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.

I almost can't bear the idea of leaving Australia in a week and a half. Not so much the summer ("stinking" hot, as my mum always says) but the light, the accents, the crazy trees, the landscape... There's been so much of a home-coming for me in this trip - I feel like everything in me is just singing for the joy of being back.

On Boxing Day Joanne and I took off for Hanging Rock. We brought some food for a picnic (required activity at Hanging Rock) and drove out on the Calder via Woodend. Getting there found that there were bargain-priced scones-with-jam-and-cream, and couldn't resist. Sat at the cafe and had a Devonshire tea and then wandered up the rock.

It was pretty busy - and unfortunately, most people didn't seem to have the same impulse as Joanne and I to sit quietly and ponder the emptiness. I was inclined to hide away from people. Sat with my notebook taking notes on bits and pieces - lots of things to look up, follow up on. I want to be writing poems! Walking home in the dark last night I was thinking about writing, and subjects... I feel like I'm close to the new thread. Need to "listen with my heart's ear." I'll get there.

Apparently the rock itself is some sort of rare volcanic rock that other than here is only found in Scandinavia. Down the bottom it always looks so lush, and then you get up to the top and find these trees that are as grey and bare as the rock itself. It's been a few years since I was there - I went with Pete a long time ago, and sat at the top of one of the highest rocks and read him the last seven chapters of the final Narnia chronicle - I'd been reading the books to him over a few months. Since then, I don't think I'd made it back. But then, I remember before going to DC I was getting antsy because it had been a few years since I'd left Melbourne... the occasional trip to the Dandenongs aside.

Pete and I went to the zoo a few days ago. We're also planning a trip out to Healesville, probably next weekend as Pete is working during the week. I keep forgetting that he's not a man of leisure anymore. The zoo was distressingly busy - and, sadly, it wasn't just kids that thought it was a good idea to knock on the glass to try to get the animals attention. It made me pretty mad. Especially when a couple thought it was a good idea to let their three-year-old, who was holding food, walk right up to an emu wandering around the Australian section, and then laughed at their daughter when the emu took her food and she started crying. I suspect I'm something of a misanthrope, some days!

I went to Herring Island yesterday, a small island in the middle of the Yarra, near Como. It was nearly 40 degrees all day (over 100 fahrenheit for those that can't handle the proper system...) so it wasn't the ideal day for it, but Parks Victoria only run a boat service on the weekends. It only takes half an hour or so to walk all over the island, so we managed to see everything and get away relatively quickly. There are sculptures scattered over the island, which was interesting to see - they've been there a decade or so now. The Park Ranger told us they've been having trouble with a lot of the trees - the salt builds up around the island, and when trees get to a certain size, they think their roots are hitting the salt, and they're starting to die off.

Caught up with a few people last night - Amy, Aaron and Julian. Went to Section 8, an outdoor bar in a disused car park in Chinatown, then for dumplings for Amy's birthday. Good to see people! Should be spending New Year's Eve with them in some park in the city too.

I've been reading Australian stuff ferociously since I've been home - Quarterly Reviews and poetry and history... I'm hungry for it all. I feel more and more like I'm going to become an Australian specialist. So I suppose I'm stocking up on reading material to take back with me as well. Not that there'll be a whole lot of time, but - we'll get there, I suppose.

Now I'm just waiting for Joanne - we're going in to the Melbourne museum and then to a film at Cinema Nova. A nice slow day... I've got a pile of Australian movies out from my video-store-boys yesterday too, so I may watch something tonight.

At the moment it’s all writing, all the time—I don’t particularly mind. I feel that this semester has been one long class. I’ve learned so much—especially about the ways I think, and about ways to approach my formal writing. These things don’t so much overturn what I already had figured out as supplement.

Now it’s crunch time—my three big assignments are all due this week, one on Tuesday and two on Thursday. The essays I’m writing have been moving—sometimes slowly, sometimes more quickly. (My Dickens paper was all I worked on yesterday. It was good to get so much work done, and I feel that it’s going to be a good paper—it’s good to have a full draft of it now, that I can tinker with early next week.) Right now, though, I’m working on getting a full draft of the other two completed. I’ve moved out of the “DQ” (the area of the library right near the Dickens Quarterlies) into the conference and seminar rooms of the English department, which have been renamed “The Situation Room” and “The Bunker” respectively. Apparently we’re a much more present group of grad students than has been here in other years. I like the collegiality that has been set up.

