This month's entry for 
monthlydiaryday
And it's here again. The speed at which the months pass alarms me.
Wednesdays are generally busy uni days for me this term. I woke late(ish), showered, dressed and spent a couple of hours going over the material for the seminar - "Victorian Materialities" is the class I'm doing for credit this term, so I like to check I've done all the reading.
This week's book was Great Expectations, which I have taught at every level from age 13 upwards, so I didn't actually re-read the whole book this week. I looked through a few chapters, some of which appear to have annotations on them dating back to the 80s, and selected my "object". Each week we are asked to talk about a "thing" from the book and talk about it. I chose the costumes in the performance of "Hamlet" which Pip and Herbert attend, about teh way in which in effect the costumes perform the play rather than the actors and the audience responds to the individual items of clothing as much as to the play, while Mr Wopsle, former Parish Clerk of Pip's village, is playing Hamlet, not at all well. This is metonymy for Pip's own situation - he, too, is in borrowed and unconvincing clothes, masquerading as someone he is not, well above him in rank - he is thus jeering at himself as he jeers at the performance. Clothes are important in the novel in general, too.
I finished reading a chapter of Elaine Freedgood's The Ideas in Things which related to Great Expectations; I didn't find it wholly convincing, I must say. She tried to link Magwitch's tobacco with the destruction of Australian Aborigine society, and the effective genocide of many of them. I see where she's coming from, but I feel her argument here was tenuous - for it to "disrupt" a novel, I feel the majority of the readership ought to have some inkling of what the object is.
The seminar went well, with lots of interesting discussion. The others had chosen things like Magwitch's leg-irons, Miss Havisham's dress and Mrs Joe's apron, and the tutor gave us some interesting background on tobacco, including some deeply weird adverts from the period. And one she found and felt she just had to share - pills for toothache made of cocaine!
I then headed down to the café on the ground floor of the Humanities Building for a rather late lunch, and checked my email, LJ and FB on my tablet, which I love more each day. I'd posted about a page on FB whose admins were reposting a lot of artwork by people I know. It had turned into a predictable kerfuffle there, with a lot of outrage, hurt protestations of innocence, because it all came from Google or Bing which are public domain and in any case why don't we even have a heart? The (clearly not very old or mature) page admins went into meltdown, and I felt mildly guilty, but not for long.
Then I went over to the library for a couple of hours, getting ahead on next week's reading for the Victorian class - comparatively lightweight, as it's poetry, and some support material about hair fetishism in the period, all of it sent to us by the tutor. I browsed the shelves for interesting stuff on Thackeray - I have pretty much decided I want to do my essay on gendered objects in his novels, possibly just Pendennis but perhaps Vanity Fair too, if only for an excuse to re-read the book.
I did a little bit of reading in Italian too, to get myself into the mood, then went to my Italian class, which started at 6.30. Two women did presentations (in Italian) on the food of the North and the South, which was interesting. I am slated to do a talk next week. Gulp. I think I want to talk about Dario Fo, a wonderful actor/director/playwright. I need to get to work on that soon.
Then we did a hearing test which was hard - we were supposed to work out the meaning of one word from context. I failed at that, but I think I got most of the rest right. Then we played a silly game which was really about using verb tenses and subjunctive. Why do I do this to myself?
It was nearly nine before I got home and caught up on the news, much of which was about the atrocious weather we've been having. As my Mum lives in North Wales I gave her a ring to check she was OK - they had wind speeds well over a hundred mph in her area and she lives on top of a hill. Fortunately she has no risk of flooding! My lovely husband summoned me from that to supper - lasagne and vegetables, with a glass or two of red wine.
We watched Inside Number 9, a half-hour comedy which was hilarious - and almost entirely without dialogue. Strongly recommended to all those who can use iPlayer. Then Newsnight, with Paxo doing a fine job on various politicians, all of whom seem to be aiming for photo-ops in new wellies right now. Funny how it's so much more important a national emergency now it's the Thames Valley getting flooded. After that was the repeat of Top Gear from Sunday, with Tom Hiddleston in the Reasonably Priced Car. That man is as clever and quick-witted as he is pretty and talented. He did a Clarkson impersonation to Clarkson.
Bed, but I found sleeping hard, partly because of the aforementioned kerfuffle - apparently we are now accused of driving someone to self-harm. I know it's mostly bombast, but I really hate that sort of thing, even online. I read a little more of a silly vampires and demons novel by Karen Chance, and that helped me sleep. The moon was ridiculously bright, but the wind was doing a fair bit of wuthering.
