Before
Selfie in situ by a portly bookseller. It was a very cool shop.
After. ‘Oh brave new world, that has such remainders in’t”. Publisher’s leftovers. Next stop, the pulp mill.
Maria Dahvana Headley: Beowulf
Adaptations of literary classic Beowulf span both page and stage. Maria Dahvana Headley interrogates her contemporary adaptation set in American suburbia, The Mere Wife, with lecturer and wordsmith Robert DiNapoli as they muse together on the beauty of language.
3:30 PM
26/08/2018
Mission to Seafarers Chapel
717 Flinders Street
Docklands
The ship pulpit
The Mission to Seafarers
Man at work
East Village, 2017
No prizes for guessing! No one told me to jump.
Some not so new! But the me is . . .
Here’s a schedule-update for the panel-discussion of the new Beowulf-inspired novel by Maria Dahvana Headley, The Mere Wife, on which I will be a contributor. It will happen in ACMI Cinema 1 at Federation Square, Sunday 26 August at 10 am.
Here’s a PDF of my write-up of my keynote address for the conference of the Australian Early Medieval Association last year, which just got published in the Association’s annual journal. I tried to have some fun . . .
Ovid played naughty kid brother to his contemporary, Virgil, whose Aeneid became the normative (and soberly revered) foundational text for imperial Rome. Ovid’s Metamorphoses plays a much different game, resisting the unified effect of the Homeric model to produce a patchwork of short stories in verse, no less ambitious in scope, but shot through with comedy and parody, as well as profound observation of the human (and surperhuman) world.
Ovid’s work provided a rich vein of narrative for Renaissance verse and drama, many of whose stories you’ll know even if you’ve never read the originals. His takes on classical myth are part parody, part canny psychologising. Find out where Chaucer learned a great deal of both his wisdom and his cheeky audacity. David Raeburn’s translation for Penguin Classics is both a good read and well annotated.
Penguin ISBN 13: 9780140447897 12 weekly 2-hour sessions, beginning Friday, 2 February, 1-3pm in Ross House second floor room 2.1
fee: $240.00 (or $20.00 per session)
As I’ve previously posted, I’m curtailing my teaching commitments in 2018 to take a writing sabbatical. One of the big projects is a novel I’ve been trying to write for decades, that’s begun happening again with a curious twist of authorship. Long way to go, but worth posting a teaser cover mock-up.
And here’s the PDF of a scrappy verse prelude that (sort of) explains the basic frame. I’m hoping putting this stuff up will force my hand and keep me writing. We shall see . . .