Thursday is also when I hope on a plane to come back to Australia for a few weeks. As I don’t have a real television in the US, I anticipate I’ll spend some time being incredibly lazy, lying on the floor with Scout, watching movies. I’m still in shock that I haven’t seen more movies since I’ve been here. Oh well!


Because I’ve been lazy (read: insanely busy) I somehow never got around to posting my few pictures from Tennessee nor recounting the thanksgiving experience. Suffice to say: food, yum. I counted 29 Baptist churches on the highway—actually not that many for such a long drive (10 hours) but the Baptists don’t seem a very highway-centric denomination. More into the small towns the highways all bypass. I may get around to posting the list of churches, or else they may turn into a found poem.

I met Jorie Graham a few weeks ago too—I don’t always love reading her poems (some of her recent books have one or two absolute stunners, and then more that are fascinating, but also seem loose in some way I can’t define) but I’m always interested in them. And I am a fan—can’t help it. I was talking to David Gewanter about this last week, and I think it is simply that the “tyranny of distance” negates the possibility that I can play it cool with overseas poets. I love Australian poets and poetry, but I suppose I sometimes feel cut off from the rest of the world so much sometimes, that now I feel like fainting every time I get to meet a new poet. And it’s lovely that I actually get to meet some of them! I’m hoping that next year I’ll finally get into gear and do some interviews

Well, after I got over my sickness, I developed a toothache. This caused some panic, as I had to figure out the American dental universe, but Candace, a kind soul in my course who is also on the Georgetown University health insurance plan, told me that the insurance plan gives me access to Dental Basix (their spelling, not mine of course…)—it’s not dental cover, but a student discount toward all dental appointments with a handful of DC dentists. Had an appointment (shamefully, it was my first dental appointment in several years) and received high praise for the state of my teeth from the dentist. It wasn’t a toothache but a canker sore on my gums, which came from being run down the week before when I was sick. Now, in time for thanksgiving, it is all clear.

In the mean time, I feel like, after a few weeks spent in a groggy state, I’ve woken up. John Ashbery a few weeks ago was charming. Honestly, I just wanted to hug him. But I didn’t want to get too close in case I gave him whatever virus I had. I was afraid I would be responsible for killing a great poet, and obviously that would not sit well in my conscience.

Trapeze has been blissful. Sunday morning we did trapeze, aerial hoop and some tissu. I somehow have never warmed to tissu, but aerial hoop is increasingly a revelation. There’s something about the hoop that seems to come quite naturally to me: I find it easy to get my balance, and I love the transition between faster and slower spinning as my body shape changes. Besides all that, it was just so good to hang upside down, to do front support balances and falls into catches… all those trapeze-type things that make me suddenly speak in a different language. I’m aiming to get some more private classes to work on my problem areas (stroke correction, so to speak) and see if I can start developing some kind of act, for fun. There’s no-one local that teaches cloudswing unfortunately… although I may speak to the lovely ladies at Arachne and see if they ever do swinging trapeze. I’d like a little momentum… it’s thrilling. I’m also hoping in the coming weeks to do some indoor climbing in Alexandria. I need some verticality to get me more active than I was in my first couple of months here!

I’ve been watching some television shows online, as I don’t have a television here. After watching something on the (American) abc website, I noticed an ad for the complete series of “My So-Called Life.” They’ve just released a deluxe DVD. This sent me into a tailspin, and I immediately ordered it from Amazon. When I mentioned this to friends Allison, Michelle and Robyn, I discovered they were all as obsessed with the show as I was (we’ve been quoting it to each other for weeks) so we spent Saturday night having a MSCL marathon. In proper teen style we had pizza, icecream, oreos and cheap wine (in my case, swigging from the bottle added to the style of the event). To continue our nerdiness we formed the “Frozen Embryos fan club.” Robyn’s looking into getting t-shirts made. These photos were taken with my co-embyro fans.

Tomorrow morning (oh so early) Lisa-my-Lisa and I are heading to Tennessee. My first Thanksgiving. I don’t know exactly what to expect. I’ve been warned several times that I’m heading for the real south. And that my tendency towards sass could get me into trouble. I hope to internalise the sass. Hope.

