with three cats. I don't want to be worried about them while I'm away.

If you are interested, or know someone who might be, get in touch at sillsbend AT gmail DOT com.

Samson & Delilah

2009-06-02T19:18:00.004+10:00

I was so pleased in today's seminar (last class for two months! Hurray!), that when asked about which one Australian text they'd choose to make Year 12 students study, somebody nominated Samson & Delilah and other people agreed. (NOBODY voted for Voss. Which is a datum ripe for investigating, because it was a school book when I was a school child, and I went to a technical school, and nobody objected to it specifically any more than they objected to having to study books at all.) Anyway, Samson & Delilah is such a terrific film - entirely deserving of the recognition it's got at Cannes and of the packed audiences it's attracting here at home - and just when I'd begun to think the local film industry was really and truly permanently stuffed, along it comes, almost out of nowhere, because I understand that the director and writer Warwick Thornton has not made a feature film before this one.

It's such an incredibly difficult thing to do, to begin with, to make a piece of art about traumatic subject matter. It's a minefield actually. Over-aestheticising and disappearing up one's own art-cinema-hole is a problem; creating emotional pornography is a problem, especially when rape is depicted; getting into a black pit and wallowing there is a big problem, but so is the ethically suspect Schindler's List technique of inflicting upliftingness on a story that is actually anything but. Samson & Delilah negotiates all this so well that not only does it avoid traps but it positively and meaningfully steers the storytelling, with integrity and purposefulness. That's what 'directing' means, actually. The effect of this for the (white) spectator is that the film always feels underwritten or guaranteed - you don't doubt that the movie is doing what it's doing for good reasons - which is indispensably necessary when the film shows things that are very hard to witness and which are not so easy to understand.

What it reminded me of was Robert Bresson, especially Mouchette; only perhaps better, in that some aspects of Bresson's style which in his films don't really rise above the beautiful and poetic acquire ethical valence in S & D, and this in turn strips off some of the noli me tangere aura of high culture that art films can be damaged and limited by.

A stray comment I read years ago about some German filmmakers is exactly applicable to the style and method of Samson & Delilah: it's a film that knows exactly where to set up the camera in relation to the characters. Not so distant that we can't form a human relationship with them - but not so close either that we invade their privacy. The very careful limiting of talking in the movie is doing exactly this too. No talking between Delilah and Samson sharpens our need to interpret them both, Delilah especially, but it also makes us know that we can't just frictionlessly colonise their inner lives. That tension between wanting to have every private emotion revealed to us in the easy manner we're familiar with, and also willing these two people (again, Delilah in particular) to find a space where their physical and emotional sovereignty is respected, is very productive for the film and very pwerful for a white audience (I don't mean to suggest that the film is for whites or that a white reading of it is what matters, but I do wish lots of Australians would go and see this movie as enthusiastically as we went to see Australia.) The film repeats and reconfigures that doubled tension between wanting to see private meanings, and learning to hope for the survival of meanings screened or opaque to 'our' eyes, in all kinds of subtle, natural ways. I loved the tape Delilah listens to each night (and I wonder if that's an intentional echo of Never Let Me Go?), and the series of events related to the uses of painting is incredibly rich and thoughtful.

There was much in the movie that I found quite mysterious and much too that is horrible - the violence and the despair, the indifference of various white people to Delilah's injuries and obvious distress. It doesn't seem like a betrayal of these elements that the film allows both Samson and Delilah to survive, and I haven't yet managed to work out why that is. I'd like to see it again, and soon.

Essay topics

2009-06-01T21:23:00.005+10:00

I've been writing essay topics today.

That, and reading a selection of publications by gentlemans of UniMelb EngDept that made me feel all stupid and unsophisticated like, then having an interesting debate about them with myself in my afternoon seminar where nobody else had done the reading. I should really get a couple of sock puppets to make these one-woman debate shows a little bit more visually interesting.

Yes that, the essay topics, and writing and sending off a conference paper proposal also in the general direction of Parkville and also feeling it lacked a certain something along the lines of the clever way they talk there about spectacular discursive formations and suchlike. The good thing is I am old enough now not to mind this very much.

It's only fair to acknowledge that while I was doing these things I was using a computer, and that means yes I did look at a video or two on Youtube. Like this one for example.

Here are the essay questions I settled upon. Tell me which essay you would do, what book you would do it on (any book you like as long as it's by a woman) and what you would say. Thus you get all the fun of thinking about essay writing without actually having to write the essay itself. If you want to complete the fantasy by receiving a mark for your imaginary essay, you can give yourself 64 which is what Dorian usually suggests I do with the remaining biannual essays when I'm about two thirds of the way through and the thought of reading another one is hurting me. No, actually, just go ahead and give yourself a mark of your own choice. According to my understanding of the latest principles of educational theory, self-assessment is a very fine and totally non-dodgy thing. The highest grade gets a prize.

(NB 'wwb' is the subject code. Not some newfangled literary studies jargon. It reminds me of the PKD story "Beyone Lies The Wub.")

1. “I may tell you that the very next words I read were these – ‘Chloe liked Olivia…’ Do not start. Do not blush. Let us admit in the privacy of our own society that these things sometimes happen. Sometimes women do like women.” In A Room of One’s Own, Virginia Woolf writes that fiction by men contains very few depictions of friendships between women. Discuss how female friendship, liking, co-operation or affinity is represented in a text studied in WWB.

2. Explore the ways a WWB text of your choice thinks about being dependent and/or being depended upon.

3. Anger and aggression, and conciliation or the desire to please, are the two dangers facing women novelists, according to Woolf. Why might this be so? Discuss a WWB work of fiction that you consider to be either angry or conciliatory, saying whether you think that text is distorted or limited because of this, and explaining how you arrived at that opinion.

4. What does clothing mean in the WWB text of your choice? How does it relate to the “real” self?

5. “War shadows every gendered relationship” argues Joshua Goldstein (in War and Gender). Discuss the ways a WWB text uses war to construct relations between men and women.

6. Discuss the representation of a woman writer in a WWB text, using Woolf’s stipulations about the necessity of financial and spatial independence as a starting point.

