Blue Moon

It must be a blue moon. I've just put a post up at Sarsaparilla--which has temporarily relocated-- about The Henry Mayer Memorial Lecture I attended last Friday.

In Which Your Author Becomes Irritated And Behaves Badly

I'm not sure why I'm writing this post. I'm suspicious of my motives.

I recently expressed an opinion quite strongly. I was not at all tactful. And while I still hold the opinion, I feel a sense of remorse about the way I said, amongst other things: 'You're talking out of your arse'.

I wish I hadn't said that. It's emotionally immature. But it was something I'd been holding in for quite some time.

Is that an excuse for inexcusable conduct? My reaction was explicable: I felt judged and belittled. On this topic I have often felt this way. My outburst was fuelled by innumerable conversations; my interpretation of the most minute facial expressions; my sensitivity to rejection; and so on.

I don't want to write a post that's self-serving. I've read those and despised them. I think I've always tried to be scrupulously honest with my least attractive traits. But I need to think of myself as better than my recent behaviour suggests.



Someone once said to me that they found all social networking sites other than Good Reads to be 'a complete waste of time'. It was expressed in such a quelling tone that I thought to profess my own enjoyment of Twitter and Facebook would be to risk a similar dismissal.

At the same time, I had previously been in social situations with this very person where I, and others, had openly discussed our participation in and enjoyment of Twitter and Facebook. I felt shocked that someone would know this and not even attempt to mitigate their words in the same company.

Perhaps the comments just weren't about me and my cultural choices.

Am I unnecessarily conflating the judgement of the cultural artefact with a judgement about the person, in this case myself?

Another person has always smirked, in what I have interpreted as a kind of contemptuous, pitying expression, when Twitter and Facebook are mentioned. It's an expression that the same person extends to discussions of blogging, Second Life, and more recently Wii.

She argues that they don't offer a real experience; that they are a poor substitute for talking to actual people, living life, and exercising. For her, such substitution is a widespread and contemporary pathology.

Here I will sound defensive when I write that I have formed very real friendships with people I've met through blogging. I'm friends with the same people on Facebook, and we follow each other on Twitter. I try to meet them in the flesh if I travel to their city, and they return the favour when they happen to be in Brisbane.

I have never been on Second Life, but another participant in these discussions is using it as a teaching tool and is fascinated by the legal precedents it presents.

I have explained my decision to purchase a Wii Fit and my subsequent enjoyment of what it allows me to do that walking up a hill in my suburb cannot.

I have a linguistics-cultural studies suspicion of any assertion of real, unmediated experience. I tried to argue that many of these activities were simply another means of mediation of particular experiences: some modes of interaction are enabled while others are not. I'd be careful about privileging one as any more real than any other, especially when it's clear that it's a matter of value or lack thereof being ascribed to a particular medium.

Somehow this elicited more mocking laughter about some apparently ridiculous scenario proposed by Lacan to illustrate his concepts of the Real and the Symbolic.

It might be better to quote another friend here who says all of these activities are not substitutions, but experiences in their own right. She is wise and more lucid, perhaps less invested in such activities than I am.

I am still suspicious of my reasons for posting this. I have explained the reasons for the extent of my reaction, but perhaps I should just learn to conduct myself more appropriately in company.

To Whom It May Concern

There are many reasons why a postgraduate student or an early career researcher might feel utterly crushed by her experience in academe, but recently I was asked to write a letter of support to be included in an application for promotion for someone I have worked for over the past couple of years, both as a tutor and a research assistant. It gave me the opportunity to reflect, in a concentrated way, on what I hope won't be a rare collegial experience, or prove the exception to the rule. Here's the letter I wrote:

To Whom It May Concern:

I have had the privilege of working with _____________ in the _______ discipline within the ____________________ Faculty at ___ over the past two years. During this time I have been employed by ____ first as a marker and then as a tutor. With ____’s support I have also had the opportunity to deliver a lecture. In 2008 I worked as his teaching assistant which involved a range of administrative activities, including communicating with students on his behalf.

Throughout my association with ____ he has provided a great deal of professional support and encouragement. On a day to day level, he has always provided a range of materials, such as clear marking criteria and suggestions for tutorial activities, that have equipped me to do the task at hand. He has also made proper arrangements for marking moderation meetings and any other additional activities that have been required.

There are many aspects of working with ____ that I have appreciated over the past two years. In addition to his talent for organisation, he has always demonstrated good humour and conveyed respect for my contribution to his courses. Further, he has provided compassionate and useful advice for my development as a teacher, as well as offering specific opportunities to increase my skills.

I have learned a lot from ____, simply by observing him work. To this extent, as a PhD student looking to pursue an academic career, I consider that he has provided me with invaluable mentoring for my chosen vocation.

Yours sincerely,

Kirsty ________ (M. Phil)

Neverwhere

I've just finished reading Neverwhere by Neil Gaiman. I don't know if I've mentioned before that I'm not especially into fantasy as a novel genre, so this is the first of his work that I've read.

I do know a few people who like Neil Gaiman, so I had heard of him before in a favourable way. It's because of these recommendations that I was glad of the opportunity to read his work when it was proposed by one of the people in the book club; I probably wouldn't have sought it out otherwise.

Anyway, I'm not really going to say much about it here except that I liked it. I'll save my discussion for book club or in the comments below (especially if you have some insights that I can use at the book club).

