Home again; or 'what happened to my corkboard while I was gone?!'

Dear Void,

I have been absent. I’ve left a me-shaped gap (in these posts) in my wake. I’ve been to London, to Coventry, back to London, to Paris, back to London, then via a stopover at Dubai, finally home. I found the world to be a good place, exciting. To paraphrase Noel Coward, very big, the world. And now it is more absent to me than I to it.  So, my next few posts will be giving an account of my time presenting at a conference (the Coventry bit) and taking in the cultural spaces of London and Paris as they relate to my research. I was away for a little over two weeks and crammed multum in parvo!

I’m still thinking/writing through the fascinating material presented at the conference on modes of authorship that I caught in my notebook. Some themes included the poetics of continuation and serialisation (where acts of repetition in classic texts acted as appeals to an audience’s familiarity with story while recontextualising plot points through expansion and enrichment, ‘leaving an abundance of hanging threads’) ; shipwreck epigrams ; practices of versioning in cover songs ; a ‘Marxish’ reading of Virgil’s mnemonic labour and the material conditions of writing ; more epigrams (reader responses to Sappho & Erinna) ; poems without poets ; twice-concealed authorship ; the undesired experience of a translator ; and Cicero’s lamp just to name a few.

More later on the way I’m thinking of these presentations, and the conference as a whole, as being in conversation with my project. I promise.

* * * * *

I’ve promised much in my earlier posts:

I promised to tell you about Lord Byron’s love for Lady Mary Wortley Montagu (here on March 28, 2022 CONFERENCES, NAVARRE AND 'GUTTERANCE'),

I promised to tell you about the ridiculous practice of making post grad student 'hotdesk' (here on January 25, 2022 ON THE PLEASURE OF RESEARCH)

I promised to tell you why I’m reading Aphra Behn’s Seneca Unmasqu'd (here on February 07, 2022 MONDAY, BIRTHDAY)

And I will. Promise. (here I chat about a promise involving [presumably] an inwards act and an outwards expression of that act).

* * * * *

Speaking of gaps. While I was away, I had some material taken from my little corner of the uni. I had a corkboard of images and objects that I use for my work, a lovely picture of my kid, an image of Jen Bervin at a work table in her studio (for inspo), plus a printed mask (‘mask appreciated’) from the recent Artist-in-Residence at Rare Books Fisher Library, Caren Florance, but more importantly a poem that I was working on. I found the cork board, empty, leaning against a wall at the front of the room. I had noticed it when I came in earlier and thought to myself ‘hmm, there’s a corkboard. Like mine. Only empty.’ It was later when I looked up to refer to something, that I realised mine had gone, and that one was it! Actually, you can see a few of the things on the board in the picture in my last post.

Isn’t that weird? Perhaps it’s presence had only been illusion. 

Perhaps, it’s time for me to call it a day.

Good night, Void.

Jx

PS. Most of the day today I was working on Anne Carson’s Nox, the beautiful elegy to her brother.

PPS. If you’re new here: Hi! As an overview you can go back through the posts to see what my project is. Here’s a quick welcome. This one has a closer look at a detail of the manuscript (literally a gap!). And in these two here and here I talk about keeping a research journal and managing your research.