Welcome, Void.
I’m sort of starting at the end here.
I’m coming into the final months of my doctorate candidacy, slightly panicked but not too overwhelmed by the idea of bringing all the intellectual effort of the last two-and a-half years into material form. See how I talk? I’m all scholarly! : )
No, actually, that is how I talk. I like words. And I like
using them!
The name of this blog is the title of my research project. ‘Portrait of a Lady’s commonplace’ is a project that examines an eighteenth-century manuscript (a commonplace book). I’m creating new work (in poetry and image) that emerges out of what I’m seeing as a conversation with the object. Think Keats talking to an urn—'Thou foster-child of silence and slow time’—and being able to hear a response from the urn. That sort of thing.
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| O Covid! 10 months into my degree, lockdown in April 2020. |
This blog will just be a bit of a chatter from me at the end
of the day, writing through these working days, as a way of taking account of
what it is to work using the techniques of commonplacing, how they orient my
practice (reading and writing/image-making) towards an object, developing complex
forms and complex knowledges (this is required of me, to make all of this applicable
to funding and current research structure. That wasn’t me talking, that was the
funding and current research structure talking. An industry built from
assessments, quality frameworks and national priorities (Haseman, ‘Manifesto for
Performative Research,’ 2006. I’ll tidy this citation up later. Or not. It is ‘just
a blog’ after all).
I’m reading Barthes (A Lover’s Discourse: Fragments), Foucault
('Self-Writing'), Aphra Behn (Seneca Unmasqu’d), Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (Complete
Letters, ed. Halsband), Michael Taussig (Mastery of Non-Mastery in the Age of Meltdown), Lisa
Robertson (The Baudelaire Fractal, Nilling). You won’t be getting reviews from
me but these texts inform my work, in light of the commonplace book and my
relationship to it.
And along the way I’ll introduce you to the compiler of the commonplace,
Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (who you will totally fall in love with, as I have),
Aphra Behn whose work is transcribed in the book and who you should know about
anyways, the letters of Roger de Bussy-Rabutin, and Madames Bossuet & Scudéry in 1670s, Henry M Green, Fisher Librarian from 1921 to 1946, Mr & Mrs
Martin Wood (who at this stage are the front runners as candidates for having a
hand in getting the book here in 1925) and oh, so many more of the cast to come.
These are just the ones on my mind today.
And do you know who introduced all these people to me? Yes, it
is a who. The commonplace book, RB.Ms.Add 35 held at the Fisher Library,
University of Sydney on unceded Gadigal land.
Stay healthy, void. Will clock in again tomorrow. I'm off to read JL Austin's Lecture I in How to Do Things with Words.
J.
I highly recommend reading the texts mentioned in my posts. If you can't find a copy in your local secondhand store then, and only then, may you click below to find your copy at the Amazon store.
Texts mentioned
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