May 2, 2007

a long dry route

Posted by dogpossum on May 2, 2007 1:48 PM in the category academia

It's been a slow month or so for me.
The first rush of post-thesis creativity/productivity has ebbed, and I'm not doing any writing at all any more. Plenty of sewing, some crocheting, some quilting, some dancing, some DJing. We're also getting onto MLX7 stuff - a trifle late, but still, getting on. Slowly. But there's not been so much of the high-brain stuff lately.

I can't honestly say I've been sitting down to write much lately. But I have a heavy post-exchange cold (of course) where my throat is killing me, I sport a temperature and some snot and generally poor concentration. So writing is hard.
Yesterday I had lunch with a scribbling friend who's had similar issues. But it's pictures for scribblers, not words.
But I noticed it's Big Brother season again (why are all the characters the same person - I can't tell any of them apart! But I do love listening to them talk crap - it's like gossip. I love gossip. I love the complexities of group politics and personalities), and that seems to be a good time for writing for me. So maybe I'll get lucky. Or productive.
I have a couple of zillion papers in the works. The one that keeps catching my interest is about the type of music swing dancers are into, and how this is about jazz - as 'art music' or 'high culture' - becoming young people music with a physical purpose. It's there to be used again, not just listened to in silent clubs or theatres. It's turned up really loud, having a few beers and arguing about room on the dance floor again. It's thinking about sex, it's touching other people inappropriately and laughing loudly and rudely. Finally.
So I want to write about how young people are getting into this action, and how they're developing new relationships with bands. And, somewhere in there, I want to write about how the other people at the band gigs who best appreciate this, and really like it, are not the younger, cooler 30-somethings, but the nannas and poppas, who best appreciate the fact that jazz is about being rowdy and disreputable and having fun. And that black polar necks are really quite inappropriate wear for a jazz gig.
The other paper I'm thinking about is to do with gender performance on the social dance floor, and the way dancers use digital clips to learn ways of performing feminity or masculinity (remind me to tell you about K dancing with C at Perth: amazon lindy!). This is something I should have written about ages ago in a paper, but haven't. It's hard to write because I have so much to say. But it's the sort of thing that feminist media studies people like.

So I kind of feel as though I'm getting a bit closer to being able to write some stuff down again. We're kind of in the same room again. Not sitting next to each other, but closer.

On that note, I'll leave you with a picture from the Hullabaloo ball the other weekend. Those Perthlings give good venue, that's for sure. If you click on the pic there, you'll be taken to the larger picture in The Squeeze's gallery. And, for those who are interested, we love picasa Aperture (sorry) in our house, though it can be a bit resource hungry. It's a lovely program that organises your photos and helps you make galleries for the internet quickly and simply. It makes The Squeeze all smiley.

Posted by dogpossum on May 2, 2007 1:48 PM in the category academia