Zooming across oceans

It's been a rather video-heavy weekend. Yesterday, I had the online graduation for the postgraduate certificate in teaching that I completed last year. Originally, this was meant to be an in-person graduation in May, at which I had elected to graduate in absentia. (To be perfectly honest, being there in person seemed a disproportionate amount of effort relative to the personal importance the qualification held to me.) But given the ceremony ended up being a prerecorded online event, I decided to 'attend'. What this meant in practice: sitting in leggings and lopapeysa in the living room, drinking tea, and skipping the parts of the ceremony irrelevant to me. I could get used to this style of graduation!

Several hours later, Matthias and I Zoomed in for the alumni event at the department where I did my postgraduate studies (and where he did undergraduate and postgraduate degrees). This event usually involves hanging around in the departmental common room, eating chips (crisps), drinking cheap wine, and listening to brief presentations from faculty members about their current research. Over the years, the number of friends among the alumni who still live in Cambridge has dwindled, and therefore we've rarely seen anyone we know. But because this event was online, we got to see friends in Vienna, London, Anglesey, Tübingen, and Utrecht, in addition to faculty, and it ended up being a nice way to catch up. We didn't get a chance to talk to everyone, as the organisers wisely decided not to have a thirty-person free-for-all, but rather split us into breakout rooms of three or four people.

Further online social events are on the horizon: I missed an event at which Roshani Chokshi was in conversation with SA Chakraborty to launch her new book, as it streamed live in the middle of the night in my timezone, but thankfully it's now been uploaded to Youtube. (I'm just trying to decide whether to finish the last thirty per cent of the book — which is excellent — before watching the video.)

I've also signed up for the virtual launch event for Robert Macfarlane's new book. As Macfarlane lives in my timezone (indeed he lives in my city), this is taking place at the much more civilised time of 7pm on Thursday. If anyone else is interested, you can register here (it's free, but you need to 'buy' a ticket in order to get the Zoom link).

Given my job involves teaching via videoconferencing software, and loads of other virtual meetings, I need to remember not to overdo this sort of thing in my spare time, as it can become very draining on top of the hours of Zooming and Teamsing for work, but at the moment it's pretty manageable. There are a lot of things I hope remain the norm long after we emerge on the other side of the pandemic tunnel, and above all I hope we retain a certain degree of online conferences, workshops, conventions, book festivals and book launches. They're so much more comfortable to attend, a lot of them are free, and the lack of cost and travel opens them up to a much wider audience than in-person events make possible. You lose all the in-person spontaneous networking, but in some ways I think that's a good thing.

It's growing significantly colder here (which inevitably coincided with our boiler having a hissy fit; I think we've fixed it by bleeding the radiators), and the grim greyness and gales of wind certainly didn't encourage me to go outdoors. That made it the perfect time to curl up with lots of virtual social events, get my Yuletide nominations in, and catch up on a bunch of Dreamwidth comments. Sometimes, that's a nice way to spend the weekend.

Sugared almonds, lemon tea, and fresh bagels

I've written up a review of one of my most beloved childhood books, The Girls in the Velvet Frame, by Adèle Geras. This is a work of historical children's fiction, a meandering, gentle, emotionally affecting story of a widowed mother and her five daughters, and a beautiful portrait of life in 1913 Jerusalem. One of the things I've always loved about it is its depiction of a world and community in which Jewishness is normative — and its assumption (even though it was published by a major British publisher, and aimed at a British readership of children which was not necessarily majority Jewish) that its readership, if not Jewish, would be perfectly fine working things out from context. (Certainly that was my experience as a small non-Jewish child when I read the book for the first time.)

On top of all that, the book has one of the features of older children's fiction which I most enjoy: lots and lots of descriptions of food. It's not on the level of, say, Enid Blyton — it's more that the book takes place mainly indoors, in kitchens and around dining room tables (and one character works in a bakery), and so food preparation, and eating, tends to be happening at key points in the narrative.

It's also probably the book that set me up for a lifetime of searching for fiction which recognised that the unglamorous, unrecognised work and experiences of girls and women — the parts which didn't seem important to men, and which often went unnoticed — were, for the individuals concerned, extremely important, and worthy of being told as a story:

The Girls in the Velvet Frame is a celebration of the quiet, powerful, ordinary lives and work of girls and women: cooking, cleaning, caring for smaller children, stretching every last penny (there’s lots of discussion of hand-me-down dresses, bathing in the kitchen so as not to waste hot water, and so on). This work is at the heart of the story, and is given the dignity and primacy that it would have had (and still does have) in millions of similar women’s lives.

You can read the full review over here, at dolorosa12. As always, I welcome discussion both here on Dreamwidth, or at the original post.