Conference Season

I’m always a bit wary of these sorts of “how to” lists.  I suppose I really consider this more of a “how I try to” post.  While there are bits of advice one can give as an academic, everyone’s got to find their own way of doing things.  Advice isn’t the same for those with seen or unseen disabilities, and I’m conscious I can’t speak to that.  Maybe it’s different in your discipline, too – I’m in English, so maybe check with people in your own area if you aren’t.

So, with all those caveats in place, and with conference season rapidly approaching, here are some thoughts on attending conferences and getting the most out of them.

1. Enjoy talking to people and be enthusiastic about what you’re doing.

This sounds like a no brainer, but it’s worth reiterating.  Mostly academics like talking to other people who are interested in the similar things.  I’m a bit of a sceptic about planned networking: I have been known to opine that once you conceptualise it as networking, you’re already failing at it.  That’s probably a bit over the top, but if there is anyone I’m really keen to catch, I try to let it happen organically if at all possible, and then make a more concerted effort towards the end of the event.

2. Nobody is so important that you must cultivate their favour at all costs.

There are plenty of big names.  Most of them are very pleasant.  If they aren’t, then don’t dwell on it.  There will be lots of people who are friendly and welcoming, and they are much more worth your time.  There’s nobody who is so vital that you need to make an effort if they won’t make one with you.

3. Be friendly to everyone.

The converse of the above, is that it’s worth talking to everyone.  People from all career stages have interesting things to say, and people who are at your stage right now are the people you might well be spending the next thirty plus years working with.  Seniority isn’t everything.   Equally, senior colleagues, please make an effort to be inclusive and talk to PGRs and ECRs.

4. Take breaks if you need to.

At long conferences it can be really difficult to keep up the energy to be “on” all the time and attend every session.  Don’t worry about it!  Enjoy being wherever the conference is too.  Allow yourself time to recharge and give your best when you are there, rather than flogging yourself into the ground trying to do everything.

5. Ask questions about the material presented.

It’s always tempting to end up making a comment, asking a “have you read this thing I’ve read” question, or crowbarring one’s own interests into the mix.  Sometimes it’s appropriate, but try first of all to ask a reasonably open question, and frame it sympathetically.  Book recommendations can be made over coffee, and don’t need to be done as a form of grandstanding or taking up space.

6. Make critical comments discreetly.

Sometimes there will be people who’ll say things that you don’t agree with, or that are, perhaps, wrong.  That doesn’t mean that the right way to address these things is to call them out in questions.  Try to catch them one on one.  Frame it supportively by asking if they’d considered this other point of view.  Remember that we’re all still learning.

 

I’m sure I’ll keep thinking of more of these.  Maybe I’ll come back and edit this post.  I’m sure you’ve got more yourself.  Basically, as with most of my advice, it really all boils down to two things: be kind to yourself, and don’t be a dick.

Richard Aldington

Those of you who follow my academic stuff might know that I look after the New Canterbury Literary Society Newsletter.  It was founded and edited by the Aldington scholar Norman T. Gates for many years until his death.  Fellow Aldingtonians David Wilkinson, Norman’s Associate Editor and representative in England for many years, and Mike Copp, a regular publisher on and editor of Aldington, also edited a few issues before I took it on.

Last year I finally got round to bringing the NCLSN into the twenty-first century (OK, the late twentieth) and publishing it as a blog, rather than a physical newsletter.  It’s made it easier to post regular entries, rather than having to collate material into a quarterly digest.  It also means more time sensitive things can be posted.

Many previous issues are available via Paul Hernandez’s excellent website imagists.org.  There’s lots of useful information there about Aldington, H.D. and their circle.  You can also see there the original format, which included ten asterisks between items, representing the ten members of the original Canterbury Literary Society.

I’d really like to hear from anyone who’s working on RA.  I know that there are more people out there than were receiving the NCLSN when I finally sent it in e-mail format.

I’d also like to hear from non-academics who are interested in RA.  Do you have a favourite part of Aldington that others should know about?  How did you come to find out about him?

My own recommendation for a lesser-known work is All Men are Enemies (1933).  This is a classic war story not about the war – it focuses on the love between the protagonist Tony Clarendon and his inamorata Katha, and their attempts to find each other after the war.  I enjoy the brutality of Death of a Hero, but I think All Men are Enemies is Aldington’s finest, most subtle achievement.

Let’s hear your Aldington interests!

Reading, not researching

It took me ages to get back into reading for pleasure after I finished the PhD.  In a way it was as if I’d forgotten how.  I found reading anything slow going, no matter how long or difficult it was.

There were a couple of ways that I got my social reading mojo back.

One was to start reading things that couldn’t even be thought of in the same breath (to mix a metaphor) as my research interests.  I started reading things that were more in line with my recreational interests.  So, biographies and histories in music and sport were a good starting place – things where I “knew the story”, which helped me to turn down the dial on my analytical faculties.

I’ve read some great books in this line recently – Cosey Fanni Tutti’s Art Sex Music, telling the fraught story of Throbbing Gristle and her own performance art career; Carrie Brownstein’s Hunger Makes Me a Modern Girl, taking us through the Sleater-Kinney years to Portlandia; and Bob Stanley’s Yeah Yeah Yeah, a compendious history of pop music in the widest sense.

The other, which I really had to make a conscious effort at, was to make myself read faster.  Reading things for work I’m always trying to be conscious of the language used, even if I like my first pass to be fairly quick.  It is, after all, what forms the basis of literary-critical work.

