Showing posts with label Blogging. Show all posts
Showing posts with label Blogging. Show all posts
Thursday, December 17, 2009
Sunday, August 31, 2008
Reasons why a blogger might suddenly not be blogging
It would be comfortable to think that the reason I've not had much of substance to say here over the last week or three is that life has been particularly busy, intense and fraught; several major tasks and crises have coincided, some of them not of a bloggable nature and/or in any case more likely to produce a thoughtful silence than anything else.
But I think the main reason is probably this thread and all that it implies. Regarding the original post, there are good arguments to make, and IRL in conversation with the author of the post one would probably at least try to make them. But any post about rape, abortion, breasts or any other area of contest and incomprehension between men and women is always going to bring misogynists, extremists and full-on florid nutters out of the woodwork and into the comments thread, and that is where you need to stop and ask yourself what on earth you think you're doing. Such is the charm of blogging that you sometimes forget how much precious time you're wasting in engagement with people you'd normally walk five miles through waist-deep mouldy custard to avoid.
Not always, though.
But I think the main reason is probably this thread and all that it implies. Regarding the original post, there are good arguments to make, and IRL in conversation with the author of the post one would probably at least try to make them. But any post about rape, abortion, breasts or any other area of contest and incomprehension between men and women is always going to bring misogynists, extremists and full-on florid nutters out of the woodwork and into the comments thread, and that is where you need to stop and ask yourself what on earth you think you're doing. Such is the charm of blogging that you sometimes forget how much precious time you're wasting in engagement with people you'd normally walk five miles through waist-deep mouldy custard to avoid.
Not always, though.
Saturday, July 26, 2008
Gardening mystery solved
Damn, I might have known I wouldn't get right through to the end of July posting every single day, but I have done for over three weeks and it's been quite revelatory in a number of ways. Never mind, here's a gardening post for today, and in a moment I shall select a LOLcat to make up for yesterday.
A few posts back I asked for helpful suggestions about what garden pest might have been eating my mint. With the help of a clear day, the trusty digicam and my reading glasses, I have finally found the malefactors.
At first I thought this chameleonic little dude here,
a lover of other herbs besides mint as I already had cause to know (they also like sage, another herb that mostly gets left alone by pests, and as with mint they blend in beautifully with the green) was the only culprit.
BUT NO ... the tiny woolly bears were in on the act as well. I know it looks like a giant monster here, but that is a small mint leaf, as you can see from its size in the previous photo relative to the tip of a modestly sized index finger.
Bastards. No prizes for guessing what happened to these creatures after they'd had their portraits taken. It's all very well trying to be Buddhist-like about living creatures and so on, but there are limits.
A few posts back I asked for helpful suggestions about what garden pest might have been eating my mint. With the help of a clear day, the trusty digicam and my reading glasses, I have finally found the malefactors.
At first I thought this chameleonic little dude here,
a lover of other herbs besides mint as I already had cause to know (they also like sage, another herb that mostly gets left alone by pests, and as with mint they blend in beautifully with the green) was the only culprit.
BUT NO ... the tiny woolly bears were in on the act as well. I know it looks like a giant monster here, but that is a small mint leaf, as you can see from its size in the previous photo relative to the tip of a modestly sized index finger.
Bastards. No prizes for guessing what happened to these creatures after they'd had their portraits taken. It's all very well trying to be Buddhist-like about living creatures and so on, but there are limits.
Thursday, July 24, 2008
Circularity
The post below promising an espresso and a free kitty to unattended children caught the eye of ThirdCat, who has also been seeing interesting child-related signs, which in turn reminded me of something I saw yesterday at the supermarket checkout.
You know those little recipe booklet thingies, maybe 5"x7", often put out by the Women's Weekly, on very particular themes and with maybe 20-30 recipes in them, one per page? There was a rack of them at the checkout yesterday and the title of the most prominent one had obviously been inspired by textspeak, specifically the practice of using numbers to signify words and/or phonemes, as in, say, "L8er, dood" or "Luv 2 ur mum", etc.