Anyway, Lisa and I are meeting at the Metro Center at 8am, and catching a train to either Pentagon City or Crystal City (I can’t remember which) where we pick up the car. (I got in “trouble” with Blair, who’s trying to teach me to speak “American” when I mentioned we were “hiring” a car. They don’t hire cars, apparently—they “rent” them.) From there is should be 9 or so hours driving (with a stop or two at some roadside diner… !) and before we get to Dayton, Tennessee, which is meant to be nearish to Chattanooga.

We’re heading back on Friday morning, so it’s really only a flying visit to Tennessee—there is so much work to get done, as ever. In a month all our final projects are due, and we’re getting started on them. I feel out of practice at writing to deadlines. I think I’ll spend at least part of this weekend in the library here. “In the DQ” as Allison and I now call our study nook—a silent row of tables overlooking 37th street, just near the “Dickens Quarterly” in the periodicals section. I’ve done a lot of good study there in the past week or two. I’ve got two long essays and a complete course sequence to write before I fly home on 20 December, so there’s certainly no rest in the foreseeable future. When it’s not stressful, it’s exhilarating!

So, I’m sick today. My first time sick since I’ve been here, and I’m feeling pretty sorry for myself—sore throat, on top of sore muscles. (Yes, I finally found a trapeze class. Yes, I now know how soft I’ve become. No more of that!)

I’m giving a presentation in Dickens this week—so I’m trying to get some reading done before that. We’re on to “Our Mutual Friend,” which means we’re getting close to the end of all the class work. I’m in a group for this presentation with Allison and Maureen, which is a really lovely working group. We’ve got a meeting lined up for tomorrow to figure out exactly what we’re doing. We hope. In the mean time… reading, thinking, making notes, and…

Going to see John Ashbery read at the Folger Shakespeare library tonight. Now, with my head feeling the way it does, it’s actually just about the last thing I want to do (leaving the house is very low in my priorities right now) but I must go—I can’t miss it. And it IS exciting—it’s over ten years ago that I first read his work. It feels a little unreal. When I can feel anything at all. Mostly, I can just feel my head spinning.

Some account keeping:

In the next two days I need to:

Pay rent.

Write up my case study, after I observed two classes and interviewed the teacher, and reflect on their pedagogical methodologies.

Reread another 140 pages of “Our Mutual Friend”, and if I have time, write a response paper on it.

Write a proposal for my final paper for the Dickens class, and an annotated bibliography. After I meet with a research librarian for assistance.

Reread Johnson’s “The Vanity of Human Wishes”. Read another 50 pages of Johnson criticism. And write something erudite on Dr Johnson.

Sleep.

Since the semester started, Fridays have always been reserved for English department happy hours, but tonight I decided to stay in and do some reading, some homework, some cleaning. I’ve just managed to post some work on a subject blog for my Approaches to Teaching Writing class, and will spend some time this evening reading “Rasselas” by Samuel Johnson. (I admit, I’m becoming a huge fan of his…)

Things are afoot. I’ve started to plan my two major essays for the semester: for Dickens I’m going to look at “Bleak House” and for 18th Century I’ll be focussing on Samuel Johnson’s “A Tour of the Western Isles”. I’ve got a research consultation with a librarian lined up for Wednesday this week, so I’ll have a month or so to really work my way through those pieces. In the mean time, there’s the rest of classes and class reading to think about. So: I’m diving in.

We had a “Town Meeting” for the graduate students in the department last week. It was a chance for graduate students to come together as a group outside of class time with Professor Temple, and ask questions. The main focus last week was on PhD application processes—a large pile of paperwork that I am NOT looking forward to, I have to say. It was quite motivating, however, and made me think through my research interests. Since I’ve never been able to settle into a specific author or period that I want to focus all my energies on (Henry James aside… and in spite of my love affair with him, I don’t want to spend my whole life simply as a Jamesian who occasionally branches out into Edith Wharton) I started thinking about themes and research frames that interest me. I keep coming back to aspects of space, exile and melancholy. Perhaps over the next six months or so this will coalesce into something.

