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My thanks to you all for your kind wishes on the next few months' change of occupation. I spent today on sick leave, not discharging my duties. The pattern of the days when I am on my feet and on the job is not that different from the rhythms of teaching: thinking, preparing, doing, reflecting. The difference is that I share my work now with a wider variety of people, and have a rather more looming sense of my responsibilities to others, because I am new at them. Last week I endeavoured to combine a meeting in Wellington with a few days' break. It may have been a better idea to schedule the break after, rather than around, the meeting, but I am not necessarily the best decision-maker concerning my leisure. Nonetheless, it was splendid to see so many people and do so many things. I took in the shooting of an episode of Off the Ropes, in the company of Jo, Ms. Ratpony and others, not least among whom was the wrestler Lazarus Volt, for whom we waved glittery lightning bolts o' cardboard and shouted down the Heels with due ceremony. Later, an erotic reading at The Watusi was not quite what I expected, and even as the wine flowed, I considered, not terribly coherently, the problem at hand. The next day I enjoyed lunch with MTNW and the Gamester at Large, then ambulated from Thorndon to Mt Vic to see the newest premises of Wanda Harland, where I was greeted, unexpectedly, by Kowhai at the counter. This was my chance to see first hand so many of the household items and objets d'art that I have previously viewed only online. Following afternoon tea with Megan, we took the opportunity for a second journey to the original shop in Petone, where I was delighted to meet for the first time the proprietress and make a small purchase. Later I had dinner with Faith, working on luring her back home for my hen's outing in exchange for the imposition of my getting married on her birthday. (I promised not to do it again.) After Friday's all-day meeting there was just time to take a glass with most of those heading to the WOW opening (which my eye continually misreads as WoW, thanks to where the seor's interests have lain), and on Saturday morning I enjoyed brunch with Dangermouse, with whom I considered the relative ease, or not, of coordinating family members away from home while attending a wedding. During the afternoon I was considerably entertained by the company of Stephen, Kathy and Hannah (whose latest work you can see here), who took me around the south coast, including the sadly-named Happy Valley and the intriguing Carlucci Land. Here, salvaged goods became newly rendered on the landscape. My favourites were these foreground spheres, which rolled out like totems along the driveway. I returned home to a newly-shorn seor, although the extent to which his more conventional crop has an impact upon the world's gender confusion remains to be seen. We have now less than a month until our wedding, to which I continue to look forward. There are a still a few matters of which to take care, and for which I hope to have more enthusiasm when I am feeling a little more well, and I thank my Wellington friends for their company on what was technically my last out-o'-town outing as a spinster. Tags: in aotearoa, the social round
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Colloquy with this post. You whom we made,
you whom we need,
Needless, to say,
mindfully, risingly,
needing, needling,
kneeling, kneading,
the pounding of the dough.
The heart set, to-and-fro. Tags: poems
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My employment in my current position began in June, eight years ago, when I was grateful to have a job, a salary and a desk to call my own. Indeed, I still am. Since then I have taught continuously for anywhere between thirty-six and forty-five weeks a year, running parallel to, but not in sync with, the wider university's teaching schedule. In the early start-up days, this included teaching from April to October with no non-teaching time, thanks to two overlapping twenty-four week programmes. In October there was one week's break and then straight on until Christmas. In 2002, my first year full-time on the job, I went more-or-less mad. I had an office to myself behind the covered bike-stands, which was a fairly grim view but offered privacy for when I needed to cry between classes. You get the idea. Somewhere in between the incessant turning-over of weeks, I managed to get out some: to the Old Countr(ies), France, and latterly Hong Kong and Japan, not to mention the wider environs of Aotearoa, from the Far North to the depths of Western Southland. For a long time, my working pace was such that marathon holiday jaunts, such as one-day drives from Wellington to Auckland via the Taranaki Coast, or from north Northumberland to Oxford in a day, seemed consistent with the pace of working life. As of today, however, I am seconded from my teaching for the next five months, thanks to the current demands of my voluntary role. This was only confirmed in the last few days, so there has been very little mental time to prepare. I hardly know what to make of this, and keep having to repeat it to myself: from now until February, I will be working on course development, contributing to a group research project, and (for the majority of my time) carrying out the voluntary duties for which I am now paid. I don't think this will really sink in until my colleagues start teaching again (and, to be honest, since that begins a week before my wedding, I doubt I'll be paying too much attention for a while). I feel neither excitement nor trepidation at this point, so much as relief that I won't be potentially short-changing my students by rushing off to meetings. Now I can rush unencumbered. I think if I am to make the most of this time in terms of the skills I have worked so hard to acquire for much of this century -- and from which I am officially on hiatus -- it will be to think hard, but stealthily, about what I've accomplished and what I would like to do next. I'm enjoying, a great deal, the stimulation of university-wide work and the opportunity to contribute on a wider scale (and have been helped to this point by the fact that those students who know about my role think it's a cool thing to do); it serves my altruism and my love of meta-narratives alike, not to mention my sense of responsibility to my colleagues in the wider university. But I wonder how long it will be before I miss the classroom, the responsibility and the intimacy of the teacher-student relationship, the blend of duty and creativity. I don't know what's next. This is the first time in nearly nine years that I've been able to say that. I'm happy that the possibility of new adventure synchronises so well with my intention to marry next month. Even if life continues with business as usual, the symbolism of the juncture will be sustaining. [youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=6KO90EdKB-g[/youtube]A hat-tip to MTNW for the video link. Tags: teaching & learning, writing & research
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[youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=X5JALwwaASg[/youtube]You ain't nothing but a hound dog
Crying all the time.
