One of the reasons I have such energy for writing here at the moment is as a kind of proof-positive against my perpetual fear: that my professional and voluntary roles at Concrete University will drain my energy reserves and leave me unable to do anything except work, eat dinner and go to bed early. The present time of year, in which I am between semesters (we run on a slightly different calendar from the undergraduate university proper) is a time in which such a worry seems to flourish. So there’s a defensive element to my prose, getting as much down as possible so that when the time crunch comes I won’t feel I wasted it when I had it. (The final chapters of my manuscript could benefit from the same kind of fidelity, it must be said.)
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There 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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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.
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 relocation of Philip Matthews, the former Listener journalist, to the South Island has, I infer, brought about the confrontation that many northern migrants must make with the different way of life here: colder and sparser, a sense of foreboding appears to infuse the sensibility of the new arrivals. Of course, I am reading into this article a sense of personal difference from what is the here and now: the muggy, populous green environs of Auckland’s triple star (south, west and east-Central) superseded by the colder, grimmer and more constrained climate of these southern outposts.
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22 September, 2008
in commentatrix,in Aotearoa,O internet,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.
[click to continue…]
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