From the category archives:

writing & research

The author as ghost

5 April, 2009

in O internet, writing & research

Vanity GoogleThere are various names, are there not, for the act of running your name(s) through a Google search: vanity googling, auto-googling, and so on.  I do this from time to time, looking in particularly for any citations of my work and also, of course, the possibility that someone has started a hate-blog about me (some strange part of my mind remains ever fourteen; one can never be too vigilant).

A little while ago I came across this article, written for a 2001 issue of a periodical then newly online.  My contribution was extracted from the first chapter of my then-recently-submitted thesis, and its publication a chance to share a part of a trawling of my field that I thought would likely never see the light of day elsewhere, on account of its length.

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Facebook, here are your twenty-five things

2 February, 2009

in dogs, in Aotearoa, memes & quizzes, teaching & learning, we are family, writing & research

My fellow Norwich Terrier breeder and Facebook friend Magda has included me in the “25 things” exercise that is currently meshing with the tag option on Facebook’s notes.  This is the rubric

Rules: Once you’ve been tagged, you are supposed to write a note with 25 random things, facts, habits, or goals about you. At the end, choose 25 people to be tagged. You have to tag the person who tagged you. If I tagged you, it’s because I want to know more about you.

I am modifying this a little: since my Facebook notes are syndicated from my webpages, I am making the original post there, and since my Facebook friends are from so many different times and facets of my life, I am going to write five paragraphs for five things.  Those of you who’ve been my students will know my mantra “an academic paragraph is usually around five sentences”, and it’s time for me to test it here.  I will reserve the option to tag, knowing that many among you dislike it.

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Might say, might write

6 January, 2009

in writing & research

And now I have this exquisite space in which to speak, I must do so.  Back at work since yesterday, I’m currently in that strange dream space of resetting my body clock.  It took very little time to revert to my old ways, rising late morning and retiring in the early morning.  Doing so felt like encountering a younger, earlier version of my self, who might be crouching in the back bedroom adding files one by one to her new third-generation iPod, or some similarly nocturnal activity.*  This taking back of the night also opened up my evenings to some fairly intensive writing, after an innocent inquiry from a friend as to how my manuscript was going and some gentle, if not completely intentional, prodding from the señor.

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The tenant moves in

5 January, 2009

in meta-diarist, mine host, writing & research

It’s my hope that if you’re reading this it’s because you’ve followed the redirection from my old home at wordpress.com.  I hope that those of you kind enough to link to that site will update your links to here. *

As with any move, my attention at the moment is held by the bright shiny newness of it all, so it may be a day or two before I begin the usual reflective writing for which I am known across the prairies of the internet.

Let me tantalise you in the meantime by contending I have fewer than five thousand more words to write before my manuscript is complete: final draft, reading for final editing.  Once I began, at the prompting of the señor and a friend or two, to move around large blocks of text, the thing began to take shape much as a puzzle might unexpectedly near completion.  I am quite pleased with it, but that could be the result of a summer’s break.

CP

*2249 ETA: I’ll also be cross-posting from here to my old LiveJournal (primarily just because I can), for those of you who prefer to read my entries there.

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Floating the canoes of picnickers

4 November, 2008

in in Aotearoa, writing & research

With a lighter teaching load this intake I have the opportunity, in terms of time at least, to do some [hushed tones] primary research, that ephemeral pastime whose presence connects to my working life much in the same way that reading under the blankets with a torch in the dark, aged nine or ten, does to everyday daylight reading.

I am, perhaps unsurprisingly, revisiting some of the close readings I made of Robin Hyde’s fiction, almost twelve years ago now.  Through this, I happened on the below-quoted which I share with you, since it made me so laugh: [click to continue…]

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The new poetics

26 October, 2008

in O internet, in Aotearoa, writing & research

We all know that the internet is for porn, but it is also for poetry.  The amount of time I have ignored, more or less, the latter of these two facts is perhaps surprising, given the extent to which my ability to make my living has been contingent on making contentions about poems and poetics.  Indeed, my writing life started as poet and prose stylist in equal parts, the adolescent rip-tides of Feelings and Self-Expression driving only slightly off-course my attention to form in both these modes.

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Cross-pollination

22 September, 2008

in O internet, commentatrix, in Aotearoa, teaching & learning, the social round, writing & research

I have non-teaching time, at this, the sweetest time of year.  Most of Concrete University, and much of Sockburn too, is heavy with blossom.  Individual petals blow in drifts across lawns, adhering to my clothes and hair, the north face of the house and in the ears and up the noses of unsuspecting puppies.  A few days of rain at the end of last week made the gutters run with lemon-coloured pollen water.  The return of the sunshine is such that, though eyes stream and grow puffy on people and animals alike, the whole of the western suburbs seems to be strolling about, amiably, in short sleeves, asking itself how nice it is to see the sunshine.

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The border to another country

26 August, 2008

in commentatrix, teaching & learning, the social round, we are family, writing & research

This winter I have not had ‘flu, which I attribute both to my willingness to pay for the vaccination (which takes care, I assume, of one strain) and good luck more generally. I have, however, had sinusitis, two bouts of gastro-enteritis (one at the same time as the sinusitis) and two colds, the second of which is engaging my immune system in a forceful battle right now. Indeed, I have been ill so frequently that when a new ailment strikes, the previous one is still fresh enough in memory that I can locate where I put all the over-the-counter drugs with which I treated it.

This suffering is minor enough that my chief energy is expended in complaining, rather than recovering, but I welcome nonetheless any sympathetic expense of comforting energy any fair readers might wish to give. It has the side effect, however, of focusing my mind on the congestion at hand (or, more accurately, at head) and not worrying about all those peripheral matters that usually engage my mind when I’m not in the classroom.

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Fine Little Girl

17 August, 2008

in O internet, at home, writing & research

The señor has been listening to the original version of “Louie Louie”, not The Kingsmen’s famous mumbler, but the one written and sung by Richard Berry. He points out the tender phrasing, the quasi-Jamaican lilt, the simple happy love story it evokes.

Edit: embedding is disabled on the Berry video: go here to see it.

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Speak and reveal yourself

17 August, 2008

in at home, commentatrix, teaching & learning, we are family, writing & research

Just a couple of days of sunshine has been enough to transform everyday activities into something special: the bed linen, stretched taut on the line, or the living room ranch slider opened so the dogs can come and go through their choice of front doors. That it’s raining now won’t matter till tomorrow; even in the dark I am still feeling the restorative effects of the brief bright day.

It has been a testing week, not so much for me as for the señor, who is lighter for two extracted wisdom teeth, with more to follow. He moves around the house in a haze of codeine and antiseptic mouthwash, for the which he has an applicator that looks as if it could also be used for the kind of animal husbandry in which I am seasonally involved.

My beloved is a stoic post-operative character, although the greatest pressure on his well-being may have come from my continually asking him if he is okay. He remarked last night that we have been something akin to sad sacks for a month or so now: his surgery preceded by my druggie switcheroo, preceded by at least two weeks of winter ailments that took down first our office colleagues and then us, giving us first a sense of doom impending and then assailed intestines and recalcitrant sinuses. In short, we have had a winter.

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