Wednesdays are generally busy uni days for me this term. I woke late(ish), showered, dressed and spent a couple of hours going over the material for the seminar - "Victorian Materialities" is the class I'm doing for credit this term, so I like to check I've done all the reading.
This week's book was Great Expectations, which I have taught at every level from age 13 upwards, so I didn't actually re-read the whole book this week. I looked through a few chapters, some of which appear to have annotations on them dating back to the 80s, and selected my "object". Each week we are asked to talk about a "thing" from the book and talk about it. I chose the costumes in the performance of "Hamlet" which Pip and Herbert attend, about teh way in which in effect the costumes perform the play rather than the actors and the audience responds to the individual items of clothing as much as to the play, while Mr Wopsle, former Parish Clerk of Pip's village, is playing Hamlet, not at all well. This is metonymy for Pip's own situation - he, too, is in borrowed and unconvincing clothes, masquerading as someone he is not, well above him in rank - he is thus jeering at himself as he jeers at the performance. Clothes are important in the novel in general, too.
I finished reading a chapter of Elaine Freedgood's The Ideas in Things which related to Great Expectations; I didn't find it wholly convincing, I must say. She tried to link Magwitch's tobacco with the destruction of Australian Aborigine society, and the effective genocide of many of them. I see where she's coming from, but I feel her argument here was tenuous - for it to "disrupt" a novel, I feel the majority of the readership ought to have some inkling of what the object is.
The seminar went well, with lots of interesting discussion. The others had chosen things like Magwitch's leg-irons, Miss Havisham's dress and Mrs Joe's apron, and the tutor gave us some interesting background on tobacco, including some deeply weird adverts from the period. And one she found and felt she just had to share - pills for toothache made of cocaine!
I then headed down to the café on the ground floor of the Humanities Building for a rather late lunch, and checked my email, LJ and FB on my tablet, which I love more each day. I'd posted about a page on FB whose admins were reposting a lot of artwork by people I know. It had turned into a predictable kerfuffle there, with a lot of outrage, hurt protestations of innocence, because it all came from Google or Bing which are public domain and in any case why don't we even have a heart? The (clearly not very old or mature) page admins went into meltdown, and I felt mildly guilty, but not for long.
Then I went over to the library for a couple of hours, getting ahead on next week's reading for the Victorian class - comparatively lightweight, as it's poetry, and some support material about hair fetishism in the period, all of it sent to us by the tutor. I browsed the shelves for interesting stuff on Thackeray - I have pretty much decided I want to do my essay on gendered objects in his novels, possibly just Pendennis but perhaps Vanity Fair too, if only for an excuse to re-read the book.
I did a little bit of reading in Italian too, to get myself into the mood, then went to my Italian class, which started at 6.30. Two women did presentations (in Italian) on the food of the North and the South, which was interesting. I am slated to do a talk next week. Gulp. I think I want to talk about Dario Fo, a wonderful actor/director/playwright. I need to get to work on that soon.
Then we did a hearing test which was hard - we were supposed to work out the meaning of one word from context. I failed at that, but I think I got most of the rest right. Then we played a silly game which was really about using verb tenses and subjunctive. Why do I do this to myself?
It was nearly nine before I got home and caught up on the news, much of which was about the atrocious weather we've been having. As my Mum lives in North Wales I gave her a ring to check she was OK - they had wind speeds well over a hundred mph in her area and she lives on top of a hill. Fortunately she has no risk of flooding! My lovely husband summoned me from that to supper - lasagne and vegetables, with a glass or two of red wine.
We watched Inside Number 9, a half-hour comedy which was hilarious - and almost entirely without dialogue. Strongly recommended to all those who can use iPlayer. Then Newsnight, with Paxo doing a fine job on various politicians, all of whom seem to be aiming for photo-ops in new wellies right now. Funny how it's so much more important a national emergency now it's the Thames Valley getting flooded. After that was the repeat of Top Gear from Sunday, with Tom Hiddleston in the Reasonably Priced Car. That man is as clever and quick-witted as he is pretty and talented. He did a Clarkson impersonation to Clarkson.
Bed, but I found sleeping hard, partly because of the aforementioned kerfuffle - apparently we are now accused of driving someone to self-harm. I know it's mostly bombast, but I really hate that sort of thing, even online. I read a little more of a silly vampires and demons novel by Karen Chance, and that helped me sleep. The moon was ridiculously bright, but the wind was doing a fair bit of wuthering.
