A conversation between Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix
Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix have perceived their work as being “in conversation” for quite some time, so the strength of their shared sense that Harrington’s recent Disapparitions and Hix’s Moral Tales were intent on listening in related ways led them to formalize their conversation. The result is the following inquiry into attention, attunement, genre, and other matters of writerly — and human — concern.
Joseph Harrington and H. L. Hix have perceived their work as being “in conversation” for quite some time, so the strength of their shared sense that Harrington’s recent Disapparitions and Hix’s Moral Tales were intent on listening in related ways led them to formalize their conversation. The result is the following inquiry into attention, attunement, genre, and other matters of writerly — and human — concern.
This familiarity with wrong meanings puzzles one
I hadn’t planned for this commentary to coincide with the Sussex Poetry Festival, the chief criterion in my dashed-off email to Jessica nearly a year ago being that I put it off until later. But here we are talking about irritation, and anyone who’s been involved in planning a poetry festival knows about that.
At Sussex our union is in a labor dispute with management over eroding real pay against increased workloads, the wage gap for women, and casualization (again: gendered). Basically, although no one has said this, it is a dispute over the “feminization of labor,” the fact that it is now considered not only okay but natural to treat all workers the way it was always considered natural to treat female workers (underpaid, precarious, competition-based, smile required).
We are working to rule (a bad strategy in the summer; we should do it during term-time when our research time is destroyed anyway) and there was some question as to whether we should hold the festival at all.