7. Describe the stylistic, thematic, and psychological role of interruption in a WWB text of your choice.

8. Several WWB texts suggest special links – both bonds and resemblances - between women and animals. Explain how such links operate in a text of your choice. How do you feel about these suggestions?

9. Write an essay exploring how a WWB text depicts female education. What is the appeal of stories about schools and schooling? Pay particular attention to what girls are taught and to what they actually learn.

Save Salt

2009-05-28T10:11:00.002+10:00

Salt Publishing, heroic independent international publishing house specialising in contemporary poetry, is in deep trouble.

Thanks for that, GFC.

Salt is asking for people who don't want to see them go under to buy one book from their lists. It doesn't matter whether you buy it from a physical bookshop or online, but you need to do it quickly. Here's their online shopfront. They do gift books, criticism, anthologies as well as poetry collections and chapbooks. I'm leaning toward this.

Congratulations anyway.

2009-05-27T17:30:00.005+10:00

Normally when I put up a new post, the blog gets about 70 visitors on that day. Today, it's had ten times that much traffic.

Just think of how many bazlottoes have come and gone, unnoticed, unloved, among those seven hundred Monthly-gossip seeking blog wanderers. Poor little Bazlottoes! Come back to the safe and warm arms of the ones who really love you.

Meanwhile, elsewhere, the great pageant of the blogosphere embarrassing itself trundles on.

I'm sorry

2009-05-26T18:06:00.005+10:00

Five years ago I was sitting in a minibus with a whole lot of people who were Americans. (This was in America.) One of them spoke to me and of all the people I talked with on that trip it's only her whose face and voice I can remember. That's because she was the first real person I'd personally encountered to voice that magnificently blended joint insult and compliment that Americans have been giving Australians for the last forty years. She said: "I went to Australia and I thought it was great. It was like how I imagine the US used to be, in the 60s - before it got all crapped up."

When I woke up this morning Sol Trujillo was on the radio giving his views about Australia and when I got in the car this evening to go home the talkback venom was flowing free in a manner that suggested it had been doing so for quite some considerable time.

How long did Trujillo live & work here? Long enough to notice that Australia is a racist country. So it was longer than five minutes. But that's not the reason nobody here liked him. Nobody liked him because he phlegmatically presided over the neverending postapocalyptical demoniac nightmare of hopeless, infuriatingly stupid and expensive fuckups that is the national telecommunications "provider", and he got paid a million billion dollars for doing so. But what's this about having a backward business culture compared to the leaders on the global financial stage? He said that like it's a bad thing.

Now about this whole shiny new editor of The Monthly business. Unlike the first time I gave my unsolicited opinion about The Monthly here, upon the occasion of its appearance on our wide brown mediascape, I've thought quite carefully about what I'm going to say. (Don't bother looking for that other post, because it's long since been deleted. Let's just say that one of the contributors turned up in comments threatening to punch me on the nose.) Sacking the previous editor in that manner was totally shameful and The Monthly can't really be regarded now as much more than a source of trainwreck for those of us interested in publishing.

So, new editor: I have to say that all things considered so far, the appointment strikes me as positively effulgent with possibilities for the richest varieties of farce. 23 is not too young to be editing a big-deal magazine by any means, (but is he really 23? Look at that photo in the paper. Surely he is only 8.) I know The Age has its tongue in Gabriella Coslovich's cheek when pointing out that he numbers Alain de Botton among his facebook friends, as if that's one of the accomplishments that earned him the job, but at the same time they couldn't get away with that if he'd done anything that seemed to indicate he was equipped to handle the very specific difficulties associated with this job.

This interview with Umberto Eco was pointed out in comments at LP and I have seen it seriously mentioned as one of the for-real strings to the new editor's bow. Well, I read that, and to misparaphrase Lucky Jim, it shows he's got some of the qualifications, but unfortunately he's got most of the disqualifications also. The patronising little verbal head-pat bestowed by Morry Schwartz, as quoted in that Age story, bodes extremely well too as a harbinger of future golden entertainment. Anyway, I wish him good luck, but not too good.

me again

2009-05-22T23:24:00.004+10:00

Hi. I'm still sick. This is crap! Who is responsible!
Anyway, it occurred to me that you, Blog, have not yet been informed about what happened last week when I tried to renew my passport. Have you done this lately? You have to fill in the form online, print it out, and take it to the P.O. You can't just get a form there and write in the answers.
Although, because about half my typed-in answers somehow changed themselves into jumbled & incomprehensible code, the post office person whited them out and I wrote them in again. So I was wondering why I had to do it online in the first place when she asked me to sign and date the application.
Which I did, putting the wrong date on the form. And then they said they would not process the application so that was the end of that particular waste of time exercise.

Now I am going to have to attempt it again on Monday because we are going overseas a month and a half. We're going to England - I'm going to a lovely Jane Austen conference at Chawton where Austen used to live, then we're going to Bath and a few other places, then a week in London, then a bit where we haven't decided yet between country France and St. Petersburg (though strongly leaning toward the latter) and then a week in Venice where Dorian is also conferencing but I will probably just go to the Biennale or something.

Won't all that be fun and also horrifyingly expensive. We're not actually very organised yet but my main priority is to get next semester's teaching sorted out before we go, although organising the new passport is admittedly kind of essential. I also need to decide whether to re-attempt the unpleasantness of having the required photographs taken because the man who did it last week made me look like a horrible, old, double-chinned murderer.

carry on matron

2009-05-22T10:33:00.003+10:00

If I said I was lying in bed with clag dripping out of my nose and weird noises emanating from the belly, what would you think? Yes, that's right I'm sick!!! It's come a bit early this year; there is actually still a fortnight of teaching to go. Dorian has had this attractive disease for two weeks and I thought I'd managed to avoid acquiring it, but obviously I thought that too soon. And sadly he is not really better enough himself to nurse me as I recline in my bed of pain.

I'll have to drag my leaking carcass off to work this afternoon as there's stuff there that must be attended to but I'm planning to sleep a lot and do little else on the weekend and my fingers are crossed that a good rest will nip this in the bud.

