A few days ago I went to see Barbara Feinman Todd speak at Georgetown, as a guest of the Georgetown Writer's Series. Feinman Todd heads up the journalism school, and, in a previous life, was a ghost writer. As a ghost writer, she fell largely into writing for political figures - most "famously" (infamously?) for Hillary Clinton. The fame part came in from the fact that when she was hired for the project, it was announced that she would "help prepare the manuscript" of It Takes a Village - and yet, when the book was published, Clinton did not acknowledge either her or anyone else by name for their assistance in bringing the book into being. Something akin to an uproar ensued, and Feinman Todd humourously refers to the incident as "ThankYou-Gate" in her article "Ghost Writing." When I asked her where along the road to recovery - or how far into ghosting "rehab" - she is, she answered that she'd been dealing with it pretty well until recently. In January the New Yorker ran a long article on Hillary Clinton, that included a reference to her work on It Takes a Village. As a democrat, she said, it is difficult to find your cause taken up to serve conservative ideals.

She said she got into ghost writing thinking that it would help her develop her writing voice - that by getting into the skin of others, she would really be able to develop the characterisation that is so important to novel-writing, her first love. Apparently, what she has trouble with is plot - oh, that old thing! I'm guessing ghosting for someone else doesn't necessarily help with the mechanics of a story, so perhaps it was already playing to her strengths. Ghost writing? Not a path she'd recommend, however interesting her past makes her seem at cocktail parties. In fact, she said if anyone was considering it as a career option after her talk (the upside? money) she would take them out for a drink and talk them out of it. It seems like the problem is the entrapment in the field: money and constant work must be a lure. Says the graduate student.

I was particularly interested in the project she has started at the Journalism school - the "Pearl Project," and she spoke about this on Monday. Faculty and students are investigating the "what really happened" to the reporter Danny Pearl, who, while working on a story in Karachi in 2002, was kidnapped and murdered. Part of the project may involve an attempt to complete the story Pearl was working on at the time of his death. Feinman Todd is hoping that in the future, they will be able to run similar projects in the future through funds that the journalism school has received to continue this kind of work.

I have a list of things that I still need to write about, but in the mean time, you may be interested in my new "Independence Day Project", which will be a blog of world poetries, and occasional history lessons (for myself, at least). I hope you'll consider checking it out.

Australia day, in Washington DC. I know there's a network of Australian expats in DC, but I decided not to seek them out, and instead to initiate the English grad student community into the ways of our nation. This resulted in a party. The party. Songs will be written. I had a memorial in the corner to Heath Ledger, and people paid their respects. The Kylie Minogue dance-party that ensued will be talked about long into the future. Any event that results in a little cross-dressing is clearly memorable. And, when a friend claimed a spot on the futon for the night, my childhood bunny, Sarah Rabbit, got to help finish off the night. Who doesn't need something to cuddIe when they sleep in a strange place? had quite a collection of Australian wine bottles to put in the garbage at 1.30 in the morning.

On Friday night, my fellow My So-Called Life fanatics and I went to see Buffalo Tom play - no, not at Pike Street, but at DCs Black Cat, a good-sized venue that's suitably grungy for a proper gig. There was much screaming when both songs from My So-Called Life (Soda Jerk and Late at Night... if you don't know them, check them out - particularly the latter) were played ("You know, they were in that TV show," Bill - the lead singer - joked). Michelle left early, so she didn't get to fulfill the mission I had assigned her: get a copy of the set list. I completed the mission in her place, and when Bill came out after the show, I got him to sign it. As it was already after midnight - and so already January 26 - he wrote "Happy Australia Day" on it, and so my little moment of teen-style swooning has been immortalised. They played for about an hour and a half, and I can't help but feel, it was $15 incredibly well-spent.

There are a lot of readings, etc, going on about town at the moment - my calendar is full of commitments. Beside the occasional feeling that I'm going to drop dead running from one thing to the next on of these days, it's exciting to see so much going on. I have plenty of literary and cultural updates to make in the next few days... In between this hobnobbing there is study to be done: the combination of reading, writing, coffee lives on.

Yesterday I went to see Tim Raphael talk, as part of a series David Gewanter has put together - the Georgetown Writers Series. Tim Raphael is a theatre director, and newly arrived in the Theatre Studies department at Georgetown. He said in the talk that he has never seen himself as a writer before, although some of his theatre work has involved him making adaptations of work that originally appeared in other forms (such as Michael Ondaatje's The Collected Works of Billy the Kid). Now he has co-written a "folk opera," based on Michael Lesy's book Wisconsin Death Trip, and this is what he was speaking about.

