Get Rea-dy!!!!

I'm coming back to blog tomorrow, or possibly the next day.

In the meantime here's some music.



I can't believe I lived 37 years in this world before finding out that there is a song called 'get your cat clothes on'.

What's happening.

Here's the thing. I'm in the middle of a very difficult semester. The teaching workload is very high, the subject matter in my Women Writing course is proving to be emotionally exhausting for me and for my students, there's a lot riding on what research I can squeeze into sausage casings during the next few months, so I've committed myself to producing lots, and the university has just thrown some fairly amazing obstacles in the path of anybody teaching certain categories of subjects next year which requires a lot of thinking and planning for there to be any chance of dealing with them successfully. I don't mind telling you that my ability to deal with it all in a calm and reasonably psychologically healthy manner is being seriously tested. Physically it sucks, too - just now I've got this disgusting twitch in my right eyelid, and writing 8-12 thousand words a week is a pretty sure recipe for tendonitis.

One catch with all of this, the part that's making it harder than it probably needs to be, is that it's put my mind into a state that feels a bit like how bipolar disorder sounds in the descriptions of it that I've read. I can't turn it off when I've met my deadlines, and so I'm amassing a growing pile of scribbled notes for future critical writing which in each case I'm horribly excited by the thought of but I don't know when I will get an opportunity to return to any of them. Certainly not within the next six months. Well, work is very demanding in both bad and good ways at the moment and it's hard to write about it or about anything else. With the small pieces of time off that I do take (and which I can only have if I let something else slide) I don't want to be thinking about how to put experience into words (to quote DW Harding) - I want to be gardening, or sewing, or cooking, or communing with a cat, or doing thing siwht friends, or dancing (!! yes Dorian and I have taken up social dancing! inspired by various things including the aftermath of the Canberra trip, Dorian's jazz adventures, and all those yearsof reading Dogpossum blogging about lindy hop) - basically doing something that's not all in the head, in the head, in the head.

So anyway I thought I should accept and say that much as I would love to be putting these experiences into the record of my life that is this blog, I'm basically on blog-writing-in-any-meaningful-sense hiatus, at least until the end of semester.

That said, I did enjoy posting pictures from Europe and I will continue to do post pictures, although pictures of La Trobe tutorial rooms don't have quite the glamour of pictures of gondoliers drifting by the Rialto. That was another thing (that trip) which was just too full for me to be able to write it down, especially in the little bits and pieces of time I had available. Suffice it to say that it gave me plenty to think about, and in between scratching up lectures and what have you, I'm continuing to do just that....(think).

intimate publics

Though it really doesn't fit with my research agenda for the next year and a half (which is how far I can plan ahead, at the moment) I keep reading and mentally rereading this call for papers for a conference next year on life writing and intimate publics. It's the sort of meeting I'd like to take part in for personal reasons - to do some critical thinking and discussing about what this blogging thing is, does, means - as much as professional ones. If I was to try to go I'd be dabbling but that's all right.

But I'd like to try to send in a panel proposal, and to do it with 'friends', which is why i'm posting the CFP here. If anyone who reads this blog is interested in tossing a few ideas around, drop me a line. (Need to do it soon lol!)



Call for Papers
The 7th Biennial International Auto/Biography Association Conference University of Sussex
28 June-2 July 2010
Conference Topic: Life Writing and Intimate Publics

The Centre for Life History and Life Writing Research and the International Auto/Biography Association invite scholars and life writers to attend the 7th IABA conference, at the University of Sussex, Brighton, England.

Keynote speakers include Nancy K. Miller, Sidonie Smith, Jenny Diski, Liz Stanley, Alistair Thomson, Dorothy Sheridan, Nadje Al-Ali and Alessandro Portelli.

Late modernity has spot-lit intimate relations. Families, feelings and love lives have been opened to public politics through pressures of globalisation, digitisation, the mass media and social movements such as feminism. At the same time, traditional citizenships of public rights and responsibilities find new definition through trauma, consumption, identity and care. As boundaries between 'public' and 'private' multiply, new constituencies of belonging and claim are convened, from Fathers for Justice to flood survivors to Facebook. This conference begins from Lauren Berlant's term 'intimate public' to explore these new constituencies in relation to life writing and life storying across media, discipline and profession.

Life writing and life story construct intimate publics in autobiographies, biographies, diaries, oral histories, blogs, reality television, photography, letters, life histories, documentaries, graphic memoirs, quilts, exhibitions, mobile phone texts. They have also been crucial agents in constructing counter-publics. We welcome papers dealing with the following questions, and others which may be related to the conference

theme:
" How do life writings construct citizenship, civic relations and/or counter-publics? How is life history used in non-governmental public actions and activisms? And how have governmental organisations used life history and life writing?

" What intimacies are facilitated by life writings and life stories?

" How does life writing relate to life story, life history and oral history?

" How has life writing and life story participated in care contexts such as parenting, social work, health, education? What discourses of risk, claim, vulnerability, rights and responsibilities are revealed in life writings and their uses?

" What engagements do/should life writing and life history have with therapeutic cultures?

" How does the economy of life story production and consumption relate to the construction of intimate publics and who are its consumers and producers?

" In what ways can we compare ethical codes for life writing, oral history and life history? How do these manage the nature of intimate publics?

" How do life writing and life history contribute to public and private archives and to public history/heritage?

" How does life writing construct or obstruct cross-cultural or cross-linguistic relationships?

" As we understand more about the work of life writing, how is life writing making us work?

" What relationships persist between life writing as aesthetic and as social act?

Hello!

I did indeed get home to Australia safely, in case you were wondering. And the very next day after I got home (which involved four flights with about 14 hours of assorted transit stops wedged in between, so I didn't smell too delightful) I went straight back to work and I've been rather hard at it ever since. But tonight i'm having a lovely evening off - just how lovely may be imagined from the fact that I've just cracked the seal on the fourth Honey Murcott in a row, releasing as I did that stingingly rich puff of aromatic mandarine oil. I've got a cup of tea as well.

Now I am going to put the blog down and read a book or something, but tomorrow I will blog once more, and properly, about something interesting.

Talkative Ginger cat, Canareggio, Venice

Last cat till home. Leaving for the airport now. Will get home on
Sunday.

Our feet in Venice

Taken at about three pm, just before they began to ache and throb in
earnest.

Renaissance cat on lead (to stop it falling in water), Accademica, Venice

Stray cat, Arsenale, Venice

Stuffed cat in German pavillion exhibit, Giardini, Venice Biennale

I have not been able to find out how this poor creature met its end.
The only thing in Venice I do not like.

Briefly interrupting world tour of cat features to acknowledge existence of other interesting items