Despite the germs Dorian kindly accompanied me last night to the opening of Persuasion at the National Gallery of Victoria. This is an exhibition of Regency-era (loosely interpreted) fashion; they have got a lot of fashion magazines, at which I didn't really look because they were hard to see and you can get a better sight of such things online quite easily now, and about thirty garments which I did of course look at with great interest.

Only a minor miracle preserves a muslin dress or a silk pelisse or a pair of red kid shoes in anything like exhibitable condition for two hundred years - my jumpers in the cupboard managed to get mothholes in eight months - & of course it's only the costly garments that get put aside rather than being worn out. So not only is there not much in the exhibition in the way of workaday clothing, there is hardly any mens clothes at all - just one quite beautiful linen shirt. Unless you count the kind of amazing installation placed in the very centre of the gallery, namely a getup allegedly worn by Colin Firth in the 1996 P&P. ('Allegedly' because the display card says the costume supply firm it's been borrowed from *think* this is the outfit he wore for the diving into pond sequence, even though you cannot see any bit of shirt under the coat and waistcoat and stock, and the coat that *is* there doesn't appear to match any of the coats in the screenshots I can find on the Web. It's probably a good thing that my DVD is in my office or I'd have to spend the rest of the day fact-checking.) I quite see that this costume had to be displayed on its own and not mixed in with the historical garments and that's why the curator put it in the only freestanding display case, but aside from the practical reason, the placement of an interpolated fetishised Darcy-body at the centre of an exhibit nominally devoted to celebrating what women wore in Jane Austen's lifetime is, how do you say? symptomatic?

It was good hearing people's comments to each other about the dresses. The one pictured here was quite clearly labelled as a day dress, but spectator after spectator assumed it was a nightie. There are two basically red printed cotton day dresses on display and I heard a couple of people say confidently that these were unusual because women mostly didn't wear strong colours. As if they'd been to 1809 and seen evidence of this with their own eyes. I remembered that after I started reading Austen it took me several years to develop any sort of concept of how the kinds of people and places represented in the novels might have looked. It just didn't seem to matter. Now we are all pretty fluent in the visual grammar of the Regency - or in the versions of it seen in the movies, really.

Down in the lobby, at the unneccesarily lavish launch function, a young woman in costume played the harpsichord (not, as it turns out, an instrument specially suited for providing background music in a noisy cavernous room). Following the Canberra exercise I'm pretty familiar with the way dresses based on the same pattern I used tend to look, and the one she had on was definitely cut to that design. And being able to compare actual Regency garments with a modern approximation of them was enlightening. We do the bust area entirely wrong, to begin with. The breast shape is totally different - there's no under-curve - it's a smooth sort of pigeon-chested rise upward with a bit of cleavage at the top (which is probably swathed in a neck-kerchief or a fine muslin collared insert, on most women.) Also, all the sleeves are so long - fingertip length or more - that either women wore them pushed them up or their cuffs were continually filthy.

From a dressmaking persepctive I was most interested in the way Regency fashion dealt with the intersection of the shoulders and the upper back. That our recent minor Regency-style revivals have focused on Empire waist and bust line treatments (eg, 1960s style) probably says something about the modern titty fixation distracting us from all the other characteristic shapes. Regency shoulders look genuinely weird and interesting to my eyes, because they extend so much further across the upper back than our sleeves do. This makes the back itself look narrow and the natural shape of the arms and shoulders tends to disappear under drapery and moulding. The time's probably ripe for some enterprising designer to plunder Regency techniques (with a bit more realism than John Galliano's recent attempt.)

me on the radio

2009-05-15T18:07:00.004+10:00

Tonight I'm being interviewed on ABC local radio (which as you know is the same program nationally overnight) about why Jane Austen is still and/or suddenly popular. I am mentally getting ready for this by trying not to think about my default model for any sort of public talking about research exercise, which is of course the "Merrie England" lecture in Lucky Jim. If you happen to be awake at 3.30am then you can hear the interview, and perhaps you could assist by throwing a faint to create a distraction if I seem to be getting into dangerously deep waters.

No Place for a Nervous Budgie

2009-05-14T10:53:00.002+10:00

If only I had had a camera. Yesterday afternoon I was walking along the ground floor corridor connecting the Humanities buildings. (Which looks like this -

- not very nice hey)

And I happened to look down and to the left, and I saw a little blue budgie standing in the corner with his face to the wall, looking uncannily like Phillipe in the inaugural instalment of Achewood. I bent down and put out my hand and little budgie turned around and walked onto it. Budgie was very tame and friendly and stood quietly and trustingly on my finger while I wondered what to do with him. In the lift back up to the 5th floor he kept doing little wriggly movements with his shoulders so I decided to call him Atlas Shrugged. Atlas sat placidly on my forearm while I rang the vet we take the cats to for instructions ('I rang for instructions', I mean, not 'we take the cats to the vet so they can be instructed', although that's probably not a bad plan). They suggested taking him to the local pet shop. At this stage I was still thinking it might be possible to reunite him with his owner. I considered ringing Today Tonight but thought better of it. As a last resort I called the wildlife sanctuary that's attached to this campus and they didn't want him either, although they did seem to say that they'd had other calls about little budgie that day. (Which means some mean person noticed him and tried to do something but in the end just left him to his fate.)

So I put him into an empty copier paper box and drove him to the pet shop. The pet shop owner said he was a male and put him into a private budgie suite. Last I saw he was having a drink of water and eating some budgie seeds.

So if you know of anyone who's lost their budgie in the Bundoora / Macleod area, direct them here.

Disastro

2009-05-06T13:13:00.004+10:00

Q. What's worse than Swine Flu? A. Keira Knightley Flu, and Kazuo Ishiguro's brilliant novel Never Let Me Go is the latest tragic victim.

