Many thanks to Maria Dahvana Headley, the Melbourne Writers Festival and the fabulous audience (and my friends and family among them!) for helping to make our discussion of her novel, The Mere Wife, such a joy.
photos by Bec DiNapoli
Eal is læne
Before
Or, in modern English (sort of), ‘All things must pass’. The old site of Flinders Books, where once I passed myself off as a bookseller, has reverted to form (after a fashion) from a Bon Bon Bakers to a Book Grocer pop-up. There’s always the bad puns about the Book Grosser, I suppose.
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.
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The Melbourne Writers Festival Update
The session I’ve been asked to participate in, which centres on Maria Dahvana Headley’s modern adaptation of Beowulf, a novel titled The Mere Wife, will be taking place in a different venue than first publicised. Here’s the program entry:
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
Some New Shots of New Me
Man at work
East Village, 2017
No prizes for guessing! No one told me to jump.
Some not so new! But the me is . . .
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A Few More Poems for Arena Magazine
A trio of shorts in Arena Magazine
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The Melbourne Writers Festival: Update
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.
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The MLS Refectory: One-Off Cancellation
The upcoming session for Wednesday 6 June has been cancelled, because I have an out-of-town teaching commitment. Apologies for any disappointment or inconvenience, but we’ll be back to our usual weekly schedule from Wednesday 13 June, at our usual time and place:
1-2pm, Ross House, second floor room 2.1
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Got a Gig of Sorts
Big thanks to Felix Nobis and Marieke Hardy for inviting me to take part in a discussion of the forthcoming novel, The Mere Wife, by Maria Dahvana Headley at the Melbourne Writers Festival in August.
The story re-imagines Beowulf in the setting of a modern gated suburb. This could be fun . . .
The event is scheduled for a mid-morning session on Sunday, 26 August.
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Better Late Than Never
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 . . .
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Ovid’s Metamorphoses
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)
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