One of the girls here, Olga, has been very proactive in starting a graduate poetry group. A few of us had been talking about the idea of getting one under way, and then it’s suddenly sprouted. We met last night for the first time. I think we were initially under the impression that it was going to be a sorting-it-all-out meeting, but David Gewanter, the faculty member who’s helping us out with it, asked if anyone had poems, and we ended up jumping straight into a poem I wrote a couple of weeks ago, “October.” I think that group will be a source of sanity for me. And I’m keen to get us discussing some contemporary poets and poetics too.

I’m also getting together a reading group for next semester. They don’t really have reading groups here in the same way they do in Melbourne, but when I’ve floated the idea of getting a critical theory reading group together, a lot of people have responded very positively—including members of staff. As well as giving suggestions for a list of books we might want to consider reading in such a group, a couple have expressed an interest in being kept up to date on it—I don’t know if that means we could potentially end up having faculty in the group, but if we do, that would be wonderful. In general I’m impressed with how much staff and students come together here.

A few weeks ago in Dickens, Leona Fisher had told us about a former student of hers who has twice made a spectacle of himself in the library when reading Dickens—the first time dissolving into laughter, the second time into tears. I’m afraid I joined the spectacle-in-the-library society yesterday. Rereading the end of “Great Expectations” I just broke down when Joe left Pip a letter, after nursing him through his illness. “Ever the best of friends.” Some days I think I’m too much of a literature student for my own good.

It’s been raining most gloriously in the past few days. I have to waterproof my boots and think soon about getting a real winter coat. I have no concept of what temperature it is, because I just can’t come to terms with Fahrenheit. I just know that summer is over, and the pre-rain smells like home.

I’ve just had a response from one of the Calls for Papers I answered, and am writing my first encyclopaedia entry over the next month—I suppose I’m starting to get into this whole graduate student world well and truly now. But I’m balancing it out by convincing people to go see films and go to the zoo with me. Well, I hope I am!

I’ve been looking at Calls for Papers, for conferences and journals, and hope to write a couple of abstracts up this week. I’m also on a campaign to get others to join me in this endeavour, so we can all submit work and get into the swing of graduate student life. I’m glad I gave a paper at the Antithesis “Piracy” Symposium earlier this year: it feels, now, like it was a good hurdle to get out of the way, and now that it’s done, I can approach the next batch in a less nervous manner.

Somehow lately I have the creative energy I’ve been lacking for a while—sat down to write a poem a few days ago, and the words arrived. It’s not the right moment to sit down and write more yet, but that will come. It’s such a relief!

The last few weeks have been a bit emotional for me—I’ve been pretty homesick, which has been something of an ordeal. But too, I feel like I’ve started to make real friends too. Moments have arrived where I’ve been able to tell people that I’m not at 100%, and people have responded with real warmth. And so there’s a flipside to it all. In a way I feel that this grieving for Australia is what will help me make a real home here, for the time that I stay in America.

I gave my first (real) class paper this week, on Tom Jones. I did a kind of practice run two weeks before that when I gave a (voluntary) paper on some features of Gothic literature of the Gothic period. I found it inspiring that, without notes from the course I took way back in 2000, I could still remember so many of Peter Otto’s lectures with such clarity. That paper went well, but because it was voluntary, it wasn’t really a pressure situation. This week we’re finishing off Mr Jones, and talking about current trends in literary studies. I’m looking forward to that.

I’ve got my thanksgiving plans sorted out—my “muse” Lisa is taking me to Tennessee, where she has an aunt and uncle. My first road trip! We’ll give it a nerdy spin, as I’m trying to put together some kind of reading list for us to get through. Judith Butler and perhaps Elaine Scarry. In other news, filling in a medical form this week I had to list someone local for an emergency contact, and Lisa became my “person”. We’ve spent a lot of time in the last week sitting silently together in cafes, on benches, on the Healy Lawn, reading books and taking notes. It’s certainly nice to have a person here!

Just in case anyone thinks it’s all work, all the time for me here at Georgetown, I thought you might like to see that we also play… board games! The lovely Adam decided to institute “Game Night” on Wednesdays, and this evening the four souls who weren’t bogged down with work camped out in the grad lounge to play Risk. Kara, that is the yellow army, might have been new to the game, but she knew what world domination was all about. And I held Australia safely from the first round onwards…

My first birthday away from home, and it was a success. I spoke to people from home—mum and dad, Pete, Joanne and my brother Paul. I started celebrating on Friday night, because it was already my birthday in Australia, and I drank my first Cosmopolitan. It was delicious, which makes me slightly bitter, because I don’t want to seem like it’s a drink of choice just because of Sex and the City.