Truly, that is incredibly bad news.

oh dear

2009-05-05T19:31:00.007+10:00

I was planning on writing a rather ranty post about how sad Frank Kermode's essay in the current London Review of Books has made me, but the online version is only available to subscribers so I don't think I will trouble you with that. Except to say that really, there is no point at all going on insisting that Sense & Sensibility is not as good as Jane Austen's other novels. It is just an utterly pointless, worthless critical gesture. Unless the aim is to make some sort of reverse-engineered swipe at the multitudes of people, female people almost always in my experience, to whom that novel means a lot and means it very deeply. Except I don't want to believe that can be the aim, mainly because Kermode is too intelligent and decent and good a critic to stoop to that kind of thing, but also because I don't think he seems to be conscious of how much the novel is valued, not for its movie connections or its olde-worldeyness, but for itself. Nor indeed does he seem conscious of what is valuable about it. As part of that strange critical project of demonstrating that S&S doesn't have much intrinsic value and only retains a readership (at the expense of other, better, but forgotten novels, which aren't named, I note) because it is by the author of P&P (which people apparently only like because the tv show had a wet blouse in it), Kermode quotes Elinor praising Edward Ferrars: the problem, he says, is that how Elinor talks is not how a sisterly-girly chat about a boy actually sounds. No: that's right; this is a novel, like Ulysses and Lolita and those other books where people are liberated from the burden of having to talk exactly how they do in real life, and I can't for the life of me figure out why one of the best critics alive has fallen into thinking it's a bug rather than a feature. Besides the strange animus against S&S there is also an unedifying bemusement about the project of editing Austen's texts with the same care and seriousness routinely meted out to Shakespeare (and as Kermode observes, to D. H. Lawrence, among other novelists.) Because really, who's interested in those trivial and boring little details?

Last year, at the Austen summer school at UQ, on the last afternoon, one of the younger women taking the course told us that at lunch a man from the James Joyce stream had said to her "Jane Austen brings out the absolute worst in the silly women who read her." That, my friends, is a True Story. Something* about Austen makes people feel they can say that kind of nonsense. Why, why, why, why, why. Anyway. I realise now I have written the rant anyway so there is nothing for it now but to publish. Here is a picture I took in Canberra. The sculpture is by Tom Bass.

Looking at this photo I realise that while I am here ranting I also want to record my profound disappointment in the pathetic photographs The Sartorialist has published from his Melbourne - Sydney jaunt: I don't know whether to hold the subjects or the photographer responsible for being so unimaginative and generally embarrassing, but it's the same outcome either way: LAME.

* by 'something about Austen', I probably mean 'the lack of a dick'.

Golden Clericism

2009-05-04T11:48:00.002+10:00

When I say 'Golden Cleric Award', or more specifically Golden Cleric Award Acceptance Speech, do people actually know what I'm referring to? It is all too easy to forget that not everyone is lucky enough to know Father Ted off by heart. I haven't received my G.C. award yet but I have gotten a somewhat chuffing invitation to come to a dinner put on by one of the residential colleges here and impart wisdom to the assembled collegians. (I think the Baron might have done something similar last year if I remember rightly.) Of course I will actually think of something appropriate and meaningful to say but I do love having the opportunity to imagine delivering a G.C.A.A.S. Should I tell them my views on plagiarism? Or what I think about the 'is an Arts degree useful' debate? Or some thoughts on Literature today...? It is part of the broader fantasy of getting into some kind of position of authority and success and immediately & completely abusing the privileges accompanying it, in the most reckless possible manner.

Just one of the many many reasons why Father Ted is the best tv show ever made.

Monday morning can't-look-away

2009-05-04T11:35:00.002+10:00

Pictures of stuff from the auction of Michael Jackson's possessions.

Thoughtfully arranged into a slideshow of incredibly terrifying compellingness.

Thank me later.

Teaching only positions

2009-05-01T10:08:00.003+10:00

We've changed our banking arrangements recently and what with one thing and another I have been slow cleaning up the transfer of direct debits to the new accounts. I just did the last one this morning - NTEU fees. And I came damn close to resigning my membership in the process - not only because the website is the worst organised and slowest loading in the entire modern world - but because of the unbelievable fact that the senior executive of the union is flatly opposing the introduction of ongoing teaching-only appointments. If what's reported in this article by Bernard Lane is accurate (and there's no reason to think otherwise) then it seems to me that the union has pretty much lost sight of the most basic objectives of trade unionism, ie to use solidarity and collective bargaining to improve the working conditions of the most vulnerable and exploited workers in the industry. Those being casual academics. The NTEU does have a some sort of department aimed at representing the interests of casuals, but now that push is coming to shove I think the fundamental tokenism, or at least ineffectuality, of this gesture is revealed.

Lane quotes McAlpine as saying "A teaching-only academic is an oxymoron." WTF. WTF. WTF. What does this say about the union's opinion of the work done by casual / sessional / short term fixed contract academics? Doesn't he know about the excremental theory of graduate education?

The implied suggestion that research activity is necessary for effective teaching is a red herring. I think it's debatable that it is, personally, given the stupidity of many of the current measures of research activity now in use. But, in humanities at least, the casual staff who are now currently employed on a teaching only basis (and upon the steady supply of whose labour the viability of the current system absolutely depends) are almost without exception also engaged in research. They're just not being paid to do it. Which is of course an issue. But I'm not convinced it is as urgent and pressing an issue for the union to concern itself with, when the actual employment conditions of casuals are so unbelievably exploitative and insecure. I have to wonder if the union has asked its sessionally employed members at the unis considering industrial action whether they would like to be able to apply for ongoing teaching-only positions.

From the article again - "If it was about casuals and they wanted to offer them a more secure form of appointment, that's one thing," said Michael Thompson, NTEU president at Sydney. "(But) when we discussed it with them last week, they were for advertising teaching-only positions." Again, WTF is this supposed to mean?

I've only ever been in one other union - the SDA. Retail is another industry with a permanently high proportion of casual staff. The SDA looked after casuals and didn't treat them as second-class members of the workforce. The contrast is really striking.

As far as the motives of the university executives who are pressing for the introduction of teaching-only positions are concerned, of course it's right to assume the worst. But that doesn't mean that the interests of the administration can't coincide with the interests of the workers at the bottom of the food chain.

