How satisfying! I’ve begun what I guess will have to be my last series of ripping apart my manuscript. (Someone just has to take it away from me soon… That’s hopefully in the pipeline.) Looking at it now, ruthlessly, it’s so fun to wield the scalpel. Take this out, extract that stanza… I’m really glad, now, that I didn’t publish it before now. I feel like I’ve learned all these new ways of looking at poems recently, and that’s been so good for me.

When I caught up with Elena Knox—gosh! over a week ago—I was delighted to hear that her book looks like it’s also in the pipeline. She’s been on a train overnight from Chicago, and (from what I remember) had been working on edits during that trip, as well as, more generally, while she’s been in the States. Apparently an Australian editor had looked at her book, told her he liked it, thought it was great—couldn’t publish it. “It’ll sell 20 copies in Australia.” So, she’s been talking to an American publisher. Elena and I met several years ago at Varuna, the Writers’ House in the Blue Mountains (and, really, a little oasis) when we were there for a mentorship program during an absolutely delicious week of poetry. Our fellow-poets Ivy Alvarez and Kathryn Lomer have published their books already—Kathryn, precocious lady!, has published two volumes of poetry and a novel—so it’s nice that their stable buddies are slowly making good on the process too.

Is it cheating if, unable to find a poem from the Marshall Islands, I choose to use a myth instead? I’ve found a lovely one. But I’ve got over a month before my Independence Day hunt for poems from this particular nation of Oceania becomes pressing. In the mean time, I’m backing up the effort with the myth. I’m holding it in reserve.

Spoke to a friend who is fluent in Portuguese—I’d like to work in partnership with someone to do some translating. I don’t feel that any of my languages are fully up to the task—I can muddle my way through reading most Romance languages these days, but wouldn’t trust myself on a translation, except for some simpler Italian pieces. So it was time to find a helping hand. Or tongue, so to speak. Now I have to find something untranslated that I think it would be good to work on. The next step. I don’t know exactly when this will happen, but speaking to a translator last weekend, he said all I can really do is dive in—you’re never really “ready” as such. When are we ready for anything?

A nice surprise last night: within a few minutes of each other, emails from poets Adam Aitken and Chris Wallace-Crabbe arrived in my inbox. Adam is currently based in Cambodia—he’ll be back in Sydney later this year. So it was one poet-in-exile addressing another. And I was delighted to hear that he’ll have another book coming out soon with Giramondo. I came across his work when I was drawn to the cover of Romeo and Juliet in Subtitles, and, after taking it home, there was one poem that drew me into the book. Something to look out for—I guess I’ll be sending another wishlist home later this year, for books I can’t get here.

Then, Chris. Chris was one of my earliest mentors as a poet, and again I’m pleased to here that another book is forthcoming. A recent notification from ABR informed me that another selection from his diary was published in a recent issue—it made me wish that I could afford to be an international subscriber. If my book does end up working out, it will be in no small part because of his encouragement and assistance over the years. He must be one of the most generous poets in Australia, always willing to look over work and tell me when it’s “flat as a pancake.” (True—among the first ten or so poems I ever showed him, he liked a number of them; but one came back with this comment. I’ve valued his opinion ever since. I was especially proud when he told me I’d recent a quite-good terza rima.)

To top that off, Ella Holcombe sent me her first book, which appeared in last year’s New Poets series from Five Islands Press. I’m currently interviewing Ella, and am looking forward to reading the book, some other poems she sent with it, and writing about it here. It’s always lovely when a parcel arrives! On a purely superficial note, I’m so glad to see that Five Islands have shifted the series into a format that includes perfect binding and much better design. So often in the past, exciting new voices were buried in badly designed, stapled booklets.

Which has made it an even more poetry-filled week. Refreshing and exhausting—I wouldn’t have it any other way.

Yesterday morning Condoleezza Rice spoke at Georgetown university on “Transformational Diplomacy.” In the spirit of getting as much out of this DC experience as I can, I decided I'd go to the speech: I don’t agree with a lot of her politics, but I can’t help admiring her for everything she has achieved. There is, too, still an excitement for me that Georgetown brings in people of this caliber—that I have the opportunity to attend these events for free.

That said, I’m not sure what I got out of the experience. Getting into the event in the first place was an ordeal: the doors opened at 8.45 for an event due to start at 10.45. Why? Not only in anticipation of the crowds (in fact, the hall was not entirely full) but to clear security. We weren’t allowed to bring in backpacks (this is a school, right?), computers or cameras, had to remove coats to go through the security checkpoint... I got to the hall at 9.15, and at 10 (the point at which they turned people away—you had to have cleared security 45 minutes in advance or you couldn't get in) had my seat. So, I sat reading William Carlos Williams's poems for three quarters of an hour.

There were some dissonances for me in the speech: for a start, Rice framed her speech as though she were only addressing Americans. While this might not seem unusual at an American university, she addressed her remarks several times to the School of Foreign Service, which attracts a large number of international students to Georgetown.

Of course there was politicking in there—that was always going to be the case. Talking about attempting resolutions to situations that required diplomatic interventions, Rice referred obliquely to the inevitability of “short-term tensions” (how short is short-term?); she referred to moves made by Bush’s administration as “historic”—without irony; at one point she referred to resources being used up by government in the 1990s (no, she didn’t mention Clinton by name—after all, he attended Georgetown). There was the kind of alliteration and snappy rhetoric that a good speechwriter can produce once he gets a good cup of coffee in him.

Nonetheless, a sentiment I really valued was one central to her vision of an effective diplomatic corps: her aim, she said, is “not just recruiting the best and brightest—but making them better and brighter.”

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!