And, since I’ve made it to the ripe old age of 28 without missing out on a birthday celebration of some kind, I had a party on Saturday night. Thirty or so people crowded into my apartment, many of them bringing Australian wine. When I made my (brief) birthday speech I had to explain that the extremely loud exclamation of “OI!” that I made was an indication that it was now time to pay attention to the birthday girl.

Lisa, who I take “The New 18th Century” with, ended up staying on the futon and Sunday almost-still-morning we went “Le Pain Quotidien”, a glorious French bakery/café on M Street for a late breakfast. Proper café au lait in bowls, delicious pastries, organic soft-boiled eggs with fresh breads. It’s my new favourite place to eat, to drink coffee, to sit and scribble.

And presents! A few people brought me presents, the angels! I know I’m meant to be getting close to a grown-up age, but I still get incredibly excited to receive presents. Annie was away for the weekend, so missed the party, but was very pleased to see the marble cheeseboard that Sheena and Jeannine gave me, and we’re planning future cheese-eating ventures to give that cheeseboard a good workout.

The busy weekend meant that I got a little behind in my working routine, but I’m steadily catching up. I have 70 pages left of Bleak House to read for the week, and am halfway through writing my Dickens paper for the week (on the effect of Esther Summerson’s voice as the co-narrator of Bleak House). I’ve just written up a brief overview of Gothic literature for my 18th century class. I have two articles to finish reading, and a proper paper and a note (the note is something on Petronius, as I object to the way Ian Watt treats The Satyricon in his history of the novel, but it’s not completely relevant to the class, so it won’t do for a paper) to write for 18th century still. But: it will all be done.

Then this coming weekend—heaven!—is the National Book Festival. Every time I think of it I get excited, as Charles Simic is going to be in DC on the Mall. And Annie’s having a party for Adersh on Saturday night, as he leaves for India on Sunday. There’ll be wine tasting galore, from what I understand.

I’m planning to get out of the city for at least a day the following weekend. I’ll be curious to see if that plan works out for me!

I’m starting to get into a routine, which is a relief. The first week or two of classes I was finding it difficult to approach everything with the necessary organization and, I suppose, discipline, to get through everything comfortably. The result was that I was up late a lot of nights reading—and I’m still up late reading most nights, but I’ve managed to put a division in place such that when it comes to reading in the evening, I’m reading things that aren’t related to my classes—at the moment that consists of Edward Hirsch’s anthology The Poet’s Choice, Marianne Moore’s Complete Poems and some essays by Cynthia Ozick. Those three will most likely keep me busy for a little while, but it’s good to feel like I have some kind of time to myself to remember that, as well as being work, reading is also a pleasure.

I live very close to the M Street Barnes and Noble, so I’ve settled on that as my work place in the mornings. I read an interesting article about ways digital literacy impacts study, and one point that struck a chord with me is the fact that when you work directly onto the computer, you are more likely to interrupt yourself—either checking things online, or playing some addictive game that came with the operating system—such that the task at hand never gets your full attention. I’m now trying to go back and make a plan for essays and response papers by hand before working through them. When I’m at Barnes and Noble I don’t pick up internet (well, not without paying—which I don’t do) so it takes away one of those distractions. On weekday mornings the café isn’t too crowded, so there’s ambient noise but not the kind of bustle that makes me lose my train of thought.

Before I had an office on campus earlier this year, I found that my best way of working was “constant change of location”, so I’ve gone back to that work method. One to two hours in Barnes and Noble are followed by one to two hours back in my living room, before I go into university, where I work a little and socialise a little before classes or Writing Center work start.

Starting this Thursday I’ll also be spending an hour a week at Duke Ellington High School as a volunteer writing tutor. Duke Ellington is a local school for the arts, with streams in Music, Dance, Fine Art and Drama. I’ll be interested to see how the program functions, and fit in another piece of the puzzle that American education is for me at the moment. I think it will be another nice complement to the subject I’m taking, Approaches to Teaching Writing, which I’m starting to get very interested in.

