Outwardly Bound

My reflective time is at the moment constrained by a different range of duties at work.  Concerte University, as you may know, has this year a new leader, which inevitably brings restructuring.  In my union capacity, I am in the thick of things, to the extent that the university has seconded me to do this work.  I still have my teaching, but for the next few months there will be less of it.  My days are what I would call surface-busy: lots of meetings, a great deal of planning and strategising, much communication with members, and little time as a result to sit and think.

A positive outcome of this is that I am learning a heck of a lot, not so much on a curve as a series of steep climbs followed by brief plateaux.  I do get bored easily, professionally, and this scratches my itch for variety.  More importantly, it is to my mind ethical work, and part of my long-held wish never just to lie back and take things as they are dealt, but (after James Brown), to get on up and get involved.  I am, to be sure, staying on the scene.

A less positive outcome is that I find myself at the end of the week mentally not much different from where I began: tired, a bit anxious and irritable, attempting to stay on top of a schedule that quickly fills up in advance.  I fear intellectual backsliding, or, more accurately, a lack of opportunity to reflect on my actions, even as I must act, act, act, to keep on top of things.  There is no longer a lot of silence in my day.  I need to be talking to people all the time, and I wonder about the loss of variety in what I say as we remain necessarily on industrial message.

In lieu of detailed end-of-week musings, then, I offer an outward-looking précis of some of what I have been reading lately, since the need to read never stops.  This is an irregular, selective list, and no slight is meant by lack of inclusion.

Megan Wegan was gracious enough, via Twitter and her blog, to dress me up on the internet.

The daily turnover of Learning Curves, captures, in so many ways, the administrative minutiae of university teaching.  Despite the disciplinary differences, many aspects of her work are similar to mine.

Merc’s pages move me much.  They are a window to something special, a form, as he recently himself said, of living book.

John-Paul’s excursions into cultural history remind me of the writing of Steve Braunias in his Listener days, with less vinegar.  Here is a textual snapshot of Shona Laing in the early 70s.

Philip Matthews, formerly of The Listener and now writing for The Press keeps a film-and-culture blog that educates me, in the best sense of that word, travelling down cultural fire trails to the unattractive as well as alluring past.  Here he writes about Bowie and Jarman and the occult, in a post which I read and re-read.  (Bowie’s in space, indeed!)

Tim Jones, or @senjmito as he is on Twitter, has drawn me into a conversation of poets that includes @southernkbelz @ehjc @showyourworking and @HelenRickerby.  It is very flattering to be in such good company, not least because I have been too shy, for a long time, to join any community of creative writers.  This loose touching of bases, however, has happened rather more naturally and from it I draw encouragement in my small efforts.

Emma, whom we also know as @Ghetsuhm, didn’t start the fire, but the comments to her recent post at Up Front have fanned some mighty flames.  Lurking in a thread was never so pyrotechnical!

Some of you may have seen on Facebook my link to a post about the influence of F.R. Leavis on literary academia, written by LitLove in her long-form blog, Tales from the Reading Room.  I thought her account spot-on, in commenting both on the past and the present, and added a few words of my own.  I have such ambivalence about my relationship to the literary academy (one foot in, one foot out) that I find insider/outsider accounts reassuring in the way they resemble my own thinking.  I do wonder what my academic life might have been like if I’d picked a different discipline.

Finally, I delight in the writing of Ta-Nehisi Coates at the Atlantic.  His words are wry and wise and offer a window on American culture not typically, I think, available to the casual reader outside the mainland United States.  His recent visit to Civil War sites in Virginia had me checking my feed reader for more.  This entry, near the end of the story, is a good, if achronological, place to start.  Moreover, he revisits the music of his youth (which was, as his contemporary, also my youth) under the moniker “Echoes of the Crack Age”, linking in this post to this video that, again, felt like a cultural sounding I wouldn’t otherwise have experienced.

Tagged as: blogs, reading, work