Thursday 27 October 2011

The Salon Presents: A Cock and Bull Story

Hello, Saloneers, Leicester postgraduates, and those who have merely wandered in from the internet having exhausted the amusement value of LOLcats. Welcome! Some of you may be a little dispirited by Autumn's encroachments, the demands of the postgraduate workload, or the failure of memers to use the appropriate font on their funny cat pictures. The Salon will be countering these woes with a showing of the comedy, A Cock and Bull Story, three short interdisciplinary presentations, and tea and biscuits. I know, I know; we're so good to you!




Taking inspiration from the upcoming Literary Leicester festival (http://www2.le.ac.uk/institution/literary-leicester), at next week's Salon we will be showing A Cock and Bull Story, the 2006 adaptation of Sterne's Tristram Shandy starring Rob Brydon and Steve Coogan. The film will be introduced with three short interdisciplinary presentations from within the department: Miriam Cady will look at the use and representation of the country house within the film, Emma James will consider its status as a literary adaptation, and Victoria Byard will look at the film in terms of genre and form. Tea, coffee and biscuits, and possibly cake depending on how everyone's research is going, will be provided. 


The Salon will take place from 13:00-15:00 in Seminar Room ATT 202, Attenborough Second Floor on Wednesday 2nd November. You can also keep up to date with what's going on at The Salon with Twitter @thesalon_haf, or join the Facebook group at https://www.facebook.com/#!/groups/155452421216246/. If you would like to contribute to this blog with posts about ongoing research, issues that you've come across as a postgraduate student or even just interesting links, then we would be more than happy to have you! Just talk to either myself or Julie at the Salon meeting. I will be the one doing a convincing impression of the Cookie Monster.

Hope to see you next week, and, as ever, the Salon is open to everyone so please feel free to forward this information on to anyone you think might be interested.  

Monday 3 October 2011

The Salon in October

Welcome back, Salonblog readers! The Salon Summer Trip went off without a hitch and was comprehensively photographically documented by your humble chronicler as well as Salon cabalist, Miriam, and we hope to have some of the less awful photos up very soon. Threat or promise? You decide! I leave you with a fairly innocuous but intriguing picture of a sculpture made entirely out of butter. Yes, butter. And no matter how hard it may be to carve something out of butter, it is infinitely harder trying to take a photo of it inside its refrigerated glass case with the sun shining on it.


I hope that you too have had productive yet entertaining summers, even if they were sadly devoid of butter sculptures! 

The Salon has already started off the year in fine style with a well-received presentation from Julie Ives, titled 'Give It Some 'Ommer: ITV regional programming and the performance of the Black Country', and we hope to carry that quality on into upcoming Salon sessions. Traditionally, the Salon meets on the first Wednesday of every month, but with the start of the new academic year and incoming postgraduate students, we have made an executive decision to move this month's Salon session back. Consequently, October's The Salon will be meeting on Wednesday 12th October, 13:00-15:00 in ATT 202  (Attenborough Second Floor SR 202) and will be a general introductory session for new students and a chance to reconnect with fellow postgraduates for everyone else.
To this end, we are asking for Saloneers to attend and share their hard-won wisdom about the strategies, resources and pitfalls that they have used and experienced within their postgraduate studies. This will be an informal discussion session with brief representations from those Salon volunteers. If you would like to be one of those brave volunteers, please feel free to comment here or email me at victoriabyard @ gmail dot com and let us know. Regardless of how active you wish to be within the session, we would still be delighted to see you there, as we feel that the Salon can be a useful way to provide support and share research within the department as well as within the wider postgraduate community. 

As ever, everyone is welcome!