You ain't nothing but a hound dog
Crying all the time.
Well, you ain't never caught a rabbit
And you ain't no friend of mine. The seor and I came out of sleep and into the weekend arguing, as is our habit, about metaphors. Our focus in this case -- and I cannot remember why (perhaps the part of the conversation that began while I was still asleep) -- was on Elvis Presley's recording of "Hound Dog". Recalling early hearings of it in early childhood, the seor claimed the song to be, most likely, about a disappointing dog. Then why, said I, would the singer tell a dog that it had previously appeared "high class"? Maybe, said the seor, it had been sold him as a top show dog, or hunting dog, since rabbits were mentioned. I stuck, metaphorically, to my point, and claimed the song was directed at a person. Why though, if it were a song of disappointed love, would the singer address his let-down of a lover as a "hound dog"? Did he want to call her a bitch? Was he in fact speaking to a friend (but again, the problem of "high class")? It sounded, I said, as if the song had been originally sung by a woman addressed to a man, and had got appropriated for the use of Elvis. The point after all, we agreed, was that Elvis rock it, not that the lyrics be particularly illuminating or penetrating. Since ours is a Love 2.0, we asked the tubes: I to my netbook and he to his iPhone. The trail was quickly revealed, thanks to Wikipedia. Elvis in April or May 1956 heard the song performed in Vegas by Freddie Bell and the Bellboys, whose lead singer gave him permission to include it -- as a comic closer -- in his own performances, using the lyrics and some of the movements of Bell. Bell and his band had recorded the song the previous year, after rewriting the original lyrics at the suggestion of Bernie Lowe, for whose label they were making singles. The rewritten lyrics were intended to broaden the song's radio appeal. In April 1953, five different country-style versions of the song with its original lyrics had been recorded, following its release, the previous month, on Peacock Records, performed by Big Mama Thornton. Thornton's 1952 recording had been produced by the song's authors, Jerry Leiber and Mike Stoller. As a twelve-bar blues, it was an R&B number-one single. And at the point of Thornton's performance, it all becomes clear. The song is addressed to the lover the singer is trying to jilt. Her points of frustration are clear: this main is a moocher, a shyster, from whom she needs to disentangle her time. Thornton's delivery is imperious but sassy, the kind of indirect storytelling that brings in one's friends and neighbours to shoo the interloper off the premises. Sometimes lovers come back, and are duds (even as late as 1965, the time of the performance below). What are you going to do? [youtube] http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=5XUAg1_A7IE[/youtube]You ain't nothing but a hound dog
Been snoopin' round my door
You ain't nothing but a hound dog
Been snoopin' round my door
You can wag your tail
But I ain't gonna feed you no more So what's the point? Something like this: that the seor and I were both right, about the song's underlying metaphors, and their flattening out to the point of death by the time of Elvis's performance. Both singers performed with barking and howling noises, but the weighting was different. "Hound Dog" carried Elvis's new celebrity, his notoriety, his threat to propriety; the dangerous dog was, in effect, he. Thornton makes barking noises and finishes the song where she started, but Elvis goes out on a shouting, gyrating, end-note, the song an augmentation of what began before it. If my preference is for Thornton's performance, that also recognises that, in Elvis's case, the song is not the point. Tags: at home, commentatrix, o internet
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