I stayed in the union for now, but if industrial action is to be taken at La Trobe I will have to reconsider.

update: today's news looks slightly better

teaching tip

2009-04-28T19:46:00.000+10:00

Make your students do Show and Tell. Seriously. It is the best thing ever.

So you think you can dance? (jane Austen edition)

2009-04-19T20:14:00.005+10:00

Just a few pictures while I work out how much (if any) I can ethically blog about our weekend among the dancers

I can probably safely mention that 1) I walked home in that getup on Saturday night, though Dorian removed his hat 2) my calves are still aching and 3) as good as the festival was the most fun part of the whole four days was very definitely hanging out with local bloggers - first meeting Hil on Friday afternoon and then breakfast with the Ampersand Duck and Crazybrave / PDP households this morning, followed by a tour of Ms Duck's studio and a visit to the National Portrait Gallery. Delicious, hilarious, interesting, and most importantly, sane! Thanks, Canberrans.

dress done, plus Wednesday night stupid

2009-04-15T19:29:00.004+10:00

I made the dress.

It's not turned out too bad, I think, considering how very very bad it could have been. Because I'd had a couple of glasses of wine when I cut it out I made rather a bad mistake in cutting the back of the skirt and had to patch in another panel, which fortunately isn't that noticeable (at least, I can't notice in when I've got the thing on.) Dogpossum's advice to make it a wee bit on the small side to allow for ease when it gets warm really helped - as, I must say, did all of the comments telling me not to go the long sleeves & high neck. Oh, and I did have other help too.

Dorian said the finished dress looked like something Mary Crawford would wear. I'm taking that very much as a compliment (although one of the RJA students last year said M.C. was a 'skank'.) And I'm assuming he didn't mean Mary Bennet, or, god help us, Mary Musgrove. It feels weird to wear because the waist seam is about an inch below the armpits. I'll get some photos on the weekend. Afterwards it will make an excellent dishevelled madwoman nightgown for watering the front yard in at 6am on Sunday mornings.

Now, on to the bonus Wednesday Night Stupid:

This was in the local paper. It's an ad brochure for a housing estate.

I'm going to write to them.

more wedding pictures

2009-04-09T21:23:00.002+10:00

I see that Dorian has put up a selection of wedding photos on FB. I have no idea how the permissions thing works there and you mightn't be able to see them if you're not one of his seven hundred thousand friends. But here's the link, anyhow (this is assuming you're still interested. My own interest is much decreased, which is a great relief, because it was thoroughly overpowering towards the end there.)

Ampersand Duck's picture of the back of my legs standing on a confetti-strewn lawn is the one I like best, and not only because she magically managed to photograph it in such a way that you can't see how insanely crooked that hemline is. I haven't commented on her post or Meredith's or Pav's or Tim's, nor have i said 'thank you' for the wonderful comments you all wrote on Sunday's post, because to be truthful I am still feeling extremely emotional about the whole thing, I hadn't expected that at all, and it's exhausting. I need to just be reserved about it for a little while now. By the time I feel less all-over-the-shop, I expect, the rest of the world will have moved on as is right and proper. Don't think that if I don't say anything much now it's because I don't appreciate your great kindnesses.

Next research project: operation Do You Understand Muslins, Sir?

2009-04-09T19:54:00.005+10:00

Forty-two essays, one book review, and seven days from today, I'm going to a Jane Austen shindig in our nation's capital. (My exquisite husband will be accompanying me: he's going to pretend he's read those novels, he says.) The shindig is extensive and elaborate and mainly, indeed, entirely appears to revolve around getting dressed up and pretending you are Lizzy. I don't know how much of four days' worth of dancing, embroidering, card playing, swordfighting etc I'll be able to cope with. But as long as I can manage a couple of days that's probably enough: the main purpose of the visit is to meet and get to know some Austen / costume enthusiasts, and to invite them to be interviewed about how they see the relationship between the re-enactor suite of activities, and the novel-reader set of experiences. Stephanie's work on medievalism and Gothic in Australian culture amply demonstrates that there's a great deal more to this kind of reworking than the eccentricities that meet the eye.

In the spirit of disposing of the last few lingering shreds in my soul of cool and scholarly disdain for the reading practices of the hoi polloi, I am going to do two things quite frightening to me: dress up in Jane Austen clothes, and attempt to dance. In other words, I'm joining in, and I hope this will cure me once and for all of using words like freaks in my conversation to describe Regency re-enactors. (I managed not to call them freaks or weirdos on the ethics application, though, so I'm getting better.) I'm uncertain which to be more scared about, the dancing or the gowning, and that's good thing because it means I can alternately fixate on whichever is temporarily less anxiety-inducing.

Dancing is particularly hard for me because I have severe left-right confusion and can't follow spoken directions; nor can I imitate the movements of somebody who is facing me. Yes, I AM aware that this makes me Mr Collins. And thanks to Lost In Austen, this means that whenever I go the wrong way or tread on somebody's feet I'll be picturing Mr C. sniffing his fingers.

Not much can be done about that now, but, ladies (and gentlemen if you are interested in these things) you could help me decide what to do about the gown. Here's the pattern I've got:

I need to decide whether to do the long sleeves or the short, and the high neck or the low.

For an evening dress it should really be short sleeves / low neck. But vanity whispers in my ear that this is the combo that makes you look more like 'the fat girls with short noses that so disturbed [Austen] at the 1st. Ball' than is strictly necessary. There is also the 'expensively & nakedly dress'd' judgment Austen intimidatingly passed on some poor woman of her acquaintance. But neither do I specially want to dress up as a Mormon wife. I also wonder how much trimming and of what kind to put on the dress. Too much is Mrs Elton angling most awfully for compliments. Not enough is, well, Anne De Bourgh. If only Trinny and Susannah were here to decide for me. The fabric I've got is the most plausible Regency-esque stuff I could find for $5/m. It's a sort of Wedgwood blue silk with matt/satin stripes. (I intended to do white - 'a woman can never be too fine while she is all in white', [Edmund Bertram, whose ideas about clothes are certainly not as impeccable as Henry Tilney's] - but I couldn't find any white material that looked sufficiently unmodern). I got a bit of soft old gold rumpled silk that could be a sash and some teal ribbons that could go around the hem. Both would be overkill, so it's one or the other. Opinions sought, especially with links to pictures.

slight headache today

2009-04-05T12:57:00.005+10:00

Thanks for all the well wishes, it was a wonderful day and we loved it. I'm exhausted today (and I've now got to write the rest of tomorrow's lecture) so i won't catch up on reading / answering email for a day or two more, sorry about that.

