No wireless in the airport at Dubai

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

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

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

I wish Basil could come with us

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!

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

Housesitter

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

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

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

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.