And several different people -- the writer, the editor, the designer, the publisher -- must have all had a nasty case of 3.30-itis, like the dude in the Continental Soup ad who lets the drug packages go through. Because the book was called
4 Kids To Cook
You know those little recipe booklet thingies, maybe 5"x7", often put out by the Women's Weekly, on very particular themes and with maybe 20-30 recipes in them, one per page? There was a rack of them at the checkout yesterday and the title of the most prominent one had obviously been inspired by textspeak, specifically the practice of using numbers to signify words and/or phonemes, as in, say, "L8er, dood" or "Luv 2 ur mum", etc.
And several different people -- the writer, the editor, the designer, the publisher -- must have all had a nasty case of 3.30-itis, like the dude in the Continental Soup ad who lets the drug packages go through. Because the book was called
4 Kids To Cook
Tuesday, July 22, 2008
ZOMG!!11!!1 Six figures!
Oh yes, it would be nice if that title referred to my income ... heh ... but ... haha .. I probably wouldn't blog about it .... HAHAHAHAHAHA oh well. Sorry, let me regain my composure for a moment here.
No, the title refers to the number of visits to this site since I first installed the stats counter (the one with the numbers at the bottom of the page, not the country-counting one in the sidebar; that's more recent) in March 2006. I didn't expect to get to six figures for another few days, but a couple of links from well-attended sites yesterday put a positively alarming spike in the visitor stats.
I gather that many bloggers obsess about numbers of visitors and comments but I've given it much less attention than I thought I would when I installed the counter, which remains the very basic freebie one that doesn't do all that much fancy stuff. If one blogged in order to make money, I suppose it would matter more -- but then, if one blogged in order to make money it would be incredibly tedious and dreary and I wouldn't do it, so.
My favourite features of the stats counter are (1) the maps that show you where visits are from, (2) the details about visitors' computers, browsers, locations, addresses and so on that help you to stalk your stalkers, and (3) the often hilarious information about what search terms have led total strangers from Chile and Uzbekistan to finish up at your blog.
I haven't done a 'search term' post for ages, but an odd fact leaps out at me every time I check them out. Apart from the usual variations on the themes of 'Pavlov' and 'Cat', the two search terms that most frequently land people here are, wait for it, octopus tentacle porn and frog cake.
The latter now has its very own Wikipedia entry, complete with cross-section. Frog Cake t-shirts are also available.
No, the title refers to the number of visits to this site since I first installed the stats counter (the one with the numbers at the bottom of the page, not the country-counting one in the sidebar; that's more recent) in March 2006. I didn't expect to get to six figures for another few days, but a couple of links from well-attended sites yesterday put a positively alarming spike in the visitor stats.
I gather that many bloggers obsess about numbers of visitors and comments but I've given it much less attention than I thought I would when I installed the counter, which remains the very basic freebie one that doesn't do all that much fancy stuff. If one blogged in order to make money, I suppose it would matter more -- but then, if one blogged in order to make money it would be incredibly tedious and dreary and I wouldn't do it, so.
My favourite features of the stats counter are (1) the maps that show you where visits are from, (2) the details about visitors' computers, browsers, locations, addresses and so on that help you to stalk your stalkers, and (3) the often hilarious information about what search terms have led total strangers from Chile and Uzbekistan to finish up at your blog.
I haven't done a 'search term' post for ages, but an odd fact leaps out at me every time I check them out. Apart from the usual variations on the themes of 'Pavlov' and 'Cat', the two search terms that most frequently land people here are, wait for it, octopus tentacle porn and frog cake.
The latter now has its very own Wikipedia entry, complete with cross-section. Frog Cake t-shirts are also available.
Monday, July 21, 2008
Another border skirmish in the war between men and women
Over at Larvatus Prodeo there is debate raging on several different threads about various things to do with sex, gender and feminism. Assorted male commenters who have not done the reading are doing what such commenters usually do and instructing the female commenters (who have done the reading) on what feminism is, what women are like, and how to define such terms as 'patriarchy' and 'the male gaze'. Most of the definitions they offer appear to be matters of personal opinion; most of their instructions about what women are like appear to be based on particular personal acquaintances.
The terms 'patriarchy' and 'the male gaze' are cornerstones of feminist theory that have, over the years, built up quite precise yet complex meanings within feminist (yes I'll say it, because it's exactly what I mean) discourse. Those who have been following the debates in feminist and gender theory since the 1970s, or who came to it later but have done the reading, have very detailed understandings of how these terms are used within that conceptual framework.
