For the record

I'd like to set this down in writing somewhere, because I know that no one else - particularly those administrators who have asked me and my friends about this for FIVE years now - will make a note of it anywhere:

There is NO postgrad conference organiser folder. It was never created. There wasn't one last year, or the year before, or the year before that, or even the year before that. There is not one this year. It unlikely, before you ask, that there will be one next year (see above about one never being created). In its place, I suggest you encourage communication between the postgrads who are running the conference this year and those who did it last year. This might help to re-instate the sense of postgraduate community that we had when we spoke to each other and did not need to create a folder.

I hope this is now clear, and uncomplicated, and the folder (which really does not exist - if we were trying to hide it from you we would have lost all amusement in this by now) will not be chased around again this year. Or next...

Having Brunch and Talking Seriously About Work

On Monday I came back to the City where the Castle is also Prison after spending the weekend with my friends in the Beautiful Scottish City that I Miss. On Saturday, I had lunch with Aspiring Author, and later I had a lovely evening at Amy's birthday ceilidh, where I danced (a lot) and giggled more than I have giggled in a very long time.

After such a wonderful - but late! - night, September Blue (with whom I was staying) and I had a very lazy Sunday morning. I got up after a lie in, which is something of a luxury for me because my Little Dog doesn't usually sleep that long, and spent an hour or so sitting in my pyjamas finishing a novel (the one for job 4, but reading a novel doesn't feel like work).

When we were both up and dressed, and after a little time spent checking emails and playing scrabble on Facebook, we decided to go out for breakfast. I looked at my watch and said, 'I suppose we could call it brunch now, really'. 'Yes,' said September Blue jokingly, 'we should Have Brunch and Talk Seriously About Work'.

We walked down to the diner that makes cooked veggie breakfasts (including vegetarian haggis!), ordered the food and talked for a while about the prevous night's ceilidh, how much fun we'd had, and how different our social lives are since our cohort finished our PhDs, and I moved away from the Beautiful Scottish City that I Miss. And we talked about how we're doing juggling jobs (she has had more practice at this than I have; she's been doing it longer), and how very exciting it is that she is hearing positive things from a Big Named Journal about an article she has submitted to them in hope of publication. We talked about our future publication plans, our research plans, the job market and the poor conditions of TAs in all institutions.

I pointed out that we were actually Having Brunch and Talking Seriously About Work.

The waitress offered us dessert / coffee, and looking out of the window and seeing it was raining heavily, and not being inclined to move anywhere, we ordered more coffee.

And talked about deadlines, and friends, and thesis submission (ours and theirs)...

[pause to order vanilla cheesecake with two spoons, and 2 decaff coffees]

...bad boyfriends, former boyfriends, potential boyfriends, and our mutual friend who is Young and Fashionable, and the advantages and disadvantages of internet dating.

The diner was starting to get busy, and we were nearly finished with our coffees; it was no longer raining so heavily, and we'd probably been there around 2 hours, so we decided to pay the bill and leave. We were back in plenty of time for me to pack my bag and catch a train to Road Grid City to spend some time with The PhDLitChick.

It was a very luxuriously lazy and lovely way to spend a Sunday (and a whole weekend).

And I realised how very much I miss spending time and being silly with my friends in the Beautiful Scottish City that I Miss, and Having Brunch and Talking Seriously About Work.

Email circulars.

Here is a conversation I had with the IT helpdesk today:

Me: Hello. I've just started work as a temp in the Philosophy department office. Would it be possible to set up access for me to the office's email account, please?

IT guy: You want access to the office email account?

Me: Yes, please. I am covering the sick leave of the two people who usually have access, so I need to be able to check the emails in their absence.

IT guy: Hold on a moment, please.

[He plays BAD 'on hold music' to me]

IT guy: The procedure for that is that someone who already has access has to contact us to ask to have you added.

Me: But I only need access to it because they are both on long term sick leave.

IT guy: The procedure is that one of them has to ask us to have you added. It's a security measure.

Me: Yes, I understand that. But, if one of them were here to be able to contact you with that information, then I wouldn't need you to give me access to the email account. I only need access because they are both away ill.

IT guy: Well, maybe you could email them. Are they checking emails?

An almost beautifully balanced day

I've been juggling jobs today. I'm not the first post- (or indeed pre-)PhD academic to be doing this, and I definitely won't be the last. And although it's been a very long day, there was something strangely pleasing about the order of things...

This morning on the bus to campus to attend a first-year lecture (part of the expectations of job number 1), I was reading a novel. It's currently on a module I will be teaching after Christmas at the other university in the City where the Castle is also a Prison (lets's call this job number 4). I have some control over what texts I teach on it, so because the topic of the course is not my usual area of research - in fact it's far from it - , I'm reading the current booklist so I can decide what to keep and what I might like to change. I need to make this decision at some point this month, I think.

After the lecture, I went back to my office in the English Department to continue to do a time consuming but not particularly difficult administrative task for which I am being paid by the hour in order to lighten the load of the office staff (job number 2). After a couple of hours, I went across campus to start my new part time job in the Philosophy Department office (job number 3). I suspect this may, at some point, be confusing for those of my students who take both English and Philosophy. The department is quite small, and seems to be friendly, and I spent most of the afternoon just finding my way around. I'm sure it will get busier though! I will usually do this job Wednesday -Friday, but tomorrow afternoon I have a meeting for job number 1, so had to move job number 3 to this afternoon to make up the hours this week.

