I Aten't Dead

 'I Aten't Dead' is the sign the ultimate brommager  Granny Weatherwax leaves next to her body while she hitches a ride in animals' consciousnesses in Terry Pratchett's novels. Whether we're all consciousnesses hitching a ride in our personal meat-vehicles is a questions I'll leave to the philosophers, but it's how I've been feeling for the past couple of weeks. 

Not in a bad way (for a change): we're getting to the end of the third week of teaching, a blend of face-to-face and online. I'm teaching every day, which is exciting but leaves little time for preparation or research activities. The drawback of in-class teaching is the lack of a mute function, but on the whole it's been a joy despite my reservations about the way the government and the university has abandoned all health precautions. Both the new and returning cohorts of students are much more engaged and talkative than I remember in the before-times: the majority are reading the texts and bringing informed opinions. I've more male and more mature students than in recent years, so there's a wider range of opinions and experiences. It's just such a pleasure to sit down and talk to interested people about interesting texts: this week has included Aphra Behn's Oroonoko, the influence of James Baldwin on The Fresh Prince of Bel Air, Alice in Wonderland, Valerie Solanas's The SCUM Manifesto (full text) and Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. It's been quite a while since a student offered a detailed analysis of Friedan's The Feminine Mystique unprompted - being stretched intellectually in class is one of the best things about being an academic. Hopefully there will be much more to come. 

The other academic pleasure of the month was taking part in the launch of this excellent book on Welsh Valleys' masculinities in literature by John Jenkins - I was his external PhD examiner, then read the book manuscript once it had been de-doctored, and there are even a couple of references to my dreadful PhD in it. We had an online launch with questions for John from Prof Jane Aaron and myself, then a q+a session which brought up some interesting new thoughts. While I have reservations about online teaching, being able to attend events normally out of reach has been a real high point of the last couple of years. The other massive pleasure of the past few weeks is examining a PhD on identity politics in nerd culture for an Australian university. They don't do vivas, which is really disappointing: while I have no interest in flying across the globe, an online one would have been fascinating because the dissertation is so good and I just want to hear more from its author. The topic is contemporary, the theory (a mix of feminist and classic Cultural Studies work alongside some ethnography and auto-ethnography) handled well and the writing is beautiful - clear and charismatic. 

Weirdly, despite reading all these texts and writing lectures on them plus all the other stuff, it feels like I haven't had much time for other reading, but I randomly plucked Mary Gentle's Ash: A Secret History from the Room of Unread Books. I don't know anything about her and had no memory of buying this book, but it really justified its 1000+ pages. Taking as its starting point the almost overnight disappearance of Burgundy, a rich and powerful state, in the 15th-century, Gentle constructs a quite brutally visceral alternative history, following the fortunes of a female mercenary leader into a plot that weaves an astonishingly detailed history (from the top and from below) with subtly handled fantasy elements. Definite shades of Byatt's Possession alongside familiar fantasy authors, and beautifully handled. 

Right, back to the lectures, the late chapter abstract and the late manuscript review…