On Thursday, Friday and Saturday I attended a Society for the History of Authorship, Reading and Publishing (
SHARP) conference at the University of Queensland called "The Long Twentieth Century". It was fantastic. With papers presented on a whole range of interesting topics such as: censorship, university and private presses, the future uses of books, literary cities and "book towns", the Nobel prize, aboriginal non-fiction book publishing, marginalia, and the "middlebrow". As well as papers that focused on specific texts and authors like
Bobbin Up and
Michael Dransfield (now out of print for the first time in thirty years).
The conference provided intellectual and PhD-related inspiration, but by Saturday night I was all but mentally exhausted. So spending a nice Sunday afternoon with a few friends and a glass of wine in hand while we watched on at the May
Speedpoets event was a fine way to wind down and finish off the week.
I will now go back to watching all of the breaking news on all things bin Laden. Hope you had a great weekend; and for those in Queensland, I hope you had a great long weekend (for Labour Day).
In the person of the man whose intellect and will made him its leader, the army had the intention and determination to take up the struggle in this field, too, but it lacked the instrument which would have been necessary. And from the psychological point of view, it was wrong to have this enlightenment work carried on by the troops themselves. If it was to be effective, it had to come from home. Only then was there any assurance of success among the men who, after all, had been performing immortal deeds of heroism and privation for nearly four years for this homeland.
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