Now someone's turned up observing, correctly, that it's impossible to have a discussion en blog about things to do with sex, gender and feminism because people always end up getting heated and unreasonable.
I wonder why that could possibly be.
The terms 'patriarchy' and 'the male gaze' are cornerstones of feminist theory that have, over the years, built up quite precise yet complex meanings within feminist (yes I'll say it, because it's exactly what I mean) discourse. Those who have been following the debates in feminist and gender theory since the 1970s, or who came to it later but have done the reading, have very detailed understandings of how these terms are used within that conceptual framework.
Now someone's turned up observing, correctly, that it's impossible to have a discussion en blog about things to do with sex, gender and feminism because people always end up getting heated and unreasonable.
I wonder why that could possibly be.
Tuesday, July 15, 2008
Blog post du jour: 'Dead Flat Piece of Dirt of Grace'
This post-a-day business is quite demanding even when one cheats and posts a LOLcat. And tonight it is doubly difficult and delicate, because I know from observing the terrible mistakes of others -- there but for the grace of God, etc -- that if you have had more than two glasses of wine then blogging (or indeed any other form of communication) is potentially a really terrible idea, and I am, well, further on than that.
I mean, hey. I live in South Australia. Temptation finds me. This stuff, for example. Or this. Or, of course, this.
I mean, hey. I live in South Australia. Temptation finds me. This stuff, for example. Or this. Or, of course, this.
Thursday, July 03, 2008
Post-a-day
Having got off to the worst possible start by not actually putting up a post on the first day of the month, I have nonetheless decided that July will be a blog-every-day month, for no reason other than that I've never tried to do it before. The default topic is Work.
Today's work:
-- read, grade and write an examiner's report on an MA thesis in Gastronomy that looks at the evolution and influence of food blogs
-- write and send invoice for same
-- do a whole heap of filing
-- start in on my tax
-- start reading Zoë Ferraris's (she makes a feature of the diaresis and who am I to muck around with someone else's name) novel The Night of Mi'raj for review. Sample:
Today's work:
-- read, grade and write an examiner's report on an MA thesis in Gastronomy that looks at the evolution and influence of food blogs
-- write and send invoice for same
-- do a whole heap of filing
-- start in on my tax
-- start reading Zoë Ferraris's (she makes a feature of the diaresis and who am I to muck around with someone else's name) novel The Night of Mi'raj for review. Sample:
Although it was her wedding, she felt a deep need to please her in-laws, or at least not disgust them. A few weeks ago, Nusra had arranged for a professional dressmaker to come to the house, and the woman had arrived with twenty dresses, every one of them gaudy and overpriced, bedizened with sequins and Byzantine embroidery, gold lamé and tassels, heavy layers of satin and lace. Some had real bone corsets and others had monstrous hoop skirts, which made her feel like a roundabout statue, something to gawk at. Worst of all, the colours were appalling -- mustards and hot pinks, chili greens and a hazardous, painful orange.
Tuesday, May 13, 2008
But I doubt if any publisher would let me call it Femmobolshoblogohemisphere, no matter how hard I begged
I find that some time in the last 24 hours I have written, if only in my head, most of the introductory chapter of a book whose subtitle (visible or otherwise) would be 'Blogging and Gender'.
Unfortunately, much as I would love to research and write said book, there's the small matter of doing the work to pay the bills, including the time-consuming paperwork I'm sure will be involved in taking out a petrol loan, and the several months it will take to clean up the house for sale so I can keep paying for health insurance, which in any case is largely a scam.
So much to say, so little time.
Unfortunately, much as I would love to research and write said book, there's the small matter of doing the work to pay the bills, including the time-consuming paperwork I'm sure will be involved in taking out a petrol loan, and the several months it will take to clean up the house for sale so I can keep paying for health insurance, which in any case is largely a scam.
So much to say, so little time.
Friday, May 02, 2008
New(ish) cooking/kitchen/gastronomy/culinary arts blog!
Now that I have been patiently led by the hand to the cyberplace where it resides, I can in turn direct the as-yet-uninitiated to Zoe-from-Crazybrave's beautiful new food/cooking blog, Progressive Dinner Party.
