Anyway, 'approximately this time' is a bit of disingenuous romantic uncertainty for ya; of course I could just look up the post and the accurate time-and-date stamp would do the rest. You have to work to recreate the pleasant melancholic fuzziness of memory in this digital age. I (choose to) imperfectly recall that I framed for you a window onto the range of seminar experience available to the diligent Cambridge attendee - from the vantage point of the audience. Now comes the vengeance. This time I'm going to look down my nose onto a piece of paper in front of me, crammed with neat paragraphs of right justified 12 point times new roman, and occasionally make eye contact with you. If you're lucky. I'm going to make you listen by the sheer force of declamation and visual centrality of the speaker's platform. I'm going to give you a lecture dressed up as a seminar dressed up as a blog. The only difference being: when it's so overdressed, you don't have to listen. That is, the advantage of reading is that you can abuse me without risking an awkward moment in the post-seminar pub. 'Hey Tom, shut up.' 'Er...just stop reading.' 'Oh yeah. That's better.' Silence.
Look who comes crawling back. Exploiting your mouse-scrolling desire for narrative. How cheap of me. But I've never held words too dear...have I?
So, this term has been all about giving oral over receiving aural. In my bright-eyed 'First Yr PhD - Yeah!' hat, I stupidly signed up to give three papers within four weeks. The overall arc went nicely: the first felt good, the second took a dive, the third rallied and almost held an untenable fort. It was a seminal reproduction of that form introduced to me in a teacher training day last year as the 'criticism sandwich': fine, shit, fine. As long as the bread is intact, the filling will be rendered tolerable...even if it's the scrapings of a dying goat's anus (primary source of goat's cheese. Fact.).
The graph also showed a neat upwards movement when nerves were plotted against time. The first presentation was the neural nadir: a King's Lunchtime Seminar. This is run in college by graduates/for graduates over a free lunch of bagels/fruit/juice; the formula of nourishing mind and belly simultaneously is, to my mind and belly, a winning one. It usually nabs about twenty people of widely divergent academic backgrounds as audience. Keep it General's the guiding principle. The papers themselves reflect the sprawl; look across any given weeks and you're sure to find priceless juxtapositions. For example, my paper, on a poem of Ovid published in 8CE, was followed the next week by a pimping expose of the straw-plaiting industry in 19th century Hertfordshire. Yes, we get paid. Yes, it's important.
A good (?) outcome to emerge from the exercise was my induction into the brave new world: I used powerpoint for the very first time. And what a time. Because the stuff I do is very, very textual, the only images I can ever justify including are very, very tangential; in other words, lack of graphs and tables = license to fun. I've always had an appreciation for google images, but never quite tested the depth of potential humour released when the relation of equivalence between word and image goes horribly wrong. I'm talking about the server-exploding moments when you type in a weird phrase which is converted into a picture ten times juicier than any fruit of the human imagination. I entered 'Latin Water Cup Full' (long story), the computer paused in thought, then deemed it best to offer me an image of: Darth Vader's head at the dinner table, about to dive into a bowl of nachos. Surely it's for this, rather than any meagre 'utility', that the world's greatest search engine should be praised to the star(war)s.
Most of the images I unearthed went down well, apart from the climactic one. I was doing a bit about Ovid's exile to Romania. I could have served up a map I suppose; but geography is rarely striking. So I scanned pages of results and finally hit on the killer:
I thought it was funny. More so (or less so) because there were no Romanians in the room. So it had a tinge of cheap Borat-style 'let's laugh at overweight eastern europeans' about it; a synonym for charm, I would have said. Anyway, muffled laughter was mingled with gentle, egg-and-mayonnaise dribbling disgust. I lingered on him for a few seconds and mercifully took him away. Such are the laws of British etiquette: a scantily clad Romanian ambassador may not be viewed while eating.
I didn't quite get away with that, to be sure. But I find that being Australian definitely works in one's favour when trying to push the boundaries in this country. The stereotype of uncouthness is one with and inside which I'm quite happy to work. On the other hand, with great power to offend-without-offense comes great responsibility; and I think an inflated sense of this power had a small hand in the downfall of my next seminar. This was the GIS (Graduate Interdisciplinary Seminar - pronounced 'Jizz', and the phonic connection may prove fertile...), an intra-classics faculty meeting of graduate minds. High on my new ability to manipulate a sliding powerpoint story, I filled this one with visual jokes to complement the verbal: I metaphorised the sticky task of interpreting Virgil's Eclogues into the process of immersing one's hand in cowpat. Yep, image of poo on-screen and on-duty. To explain: the Eclogues are poems broadly re herdsmen milling about in the countryside, so when we critics navigate their world, we're bound to get caught in a fresh pile of shit at times. Like a fat Romanian from a diving platform, toilet humour flopped - as did most of the other jokes. I also grossly overestimated people's knowledge of the material (for which I duly kicked myself...because it's one of my own pet (cow) peeves of academia that everyone assumes that people will have thought about exactly the same things as them for the last five years). And I went too fast. The freshly laid waste-egg became an unintended icon for my paper, as no-one asked questions afterwards (the sure measure of paper-flop), and it all went to shit.
The next and last was the most important and quakeworthy: THE faculty literature seminar, where all the profs congregate to fall asleep and destroy arguments at the same time. No powerpoint this time. Just sobre paper handouts. But it wasn't all black and white. I couldn't resist rubbing a few jokes in to the texture - and a few laughs were won. Sure, I didn't raise the roof like an early Eddie Murphy. But people warmed more than expected. Criticisms were, perhaps, even funnier: one prof told me to deliver 15% more slowly, another that I should read metrically (i.e. according to the rhythmic pattern of the verse), because I was mispronouncing all of my Latin. It takes more than playing Cicero in a Latin musical to fool the keen Cambridge ear.
So the tour dates are technically gone. But if you have a spare forty-five minutes, I'd be happy to give a repeat performance. I'm still learning the ABC's of oral packaging, which is why I'll gladly send you straight to...
zzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzzz
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