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gillpolack's journal
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Even in a little thing  Teaching is finished for the week and tonight's class was small, so we took down our hair and I sat on tables a lot. One of my favourite worldbuilding exercises is to have students test their own understanding of the Middle Ages by creating a fantasy Medieval town, so that's what they did. I would go from map to map, making rude comments about the functions of a castle or how the town is fed. We did a lot else - the classtime wasn't entirely dedicated to me and my rude comments, but I enjoyed the mapmaking the best. Only one more class with this mob, and then no more teaching on Thursdays for a fair while. This means that after Continuum I get four days a week straight research/writing, which will be a very good thing. I will miss the worldbuilding class, though, for they're a lot of fun. Admit it, if you're in Sydney you looked at the Continuum program smugly and thought "I can avoid Gillian so very easily - she's going to Melbourne." I know one person who did. This is your warning to get out of Sydney (specifically, don't visit the NSW Writers' Centre) for a short time in July. I'm teaching for just one day there, and it will be grammar and punctuation very specifically for writers. One thing I promise in this short workshop: I will make my Star Trek joke. Boldly. I am 90% sure I have found a way out of the Scholar's Circle of Hell (which Dante didn't write about for fear of being confined there): I've found the underlying good in a book. For three weeks this book has been nagging at me. It wasn't as bad as it read. I knew that. What I didn't know was why. If I hadn't had this nagging sense of missing wood for trees, I probably would have trashed the book and got myself into deep trouble. Thank goodness for inner scolds! There are flaws in the book, but I had the exact opposite flaws in my reading of it. I was looking at it from the wrong discipline, quite simply. Today I was reminded of this by a discussion of literary awareness vs historical criticism elsewhere. And this is exactly why reading too narrowly can be a problem. Doctorates are wonderful things, for they focus the mind, but they need to *not* get in the way of really good reading habits. It's Thursday. It has taken me hours to work this out. I keep thinking it's Friday and that I have to be at the dentist. Instead it's Thursday and I get to torment my world-building class. My inner prophet sees butchers' paper in their future, and Medieval chronicles. My other inner prophet sees that I have no medical appointments today and that my eyes seem to be operational: my day will be full of words. My Wednesday class was on fire today. We had three words of the day (chandelier, temporise and renaissance) and the latter led to a request for a reminder of which king was which and when in the Middle Ages. Apart from this, we spent a lot of time on transits of Venus, Captain Cook, and reconciliation. We agreed that it was ironic that the transit of Venus occurred just after Reconciliation Week ends. To note this irony, J made sure that one of the word-art posters we did included Captain Cook, ironically. Irony comes easily to this group. So does politics. I had a case of hiccups at one stage and one of the students turned to me and said "Tony Abbott." The hiccups were defeated. He maintains it was the shock; I maintain it was the laughter. I did so many messages both before and after the eyes that I only have housework and one phone message to run before teaching tomorrow. Two hours of stuff, in toto. This means I can do actual work, and not minutiae. Life proceeds. The eye? It was checked and re-checked and lasered. I am short a small amount of peripheral vision (but less than 2 years ago, when I lost over 25% - I think the amount of vision I recovered surprised everyone) and my eye is about as safe from blindness as it can be with modern medicine. I don't have to go back to the hospital for two months. This is good all round, though I did find the laser unnerving. I keep thinking back to two years ago. It was only two years ago - the eye specialist reminded me of this. Comparing me now with me then and I've made stunning progress. I'm doing more than a normal day's work (study and paid work and various bits and pieces add up) and it took me a series of unhappy incidents to slow me down this much, right now. I may whinge for a while to come, for I'm still sorting things out, but two years ago I was nearly dead and now I'm merely mopping up the mess and whingeing. It really is rather wonderful, when one stops to think. I have so earned my special treat tonight: Geoscience Australia here I come! I had so much happening yesterday that I didn't tell you about my bus ride. This was very negligent of me. People were staring at me on the way to work. I was too tired to wonder much, so I just let them get on with it. About halfway there I remembered I had fluoresced the day before. I also remembered that the bus had fluorescent lights, it being after dark. I looked down at my hands and lo, I was glowing, faintly. I'm afraid I spent the last few minutes of the bus ride analysing the glow and working out all the ways that glow-in-the-dark characters in movies are wrong. My twenty minutes of pretending I was a stray deity mixing with the hoi polloi are now lost, forever, not utilised. I ought to apologise for so many posts today, but I'd have to apologise more if people weren't given the wherewithal to avoid me at this year's NatCon. It's very important to me to make sure that this opportunity is given to everyone. Not everyone can take advantage of it - note that some souls have to suffer the ignominy of sharing panels with me. If you turn up to support them, I will completely understand. ( To avoid the Official Guide to Avoiding Gillian, avoid clicking here. ) Back from teaching and the phone rang. I answered and it was a phisher. I said, three times "Are you sure you meant to ring a business? Who did you want to talk to?" He finally picked up the word 'business' and became very, very apologetic and hung up before I could say "Goodbye." It might have helped that I used my teacher voice. This is because I have just come from teaching Latin and Latin Requires a Teacher's Voice. Latin especially requires a teacher's voice if one teaches using 19th century versions of nursery rhymes. My students needed to start seeing the language as a language and not just as a set of grammatical constructs, and I thought it was far better to ruin "Bye Baby Bunting" for