Here's a photo. First of several probably.

Any bloggers who happened to be present, you have our blessing to post whatever you like as long as there aren't any identifiable children in the pictures. I have some nice pictures of you and I'll post them if (& only if) you tell me it's okay.

update: Dorian and I

and moi with only broidesmaid who showed up before all the guests went home (he obvs overslept, and forgot to wash his face as well)

Hi blog

2009-04-01T09:23:00.002+11:00

Sorry dear blog for not posting for more than two weeks. As you know our wedding is on this Saturday and I still have quite a few things to do like finishing my dress which I am totally bored with making and generally agonising over. There have been several other things like we FINALLY had the asbestos roof removed and a new corrugated iron one put on instead. Also, I've had a lot of work work to do (got a lecture to write for Monday, for eg). So I prob won't be back until the middle of next week, altho I would like to try to fit in a bit of weddingday liveblogging if I can manage it. The night before last we fitted out my study as a bloggers' lounge (desk and bookshelves out, slightly scary cane lounge suite found on nature strip in). There has been a fair amount of furniture-moving going on, as you might expect if you've ever been to our place and thought about how you would fit ninety people in there.

If you're coming to this wedding here are some dot points for your consideration:

* the weather bureau seem determined that it's going to be a coolish day with maybe a few showers in the morning. Boo to that. But yeah, it could rain, and the ceremony is outside, so be prepared.

* On the other hand, last Saturday we had a practice in the back yard and I got sunburnt. So be prepared for that too possibly.

* There's just the normal amount of car parking in our street. The train is recommended, and the station is five minutes walk away from the house.

* People have asked about wedding presents. Firstly these are unnecessary. Secondly if you want to buy us a third-world chicken from Oxfam that would be lovely. Thirdly I have always coveted one of these. Fourthly, the front yard still has a lot of room for plants in it (west-facing, clay, not getting a lot of water.)

Since I probably won't be back on the internets before next week I will also note that I've got an article in this coming Saturday's Age which will explain in abundant detail why it's a very good thing that we don't have a ute nor any other vehicle capable of fitting very much scavenged stuff into the back. Enjoy.

They'll be able to wear them again.

2009-03-15T12:14:00.004+11:00

I made the chief bridesmaids their outfits yesterday. They are not allowed to wear them out of the house because there is mud everywhere at the moment. That said Basil has got his on and I don't know where he is. Probably lying contentedly in a puddle somewhere.

Albie doesn't know how to hold still. This is as unblurry as I can make him.

I can't look at these for too long, my stomach incisions hurt when I laugh.

Operation! (Bzzzt!)

2009-03-15T09:24:00.005+11:00

On Friday I had surgery. It was just about as much fun as you might expect. I was instructed to present myself at the Mercy at 6.30 in the morning and did so, but then had to sit and twiddle my thumbs for three hours in a chair facing a television showing morning television shows. The form-filling-out preliminaries took about ten minutes and then I just sat and waited. There was no visible queue which somehow made it more annoying. Have you ever tried to read a review of three monographs on the Nazi film industry while Spongebob Squarepants is squealing in your ear? By 9.30 the operation was a welcome interruption to Mel & Kochie induced irritated boredom.

I must have looked terrified when I went into the lying-down-on-table room, though, because the three people there to get me ready all immediately began making soothing clucking sounds while putting in the drip-thing, squishing something cold through the tube into the back of my hand etc. I was lying there sleepily looking at the double doors to the operating room and then I was waking up, still on the table but in another room, looking at a clock that said 12.30.

A nurse was asking me what my heart rate was normally. I tried to say that I didn't know (but was it just that I didn't understand the question? If she had asked me what my normal blood pressure was I would have known, but anyway.) Another nurse came and asked me if I did a lot of exercise and I seemed to say yes to this and this appeared to have satisfied them both. Now Nurse #1 was flipping through the pages of forms I'd filled out.
You're a uni lecturer, she told me.
mmm
Good hours. You only come in to work about four hours a day.
mm nn no

After the heart rate conversation I felt it would be a good idea if I tried to not go back to sleep in case my heart slowed down any more but I don't think I succeeded. After a bit I was wheeled into another room and lay there, sleepy, curious, and bored while various things happened. My stomach began to hurt and I was given a ‘morphine-like’ pill. I became confused and wished I had brought Voss to the hospital so I could read it while on morphine-like drugs. One of the surgeons who (apparently) did the operation came and showed me two sheets of A4 each with eight full-colour photographs of my ovaries and uterus on them. She pointed out some of the highlights to which I paid less attention than I now wish I had paid, and I think she said I would get the pictures to take to my gynaecologist, although perhaps not because I don't have them now. Or perhaps she knew I would just post them on my blog and so she didn't give them to me. Everyone else in there was wearing blue scrubs, but she had on a really strange dress which was like a normal fitted bodice to the waist, with a scoop neck and cap sleeves, but the skirt was like a full bell with deep pleats folded like the noses of paper aeroplanes, and it was short and pouffy. It also appeared to have a small brass plaque (exactly like a doctor's nameplate next to the door) affixed to the back just below the neckline.

