My good friend José Francisco Fernández Sánchez, from the University of Almería, emails me to announce good news: the volume gathering together the complete short stories by Margaret Drabble, A Day in the Life of a Smiling Woman, is just out (see http://www.amazon.com/Day-Life-Smiling-Woman-Complete/dp/0547550405). He’s the proud, happy editor. Congratulations!! José Francisco includes in his message a link to a radio interview with Drabble, in which the volume’s publication is discussed (http://www.npr.org/2011/04/24/135611071/stories-of-changing-english-life-in-smiling-woman). A delighted Drabble explains that “He wrote to me and he said, ‘I’ve assembled all your stories’ (…) and he edited the text, and he’d just done it out of pure love. (…). It was a bit like a fairy story, to find a handsome young man who really loved your work and wanted to see it in print.” I must smile, for he is handsome –and this is a fact, not an opinion. And yes, I can imagine how she must have felt, getting this marvellous token of admiration for her talent…
Here’s the funny thing: I dare not send the link with Drabble’s praise of José Francisco to our national AEDEAN email list for I’m not sure whether Drabble’s sweet comment will be welcomed by our academic peers. Will they sneer? Will José Francisco’s efforts be mocked by some envious academic, spurned by his or her idol? Ugly of me to suspect my own peers yes, I know, but I’ve seen worse… Still, I feel that he deserves much praise for what Drabble reads, correctly, as an act of ‘pure love.’ So, here’s my entry, to remind ourselves that what we do for academic reasons is often not so far from a fan’s passionate dedication. And it is often shared by other fans, as you can see from the rapturous reviews the volume has got from a handful of admiring readers at Amazon.com.
Of course, what I’m itching to say is that, inevitably, as a woman, I notice the gender issues raised by Drabble’s grateful praise of José Francisco’s homage. Fancy a male writer saying this of a female academic in our times… Yet, this is also the time when, finally, a male academic can kneel at the feet of a female writer and show truly felt admiration. This happens in the same week when, here in Spain, a fragile, 85-year-old Ana María Matute is finally awarded the third Cervantes prize received by a woman writer in 35 years. No wonder Nuria Amat complained that women writers working in Spanish are still ninguneadas (see http://www.uimp.es/blogs/prensa/2009/06/23/nuria-amat-critica-que-las-escritoras-hispanas-son-ocultadas-por-el-mercado-editor-la-academia-la-critica-y-los-lectores/ ).
So: handsome the man, yes, but even more handsome the gesture, the book. I just wish many other, male and female, academics would learn from the example and do more for the love of the women who write.

I’ve been interviewed by Raúl Calvo for his blog, El cinéfago de la Laguna Negra, and here’s the link:
http://elcinefagodelalagunanegra.blogspot.com/2011/04/sara-contra-los-monstruos.html
Enjoy!!

I seem to be developing an allergy to novels, for causes I find hard to diagnose. I have frequently heard that when compulsive readers reach a certain age (em, mid-forties) we get tired of novels and seek in other genres the literary and intellectual satisfaction we crave for. This may be happening to me, as for the first time in my reading life, I’m avoiding novels (except the ones I teach, of course…). What am I reading instead? Drama, poetry and everything else, that is to say, non-fiction.

I find the label ‘non-fiction’ lazy and silly; it sounds even worse in Spanish or Catalan, trust me. Yet, as often happens with lazy, silly labels (think: Romanticism) it has stuck and it is beginning to create a serious problem: how to define the genre (non-genre?) it names. Strictly speaking, the problem has been around for quite some time and what I really mean is that now that I’m itching to teach a course (sooner or later) I find myself concerned with it. That’s egotism for you.

Surfing the net, I’ve come across two interesting lists of non-fiction, both American as, somehow, the label seems to be more popular across the Ocean (Amazon.com includes the category in its best-sellers lists, Amazon.co.uk doesn’t). Check the list of 100 best non-fiction books at the Modern Library website (http://www.modernlibrary.com/top-100/100-best-nonfiction/) and the counter-list at CounterPunch (http://www.counterpunch.org/top100nf.html), which also includes a twin list of non-fiction in non-English… Ualah!!, as kiddies say today. The horizon expands and suddenly I have almost 300 more interesting books to read. A miracle!

