Hi Masto, I'm home. The day began with the wind and rain which had me wanting to listen only to The Cure during my commutes and while I was prepping for class. Can the eyeliner be far behind. I jest. My eyes are far too sensitive for eye makeup these days and all of my fancy eye makeup palettes are going to waste.
It was an okay day. Another Drama Lab with my Oral Literacy MA Students. Their big project for this semester is connected to The Lady's Not For Burning. My approach to Oral Literacy is Oral Literacy x Pop Culture x Performance Studies. I'm enjoying it! I always enjoy teaching performance as it takes me back to some of those roots (I did two years of a performance studies x literature PhD before I defected fully to lit to be a Gothic scholar)
Been awhile, but I guess I could do a #3GoodThings today.
Unravelled a knot that had me stuck in a chapter of #Rosemirror
Listening to The National all morning while working on my Oral Literacy lecture.
Enjoying teaching (and in so doing learning more )about Literacy. Fascinating field, many intersections with my focus in Popular Culture, Literature and Philosophy.
Here are the other posters (and the original poster) for the Memory Studies in Literature and the Humanities II: Memory, Space, and Mobilities webinar.
The webinar will feature a keynote from Professor Emma Bond who will be talking points from her second monograph "Writing Migration Through The Body" which was really helpful for me in working through the knotty subject of mobility in relation to memory. Apart from that, this webinar is very much postgraduate oriented and will feature 7 supervisees of mine, and papers from me and an academic collaborator/friend (Dr. Sanghamitra Dalal). We'll likely be closing registrations by Monday as we already have 129 registrations so if you were interested and thinking about it, do sign up as soon as possible.
Today's music: some classical (Debussy) but mostly I woke up with St. Vincent in my head so I listened to her 2015 album on the commute and later while working. Then segued into Father John Misty. Good times.
Visited new-to-me pokestops and a good gym battle after my afternoon trip to the pharmacy!
Started prep on the #hauntology paper I swore I wasn't going to present on Tuesday and am now quite academically pleased with myself.
Academic Updates: I've got at least one article in the bag re article acceptance, final copyedits all done. Waiting to hear from the others...
There are other urgent things to settle, however: The two events I am running in November, and I'm going to be giving a talk at the Romancing the Gothic series of events, also in November. Which means I'm prepping for two talks -- I'll be presenting a paper at the Memory in Literature and the Humanities webinar I am running on the 28th of November.
Keynote: Professor Emma Bond.
I'm also writing two grant proposals (which will make four grant applications sent in this year) and preparing a handful of PhD supervisees for proposal defense, and another handful for paper presentations.
Managed to clear a handful of anxiety-inducing things off my academic to-do list, which is another win for today. Got my groceries in (I have them delivered to my office) because by Friday and the end of the last class of the week I'm going to be too beat to even think of weekend groceries (it's going to be Korean food this weekend. Well, that and more pizza), and ordered dinner because I was craving portuguese egg tarts and then found a place that does halal Kristang food, and got excited. Sadly, the egg tarts didn't arrive, I whined at the delivery service for a refund, but then I got egg tarts from another place. THE END.
Dinner, then laundry, then checking my PhD supervisee's dissertation (Malaysian Literature) because final submission is ...SOON.
We're three weeks into the semester here and it's been go go go and trying to manage all the deadlines while also grappling with chronic pain and fatigue. My to-do list has me sometimes in tears. I've already told my music teachers that class is impossible for the time being. I love my job, but I often wish doing it wasn't such a pain in the you know what.
Hello Masto! Home late and very sleepy/hoping for an early night. Still working on CE for the article I submitted yesterday (editor bounced it back to me with some corrections based on the latest APA format -- is it just me who finds the new APA's requirement re sentence case when journal/book titles are NOT in sentence case, very illogical? It upsets my eyes, but I do what I must!)
Geese continue to delight me with every single released this year, so enjoy "Space Race"!
Sunday evening has always been deadline scrambling time because I'm completely without energy on Saturday to do anything apart from cooking, laundry and watching #startrek. So here I am, struggling to do corrections to an article post-peer review while waiting for my co-author to send his corrected section to me. After this, making my lecture slides for a heinously early Monday morning class. I'll try to squeeze in a peer review before bed. Sigh. I remind myself this job pays for my nice food, the clothes on my back, this gently decaying apartment and various nice things.
I'm home early from work because the water supply was cut for repairs and we were advised to go home. Attended another research grant workshop this morning after overcoming yet another morning pain episode (meh) but the liniment the hospital provided was amazingly good. Better than the pain pack!
Anyway, resting for a bit and chilling for the sake of my back, before I dive into corrections to this article back from peer review. And then onwards to other outstanding tasks.
I need to do another working weekend because points at frighteningly long to-do list * and bajillion commitments so I'll just wish you all a good weekend early, and talk to you on Monday, Masto.
*still, I'm hoping to at least do a trial run of my piano exam recordings, plus submit a couple of short stories.
Attended an early morning online research grant workshop (talk given by my mentor), now going to reward myself with pumpkin spice latte before starting the prep for this afternoon's lecture.
Wednesday is my only day with no classes this sem, but it did mean that I was up to my eyebrows in course admin and supervision matters. Also battling a lot of exhaustion from having submitted four articles during semester break (also the mountain of grading I had to do and other stuff). Break? What break?
(It's a good thing I love my job and that there are perks that make it worthwhile)
When you're beyond dead tired but then are gently reminded by the very patient convener that your Folk Horror x Material Culture talk for a British uni* is going to go up on eventbrite soon, so you hammer out an abstract and are suddenly taken aback at your own cleverness.
gently pats self on the back
I'm actually utterly excited for this talk (eventbrite?! omg) but also really tired. Haha.
*edited because I've been such an over-extended/overworked airhead that I somehow had the misapprehension that it was an American uni!
Monday was okay-ish with some really super okay bits.
The super okay bits:
(1) One article accepted subject to some revisions (phew!).
(2) !! So I shot my shot a couple of weeks back and asked a memory scholar I admire if she'd be keynote for my Memory studies seminar. She said yes this morning! This will be great not just for me but my PhD supervisees who are working on #memorystudies with me.
(3) Got my meds from the hospital (tiring long drive though) and this marks the first time I've been there since injury without using a cane. Another milestone.
(4) First class of the semester went okay, despite a couple of technical hitches. Lovely students! And I had sufficient brainspace later to do event organising for the creative writing workshop (secured a #psychogeographer as guest speaker) plus work on another article.
Fairy-tale scholarship always has me listening to Eddi Reader because her discography was my mainstay back during my M.A. days (my Angela Carter M.A. dissertation), so I've been listening to her album of Robbie Burns songs all week.
The website for the journal I was going to submit to on Saturday is still dead and in the meanwhile I realized that what I, and my co-writer (MA student who successfully defended her fairytale studies dissertation last year) were looking at fits more into semiotics than stylistics.
Back to the drawing board, then. But am almost done and hope to submit by week's end. Then, one more co-authored article, then I'm going to focus on my sole-authored work for a bit. (trust me, I'd rather just do my sole-authored work but this uni's policies... and it's also a good thing to give my supervisees a leg up, I guess.)
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I missed this whole twitter debate on how literature professors dislike literature?
Well I do teach and study literature sometimes, so feel a need to opine lol.
I love literature! I enjoy reading books! I think the most interesting works are to study are not necessarily the ones I most enjoy reading, though. Sometimes, yes. But sometimes I get a lot out of studying works that trouble me in some way.