The watershed
You know you've been blogging for a long time, possibly even too long, when not only have you told all your best stories on the blog but you have forgotten that you've told them and have begun to tell them again.
Wednesday, April 23, 2008
'Hey, knucklehead'
Searching online here and there for this and that, as you do when you've got more pressing commitments and are an old hand at avoidance behaviour, I just stumbled on a wonderfully prescient five-year-old post by Ken Parish, now of Club Troppo, thus:
Date of post: February 18, 2003.
Isn't history fabulous?
It seems the gloves are off in the war to decide who replaces Simon the Unlikeable as federal Labor leader. Genteel Labor foreign affairs spokesperson Kevin Rudd (who I thought was very impressive on the Nine Network's Sunday program a couple of days ago) appears to have leaked to Janet Albrechtsen (of all people) an email sent to him by the distinctly un-genteel Mark Latham, in which Latham addressed Rudd as "Hey, knucklehead". I can see this getting very entertaining.
Date of post: February 18, 2003.
Isn't history fabulous?
Monday, April 14, 2008
Blog revival
Because I have multiple crippling deadlines, I have chosen this evening to continue the attempted revivification of t'other blogs with a post on the new UWA Chair in Australian Literature, here.
Wednesday, March 26, 2008
Saturday, February 09, 2008
Summit 2020
Within hours of the announcement of the proposed Summit 2020 in Canberra in April, Australian bloggers were all over it like a fire blanket and mostly, I'm sorry to say, trashing the whole idea for dear life. There was a flurry of jerking knees, a cacophony of sneering, and a disproportionate amount of envy-fuelled dick-waving involved, and the subtext 'Why don't they invite MEEEEE' was barely sub.
But some of us think it's quite a good idea. Some of us are also sceptical about the 'not just a talkfest' protestations; of course it's a talkfest, and there is nothing wrong with talkfests. They can be really useful and helpful. I've been in several in the field of the arts, and good, workable suggestions and solutions have always emerged, if not always from expected sources or in expected directions, but that is all to the good as well.
However, something has just arrived by email that makes me wonder how well this gig is really being organised.
Given how often I do something I didn't intend when using this computer, it's not all that surprising that some time last year I somehow ended up on Malcolm Turnbull's email newsletter mailing list. But I regard Turnbull as the least worst of his lot by a very long way -- not least because he is interesting and smart, which few of his coalition colleagues are (Nick Minchin is certainly interesting, but so are funnel-web spiders) -- and the newsletter usually has at least one useful or arresting piece of information in it so I haven't cancelled it.
The latest one, the first for 2008, has just arrived, and here is one of the items it contains:
Just this week I wrote to the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd urging him to reconsider the date for the proposed Summit 2020 of 1000 Australians described by him as the "best and brightest" to a date which does not conflict with the Jewish Festival of Passover. It is, frankly, incredible that a Summit of this kind would be set on a weekend which is likely to preclude the attendance of most Jewish Australians.
Isn't there somebody whose job it is to check this kind of stuff?
And now that I think about it, here's another question: given how soon the summit is scheduled for-- just over two months away -- won't an awful lot even of the non-Jewish 'best and brightest' also have been booked up months ago into commitments that will preclude their dropping everything and zooming off to Canberra for the weekend? Is the relevant public servant drawing up a 'Best and Brightest B-list' even as we speak?
But some of us think it's quite a good idea. Some of us are also sceptical about the 'not just a talkfest' protestations; of course it's a talkfest, and there is nothing wrong with talkfests. They can be really useful and helpful. I've been in several in the field of the arts, and good, workable suggestions and solutions have always emerged, if not always from expected sources or in expected directions, but that is all to the good as well.
However, something has just arrived by email that makes me wonder how well this gig is really being organised.
Given how often I do something I didn't intend when using this computer, it's not all that surprising that some time last year I somehow ended up on Malcolm Turnbull's email newsletter mailing list. But I regard Turnbull as the least worst of his lot by a very long way -- not least because he is interesting and smart, which few of his coalition colleagues are (Nick Minchin is certainly interesting, but so are funnel-web spiders) -- and the newsletter usually has at least one useful or arresting piece of information in it so I haven't cancelled it.
