Tuesday, June 05, 2018

Mountainous Terrain

I want to review Sunday Shenanigans but I'm waiting to be sent a poem by one of the poets, Andrew, which is about how much he hates Outer Space. Send it, Andrew- it's great!

At the moment life seems to consist of mountains: like the bear who went over the mountain, as soon as one has been climbed, there's another one looming on the horizon.

The academic article got accepted yesterday; this is terrific news. It has been redrafted more times than you could possibly imagine but the editors seem pleased with it. What helped enormously was when Offsprog One read it. She was shocked at some of the stuff I'd found out but she suggested that the conclusion should be more simple, and she was right. Sometimes it is hard to state awkward facts without pussyfooting around them, and that word is used advisedly. Half of me, brought up by a strict Presbyterian McMother, doesn't want to state the obvious and rock the boat; the other half, a punk feminist, wants to tip it right over.

The marking is almost finished; the second year at University is a difficult one for students, sandwiched between the newbie first year experience, and the semi-excited, semi-terrified third year.
They have achieved loads this year, best one for songwriting so far, and Mike, Stuart and Bridgette really pulled out the stops with their lectures. Big thanks, you lot! And big thanks to David for the massive marking workload he did for the third years.

Next mountains? I got up at 6 this morning to start reading through the draft of the book, and to try to strip the sound off a version of the documentary. The first thing worked (up to the limits of my attention span: a few more days to go before re-writing it), the second didn't. Off to work this arvo, remixing Shola's track tomorrow, working on the doc on Thursday and maybe Friday, then gigs in Hull and Leeds.

These are not dull, boring and tedious mountains; they are exciting!

2 comments:

Wilky of St Albans said...

Good that the article is finished and accepted. Will it be available for your captive audience here to read at some point? We have all, well, some (most) of us, felt your pain and anguish during its gestation yet I for one haven't a clue as to what it's about (asleep at the back as usual!)

Helen McCookerybook said...

It is an academic article for an academic journal, one that I have not written for before. I don't know how available it is for people to read. In a nutshell, it's about men producing women's songs and women producing men's songs and when things have settled down a bit on the work front, I will probably post a bigger nutshell on the blog. It was tempting to try to write it differently and pitch (!) it to Pitchfork or The Quietus but that wan't the agreement that I had with the producers when they were interviewed.
I am writing a book about it all which should be out in about a year; the first draft is just finished.