I did make it to the gallery last week (then later the same day nearly passed out from sheer exhaustion). I spent about two hours there only, as I really just wanted to get a feel for the collection (I viewed sections of the West building only—so I haven’t gone into the twentieth century selections yet) and to find some paintings I want to come back to. There’s a wonderful Rubens painting—the first I have been really engaged by—of Daniel in the Lion’s Den. The lions were wonderful: especially their big velvety paws. I sat in front of it for a while, and will revisit sometime soon. The bus across town from M street only takes twenty minutes or so when it’s quiet, so I should be able to dash across to the mall more often now that I have scheduling somewhat sorted out. But obviously my next trip will be devoted to the East Building… and there are so many other museums and galleries to catch up with. All in good time.

I feel that I’ve started to disappear into the tunnel of graduate student life. People keep telling me that I’m very organised, and all I can say in reply is that I have to be organised, or I wouldn’t be able to get anything done.

I’ve started my Writing Center position—that is, I’ve started the work that surrounds the my position. This Sunday will be my first night in the Writing Center itself, and as such it’s my first opportunity to get hands on. I don’t know how exactly to prepare myself for this, simply because I don’t know what to expect from the students I’ll be working with. I’m sure there will be a lot of different levels of expertise.

At the same time, one of the subjects I’m taking is “Approaches to Teaching Writing.” I still feel a little mystified about what is expected of us as students in this subject, but nonetheless have already read essays on pedagogy that are going to be helpful to both the way I work through texts and which I’m sure will also be able to assist me in helping students with their work.

The book that has so far “grabbed” me the most is "The Elements (and Pleasures) of Difficulty", which not only makes the point that difficulty is itself a normal experience, but also makes the assertion that the point at which you experience difficulty is also a possible point of greater illumination: thinking out the implications of why something is itself difficult will allow the reader to see the layers that are in front of them, without the demand that everything be immediately clear.

I’ve also taken an introductory session to a series of Apprentice Teaching workshops which will give me both theoretical and practical experience that should be translatable to many different types of classroom. I need to register for other workshops now.

On Monday some emails I had written to introduce myself to students and staff in the Liberal Studies program with whom I will be working: by the end of the day, I had received at least a dozen replies to these emails—some were from staff outlining areas they believe students in continuing studies may need some extra help with, some from students keen to participate in support groups or to just ask some quick questions. I’ve also been to two MA thesis workshop classes during the week to introduce myself as someone students can come to with some of their concerns about the practical elements in writing a thesis.

One of my teachers said a fortnight ago that an expert is someone who feels confident working at the edge of their competence. It’s funny, because what I’ve already completed on my Melbourne thesis is actually longer than the thesis I will have to write at Georgetown next year—so I do already have a degree of experience such that I feel I can help other people. At the same time, I do sometimes watch myself planning this work and remember the time I used to find it difficult to speak in a class, for fear of being wrong. In my case, what I really needed was to accumulate a base of knowledge so that I could begin to see the connections between things, in addition to just developing confidence. I’m getting interested in how people learn, in how people listen. My Liberal Studies experiences will tie in nicely to the teaching workshops, and, hopefully, my classes in “Approaches to Teaching Writing.”

I’m really interested in some of these questions surrounding approaches to teaching and learning styles, as well as how other people approach organization for researching a longer work like a thesis. I’d love to hear from anyone who has any thoughts on this material.

The wonderful Annie, my housemate, had probably begun to think I would never emerge from my room, where I am usually either in or on bed, sleeping or reading, or at my desk, typing or playing Scrabble online with all and sundry. Thankfully, this isn’t the whole picture. Last weekend I went out to hiking with Annie and her friends at Great Falls in Virginia for a few hours, which was nice. We went out for Mexican food in the evening as well. On Sunday Annie and Adresh (her boyfriend, who is moving to India shortly) cooked up a feast, with fondue, mushroom tart, stuffed tomatoes and potato gratin, followed by baklava. Then they settled in with their friends Lindsay and Nikki for a Monopoly rematch—apparently the previous game had been very intense, which I can easily believe after witnessing some of the deal-making going on, while I wandered in and out of the room in between studying. And I’m determined to get to the National Gallery tomorrow, having failed to make it there several times already. I WILL see some of this town, other than the library, soon.