That Stage of Term

Hey -

I'm evolving a long and thoughtful post about queerness in children's literature, and about the queer child (as) reader, but I don't know when I'm going to get to write it up. On the back burner, also: to follow the links in, and think about the mechanics/techniques of blogging put forward in, this post on Going Somewhere?

I'm busy and tired, and sick of being in That Stage of Term where I can barely get done what I need to do and then go into serious down-time in order to reproduce my labour: in the last week I have watched two-and-a-half seasons of Scrubs, and on Friday night I had to stop knitting because I'd gone beyond my hands' capacity to continue. I mean, I like knitting - and I love Scrubs - but I would like to be starting to plan next semester's teaching, and reading around for this essay on queer intergenerational sexuality in Derrida's The Post Card, and writing fiction, and blogging, and keeping in touch with friends, and Not just marking, and reading for classes, and photocopying handouts and formulating basic questions for seminars, and then resting. Maybe I'll catch up with myself soon, and get some spare energy which doesn't just get cycled back into work.

In the last week, I have...

Flown to San Francisco, given a paper at a workshop on ancient and modern imperialisms at Stanford, asked questions about many interesting and exciting papers at said workshop*, eaten many delicious meals including J's birthday dinner (tasting menu at Junnoon) and a lunch with my brother who happened to be in San Francisco (delicious veggie splendour at Green's), flown back from San Francisco, crawled onto campus to photocopy bundles of stuff for today's teaching, taught a two-hour seminar on ideology and Frankenstein and a one-hour seminar comparing Chapman's translation of the Odyssey to the opening of Walcott's stage version of the Odyssey, eaten some sushi, read my personal email, opened my work email (and despaired and closed it again without reading anything), and caught up on some blogs. A fine sense of priorities, I think.

And so hence I give you this link,

Conceptual Terrorists Encase Sears Tower In Jell-O

via gaylourdes: when the Onion is good, it's really good. I don't even have any commentary on it, it's so good.

Okay, now I have twenty-five minutes before my next class (another two-hour seminar on ideology and Frankenstein, followed at 4:10 by a research paper on Catullus and the gift which sounds awesome, so I hope I can stay awake for it - of course it will only be 8am in California, but then by that logic I did start teaching at 1am), so I had better go and... do something. Answer all that email, I suppose.


*But I think the clear winner was Alastair Blanshard, with a paper on Arcadian imagery in Australian art, which was probably the most thought-provoking paper at the workshop and also the most entertaining and energizing. Which is cheating.