Sunday 7 September 2008

Publications

Actually, what I want to post about is two things: (1) Mysterious Skin which I finally summoned the energy to watch yesterday and which (you were quite right, Az) is unbelievably brilliant, and now I even more can't believe that anyone bothered to make The Woodsman or was ever fooled into thinking it was anything but a facile, spurious piece of Holden Caulfieldery, and (2) the Aeneid, because it's occurred to me that I never actually write about the Classics, and that most people I know don't like the Aeneid even though it is the greatest work of literature in the Western canon,* and they must be shown the error of their ways.

But those are long and thinky posts, and who knows whether I will get time for them today, so in the meantime, I just thought I would let you know that my abstract for the Doctor Who essay was accepted (yayy), and that, in a bizarre blast from the past, my co-editor on an edited collection called Origins of Deconstruction, which we put together in 2003 and which I thought was long dead and buried but which contains an essay I'm still quite proud of, on Dido and Derrida's 'The Double Sesssion' and Irigaray... anyway, he got in touch with me to say that it looks as though we'll get a contract for it with Palgrave Macmillan in the very near future (the reader's report was glowing). So that's strange but good: the collection contains first English translations of a couple of interviews with Derrida and Cixous. The Derrida interview is all about his writing practices - handwriting, typewriting, computers, etc - and is one of those lovely theory-meets-geeky-fetishism pieces. (He wrote Of Grammatology standing up, with a quill. I'm serious.)

*except possibly the Georgics, which is like Gerard Manley Hopkins translating Lucretius with a sudden, From-Dusk-Till-Dawnesque twist into high fantasy at the end.

1 comment:

Cathy Butler said...

Standing up, with a quill? Like Dickens! I've often thought that would be the perfect way to write, with plenty of opportunities for flouncing round the room in ecstacy/despair without having to stand up to do it (which makes it feel just a tad less spontaneous), but I've never had a high enough desk. Perhaps I should invest...

Congratulations on your many contracts, both putative and in the bag!