proposed reading list - feedback?

I need to get a reading list together, by tomorrow afternoon, for a unit on post-1900 women's writing (to teach next year.)

This is what I've got so far. I'd like to hear your thoughts - constructive ones in particular but not exclusively. Whatever you've got.

The definites are bolded. They're definites because I love them. The perhapses explained below.

Preliminary:
A Room of One's Own

Prescribed:
The Getting of Wisdom (HH Richardson)
Flush Woolf
The Prime of Miss Jean Brodie Muriel Spark
The Group Mary McCarthy
Swastika Night (Katherine Burdekin)
The Memoirs of a Survivor
Sacred Country (or) Restoration (Rose Tremain)
Baghdad Burning: Girl Blog from Iraq (Riverbend) (or) Persepolis (Marjane Satrapi)

Themes, in no particular order: education, autonomy, conformity, modernity, mass culture, war, schooling, consumerism, women and animals, sexuality, violence, gender, totalitarianism...and the desire to imagine thus... and the technical means of representation thereof.

Limiting factors: there absolutely cannot be more than eight texts on the Prescribed list, and even that is pushing it. All the definites are quite short except for The Group. I would quite like to intersperse the novels with related short stories and if I can refine this down to seven prescribed then that's a possibility.

There is already a fair bit of Margaret Atwood, Toni Morrison etc floating around the department. Obvious omissions might be for that reason.

Doubts: Restoration is a bit of a misfit, not because it's about a man but because it sits oddly with the present/future direction of the rest of them. I think it fits thematically, and historical novels need to be represented, and it's marvellous. But it's still weird. Swastika Night I have doubts about because it's quite expensive. And maybe the Richardson and the Spark together is overkill?

Anyway, like I said, this needs to be finalised by tomorrow. LOL.

no no no - revised

Andrew Davies is doing a masterclass on literary adaptation at the Melbourne Writers Festival.

This is something that would be incrediby useful and interesting for me.

But, I've already agreed to do a talk at the Jane Austen Society on that day.

I'm very, very disappointed.

VERY

(later....)

Well, I had the date of the JA Society talk wrong - it's the day before. So I actually can do both. I should have taken into account the ongoing problem I have with understanding which day of the week is which and so forth.

I was attempting to vent when I wrote this post. It clearly didn't work because I woke up at 4am this morning still incredibly vexed and lying there I decided to try to weasel my way out of doing the talk. Fortunately it occurred to me to double-check the dates before showing myself up as rude, selfish, and laughably disorganised.

*phew*

Olympics hating part 2: bad bus

On the news tonight, two items: first, some fragile little Incredible Hulk of an olympics kid whining about how, because he's seven feet tall and weighs 120kg, it hurts him to walk around and so he can't go to the opening parade because then he won't be able to play basketball properly afterwards.

Why don't they teach these people that whinging because you don't want to walk there because you're too weak, but you're still sulking because you really want someone else to carry you, is for little babies?

Then the next story was a man giving a press conference about how the Australian sport-players don't like it in China, and his example of how it's all just not good enough was the buses the canoeists have to take to go to where their sport is. Apparently the bus has hard seats, is not air conditioned, and takes 50 minutes. Inferior chinese bus an insult to the Australian canoe paddlers, who are entitled to the best that buses can offer.

Hearing this pathetic moaning I was instantly transported back to the ex-demilitarised zone in Vietnam, in 2001, where the minibus hauling a load of Western tourists from Hue out to Khe Sahn, the bridge across Ben Hai at the 17th parallel, the tunnels at Vinh Moc, and a whole lot of other depressingly unreconstructed bombed-back-into-stone-age historical sites, raised the ire of a red-bearded German tourist. Bouncing along a red dirt road we were, probably having just left yet another of the two-horse villages where tourists are mobbed by five year old kids trying to sell cans of Coke, or maybe on the way to the place where Hmong people lived in single-roomed bamboo houses and I saw an English girl wave a two hundred dong note above a child's head, just out of reach, and laughingly tell the kid to jump for it, when suddenly Redbeard yelled out

"THIS IS A VERY BAD BUS"

It wasn't the best of buses but compared to everything else we were showed that day it was a mobile palace of luxury and comfort.

Olympics

I loathe the olympics and I'm very tired of hearing about them, most especially of hearing whiny threats from various sport administrators to the effect that if Australia doesn't win everything going it will be the Government's fault for not spending enough money on sport. Apart from the fact that all the money the government puts into training Olympics players is effectively a massive gift paid to channel 7, there's nothing laudable about being the best trained and practised if that differential is enforced by a grotesquely uneven economic playing field. Nation vs. nation sport enshrines global inequality and exploitation. Also, all that smog in China didn't just grow there by itself - somebody paid them to make it.