them forever than to ruin Cicero. They thought so,too, and have asked for a reprise in the final week. In an ideal world, I shall find more silly texts to use. The short poems really helped my students sort out how sentences fitted together and what I meant by the grammatical explanations. If anyone has any suggestions (with accompanying text - they need clear English translations even if the translations are loose - as they were tonight - for 12 hours is not a lot of time to learn Latin) I promise to credit you in class. I also took in some food (based on Cato) and that made my students very happy. One of them admitted that it seemed a shame to have a course by me and not taste my historical cooking. No-one ever says that it seems a shame to have a course by me and not get my personal view of the chansons de geste. I guess some specialisations are sexier than others. Callout to Australian writers - the new CSfG anthology is seeking submissions. Submission Guidelines Canberra Speculative Fiction Guild is delighted to announce: Submissions for the next CSFG Publishing anthology, ‘next’, are welcome between 20 May and 15 October 2012. Sequence. Succession. Cause and Effect. Show us what happened. next. ‘next’ will be edited by Simon Petrie and Rob Porteous. Stories may be any length up to 5,000 words. All approaches to the theme are welcome, as long as they are by nature speculative. Payment will be a copy of the print version of the anthology plus $10 for stories under 1,500 words and $30 for all others based on published word count. Submissions are encouraged from Australian writers of all levels of experience, with special encouragement given to CSFG members. Multiple submissions (up to 3 per author) are OK; simultaneous submissions and reprints are not. Submissions should be sent (as .rtf attachments only) to next.anthology@gmail.com Please make sure that the following information is in the email proper: Name Address Email address Author's name, as you would like it to be published Name of Story Word Count Other contact information If you wish to contribute to the interior artwork, please contact next.anthology@gmail.com Small Print: If your story is selected, we will be seeking assignment of First English Anthology Rights, First World Anthology Rights, and First Electronic Rights, for its publication in the English language. We'd like an exclusive licence to print, publish and sell your work (story or artwork) for one year from the date of first publication. We will use your work only in the print and e-book versions of the anthology and re-printings of it. Visit the CSFG website My beef-of-the-second is writers who feel they have conquered time. Writers who take a bit of this and a bit of that are capable of annoying me, for some of them completely fail to understand why there's no underlying unity to the this and the that they have welded together in their work. They can't see a difference between nineteenth century England and twenty-first century America, or between Mainz in the eleventh century and in the sixteenth. A lot of history of Jews is written with this approach. Jews are universal, after all*, and so are not culturally confined by time and space in the normal way. My favourite history books (focussing on any subject) have an acute awareness of the long patterns of time and the short patterns and how geography and status and gender help configure time in a culture and how different people experience all this as themselves, not as projections of theory. My favourite recent book on this is by Elisheva Carlebach (Palaces of Time). It's a masterly study of the kind of things I think writers and historians need to understand. Right now, I'm reading a study that does the opposite. It contains such good ideas, but the author doesn't have much of an insight into how the cultural contexts of the works she examines actually operate. This means that the text is muddled and the conclusions are muddied and the whole work rests on insecure foundations. What I think I'm finally realising is that time and space in cultures operate the same way the palette does in painting. They need to be understood at a fairly deep level. They don't always need to be expressed. They help inform a writer's decisions. Quite often a work itself progresses with hardly a mention of them, but the solid understanding is working hard in the background, assisting the story or the argument. Moving to fiction for a moment - it's not a question of whether a society has clocks or if people travel a lot. It's a question of how time is measured and how time is perceived (both - not either/or) and how space is visualised and used. There are so many different ways a society can operate and still have most of its members limited to a 30 mile radius in their lifetime, for instance. It might be the difference between a housewife in 19th century outback Australia (on a Steele Rudd type property - since these things count) and a cockney woman in 19th century London: the two woman might be born in the same year and travel the same total distance in their lives and still have hugely different spatial awareness. And their lives! So vastly, vastly different. I suspect that one reason some books are more easily accessible to a wider range of readers is because those books have this awareness informing them. The writers either understand space and time and build their world to manifest that clearly (taking this and that, but taking this and that with scrupulous care), or they select very narrow boundaries and stick so closely to those boundaries that the palette is consistent**. Some readers (of fiction, of general non-fiction, of academic studies) also lack that time/space cultural understanding. They couldn't care less if the palette jars sensibilities. Some of us care very deeply and things jar easily. Most readers are somewhere in between and a modicum of care and a bit of a reach to develop a palette will make most readers much happier. And that's an end of my rant. it's a pity, because it only has two footnotes. *So a popular assumption says, anyhow - I don't feel particularly universal. **For some books, of course inconsistency is way important. The Adventures of Alianore Audley, for instance (which is where this rant came from - the contrast between Wainwright and the other authors I'm looking at today). It's done intentionally and for comic effect, however - the writer still has a deep understanding of the place and time. It's one of those instances where someone who knows something very well can mock it very effectively. |
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