The book itself has been on his mind since 1980, when he encountered a copy of it in a log cabin in Vermont. In the early 90s he began the serious work of imagining a stage adaptation, in partnership with the musician Jeffrey Berkson. In bringing it to the stage, they have framed it as a visitation by ghosts, and Raphael described the musical setting as an eclectic mix of styles. He was interested to find that, rather than the homogenous community he expected to learned inhabited Wisconsin at that time, it was in fact a melting pot of different ethnicities - something that, he seemed to indicate, could be a reason for the musical eclecticism he described. Sometimes I worry about eclecticism: that creating too much of a hotchpotch works against creating an overall form for a work - at the same time, in the piece he played us, he cited influences of Native American rhythms that were a backdrop to the music, yet unless you knew you were looking for them, you would not hear them. I wonder if perhaps the eclecticism itself will turn out to be in some degree flattened, ordered. When I was writing music more diligently, I remember finding different frames all the time, to spur on the act of creation: but like when I write poems that morph between several different forms, there are other aspects of a work that can ground it in a single voice/vision.

Wisconsin Death Trip is premiering here next week. I'm going to be going to see one of the final performances on February 8 - his talk has made me fascinated to see the outcome. It's also made me want to look at the book - and at more of Lesy's work. I borrowed another of his works yesterday - Time Frames: The Meaning of Family Pictures. In the introduction he talks about the way looking at tens of thousands of photographs changes you. I feel that as a cultural historian he's working very intuitively, and I want to get acquainted with his ideas, his way of seeing.

Some days I feel really successful. After a slow start today, I ended up making it to some of the things I wanted to get done. I left home just after 11 this morning (Michelle, angel that she is, picked me up) and we drove over to the Library of Congress. As I still hadn’t had a coffee yet (obviously a necessity, as anyone who’s met me realizes) we walked over to the Eastern Market and I got a coffee and bagel to snack on while walking around. We looked at the market and stopped in at Capitol Hill books, the most densely book-ed secondhand bookshop I have ever been in. Last time I was there I bought (accidentally?) eleven books, but today managed to adhere to my budget with much greater discipline. From there we went on part of a tour of the Jefferson building of the Library of Congress, and after we saw how beautiful the main reading room is, we immediately left the tour and went to the Madison building across the road to get Reader Cards, so we would be allowed to use all the public reading rooms in the Library of Congress. I thought this process might be tedious, but in actual fact it was painless, and took about twenty minutes in total. Then we headed back over to the Jefferson building, and took up spots in the main reading room where we proceeded to do a few hours of study. (Am getting near the end of Edgeworth’s Belinda… I’ll be reading a little more tonight.)

After that we wandered over to the National Gallery of Art (the West building) and I got to look at some of my favourite paintings from my previous visit. As I said to Michelle, I feel that Rubens’s “Daniel in the Lion’s Den” is the first painting I made “friends” with when I arrived, and it still amazes me, mainly because the eight lions are so beautiful. We looked at the Da Vinci, some Rembrandts and El Grecos, and I was happy to see a Bronzino—I almost feel that Bronzino, along with Whistler, is a “private” painter, just for me. I love his portraits, even in their slightly odd starchiness.

After all this, we were both starving. Being grad students (ie. cheapskates) we decided to go to the supermarket and buy dinner there instead of heading out to a restaurant. Now I’m home for the evening, and planning another night of blissfully little to do. More Belinda, and maybe some Australian poetry—I’ve been reading Lucy Dougan’s new book, White Clay, with admiration. She has a beautiful touch—there are a handful of poems in the book that I feel really work, and her poetic language and form come together with just the right subjects. I don’t always feel when I read a book of poetry that there are poems I want to spend more time with—so I’m glad there are pieces here that I want to revisit. It makes me feel I’m carrying a piece of “home” with me, that I have a handful of new Australian books to carry with me here.

It’s been one of those packed weeks—I’ve had all my classes, as well as the meetings that come with the start of the new semester. I’ve caught up with everyone—we only had a few weeks break over Christmas, but those weeks feel like the hours after school for a schoolgirl who can’t wait to get on the phone and gossip. So, I’ve fallen back into the swing of everything, caught up with people and remembered my niche here, while also finding plenty of time to think about—and miss—Australia.

It snowed here yesterday morning. The campus looks beautiful when it snows, and I had planned to take my camera and get a few photos of it, but I forgot yesterday. Then I thought I'd look through images of Georgetown online to try to find a good one, but the few I saw were really pretty ugly. Very disappointed. But while I was looking for images of Georgetown, I came across this picture - apparently last year researchers in the Georgetown University Medical Center last year were "able to use simple, non-toxic chemical injections to add and remove fat in targeted areas on the bodies of laboratory animals." So it's not just a pretty place. Oh, and actual photos of Georgetown, snowy or otherwise, will follow. Sometime. When rodents don't catch my fancy more.