The latest one, the first for 2008, has just arrived, and here is one of the items it contains:
Just this week I wrote to the Prime Minister Kevin Rudd urging him to reconsider the date for the proposed Summit 2020 of 1000 Australians described by him as the "best and brightest" to a date which does not conflict with the Jewish Festival of Passover. It is, frankly, incredible that a Summit of this kind would be set on a weekend which is likely to preclude the attendance of most Jewish Australians.
Isn't there somebody whose job it is to check this kind of stuff?
And now that I think about it, here's another question: given how soon the summit is scheduled for-- just over two months away -- won't an awful lot even of the non-Jewish 'best and brightest' also have been booked up months ago into commitments that will preclude their dropping everything and zooming off to Canberra for the weekend? Is the relevant public servant drawing up a 'Best and Brightest B-list' even as we speak?
Thursday, December 13, 2007
So much to blog about, so little time
Here are some of the things I wish I had time to blog about:
1) Hot on the heels of extended blogospheric and other discussion about excessive banging on in the meeja and elsewhere regarding the Acting Prime Minster's looks, hair, voice etc, we now have a huge kerfuffle about the new Member for Bennelong's skirt length.
2) Helen Garner has a new novel coming out next year. It will be her first book of fiction for over fifteen years.
3) Kangaroo Island is on fire.
4) December is impossible.
5) Having gone off Patricia Cornwell quite a while ago and therefore having missed the last two or three books, I liked the look of her new(ish) novel Book of the Dead enough to finally give in and buy it the other day. If I have read the first half aright, it is among other things an extremely damning commentary on the US presence in Iraq, with specific reference to Abu Ghraib. It's very heartening that such a widely read writer can reach her millions of readers with the grisly image of what can happen to a soldier's psyche, especially in such a dubious war.
6) There seems to be yet another uprush of nonsense in various op eds around the place along well-marked 'Why feminism has failed' lines. I plan a longish blog post entitled 'Why feminism has succeeded' and a very short one entitled 'Why all attempts to educate the public as to the correct meaning of the term "begging the question" have failed.'
7) I have a new Christmas Tree ornament:
1) Hot on the heels of extended blogospheric and other discussion about excessive banging on in the meeja and elsewhere regarding the Acting Prime Minster's looks, hair, voice etc, we now have a huge kerfuffle about the new Member for Bennelong's skirt length.
2) Helen Garner has a new novel coming out next year. It will be her first book of fiction for over fifteen years.
3) Kangaroo Island is on fire.
4) December is impossible.
5) Having gone off Patricia Cornwell quite a while ago and therefore having missed the last two or three books, I liked the look of her new(ish) novel Book of the Dead enough to finally give in and buy it the other day. If I have read the first half aright, it is among other things an extremely damning commentary on the US presence in Iraq, with specific reference to Abu Ghraib. It's very heartening that such a widely read writer can reach her millions of readers with the grisly image of what can happen to a soldier's psyche, especially in such a dubious war.
6) There seems to be yet another uprush of nonsense in various op eds around the place along well-marked 'Why feminism has failed' lines. I plan a longish blog post entitled 'Why feminism has succeeded' and a very short one entitled 'Why all attempts to educate the public as to the correct meaning of the term "begging the question" have failed.'
7) I have a new Christmas Tree ornament:
Wednesday, November 07, 2007
Wednesday Claytonsblogging
Lest anyone (employers past, present and yet to come, this means you) get the wrong idea, let me begin by saying that late last night as I waited for the beta cat to finish her dinner so I could let the alpha cat out of the bathroom and go to bed -- they have to be fed separately, as alpha-cat bolts but beta-cat eats hers in instalments, three or four dainty snacks stretched over half an hour; if they are fed together, alpha-cat simply eats her own and then bumps beta-cat away from the bowl and eats that as well -- as I waited, I flicked through the current Women's Weekly's massive survey on women's lives deciding what my answers would be if I had the energy to get up off the sofa and get a pen.
