PAIN

[childeproof]

I reek of Deep Heat, and have just given a lecture to two hundred snickering third years while clasping to my lower back a hot water bottle in a woollen cover with snowflakes knitted into it

Comments

[msilverstar]

Poor baby, what an injury! On-the-job accident!

Your students will be deeply affected by your committment to teaching.

Do take quite a lot of ibuprophen, it really helps me more than anything else, if taken in quantity and kept up over time. *massages your back*

[childeproof]

I nearly asphyxiated the front row with Deep Heat, but they were rather noble about it, considering.

I think I'm going home via the chemist to purchase Serious Painkillers.

[lobelia321]

*glomps you*

*on second thoughts, unglomps as glomping may do your back in entirely*

When can we two meet? March? In London? What day of week is good? Tues and Fri best for me, Wed and Thurs no good.

[childeproof]

*cringes at mere thought of glomping, however affectionate*

April is better for me, as our semester ends at the end of March and my presence won't be so necessary - at the moment, I'm only intermittently at home, mostly on weekends.

Will you still be on leave then? I'll know about mine for September by then also...

[lobelia321]

Am on leave till September. April it is! I will be gone for a week around Easter.

[made_up]

Oh no! Hope you are now recovered. You should only read short, stupid books. Or better still, do as I do and only teach via DVDs.

I'm seriously considering getting out altogether. Don't know how much more "Virginia Woof Wuff whatever is bollocks," style comments I can take.

[childeproof]

We all had to spend an hour this morning filling in a phone-directory-sized questionnaire from the university's Centre for Good Teaching Practice (or something - it has a cooler acronym than that), and the FINAL question, number nine hundred and something, was: 'During the past five years, have you ever considered leaving academe?' To which I responded, ignoring the little 'Yes' or 'No' check-boxes, 'Daily'.

[childeproof]

The thing about Oxford that people don't know, and that the university is VERY careful to keep under wraps is that a huge amount of the much-vaunted tutoring is done by postgraduate students. So, yes, absolutely, Orlando-as-doctoral-star would be extremely likely to be tutoring - not doing university lecturing, but having undergraduates being prepared for Schools papers in which he might be loosely seen to have a specialism. It wouldn't necessarily be anything to do with his college, or given to him by his supervisor, either. (My first Oxford tutoring was handed to me by a man I'd never actually met at Magdalen, who assumed on no evidence I was a Joyce expert.)

I'm only giggling because I have difficulty imagining Orlando as literate, far less literary...

[idlesloth]

Hello again, and thank you so much for replying - all the more so as I note (to my shame) that I just barged in with a query and didn't bother asking after your health, physical or metaphysical, let alone your epic struggles with your evil publishers. I hope you are triumphing on all fronts? Anyway, thanks for the reassurance that Orlando (bless him) is allowed to teach some poxy undergrads. I do remember being palmed off on some post-grad for one paper when I was an undergraduate, but this was at The Other Place and also about 150 years ago, so I was concerned in case the English Dept at Oxford might have had a brush with the 21st century or something similar.
I am intrigued as to how you conveyed expertise in Joyce - apart from being Irish (despite your denial about the horses in the back paddocks at home). Or was he just trying to get into your knickers? Talking of knickers, I see to my dismay that you seem to have vanished off the face of LJ, prolly trying to deny your Slashy Past. Our loss.
Thanks again :)

[childeproof]

*waves at you*

Oh, I'll be back, never fear. I'm just bottlenecked with deadlines, proofing one book and kicking publisher ass re the other - no, it still hasn't been published, but has acquired a somewhat hyperbolic pre-publication leaflet which claims it is a work of consummate intellectual magnificence or something. Plus I've spent the entire past week and a half at two conferences on the same writer in two countries and have developed a pathological hatred of my fellow-specialists, plus a desire never to stay in a hotel again, ever.

I've no idea why Professor X thought I might be qualified or willing to teach Finnegans Wake - I suspect he had no intention of teaching it, and was desperate.

There, now I bet you're really glad you asked about my metaphysical health....

[idlesloth]

a work of consummate intellectual magnificence I don't suppose this begins to do it justice. And all this before they even read your Grumpy!Sean and Yearning!Viggo (how I loved them *dippy sigh*).
Tell me when you get an ISBN and all that; I will buy several copies and double your sales.
Naturally your metaphysical health is of importance to me. If it suffers enough, you may yet take solace in a Return to Slash...