When I'd come to the end of the working day at job number 3, I returned to my English Department office to continue with job number 2 for a couple of hours - actually until I ran out of the cards I was completing. And then, on the way home, I read some more of the novel for job number 4. If I'd just squeezed in a little bit of teaching prep or admin before that, I'd have had a beautifully balanced day:

4, 1, 2, 3, 2, 4.

Scared students: a fitting title for Halloween.

"So, how are your classes going", asks the Creative Writing tutor with whom I share an office. I only really see her on the day she has an office hour, and she isn't usually this chatty. I was worried she felt left out of the 'early modernist faction' that is the rest of our shared office, and I'm really pleased that she doesn't seem to be quite as cut off as I thought.

I say mine are going really well: chatty students (not always on the right topic, but easily steered back on track), good attendance, reasonable amount of preparation (although we'll see - so far they haven't had a vast amount of prep to do...). All in all, I'm quite pleased with how they're doing. "How about you?", I ask.

"Well, not too bad. Although they aren't coping very well with the virtual learning environment - and when I look at other tutors' folders there, their students seem to be coping much better". I point out that this might not actually be the case - the other tutors might just be tidying up their folders. "And," she says, "they've taken a vote and decided they are scared of me, and that wasn't the sort of atmosphere I was going for."

"Well, no.... Taken a vote? How did they tell you this?"

"Just that they'd taken a vote and were scared of me. Are yours scared of you?"

I'm fairly sure my students aren't scared of me. If they are, they really don't show it. Maybe I'm just not a scary person - not that Creative Writing tutor is. Maybe I just have more confident students. Maybe I'm not scary enough. I guess time will tell - will they read the novels for later classes / hand in their work on time / continue with the good attendance...?

But I think that if your students are prepared to tell you that they have taken a vote and decided that they are scared of you, then they can't be that scared. My advice would probably be to find a way to make them laugh; a shared giggle goes a long way.

Any other suggestions?

A post of sad news.

Yesterday my family had to say goodbye to a much loved pet: our collie, Rosie, who had been ill for some time. It is always difficult to lose such a clever and affectionate member of the family, but it is comforting to know that she is no longer in pain, or struggling with a rare doggy disorder (an extraordinary dog like Rosie wouldn't settle for a common-or-garden illness).

I'm sending extra hugs to Sees Through the Eyes of Children and The Artist to whom she 'officially' belonged, although really Rosie was always in charge.

Rosie taught my Little Dog a lot of things - some good habits, some bad. And we will all miss her very much indeed.

Taming the Shrew

*** Spoiler warning if you intend to see the RSC Taming of the Shrew ***

Yesterday I went to see the RSC production of The Taming of the Shrew with a group of students. I had been told it was a controvertial Shrew (you can read reviews here and here) but didn't know much else about it.

It is a particularly brutal production. There is a lot of physical violence throughout, and Petruchio's 'taming' of Katherina is shown deliberately and overtly as acts of mental and physical cruelty.

The production was not without comedy, particularly in the scenes with Bianca and her suitors, with Tranio and Biondello, but the comedy was rarely with Petruchio and Katherina. I think this is what has caused such controversy. Petruchio's scenes of 'taming' have, in other productions, been played comically. And, I think, some audiences do not want their Shakespeare - particularly their Shakespearean comedy - to be so harsh / brutal / condemnatory of patriarchal values. But the RSC did not show anything in their Petruchio / Kate scenes that Shakespeare did not write. It was only their interpretation in performance that seemed to be shocking.

Despite his brutality on stage, Petruchio's speech in Act IV still provoked some laughter:

Thus have I politicly begun my reign,
And 'tis my hope to end successfully.
...
She ate no meat today, nor none shall eat;
Last night she slept not, nor tonight she shall not.
As with the meat, some undeserved fault
I'll find about the making of the bed,
And here I'll fling the pillow, there the bolster,
This way the coverlet, another way the sheets.
Ay, and amid this hurly, I intend
That all is done in reverend care of her.
And in conclusion she shall watch all night,
And if she chance to nod I'll rail and brawl,
And with the clamour keep her still awake.
This is a way to kill a wife with kindness,
And thus I'll curb her mad and headstrong humour.
He that knows better how to tame a shrew,
Now let him speak: 'tis charity to show. (4.1.175-198)


I wonder whether it is an audience's need to find comedy here that provoked the laughter, or whether it is related to a modern, western understanding that the idea of an husbandly 'reign' or 'shrew taming' should be absurd. But there was nothing comic in the delivery of this speech, or in the scene that preceded it. And the emphasis put on killing his wife with kindness, even metaphorically, was deeply disturbing. The most painful scene, for me, was one in which Katherina was shown to offer sexual favours to Petruchio's downtrodden servant Grumio - who himself had been shown, up to this point, to be the very lowest of the characters in the play - if he would give her food. He both humiliates her and denies her the food he has shown to her. Although Katherina delivers her final speech of wifely obedience with dignity, her subsequent on stage almost lifeless submission to Petruchio's sexual appetite leaves no doubt in this production that Kate is a defeated woman, however much scope for ambiguity the play itself might allow. It is a very dark production.

But that said, I thought it was an extremely good and thought provoking production. And I wish my class of Shakespeare students from last year had seen it. It might have made one or two of them think more critically about their uncritical, 'un-scare-quoted' use of the word 'taming' in their essays. Their unquestioning acceptance of it as a term was slightly concerning to me, and my suggestions in seminars that this was not necessarily presented as a good thing in the play went unheard in several cases.

They would not have been able to dismiss this production's interpretation quite so readily.