But reading for pleasure I don’t need to do that.  Sure, I notice particularly elegant or striking turns of phrase.  But I don’t need to be earmarking phrases and sections for later discussion.

I really got back into reading a lot when I was essentially out of academia.  It was seven years between me finishing my PhD and getting my Napier job, my first permanent one.  The final year before that I felt very little connected to academia (I’ll write more about the academic hinterland another time).  But it meant that I read a lot – reading’s something that I’ve always had to do, one way or another.

My biggest read in that time was all twelve volumes of Anthony Powell’s A Dance to the Music of Time, which I very much enjoyed over the course of about 18 months.  I do like a long read – I’m secretary to the Ford Madox Ford Society, and have written quite a bit about Parade’s End; I also have an enduring affection for George Eliot’s Middlemarch having taught it for many years at Manchester.

I’ve started to try and slacken the boundaries between pleasure and work reading in the interests of broadening my frame of reference.  As a good modernist, my project this year is to get started on Marcel Proust’s In Search of Lost Time.  I’ve been talking about this with my brilliant modernist colleague Tara Thomson since I got to Napier.  She is much better than me and has made a start.  I’ve now bought the first couple of volumes in the Vintage edition and am determined to get going.

Anyone want to read along and hold me accountable?  Any Edinburghers / Scottish modernists / interested folks want to join us, perhaps in the pub, to talk about it?

Imagining the defence of England. Well, some of it.

I’m writing an article at the moment about invasion literature in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.  I’m particularly looking at Erskine Childers’s The Riddle of the Sands (1903), but have spent the day looking at George Tomkyns Chesney’s The Battle of Dorking (1871) and some of the responses to that.  And there were plenty of responses to it: The Battle off Worthing: Why the Invaders Never Got to Dorking, and What Happened After The Battle of Dorking: Victory at Tunbridge Wells to name but two.

Chesney’s book is a response to the recent Franco-Prussian War of 1870-1.  He imagines an unnamed but obviously Germanic foe taking on the complacent British Army, sweeping through the southeast.  Indeed, the novel and its respondents are focused on London and the surrounding area.  The tacit assumption that underlies all of these works is that if an enemy were to make it past the capital, then it wouldn’t be worth bothering to carry on.

The appearance of troops from the north of England in the novel (well, it’s a novella, really – about 80 pages) is revealing.  They are prisoners of war, and the unnamed protagonist intervenes on their behalf as they are about to be summarily executed:

“Herr Hauptmann,” I cried, as loud as I could, “is this your discipline, to let unarmed prisoners be shot without orders?” The officer, thus appealed to, reined in his horse, and halted the guard till he heard what I had to say. My knowledge of other languages here stood me in good stead, for the prisoners, north-country factory hands apparently, were of course utterly unable to make themselves understood, and did not even know in what they had offended. I therefore interpreted their explanation: they had been left behind while skirmishing near Ditton, in a barn, and coming out of their hiding-place in the midst of a party of the enemy, with their rifles in their hands, the latter thought they were going to fire at them from behind. It was a wonder they were not shot down on the spot. The captain heard the tale, and then told the guard to let them go, and they slunk off at once into a by-road. He was a fine soldier-like man, but nothing could exceed the insolence of his manner, which was perhaps all the greater because it seemed not intentional, but to arise from a sense of immeasurable superiority. Between the lame freiwilliger pleading for his comrades, and the captain of the conquering army, there was, in his view, an infinite gulf. Had the two men been dogs, their fate could not have been decided more contemptuously. They were let go simply because they were not worth keeping as prisoners, and perhaps to kill any living thing without cause went against the hauptmann’s sense of justice.  (George Tomkyns Chesney, The Battle of Dorking, pp. 90-1.)

The protagonist suggests that he needs knowledge of two more languages than his own: that the northern dialect is in effect a separate language, which he has to translate again into German.  It is suggested that they have been doubly cowardly: both for hiding, and for the possibility that they might take the unsporting action of shooting men in the back.  The protagonist suggests that they are explaining away their actions, and the description of them slinking off emphasises the unmilitary bearing of those men.  They are equated with animals and deemed worthless.  The official version of Englishness is at stake here: the protagonist can only conceive a proto-Newbolt honourable playing of the game of war by those who speak the right language and play by the ‘correct’ rules.  The story seems to be about a twofold defence: defending the south, the seat of power, from corruption by the dissolute and dishonourable north, and defending it from invasion from the sea.

This quotation, and the elision of the north of the country from these narratives, attests to the alignment of official narratives of Englishness with the south of the country.  It’s something I’m trying to think more about as I move from thinking primarily about the war to working on literary geographies.  But I’m beginning to think that maybe, following the lead of work that’s already been done on the war and space by people like Mark D. Larabee in his Front Lines of Modernism: Remapping the Great War in British Fiction, that I might be combining the two.

Some interesting war memorials and war-related places I’ve been to (1)

The title for this occasional series might need some work.

Cairn and cross, Helvellyn, summer 2013

 

I spent a few days in Patterdale last summer with my estimable partner in crime, Lisa.  We climbed Helvellyn on one of the hottest days of the year.  (In case you’re wondering, this isn’t advisable.)  We ascended through Grisedale and then up the vertiginous, winding Dollywaggon Pike.

At the top we came across this cross-mounted poppy, looking towards Ullswater.  Remembrance reaches to some unlikely and not-that-easy-to-reach places.