Yesterday morning I went to a lecture given by Eric Maskin, who shared the Nobel Prize in Economics in 2007. This is the second opportunity I’ve had to see a recent Nobel Prize winner, though I didn’t make it to see Orhan Pahmuk last semester as it clashed with a class. Maskin is interested in politics, and some of his work is specifically applicable to the mechanism of voting. The title of his lecture was “How Should We Elect Presidents” (a timely consideration… the next primaries are coming soon) but it was in reality quite a dry lecture on different methods of voting. While the US system of indicating only one preference on the ballot is in his consideration a very unsatisfactory method—he showed lots of slides regarding the “Nader factor,” allowing a minority candidate to change the likely outcome (yes, I detected, as a pattern, a remaining bitterness on his part that it’s been eight years of Bush, instead of eight years of Gore…)—he conceded that the Australian system is vastly preferable. Though still not the best. I was interested that all the viable voting systems he examined had been proposed centuries ago—and when he described the five desireable outcomes that a voting system should allow for, all existing systems only allowed for four out of five. (This, apparently, had also been analysed fifty or sixty years ago.) Some of his recent work has basically been to prove in a number of ways that a True Majority Rules method is the best. It may well be, but I have to say I would not want to be a vote-counter or scrutineer for that particular tallying. Especially if there were more than three candidates! It made for quite a dry morning, but I’m glad I went. Still, analysis of voting systems, it turns out, does not a rousing subject make.

My friend Robyn, the best friend-from-Pittsburgh a girl could ever want, had her oral exam this morning—this exam is akin to giving a conference paper and then being quizzed on it by two professors—and passed with flying colours. She arrived in the grad lounge soon after eleven this morning, flung herself in a chair and said, “I need a drink.” I was waiting in anticipation and we headed over to the Tombs for some pre-noon wine. This is not, as those of you who know me well already understand, a regular activity for me. In fact, I believe it is the first time I have ever gone to drink anything before noon. Perhaps it was my inexperience that made this colour my day—I got through everything fine (meetings; reading Judith Butler; talking about Judith Butler in the critical reading group I have just started…) but when I got in the door tonight, I didn’t want to leave again. I had a couple of invitations, but I’m holed up at home, enjoying a rare evening of no study. I’ve been playing cross-hemispherical scrabble online with my mum, always a happy experience.

This weekend is a little up in the air. Monday is a public holiday—it’s Martin Luther King day. I’m hoping to see a film on Monday morning, because the cinema near me has cheap sessions before noon on a Monday, and I’m glad to say that I’ve actually been up and out of the house early every day this week. I plan to keep it up. I was talking with Michelle about having a study session at the Library on Congress tomorrow: it’s a combination tourist/student activity, and we grad students like to multi-task as much as possible. I’ve been checking up what’s around town, and I’ve found that the National Gallery of Art is showing free British New Wave films over the weekend, including “Saturday Night and Sunday Morning,” which is also a possibility—as is the fact that Madeline Albright will be at the Borders in Tyson’s Corner signing her new book. This seems kind of demoralizing: there she was, Secretary of State, and now here she is at Borders in Tyson’s Corner. I guess those cameo appearances on the Gilmore Girls can’t last forever…

I need to finish reading Belinda this weekend: I was worried it would be tedious, but I am so much enjoying it. It’s obvious where the storyline is eventually headed, but I’m curious as to how it’s going to get there. There’s something lovely in that moment of anticipation: I still don’t know how Maria Edgeworth is going to work out all the problems she’s set for herself—especially as the organization of the novel has so far been so intricate, so clever.

The other lovely thing that happened this week is that I’ve met another Australian—a Melbourne University girl, in fact, who’s here on exchange, studying Art History. I overheard her in Saxby’s the other morning and rudely interrupted her, because I was happy to here an Australian accent. We exchanged details and met up for coffee yesterday. It was one of those nice moments where we realized there were teachers and even students we knew in common. She should be joining in the fun at my Australia Day party next week. She did suggest that we try to make pavlova, but I’ve never made one, and neither has she. Furthermore, she told me herself she’s a terrible cook. I’m not, but I can be an impatient one, and I’m not sure how busy the day will be. Maybe we’ll stick to honey joys (which they don’t have here!) and lamingtons. Marvellous!

