Some impatient souls have started with the fireworks tonight. Over the high-rises across the valley (formed by a line of council houses, with their own humble beauty, behind a row of perennial trees, and an invisible speedway lined by rows of taller, deciduous trees, now waving bare branches in the dark), red and white and yellow sparkles bloom and erupt and perish. It is a lovely sight. It will be grander tomorrow.
A busy day tomorrow, culminating in the Hunterian Associate Keynote event. The blog I started for that project, at http://historyfictionfantasy.wordpress.com is what gave me the idea for this one. They share a title, but their purpose is slightly different. In the other blog (the main blog) I mainly discuss the sixteenth century historical epic The Liberation of Jerusalem by Torquato Tasso. I am enjoying that blog, which is not a strictly academic pursuit, although it is related to my PhD research in a rather oblique way. Tasso's epic (in elegant verse, the making of which is an art I really admire and regret not learning when I had the chance) veers into fantasy, but it is a very modern work for its time, and many of its anxieties are still our anxieties today. I won't go on about it, there's the other blog for that.
For the noo (as they say here in Glasgow), my anxieties are of a different and rather technical sort: an adapter to connect my laptop to the projector, which was supposed to be here today, hasn't arrived on the post yet, the PowerPoint presentation changes every time I look at it, there's an uncertainty re: cameras and videos and their allocation ... In short, I have a feeling that everything that can go wrong, will go wrong. Not discounting the nagging feeling there's still something else I should have done, something terribly important and crucial, only I can't remember...
At any rate, by that time tomorrow it will be all over, and I can go back to relishing Tasso's haunting verses (at one point he describes death as 'the stern gaze, the iron sleep') on my own, and doing my blog in my own good time without the pressure of direct public engagement. Amen to that.
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© The Hunterian, University of Glasgow 2014
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Sp Coll Hunterian Cd.2.1., Special Collections,
University
of Glasgow Library.
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At any rate, by that time tomorrow it will be all over, and I can go back to relishing Tasso's haunting verses (at one point he describes death as 'the stern gaze, the iron sleep') on my own, and doing my blog in my own good time without the pressure of direct public engagement. Amen to that.
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