I’ve been invited to give an (ArtsSA funded) guest lecture in ‘Short Stories and Their Writers’ course next semester. The topic I’m to wax poetic about for 50 mins?
Does ‘new’ writing interrogate paradoxes, demarcations, exclusions, margins or peripheries?
How new is new? When is new? How long can new be new?
How do we recognise writing that leaps into its own and that crackles with ‘now’? Who decides?
Coolness.
Lisa L. Hannett 
I have a cat called Mittens.
This is why you’re the clever part of the brain and I’m the brain that finds shiny things in shops.
LOL! But I when I was sitting in my supervisor’s office this morning, discussing his paper on Satire in Hume and the Enlightenment (or something like that), the whole time I kept hearing ‘Meow, meow, meow…’ and I felt like saying, ‘Mittens? Is that you?’
My brain was holidaying in your brain – sorry, sometimes a migration happens unexpectedly.
AWESOME! Free government money is great. Well done, you superstar you.
PS I couldn’t even talk about the above for 5 mins. They’d get 45 additional minutes of long-winded anecdotes, bad puns, the fricken works.
“Margins or profitteroles?” says I, peering at my notes with confusion. “Bugger this. The lecture is now about how monkey-punk is the rising sub-genre worth watching. And a 30 min Q&A about zombie Colonel William Light.”
LOL! I’d like to attend that lecture 😉
That’s cool.
You could always mention Bart’s definition of a paradox – You’re damned if you do, and you’re damned if you don’t.
Heh. Will keep that in mind… 🙂
Interesting.
You might tie it in with something China Mi(with a little doobry over it)eville blogged not long ago, about ‘new movements’. (Tallaudrey will be able to point you at the reference, regardless of the name of her cat.)
Among other things, Mieville noted that ‘new movements’ only get labelled and identified by the time they’re so mainstream that many people are already moving on. And he used that as a springboard to postulate half-a-dozen really funny concepts in ‘new movements in SF’… you could certainly crib some of the funnier bits, especially if you gave credit where it was due.
You are a gentleman and a scholar, Dirk. What a great suggestion! I’m definitely going to incorporate some Mi(doobry-e)ville into the lecture. Thanks! 🙂
You’re kind… but actually I’m a rakehell and a dilettante with unusually wide reading and a good memory. But I do try to be helpful. At times.
You’re welcome!