I’ve gone from one home to another. I went grocery shopping this morning, and now that I’ve stocked up on food I feel like I’m back here again. A trip to Whole Foods this morning to buy ingredients for a pasta sauce and a Sicilian caponata—my likely diet for the next few days. Last night was spent cleaning up my room, filing papers from last semester (sometimes carefully, sometimes by dumping them in a box and hoping there is nothing in there I need to find in a great hurry…) and getting ready for the new semester—new folders, and already a steady stream of articles and other bits and pieces that must be kept in order. I’ve been out for coffee, I’ve been to a class, I’ve been to the library: so, Georgetown life has, it appears, resumed.

I think I’ll spend the afternoon at home, cooking and reading. I started Maria Edgeworth’s Belinda last night. I was worried it would be tedious, but am actually finding it immensely enjoyable—and interesting, probably because I’m reading it with a real eye to its mechanics in terms of linear development. I missed my first class for National Identity and the Nineteenth Century Novel (I was still on a plane…) but was brought up to speed by Allison and Lisa yesterday. Professor Ragussis wants to take a formalist approach, and advised the class that we’d be looking at texts in a linear fashion, to examine not only what it going on, but that actual progress of ideas. It seems strange that I should get to the second semester of a graduate degree before I’ve had a teacher who wanted to do that. I’m oddly excited, to see how it goes. It’s also always nice to have a teacher who reminds you that things like chapter titles are important—it reminds me of Peter Steele, whose classes at Melbourne I always loved unreservedly.

I also have a lot of work to do for my Poetry/Poetics class—as well as writing responses to individual poems, we’re writing abstracts of the articles we’re reading. I’m not sure how I feel about this—I suppose I’ll see as the class progresses. It seems like a way of quantifying the pre-writing that will go into later aspects of thinking through the relationship between a poet’s writings on poetics and their actual practice. I also have quite a bit of Milton to read before Wednesday night—there’s no shortage of things to do.

Tonight Michelle is having some of us over for wine and cheese. It’s a belated birthday celebration, but it also just seems like a nice way to start off the semester. I’ve got to try to get in a good few hours of work before that. Getting back into the rhythm of working this way is going to take a few days… but it will happen. This weekend is going to be pretty full with study, but I’m planning to take at least half a day to do something new—a gallery or a museum or a visit to a different area… Something will happen. In the meantime, I suppose I should open my hymnal to page…

It's been a pretty quiet week - I was hoping to go to all these places, but it just never happened, and now I'm running out of time... I've caught up with people, but have mainly been back at the old haunts. Stopped in at Cavallini again this morning - for once didn't run into Rob and Natalie: it was their first day open after 10 days off, and I guess they were somewhere bustling around in the background.

I spent New Year's eve with Amy, Aaron and Julian - we sat in a park in North Melbourne. I looked at a map earlier in the day, and saw that there were fireworks in several spots surrounding our quiet patch of grass, but somehow we chose a spot where we couldn't really see any of them - they were either too far away or masked by trees and buildings. I did like the fact that through the trees I could see some fireworks reflected in the glass windows of one of the buildings. Mostly I closed my eyes and listened to the noise. It was a very English-student-like gathering, with assessment of various contemporary authors forming the bulk of conversation.

Joanne and I met up on the second for our now annual ritual of making a list of things we'd like to do during the year, and looking at how we'd done on last year's list. We both got our major goals out of the way - for Joanne, getting her AMus for flute, for me, going to America. This year, another list of goals - from the little (do some more rock climbing) to the large (apply to PhD programs at the end of the year, write 20 poems). I made two copies of the list again, so we've each got one. Joanne's hoping to be overseas at the end of the year, so we may end up meeting up in DC to compare lists before Christmas.

Looking forward to the new semester (though I have to admit, my brain doesn't feel quite ready to jump back into it all... that delicate energy. I feel like I write slower and slower...) I've been looking for a copy of Maria Edgeworth's Belinda everywhere in Melbourne, to try to get a start - to no avail. So I've been reading Lorca's plays, for myself, instead. I'm in love with sections of Blood Wedding. I'd like to think this is not just because it has "blood" in the title, but I know Pete will disagree. C'est la vie.

I've written scraps of poems - about 4 little things since I've been home. I have another few to get under way. I want to write something large - I think there's something gathering, but I really have to figure out what my new subject is - though I think it's going to be a variation on absence. In the mean time, I've ordered a book on Louise Brooks, so I can start thinking through the idea for a poem on her I have. I think there may only be three more actresses and then - done. But Brooks is the one I'm keen to get to work on. Other than that, I made a list for myself of things that I'm currently interested in writing about - a little session of brainstorming. Writing is slow at the moment, but I’m hoping there’ll be a little onrush soon enough.