All day I’ve been multi-tasking. There’s something vaguely sinister about the multi- prefix. Makes me think of multifarious, which rhymes with nefarious… But the point is that multi-tasking is when I’m typically at my most efficient and productive, even though it’s a fine line between spinning plates and blood-spattered sherds.
What I’m mostly working on is doing the edits for my chapter in a forthcoming volume, born of the Moving City workshop held in Rome over 2011 and 2012. I was lucky enough to be invited to participate, and then to give a keynote presentation at last summer’s event.
One of the frustrating things about multi-author, edited volumes, is that they can lack coherence (typically, this is the fault of contributors: marshalling them can be like herding sheep), and feel like a mixum-gatherum. In this case, the editors have wisely decided to get us all working together, not just across the two workshops, but via a shared folder online in which we can find, read, and then xref, our fellow contributors papers.
It’s been a blast 🙂 I’ve been reliving the workshops (hosted by the Swedish and Norwegian Institutes, in Rome) intellectually and inspirationally, and in the process, rethinking my own contribution in the light of closer reading of colleagues ideas. Plus, I’ve realised that one of the images I planned to submit as an illustration is the wrong thing entirely.
Bonus point for me: since I’m working in Rome this weekend I can pop out and snap the right image later today when the traffic’s quieter.
Rome and all that... 