Too much Grocery Watch just before bed

I had an epic, episodic dream last night which ought to have been a nightmare strictly speaking but in practice was more like an overlong, clumsily constructed disaster movie. A boring dream, commencing with an unspecified yet boring critical emergency of some kind, signalled by the complete breakdown of society, no water, food, law-abiding or electricity etc. Me in my house feeling vulnerable to roving gangs of looters because of the picture windows facing the street, yet unable to work up enough care factor to do something about barricading them up. (This may relate to the fact that after a year and a half's residence the front windows are still painted shut and still not properly kitted out with functioning winders and so forth.) Later in the dream I stood in darkness on the front terrace and looked out of the familiar evening panorama of suburban streetlights, observing with extreme weariness two or three jets tumbling screaming from the sky and exploding into boring fireballs that belched cones of black smoke. Later still Dorian acquired from somewhere (ebay?) a cache of tinned carrots, and reclined like Olympia among them, anticlimactically forestalling the desperate measures starvation seemed certain to have brought us to. The remainder of the dream was taken up with a lengthy and inconclusive discussion about how many of what types of vegetables we should plant in spring and in which part of the yard, which is exactly what happens every day of my life in the non dreaming world.

Sam Newman

Where is Kevin Rudd, and all his ample, authoritative capacity for being absolutely revolted, when we actually need him?

Asparagus mon amour

These narrow fellows are my asparagus plant seedlings. The seeds were planted about three months ago, and it will be at least another eighteen months of careful nurturing, and a planting out in a permanent garden bed of their own, and some rather scary-sounding cutting back, before we see any edible asparagus off them. The very idea of keeping tender plants like this alive and growing for two years before they become productive is a bit overwhelming. They're all right now but it's so very easy for young plants to suddenly die in the blasting hot part of summer if you fail to keep up their maintenance for a day or two.

The seeds were an unplanned impulse buy based almost entirely on the fact that the variety is called "Fat Bastard." You know what I'll say on the day I finally see spears making their way up from the underground, don't you. I've got twenty-five plants here. I wonder how many will make it.

Friday Mogblog - Hong Kong Horripilation Edition

My friend in Hong Kong (who owns those visitor cats, and who is staying on there a little longer now) came back to Melbourne recently for a holiday, out-Magiing the Magi with what is indubitably the finest gift anyone has ever given or received: a cat acupuncture points model.

Kitty is made of a clammy-feeling soft vinyl, and is about the size of a loaf of bread. One side is white with the points picked out in red dots with black numbers, like this:


The other side is a little more graphic. Highly educational, though, of course. It appears that the cat brain is a sort of small conical trickle of baby poo descending down the side of the head. I never would have guessed.


The numbers correspond to instructions in an accompanying leaflet. The treatable conditions are not generally of the sort that my cats are much prone to (except they do admittedly have 'impotence', but they don't feel inadequate because of it.)

A new disease?

I appear to have grown some new bones in my elbows. That's how it feels anyway. I rest them on the desk and it feels like instead of there being a flat spot there is actually a big wobbly knucklebone in there. I was filling in a form just now and leaning my head on the other hand and because of the wobbling I became distracted and spelled "examination" wrong. Now i'll have to go and get another form. But from where? This was the last one in the pigeonhole. I hope the new bones do not grow any larger, I won't be able to put my coat on. Or take it off.
It's disturbing.

I'm writing this down just in case I don't make it.

Another reposted post from the Ancien Regime of yore

More repostings today. I was going to apologise but then I thought, no.

"Cardinal Biggles! Fetch.....THE SOFT CUSHIONS!!!", originally screened May 14, 2005.

* * *

We made our beautiful floor cushions yesterday, hurray! and they turned out so well that in their honour we spontaneously shifted round all the living-room furniture to accommodate them, and additionally we are now considering applying to Channel 31 about hosting our own lifestyle program. The show would have all the usual segments about how to make bacon and pineapple cake, how to build an aircraft carrier out of MDF, how to break into your neighbour's house and paint their rumpus room purple etc, but the gimmick would be that Baz would be the host. He certainly "helped" a lot during the cushion-making enterprise.

Dorian bought some cotton padding of the kind used inside futon mattresses. As soon as the cat saw this he made a bee-line for it.



While he sat there looking mighty pleased with himself we measured out and cut up our kimono silk lengths.





I sewed up the seams and Dorian pressed them flat. Baz meanwhile worked on making sure the cotton padding was evenly kneaded.



Then we put the covers onto the padding, which made the cat a bit angry.



But he's a clever Baz, and before too long he understood why we were putting the cover around the cotton fluff.



Next we vacuumed up all the bits of white cotton fluff that had transferred to the outside of the cushions. Once again, Basil assisted to the best of his ability.



Then I stitched the open end closed and voila!



And after installation in spontaneously rearranged loungeroom....



* * *

Here endeth the repost. And for the record I will state that eighteen months ago those two cushions were cut in half and restitched to make four smaller square ones, and about a year after that one cat pooed himself on one cushion, and few months after that a different cat was sick all over another, and then I stuffed them bodily into the washing machine (the cushions not the explosive cats) and the colours ran. Such is life.