There are pages and pages of multiple choice in this quiz and my answer to every other question was NONE OF THE ABOVE, but then I found a question with an answer option that exactly fitted my case:
Q. If you are currently employed, which of the following statements most accurately describe your feelings about work?
A. I love my job; it gives me great personal satisfaction.
It's not exactly a job qua job, since I'm self-employed and much of my work involves regular or one-off tasks of various magnitude. But there is an unprecendented number of said tasks on concurrently at the moment, a situation it's possible to survive only if you work on each one in strict rotation for an hour or two at a time, thereby not getting irretrievably behind with any of them. ('If it's 1 am, this must be the proofreading.')
Which means that blogwise I am resorting to the very last, erm, resort of bloggers (and, before them, columnists) everywhere: write a blog post about why you're not writing any blog posts.
I'd blog about the garden but at the moment I'm not spending any time in it and thinking about two major problems out there gives me panic attacks but there's no time to do anything about it.
I'd blog about politics but I don't have time to read or watch the news.
I'd blog about music or theatre, but I don't have time to go to any.
I'd blog about work, but I'm too busy working.
There are pages and pages of multiple choice in this quiz and my answer to every other question was NONE OF THE ABOVE, but then I found a question with an answer option that exactly fitted my case:
Q. If you are currently employed, which of the following statements most accurately describe your feelings about work?
A. I love my job; it gives me great personal satisfaction.
It's not exactly a job qua job, since I'm self-employed and much of my work involves regular or one-off tasks of various magnitude. But there is an unprecendented number of said tasks on concurrently at the moment, a situation it's possible to survive only if you work on each one in strict rotation for an hour or two at a time, thereby not getting irretrievably behind with any of them. ('If it's 1 am, this must be the proofreading.')
Which means that blogwise I am resorting to the very last, erm, resort of bloggers (and, before them, columnists) everywhere: write a blog post about why you're not writing any blog posts.
I'd blog about the garden but at the moment I'm not spending any time in it and thinking about two major problems out there gives me panic attacks but there's no time to do anything about it.
I'd blog about politics but I don't have time to read or watch the news.
I'd blog about music or theatre, but I don't have time to go to any.
I'd blog about work, but I'm too busy working.
Wednesday, October 17, 2007
Not a well person
Before I succumbed completely to whatever virus or bacterium it is that currently has me in its icky clutches, Stephanie from Humanities Researcher and I went out to the University of Western Sydney's Bankstown Campus last Friday as guests of Professor Ivor Indyk's Writing and Society Research Group to talk about blogging and writing and literary criticism. Judith Ridge, who was there, has written about it here at Misrule (found via Matilda).
Stephanie and I are old friends and regular readers of each other's blogs, so it was a different sort of occasion from the usual more formal academic presentation -- something I don't think, after ten years away from the academy, that I could convincingly do any more in any case. (Though it does appear to me that in terms of intellectual influences and fashions, of new habits and modes of theory and critique, time has stood still while beleaguered academics everywhere instead spend their time being forced to do endless, pointless administration, sit on committees, find new ways of raising funds, and get dragged down by the never-ending nightmare of the compulsory ARC grants application cycle as by a giant squid, so perhaps I could.)
Giving a joint presentation with a dear friend is something I recommend highly, and I think it's probably fun for one's listeners as well; it adds an extra (and extra-benign) dimension of performance dynamic and a light blanket of warmth to what can otherwise be quite a challenging situation.
But the session was further complicated for me by the intermittent spinning around of the seminar room as I attempted to deliver my spiel and respond to questions. I'd been flat out meeting deadlines, having assorted dramas and doing various bits of organisation before I left for Sydney and I figured the week of early-warning momentary room spins was just the effects of tiredness and stress, but alas, it wasn't.
Apart from a lifelong predisposition to motion sickness that sees me permanently stocked up on medication for it wherever I go, and a very good thing that has often turned out to be (or not; at least one regular reader of this blog will not have forgotten the unfortunate flight over the Swiss Alps to Florence in 1993), I very rarely catch anything infectious or indeed get sick at all, so the opportunities for pathographyblogging here at Pavlov's Cat have always been thin on the ground.
The last two weeks, however, have been quite something. If you see an infection approaching that appears to include a virulent sore throat, head cold, chest cold, headache and apparent middle/inner ear thingy involving attacks of vertigo lasting, at their height, up to five or six hours and involving violently nauseatingly spinning rooms, and that seems to go on and on and on and bloody on with ever-new and more charming symptoms, tell it you don't want it and to please go away.