A nurse placed a round of corned beef sandwiches in front of me and another nurse took them away because it was too soon. A bit later the first nurse brought them back again. It was very still and there were few other patients. Someone I couldn't see was quietly sobbing. The nurses and doctors were talking about a caesar, and after a bit I heard a newborn baby exercising its lungs. I could not get comfortable on the trolley because my arms wanted to flop off the sides. I thought about the thing a yoga teacher said to me eight years ago – you have got unusually long arms, Laura - which I have probably thought about more than anything else anyone has ever said to me in my whole life. Based on nothing at all that I could observe, a nurse told me to put my clothes on and go to the toilet. 'When you get up you will see there's a surfboard between your legs' she said. A surfboard? I was very curious about what it could be and was disappointed to discover it was only a big lump of cotton wool. But was I supposed to leave it there? It wasn't attached to anything. I tried putting my undies on over it and the result was ludicrous enough to pierce the morphine-like brainfog. So I left my surfboard on the trolley and went away.

Dorian was there to meet me when I came out of the toilet but I had to wait a bit longer before being told to go home. I have four small cuts in my belly, which is grotesquely distended because they inflate the abdomen with gas: one cut on the navel, one above the hairline, and one at each side of the curve. It's really damn peculiar to think of total strangers fiddling about inside my stomach without my being there while they did it. I only have the cuts to show anyone was ever in there. They have got sticky tape over them. The belly button sticky tape panel goes over the entire belly button, which is gross. I didn't have a shower until early Saturday afternoon, and while I was wiping away the yellow rinse that had been swabbed across my stomach I discovered several creepy dried drips of blood running horizontally across my hips from front to back.

Not looking forward to picking off the sticky tape. That's got to hurt.

Sarsaparilla Lite, and Twitter

2009-03-11T10:34:00.003+11:00

You might've noticed that Sarsaparilla is broken - it has been for quite some time, in fact. This is entirely my fault for setting the thing up somewhat shonkily initially and then failing to engage in all the somewhat strenuous maintenance involved in running a wordpress blog. But it's on the road to recovery, and meanwhile there's a temporary Sars, here. Please add it to your bookmarks or feedreader.

Also, I have gone on Twitter, as lucytartan. Another internetty thing to neglect, hooray!

While I'm here I may as well say that the O-week lady is in my first year tutorial.

?

2009-03-06T20:57:00.001+11:00

oh my god! Was there just an earthquake in Melbourne? The house was quivering. the cats seem freaked out too.

You're doing it wrong!!!!

2009-03-05T21:41:00.004+11:00

Last week I staffed the English information table at some sort of O-week session for Arts students. It was fairly monotonous, in the main, if eye opening; all the questions were variations on the same theme, namely, what are the books for the subject I'm doing? Which is interesting inasmuch as it implies that a lot of enrolling first-years (and it's the motivated ones who show up to o-week things) don't read even as far as the second paragraph of the course description. And that makes me wonder how they decide what subject they're going to do? Not a completely idle wondering since one of the two sem 1 subjects has drastically more students enrolled than does the other, for no good reason that i can deduce. (The names are very similar, so that's probably not it.)

Anyway, after a while along came a student with a different sort of question. And now I will just say that you know I never write about the things individual students do and say, positive or negative, but in this case I feel the making of an exception is appropriate.
The student wanted to know how we break down assignment marks - what percentage goes on expression, what percentage on research, on ideas, argument etc. We don't do it that way and I told her so.

What?!? Huh? Why don't you. You should. Other departments do.

Well, we don't think you can separate 'expression' from 'ideas' in that way. That's kind of what we're about. Form and content depend on each other.

You can separate them, of course you can, and I can't believe what I'm hearing. Ridiculous. So how am I supposed to know what I did wrong?

Well, it's not ridiculous. And (beginning to get a bit warm now) even if you could separate them, why would assigning a separate number for each hypothetical category make a more meaningful grade than one overall number, plus the very detailed comments you will get on each essay? The comments will tell you what you did well and suggest ways to improve.

It's not scientific.

I agree with you. English isn't all that scientific.

(pause)

Then it's all arbitrary, is that what you're telling me? And are the essays anonymised? Does the marker know the name of the writer?

It is NOT all arbitrary, we are very experienced at this, we use criteria that everyone is told about, and we cross-check with other markers in the department. Why do you think breaking it down into sets of numbers would be any less arbitrary?

Are they anonymised?

No.

So it's the person who gets marked, not the essay?

No, it's the essay.

We need to know the writer personally so we can judge whether the essay might be plagiarised.

I don't see how that would help you see if it was plagiarised.

It's the only way to get an idea of what the writer is capable of.

I still don't see how it would help. And I can't believe you don't break down the marks. That's incredible and bizarre.

Well, you are very welcome to take it up with your course co-ordinator.

Oh, I'll be doing that at the first opportunity.

And that was the end of the conversation. As she left, the semicircle of students waiting behind her rolled their eyes and made various other grimaces of extreme irritation. The two girls next to the table explained how much they hated that sort of behaviour, assured me that they grasped the concept of different sorts of assessment in different subjects, and expressed their strong desire to never be in a tutorial with someone who didn't know when to shut up.

Actually, I don't mind being pressed to explain the logic behind institutional processes (though it's never fun trying to negotiate how to do that when the process in question actually IS a bunch of ill-thought-out rubbish) and so what I said to these girls was something to the effect of 'it's all good, airing that sort of challenge is a big part of what going to university is about.' But thinking it over, actually, no. Another at least equally big part of going to university is about holding your tongue long enough for the new information to make its way into your brain. If only in the interests of not shitting fellow students to tears. There's actually no student behaviour I loathe more, not even plagiarism, than when they display their irritation/boredom with one another's tutorial performances. Nobody ever comes out looking good from that sort of scenario.

While we're on the topic of epic fails, there is another reason the o-week questioner should have listened to my answers and here it is:

Yes, I am apparently a La Trobe Lecturer of the Year finalist, and all I've got to show for it is this certificate with its spectacularly grating example of the illiteracy I hate most, i.e. deployment of 'singular they' when the subject's identity and gender are not only known, but are actually identified in the very same sentence.

The other La Trobe certificate-recepient I know of was a person in Philosophy who the students call 'groovy Jack'. It was apparently some sort of student-voting popularity contest organised by a higher ed job recruitment firm, and I didn't know about it until it was all over, obviously, or I'd have told my classes to vote for me. The winner, someone in Queensland, got a trip to Fiji.

