catch-up/update

Still here, still writing. Actually I printed out a complete (so far: missing four 'interludes', which are going to be brief readings of particular passages of Latin which serve as transitions between the five chapters, and an introduction) draft of N&R the other day and read through it, which was nerve-wracking, but you know, I think it's okay. Well, it's like there's a narrow, perilous bridge of thinking-it's-okay over a cavernous abyss of doom in which I think I should be more scholarly, more relevant, more poetic/difficult, more lucid, more disciplined, more wild... But sometimes a narrow perilous bridge is all you need.

Other stuff that's going on: I have two conference papers to write (both for July, one on queer family in Diana Wynne Jones and one on sovereign violence in Lucan) and a fifty-minute paper (probably a version of the Doctor Who: Fires of Pompeii Latin-as-time-travel paper) for the Classical Association of Victoria. I'm behind on my postgrad supervisions because it's the end of the undergraduate marking season (sorry postgrads), and looking forward to getting to those: this year I'm supervising a PhD on ideology and phenomenology in Tacitus' Agricola and one on Penguin Classics, and MA dissertations on: (1) social control/propaganda in contemporary advertising techniques and Vergil's Aeneid; (2) memory, secrecy and revelation in Augustine's Confessions; (3) the construction of Hollywood cinema in the novels of Carl Van Vecht; and (4) appropriations of Plato and contestations over the meaning of 'Greek love' in the work of John Adyngton Simonds Addington Symonds, whose name I should learn to spell. I'm also working on a new third-year undergraduate unit I'll be teaching next year, 'Literature's Children', on childhood/children in literature (including children as implied readers), which is fun but involves a huge amount of reading. Oh, though, I am reading Carolyn Steedman's Strange Dislocations: Childhood and the Idea of Human Interiority, 1760-1930 and it is really, really interesting and thought-provoking: I hope we can get her to come to Bristol and talk about reception.

The other main thing that's going on is this: I'm starting to realize that despite the fact that it's after we get back from Australia, September is still, unfairly, going to happen. I'm supposed to spend the month holed up doing final revisions on N&R, but I notice that in my insouciant disbelief in the existence of the bloody month, (1) I've agreed to chair a panel at a very excellent postgrad conference in Bristol, (2) the research group I head up (Word Unbecoming Flesh: Beyond Text, Across Media [link is to a pdf document, scroll down to p.2]) is doing two or three biggish events, (3) I really want to give a paper at a conference in memory of Don Fowler (an amazing, amazing Latin literature/literary theory person), and (4) I've just agreed (subject to funding) to be keynote speaker at a postgrad conference in, er, Melbourne. That's right! Four weeks after I get back from six weeks in Melbourne, I will be flying out there again for, like, five days! But the theme of the conference is 'cultural capital' which is a subject dear to my heart, and plus, invitation to keynote, what could be more flattering than that?

And then in November, another conference, this time in the States and part of the 'imperialisms ancient and modern' series, where I am not keynoting because Homi Bhabha is keynoting. Which, squee.