I really just wanted to link to the television adaptation of Neverwhere that someone has stuck up on YouTube. I've just watched the first installment and again I'm reminded that while I'm not especially keen on fantasy in novel form, I rather like it on television.



I suppose this means that, for me, fantasy is more suited to the televisual form. It must be all those special fx that I like.

Happy New Year

I'm enjoying the last day of my self-appointed holidays before I make myself go back to work tomorrow. There's nothing so special in this timing, since it's the same schedule as the majority of the population, but that's the point I suppose, to find some sense of normality in this treacherous task of completing a PhD.

I say treacherous, because it's an insecure and self-disciplined way of existing. I'm not especially good at self-discipline and so I have rendered an insecure existence even more insecure by nearing the end of my scholarship with about an additional six months of work to do. This is not so unusual, many people of course take more than a further six months to complete their theses after their funding runs out. I could be one of those people, I suspect I will be, but for the moment I need to be hopeful that I won't be.

I think the trouble is that even with the funding I have remaining, I will need to get some work so I can pay my bills. I'm quite understandably a bit spooked that I don't have any confirmed prospects of work for the semester ahead. At the moment I'm living on my savings to pay bills and participate in holiday festivities and outings. Part of me thinks I shouldn't have spent $30 on two cocktails last night, but the other part of me believes I will get some research or teaching work before my next electricity bill arrives.

I'm a bit resentful that it now seems to be de riguer for rents to increase at the beginning of every 6 month lease. Time was when you could pay the same rent for two or three years running, but that's no longer the case. I wonder if I'm living above my means. I am, but I genuinely tried share accommodation and that ended in even more bills and, retrospectively, I can see, a bit of post-traumatic stress. I think it was only by August in the past year that I actually felt able to progress on my thesis after the experience of sharing with someone who completely violated any reasonable boundaries of communal living.

I suppose this is why I tend to think of 2008 as a fairly so-so year, even though I had moved out of the share situation by December 17, 2007. I wasn't able to go to the wedding I was invited to in Italy because I ended up ravaging my savings moving again, as well as effectively furnishing a house, which included buyingwhite goods. I am grateful that I had savings to be able to make my home liveable, but I suppose the whole scenario brought home a sense of my vulnerability as a single person on an irregular income: all the burdens are mine, financial and emotional. Right now, I would have little problem with being a kept woman if it meant I could stop worrying. If someone else would make me a cup of tea.

My sense that this past year was not the best year was exacerbated by a falling out I had with my brother at the end of 2007. It's an indication to me of how deeply I was affected by this event that I haven't really spoken about it to anyone. I won't go into details. What I have been able to identify is a repetition of patterns of relationships within my family that cast me in a particular role, which has been very difficult to fight against. I guess if there's one thing I'm proud of myself for recently, it's that I took advantage of an opportunity that presented itself to tell my mother that I could identify how that pattern had emerged. I hope by telling her she pulls up my siblings in their treatment of me. Of course I have to do that for myself too. I'm working up to it.

I managed to tell my mother my perspective while we were sitting on the edge of the river at South Bank, waiting for some recently met relatives who were visiting from the UK. The meeting of these relatives on my father's side is really the biggest news of this Christmas for me. I learned from my oldest sister that a cousin, who I'd never really heard of, had moved to the Sunshine Coast, just north of Brisbane, from the UK with her husband and children. Over Christmas, her parents, my aunt and uncle, were visiting and they had expressed a desire to meet us.

It's all very complicated. My father has a series of step-brothers and step-sisters, both older and younger than him. A few years ago, one of the younger brothers was determined to track my father down. He was very upset with another brother who had traced the oldest brother without telling the rest of the siblings. The younger brother got in contact with my mother's family. He found my mother, who was visiting her own brother in the UK at the time, and so his nieces and nephew: me and my siblings. He didn't find my father, because no-one in this mish-mashed family has had contact with my father since he departed without a word over 23 years ago.

On the 27th of December my mother, me and my two sisters trekked up to the Sunshine Coast and met this aunt, uncle, cousin and her husband and children. Then on the 30th, they trekked down to Brisbane to spend some time with us.

How are these things supposed to go? My mother and my uncle spoke about my father and the other siblings, as well as my paternal grandmother. I learned that my father's family knew him as 'Sandy', when in Australia everyone knew him as Alex. It was determined that the sister just older than me most resembled my paternal grandmother, and we all came away with a scanned copy of a photo of her at around the age of 18. I was reminded of the explicitly racist reasons as to why my father chose to take his family away from Birmingham to settle in Australia: my uncle expressed the same sense of working class siege and dispossession as that expressed by my father nearly 40 years ago towards the Asians ethnically of the Indian sub-continent. One of my sisters felt some pressure to explain why nobody had ever really bothered to search for my father. She took my uncle aside and apparently he responded that he had known my father was a 'hard man'.

I didn't really intend this post to be a litany of woe, but while I'm here let me just say that I hope not to endure another Christmas where a particular individual drinks all day to the point where he becomes even more boorish, relaxed to the point where it seems reasonable to express disgust at a close relative's weight and begin a diatribe against women who marry and don't adopt their husband's surname. I also hope never to have to listen to another expression of disgust about the realisation that all those years ago, George Michael was likely singing his heart out in Last Christmas to a man rather than the female depicted in the film clip.

If you've managed to read this far, thank you. The misery ends now. And, really, I mean it: Happy New Year!