Basil report

2009-03-04T11:50:00.003+11:00

Here's a picture of that elegant young gentleman Basil.

It was taken in early January which is why the grass is still green. In an effort to preserve the life of the lawn over summer I did all of the following: bucketed water from the washing machine, when it could be spared from other parts of the garden; covered it in old sheets and doona covers when 35 degree days were predicted; and, finally, mulched it with pea straw. Consequently, there are still a few minute green spots remaining here and there amid the brown. The beautiful and strange rain that has been falling over the past few days might bring the grass back to life. I hope so since I don't want to get married standing on a claypan covered in a load of shrivelled hard dead leaves (cue confused Bridezilla-like roaring and sounds of smashing glass). But even less do I want to get married in my back yard with a hundred friends and relatives standing about getting rained upon. So in summary I would like it to rain a lot over the next three weeks and then stop. Are you listening, Ceiling Cat?

Back to Basil report, though: while he looks really charming and cuddly and sweet in that photo, Basil is actually growing increasingly snappish and cranky with age. Sometimes, in the evenings, when he comes and sits on the couch with D & me, he falls into such an ecstasy of blissed-out happiness that you can hear the purring from the other end of the house. But most of the time, cheerfulness gives way very easily to irritation, which is expressed by biting and/or fisticuffs. It's what lies ahead for us all I suppose.

Don't say I never give you anything.

2009-03-03T19:29:00.000+11:00

Word for today

2009-02-24T14:18:00.001+11:00

Pissoceros

I would not advise you to look it up in the dictionary; most likely you will only be disappointed.

'Average' wedding expenses

2009-02-19T11:40:00.005+11:00

It was widely reported yesterday that significant numbers of Australian weddings now cost an average of $50,000. The ABC's version is filed in their Global Financial Crisis section which seems about right, considering that they don't seem to have a Globular Meringue Dress Costing $6000 Crisis section. And also considering that this kind of dashing, heroic, devil-may-care, no-thought-of-personal-safety spending is what's going to save all of us from economic ruin, if anything is. Oh, hang on a sec - isn't it the getting into stupid, worthless debt thing what set all this going in the first place?

Even though the 'data' derives from an online poll carried out by a bridal magazine, which presumably has advertisers to whom it wants to sell the prospect of reaching a cashed-up and, frankly, heavily suggestible readership, I don't actually doubt that quite a few weddings do indeed cost about this much money. Which is sick.

Discuss......

On the domestic wedding front, perhaps you might like to see the invitations we made.

Geez I've gotten good value out of that book of dressed up kitty photos; thanks Zoe.

cold, hard currency

2009-02-13T12:23:00.003+11:00

We all want, badly, to help the bushfire victims.

Indeed because so many of us want urgently to do this there is no way any kind of material object donation (short of stockfeed, or long-term lending a house or caravan you own) can be helpful. To donate goods that haven't been specifically asked for is both wasteful and a nuisance. So don't do it. Send money. Sell the stuff you've got that you were going to donate, and donate money instead. If it's not sellable, then it's certainly not donatable.

I know that this is frustrating because we want to give meaningful gifts, we are not comfortable with giving plain old money and we do not think it adequately conveys the depth of our feeling.

Frustrating, yes. But, too bad - get over it, and send money. If you've bought stuff, take it back, get a refund, and send the cash.

Send money to the Red Cross. (International readers, this totally means you, too. Consider it a token of appreciation for whatever fun you've got out of reading this blog over the years.)

Emma '09

2009-02-02T13:26:00.003+11:00

The BBC did say a while back that they were not going to do any more classic novel adaptations for a bit, but the credit crunch seems to have sent them straight back to devotedly doing what they sell best, because they are shortly about to produce a new four-parter of Emma. I enjoyed the defensiveness in that press release, viz, Ben Stephenson, Controller Drama Commissioning: "2009 will also see Desperate Romantics and Small Island burst onto the screen and we believe that this offers viewers a real range of stories about our heritage." Desperate Romantics is about the Pre-Raphaelite Brotherhood, 'a real range of stories' lol! Small Island by Andrea Levy I read a few years ago - it's about postwar Carribean migrants to GB - and it's slightly more plausible to speak of it as being some distance away from the Jane Austen classic serial gold standard, but anyhow, moving along... maybe I'm reading too much into it, but the press release really seems to me to be offering a string of justifications for yet another Austen serial, knowing how much complaining there's been about the prevalence of austeny television over the last two years, but at the same time without actually genuinely believing any of the points it halfheartedly puts forward. And why on earth not? Emma is one of the greatest novels in the English language. BBC folks, it's really OK to say that. Ah, well. I also appreciated the snarky postscript about the 1996 ITV version.

A few musings:

1) it's nice to see somebody else is being given a turn at writing an Austen television adaptation

2) the serial will be four hours total which strikes me as almost long enough to do a good job of getting to grips with Emma

3) Over at Austenblog there is a delightful spontaneous proletarian uprising demanding the instatement of Richard Armitage in the role of Mr Knightley.

(Armitage as John Thornton in North & South)

Several Austenblog commenters pointed out that Armitage is almost exactly the right age (37) for Mr Knightley; this does seem to clinch it somehow but assuming he's not available who else might be good for the part? (Please don't say Colin Firth.) And the other parts, who do you like for them?

(that's really all I wanted to write but I'm reminded that in the 'Filmography' section of a recent book about Jane Austen movies, they have listed a 1994 Northanger Abbey starring Anna Paquin, Anthony Hopkins, Ioan Gruffud and other terrific actors, which unfortunately does not exist in reality and was totally invented by Austen fangirls wishlisting away on the internet. Oops.)

floor

2009-01-30T09:57:00.001+11:00

oh yah? I has a bigger floor, and I iz lying on it, molten.

I can't stop

2009-01-28T16:31:00.002+11:00

I can't stop listening to this song. I have to listen to it at least twice a day, more if possible. Don't look for an explanation because there isn't one. There cannot be one.

All the videos on Youtube are just like this one: compter-generated psychedelia + photographs of horses. The horse was the animal of the decade in the 1970s just as lolcats are the epitomic creatures of this era.