During surfing I also come across Lee Gutkind’s label ‘creative non-fiction’ (see the eponymous journal he founded at http://www.creativenonfiction.org/), which he uses to distinguish, with less than meridian clarity, non-fiction of a literary cast from the more utilitarian kind. ‘Non-fiction’ used to be called the ‘essay’ and even ‘belles-lettres’ but Gutkind seems to be guilty of persuading the National Endowment for the Arts to embrace ‘creative non-fiction’ as the comme-il-faut label in 1983. He mentions as examples of the best 20th century non-fiction classics like George Orwell’s Down and Out in Paris and London, James Baldwin’s Notes of a Native Son, Ernest Hemingway’s Death in the Afternoon, and Tom Wolfe’s The Right Stuff, “books that communicate information (reportage) in a scenic, dramatic fashion.” Of course, the genre becomes fully established with Truman Capote’s intense In Cold Blood. That might be it, for my own more recent favourites respond to that description: Susan Orlean’s The Orchid Thief, Deborah Cadbury’s The Dinosaur Hunters, Sebastian Junger’s The Perfect Storm and even Mark Bowden’s Black Hawk Down (in Spanish, Ignacio Elguero’s Los niños de los Chiripitifláuticos).

However, this category of the ‘lively reportage’ is to narrow to encompass all of (creative) non-fiction. The lists I’ve mentioned include plenty of other kinds of valuable non-fiction: from The Education of Henry Adams to Aspects of the Novel, passing through James Watson’s The Double Helix and even Elizabeth David’s French Provincial Cooking (in non-English, some highlights are: Thor Heyerdahl’s Kon-Tiki, Barthers’ Mythologies, Rigoberta Menchu’s Autobiography and Hassan Fathy’s Architecture for the Poor: An Experiment in Rural Egypt).

I’m beginning to think that ‘non-fiction’ simply means an interesting book in prose which is not a novel (and not poetry and not drama)… This would be the equivalent of calling men ‘non-women,’ which might have a point but is hardly a useful, self-defining label. I do know there are narrower categories (the Wikipedia entry for ‘non-fiction’ gathers together 30 genres under this label!!), but I also know that when I visit the library I do not use them. I just want a non-novel, which, funnily enough includes drama (also fiction!!) and poetry (not quite, unless we’re talking Beowulf…).

More thinking to do… My, this never ends.

I was head of department for a brief stint (2005-8), a hectic time that left me with the perfect metaphor for what we, academics, do: plate-spinning. Recall the stereotypical Chinese circus artist, keeping a dozen plates furiously spinning: that’s us. Preparing and marking exercises, writing paperwork, preparing and teaching and classes, answering email (lots of…), seeing visitors at office hours, making appointments, organising and attending conferences, reading dissertations… and that’s just a typical day. Today for instance has already had a little of all this, much of it through email – and it’s only 14:00. Writing this blog entry feels actually like a break.

I realise now that doctoral students writing their PhD dissertations are immensely privileged as they can claim priority for their research, which we, tenured teachers, cannot do. This week, for instance, I need to decide whether to spend Friday marking exams or working at the library on a conference paper. Whatever is not done on Friday will have to be done on Saturday, so my guess is that the exams will take part of my weekend (either that or work during my Easter… holidays?). Then, just yesterday, I got a 400 page dissertation by one of my doctoral students; I am already reading another one sitting on my table… The problem with the plates is not just that they must be kept spinning but that unexpected ones keep falling from the sky…

What about my writing, I wonder? I do write, of course, but almost always to a deadline (conference, collective volume…). What is fast disappearing from my life as a researcher is the free-choice article, the one you embark on just because you need to say something in particular that some journal might pick up. I don’t know how I managed to write one last autumn… The one I want to write this semester is not even at the stage of basic bibliographical research. As for books, I have no idea how I have managed to publish a few, for the one I’ve been working on for the last three years has been actually on stand-by for one and a half. Maybe I need an academic wife, that’s some thought for a feminist…

I blame Oxbridge novels and films, though I couldn’t name one in particular, for the very wrong view of academic life as a peaceful, sedate oasis of intellectual cultivation. I don’t seem to find the peace and as for the cultivation… Perhaps I’m just getting old and losing the capacity to sacrifice more of my so-called free time to my job, or maybe I just can’t cope with so many plates.

End of the break…