categorising things

I have a week of events coming up:

• Monday 28 April: giving a guest lecture at Bath Spa University for an English Literature module called ‘Reading Communities’

• Wednesday 30 April: heading to London to participate as an advisory group member for 2 days at Birkbeck for the ‘Recovery Histories’ oral history project

• Saturday 3 May: talking at Tate St Ives about Ithel Colquhoun: Between Worlds.

Volcanic Landscape, c. 1941, Colquhoun (+ filters)

These three very different occasions – with no connection other than being in the same week – have prompted me to reflect on my academic directions. That the first is at Bath where I started out on my BA, and the second at Birkbeck where I did my MA & PhD, also feels significant. I’d like to draw some kind of map through some of the fields my career has spanned to find a way of navigating or taking stock... and so I’ve come up with a few broad overlapping categories into which to group my books, etc.:

Sound and vibration

Oral history, life writing

Environment, place, rocks, Cornwall

Reading and libraries

Psychology, memory, and trauma

Gothic and other literary studies

Creative writing

So now I have this list of categories to tidy lots of my mess into, and it all seems to make much more sense :-)

PS

reminded of a “Chinese encyclopedia” in which “animals are divided into: (a) belonging to the Emperor, (b) embalmed, (c) tame, (d) sucking pigs, (e) sirens, (f) fabulous, (g) stray dogs, (h) included in the present classification, (i) frenzied, (j) innumerable, (k) drawn with a very fine camelhair brush, (1) et cetera, (m) having just broken the water pitcher, (n) that from a long way off ”look like flies”.

(Foucault's The Order of Things.)