Especially if you are alone in a hotel room in a city not your own.
Alternatively, you could try very hard not to get so run down that not even your normally very resistant immune system can repel this little charmer. At least, having checked in with my GP, I'm now at the entertaining stage where I can feel the bug and the drugs fighting it out in my bloodstream.
Stephanie and I are old friends and regular readers of each other's blogs, so it was a different sort of occasion from the usual more formal academic presentation -- something I don't think, after ten years away from the academy, that I could convincingly do any more in any case. (Though it does appear to me that in terms of intellectual influences and fashions, of new habits and modes of theory and critique, time has stood still while beleaguered academics everywhere instead spend their time being forced to do endless, pointless administration, sit on committees, find new ways of raising funds, and get dragged down by the never-ending nightmare of the compulsory ARC grants application cycle as by a giant squid, so perhaps I could.)
Giving a joint presentation with a dear friend is something I recommend highly, and I think it's probably fun for one's listeners as well; it adds an extra (and extra-benign) dimension of performance dynamic and a light blanket of warmth to what can otherwise be quite a challenging situation.
But the session was further complicated for me by the intermittent spinning around of the seminar room as I attempted to deliver my spiel and respond to questions. I'd been flat out meeting deadlines, having assorted dramas and doing various bits of organisation before I left for Sydney and I figured the week of early-warning momentary room spins was just the effects of tiredness and stress, but alas, it wasn't.
Apart from a lifelong predisposition to motion sickness that sees me permanently stocked up on medication for it wherever I go, and a very good thing that has often turned out to be (or not; at least one regular reader of this blog will not have forgotten the unfortunate flight over the Swiss Alps to Florence in 1993), I very rarely catch anything infectious or indeed get sick at all, so the opportunities for pathographyblogging here at Pavlov's Cat have always been thin on the ground.
The last two weeks, however, have been quite something. If you see an infection approaching that appears to include a virulent sore throat, head cold, chest cold, headache and apparent middle/inner ear thingy involving attacks of vertigo lasting, at their height, up to five or six hours and involving violently nauseatingly spinning rooms, and that seems to go on and on and on and bloody on with ever-new and more charming symptoms, tell it you don't want it and to please go away.
Especially if you are alone in a hotel room in a city not your own.
Alternatively, you could try very hard not to get so run down that not even your normally very resistant immune system can repel this little charmer. At least, having checked in with my GP, I'm now at the entertaining stage where I can feel the bug and the drugs fighting it out in my bloodstream.
Tuesday, October 09, 2007
'Writing & Society' blogging seminar: Friday October 12
Stephanie has (as usual) been better organised than I about publicising this, but we are doing this joint gig at UWS in Bankstown next Friday afternoon.
Please note that this is part of a writing program, so I expect there'll be little or no discussion of the more usual things -- politics, influence, so-called 'citizen journalism', the American blogosphere and so on. Stephanie and I are both literary types to the core, and the focus will be on writing, scholarship, criticism and literature.
Friday 12 October
1.00-4.00pm
"The Uses of Blogging"
with Kerryn Goldsworthy, literary critic & author of
the blog Pavlov's Cat
and Stephanie Trigg, medievalist & author of
the blog Humanities Researcher
University of Western Sydney, Bankstown campus
Building 23, conference room 1
(via the Henry Lawson Drive exit of the M5)
All welcome - lunch served at 1pm.
RSVP to writing@uws.edu.au
Please note that this is part of a writing program, so I expect there'll be little or no discussion of the more usual things -- politics, influence, so-called 'citizen journalism', the American blogosphere and so on. Stephanie and I are both literary types to the core, and the focus will be on writing, scholarship, criticism and literature.
Friday 12 October
1.00-4.00pm
"The Uses of Blogging"
with Kerryn Goldsworthy, literary critic & author of
the blog Pavlov's Cat
and Stephanie Trigg, medievalist & author of
the blog Humanities Researcher
University of Western Sydney, Bankstown campus
Building 23, conference room 1
(via the Henry Lawson Drive exit of the M5)
All welcome - lunch served at 1pm.
RSVP to writing@uws.edu.au
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